#things / policies like this are so broad until we see actual affects all we can do is keep minding out business and protecting our peace

[theloveinc]

It’s not bait sorry if it came off that way. I live in a red state and I yam scared and I just wanted to see what others thoughts were on it 😭

you know.... i wish i had something more hopeful to say but like......... red states have been going nuts with the censorship stuff lately, not even in terms of just internet safety, but like.... literally raiding schools for LGBTQ books and banning changing your gender on your drivers license and stuff..... so i have no idea !!!! how this will go or what to think abt it!!!

i def think it's stupid and just apart of the government's larger goal of using stupid "laws" to oppress and silence people (i can imagine so many ways this "policy" wouldn't even alter spaces like tumblr and would instead be used to target individuals trying to spread helpful information)

but until we know........ 1. if there is a likelihood of this being passed, and 2. how it will actually affect us..... i'm just not going to worry abt it (and you shouldn't either, unless you live in like....... florida. sorry florida).

[everydayanth]

Let’s talk about talking about politics! Yay! Everyone’s favorite!

Over the past few weeks/months/years, I have had this strange insider seat to a bunch of criminal justice/poly sci professionals (as in, they get paid as professors or scientists or compliance officers, etc.) as they talk about politics and get angry at the general public for our lack of understanding, without having the patience to teach or explain. 

Two problems: 1. the ivory tower issue of watching and not actively engaging in the social part of social science, but as their friend, I will note much of this comes from burnout through negative engagement and attacks; 2. expecting others to have had an adequate education to even know many of these tools exist in order to discuss things beyond our average public school education that cuts out Fridays and makes random half days because we can’t afford teachers or textbooks. 

As an awkward observer, here are some things I never talked about in school, despite having a better political/civil/economics education included in my curriculum than many of my friends:

1. When we vote for someone, we are voting on a trend in politics. Not as a result, but a direction to move, and most voters vote for the candidate who is closest to their current values already, rather than following the trend of voting for who would move policy to match their needs. 

2. Our values change far more than we think they do and they almost always align with a problem we require a solution to or a fear we would like to stabilize or go away, such as property taxes. Because we need to trust the person to solve our problems, especially if we are projecting large fears, candidates who are most likable. We don’t like to stir the pot, we just want it to go where we want, fighting for something is exhausting for everyone.

3. We consider political agendas to be moral agendas but do not agree on obligations. Many feel powerless, others are powerless, we talk about responsibility, but without acknowledging those first two things, it sounds more like blame. We also imagine many things to be wishful thinking that are enacted successfully elsewhere and fail to understand or use logical reasoning to really discuss issues. Anything will be an experiment because the US is so huge, but it is a scalable experiment working in other places, often we don’t understand that until we’re abroad and sick.

4. We’re not sure how to translate policy, and our country was built by and for lawyers. There are very little areas where we agree as a society on black/white right/wrong, and in many ways that’s good, but when it comes to discussing policy, it can be very confusing.

To account for these aspects, people use charts and grids. Much like personality tests, these are useful for creating a foundation upon which to debate and discuss, but are ultimately made by humans in order to generalize and will have errors and discrepancies. But the political spectrum has rarely been the single line most of us were taught. Instead, it is often a grid used to navigate the direction and preference of trends. Most people are much more moderate than they think, but have problems that need cooperative solutions, like the water crisis and fires on the west coast, disaster relief in the south, crop failure in the midwest, and ticks and diseases in the northeast. We all have huge problems and some areas are insulated from them for now, but they will come. How we navigate and demand solutions for those problems is what creates policy and the policies we agree with because of our value is what dictates our vote. 

So here’s some charts that human people made to talk about these things with and they have helped ground a lot of engaging conversations with people as I watch them argue but not get angry, because there’s a visual thing to talk around. Those kinds of tools should be everywhere. 

The political compass:

via Wikipedia: political spectrum

^

^A generalization of what different areas might look like. I’ve seen so many versions of this, but I liked the way this one because it gave me a better understanding of words I’m more familiar with and where they fall within the broad concepts. I couldn’t find the source. 

^ Here is another one from Google that took me to a shady site, so I didn’t link it, but the goal is to just be familiar with the different ways people structuralize and use definitions and terms to divide them up, in the end, the general understanding is all that matters, and our goal is to be functional, for the government to be usable by the people. Hamilton, the musical, was/is so important for many reasons, but one of the big ones is that it reminded us that this fight of trends and moving around the board has been going on since the very first election of a president to America. It’s always about one group pulling another, creating a tug-of-war that keeps us near the middle, hopefully.

This is a graph showing the individual party ideologies of past presidents by a site called Fact Myth. It is showing the party split between individuals and while we could argue and speculate about accuracies and meanings, whether a president was pushed to make a decision as a person, etc. in the end, they represent the will of the people and the trends we with to follow to solve problems at the time. 

^An outline someone made of 2020 candidates on Reddit that has been going around for a while. Jake showed this to me and while he was perfectly receptive to me saying that yeah, but a person made this and they can have agendas and just put people places, he also had some really great points on how Americans often think we’re moderates, but what we perceive to be in the middle is often skewed by capitalism. That’s not to say it’s bad, simply that if we’re talking trends and problems and solutions, we have to understand where we are on the real scale, not just our own. We will also tend to vote for those who are closest to us, rather than moving in the direction of us, so, say someone sits right where Ryan is, Ryan drops out; now, despite their personal political preference being on the edge of the middle moderate square, they move to Biden rather than Warren or Sanders because Biden is closer to their original place, even if, coming from Trump, moving to Warren/Sanders would pull the political trend back toward their moderate preference. 

Not everyone does this, obviously, but I’m fascinated by how our individual personalities affect how we decide politics. Are you a “next best thing” kind of person? Are you a “obsess relentlessly until it’s done” kind of person? Are you a “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke? Or what about “out of sight out of mind, doesn’t bother me, I don’t care” kind of person? So many of the ways we solve our daily problems are reflected in the ways we move our own political affiliations during voting times. I just think that’s interesting because I’m a social science nerd though. 

A friend from Brown who is much older than us (also a social science nerd <3) pointed out that she grew up with such antagonizing propaganda during the cold war and beginnings of technological boom and peak oil, and it all said the same thing, anything outside the blue is morally wrong and heavily corrupt. I thought that was an interesting point about exposure and remembering past problems, how voting ages overlap to find new solutions or rely on old ones, and what it would cost us to see American politics on a global scale. 

^This is a global scale of values (not politics) from the wikipedia page on political spectrums, and I thought it tied into the conversation in interesting ways, especially when we look at American generation differences in individualism and social cooperation and how they are viewed by each other to both be equally negative. There’s a whole world of solutions and different ways things our done, but we’ve been taught from birth that some are bad and others are exceptions and ours is good. 

Vox has an interesting tool to figure out where abouts you would lie on the compass. I think debating it with others is a better way, since it’s a primarily relative scale (unless you prefer those structuralist ones, but keep in mind that it’s a preference, not a requirement). But I thought I’d include it for those who may not have access to that kind of conversation. 

