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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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2:00PM Water Cooler 8/7/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 8/7/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Trade

“U.S. agricultural exports to China plummeted more than 50% last year to $9.1 billion as tariffs raised the cost of American soybeans, pork and other farm products. The exports dropped another 20% in the first six months of this year. The pain is rippling through agricultural supply chains. One forecast says tariffs could cost the sector as many as 71,000 jobs over the next two years” [Wall Street Journal]. (Apparently, China’s swine fever epidemic has not cut demand for soy.)

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of August 5: Biden fluctuates to 32.3% (32.2), Sanders continues climb to 16.7% (16.5%), Warren flat at 14.0% (14.0%), Buttigieg flat at 5.5% (5.5%), Harris down at 10.2% (10.3%), Beto separating himself from the bottom feeders, interestingly. Others Brownian motion. So, I think we can conclude that Sanders won both debates.

* * *

2020

Sanders (D)(1): Sanders calls his shot not only the effect of trade deals on workers, but on the two-party system. In 2000. The whole video is worth a listen, since the Tweet doesn’t quote all of it.

In the year 2000, Congress voted to grant China upgraded trade status, helping it become world's most powerful dictatorship.

Bernie Sanders voted against. He stood next to Pelosi at Dem presser and blasted Bill Clinton. "Let me tell you where he got his money," Sanders intoned. pic.twitter.com/JzBZ3UiXka

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 7, 2019

No wonder they hate him….

* * *

“Few candidates have loyal small-dollar donor bases” [WaPo]. • Few, but not none:

Turns out small donor money isn’t all that fungible.

“Shadow of Dark Money Grows as 2020 Groups Shun Donor Disclosure” [Bloomberg]. “Democratic and Republican groups raising tens of millions of dollars for the 2020 elections increasingly are keeping their funding sources secret, a trend that watchdog groups warn allows high-dollar donors to gain influence with candidates without risking exposure. Priorities USA, which collected almost $200 million to help Hillary Clinton in 2016, says it wants to spend that much or more to help the next Democratic nominee defeat President Donald Trump. This time, however, Priorities is being funded mostly by undisclosed donations.” • What could go wrong?

“Are the Democrats divided? No — they’re poised to win big if they don’t screw it up” [Bill Curry, Salon]. “Everyone wants to see Warren and Sanders face off against Biden because the real dividing line is between the middle class and the donor class. Warren and Sanders never attack Obama, Biden or each other and they won’t do it in September. What they will do is compare their ideas and campaigns to his. The facts will be fierce, but the delivery will be civil. It’ll be Biden’s toughest test. Progressives want to take a new path, but I’ve yet to meet a “Never Bidener.” The stakes are too high. To defeat Trump, Democrats need to answer his racism with a message of both racial justice and social conciliation, and answer his corruption with a message of economic justice and political reform. So long as their candidates don’t make a fetish of their small differences, they’ll get there.” • White House counsellor to Clinton. Not seeing a whole lot about “economic justice and political reform” from establishment Democrats. Of course, if they hadn’t spent three years yammering about Russia, they might have had time to come up with something.

El Paso and Dayton Shootings

“Dayton shooter may be antifa’s first mass killer” [NY Post]. • I dunno. It’s the shooters pr0n rock band that gets me. I see the El Paso shooter, who — assuming the provenance proves out — wrote a manifesto as being ideologically serious in a way that the Dayton shooter, who was just a mess by all accounts, was not. (We should also think back to the Orlando shootings, where literally everything about the initial stories was wrong). And speaking of pr0n–

“Photos from Dayton and El Paso illustrate the grim routine of mass shootings” [WaPo]. • If I see one more photo of beautiful young people holding candles… Honestly, it’s like some weird kind of pr0n. I don’t equate viewing digital images of people mourning as actually mourning.

Where “we” are:

Panic in Times Square After Motorcycle Is Mistaken for Gunshots https://t.co/F5qsndMPfD

— Dan Froomkin (@froomkin) August 7, 2019

Somehow, I can’t help thinking that a panicked populace is not conducive to sound democratic decision-making…

“What Experts Know About People Who Commit Mass Shootings” [New York Times]. “Can one mass shooting inspire another? Yes… Are video games to blame for mass shootings? The results of studies attempting to clarify the relationship between violent video games and aggression have been mixed, with experts deeply divided on the findings. How strong is the link between mental illness and mass shootings? Tenuous, at best. Would drugging or confining people showing “red flags” prevent massacres? No one knows for certain.” • This is pretty thin stuff.

2018 Post Mortem

No:

.@ChelseaClinton and I are thrilled to announce "The Book of Gutsy Women," out October 1st. It's a conversation about over 100 women who have inspired us—and narrowing it down was a process! https://t.co/DOhSrVq9SC pic.twitter.com/bOVES73FAQ

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 6, 2019

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Is ‘Bernie or Bust’ the Future of the Left?” [New York Times]. • Report on the DSA convention. I dunno, it seems to me that an organization dedicated to seizing the means of production shouldn’t be getting press this good. Perhaps it’s their stand on open borders.

“Twitter says it won’t verify new candidates until they win their primaries” [The Hill]. • Swell. More incumbent protection. That should certainly help Twitter with regulatory issues!

“Inslee Is Doing Very Well in the Power Primary” [Mike the Mad Biologist]. The conclusion: “Democrats in 2021 will need to make people’s lives better in meaningful ways. If not, we will have a repeat of 2010 in 2022, since next time we won’t get Trump, we’ll get someone smarter and more disciplined. As bad as Trump is, President Tom Cotton would be far worse.” • Yep. 2020 is their last shot. Biden/Harris all the way!

They call it historical materialism:

The political continuum hypothesis states that there exist historical precedents besides Nixon and Hitler. It is widely believed outside the United States, in countries Americans have never heard of

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 7, 2019

Stats Watch

JOLTS, June 2019 (yesterday): “Moderation in labor demand is this year’s theme of the JOLTS report” [Econoday]. “Quits, which are tracked by Federal Reserve officials for indications of worker mobility and related wage pressure, remain flat… This report hints at easing capacity pressure in the labor market and will likely be welcome by Fed officials who, with last month’s rate cut, are adding new stimulus to the economy.”

MBA Mortgage Applications, week of August 2, 2019: “A big drop in mortgage rates — the result of last week’s rate cut by the Federal Reserve — triggered a surge of refinancing applications” [Econoday].

Shipping: “Slots in heavy-duty truck production lines are opening up but few fleet operators are getting in line. Orders for Class 8 trucks fell last month to their lowest level since 2010” [Wall Street Journal]. “A factory backlog for Class 8 trucks that exceeded 300,000 orders late last year is down by more than a third, and research group FTR expects production to decline 22% next year. The good news for manufacturers is that cancellations have remained relatively light. That could change if weakness in the broader industrial sector gets worse and trucking companies decide to park their current fleet plans.”

The Bezzle: “A pioneer in the meal-kit market is losing its sizzle. Blue Apron Holdings Inc. narrowed its quarterly loss but is still losing customers… and a turnaround could involve a lot more logistics for a business already laden with complicated fulfillment” [Wall Street Journal]. “New Chief Executive Linda Kozlowski says Blue Apron’s plan to boost revenue and customer growth this year will include serving more households and offering greater menu choices, including flexibility to tailor the options…. Perhaps more challenging, analysts say the overall market is already saturated and likely smaller than companies had hoped.”

Tech: “Trump Wants to Make It Basically Impossible to Sue for Algorithmic Discrimination” [Vice]. “The new rule takes aim at a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, which decided that consumers could combat housing discriminatory business practices by making “disparate-impact claims” under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In a disparate-impact claim, if you find out that a business practice had a disproportionate effect on certain groups of people, then you can hold that business liable—even if it was an unintended consequence….. HUD’s new rule would throw all that out the window by introducing huge loopholes to shield businesses from liability when their algorithms are accused of bias. As Reveal News reported, ‘A hypothetical bank that rejected every loan application filed by African Americans and approved every one filed by white people, for example, would need to prove only that race or a proxy for it was not used directly in constructing its computer model.’ But there is substantial evidence to show that racial bias is fundamentally baked into the way that these algorithms and their data sets are constructed, even if they don’t specifically take race into account.” • Code is law…

Tech: “Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage Without a Warrant” [Vice]. “When police partner with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance camera company, they get access to the ‘Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal,’ an interactive map that allows officers to request footage directly from camera owners. Police don’t need a warrant to request this footage, but they do need permission from camera owners. Emails and documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that people aren’t always willing to provide police with their Ring camera footage. However, Ring works with law enforcement and gives them advice on how to persuade people to give them footage. Emails obtained from police department in Maywood, NJ—and emails from the police department of Bloomfield, NJ, which were also posted by Wired—show that Ring coaches police on how to obtain footage. The company provides cops with templates for requesting footage… Ring suggests cops post often on Neighbors, Ring’s free ‘neighborhood watch’ app, where Ring camera owners have the option of sharing their camera footage.” • It’s a little tough to rank Big. Tech companies for evil right now, but surely Amazon gets a boost for this.

Tech: “Jeff Bezos feels a tap on the shoulder. Ahem, Mr Amazon, care to explain how Capital One’s AWS S3 buckets got hacked?” [The Register]. “After last week’s revelations that a hacker stole the personal details of 106 million Capital One credit card applicants from its Amazon-hosted cloud storage, a US Senator has demanded Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explain what exactly what went wrong. The sensitive information was siphoned from Capital One’s Amazon Web Services S3 buckets by a former AWS engineer, who was arrested and charged at the end of July…. Wyden is particularly concerned that other companies that store their data in the AWS cloud may have been hit in the same way by the suspected Capital One thief, Seattle-based software engineer Paige Thompson. He cited reports that Ford, the University of Michigan, the Ohio Department of Transportation, and others may have suffered similar losses of information at the hands of Thompson, and that this may point to a systemic weakness in Amazon’s security.” • Uh oh. Keeping my data on my hard disk, thank you very much.

Tech: “FCC Plans to Redo Flawed Broadband Maps” [Inside Sources]. “Accurate broadband maps would help under [-served] areas get internet access, and they could also be used to hold telecom companies T-Mobile and Sprint accountable for their pledge to build out 5G to cover 85 percent of rural Americans in three years and 99 percent of all Americans in six years once they complete their merger. (The combined company will face financial penalties if they don’t meet these conditions.) According to the FCC’s Report and Order for the Digital Opportunity Data Collection, the FCC will require all internet service providers (ISPs) ‘to submit granular data maps of the areas where they have broadband-capable networks and make service available.’ Previously, ISPs submitted census block data, which means even if they only served one person within a census tract or county, they counted that entire tract or county has having internet access.” • Wow.

Tech: “More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp” [Schneier on Security]. “Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans.” • A retraction, which speaks well of Schneier.

Tech: “Hacked Equifax Customer Receives 10,000 Stolen Social Security Numbers As Share Of Class Action Settlement” [The Onion]. • News In Photos, so the headline is the joke.

Manufacturing: “Boeing Holds Workshops With China Carriers to Bring 737 Max Back” [Industry Week]. “Boeing invited pilots and engineers from China Southern Airlines Co. to a gathering in Guangzhou on Monday, according to an emailed statement from Boeing. More such workshops will be held with Air China Ltd., China Eastern Airlines Corp., Xiamen Airlines Co. and Hainan Airlines Holding Co. in their respective hubs this week. The gatherings are among the latest steps Boeing is taking to bring the plane back, though the exact timing remains unclear. Boeing is redesigning the plane’s flight-control system and is still aiming to present a final software package to regulators by September, though the timeline could slip, a person familiar with the plans has said. China Southern and Air China are among Chinese carriers seeking compensation from the U.S. manufacturer for order delays and losses caused by the grounding of the 737 Max in the wake of two deadly crashes.”

Transportation: “Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready to Do Business in Texas” [WIRED]. “The truck developers come for the weather: It can get chilly in Texas, but the state doesn’t get the months of snow, which can bedevil automated vehicle sensor technology.” • So, when the headline says “in Texas,” it really does mean “in Texas.”

Transportation: “How Much Traffic Do Uber and Lyft Cause?” [CityLab]. “Today the ride-hailing giants released a joint analysis showing that their vehicles are responsible for significant portions of [vehicle-miles traveled (VMT)] in six major urban centers… Now, the Fehr and Peers memo indicates that [transportation network companies (TNCs)] accounted for nearly twice the VMT in San Francisco than the SFCTA had estimated, said Gregory Erhardt, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who has researched Uber and Lyft’s effects on public transit ridership. That means the services are likely delaying commuters more, too… On average, between the six cities, just 54 to 62 percent of the vehicle miles traveled by Lyfts and Ubers were with a rider in tow. A third of these miles involve drivers slogging around in between passengers (“deadheading,” in taxi-driver argot); 9 to 10 percent are drivers on their way to a pickup.”

Transportation: “Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash” [IEEE Spectrum]. “For about a year, Swiss Post and Matternet have been collaborating on a drone delivery service in three different cities in Switzerland, with drones ferrying lab samples between hospitals far faster and more efficiently than is possible with conventional ground transportation. The service had made about 3,000 successful flights as of last January, but a January 25th crash into Lake Zurich put things on hold until April. A second crash in May caused Swiss Post to suspend the service indefinitely, and a recently released interim report published by the Swiss Safety Investigation Board provides some detail on what happened—and a reminder that for all the delivery drone hype, there are some basic problems that are still not totally solved.” • In this case, parachutes that deploy “if something goes wrong.” More: “We have no idea exactly how safe Amazon’s drones are, or Google’s drones are. Even Zipline, which has been flying drones dozens of times per day for years, is still working to make their drones safer. What we do know is that crashes can (and do) happen, and the Swiss Post incidents are further evidence that we’ll need a much better understanding of where all of the risk is if we want drones flying regularly over populated areas.”

Concentration: “Australia Strips Google/Facebook to Their Underwear” [Matt Stoller, Big]. “The [Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC)]’s most important contribution to the debate is to say, unvarnished, that Google and Facebook have exceptional amounts of market power and the incentive to use it to manipulate and exploit publishers, businesses, and users. Over the past fifteen years, Google and Facebook have become, as Sims put it in his press conference, “essential gateways for consumers and businesses.” The consequences of this shift are the killing of the free press and the mass manipulation of users….” • Most NC readers already know that, but Stoller’s post is well worth a read for the wealth of detail and clarity of exposition.

Mr. Market: “Carry On Like Nothing Really Matters. Until It Does” [John Authers, Bloomberg]. “It’s no secret that yields on sovereign bonds around the world remain stunningly and historically low. And that, in turn, means a revival in the ‘carry trade.’… Carry trading is best known from its incarnation in the foreign-exchange market. It involves borrowing in a currency where interest rates are low and parking that money in a currency with higher rates, pocketing the difference, or ‘carry.’ Ideally, you get paid for doing nothing… In practice, any increase in volatility or perceived risk — which can be nicely proxied by the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX — spells doom for the carry trade.” • Uh oh.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 20 Extreme Fear (previous close: 27, Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 48 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 7 at 12:19pm. • Restored at reader request. Note that the index is not always updated daily, sadly.