In the end, consider your morals and how they are different from your current values, and how your current values are affected by your current problems, and how you want the world to look, how you want trends to move, and how your biases of experience or ignorance might play a role in that. I honestly didn’t really think about healthcare until I was in Ireland and saw how simple an alternative was and how freeing it felt. My parents can’t even imagine it (and they are of the class who should most desire those changes), they don’t have enough of a base knowledge to understand how it works, it’s electricity after gaslamps. 

Anyway, just thought I’d share some of those tools. As a skeptical person, I want to remind everyone that these are tools, not documented facts, and fighting about where people are on the graph and where we might be is part of how we come to conclusions about rights and wants and solutions and needs and what we actually value. Most of us, in the end, value comfort and hope, and we vote for the people we think provide that to us. The problem often lies in people misunderstanding their own comfort and relying on ignorance rather than hope. I found these graphs useful in grounding my talks with overwhelming professionals and finding some semblance of peace in what I wanted to hope for and I hope maybe for some of you they can provide that as well. ❤️

If, like me, you reached your 20s and realized a gaping hole in your education, I also recommend the Crash Course series on US Politics. It helped me understand a lot of things that were skimmed over in textbooks or left as multiple choice answers on a standardized test. Politics are a series of solutions to the problems we face as a social group, and knowing how to talk about them completely changed my own feelings of helplessness when communicating to others. 

[aspire-to-the-light]

Micro-disability

I cannot follow pointer fingers, or rotate objects in my head. If you point at an object on a table of objects, I usually can't pick out the one you're talking about unless you get close enough to almost touch it; I just can't draw that invisible line in space and select the object you're trying to indicate. If you're giving me directions, you can't point to a house and say "turn left there" - all I'll do is look puzzled and repeatedly ask where you mean until you clarify with a description.

I knew someone once with an old shoulder injury that meant he couldn't lift one arm directly above his head. He could lift it most of the way, but not the whole way, so his reach was just a little less than others might have assumed, and sometimes he got odd looks if he had to ask for help reaching a high shelf.

A partner of mine can't be in rooms where too many conversations are happening at once. His brain can't filter out the ones he isn't listening to from the one he is, so he quickly gets overwhelmed and distressed and needs to leave.

I can't walk quickly without it taking up my entire concentration and becoming tiring very fast. I walk at an astonishingly slow pace naturally, and if I consciously speed up my steps then they subconsciously get smaller, and if I consciously lengthen my steps then they subconsciously get slower. Something about going faster is just very rapidly physically and psychologically exhausting, and I don't know precisely what it is. I can run forever without dropping at my comfortably mid-speed loping pace, but I can't go much faster than it.

None of these things fit the criteria to be disabilities, under the 'standard' definition. We aren't incapable of holding jobs or having fulfilling home lives because of these limitations. We don't need paid carers, or the government to give us benefits because we can't work, and it probably isn't worth medical help to fix the problem.

At the same time, a huge amount of the discourse around disability rights is valid and useful for discussing these problems. My partner ought to be able to say that a room is overwhelming because of the number of conversations happening, and people ought to respect that by taking him elsewhere to continue their own conversation. He shouldn't be judged for it, or have people assume he just isn't trying hard enough, or be shamed. He certainly shouldn't be fired for it; accommodations should be made.

Like with 'full' disabilities, micro-disabilities can become more disabling when there's an intersection of them. I also have auditory processing disorder; I struggle to hear people if there's background noise, or if they're looking away from me and not projecting towards me. In other words, if you're walking in front of me, I can't hear you - and because I walk slowly, I'm almost always trailing behind the back of the group. It makes me feel constantly excluded and dismissed from conversations while I'm walking with people, like nobody values me enough to slow down so that I can hear them.

The concept illustrates some aspects of how we think about providing accommodations, asking for evidence, and validating disabilities. Often, the policy of institutions is to require evidence of a disability before they will accommodate it. You can't get free medical treatment unless a doctor certifies you actually have the disease, or you can't get extra time on tests unless you fail some other tests, or you can't sue your employer for firing you unless you can demonstrate it's actually your disability that's making you late all the time. The thing about micro-disabilities is that almost nobody will ever be able to prove that they have one, because it simply isn't worth diagnosing. I can't go to a doctor and get a certificate that says I get nauseous if I wake up too early, or I struggle to follow pointer fingers, or I have to keep my hair short because I find it painful to hit a tangle when I'm brushing my hair, or I get stomach bugs more often because of my hopeless addiction to biting my nails.

My doctor simply does not have the time or inclination to measure my ability to understand finger-pointing, decide whether it falls below some threshold, and issue a certificate that says I am now Officially Disabled and my employer will be in Big Trouble if they fire me for being unable to follow pointer fingers. So if I want this to be accommodated - if I want people to give me descriptive directions rather than assuming I can see what they're gesturing at - I have to simply ask them to trust that I really am trying my hardest, I just can't do this.

How you treat micro-disability is, I think, a good lens into whether you truly respect the needs of disabled people. If you'll grudgingly provide accommodations to those who can prove they are really disabled, that's one thing. But people with micro-disabilities aren't really disabled. They're just... a little bit disabled. So do we accommodate them? Do we respect them when they say 'hey, I can't do this' or do we raise our eyebrows and ask them to try harder? Do we listen when they say things are harder for them than for others, or do we look at them oddly and tell them we've never heard of that disability before?

It's a more complicated question than it might seem, I think. Because we accommodate all sorts of micro-disabilities all the time - the ones that are ordinary enough that we don't even think of them as disabilities. Being too short to reach high shelves, or too weak of grip to open jars, or too broad-shouldered for a small-size jacket; these are things we accommodate all the time.

We don't think of someone as disabled for needing reading glasses, but neither do we think that they're faking because they only need the glasses sometimes.

The micro-disabilities people doubt are the odd ones, the ones we struggle to explain and understand. Neither I nor doctors understand why I walk slowly, and it isn't a common problem to have, and that's precisely why people assume I could just try harder and keep up.

Which is awkward when micro-disabilities are so often just tiny, rarely-reported or lesser-known symptoms of "official" disabilities. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, and the common perception is that that means that I can't concentrate or sit down. But it actually affects so much more than that. How many of my tiny mental symptoms are my ADHD expressing itself in ways nobody knows are associated with ADHD? Who knows.

It is meant to illustrate that disability is a spectrum. We cannot draw a line, anywhere in the progression from 'gets tired easily when walking' to 'walks with a limp' to 'can only walk with a cane' to 'can't walk and uses a wheelchair', and say with confidence that people on one side of the line are really fully disabled and those on the other side aren't. 'Micro-disability' merely points at the existence of some centre place between fully abled and being so disabled that it majorly impairs your ability to have an ordinary life; it's still a fuzzy category, with boundaries that almost make less sense the more you think about them.

It's a more inclusive view of disability, certainly. Almost everyone has some kind of micro-disability, whether it's slow reading or a food sensitivity or a chronically infected toenail that hurts when stepped on. Disabled people aren't some odd group of cripples hidden away in hospitals that you'll never meet; disabled people are everyone who can't do certain things that others can do, for reasons that aren't their fault. Some of us may need more or less help and support than others, but all of us just deserve people to listen to us about what we need.

It took a long time, but I ended up reframing a lot of my little difficulties in this way, and I think it makes my life better. I don't force myself to just try harder to navigate any more; I just take my phone everywhere and use Google Maps, rotating the screen for every turn I take because I can't do it in my head. It's... a thing worth introspecting about.

[bountyofbeads]

Trump Policy Favors Wealthier Immigrants for Green Cards https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/us/politics/trump-immigration-policy.html

"The rule has been the top priority of Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, who views it as the most significant change to regulations that had encouraged migrants to come to the United States. Mr. Miller has repeatedly pushed administration officials to finish the regulation, known as the public charge rule, at one point telling colleagues that he wanted them to work on nothing other than it until it was completed."

Trump Policy Favors Wealthier Immigrants for Green Cards

By Michael D. Shear and Eileen Sullivan | Published Aug. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 12, 2019 |

Leer en español

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will make it harder for legal immigrants who rely on government benefit programs, such as food stamps and subsidized housing, to obtain permanent legal status as part of a far-reaching new policy aimed at altering the flow of legal immigration and reducing the number of poor immigrants.

The move will have the greatest impact on immigrants who are living in the country legally and are likely to receive government benefits, making it much harder for people who are struggling financially to win legal permanent status — commonly known as a green card — so they can remain in the United States.

Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, announced the new regulation at the White House on Monday morning, declaring that it would allow the government to insist that immigrants who come to the country were self-sufficient and would not be a drain on society.

“The benefit to taxpayers is a long-term benefit of seeking to ensure that our immigration system is bringing people to join us as American citizens, as legal permanent residents first, who can stand on their own two feet, who will not be reliant on the welfare system, especially in the age of the modern welfare state which is so expansive and expensive,” Mr. Cuccinelli said.

Under the new rule, the financial well-being of immigrants who are in the United States legally on temporary visas will be more heavily scrutinized when they seek a green card. Immigration officials will consider an immigrant’s age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status and education. But the officials will be given broad leeway to determine whether an immigrant is likely to be a user of public benefits, to deny them a green card, and to order them deported out of the country.

Officials said the program would not apply to people who already have green cards, to refugees and asylum-seekers, or to pregnant women and children. But immigration advocates warned that vast numbers of immigrants, including those not actually subject to the regulation, may drop out of needed benefits programs because they fear retribution by immigration authorities.

“This news is a cruel new step toward weaponizing programs that are intended to help people by making them, instead, a means of separating families and sending immigrants and communities of color one message: you are not welcome here,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

She added: “It will have a dire humanitarian impact, forcing some families to forgo critical lifesaving health care and nutrition. The damage will be felt for decades to come.”

Monday’s announcement is part of President Trump’s concerted assault on the nation’s system of immigration laws and regulations. For much of the past three years, the president has railed against what he calls the dangers of illegal immigration. But administration officials have also sought to impose new limits on legal immigration into the United States.

L. Francis Cissna, the former director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, had resisted the rush to finish the rule, drafts of which were several hundred pages long and very complicated. But Mr. Cissna was forced out of his position earlier this year and replaced by Mr. Cuccinelli, a former attorney general in Virginia and an immigration hard-liner who shares Mr. Miller’s view that immigrants should not rely on financial support from the government.

The complex regulation, which is scheduled to go into effect in 60 days, would give the Trump administration a powerful new tool to narrow the demographic of people who come to live and work in the country. According to the new rule, the United States wants immigrants who can support themselves, not those who “depend on public resources to meet their needs.”

The ability of immigrants to support themselves has long been a consideration in whether they were granted the right to live and work in the United States permanently. But the Trump administration’s new move has made predicting the economic well-being of immigrants a more central part of that decision-making process.

An applicant who speaks English, shows formal letters of support and has private health insurance would be more likely to be approved than someone whose economic situation suggests they would probably need housing vouchers or enroll in Medicaid in the future if they were given a green card.

Over time, administration officials hope that the tough policy will shift the composition of the American immigration system by favoring wealthier immigrants.

Asked about the plaque on the Statue of Liberty that invites “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” Mr. Cuccinelli said that “I’m certainly not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty. We have a long history of being one of the most welcoming nations in the world.”

But immigration advocates reacted with anger at the announcement, calling it a cruel policy that they said was already causing immigrants around the country to abandon housing and medical benefits because they were concerned about the impact that using them might have on their immigration status or the status of someone in their family.

“Shame on the Trump administration for expanding a rule with racist roots in a shameful ploy to rig the immigration system for the wealthy,” said Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. “We thank all who stood up against the administration’s hate-filled agenda, and we will continue to fight for our values of community, compassion, and common humanity.”

The fear touched off by the new rule is illustrated by Maria, a 28-year-old woman from Colombia who is five months pregnant with a baby girl and reached out to her lawyer for advice a couple of weeks ago after she started seeing coverage of the draft version of the public charge rule in the news. Her husband, a childhood friend from Colombia, is a United States citizen, and she is in the United States on a tourist visa while she applies for a green card with him as a sponsor.

Maria’s husband, a high school teacher, had been off work during the summer break, forcing them to enroll in supplemental nutritional program for women, infants and children, known as WIC, in order to afford food and prenatal care. Though the new rule specifically does not penalize pregnant women for seeking such assistance, she said she fears that it could be used against her anyway. She said she wished she could stop accepting the help.

“I can’t,” said Maria, who worked as an industrial engineer in Colombia and asked that her last name not be used because she feared reprisals by American immigration officials. “Right now we need to use it,” she said, adding: “Whatever happens, the most important thing is that the baby is O.K., right?”

How many people the rule will affect is in dispute. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not conduct an “in-depth” analysis to estimate that, according to a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity to brief reporters on the rule.

But in the Federal Register, Homeland Security officials estimated that more than 382,000 immigrants seek an adjustment to their immigration status each year and would be subject to the public charge review. More than 324,000 people in households with noncitizens are estimated to drop out or not enroll in public benefit programs.

Advocacy organizations say the number of people affected by the regulation is vastly larger, estimating that 26 million immigrants living in the United States legally will reconsider their use of public benefits because they fear how accepting assistance could affect their ability to remain in the United States.

Asked whether the agency expected immigrants to drop out of benefits they’re entitled to simply because of fear of losing their protections, the official said, “whether or not somebody disenrolls, you know, that’s a decision the alien would have to make to consider the future immigration consequences but the intention is not to have disenrollment consequences.”

Several immigration groups have pledged to sue the administration in an attempt to block the regulation from going into effect. Tens of thousands of people opposed the rule in a public comment period over the past several months.

The regulation was published in the Federal Register Monday morning with the following acknowledgment: “While some commenters provided support for the rule, the vast majority of commenters opposed the rule.”

Caitlin Dickerson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

[scifigeneration]

Sex robots are here, but laws aren't keeping up with the ethical and privacy issues they raise

by Francis X. Shen

The robots are here. Are the “sexbots” close behind?

From the Drudge Report to The New York Times, sex robots are rapidly becoming a part of the national conversation about the future of sex and relationships. Behind the headlines, a number of companies are currently developing robots designed to provide humans with companionship and sexual pleasure – with a few already on the market.

Unlike sex toys and dolls, which are typically sold in off-the-radar shops and hidden in closets, sexbots may become mainstream. A 2017 survey suggested almost half of Americans think that having sex with robots will become a common practice within 50 years.

As a scholar of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and the law, I’m interested in the legal and policy questions that sex robots pose. How do we ensure they are safe? How will intimacy with a sex robot affect the human brain? Would sex with a childlike robot be ethical? And what exactly is a sexbot anyway?