The Biosphere

“Who Will Save the Amazon (and How)?” [Foreign Policy]. “Aug. 5, 2025: In a televised address to the nation, U.S. President Gavin Newsom announced that he had given Brazil a one-week ultimatum to cease destructive deforestation activities in the Amazon rainforest. If Brazil did not comply, the president warned, he would order a naval blockade of Brazilian ports and airstrikes against critical Brazilian infrastructure. The president’s decision came in the aftermath of a new United Nations report cataloging the catastrophic global effects of continued rainforest destruction, which warned of a critical “tipping point” that, if reached, would trigger a rapid acceleration of global warming. Although China has stated that it would veto any U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Brazil, the president said that a large “coalition of concerned states” was prepared to support U.S. action. At the same time, Newsom said the United States and other countries were willing to negotiate a compensation package to mitigate the costs to Brazil for protecting the rainforest, but only if it first ceased its current efforts to accelerate development.” • Ulp.

“Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene” [Nature]. “Crawford Lake is one of ten sites around the globe that researchers are studying as potential markers for the start of the Anthropocene, an as-yet-unofficial designation that is being considered for inclusion in the geological time scale. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a committee of 34 researchers formed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in 2009, is leading the work, with the aim of crafting a proposal to formally recognize the Anthropocene. This new epoch would mark a clear departure from the Holocene, which started with the close of the last ice age. To define a new epoch, the researchers need to find a representative marker in the rock record that identifies the point at which human activity exploded to such a massive scale that it left an indelible signature on the globe. Given how much people have done to the planet, there are many potential markers. “Scientifically, in terms of evidence, we’re spoiled for choice, but we have to pin it down,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, a palaeobiologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and chair of the AWG…. In the end, it will be the rocks that have the final say.” • In more ways than one.

“A mission to Mars could cause learning impairment and anxiety, study says” [CNN]. “On a long-term spaceflight mission to Mars, astronauts will be continuously exposed to low-dose radiation in deep space. A new study found that this exposure can cause impairments in the brains of mice, resulting in learning and memory issues as well as anxiety… Based on their findings, the researchers believe that one out of five astronauts on a deep space mission would likely experienced anxiety. One in three would be more likely to deal with memory issues. And all of them may struggle when it comes to making decisions, which would be crucial on a mission to Mars where communications with the Earth are delayed by up to 20 minutes.” • Surely there is a science fiction story with this premise, though I can’t remember one. Certainly lots of potential for dark comedy…

“This tiny insect could be delivering toxic pesticides to honey bees and other beneficial bugs” [Science]. “According to a new study, neonicotinoids can kill beneficial insects such as honey bees, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps by contaminating honeydew, a sugar-rich liquid excreted by certain insects…. The study suggests honeydew could be another way beneficial insects are exposed to deadly insecticides. This can devastate more insects across the food web than nectar contaminated with insecticides could, the team says, because honeydew is more abundant, especially in agricultural fields… neonicotinoids still account for more than 20% of the world’s insecticide market.”

Our Famously Free Press

“The GateHouse takeover of Gannett has been finalized” [Poynter]. • Ugh. I expect the imminent gutting of USA Today, which has been a surprisingly good paper.

“How to do something about local news” [Substack]. • Basically a hymn of praise to substack by a founder, but it still sounds like an interesting, er, platform (akin to WordPress, not Facebook).

Games

“Investigative journalism startup uses mobile gaming to finance its future” [Journalism]. “In the game, the player uses tools and skills that McGregor and his editorial team need in their day-to-day investigations and reports. With image verification being an example of one of the most difficult challenges, the game will ask players to assess whether a viral image is accurate or not by using software to spot areas of the image that have been edited. ‘It’s the basics and 101 of journalism – teaching people to be sceptical and what tools to use to crack the conspiracy, like searching court records or sting operations on a more extreme level,’ he explained.” • It sounds like the stories and games are fictional. I don’t see why they couldn’t be real.

The Last of the Feral Hogs, I Swear

For our readers in the United Kingdom:

“30-50 of them, you say?” pic.twitter.com/M07mLraoSE

— Josephine Long come to my show please it’s urgent (@JosieLong) August 5, 2019

A kind soul summarizes:

in the final analysis, the great moral victory of feral hog twitter was that it was much more of a carnival atmosphere with people aiming to make each other laugh than a dunkfest on the feral hog guy

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) August 6, 2019

News of the Wired

Bake like an Egyptian. Wonderful thread:

Two weeks ago, with the help of Egyptologist @drserenalove and Microbiologist @rbowman1234, I went to Boston’s MFA and @Harvard‘s @peabodymuseum to attempt collecting 4,500 year old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery. Today, I baked with some of it… pic.twitter.com/143aKe6M3b

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) August 5, 2019

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Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (EM):

EM writes: “You have been saying you need plant photos. I was just in the garden weeding when I remembered to capture this and send it to you. The pink hydrangea on the left is my favorite this year but I am also partial to the coreopsis beneath it.” I like the path, which looks like it would be nice to walk on in bare feet.

Bonus (PS):

PS writes: “Does this fill the bill?” Re Silc sent in his mobile, and Mark52 sent in his steel silhouette, and now PS. I didn’t expect a response like this. Reader, how about you?

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Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser.Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:

Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated.

If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!

2:00PM Water Cooler 8/7/2019

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thoughtsofadancerboo · 5 years ago

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HATCH: Season 3 by Dance Nucleus

Performed at the Dance Nucleus Studio at Goodman Arts Centre; Performed on ?????

____________

Dance Nucleus is an independent dance house with the aim of providing a platform for artists to develop their craft. HATCH is their artist-in-residence programme that concentrates on creative research and development leading to a studio presentation of the work or work-in-progress. The programme gives time to explore, studio space, financial support as well as a supportive environment to aid the artists.

I attended Season 3 of HATCH last night at Goodman Arts Centre (I love this place omg) and it was really crowded compared to HATCH Season 2. Congratulations to Dance Nucleus on a full house! The presentation showcased 4 works by artists of different backgrounds and experiences.

POV by Sheriden Newman

For this first piece, the audience was invited to sit on the four sides of the performance space. This piece was performed by 4 dancers connected together by elastic bands. I could see that your sitting location would have affected what you saw on the dance floor, like there was one instance where the dancers were standing in a line horizontally on different levels. However, if you sat at another position, you would have seen the dancers in a line one behind another, at different levels, so you’d see only parts of their body. I suddenly thought that it was cool that people sitting at different positions would be viewing the same thing, but the effect felt would have been completely different because of the angle. It’s like one of those optical illusion videos that you see on Facebook.

Brownian (a working title) by Sherry Tay and Joseph Nair

This was my favourite piece of the night. Okay, so they got us to move to the “front” of the performance area, because the rest of the performances did not need the 360 degrees view. However, there was a catch. Those sitting on the left have to sit near the right when they came to the front and those on the right have to sit on the left, and everyone had to move to their seats together. So while everyone was moving, the soundscape for this piece came on and when I looked back, I saw the dancers already on stage dancing. Then I realised that by making the audience move like that, they’re mimicking pedestrians walking along a crowded road, each with their own location to go towards. I thought it was so clever.

For me, the piece painted a picture of a busy street. As the theory of Brownian Motion states, everyone had their specific pedestrian movements and route to walk/dance along, and each dancer had their own specific character. It also commented on the digital age that we live in and how everyone is constantly on their phones all the time.

Shallow Water Blackout by Sherman Fu

My biggest impression of this piece was the lighting. At the start of the piece, the lights faded in and out as the dancers danced, so whenever the lights came on the dancers were always in different positions from before. To me, although I’ve never blacked out before, it was like the blacking out that you always see in movies.

Other than this, I totally didn’t get the piece at all, until the choreographer explained a bit of his choreography during the post-show dialogue. He mentioned that each dancer embodied Time, Body and Mind, and at times one overpowered the other. I thought that the idea was nice, but no one would get it if you didn’t make it clear that you were using an idea like that. All the dancers were wearing all black, and it didn’t differentiate anyone from the other, so we had no idea who was what, or even that they were embodying anything.

With(In) by Koustav Basu Mallick

For this piece, the first thing that popped into my mind was: “Abusive relationship”. Then I was like no, that’s probably too far off. Cloth was hung from the ceiling, and the dancers, at different points in time, were tied in it. So basically, I didn’t understand anything from this , but from the post-show discussion, the choreographer revealed that his piece was about exploring the dynamics of partner work with a fellow dancer, as well as partner work with a prop that seems as “alive” as cloth.

Final thoughts:

So overall, HATCH Season 3 made me come up with a lot of questions, as it always does. I think that one thing that I kept on thinking about was how does one convey to the audience what they want to say? Sometimes, I feel that there’s not much point in creating something that everyone can interpret vastly differently. Which is kinda contradictary to myself, because I always say that I feel that art is something that has a meaning or idea behind it. But I think that I feel irritated at art that doesn’t really have like a “concrete” meaning or idea to take away because I hate not knowing things. (Like I hate it when people give really vague answers about art like “It’s anything you want it to be” and stuff like that.). Maybe that’s why I liked Brownian the best, because it held such a clear meaning to me.

I also remember thinking about relationships can be conveyed on stage. Whenever we see a guy and a girl on stage, we, or at least I, automatically think that they’re in a romantic relationship, especially in dance where everything is so physical and looks so suggestive. But that might not always be the case, a guy and a girl can have relationships as friends, siblings, acquaintances. It’s not always romantic, but how can we convey that on a dance stage where everything is so physical?

Okay, so with that I’m going to stop here. I actually had and still have a lot of questions that I want to ask, but I can’t put them into words and there’s just too many things I want to ask about so yeah. I’ll save them for another time.

#dance #dance writing #dancing #dance review #dance critique #thoughtsofadancerboo

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kramer-portfolio-2017 · 8 years ago

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Maxwell Street

(this is a poem I heard in a movie that we watched this semester, and it had a huge impact on me.)

This is the poem the blood in my hands has been waiting to write

since my last Yiddish-speaking grandparent died.

My dad says

when he was too little to see above a deli stand,

his dad would let him take a quarter from that day’s earnings

and let him make his way

through the stampede

of brown-eyed brownian motion

that was Jewish Maxwell Street.

He’d lift his arm to the invisible vendor,

the quarter would transform into a hot dog.

No ketchup.

But now

my dad’s people are receding north

as fast as his hairline.

Maxwell Street became Rogers Park,

Rogers Park became Devon,

became Arthur,

became North Shore,

became

the North Shore.

And it seems to me

that this is the way we Jews have always lived –

always leaving our homes,

wandering through the world as if through deserts,

crossing from one place to another.

Even for all that Pesach prattle about the glory of freedom,

Jews are still among those

who cross the street from a dark face,

apparently honoring our ancestors

who escaped from Africans by walking the length of a sea.

And while my grandma struggled as an immigrant,

I think she at least was free,

a Jew who understood that in America

being Jewish is not as hard as being black,

that the two don’t even compare,

that the bible goes so far back

that they don’t even really have slavery in common,

just Maxwell Street.

And even if I never called my grandma bubbe,

I want to write this poem in the spirit of remembrance.

When I was on the SkoMor soccer team,

I was the only Jew,

the kids asked me if I picked pennies from the ground,

teased me about going to hell,

and I only wondered where all the Jews

who were supposed to be in Skokie actually were.

From Egypt to Israel,

from Israel to Russia,

from Russia to New York,

to Maxwell Street,

to Devon, to Skokie,

to wherever the hair on my dad’s head will go

by the time he is buried in the soil from the Mount of Olives,

I hope for these Hebrews who can’t seem to stay in one place

an exodus only from the same mistakes.

And grandma,

who never hated anyone unless they hated someone for no reason –

you were Maxwell Street,

your heart a place that anyone could call home –

where crossing the street meant saying hello, merhaba,

or Evanston chanting STEINMETZ!

or doing anything that brought you closer to someone else,

and all I wanted to ask you before you died

was how I could find God as clearly as you did,

so that I could be a prophet,

and bring your love to the chosen people,

deemed such by their meeting your standard

of having a heartbeat.

-Adam Gottlieb

#poetry

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rhetoricandlogic · 8 years ago

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Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin

Medieval Russia was a land trembling with religious fervor. Mystics, pilgrims, prophets, and holy fools wandered the countryside. Their wardrobe and grooming choices earned them names like Maksim the Naked and John the Hairy. Basil the Blessed walked through Moscow in rags, castigated the rich, exposed deceitful merchants, and issued prophecies, many of which proved correct, or close enough. St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square is named for him. Nil Sorsky was renowned for his asceticism and devotion, suggesting that, through self-discipline and prayer, you could directly commune with God, making irrelevant the extravagant rituals of Orthodoxy. Many ascetics were deemed “fools for Christ,” whether or not they behaved foolishly. Some were designated saints.

A new novel by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, “Laurus,” recreates this fervent landscape and suggests why the era, its holy men, and the forests and fields of Muscovy retain such a grip on the Russian imagination. Vodolazkin’s hero-mystic Arseny is a protagonist extrapolated from the little that is known about the lives and deeds of the famous holy men. Born in 1440, he’s raised by his herbalist grandfather Christofer near the grounds of the Kirillov Monastery, about three hundred miles north of Moscow. He becomes a renowned medicine man, faith healer, and prophet who “pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.” He makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He takes on new names, depending on how he will next serve God. The people venerate his humble spirituality. In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul.

So much of that soul seems to be wrapped up in Russia’s relationship with the natural world: intimate but wary, occult but practical. Arseny’s initial renown comes from his success as an herbalist and healer as he employs what he learned from his beloved grandfather. For wart removal, the best treatment is a sprinkling of ground cornflower seeds. For burns, apply linen with ground cabbage and egg white. The white root of a plant called hare’s ear cures erectile dysfunction. (“The drawback to this method was that the white root had to be held in the mouth at the crucial moment.”) At least some of Arseny’s remedies are suspect. (Translator Lisa C. Hayden warns, “Please don’t try these at home.”)

The remedies invoke an idea of nature as essentially friendly, or at least potentially helpful. Folk medicine remains popular in Russia to this day. Whether or not it’s effective, it connects an overwhelmingly urbanized population to the scythed fields and profound, spirit-dwelling forests of its antiquity. And Vodolazkin takes his holy fools seriously, offering a view of medieval Christianity that goes well beyond the appropriation of home remedies for religious purposes. Although Arseny cherishes Christofer’s birch-bark pharmaceutical texts, he doesn’t believe the herbs are responsible when the ill recover. (Often, they don’t.) The keys are prayer and faith. He bows to icons on a shelf. Incense burns. A vitalizing current runs from his hands into the core of the patient’s suffering. In “Laurus,” the depiction of faith is presented entirely without irony—a strategy that has become unusual among literary writers, but which is central to Vodolazkin’s effort to excavate what was meaningful from Russia’s distant past.