Defining ‘sex robot’

There is no universally accepted definition of “sex robot.” This may not seem important, but it’s actually a serious problem for any proposal to govern – or ban – them.

The primary conundrum is how to distinguish between a sex robot and a “sexy robot.” Just because a robot is attractive to a human and can provide sexual gratification, does it deserve the label “sex robot”?

It’s tempting to define them as legislatures do sex toys, by focusing on their primary use. In Alabama, the only state that still has an outright ban on the sale of sex toys, the government targets devices “primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

The problem with applying this definition to sex robots is that the latter increasingly provide much more than sex. Sex robots are not just dolls with a microchip. They will use self-learning algorithms to engage their partner’s emotions.

Consider the “Mark 1” robot, which resembles the actor Scarlett Johansson. It is regularly labeled a sex robot, yet when I interviewed its creator, Ricky Ma Tsz Hang, he was quick to clarify that Mark 1 is not intended to be a sex robot. Rather, such robots will aim to assist with all sorts of tasks, from preparing a child’s lunch to keeping an elderly relative company.

Humans, of course, can navigate both sexual and nonsexual contexts adeptly. What if a robot can do the same? How do we conceptualize and govern a robot that can switch from “play with kids” mode during the day to “play with adults” mode at night?

Thorny legal issues

In a landmark 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ sodomy law and established what some scholars have described as a right to sexual privacy.

There is currently a split among circuit courts in how Lawrence should be applied to state restrictions on the sale of sex toys. So far, Alabama’s ban has been upheld, but I suspect that all sex toy bans will eventually be struck down. If so, it seems unlikely that states will be able to wholesale restrict sales of sex robots generally.

Bans on childlike sex robots, however, may be different.

It is not clear whether anyone in the U.S. already owns a childlike sex robot. But even the possibility of child sex robots prompted a bipartisan House bill, the Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots Act, or CREEPER. Introduced in 2017, it passed unanimously six months later.

State politicians will surely follow suit, and we are likely to see many attempts to ban childlike sex robots. But it’s unclear if such bans will survive constitutional challenge.

On one hand, the Supreme Court has held that prohibitions on child pornography do not violate the First Amendment because the state has a compelling interest in curtailing the effects of child pornography on the children portrayed. Yet the Supreme Court has also held that the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 was overly broad in its attempt to prohibit “child pornography that does not depict an actual child.”

Childlike sex robots are robots, not humans. Like virtual child pornography, the development of a childlike sex robot does not require interaction with any children. Yet it might also be argued that childlike sex robots would have serious detrimental effects that compel state action.

Safe and secure?

Perhaps someday sex robots will become sentient. But for now, they are products.

And a question almost entirely overlooked is how the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission should regulate the hazards associated with sex robots. Existing sex products are not well regulated, and this is cause for concern given the multitude of ways in which sex robots could be harmful to their users.

For example, dangers lurk even in a seemingly innocent scene where a sex robot and human hold hands and kiss. What if the sexbots’ lips were manufactured with lead paint or some other toxin? And what if the robot, with the strength of five humans, accidentally crushes the human’s finger in a display of passion?

It’s not just physical harm, but security as well. For instance, just as a human partner learns by remembering what words were soothing, and what type of touch was comforting, so too is a sex robot likely to store and process massive amounts of intimate information. What regulations are in place to ensure that this data remains private? How vulnerable will the sex robot be to hacking? Could the state use sex robots as surveillance devices for sex offenders?

Sexbots in the city

Whether and how governments regulate sex robots will depend on what we learn – or what we assume – about the effects of sexbots on individuals and society.

In 2018, the Houston City Council made headlines by enacting an ordinance to ban the operation of what would have been America’s first so-called robot “brothel.” At one of the community meetings, an attendee warned: “A business like this would destroy homes, families, finances of our neighbors and cause major community uproars in the city.”

But dire predictions like this are pure speculation. At present there is no evidence of how the introduction of sex robots would affect either individuals or society.

For instance, would a man who uses a childlike sex robot be more or less likely to harm an actual human child? Would robots be a substitute for humans in relationships or would they enhance relationships as sex toys might? Would sex robots fill a void for those who are lonely and without companions? Just as pilots use virtual flight simulators before they fly a real plane, could virgins use sex robots to safely practice sex before trying the real thing?

Put another way, there are far more unanswered questions about sex robots than there are actual sex robots. Although it’s hard to conduct empirical studies until sexbots are more prevalent, informed governance requires researchers to explore these topics urgently. Otherwise, we may see reactionary governance decisions based on supposition and fear of doomsday scenarios.

The TV show ‘Westworld’ depicts how humans interact with sex robots and other machines infused with artificial intelligence.

A brave new world

A fascinating question for me is how the current taboo on sex robots will ebb and flow over time.

There was a time, not so long ago, when humans attracted to the same sex felt embarrassed to make this public. Today, society is similarly ambivalent about the ethics of “digisexuality” – a phrase used to describe a number of human-technology intimate relationships. Will there be a time, not so far in the future, when humans attracted to robots will gladly announce their relationship with a machine?

No one knows the answer to this question. But I do know that sex robots are likely to be in the American market soon, and it is important to prepare for that reality. Imagining the laws governing sexbots is no longer a law professor hypothetical or science fiction.

It’s a real-world challenge that society is about to face for the first time. I hope that the law gets it right.

About The Author:

Francis X. Shen is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[drunkexmormonsexplain-blog]

So my dad posted an infuriating article on facebook...

Here's the link: https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2019-01-22/what-to-do-with-your-questions-according-to-1-general-authority-whos-an-expert-on-anti-church-materials-48843

After reading this absolute garbage, I was so infuriated that in the height of pettiness I decided to write a 3 page rebuttal essay. Then I realized that as much as I want to stir shit with the Mormons, I don't actually want my dad to disown me. So I'm gonna post it here instead of on my dad's facebook. It's extremely rough and overwritten, but since I have no plans to revise it I'm just gonna let it into the wild. There are a few paragraphs where the wording is too poor to convince real diehards, but it should be convincing enough for my fellow exmos at least! LONG POST AHEAD

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Valerie Johnson’s piece, “What to do with your questions”, covers LDS leader Elder Corbridge’s visit to a BYU campus and outlines his response to concerns many members of the church have about unsavory parts of its history and current practices. It’s an effective piece of LDS propaganda: a piece of media that obscures or inflates the truth in order to advance the beliefs of an organization. As we’ll see below, not only does the piece fail to address the valid concerns of many latter-day saints, but it also uses familiar techniques to undermine the importance of those concerns in the first place. The following outlines both the inaccuracies in Corbridge’s arguments and the subtle ways in which the article discourages LDS readers from thinking critically about the issues at hand.

Let’s start with the first question in the article. “The kingdom of God is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as described in the book of Daniel as standing forever. The question is, will you and I stand?” Corbridge/Johnson asks. While claims about the longevity of “God’s kingdom” are unprovable, it’s evident to any non-church-funded source that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least, is dwindling. Church sources commonly claim that membership numbers are increasing, because they count all individuals who have been baptized but not ex-communicated. On the other hand, counting only active, financially-contributing members reveals that membership is declining sharply. Teens and adults who were raised in the church are leaving at a higher rate than ever. A large portion of the membership inflation reported by the church consists of individuals converted by missionaries as adults, who are counted as members until death although they often stop attending within a year.

From there, Johnson moves on to claim that attacks on the church are broad, including church doctrine that conflicts with “shifting attitudes of today”. This is a common phrase in LDS writing, used to encourage but not specifically state the idea that church doctrine, unlike the rest of the world’s social values, is permanent and unchanging. This is untrue, as many church teachings have changed with time, often shifting to become more in line with North American social norms. A famous and relatively recent example, alluded to in Johnson’s article, is the fact that black men were not allowed to receive the priesthood until 1978. Though there have been many apologetic explanations for this overdue change in doctrine, it’s hard to ignore the fact that its introduction coincided with a government warning that the church would only be able to keep its tax-free status if it got rid of its racist policies. With this and other examples, it’s clear that the church does have a historical precedent to alter teachings in order to keep up with society’s “shifting attitudes.” However, the way it’s phrased in the article contributes to the subconscious idea among many church members that society is at fault for becoming more progressive, not the church for its inability to keep up.

Changing church policy, a history of immoral doctrine, and dwindling membership statistics are only a few of the concerns plaguing modern Mormons. Corbridge and Johnson attempt to address this huge umbrella of issues with a simple response: “Answer the primary questions.” According to Corbridge, these fundamental questions about the church include: “Is there a God who is our Father? Is Jesus Christ the Son of God and the Savior of the World? Is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the kingdom of God on the earth? Was Joseph Smith a prophet?”

The first three questions refer to the existence God, which is unprovable, and the role of Jesus Christ, a distant historical figure whose true actions in life are hard to discern. In contrast, the last question refers to Joseph Smith, a man who lived in America in the 1800s, whose life is well documented and researched. Was he, as Corbridge asks, a prophet? Researching his life, the answer is clear: hopefully not.

There’s a well of damning evidence on Joseph Smith available with some quick research. He scammed people with his treasure-hunting business, was often jailed for his crimes, and even killed others during his escape attempts. Although the church tried to cover it up for years, he is most well known for his polygamy: by the time he died in 1844, he was married to at least 27 women. The youngest of these, Helen Mar Kimball, was 14 years old. Joseph Smith was 37, which makes him a pedophile on all counts – even in 1843, when they were married, the average marriage age for women was between 20 and 22. If such a man was chosen as a prophet of God, we should question what type of God would choose him, and what type of church would follow his teachings. The church itself has not addressed these concerns, sweeping them under the rug as “lies and deception”, despite multiple sources proving their accuracy. Predictably, Johnson and Corbridge do not mention anything else about Joseph Smith in the article.

Corbridge then moves on to what he calls the “secondary questions,” which Johnson broadly generalizes as “questions about Church history, polygamy, black people and women and the priesthood, how the Book of Mormon was translated, DNA and the Book of Mormon, gay marriage, different accounts of the First Vision and so on,” not going into specifics on any of these topics. Corbridge follows this up with the most bizarre claim in the entire article: “If you answer the primary questions, the secondary questions get answered too or they pale in significance and you can deal with things you understand and things you don’t understand, things you agree with and things you don’t agree with without jumping ship.”

There’s a lot to get into with this statement. Firstly, the article attempts to trivialize many valid concerns about the church. For example, “Gay marriage” is used as a buzzword to cover an array of questions about the church and the LGBT+ community such as why same-sex couples aren’t allowed to be married in the church, if it’s possible for LGB members to be happy even though they’re forced to be celibate, if trans and gender non-conforming individuals are allowed to present their true identity and be fully accepted into the congregation, why children of LGB parents aren’t allowed to be baptized into the church without cutting contact with their family, and so on. These topics are trivialized by presenting them so broadly and following them up with the statement that they “pale in importance” to the primary questions. This is not the case for the LGBT+ individuals in question, or other individuals whose happiness is directly affected by any of the issues mentioned.

Secondly, the idea that some of these secondary questions are also answered by the primary questions is a bold and frankly false statement. Knowing the “correct” answers to the primary questions does nothing to answer the far more nuanced subjects of the secondary questions. A devout Mormon who firmly believes in God and knows that Joseph Smith is a prophet can still easily have questions about why God wouldn’t allow women to hold the priesthood, or how the Book of Mormon can be a historically accurate account of pre-colonial America when DNA evidence proves otherwise. It’s clear that most of these questions fall into Corbridge’s “pale in importance” category, which minimizes the real struggles that even faithful members can experience in the church.

The last part of this statement is the most telling to Corbridge’s, and more broadly the church’s response to criticism and questioning members. He says that it’s important members deal with these controversial subjects, with “things you understand and things you don’t understand, things you agree with and things you don’t agree with, without jumping ship.” According to Corbridge, Mormons should stay active in the church if they believe in the “primary questions”, even if they have doubts about the “secondary questions.” Historically, many religious groups have been formed by those who share the same primary beliefs as another sect – belief in God and Jesus Christ, for example – but differ on how the church should be run or the details about God’s doctrine. There is even history within the Mormon faith of separate factions who have split off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints based on their different answers to the “secondary questions”, even though they share belief in God, Jesus Christ, and Joseph Smith with the mainstream branch of LDS faith. It doesn’t make sense for LDS members who disagree with or don’t understand controversial church doctrine to remain members, even if they believe in God, Jesus Christ, or Joseph Smith, as they can seek out other denominations that are more in line with their personal beliefs. Remaining in the church is not beneficial to their spiritual well-being or happiness. Non-believing or disillusioned members can create disharmony within the church, so it isn’t good for the health and harmony of a congregation for leaders like Corbridge to encourage those members to stay. What it is good for, though, is the church’s finances, since LDS members who want to access all the benefits of Mormonism must pay 10% of their income to the church. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the purpose of this article is to suggest doubting members ignore their concerns and stay active, tithe-paying members.

Johnson’s section on the methods of learning is familiar to anyone experienced with religious anti-science rhetoric. Though it references the scientific method and “analytical learning” (research), those mentions are meaningless as Corbridge states “the divine method of learning ultimately trumps everything else by tapping into the powers of heaven.” This is echoed often in fundamentalist religious writing, and means that whenever scientific evidence, academic research, or social values clash with religious beliefs, believers are to ignore the facts and trust “God”, or the teachings of their church. It’s a way to shut down logical arguments from doubters or non-believers without having to think critically about church doctrine and has been discussed at length in other writing.

A somewhat amusing and unique addition to this article is the concept of “academic learning” as separate from scientific or analytical. The idea that simply reading a text can provide the reader with truth without the “analytical” step of fact-checking and resource gathering is false. After all, anyone can write a piece (such as Johnson’s) and fill it with lies. Without multiple opinions and validations, a text on its own has no truth value.

The final two sections of “What to do with your questions” move away from laughable pseudo-academic claims and give us insight into the far more insidious psychological methods the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other religious groups use to keep their members in order. The first section is entitled “The Presence or Absence of the Holy Ghost.” Generally, most LDS members and leaders assume the “presence of the Holy Ghost” to mean a happy, warm, and comfortable feeling. This type of feeling commonly occurs in familiar, safe settings such as churches and homes. Corbridge goes on to state that “the gloom I experienced as I listened to the dark choir of voices raised against the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ… is the absence of the Spirit of God.” In other words, if members who read about controversial church history and practices feel bad or uncomfortable while doing so, it must mean these claims are false.