The faith of Vodolazkin’s holy fools is neither ecstatic, like many forms of Western Christianity, nor hierarchical, like Eastern Christianity, nor scholarly, like Judaism. Although the Greek-derived word doesn’t appear in “Laurus,” Arseny appears to embrace “Hesychasm,” the Byzantine religious movement in pursuit of inner peace. In his magisterial history of Russian culture, “The Icon and the Axe,” James H. Billington explains that the Hesychasts received “divine illumination” through “ascetic discipline of the flesh and silent prayers of the spirit.” This often required years of isolation and silence. Arseny accepts the challenge after a series of trials, most significantly the death of his beloved Ustina, a young woman who had found refuge in his log house after her family was lost to the plague. His botched attempt to deliver their child tests the limits of prayer and folk medicine: “The blood was flowing from the womb and he could not stanch it. He took some finely grated cinnabar in his fingers and went as deeply into Ustina’s female places as he could.�� Arseny acknowledges his malpractice, but not the fact that she’s gone forever. Shattered by her death, he journeys to the town of Pskov, in what was then Lithuania. He spends decades without speaking, and is designated one of the region’s three holy fools. Most of his silent communion is not with God, but with Ustina’s spirit.

The other element of being a Russian holy man was a taste for prophecy—”dominating all other manifestations of eccentric sanctity,” according to Sergei Ivanov, author of “Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond,” the most authoritative English-language account of the phenomenon. “For many holy fools the power to predict is virtually the only quality mentioned in the sources.” Arseny looks at the ill and knows, regardless of his ministrations, who will survive and who will die. As a boy fool-in-training, he peers into the fire of the stove and sees the image of an elderly man. The aged Arseny will gaze into another fire at the unlined face of himself as a boy.

With so many of the blessed running around, fifteenth-century Russia, as Vodolazkin depicts it, is the golden age of prophets. Similarly ragged and unkempt, they stand at the entrances of markets. They appear at christenings and weep for the truncated lives they foretell. They sleep in cemeteries. Since there are seven days in the week, they figure that God has ordained seven millennia of human existence. Thus they widely announce that the world will end seven thousand years after its creation in 5508 B.C.—in other words, in A.D. 1492, just around the corner. Beset by plague and pestilence, poverty and hunger, the Russians already sense themselves on the brink of annihilation. They’re receptive. In the West, especially in Spain, other Christians similarly anticipate the apocalypse.

Arseny’s Italian friend Ambrogio, who has come to Russia because of its hospitality to prophets, predicts floods to the day; he can also see within a Soviet linen shop, circa 1951. But his visions of 1492 are confused. “On the one hand, a new continent would be discovered, on the other, the end of the world was expected in Rus’.” Ambrogio joins Arseny for his journey to Jerusalem. Passing through Poland, on their way to the Mediterranean, the two holy men reach the small town of Oświęcim. Ambrogio says, “Believe me, O Arseny, this place will induce horrors in centuries. But its gravity can be felt, even now.”

The prophets put forward a peculiar explanation for their extraordinary visions. They don’t necessarily attribute it to their spirituality. They see soothsaying as a kind of physical phenomenon, related to either the circularity of time or to its illusoriness. Ambrogio goes as far as to say that there’s really no such thing as time. The sense of its passing “is given to us by the grace of God so we will not get mixed up, because a person’s consciousness cannot take in all events at once. We are locked up in time because of our weakness.”

The semi-rational notions of the two mystics resonate in a particularly contemporary register, as fifteenth-century Russian religious thought grazes against the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Some current-day scientists, particularly the heterodox British physicist Julian Barbour, have speculated that the theories imply our universe exists in a kind of frozen space-time, in which everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen is occurring right now, in a single gigantic instant. The world has already ended. Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians told the holy wanderer Billy Pilgrim something like that, too. If correct, the human experience of time flowing like a river is more a function of our physiology: a singularly intense hallucination. The minutes may indeed pass by the grace of God.

In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin conveys the simultaneity of existence in his use of language, which, as the translator notes, “blends archaic words, comic remarks, quotes from the Bible, bureaucratese [and] chunks of medieval texts.” Hayden has tried to do justice to these stylistic flourishes by mixing Old English locutions and spelling—”yonge,” for young, “wombe” for womb, and “sayde” for said—with contemporary slang. After Arseny gets beat up for exposing the local baker’s transgressions, his fellow holy fool Foma warns, “Your clock will be cleaned again, my friend.” At the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, dust motes caught in a ray of sunlight swirl “in a pensive Brownian dance”—a reference to molecular Brownian motion explained by Albert Einstein in 1905.

We live in an age in which the pre-modern frequently comes flush up against the modern and the post-. But Russia and Russian life seem to be especially prone to existing on several planes of time at once. Occasionally, certain Russians cry out that they can see the future. Others dwell in the Byzantine. They may pass you on a Moscow street, robed and bearded. On an autumn walk through the countryside, you may get five bars on your phone while a distant onion dome rises above a stand of birches, a kerchiefed woman on the side of the road sells a kilo of pickles, other women scout for mushrooms in the woods, and in the fields there is a humming swish!, accompanied by the quick gray blur of a long, curving blade on a stick.

#Eugene Vodolazkin #Laurus #mahreviews

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georgethompson081 · 6 years ago

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Mist Eliminator Filter: For Improved Work Environment And Productivity

The mist eliminator filter is a very important component that’s been seeing increasing use in many industrial processes. Its primary purpose is to filter gas streams, removing mist and heavy liquid particles from them.

The benefits from it are twofold.

First, the removal of mist from gas streams means less harm to the environment, as otherwise this mist, containing pollutants would be released into the atmosphere.

The second benefit is protecting downstream equipment that may suffer from erosion caused by the contaminants in the mist. The factory or plant itself is also made free of this pollution, increasing the wellbeing of workers in it.

Among the common applications of mist eliminator filters are:

Chlorine or alkaline processes

Acidic processes decontamination

Abatement of organic fumes

Heavy oil particle removal

The additional bonus of this is not allowing too much water (which is often essential for equipment cooling) to leave the plant. The mist eliminator filter traps it and from there it cascades back down the shaft to the reservoir where it can be filtered and used again.

This means not only a more eco-friendly but also considerably more efficient manufacturing operation.

Our inline mist eliminator technology is comprised of tiny fibers that, with the help of Brownian motion, separate the heavier liquid particles (mist) from the gas stream as it passes by and through the filtration system.

Visit Source Link For More Information :

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#mist eliminator filter #mist eliminator

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enough-finance · 6 years ago

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Semimartingale Modeling This book is written primarily for practitioners of mathematical finance. It is one of the very few books that explains semimartingale modeling of the asset price with sufficient simplicity for beginning graduate students. It is a prerequisite for many advanced papers in the field. The author is Kolmogorov's most eminent student. Go to Amazon

Shiryaev knows his stuff! This book is typical of Shiryaev, who is a representative of the Russian school of probability theory. Not only the book explains the technical details clearly, but also it explains the "bigger picture" as to why this particular mathematical set-up makes sense and it is a good approximation of reality. The book reflects the (admirable) Russian style of teaching: explain the origins of theory, which are usually some specific problem; then carefully develop a mathematical theory tailor-made for the given problem; finally, disclose the essence of the problem and produce a beautiful result. Go to Amazon

Bravo The Essentials of Stochastic Finance: Facts, Models, Theory by Albert N. Shiriaev, et al offers a clear treatment of both theoretical and emperical Finance. Shiryaev presents not only the essentials of probability as it is applied to finance,but he also covers recent develpoments in Mathematical Finance. It is very well written and it can be covered in one year (depending on the audience). Each topic moves from the specific to the general, beginning with one or more examples to lead into the theoretical results. This is the most comprehensive book out there. It covers Mathematical Finance, Martingale, Markov Thoery... to Econometric ARCH GARCH FGARCH ...to theory of Finance CAPM APT... PART II of the book requires a good knowledge of Stochastic Calculus at Karatzas and Shreve level... Go to Amazon

Excellent Monograph This monograph starts from the very basics and develops as it progresses. Its historical notes found all over the book makes it unique and entertaining. As a mathematician aspiring to break through the STREET, I found it very accessible and comprehensive. If you have Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus at Shever/Kaaze's (how ever you spell their name) level, you will skim through this book with in weeks. But if you don't, don't panic, you will still be fine with some introductory level measure theoretic probability course. Go to Amazon

#N. Kruzhilin: Books

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pratchettquotes · 2 years ago

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Rumor is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows--sometimes it doesn't even need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

It had escaped already. From the high window of the Patrician's bedroom, Sam Vimes could see people drifting towards the palace. There wasn't a mob--there wasn't even what you might call a crowd--but the Brownian motion of the streets was bouncing more and more people in his direction.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

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aidancomerfordwriting-blog · 7 years ago

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youtube

JULIA

Martha and I planned to have an awesome family, like The Brady Bunch, but even cooler ... if that's possible. I would be the dad who enlightened and entertained, somewhere between a hip Pa Ingalls and a self-aware Homer Simpson, while Martha would teach the kids how to eye-roll (appropriately) at their dad's bad jokes. It was going to be wonderful.

Then, gradually, and also suddenly, we found out that both of our daughters, Ailbhe and Sophie, were on the autistic spectrum.

Like most parents, at the start, we only understood autism as a movie trope: crippling social ineptitude married to marvellous maths.

'No, Aidan, you can't bring the girls to Vegas' - Martha.

I can be difficult to shake the myths. Neither of the girls had a special affinity for numbers: 'So they can't be autistic, right?' Our girls giggled when they were tickled. 'Autistic kids don't laugh, do they?'

Ailbhe and Sophie were four and two when our suspicions about autism were confirmed, professionally.

Nobody could tell us what they would be like when they were older. They both struggled, in different ways, with speech and eye contact. So, I assumed that as they grew, and they lost the childhood love of 'rough and tumble,' that I would struggle to make them similarly smile with words. How would they even begin to understand that Dad's jokes are of the type that are so bad that they're actually good? (Although, that's a concept Martha often struggles with as well.)

Then, along came Sesame Street.

I was in the sitting room one Saturday morning, not long after Sophie's official diagnosis, watching a DVD 'with' them. I was on the couch, and they were sitting on the floor on cushions, all of us separate.

Back then, they were both big fans of Bear in The Big Blue House ... and repetition. To quell the homicidal thoughts I was having about Tutter, the horrendous house mouse, I took out my phone with the intention of escaping down a Youtube hole. Youtube suggested a video where Ricky Gervais sings Elmo a lullaby. 'Oh Youtube, sometimes I think you're the only one who truly understands me,' I thought. As I watched it, something that didn't often happen ... happened. The girls climbed up and sat either side of me.

I laughed at the funny bit in the lullaby. They laughed at the funny bit in the lullaby too, all of us together. When the video ended, Ailbhe said, 'Play it again.' I looked at Sophie, and she was actually looking back at me! She couldn't speak at all then, but I knew what she was trying to say with her eyes: 'What are you waiting for, Dad? Murder that repeat button.'

So, I did, and eventually we moved on to Natalie Portman with Elmo and the Elephant, Feist singing 1, 2, 3, 4 with the gang, and so many other wonderful, funny Sesame street videos. Martha and I had cried an ocean of tears about the girls, but that day a trickle of joy escaped down my cheek.

We watched those videos a lot over the next couple of years, as the love of Bear in the Big Blue House faded (and Tutter was spared what would have been an unspeakable death by my hand.)

With therapy, Ailbhe's speech improved so much, that years later I was able to take her to a kids' comedy show. She even developed taste. Afterwards she said, 'Dad, why can't you write jokes as good as that?'

If you want to know what Sophie is like, now, look at the recent introduction to Sesame Street's Julia, the first children's character on television with autism. Sophie is also a beautiful, red-headed girl, who loves to play, and laugh, but often requires a lot of patience and understanding. However, Sophie's skin is a little bit pinker.

There are other differences, too, and Sesame Street capture that beautifully with two very important words. When Big Bird asks, 'What's autism?' the answer is, '...for Julia...' I remember I watched that video for the first time at lunchtime in work, and at that point in the video (around 2:35) my eyes watered: 'They get it!'

Martha and I learned over time, meeting other parents and kids dealing with life on the spectrum, that autism is a marquee-sized umbrella term, covering such a vast range of behaviours. Julia finds it hard to deal with loud noises, and needs some time out, whereas loud noises often make Sophie laugh (Sophie's nemeses are the Brownian motions of yippy little dogs.) Sophie repeats words as affirmations, just like Julia. 'Sophie play?' you would ask. 'Sophie play?' she would agree. Sophie doesn't flap her hands, like Julia does, but she does have favourite toys that soothe her. Just like Julia, Sophie is often kind and empathetic. She loves to cuddle. There are parents who have children with autism who hate to be held. Sometimes Martha and I cry. Sometimes we count the blessings.

Julia is brought to life beautifully, with so much sensitivity. It is no surprise that the creator is a parent who has a child with autism. It is wonderful to see a character that might help other kids understand. Everyone should watch it, and then watch it again.

So, what are you waiting for? Murder that repeat button.

#autsim #reading #writing #funny #sesame street

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readbookywooks · 8 years ago

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‘Look, all right, but, look, they’re talking about shutting the Library!’

The silence grew louder. The sleeping cat had cocked an ear.

‘What is happening is all wrong!’ the bursar confided, and clapped his hand over his mouth at the enormity of what he had said.

‘Oook?’

It was the faintest of noises, like the eructation of cockroaches.

Suddenly emboldened, Spelter pressed his lips closer to the crack.

‘Have you got the, um, Patrician in there?’

‘Oook.’

‘What about the little doggie?’

‘Oook.’

‘Oh. Good.’

Spelter lay full length in the comfort of the night, and drummed his fingers on the chilly floor.

‘You wouldn’t care to, um, let me in too?’ he ventured.

‘Oook!’

Spelter made a face in the gloom.

‘Well, would you, um, let me come in for a few minutes? We need to discuss something urgently, man to man.’

‘Eeek.’

‘I meant ape.’

‘Oook.’

‘Look, won’t you come out, then?’

‘Oook.’

Spelter sighed. ‘This show of loyalty is all very well, but you’ll starve in there.’

‘Oook oook.’

‘What other way in?’

‘Oook.’

‘Oh, have it your way,’ Spelter sighed. But, somehow, he felt better for the conversation. Everyone else in the University seemed to be living in a dream, whereas the Librarian wanted nothing more in the whole world than soft fruit, a regular supply of index cards and the opportunity, every month or so, to hop over the wall of the Patrician’s private menagerie.[13] It was strangely reassuring.

‘So you’re all right for bananas and so forth?’ he inquired, after another pause.

‘Oook.’

‘Don’t let anyone in, will you? Um. I think that’s frightfully important.’

‘Oook.’

‘Good.’ Spelter stood up and dusted off his knees. Then he put his mouth to the keyhole and added, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’

‘Oook.’