The truth is that anyone who learns about information that radically disrupts their current worldview will be uncomfortable. In the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaders have so effectively hidden parts of its history from its members and lied about doing so that the discovery of things like Joseph Smith’s history of polygamy and multiple accounts of the First Vision can be shocking and upsetting. Issues dealing with the happiness of LGBT+, women, and black members of the church make many members feel guilty and sad, as they feel empathy for those who have been wronged by the church’s present or past teachings. By equating the natural and understandable feelings of sadness, guilt, and discomfort with the absence of the spirit and therefore falsehood, Corbridge convinces questioning members that they should bury those feelings and ignore their questions. This is not an acceptable way to address controversial church topics, nor is it healthy to encourage members to suppress their emotions.

The final section of the article, “Elimination”, is the final nail in the coffin telling LDS members to keep their doubts private and unanswered. Corbridge reiterates that he and God can’t answer all the member’s doubts – obvious, since he and Johnson have done nothing to address any concerns in this article – and that those who truly answer the “primary questions” will not even need answers to their further questions. This effectively combines the church’s policy of repression and communal guilt: if you are bothered by unsavory aspects of the church’s doctrine, you probably don’t believe in God or Joseph Smith. LDS doctrine already encourages a heavy amount of personal guilt for members who don’t feel they are perfectly living up to the church’s expectations, but if they voice their concerns, they now face the shame of their peers. Nobody in a faith setting wants to be known as the unfaithful member, and Corbridge’s statement is clear: if you want to be respected by your religious peers, keep those questions in.

-North

[earaercircular]

'The ban on washing cars with tap water was just a foretaste'

Pieter Loose stood on the highest Alpine peaks, built a bamboo village in Brazil and took part in the World Rafting Championships in Bosnia. Now he shows off his water technology company Ekopak on the Brussels stock exchange. “Let us also try to become world champions in water recycling.”

Pieter Loose pulls his leg as he receives us. A muscle tear in the calf, the result of an hour of padel. These will be difficult weeks for the man in his thirties, without sports. "I'm a bit hyperkinetic. I need sports to recharge.'” He usually does that on the mountain bike. He covers 10,000 kilometres every year, with tours in Patagonia, Africa, Greece, the Dolomites. And sometimes rides of 5,000 altimeters per day. Suffering. “But for me this is pure holiday: crawling on my bike in the morning and just follow the GPS.”

Loose talks rather quietly and monotonously. Yet he is brimming with enthusiasm. "I've always had a big mouth and I've always been ambitious. But I never dared to think that my company would ever be listed on the stock exchange.” At the end of March, his water treatment company Ekopak[1], supported by main shareholder Marc Coucke, raised 50 million euros and it is now worth about 240 million euros. It is the temporary highlight in Loose's course. With Ekopak, he surfs along with water recycling technology on the realization that we are depleting our water reserves.

He paid "a few millions" for Ekopak. “It was a small, local company at the time, with a lot of knowledge. I put more ambition into it. The ball is rolling now. My dreams become reality. That gives me power.”

The company has been building container installations for many years to produce ultrapure water for chemical, pharmaceutical, textile and food companies, among others. “Compare it to a descaler for the city water in your home, to protect your taps. But we go much further." “For customers who produce high-pressure steam, the entire Mendeleev table has to be removed, otherwise those elements will affect the steam boilers,” explains Loose. “Every customer requires a different degree of purity. For cooling water, water to clean machines, water for chemical processes.”

While until recently Ekopak treated groundwater and drinking water, today - after thorough research - it starts from waste water at the companies themselves. “A technical challenge, but future-proof,” says Loose. In addition, he launched the WAAS (Water-as-a-Service) concept, whereby Ekopak not only builds installations, but also finances and operates them and invoices the customer per drop of water. This should result in unprecedented revenue and profit growth in the coming years. “We have turned a sustainable product into a sustainable business model.”

What is the driving force behind Ekopak's growth?

Loose: "Long ago, investments were made in a network to provide everyone with clean drinking water. Industrial companies have joined the same network. That was the most obvious solution. But the situation has become completely out of balance: factories today use billions of liters of drinking water per hour. This used water is subsequently treated in a biological water treatment plant to be discharged into streams and rivers. It flows to the sea and you lose it. Consequently we have to install desalination plants at the sea side that consume a lot of energy to pump the water inland again. That is not future-proof, and companies are increasingly interested in that.”

How serious are companies about this?

Loose: “Twenty years ago you had Greenpeace with a slogan like 'better a hole in my T-shirt than a hole in the ozone layer”. But that's where it stopped. Now a tipping point has been reached. Companies set themselves concrete targets for energy, CO2 and water use. This is important to attract investors, subsidies and staff. The dominoes are falling, and that's a good thing. Climate change is real.” “The water supply is under pressure. Companies are not only afraid of a blackout, but also of a blue out. We've already had a foretaste of bans on using tap water to wash cars and fill swimming pools, and bans for farmers on pumping water from streams and rivers in certain regions. Water has a value like oil. We never thought about that. But the awareness that there are limits is growing at a rapid pace. We feel that. We keeps us occupied.”

How bad is the water scarcity in Flanders?

Loose: "Very. There is plenty of rain, but because it is a densely populated and paved area, the rain disappears into the sewers instead of seeping into the ground. Moreover, we have an economy with water-intensive sectors: food, textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. In the OECD ranking, we are at the very bottom for the amount of water available per person, behind southern countries such as Spain and Italy. That also offers opportunities. We are forced to find a solution: Belgium will educate the world when it comes to rational use of water. That creates companies like Ekopak. We also intend to score internationally with that knowledge.”

Is the industry the main culprit?

Loose: "I'm not saying that. There is also agriculture. And in families at home, only 10 percent of drinking water is used for drinking. We still flush our toilets en masse with drinking water instead of rainwater. But our focus is on industry, which uses a quarter of drinking water in the northern region of Belgium. If we could reduce that, we are taking a big step forward.”

What is the role of politics in the water problem?

Loose: “Everyone is aware of the issues. The Blue Deal of Flanders[2] proving it. Money is earmarked for buffer basins and more wet nature, or for reductions in leakage losses, and so on. Mandatory water audits are introduced at companies and linked to environmental and expansion permits and subsidies. It is being examined whether companies can inject any surplus of recycled drinking water into the network against payment. It wouldn't surprise me either that there will be a limit on applications for which you can use drinking water or groundwater in industry, comparable to measures for your swimming pool.”

How important is the IPO in the growth plan?

Loose: 'It is crucial to roll out the Water-as-a-Service strategy. We will not only build the small water factories at the customers' premises, but will also operate and pre-finance them. This requires money: from 100,000 to 10 million euros per installation, depending on the flow rate and quality. We invoice per drop for a period of ten years or longer. We decrease the customer’s worries. And while tap water is becoming more and more expensive, our price is 20 to 40 percent lower. We therefore also strengthen their competitiveness. That makes companies bend in our direction more quickly. In this way we can tackle the water problem at an accelerated pace.” “The IPO also generates more than just money. It gives you more body when negotiating long-term contracts with multinationals. We are now approaching them as a listed company, no longer as 'that SME from Tielt with a skilled CEO'.'

Do you already have customers for that new concept?

Loose: “Eight projects are up and running, among others at the chemical companies Eastman[3], the copper film producer Circuitfoil[4] in Luxembourg and the vegetable processor Darta[5]. An installation has been started up at the pharmaceutical company Takeda[6] in Lessines to reuse 600 million litres of waste water. That's the equivalent of 18,000 people's water use, which means all of Lessen. We actually connect an entire city to the water network in one go. I also see many small and good initiatives, such as trucks collecting construction site water. But what we realize is of a different order. We are going fast, and sustainability knows no bounds. We also go abroad. Takeda wants to roll out our technology in its factories worldwide.”

You have now lost control of Ekopak. Is that difficult?

Loose: "The opportunity we now have to move forward gives me more satisfaction than the idea of being one hundred percent owner of a small company from which you are not getting the most out of it."

Source

JAN DE SCHAMPHELAERE, Ekopak-topman Pieter Loose: 'Het verbod om auto's te wassen met leidingwater was slechts een voorsmaakje' in: De Tijd, 24-07-2021,

https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/ekopak-topman-pieter-loose-het-verbod-om-auto-s-te-wassen-met-leidingwater-was-slechts-een-voorsmaakje/10321369.html

[1] https://ekopak.be/en/sustainability/ [2] With the Blue Deal, the Government of Flanders is increasing its efforts in the fight against water scarcity and drought. With this deal, it wants to tackle the drought problem in a structural way, with an increased deployment of resources and the correct instruments, with the involvement of industry and farmers as part of the solution and with a clear exemplary role for the Flemish regional and other governments in Belgium. The Flemish Decree on Integrated Water Policy is officially approved in July 2003 (Belgium Law Gazette, 14.11.03). This decree is the juridical implementation of the European Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive in Flemish law. https://www.integraalwaterbeleid.be/en [3] Founded in 1920, Eastman is a global specialty materials company that produces a broad range of products found in items people use every day. With the purpose of enhancing the quality of life in a material way, Eastman works with customers to deliver innovative products and solutions while maintaining a commitment to safety and sustainability. The company's innovation-driven growth model takes advantage of world-class technology platforms, deep customer engagement, and differentiated application development to grow its leading positions in attractive end-markets such as transportation, building and construction, and consumables. As a globally inclusive and diverse company, Eastman employs approximately 14,500 people around the world and serves customers in more than 100 countries. The company had 2020 revenues of approximately $8.5 billion and is headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, USA. The chemical company has 2 plants in the Ghent harbor in Belgium. https://www.eastman.com/pages/home.aspx. [4] Circuitfoil develops; Produces and markets high-quality copper foil, while constantly ensuring a safe and healthy environment in its plants, processes and products. rom its corporate headquarters in Luxembourg, Europe, the company distributes and markets its large range of products through a wide network of service centers and sales companies to customers worldwide. https://www.circuitfoil.com/company/profile/ [5] d’Arta is a Belgian family company founded in 1988 that has grown into a global player in the development, processing and commercialisation of fresh frozen products such as vegetables, fruits, herbs and ready-made (side) dishes. It employs more than 900 people and export our products to more than 100 countries. https://www.darta.com/en [6] Takeda is one of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in Belgium. Takeda’s presence in Belgium is reinforced by its global manufacturing site in Lessines. This Takeda site has over 18,000 m² of building surface and operates 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It is a flexible plant for purification and a packaging center for immunology and hematology products, covering a total geographical span of over 80 countries worldwide. In total, more than 1000 professionals work for Takeda in Belgium, making us a top 5 employer in the pharmaceutical industry. https://www.takeda.com/en-be/who-we-are/contact-us/

[honeyrose-tea]

i would love to hear your demos. im also curious to hear your thesis ideas, if you'd like to share. as for your comment about "annoyed professors who want [you] to shut up", I strongly recommend going to their office hours. professors generally like students who go to office hours and have interesting discussions. what classes are you taking this semester? I think you have a lot of good thoughts, and are clearly well versed in the social and historical aspects of America. is that something you enjoy studying? -🌙

I was so excited to share my demos with you:) as I mentioned the other day, my friends don't really care too much about them and it kinda hurts, so it's nice to have someone who wants to hear them💞

my professors do like me and even though we're not really having formal office hours as a university this semester (professors usually stay after class and/or offer to do a virtual meeting with you if you need it) I have been making a relationship with them. so it's not like they hate me or anything, it's mostly just me projecting my own anxiety onto them. I have a hard time with gauging how much I'm talking, and sometimes I feel like I talk too much in one class session (making like 3-4 comments) or not enough (making none). I also have a difficult time figuring out how relevant my comments/questions are, and I get afraid the professors might get upset with me for taking us away from wherever they're trying to get to. very rarely (if ever) do these things actually happen, so I guess it's just me being an anxious people-pleaser who adores this specific brand of authority figure. it probably is part of why I want to be a professor too, but I digress.

this semester I'm taking:

sociology of deviance

soc. of gender and sexuality

soc. of race and ethnicity

spanish 2

theory and methods in anthropology (which has the option for an intership that I decided to do)

thesis prep

internship prep

I know that seems like a lot but the last two are only one credit hour (they meet once a week and are super chill) so it's really not too bad. I like all my professors a lot and I'm really enjoying my classes so far

I love studying the social problems in the US (as you can probably tell from my coursework) and I enjoy US history to an extent too. history is of course a very broad discipline and there is a lot to study within it. I am especially interested in more comtemporary history (seemingly an oxymoron) by which I mean things that have happened in the last 100-150ish years. most of my history classes said they would cover all tne history until modern day but only got into the early 1900s by the time class was over, and that really disappointed me. I think things from 1900(ish) and on are some of the most important to study as they have had so much impact on today. I have had to take it upon myself to learn about the confusing aspects of our foreign policy and the wars and conflicts- namely with the middle east and russia- that still affect us to this day, and I still have a hard time with understanding them. all of that is a long-winded way of saying yes, I do enjoy history, but I haven't gotten to be educated in it the way I wish I had. that may be slightly remedied since I'm taking a history class next semester, but we'll see.

thank you for writing, my friend. I'll talk to you again soon. as always, I am an open book and I can't wait to answer anything you ask about when we talk again! ❤️❤️❤️

[khalilhumam]

Meet Matt Collin, David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Global Economy and Development

Register at https://mignation.com The Only Social Network for Migrants. #Immigration, #Migration, #Mignation ---

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/meet-matt-collin-david-m-rubenstein-fellow-in-global-economy-and-development/

Meet Matt Collin, David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Global Economy and Development