It was not completely dark in the Library, because the serried rows of magical books gave off a faint octarine glow, caused by thaumaturgical leakage into a strong occult field. It was just bright enough to illuminate the pile of shelves wedged against the door.

The former Patrician had been carefully decanted into a jar on the Librarian’s desk. The Librarian himself sat under it, wrapped in his blanket and holding Wuffles on his lap.

Occasionally he would eat a banana.

Spelter, meanwhile, limped back along the echoing passages of the University, heading for the security of his bedroom. It was because his ears were nervously straining the tiniest of sounds out of the air that he heard, right on the cusp of audibility, the sobbing.

It wasn’t a normal noise up here. In the carpeted corridors of the senior wizards’ quarters there were a number of sounds you might hear late at night, such as snoring, the gentle clinking of glasses, tuneless singing and, once in a while, the zip and sizzle of a spell gone wrong. But the sound of someone quietly crying was such a novelty that Spelter found himself edging down the passage that led to the Archchancellor’s suite.

The door was ajar. Telling himself that he really shouldn’t, tensing himself for a hurried dash, Spelter peered inside.

Rincewind stared.

‘What is it?’ he whispered.

‘I think it’s a temple of some sort,’ said Conina.

Rincewind stood and gazed upwards, the crowds of AI Khali bouncing off and around him in a kind of human Brownian motion. A temple, he thought. Well, it was big, and it was impressive, and the architect had used every trick in the book to make it look even bigger and even more impressive than it was, and to impress upon everyone looking at it that they, on the other hand, were very small and ordinary and didn’t have as many domes. It was the kind of place that looked exactly as you were always going to remember it.

But Rincewind felt he knew holy architecture when he saw it, and the frescoes on the big and, of course, impressive walls above him didn’t look at all religious. For one thing, the participants were enjoying themselves. Almost certainly, they were enjoying themselves. Yes, they must be. It would be pretty astonishing if they weren’t.

‘They’re not dancing, are they?’ he said, in a desperate attempt not to believe the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Or maybe it’s some sort of acrobatics?’

Conina squinted upwards in the hard, white sunlight.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she said, thoughtfully.

Rincewind remembered himself. ‘I don’t think a young woman like you should be looking at this sort of thing,’ he said sternly.

Conina gave him a smile. ‘I think wizards are expressly forbidden to,’ she said sweetly. ‘It’s supposed to turn you blind.’

Rincewind turned his face upwards again, prepared to risk maybe one eye. This sort of thing is only to be expected, he told himself. They don’t know any better. Foreign countries are, well, foreign countries. They do things differently there.

Although some things, he decided, were done in very much the same way, only with rather more inventiveness and, by the look of it, far more often.

‘The temple frescoes of Al Khali are famous far and wide,’ said Conina, as they walked through crowds of children who kept trying to sell Rincewind things and introduce him to nice relatives.

‘Well, I can see they would be,’ Rincewind agreed. ‘Look, push off, will you? No, I don’t want to buy whatever it is. No, I don’t want to meet her. Or him, either. Or it, you nasty little boy. Get off, will you?’

The last scream was to the group of children riding sedately on the Luggage, which was plodding along patiently behind Rincewind and making no attempt to shake them off. Perhaps it was sickening for something, he thought, and brightened up a bit.

‘How many people are there on this continent, do you think?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Conina, without turning round. ‘Millions, I expect?’

‘If I were wise, I wouldn’t be here,’ said Rincewind, with feeling.

They had been in Al Khali, gateway to the whole mysterious continent of Klatch, for several hours. He was beginning to suffer.

A decent city should have a bit of fog about it, he considered, and people should live indoors, not spend all their time out on the streets. There shouldn’t be all this sand and heat. As for the wind …

Ankh-Morpork had its famous smell, so full of personality that it could reduce a strong man to tears. But Al Khali had its wind, blowing from the vastness of the deserts and continents nearer the rim. It was a gentle breeze, but it didn’t stop and eventually it had the same effect on visitors that a cheesegrater achieves on a tomato. After a while it seemed to have worn away your skin and was rasping directly across the nerves.

To Conina’s sensitive nostrils it carried aromatic messages from the heart of the continent, compounded of the chill of deserts, the stink of lions, the compost of jungles and the flatulence of wildebeest.

Rincewind, of course, couldn’t smell any of this. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, and most Morporkians would be hard put to smell a burning feather mattress at five feet.

‘Where to next?’ he said. ‘Somewhere out of the wind?’

‘My father spent some time in Khali when he was hunting for the Lost City of Ee,’ said Conina. ‘And I seem to remember he spoke very highly of the soak. It’s a kind of bazaar.’

‘I suppose we just go and look for the second-hand hat stalls,’ said Rincewind. ‘Because the whole idea is totally-’

‘What I was hoping was that maybe we could be attacked. That seems the most sensible idea. My father said that very few strangers who entered the soak ever came out again. Some very murderous types hang out there, he said.’

Rincewind gave this due consideration.

‘Just run that by me again, will you?’ he said. ‘After you said we should be attacked I seemed to hear a ranging in my ears.’

‘Well, we want to meet the criminal element, don’t we?’

‘Not exactly want,’ said Rincewind. ‘That wasn’t the phrase I would have chosen.’

‘How would you put it, then?’

‘Er. I think the phrase “not want” sums it up pretty well.’

‘But you agreed that we should get the hat!’

‘But not die in the process,’ said Rincewind, wretchedly. ‘That won’t do anyone any good. Not me, anyway.’

‘My father always said that death is but a sleep,’ said Conina.

‘Yes, the hat told me that,’ said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls. ‘But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.’

‘Look,’ said Conina, ‘there’s not much risk. You’re with me.’

‘Yes, and you’re looking forward to it, aren’t you,’ said Rincewind accusingly, as Conina piloted them along a shady alley, with their retinue of pubescent entrepreneurs at their heels. ‘It’s the old herrydeterry at work.’

‘Just shut up and try to look like a victim, will you?’

‘I can do that all right,’ said Rincewind, beating off a particularly stubborn member of the junior Chamber of Commerce, ‘I’ve had a lot of practice. For the last time, I don’t want to buy anyone, you wretched child!’

He looked gloomily at the walls around them. At least there weren’t any of those disturbing pictures here, but the hot breeze still blew the dust around him and he was sick and tired of looking at sand. What he wanted was a couple of cool beers, a cold bath and a change of clothing; it probably wouldn’t make him feel better, but it would at least make feeling awful more enjoyable. Not that there was any beer here, probably. It was a funny thing, but in chilly cities like Ankh-Morpork the big drink was beer, which cooled you down, but in places like this, where the whole sky was an oven with the door left open, people drank tiny little sticky drinks which set fire to the back of your throat. And the architecture was all wrong. And they had statues in their temples that, well, just weren’t suitable. This wasn’t the right kind of place for wizards. Of course, they had some local grown alternative, enchanters or some such, but not what you’d call decent magic …

Conina strolled ahead of him, humming to herself.

You rather like her, don’t you? I can tell, said a voice in his head.

Oh blast, thought Rincewind, you’re not my conscience again, are you?

Your libido. It’s a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it? You haven’t had it done up since the last time I was around.

Look, go away, will you? I’m a wizard! Wizards are ruled by their heads, not by their hearts!

And I’m getting votes from your glands, and they’re telling me that as far as your body is concerned your brain is in a minority of one.

Yes? But it’s got the casting vote, then.

Hah! That’s what you think. Your heart has got nothing to do with this, by the way, it’s merely a muscular organ which powers the circulation of the blood. But look at it like this - you quite like her, don’t you?

#Sourcery

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regarde-les-hommes-danser-blog · 8 years ago

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Performance art

Or how a drunk Aboriginal makes his life more sensitive than you do

“The meaning of your life is the one you choose” told me Miss Casanova, a repulsive and fat woman friend of my mother, when I was a kid who thought that life was all about video games, football and apple juice.

I always think about this statement when I see these drunk aborigines trying to do something which no one understands the reason, or even the content. They can be in the street, in a public library, or in park, their relationship to our commun environment is constantly the same. They create noises using their voice, and sometimes their feet or hands by clapping or hitting the ground violently. They create visual interactions by moving randomly but always in a balanced way, producing some brownian motions with their outstretched arms. They create things. They are creators for who the space is a material which has to be damaged by a vibration whose the nature doesn’t matter. A drunk aboriginal is, by the end, a sort of human Didgeridoo.

That’s why we don’t have to understand what they do - Art as such is not a science. Of course, as being unconscious but powerful artists, drunk aborigines can go crazy at people around them who, according to their perception, disturbed their performance. Somedays, they shout out to dogs walking around, for no apparent reason. Dogs can be designated as innocent victims, but actually they are just a part of the show. That’s how Life, in general, works : everything is all about interactions, as Einstein had predicted it well.

For us, I mean for people who live a normal life made out of bank accounts, office jobs, and Sunday family lunch, their lifestyle is obviously, definitely, out of range. But, in fact, it is totally sensitive. Miss Casanova’s statement is all about this analysis. Except if you believe in this idea called God, Life as such has no sense - and you can’t argue with that, even after 6 pints. Perhaps, drunk aborigines found it out, this sense of Life, and that’s probably why they can look crazy, agressive or lost in their own life. But they are not crazy. They are not lost. We are lost in the jungle we created with wrong ideas, based on money, carbon dioxide and concrete - and now chipsets. A drunk Aboriginal is a melancholic, which is not a sufferer as people or doctors might claim, but more someone who is too rational for our materialism society about the evidence of the fatality - a fear which cannot be compensated by the purchase of a product or a service.

I remember exactly the moment when Miss Casanova told me her morning philosophical thought. I was watching an episode of a cartoon, Hey Arnold!, in which some students, in a particular day, try to put other students - younger than them - into beans. A sort of The Walking Dead kid version established on an interpretation of the law of the strongest. The one which put some Aborigines not into beans, but into the Melancholic’s condition, and then into Truth.

#pensees

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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2:00PM Water Cooler 8/5/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 8/5/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Trade

“Trade Wars Escalate” [Tim Duy’s Fed Watch]. “The big news everyone will wake up to is the latest escalation in the trade wars between the U.S. and China. The situation is obviously a clear net negative for the economy that will keep the Fed biased toward easing again in September. The Fed will remain under pressure to help President Trump fight his trade wars with lower interest rates in the months ahead.” • If the Fed takes away the punchbowl, the worst might happen: A Sanders win.

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of August 1: Biden fluctuates to 32.2% (32.0), Sanders up to 16.5% (16.4%), Warren down at 14.0% (14.8%), Buttigieg flat at 5.5% (5.6%), Harris down at 10.3% (11.0%), Beto separating himself from the bottom feeders, interestingly. others Brownian motion. If these trends continue in the next release, Sanders will the only winner of both debates.

* * *

2020

Buttigieg (D)(1): “Buttigieg’s New Hampshire Director Leaves Team: Campaign Update” [Yahoo News]. “The Pete Buttigieg campaign has parted ways with its New Hampshire state director Michael Ceraso. The move comes days after the second round of Democratic debates — in which Buttigieg had no breakout moments — and two weeks after the campaign brought on Jess O’Connell as a senior adviser. O’Connell was chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee in 2017 and has served as executive director of EMILY’s List. Ceraso departs just as she was seeking changes to make the campaign more competitive in key states, and ahead of New Hampshire’s state convention in September, the campaign said, adding that it will soon announce several other staffing changes.” • Yes, “chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee” is the line on the resumé I want to see…

Gabbard (D)(1): “Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We’re Doomed” [New York Times]. “‘Tracking metrics of Russian state propaganda on Twitter, she was by far the most favored candidate,’ said Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. ‘She’s the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat. She is such a useful agent of influence for them. Whether she knows it’s happening or not, they love what she’s saying.’” • Presented without comment from the, er, reporter.

Harris (D)(1):

BREAKING:

In a major ethics violation, Kamala Harris’ iconic and memorable rainbow sequin coat she wore to San Francisco Pride was sewn together by truancy convicts in a California prison work camp, sources report. pic.twitter.com/MqliI2RD8D

— MSDNC (@MSDNCNews) August 4, 2019

Check source before recirculating…

Sanders (D)(1): “Mike Gravel to Formally Endorse Bernie Sanders’ Campaign” [The Daily Beast]. “[Gravel,] who was cajoled into running an almost exclusively online campaign by teenagers David Oks and Henry Williams, filmed an endorsement video for Sanders on Sunday. Gravel spoke with Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir before coming to the decision to make a formal endorsement and is planning to speak with Sanders himself in the coming days.”

Sanders (D)(2): “Bernie Sanders explains why it’s his time to win Nevada” [Las Vegas Review-Journal]. “‘We’ve got Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and California,’ Sanders said. ‘And my guess is that any candidate who does particularly well in those five states is going to be the nominee and the next president of the United States.’… Sanders told the crowd that all of these issues — low pay, high-interest loans, medical bills — are intertwined in a web that keeps half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.” • That last sentence is interesting, because it’s not Sanders’ language; the reporter was actually listening and thing.

Warren (D)(1):

.@SenWarren has been publicly critical of Wall Street in the past. Can she convince the finance industry that she’s the right candidate to lead the Democrat campaign in 2020? https://t.co/AOu1nwojaZ

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 4, 2019

Oh, I hope not!

Williamson (D)(1): “Marianne Williamson: Holy Fool” [The American Conservative]. “[L]et’s not fool ourselves: Trump, like Sharpton and his identity-politics-besotted enablers in the Democratic Party and the left-wing establishments, are trafficking in “dark psychic forces.” For years in this space, I have warned that leftist identity politics are summoning demons. So is Donald Trump…. Dark psychic force? You’d have to be a fool not to see it. And you’d have to be completely self-deceived to think that only one side has a monopoly on it…. I believe the capacity for this kind of hatred exists within every human heart. What we are losing is the sense that it is a destructive passion to be resisted.”

TX: Suburban Republicans:

People grossly oversold GOP vulnerability in TX pre-Trump and are grossly underselling it now. Texas is an overwhelmingly urban/suburban state, so GOP weakening in the suburbs is felt disproportionately in TX. It could go blue, quickly, under this current configuration

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) August 5, 2019

2019

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, spokesman leave her office” [The Intercept]. • Looks to me like Nancy won. I hope AOC is taking care of her district.

The Debates

“Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Stood Together on Radical Progressive Ideas in the Democratic Debate” [Teen Vogue]. “Despite being jointly labeled as the party’s progressive standard-bearers, Sanders and Warren appeal to very different supporters. As explained by Politico, polling indicates that Warren appeals more to women, to better-educated voters, and to older voters; Sanders, on the other hand, is favored by the less educated, by men, by younger voters, and by those with lower incomes. The fact that the two candidates are running on similar platforms but have such divergent bases of support speaks to the broad appeal of progressive policies. Which, in part, is why it’s confusing to see so many Democrats so eager to attack these progressives.” • What’s confusing about it?

Impeachment

“Should we impeach Donald Trump?” [Patheos]. “For those like me with a more conservative inclination, we are getting a reputation for blindly tying ourselves to one political party without regard to things we have said in the past about how political leaders ought to behave publicly. To use my own crowd as an example, in 1998 while the Clinton impeachment was going on the Southern Baptist Convention passed a ‘Resolution on the Moral Character of Public Officials,’ but you’ll have to work hard to hear that document being cited by certain prominent Southern Baptists these days. We ought to hold elected officials that we like to the same standard as those we don’t. That doesn’t mean we should automatically be in favor of impeachment, but it does mean that if we were charging at Bill Clinton for his moral failings, we should be at least as critical as Donald Trump without rationalizing it away ‘because the other side is worse.’”

RussiaGate

“DNI Nominee Intent on Getting to Bottom of Russiagate” [Ray McGovern, Consortium News]. “Shortly before President Donald Trump announced he had nominated Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe made it clear he intends to hit the deck running on the ‘crimes’ behind Russiagate. ‘What I do know as a former federal prosecutor is it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration,’ Ratcliffe told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. Mincing few words, he claimed the Democrats ‘accused Donald Trump of a crime and then tried to reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation.’ It’s an extravagant claim. But it is also true, and the proof is in the pudding of which we should have a steady diet in the months to come.” • This was written before Ratcliffe was unceremoniously heaved over the side, presumanbly after The Blob said “not on your Nellie.”

El Paso Shooting

Readers, I’ll have an El Paso Water Cooler Special tomorrow; I’m still gathering my thoughts.

“After the El Paso Massacre, the Choice Is Green Socialism or Eco-Fascism” [The Nation]. “Writing in New York magazine in March, Eric Levitz predicted that the climate emergency could easily spark two wildly divergent paths away from the current unsustainable model of economic growth: a Green New Deal vision of the future where socialist policies are used to remake the American and global economy to be more ecologically sustainable—or an extreme-right model based on immigration restriction and opposition to economic growth in the Global South.” • The mental health frame is not especially useful, I think.

“El Paso Terrorism Suspect’s Alleged Manifesto Highlights Eco-Fascism’s Revival” [HuffPo]. “Titled ‘The Inconvenient Truth,’ an allusion to Al Gore’s landmark climate change documentary, the ranting four-page document appeared on the extremist forum 8chan shortly before the shooting. Authorities have yet to confirm whether Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old Dallas-area white man arrested in connection with the shooting that left at least 22 dead, is the author. ‘The environment is getting worse by the year,’ the manifesto reads. ‘Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.’ • Well, life expectancy is falling, and the birth rate is falling….

Obama Legacy

“The Democratic party’s quiet abandonment of Barack Obama” [Financial Times]. “As he surveys today’s wreckage, Mr Obama can draw on one other consolation: at least he merits the occasional mention. Bill Clinton, by contrast, has vanished. In the age of #Metoo, America’s 42nd president is persona non grata. Democrats are busy purging the past. Given the mood, it would be a surprise were Mr Biden to make it to the finishing line.” • The key word is “quiet.” The liberal Democrat hive mind operates rather like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Deprecated figures in photographs are retouched away — with no explanation and no accountability.

“Obama Reportedly Unfazed By Criticism From 2020 Candidates” [The Onion]. • A survey.

“How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans” [Sandy Darity, The Atlantic]. From 2016, still germane: “The “acting white” libel is symptomatic of a more general perspective—a perspective that argues that an important factor explaining racial economic disparities is self-defeating or dysfunctional behavior on the part of blacks themselves. And Barack Obama continuously has trafficked in this perspective. Of course, there are some black folk who engage in habits that undermine their potential accomplishments, but there are some white folk who engage in habits that undermine their potential accomplishments as well. And there is no evidence to demonstrate that are proportionately more blacks who behave in ways that undercut achievement, especially since it is clear that blacks do more with less. Nevertheless, Obama consistently has trafficked heavily in the tropes of black dysfunction. Either he is unfamiliar with or uninterested in the evidence that undercuts the black behavioral deficiency narrative. These tropes, in my view, do malicious work.”

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The Idiocy of Ballot Bouncing” [Harold Meyerson, TAP]. “The California statute [on Presidential candidates’ tax returns] may just prompt Republican-controlled states to require every presidential nominee to, say, support the ongoing criminalization of undocumented border crossings, or call for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, to get their name on the states’ ballots. If the Democratic nominee’s name were not put before voters in Alabama, it wouldn’t really matter, since Alabama is bound to go for Trump. Then again, California is just as bound to go for the Democrat, no matter who it be. But what about Republican-controlled swing states like Georgia and Florida—or, for that matter, Arizona and Texas? Should the courts rule that states have the legal right to engage in ballot-bouncing, the Democratic nominee may be bounced to far greater, and more disastrous effect, than Trump.” • My example was “No Presidential candidate shall have used a private email server for public business.” NOTE I was wrong to assert that Lincoln was on the ballot in the slave states. He was not. All the more reason for California not to emulate them.

Why there should never be a digital intermediary between marking the ballot and counting it:

1989: Brian Fox introduced code into Bash, later released as version 1.03, which included the first of the Shellshock vulnerabilities publicly reported 9,169 days later. That’s 25 years, 1 month, and 13 days of exploitability.

Takeaway? You’re always running exploitable code. pic.twitter.com/wqE3cTQFwZ

— Today In Infosec (@todayininfosec) August 5, 2019

“You are always running exploitable code.” And the author of Bash is a highly competent programmer, unlike the voting machine vendors.

Stats Watch

Purchasing Managers’ Services Index, July 2019: “‘Robust’ — both domestic and foreign — is Markit Economics’ description of US service sector demand in July which, however, is not confirmed by the no more than moderate-to-solid diffusion score” [Econoday]. However, “hiring was ‘only moderate’…, inflationary pressures ‘historically subdued’, [and] optimism in the outlook slipping for a sixth month in a row.”

Institute For Supply Management Non-Manufacturing Index, July 2019: “ISM non-manufacturing has consistently reported very solid rates of growth but it too is at a multi-year low” [Econoday]. “Yet rates of growth, though moderating, are still respectable…. Though it does fit in with the general slowing underway in global diffusion reports, this isn’t a bad report and is a reminder that domestic demand in the second-quarter… was very strong.”

Retail: “Inside the conflict at Walmart that’s threatening its high-stakes race with Amazon” [Vox]. “The company’s US online sales increased 40 percent last year, buoyed by a successful expansion of an online grocery business; the digital-first brands and digital-first talent it has acquired have breathed new life into its portfolio; and it has shed at least part of its reputation for being a digital dinosaur…. But it’s still far behind Amazon, and inside Walmart, tensions are rising. Multiple sources tell Recode that the company is projecting losses of more than $1 billion for its US e-commerce division this year, on revenue of between $21 billion and $22 billion. Walmart does not disclose these figures publicly and declined to comment. That size loss is an eye-popping figure for a company that is used to printing cash and that prides itself on its profitable operations; the overall Walmart business brought in nearly $7 billion in profits during the last fiscal year…. The problem is that building the online version of the Everything Store requires millions more products, and that means two things that Walmart’s current infrastructure does not support: dozens more e-commerce warehouses and a lot more merchants and brands selling through Walmart.com.” • Well worth a read. Almost makes you feel sorry for Walmart. • And then there’s this: “Walmart has not secured the same trust — and long leash — from Wall Street investors that Amazon has.” In other words, Amazon has and has had the privilege of running its operation at a loss for years.

Retail slash Internet of Shit:

As a tech critic, there is a lot of stuff that I think of as “Slavoj Zizek on easy mode”—labor-saving devices for the nihilist contrarian with a conference talk deadline. The Amazon dash buttons were in this rare category and I will be sad to see them go https://t.co/qF1WPGDczq

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 3, 2019

The Bezzle: “Autopilot failed to keep Tesla from sliding under semitruck at 68 mph, lawsuit claims” [Orlando Sun-Sentinel]. “About 10 seconds before the crash, Banner engaged the Autopilot system, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.” • So I’m not sure about the case, but at the end of the article there’s this: “The NTSB, in a 2017 report, wrote that design limitations of the Autopilot system played a major role in the fatality, the first known one in which a vehicle operated on a highway under semi-autonomous control systems. The agency said that Tesla told Model S owners that Autopilot should be used only on limited-access highways, primarily interstates. The report said that despite upgrades to the system, Tesla did not incorporate protections against use of the system on other types of roads.” • Because of course they didn’t. Could be that determining whether you’re on a limited-access highway is a hard problem for robot cars, just like turning left?

The Bezzle: “Finnish Tesla Model 3 Inspection Reveals Soft, Thin, Under-Spec Paint” [The Drive]. “A Finnish condition inspection of a Tesla Model 3’s paint has returned extremely poor readings for both thickness and hardness, validating growing owner concerns about easily-worn paint on the firm’s cars. These results come as Tesla negotiates the settlement of some 19 air quality violations at its Fremont, California factory paint shop, raising questions about the possibility of a connection between those compliance challenges and the thin, soft paint found on Tesla’s cars. Paint issues were one of several factors that contributed to the Model 3 losing its Consumer Reports recommendation this year.” • Oops.

The Bezzle: “Uber and Lyft Investors Are Looking for Signs of a Détente” [Bloomberg]. • Would a cartel between two firms whose business models doom them to unprofitability be unique in human history?

Tech: “AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is such a hit it almost outsold Intel’s entire CPU range” [TechRadar]. “In June, AMD’s overall market share was 68% at Mindfactory, so the increase to 79% represents a big jump, and the highest proportion of sales achieved by the company this year by a long way. To put this in a plainer fashion, for every single processor sold by Intel, AMD sold four.” • I’m used to the idea of Intel dominating everything. Oops.

Tech: “Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down (again)” [Engadget]. “Numerous reports have surfaced of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp being unavailable to various degrees on the morning of August 4th. The failure doesn’t appear to have been as dramatic as it was in July, when image services were out for several hours (we had at least some success visiting them ourselves). Still, it likely wasn’t what you were hoping for if you wanted to catch up on your social feeds on a lazy Sunday morning…. There has been a string of problems across the services in recent months, with roots in everything from server configurations to the previously mentioned media services. It’s not clear why they’ve picked up after a long period of relative stability.”

Intellectual Property: “Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier” [Office of Scholarly Communications, University of California]. “Elsevier’s offer to increase open access publishing “five-fold” would have resulted in only 30 percent of UC’s research, all of which is supported by public funding, being freely available to the public. Under the past Elsevier contract, which required UC authors to pay an additional charge for open access (after the libraries already paid Elsevier for subscriptions), only 6 percent of UC authors made that second payment — making the majority of UC research published in Elsevier journals inaccessible to the public who helped fund it.” • Elsevier, it is safe to say, is not greatly loved.

Intellectual Property: “Elsevier: “It’s illegal to Sci-Hub.” Also Elsevier: ‘We link to Sci-Hub all the time.’” [Boing Boing]. “Yesterday, I wrote about science publishing profiteer Elsevier’s legal threats against Citationsy, in which the company claimed that the mere act of linking to Sci-Hub (an illegal open-access portal) was itself illegal. You’ll never guess what happens next. Elsevier’s own journals turn out to be full of links to Sci-Hub. It’s also not hard to understand this. You see, the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn’t pay for any of the work it publishes, it’s hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 23 Fear (previous close: 36, Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 58 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 5 at 12:49pm. • Restored at reader request. Note that the index is not always updated daily, sadly.

Rapture Index: Closes up one on Crime Rate. “America’s 8th deadliest mass shooting occurred in El Paso.” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 184. Remember that bringing on the rapture is a good thing.

The Biosphere

“When Tree Planting Actually Damages Ecosystems” [The Wire]. “Tree planting has been widely promoted as a solution to climate change, because plants absorb the climate-warming gases from Earth’s atmosphere as they grow…. Many of those trees could be planted in tropical grassy biomes according to the report. These are the savannas and grasslands that cover large swathes of the globe and have a grassy ground layer and variable tree cover. Like forests, these ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon balance. Studies have estimated that grasslands store up to 30% of the world’s carbon that’s tied up in soil. Covering 20% of Earth’s land surface, they contain huge reserves of biodiversity, comparable in areas to tropical forest…. Savannas and grasslands are home to nearly one billion people, many of whom raise livestock and grow crops… Calls for global tree planting programmes to cool the climate need to think carefully about the real implications for all of Earth’s ecosystems. The right trees need to be planted in the right places. Otherwise, we risk a situation where we miss the savanna for the trees, and these ancient grassy ecosystems are lost forever.”

“‘This is the beginning’: new study warns climate crisis may have been pivotal in rise of drug-resistant superbug” [Monthly Review]. “A new analysis warns that ‘global warming may have played a pivotal role’ in the recent rise of a multidrug-resistant fungal superbug, sparking questions and concerns about the emerging public health threats of the human-caused climate crisis…. ‘The argument that we are making based on comparison to other close relative fungi is that as the climate has gotten warmer, some of these organisms, including Candida auris, have adapted to the higher temperature, and as they adapt, they break through human’s protective temperatures,” lead author Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a statement.”

“By separating life stages, metamorphosis may circumvent harmful evolutionary tradeoffs” [PNAS]. • I’m only leaving this here in case there’s an evolutionary biologist in the house who can explain it.

Health Care

“What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America” [The Atlantic]. “Bright-blue counties in Northern California, Washington State, and Oregon have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.” • There’s the lead, buried fourteen paragraphs down.

Games

“Fame and ‘Fortnite’ — inside the global gaming phenomenon” [Financial Times]. “Fortnite is technically a video game, and one with a simple premise. At the start, players drop on to an island and shoot each other until only one person is left standing. Each match lasts about 20 minutes and slowly, the numbers whittle down. A storm approaches, making the map smaller and smaller. If you jump off the island you die. Antoine Griezmann, the French football star, said playing Fortnite makes him more stressed than professional football.” • Truly a game for the neoliberal era….

Guillotine Watch

Class Warfare

But everywhere in chains (MA):

I am VERY RARELY able to access toilets while away from home in San Francisco. I am white, English-speaking, able-bodied and might be perceived as professional.

An experience last night really cemented the cruelty of San Francisco and the gig economy it has shaped. #thread

— Hans Lindahl (@hiHelloHans) August 2, 2019

(Similar case; different reaction.) So Uber has turned cab-driving into an Amazon warehouse. Here is one response to the thread above:

This is going to sound silly, but maybe this could work. There should be an app where you could summon a truck mounted port a potty to come wherever you are. Making it credit card based would keep out the messy customers. Like Uber, but for pooping.

— Jim Maruschak

(@JimMaruschak) August 3, 2019

“Make it credit-card based….” I wonder if the repellently infantile word “poop” has suddenly achieved ubiquity because our symbol manipulators are seeing more of it?

“Disaggregating data by race allows for more accurate research” [Nature]. “The term ‘women of colour’ was introduced as a symbol of political solidarity, but its evolution to a biological term encompassing all non-white women has resulted in aggregation of data from diverse ethnic groups. Breaking out statistics by race, ethnicity and gender is therefore crucial for researchers who are committed to inclusion.” • Nothing on income. Superb class erasure!

“How the Other Half Matriculates” [Inside Higher Ed]. “As a community college administrator, it was hard not to notice the sheer wealth of the university…. After the orientation, we spent a couple of days at Virginia Beach to make it feel like a vacation. At one point, the young woman behind the counter at the hotel asked me about the Brookdale Summer Shakespeare Festival t-shirt I was wearing. She mentioned that she had never seen a Shakespeare play. I suggested that the local community college might be a good place to look. She seemed satisfied with that answer. When I mentioned that outdoor community college summer productions are often free, she seemed especially happy with that. Economic reality has a way of creeping in, no matter how pretty the bubble. Back to reality…”

“The Appeal and Limits of Andrea Dworkin” [Jacobin]. “Not coincidentally, Dworkin’s influence grew as the backlash against feminism took hold in the eighties, when the utopian visions of the whirlwind period lost their persuasive power. Her dystopian vision of a women’s experience dominated at all times by male violence, or the fear of it, could feel like a bold stance against feel-good corporate feminism, especially in the absence of a dynamic left…. Particularly prescient, and often ignored in reconsiderations of her work, was Dworkin’s analysis of the Right and its appeal to women — perhaps including herself — in Right Wing Women, written in the early years of the Reagan administration. Dworkin showed how conservative women, far from denying, ignoring, or even embracing sexism, made what often looked like rational trade-offs: in exchange for the promise of what she termed ‘enforceable restraints on male aggression,’ women received relative degrees of safety, economic security, and respect. Dworkin also offered an indictment, highly relevant today, of liberal feminism and its unwillingness to view the women it failed to reach as anything other than dupes.”

News of the Wired

“The 11-step guide to running effective meetings” [Nature]. “1. Do you need a meeting?” • Excellent!

“Recursive language and modern imagination were acquired simultaneously 70,000 years ago” [Phys.org]. “Numerous archeological and genetic evidence have already convinced most paleoanthropologists that the speech apparatus has reached essentially modern configurations before the human line split from the Neanderthal line 600,000 years ago…. On the other hand, artifacts signifying modern imagination, such as composite figurative arts, elaborate burials, bone needles with an eye, and construction of dwellings arose not earlier than 70,000 years ago…. While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS)…. Thus, the existence of a strong critical period for PFS acquisition creates a cultural evolutionary barrier for acquisition of recursive language…. The second predicted evolutionary barrier was a faster PFC maturation rate and, consequently, a shorter critical period…. An evolutionary mathematical model, developed by Dr. Vyshedskiy, predicts that humans had to jump both evolutionary barriers within several generations since the “PFC delay” mutation that is found in all modern humans, but not in Neanderthals, is deleterious and is expected to be lost in a population without an associated acquisition of PFS and recursive language. Thus, the model suggests that the ‘PFC delay’ mutation triggered simultaneous synergistic acquisition of PFS and recursive language…. Such an invention of a new recursive language has been observed in contemporary children, for example among deaf children in Nicaragua.” • Culture ignites! Fascinating stuff. I’ve quoted the set-up, but check the last few paragraphs for the summary.

* * *

What a lovely wooded brook!

Bonus plantidote (Re Silc):

Re Silc writes: “My first mobile build.” We have our own Calder! This is more plant-adjacent than plant, but it looks like a really interesting project? I wonder if other readers have done similar things? If so, send in your pictures!

* * *

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So do feel free to make a contribution today or any day. Here is why: Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:

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Readers, thank you very much. The mix of one-time contributions to smaller, monthly subscriptions is now more like what is was, and hence the total I budget for is back to normal as well. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form…

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2:00PM Water Cooler 8/5/2019

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/30/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/30/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Trade

“How Trump Is Sabotaging Trade’s Ultimate Tribunal” [Bloomberg]. “As the U.S. wages its global trade war, companies and governments alike are taking notice of a little-known unit of the World Trade Organization that, if President Donald Trump’s administration has its way, will soon cease to function. The WTO’s appellate body, the preeminent forum for settling worldwide trade disputes, may no longer have the capacity to issue new rulings by year-end, which critics warn will undermine the WTO’s ability to resolve conflicts among its 164 members and will usher in an era where economic might trumps international law…. Lighthizer told U.S. lawmakers this year that his ultimate goal is to reform the WTO and sees the appellate body impasse as a form of leverage in pushing his agenda forward.” • And, as usual, this Administration is intensifying what the previous admininistration began.

“A Democrat Floats Options to Trump’s Trade Tactics” [Bloomberg]. “[T]he plan Elizabeth Warren released Monday is interesting, even if it reads less like a bold vision document than a treatise on process…. Warren does not say how she herself would tackle China, or what she would do with Trump’s tariffs. But she lays out elements of an attack. ‘We’ve let China get away with the suppression of pay and labor rights, poor environmental protections, and years of currency manipulation.’

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of July 25: Biden up at 29.3% (28.6), Sanders flat at 15.0% (15.0%), Warren down at 14.5% (15.0%), Buttigieg flat at 5.0% (5.0%), Harris down 11.8% (12.2%), others Brownian motion. Harris reminds me of Clinton, in that her numbers are like a hot air balloon, which sinks unless air is pumped into it.

* * *

2020

Harris (D)(1): “Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator” [@ne0liberal]. My result: “Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a school lunch program for games journalists who open a mini golf that operates for 15 days in Greenwich Village.” • It’s about ethics in miniature golf.

Sanders (D)(1): “”You can’t call this plan Medicare for All”: The Bernie Sanders camp pans Kamala Harris’s health care plan” [Vox]. “The differences between Harris’s plan and Sanders’s plan come down to two main factors. First, it’s phased-in over 10 years, versus Sanders’s four. And Harris’s would allow private insurers to compete within the government-run program, similar to the way that Medicare Advantage currently works for older adults’ plans. Sanders’s plan effectively eliminates private insurance.” • Why ten years? Why not fifteen? Meanwhile, Neera Tanden is just as nimble as Kamala Harris:

Reminder that the publication of @NeeraTanden‘s own think tank cited Medicare Advantage plans as proof that more Medicare privatization would be bad https://t.co/m4ZMK4a0u5 pic.twitter.com/mzaUo8N8rW

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 30, 2019

Sanders (D)(2): Theory of change:

The billionaire class will be behind Trump with endless amounts of money. We need an energized population of young people, working-class people and people of color—and the largest voter turnout by far in history—to beat him. And our campaign is going to do that.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 30, 2019

Note this is not Warren’s theory of change, though she might be able to simulate it with #Resistance-style events dominated by professionals.

Sanders (D)(3): “Bernie Sanders: As a child, rent control kept a roof over my head” [CNN]. “I was born and raised in a three-and-a-half room apartment in Brooklyn. My father was a paint salesman who worked hard his entire life, but never made much money. This was not a life of desperate poverty — but coming from a lower middle-class family, I will never forget how money, or really lack of money, was always a point of stress in our home… [O]ur family was always able to afford a roof over our heads, because we were living in a rent-controlled building. That most minimal form of economic security was crucial for our family. Today, that same ability to obtain affordable housing is now denied to millions of Americans.”

* * *

“Democratic debate in Detroit: 7 things to watch for on Night 1” [Los Angeles Times]. “Although Sanders and Warren have a similarly adversarial approach to Wall Street — and both believe in eliminating private health insurance in favor of the type of government-run programs implemented in other Western democracies — they have very different political philosophies. Warren has called herself a “capitalist to my bones” who usually believes that markets just need to be better regulated; Sanders sees democratic socialism as the solution to fighting authoritarianism and plutocracy. A debate would normally be the kind of place where you’d see political candidates try to sharpen those sorts of differences, like how California Sen. Kamala Harris took on Biden over his position decades ago on busing for school desegregation in the last debate. But with so many candidates on the stage, Warren and Sanders could just as easily avoid each other if they don’t see an upside in picking a fight.” • Remember their constituencies are less than overlapping, and their theories of change are different.

“If Democrats Want to Win in 2020, They Have to Give Detroit a Reason to Vote” [The Nation]. “The Democratic presidential contenders who will debate this week in this city have come to a state where their party’s “blue wall” cracked in 2016… But what’s the best way to reach out to Detroiters? The Democrats can start by getting serious about urban policy. Both major parties once focused on the concerns of American cities, but in recent decades they have chased after suburban and exurban voters with such abandon that they have often neglected the beating hearts of our metropolitan areas.” • They have no place to go….

* * *

“Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg Hold Contrasting Hollywood Fundraisers” [Variety]. “Bernie Sanders held a ‘grassroots fundraiser’ in Hollywood on Thursday night, delivering his message of political transformation to an adoring crowd at the Montalban Theatre. At the same time, Pete Buttigieg was holding a sold-out fundraiser at the home of NBCUniversal international chairman Kevin MacLellan and Brian Curran, featuring co-hosts Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Chelsea Handler and Sean Hayes…. ‘Some politicians go to wealthy people’s homes and they sit around in a fancy living room, and people contribute thousands and thousands of dollars and they walk out with a few hundred thousand bucks or whatever,’ Sanders said. ‘We don’t do that. … To me, an $18 check or a $27 check from a working person is worth more than all the money in the world from millionaires.’” Cf., ironically enough, Luke 21:1-4.

RussiaGate

“Ex-Host Krystal Ball: MSNBC’s Russia ‘Conspiracies’ Have Done ‘Immeasurable Harm’ to the Left” [Daily Beast]. “Elsewhere in the six-minute monologue, [former longtime MSNBC anchor Krystal] Ball accused MSNBC of cynically following the Russia story in pursuit of ratings, making journalistic compromises along the way. She directly criticized hosts like Rachel Maddow (“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Ball said to her) and on-air analysts like Mimi Rocah (a Daily Beast contributor) for leading viewers to believe that there was a strong possibility that Trump and his family would be indicted. Ball also suggested that the ‘fevered speculation’ of guests like New York columnist Jonathan Chait and former British MP Louise Mensch would have been more at home on conspiracy network Infowars. ‘Russia conspiracy was great for ratings among the key demographic of empty nesters on the coasts with too much time on their hands,’ said Ball, who now hosts an inside-baseball streaming political talk show for The Hill.” • Oddly, this story got no traction at all.

Impeachment

“Impeachment, always a longshot, fades in wake of Mueller hearing” [Los Angeles Times]. “the window of opportunity has rapidly begun shrinking. About 90 House Democrats have joined the call to open a formal impeachment inquiry. That’s less than 40% of the caucus — far short of what would be needed to overcome the opposition of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who views the move as politically unwise and likely to backfire. To significantly change the current path, backers of impeachment needed a dramatic boost out of this week’s hearing with former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. His testimony fell far short of that mark.” • Yes, the 90 includes a few new faces, but I’d bet they’re revolving heroes. So, after three years of daily hysteria from liberal Democrats, this is where we are.

Health Care

“More than two-thirds of Obamacare cosponsors are now backing Medicare for All proposal” [Fast Company]. “Twelve of the current 17 House members who cosponsored the landmark 2009 measure known as Obamacare have signed on as cosponsors of legislation that would create a universal healthcare system, according to a MapLight analysis. The five incumbent House Democrats who cosponsored Obamacare but who have declined to endorse a “Medicare-for-All” proposal have received an average of $209,000 in campaign contributions since 2011 from the 10 largest U.S. healthcare companies, their employees, and five major trade associations. The dozen cosponsors have received an average of $65,000 from the industry…. The disparity highlights the importance of moderate and conservative Democrats to the healthcare industry, which has united against proposals to ensure that the United States guarantees health coverage for all citizens.” • Ka-ching. This may also explain Harris et al. moving up their assault.

“Obama Alums Tell Health Insurance Lobby ‘Medicare For All’ Won’t Happen” [Tarbell]. “Axelrod said that Medicare for All has “become a phrase as much as anything else.” He suggested that some Democratic presidential candidates may not want to go as far as Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent credited with sparking support for Medicare For All during his 2016 presidential campaign, and might support more limited reforms like a public option or allowing some people under the age of 65 to buy into Medicare…. The AHIP conference featured a slew of other former Obama officials, including Andy Slavitt, who led the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; Sam Kass, the former White House chef and nutrition adviser; and Kavita Patel, who served as a policy aide in the Obama White House. Patel, currently a Brookings Institution nonresident fellow and vice president at the Johns Hopkins Health System, harshly criticized Medicare for All. ‘People who are very serious about health policy on either side of the fence know this is not reality,’ she said. She suggested that Democratic presidential candidates’ support for Medicare for All is ‘all just campaign talk.’” • Why, it’s almost as if preventing #MedicareForAll was the liberal Democrats #1 policy priority!

“One Nation Launches Campaign To Stop Medicare For None” [One Nation]. • A Republican front group, whose ads have been spotted by alert reader JM in California.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Activists Urging Lacey to ‘Do Her Job’ in Second Ed Buck Death” [Los Angeles Sentinel]. “Local activists are urging District Attorney Jackie Lacey to ‘do her job’ and find that the evidence presented to Los Angeles Sheriff’s is probable cause to immediately charge and prosecute Ed Buck in spite of his ‘Whiteness, wealth, and her political ambitions,’ in the death of Timothy Dean, the second man to die at Buck’s residence. ‘We’ve done all that we could do to aid the sheriff’s investigators with their investigation,’ said community activist and advocate, Jasmyne Cannick. ‘Once again, we gathered evidence and brought the sheriff’s other young men who could speak directly to their experiences with Ed Buck. I hope that this time around, the political will and prosecutorial creativity that we’ve seen used so often against Black people is used to bring charges against Ed Buck for the deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Two men have died on the same mattress, in the same living room, of the same drug, at the same man’s house within months of each other …’”

“House Democratic Campaign Chair Vows To ‘Do Better’ After Senior Staffers Quit” [HuffPo]. “The chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee admitted to making mistakes and vowed to “do better” after several senior staffers resigned on Monday. The staff exodus came on the heels of a report that the committee, whose primary mission is to help Democrats maintain and expand their House majority, was ‘in chaos’ over concerns about hiring and a lack of diversity…. ‘I have never been more committed to expanding and protecting this majority, while creating a workplace that we can all be proud of,’ Bustos said in the statement. ‘I will work tirelessly to ensure that our staff is truly inclusive.’” • Bring back DWS?

“Can a New Think Tank Put a Stop to Endless War?” [The Nation]. “[A] newly formed think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft… states that its mission is to ‘move US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.’ The group is still raising money, but with a projected second-year budget of $5 million to 6 million, enough to support 20 to 30 staffers, it aims to match the scale of more established think tanks and to disrupt the foreign policy consensus in Washington…. [T]he Quincy Institute includes the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros among its founding donors—each has committed half a million dollars—and is intended to serve as a counterweight to the Blob, as the bipartisan national security establishment dedicated to endless war has come to be known… When it comes to foreign policy, [co-founder Eli] Clifton says, there’s little difference between CAP and Republican-aligned think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. One way Quincy will distinguish itself from its better-established rivals will be to refuse money from foreign governments.”

Stats Watch

Personal Income and Outlays, June 2019: “The month-to-month breakdown of consumer spending shows slowing in what will offer support for those on the FOMC who want to cut interest rates this week” [Econoday]. “Core inflation which is under target and which suggests that an increase in demand would be sustainable.”

Consumer Confidence, July 2019: “Boosted by an evermore favorable view of the jobs market, consumer confidence jumped sharply” [Econoday]. “Jobs-hard-to-get is down sharply… One interesting point in the report is a drop in inflation expectations… [T]he overall strength of the consumer, whether in confidence or spending which are both tied to the health of the jobs market, does not speak to the need for lower rates.”

S&P Corelogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index, May 2019: “Home prices continue to slow to underscore what is becoming another difficult year for the housing sector” [Econoday]. “Despite low mortgage rates and consumer strength, housing data whether for prices or sales or construction have been flattening out in recent reports in what will support arguments to cut interest rates at this week’s FOMC meeting.”

Pending Home Sales Index, June 2019: “A fast break just when housing needed one appears in a …. surge in pending sales of existing homes” [Econoday].

Housing:

The age of the housing stock gives a fascinating insight into the development of settlement across the US. The predominance of pre-1939 settlement in North/Eastern corridor is striking.https://t.co/mlWUKDlylu pic.twitter.com/aJr89vVuNK

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) July 30, 2019

In ME-02, blue (“1939 and earlier”) is, like, new!

Real Estate: “Supply-chain automation is gaining ground in logistics as companies look to get the most out of real estate close to consumers. Startup Attabotics will use $25 million raised in a new funding round to expand its platform in the growing e-commerce market. … [T]he company’s focus is on bringing efficiency to the tight spaces companies are turning to for fulfillment operations The Canadian company makes automated vertical systems for storing, retrieving and sorting goods that it says use less space than traditional warehouses.” [Wall Street Journal].

Manufacturing: “Air Canada Removes 737 Max Flights Until 2020” [Industry Week]. “Air Canada has removed the Boeing 737 Max from its schedule until January pending regulatory approvals, joining Southwest Airlines Co. in scrapping plans for flights of the jetliner into 2020…. The Montreal-based airline said that third-quarter projected capacity is expected to fall about 2% compared with the same period in 2018, contrasting the originally planned increase of about 3%.”

Manufacturing: “Boeing needs to come up with a Plan B for grounded Max jets” [Financial Times]. “As a researcher of confidence-driven decision making, 2020 looks woefully optimistic to me, as does the company’s special charge. In fact, based on what I see, it is not too early for Boeing to start considering a Plan B for the existing Max series fleet. First, the extreme overconfidence that existed at Boeing prior to the two crashes suggests that there may be more problems still to surface. Second, the aerospace industry is uniquely vulnerable when it comes to confidence. Confidence requires perceptions of certainty and control, but aeroplane passengers are inherently powerless: they can’t and don’t fly the plane. Finally, everything that has unfolded to date has occurred with consumer confidence near all-time highs. The crowd is inherently optimistic today and demand for air travel is soaring. Should the broader mood decline ahead, not only will passenger and regulatory scrutiny naturally intensify, but interest in travel itself will drop. In an economic recession, airlines will have little use for the now-grounded planes.” And the Plan B? “Given the industry’s prior experience with the DC-10, which struggled to regain passenger confidence after a series of early safety issues, one option could be a conversion of the existing fleet to air freight. Establishing trust with a small group of professional freight pilots is likely to be far easier.” • Yikes.

Manufacturing: “Boeing drops out of competition to replace Minuteman III” [Wyoming Tribune Eagle]. “Boeing confirmed this week that it had withdrawn from bidding on the contract for the U.S. Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program. The contract is to replace the Air Force’s Cold War-era Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. Experts have estimated the project could be worth about $85 billion…. Boeing’s departure from the project creates a situation where only one company [Northrop Grumman ] will be bidding on a massive military contract to supply the nation with the ground-based portion of its nuclear triad system.” • So no bailout for Boeing that way.

The Bezzle: “Millions use Earnin to get cash before payday. Critics say the app is taking advantage of them.” [NBC]. “But critics say that the company is effectively acting as a payday lender — providing small short-term loans at the equivalent of a high interest rate — while avoiding conventional lending regulations designed to protect consumers from getting in over their heads. Earnin argues that it isn’t a lender at all because the company relies on tips rather than required fees and does not send debt collectors after customers who fail to repay the money.” • Hmm.

Tne Bezzle: “FBI found bucket of human heads, body parts sewn together at donation facility: report” [The Hill]. “The center’s owner, Stephen Gore, was sentenced to a year of deferred prison time and four years of probation after pleading guilty in October to illegal control of an enterprise.” • Ick. I’m sure the same thing will never happen at cryogenic facilities….

The Biosphere

Metaphor:

Massive Rock slide triggered in Monsoon. An excellent example of rock joints failure. Be careful while travelling to #Himalayas. @RockHeadScience @BGSLandslides @NatGeo pic.twitter.com/XD9zczxEEq

— Aamir Asghar (@jojaaamir) July 29, 2019

“Modest (insipid) Green New Deal proposals miss the point – Part 2” [Bill Mitchell]. “At the basis of the [standard neoclassical microeconomics] ‘solution’ is the belief that there is a trade-off between, say, environmental damage and economic growth (production). And the market failure skews that trade-off towards growth at the expense of environmental health. So all that is needed is some intervention (a tax) that will skew the trade-off back to something more preferable. The problem is that the whole idea that there is a trade-off between protecting our environment and economic production is flawed at the most elemental level. There is no calculus (which underpins this sort of microeconomic reasoning) that can tell us when a biological system will die. The idea that we can have a ‘safe’ level of pollution, regulated via a price system, is groundless and should not form part of a progressive response. Carbon trading schemes (CTS) are neoliberal constructs which start with the presumption that a free market is the best way to organise allocation.” • Worth repeating: Mark Blyth says that “Markets cannot internalize their externalities on a planetary scale. They just can’t. It’s impossible.” I’m wondering if carbon tax failure is a lemma from that (heretical) proposition. Also, somebody tell Elizabeth Warren.

“Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be ‘Good Business’” [Jacobin] (review of Bill McKibben’s new book, Falter). “McKibben mistakenly believes that the problems of climate destruction stem from bad ideas and policies, rather than systemic issues. The 1970s turn toward neoliberalism in fact originated with a general crisis in capitalist profitability, not with Ayn Rand’s ideas…. If you believe [with McKibben] that all working-class led revolutions end in disaster, and that it is therefore necessary to prioritize collaborating with the existing rulers of society (the capitalists and their governmental representatives), then a radical alternative to the status quo is not possible.”

“How much does your flight actually hurt the planet?” [Quartz]. “Flygskam (translated as ‘flight shame’) is a burgeoning Sweden-led movement which calls on people to consider limiting their flight use…. Michael Mann of Penn State University, and some other climate scientists, have argued against making individual sacrifices in the name of climate change, even big ones, because they feel the only true impact can be made at the level of government…. It’s true: despite incontrovertible evidence of the toll our collective lives are taking on the planet, any action an individual takes carries with it the knowledge that, however huge the personal sacrifice, the result will be nothing more than a dot in the vast global matrix. One person’s actions can’t make a difference; only collective action can…. Perhaps ‘flight shame’ is a misnomer: It denotes a sensation of embarrassment, and implies something hidden, rather than a strong ethical choice.” •

Water

“Overpopulation, Not Climate Change, Caused California’s Water Crisis” [The American Conservative]. “The issue is population. California has grown from 10 million to at least 40 million since 1950, making it necessary to move water over long distances to where people live and work. Close to two thirds of the state’s population is bunched in a few water-dependent coastal counties. Only about 15 percent of California’s water consumption is residential. Most of that is used outdoors to make the desert bloom and hillside pools sparkle and shimmer David Hockney-like, and millions expect that water at will.” But: ” Farm water comprises an estimated 70 percent of annual state water use. Private water ownership and 1,300 competing irrigation districts complicate matters…. Agriculture’s $40 billion contribution to the California economy is only about 3 percent of the state’s GDP. Rural California is still a potent voting bloc in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress, but less so every decade.” • The headline seems oversimplified, even agenda-driven.

Health Care

Original Medicare took only a year to implement, back in the era of steam:

Harry Truman’s application card for Medicare, co-signed by Lyndon Johnson on same day he signed Medicare bill at Truman Library, today 1965: pic.twitter.com/Gecp2uzYWc

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 30, 2019

I wonder who we should give the first #MedicareForAll card to. Jonathan Gruber? Nancy Pelosi?

Yikes:

NEWS: 75% of rural hospitals have now closed in states that chose not to expand Medicaid.https://t.co/1Urak8yQOg

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 29, 2019

“‘Leaving billions of dollars on the table‘” [Gatehouse News] (source of map above). “‘The irony to me,’ said John Henderson, who heads The Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals and supports Medicaid expansion, ‘is that we’re paying federal income taxes to expand coverage in other states. We’re exporting our coverage and leaving billions of dollars on the table.’… High rates of poverty in rural areas, combined with the loss of jobs, aging populations, lack of health insurance and competition from other struggling institutions will make it difficult for some rural hospitals to survive regardless of what government policies are implemented. For some, there’s no point in trying. They say the widespread closures are the result of the free market economy doing its job and a continued shakeout would be helpful. But no rural community wants that shakeout to happen in its backyard.” • Good reporting! I wonder who those “for some” are. I bet a lot of them don’t live in rural areas.

Games

“A teen who frustrated his mom gaming 8 hours a day became a millionaire in the Fortnite World Cup” [Business Insider]. “More than 40 million players participated in the qualifying events for the final, which took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City on Saturday and Sunday. Fifty duos and 100 solo players made it through the final and were competing to take home a cut of the $30 million prize pool, the largest prize pool in the history of e-sports.” • Filling a stadium. This old codger thinks that’s quite remarkable, a new thing on the face of the earth.

MMT

“The Invention of Money” [The New Yorker]. • Fun factoids, but a serious attempt would include Michael Hudson, and MMT on the origin of money as well.

Class Warfare

“When I joined my father on the building site, I saw a different side to him” [Guardian (DG)]. “It was on those building sites that, for the first time in my life, I saw a different side to my father. At home, my mother was not only the main breadwinner but also did practically all the cooking, cleaning and organisation. She was the engine of the family: paying the mortgage, asking me about my homework, remembering my friends’ names, picking up discarded socks and cooking dinner every night from scratch. My father was, at times, little more than a lodger. But at work, he suddenly turned into something like a figure of authority: intelligent, in charge, hard-working, exacting. He knew about things I had never even heard of, such as building regulations, damp-proof courses, rendering, load-bearing walls and lintels. He was patient, informed. He may have lost his pencil, hammer, spirit level and saw every 30 seconds, but he knew what he was doing. As I watched him briefing a bricklayer or discussing some finer detail of a knocked-through dining room with a plasterer, I saw someone who rarely came home. Since then, I have often suggested to friends struggling with parental relationships that might feel disappointing and strained to try meeting that parent at work, to visit them in situ, have lunch on their territory, watch them in action, and try to find this other side to someone with whom you are so familiar… Being a young woman on a building site, I also learned that the class system is alive and well in modern Britain. People I knew from school would fail to recognise me as they walked past the building site… There is nothing innately superior about life with a boardroom or swivel chair. The income discrepancy between so-called white-collar and blue-collar work is unfounded. …. work is work is work is work.” • A really splendid article.

News of the Wired

“The Pirate Who Penned the First English-Language Guacamole Recipe” [Atlas Obscura]. “British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. … He gave us the words ‘tortilla,’ ‘soy sauce,’ and ‘breadfruit,’ while unknowingly recording the first ever recipe for guacamole. And who better to expose the Western world to the far corners of our planet’s culinary bounty than someone who by necessity made them his hiding places?” • So globalization has a culinary upside; always has!

* * *

Meeps writes: “The columbines are pink and yellow this year.” Columbines are so stylish and old-fashioned.

* * *

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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/29/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/29/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

* * *

2020

Biden (D)(1): “Biden’s Medicare Lie” [Jacobin]. “Speaking at a forum sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons in Iowa earlier this month, Joe Biden fearmongered about Medicare for All. ‘Medicare goes away as you know it,’ said Biden. Under Bernie Sanders’s plan, ‘All the Medicare you have is gone.’… It’s clever politics, but it’s a total lie. Medicare for All does exactly what it says in the name: it extends the benefits associated with Medicare to the rest of the population…. Medicare for All would effectively be a Social Security income boost of thousands of dollars per year to seniors. It accomplishes this by eliminating all co-pays, premiums, and deductibles; by covering all long-term care costs for seniors; and by capping prescription drug costs at $200 a year…. All told, the US government only pays for 65 percent of seniors’ medical spending right now. Medicare for All would make that nearly 100 percent.” • 65%? Yikes. That’s a rip-off!

Delaney (D)(1): “Delaney proposes ambitious mandatory national service plan” [CNN]. “Several 2020 candidates, including Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg have proposed national service initiatives tied to college tuition or job training, but Delaney’s ambitious proposal, which would provide up to three years of free college tuition for those who participate in public service projects, is the first to mandate youth participation in service…. [I]nstead of offering voluntary service, it would be compulsory for all Americans upon high school graduation or upon turning 18. The proposal would apply only to those born after 2006, and would phase in over time, according to the campaign. The plan would provide two years of free tuition at a public college or university, and three years of tuition for those who extended their national service year to two years. Tuition could also be applied to vocational or technical training, the Delaney campaign told reporters.” • Who asked for this?

Harris (D)(1): “Kamala Harris Unveils ‘Medicare For All’ Plan That Preserves Private Insurance” [Bloomberg]. “Under her proposal, Americans could opt for Medicare Advantage, a program that allows beneficiaries to get coverage from a private insurer. Harris’s plan would put all Americans into Medicare over a 10-year transition period while allowing the participation of private insurance plans under a set of rules.” • Harris seems more than a little nimble in her positioning:

In which Jake asks Kamala Harris whether people would be able to keep their private insurance, if they prefer, under Medicare For All system — and she rejects that. "Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on." pic.twitter.com/A1AY2TOT4g

— Rebecca Buck (@RebeccaBuck) January 29, 2019

Harris has also put herself on the same side as Trump:

Here’s Trump official @SeemaCMS last week bashing Medicare for All and public option – essentially Bernie and Biden plans – as “largest threats” to US health care.

But in same speech, praising Medicare Advantage as model. pic.twitter.com/VFKcbEL4lc

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 29, 2019

Perhaps that was the goal. Both Delaney and Harris seem to be sending messages to donors, not voters.

Sanders (D)(4):

On the Bern App profile page, under religion, there are many religions listed but NOT Eastern Orthodox. That will be a problem. Especially in Alaska. @fshakir

— Alice Marshall (@PrestoVivace) July 28, 2019

* * *

“Democratic 2020 race up for grabs: Half of voters have changed their minds since spring, poll shows” [Politico]. “The volatility has a limit, however. The vast majority of voters who switched since April moved among the top four candidates or between them and undecided status. The mass of candidates languishing at 1% or lower hasn’t benefited.” • No Trump-like breakout figure on the Democrat side so far.

“DCCC in ‘complete chaos’ as uproar over diversity intensifies” [Politico (RH)]. “POLITICO reported last week that black and Hispanic lawmakers are furious with Bustos’ stewardship of the campaign arm. They say the upper echelon of the DCCC is bereft of diversity, and it is not doing enough to reach Latino voters and hire consultants of color. In addition, several of Bustos’ senior aides have left in the first six months of her tenure, including her chief of staff — a black woman — and her director of mail and polling director, both women.” • In other words, DCCC should become more like the Sanders campaign?

2019

“Pelosi backers feel vindicated after tumultuous stretch” [The Hill]. “Part of Pelosi’s strategy in the first seven months of the new Congress has been to protect vulnerable centrists like O’Halleran and freshman Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), Max Rose (D-N.Y.) and Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.) — the so-called majority-makers — whom Republicans will be targeting in 2020 in a bid to retake the House.” • (Spanberger and Rose are MILOs; all three are Blue Dogs. We’ll see how Pelosi’s DINO strategy works out, I guess.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative” [Jacobin]. “Billionaires are a politically active bunch…. Between 2001 and the end of 2012, 92 percent of the country’s hundred richest billionaires (combined wealth: $2.2 trillion) contributed to a political cause…. Yet they’re also eerily quiet…. As the trio of political scientists write, ‘many or most billionaires appear to favor, and quietly work for, policies that are opposed by large majorities of Americans’.” • Well worth a read. Since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, what if the 0.1% were “eerily quiet” about being pro-Jackpot? Thinking big, as billiionaires do, and thinking bigger than relatively minor efforts like gutting Social Security.

Stats Watch

Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey, July 2019: “Texas manufacturing activity bounced back but not as much expected in July” [Econoday]. “The survey’s demand indicators were mixed but mostly stronger…. Today’s report shows Texas manufacturing recovering in July from June’s slide more strongly than the headline suggests, and will probably not strengthen the case for more accommodation by the Fed.”

Shipping: “Carriers across the sector are throttling back profit projections for 2019 as they wrestle with the hangover from last year’s freight boom” [Wall Street Journal]. “Freight demand isn’t far off last year’s high levels, but rates have been sinking. Measures of spot-pricing for truckload business are down by double digits from last year, and customers are cutting shipping costs rather than looking for trucks.”

The Bezzle: “California steers toward a future of self-driving cars” [CalMatters]. “The future can be glimpsed at a former Navy base near the Bay Area city of Concord, converted to the nation’s largest autonomous-vehicle proving ground where computer-driven cars are let off their leashes and are free to roam across 2,100 acres. The facility, GoMentum Station, run by the American Automobile Association, is an innovation hive where Silicon Valley marries its futuristic vision to the automobile industry’s traditional know-how. • OK… More: “But it’s a significant step from allowing testing of automated cars in protected, supervised settings to unleashing them solo on the road, which experts say remains on a far horizon. There is much to be perfected: how best to turn left in traffic, for example, a maneuver that bedevils many human drivers.” • Wait. After many billions, we don’t have an algo to turn left in traffic?

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Israel. “Israel Has been generally quiet the past few weeks.” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 183. Remember that bringing on the rapture is a good thing.

The Biosphere

“Coase, Hotelling and Pigou: The Incidence of o Carbon Tax and CO2 Emissions” [Geoffrey Heal, Wolfram Schlenker NBER Working Paper 26086]. “Using data from a large proprietary database of field-level oil data, we show that carbon prices even as high as 200 dollars per ton of CO2 will only reduce cumulative emissions from oil by 4% as the supply curve is very steep for high oil prices and few reserves drop out. The supply curve flattens out for lower price, and the effect of an increased carbon tax becomes larger. For example, a carbon price of 600 dollars would reduce cumulative emissions by 60%. On the flip side, a global cap and trade system that limits global extraction by a modest amount like 4% expropriates a large fraction of scarcity rents and would imply a high permit price of $200. The tax incidence varies over time: initially, about 75% of the carbon price will be passed on to consumers, but this share declines through time and even becomes negative as oil prices will drop in future years relative to a case of no carbon tax. The net present value of producer and consumer surplus decrease by roughly equal amounts, which are almost entirely offset by increased tax revenues.” •

“Even a summer heat wave can’t light up fading natural gas prices. Some of the country’s largest natural gas producers are tearing up their drilling plans…. as natural-gas futures tumble to multiyear lows just as the calendar and the climate suggest rates should be rising” [Wall Street Journal]. “Producers point to the Permian Basin in West Texas, where oil producers are unleashing vast volumes of gas as a byproduct of drilling for crude. That’s offsetting high demand from utilities that are shifting from coal to gas, and even all-time high exports to Mexico and other overseas markets. Natural gas has been so plentiful in West Texas at times this year that the price has turned negative, meaning that producers have to pay pipeline operators more to deliver gas to market than what the fuel fetches once it reaches buyers.

“Deforestation in the Amazon is shooting up, but Brazil’s president calls the data ‘a lie’” [Science]. “Deforestation is shooting up again in the Brazilian Amazon, according to satellite monitoring data. But Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, whom many blame for the uptick, has disputed the trend and attacked the credibility of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which produced the data. Bolsonaro called the numbers ‘a lie’ during a 19 July breakfast talk with journalists, and suggested INPE Director Ricardo Galvão was ‘at the service of some [nongovernmental organization].’ ‘With all the devastation you accuse us of doing and having done in the past, the Amazon would be extinguished already,’ he said.” • Hmm. “[S]ome [nongovernmental organization]”?

“Climate Change in a Coastal County: Think Global, Act Hyperlocal” [Pew Trusts Stateline]. “[T]oday, sea level rise in Dare County [Virginia] is among the most precipitous in the nation, an average 0.18 inches a year in some parts, enough that scientists come from around the world to study the land… The resilience projects will carry the community only so far. Beach nourishment, for example, typically lasts five to seven years — though a single hurricane this fall could wipe out all the millions of dollars of new sand laid this summer. At some point, Nags Head and other Dare County communities will hit a tipping point and decide the return isn’t worth the investment. ‘I don’t know when that day is,’ said [Mayor Ben Cahoon, a Republican], the mayor. ‘But it’s out there.’ When that happens, [Reide Corbett, a coastal oceanographer and geochemist] said, communities will have to approach a final step in coastal resilience: retreat. Just move folks inland and out of danger entirely.”

Games

“Why the ending of Game of Thrones elevated the worst of fan culture” [Vox]. “‘Curatorial fandom’ is a general term for the area of geek culture that emphasizes amassing as much canonical knowledge as possible, no matter how minute… The other side of fandom is “transformative fandom.” If curatorial fandom is about enshrining an authorial version of canon, transformative fandom is about changing it. Transformative fandom is centered on fanworks, like fanfiction, fan art, or fan critique, all of which use the source text as the jumping-off point for original interpretations. The idea of “transformative fandom” is a core concept of fanworks-based fandom because transformativity is part of the legal framework that protects fanfiction (i.e. it’s a “transformative work”)….. Bran embodies the stereotype of a fannish geek who spends his entire day sitting surfing the internet…. Bran is a human database of facts and knowledge that he acquired from ‘reading’ the history/canon presented to him through his nebulous abilities as the Three-Eyed Raven. Not only that, but his first official act as king was to essentially go gaming in search of Drogon the dragon, while Tyrion and the small council were left to run the kingdom. These characteristics and behaviors make Bran easy to read as an avatar for curatorial fandom.” • Fandom is alien territory to me, but this certainly sounds plausible.

Health Care

“Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America” [Buzzfeed]. “Laverty faces a health care problem unique to many millennials with Type 1 diabetes who’ve been booted off their parents’ stable health insurance. The price of insulin, the drug that keeps them alive, tripled in the US from 2002 to 2013 — and a recent study found that, from 2012 to 2016, its average annual cost increased from $3,200 to $5,900…. That’s an impossible price tag for a generation still feeling the effects of the 2008 financial crisis and saddled with massive student loan debt and increasing housing costs. Studies show that US millennials are far worse off financially than previous generations, with an average net worth below $8,000. The result is that these young adults are rationing, stockpiling, and turning to the black market for the medication they need to stay alive — incredibly risky and desperate measures that could result in long-term harm or death.” • So Obama’s much-beloved policy of letting adult children stay on their parents’ policies until the random age of 26 — why not 25? of 27? — turns out to be an ancien regime-like added layer of complexity that fails the people who need it most. Everything’s going according to plan!

People love their health insurance companies:

Dear Blue Cross Blue Shield, Thank you for your help during this difficult time. pic.twitter.com/HV017ntjQC

— Nate Charny (@natecharny) July 19, 2019

An ObamaCare navigator speaks:

When I got a job as an ACA 'navigator' to help people who'd never had it sign up for & use health insurance, and the vast majority of them (myself included) could only afford the lowest-tier, most bare bones plans. Just disappointing people all day long.

— erik (@erikdstock) May 5, 2019

The “When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system?” is an important archive of horror stories.

Neera’s plan (Medicare Extra):

Therapist: And what do we do when the Center for American Progress keeps pushing a healthcare plan that would still cost people up to $1500?

Me: Point out how offensive it is to call that “progress” when most Americans don’t have even $1000 for emergencies

Therapist: Wow yeah

— DSA for Medicare for All (@dsam4a) July 23, 2019

“Judge OKs Trump’s expansion of short-term plans” [Modern Health Care]. “A federal judge on Friday ruled the Trump administration’s expansion of so-called short-term, limited-duration health insurance plans can move ahead, rejecting an insurer group’s attempt to strike down the move. The plaintiff, the Association for Community Affiliated Plans, immediately said it will appeal. The group represents not-for-profit health plans deeply invested in the Affordable Care Act exchanges…. The rule, finalized in August 2018 and in effect since early October 2018, allows up to 12 months of coverage through short-term plans. People can renew this coverage for up to 36 months. The plans don’t have to cover people with pre-existing conditions, nor are they subject to the ACA’s mandates such as coverage for the 10 essential benefits, includinge mental healthcare, maternity care and prescription drugs.”

“The Effects on Hospital Utilization of the 1966 and 2014 Health Insurance Coverage Expansions in the United States” [Annals of Internal Medicine]. From the abstract: “Past coverage expansions were associated with little or no change in society-wide hospital use; increases in groups who gained coverage were offset by reductions among others, suggesting that bed supply limited increases in use. Reducing coverage may merely shift care toward wealthier and healthier persons. Conversely, universal coverage is unlikely to cause a surge in hospital use if growth in hospital capacity is carefully constrained.”

“Blue-Collar Workers Had Greatest Insurance Gains After ACA Implementation” [Health Affairs]. From the abstract: “Analyzing national survey data, we found that workers in traditionally blue-collar industries (service jobs, farming, construction, and transportation) experienced the largest gains in health insurance after implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014. Compared to other occupations, these had lower employer-based coverage rates before the ACA. Most of the post-ACA coverage gains came from Medicaid and directly purchased nongroup insurance.”

“Health websites are notoriously misleading. So we rated their reliability” [STAT News]. “NewsGuard was co-founded last year by journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill (known in part for his health care reporting) and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. In rating news and information sites in the U.S., Italy, U.K., France, and Germany, it has discovered a diverse spectrum of health sites. These range from green-rated peer-reviewed medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine to hundreds of red-rated conspiracy-minded sites such as NaturalNews.com and Collective-Evolution.com…. This plague of health misinformation comes in many fevers, from the seemingly innocuous (there is no solid evidence behind the idea that Epsom salt baths heal sore muscles) to the potentially dangerous (if you take amygdalin, vitamin B17, or laetrile, different names for the same long-debunked “cancer cure” made from fruit pits, you can experience side effects that mirror the symptoms of cyanide poisoning).”

Our Famously Free Press

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette boss J.R. Block sounds like a real piece of work. Thread:

Since it’s out there, next week will be my last at the Post-Gazette. It’s been a privilege to work with talented journalists who have covered intensely challenging stories (the Tree of Life massacre, local fallout from Catholic clergy sex abuse, Antwon Rose) with humanity. (1/) https://t.co/BhmFEatJgW

— Trevor Lenzmeier (@trevlenz) July 27, 2019

Police State Watch

“Lafayette public defender found in contempt after filming duct taping of defendant” [Acadiana Advocate]. “[Michael Gregory, a] Lafayette public defender was found in contempt of court Friday after filming a bailiff duct taping a defendant during a sentencing hearing July 18…. [Amanda Koons, a public defender in the Harris County Public Defender’s Office in Houston said] she’s never seen physical force like what occurred July 18. She said duct taping someone isn’t appropriate or humane, especially when the option to temporarily remove the defendant from the courtroom exists.” • Plus, they had the duct tape handy. I don’t imagine they drove to a hardware store to get some.

Black Injustice Tipping Point

A walking tour of Charlottesville’s monuments (mostly Confederate); thread:

Saturday, July 27, 8:30 am (when it's cool!): Dr. Andrea Douglas of @JSAAHC & I will lead a walking tour of #Charlottesville's downtown Confederate monuments & the newly-installed @eji_org historical plaque for lynching victim John Henry James. Meet at courthouse on Jefferson St. pic.twitter.com/EmGxeT75ak

— Jalane Smash the Fash Schmidt

(@Jalane_Schmidt) July 24, 2019

Guillotine Watch

“Cosmopolitan”:

Jeffrey Epstein was Cosmo magazines' July Bachelor of the Month, in 1980 pic.twitter.com/aAsCDzwWJq

— Historic.ly (@historic_ly) July 29, 2019

News of the Wired

Speaking of collapse:

Why not “dark ages”? Why Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages matter? This is an experiment trying to argue for it in 10 tweets (w/footnotes). It is subjective, but hopefully balanced. Not meant to replace, but to inspire other (twitter) takes on the subject. A thread. (a) 1/ pic.twitter.com/FmH31TysPh

— Mateusz Fafinski (@Calthalas) July 8, 2019

“Another side of Samuel Beckett” [Guardian]. • A long read on Beckett’s life. Well worth a read and might expand his fan base!

“Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer” [Medium]. “Sixty-five year old Sato san wears a crisp canary yellow uniform, reflective vest and polished white helmet. His job is to guide rush hour commuters through confusing and hazardous construction areas. When Sato san realised he needed more than his megaphone to perform this duty, he took it upon himself to make some temporary signage. With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, he has elevated the humble worksite sign to an art form…. Sato san’s purpose is simple: he strives to make life better for the millions of commuters who negotiate station construction sites. His unassuming dedication to craft and service embodies the best side of the Japanese approach to work.”

“Grasshoppers invade Las Vegas thanks to Luxor hotel light beam” [Yahoo News]. • Nature’s buffet!

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