By Tylena Patton-Bullock

I’m Matt Collin, I’m a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. Q: Where did you grow up? I was born in the United Kingdom, but when I was only a few months old my parents moved to the small town of Conway, South Carolina, so I grew up in Conway. But, because my mother’s side of family is from the UK, we were going back and forth quite a lot. That is why I somehow come out of the whole thing not sounding quite like I’m from Conway or from the UK at the same time. So, I spent my first 20 years in South Carolina, growing up and going to undergrad at Clemson. Q: What inspired you to become a scholar? When I look back and think about why I became a scholar it’s very difficult to pin down that precise moment. And these things tend to be a lot more random than we often like to think about them. To give you one example of the year when I decided to do a Ph.D., I applied to do a Ph.D., but I was so uncertain about the whole thing that I applied to go film school. I didn’t get into film school, and I got a full ride to go do a Ph.D. in economics. So sometimes it feels like chance pushes you in a different direction. But I think there’s two things that nudged me toward being a scholar that works on issues of international development. The first are my parents. As I said, I grew up in Conway, where my dad taught international politics and my mom was a nurse practitioner caring for mainly poor patients from the community. From dad, I got the sense that there’s a wider world outside of Clemson. At the time, I was studying mathematics because I liked to work on problems that had a solution. But most of the things that I’ve worked on didn’t really have much applicability to the rest of the world. Dad would pull me into his own workplace saying things like “could you explain the United Nations Development Program’s population tables to me? Could you explain the Gini index to me?” (which is a popular measure of inequality). Through that I began to become interested in issues of the outside world, particularly those related to poverty. And when I got to college, I started to study economics and so I realized that there was a way to use the math-y side of my brain and start applying it to real world issues. [related]The second kind of formative moment was when, after grad school in development economics, I went to work as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance in Malawi, in southern Africa. This is a program that’s run by a think tank called the Overseas Development Institute that sends young economists off to work in developing countries as civil servants. I was there for two years and working for the Malawian government really gave me both a sense for how governments in these places can function and how they can sometimes dysfunction. But also, Malawi was a very aid-dependent country at the time. In many ways, we were beholden to international donors, which were providing a lot of the national budget. And it began to open my eyes about the fact that for a lot of these countries, while their own decisions about policy make a huge difference for their ability to fight poverty, a lot of those decisions were made outside of their own borders. And that began to clue me into other issues, like climate change, migration, trade policy—things that affect developing countries—but are sometimes outside of their control. So, with that experience in mind, that began to become more of a focus in my own work after I received my Ph.D. and started working in a think tank space. Q: What do you think is the most important issue we are facing today? If I’m being honest the most important issue we’re facing today is probably climate change, which makes it awkward that I don’t work at all on climate change. For me, it’s always been a question of finding ways to reduce poverty and inequality. Despite the fact that we’ve made a lot of progress in reducing poverty over the last 30, 40 years, the bar is very rightly going to be moved up in terms of what level of poverty we care about. I see climate change as probably being one of the bigger threats to reducing poverty in the future. But I don’t think that there’s one thing that we should always be focused on. I think climate change and migration are two of the biggest levers through which we have to worry about poverty in the future. In my case, I worry a lot about how we get the rules of an international economic system right in order to make it easier for poorer countries to pull themselves out of poverty. So, I think it’s less about there being one particular thing we should all be focused on and instead different fronts that we need to be fighting. Q: What are you working on right now? During my time here at Brookings I am largely focused on thinking about where people stash money that they’re trying to hide from tax authorities or from their own governments. There’s a broad umbrella of research around something called “illicit financial flows.” This is a big bucket of stuff that includes money laundering, cross-border tax evasion, proceeds of drugs, as well as terrorist financing. So, my work kind of focuses on two things. We’re trying to make it harder for people to keep money in the Cayman Islands or to move the proceeds of corruption without being detected. So, one is trying to determine if the institutions and policies we’re putting in place to try and reduce illicit financial flows are making a difference. Just recently a story broke about Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of the former president of Angola. Documents have been leaked that show that she had a massive network of offshore companies used possibly to launder money that she made off of her connections to the Angolan government. These companies were running in largely rich countries with very strong anti-laundering institutions. So, trying to get a sense of if these policies are actually effective is a large part of what I try to do. It’s a difficult thing because, unfortunately, money launderers don’t respond to the surveys that we send out. So, you’re trying to measure something that, by its very nature, wants to stay hidden. Some of the work that I do with my co-authors is to look at recent leaks of information and try to see when we have a leak of data that involves a big money laundering scheme, like the one that happened with the dos Santos case. We also assess if the people running that scheme seem to be reacting to new policies coming into place in different jurisdictions. So, if the Cayman Islands started sharing more information with the United Kingdom, do we see money laundering operations linked to the UK move out of the Cayman Islands for fear of being detected? That’s one part of it, figuring out whether-or-not these policies are effective. The second part is trying to better understand what some of the costs of these policies might be. If regulators tighten the screws on banks and ask them to work harder to make sure that they’re not facilitating the movement of dirty money, banks often very rationally try and do this in the least costly way possible. Sometimes they’re going to make a choice to continue doing business with clients that are going to make them a lot of money and to do less business with clients who are not going to make them a lot of money. This often means that clients from poorer countries, ones that don’t often have huge revenue implications for banks, may be more at risk of being de-banked because of rising costs. With a couple of co-authors from the UK, we’re working on updating a study that looks at the changes in payment flows going to developing countries when they are put on a high-risk list by regulators vis-à-vis money laundering and terrorist financing. And we’re finding significant effects, and so it’s less about saying that these policies shouldn’t be put in place and more about just accounting for what actual costs are. Q: If you could recommend any book for our listeners, what would it be? One of the books I enjoyed the most over the last decade or so was Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. It’s a very readable account of the first and second Congolese wars which took place in the late ’90s up until the beginning of the 2000s. And it does a very good job at mapping out not only elements that led to those wars, but also all the different players that are involved, not just the Congolese, but the Rwandans and Ugandans, and other neighbors of Congo. The reason why I like to recommend this book to people right now in my profession and those that work in development is there seems to be a little bit of an implicit agreement that there is a trade-off in some countries between progress in the sphere of development—some improving people’s welfare, increasing life expectancy, improving education—and in their rights. There are a number of countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa—Ethiopia maybe until most recently, but also especially Rwanda—where they’ve been making great strides in improving people’s well-being. But these same administrators, these same governments, are curbing the right to free speech, the right to participate in a normal democracy. I think most people have made the calculation that it’s a trade-off, at least for now, that’s worth making. But they’re often making that calculation just with respect to those countries. What Stearns’ book reveals is Rwanda was hugely implicated in the start and duration of both the first and second Congolese wars, wars that led to the deaths of millions and millions of people. Rwanda had a very good reason to be involved: it was reeling from a very recent genocide and they wanted to make sure it never happened again. But even as late as 2012, Rwanda was implicated in a lot of violence that was happening just across its borders. So, I think when people do the accounting to say we’re okay with development and progress, we’re okay with these costs in terms of freedoms, they also need to be including the costs that are being incurred by people in the DRC just across the border. And I think the book is a nice illustration of that.

[kanyi]

The Rise Of Startups... Or not

They call it a Cambrian moment. These days, every city worth its salt comes with a startup ecosystem: co-working spaces and accelerators mark emerging hubs across the United States and around the world. Since The Social Network, high school students have grown up with the legend of the college dorm room startup as a central narrative. From healthcare to insurance to apparel to food, it seems as though there is a startup for every piece of our economy today, and 10 more behind each one. They seem to be everywhere. 

In recent years, the number of new venture capital firms has exploded, raising to hundreds of new fund formations a year. My Limited Partner friends tell me they see 300+ new fund pitches per year. Accelerators are rising follow-on funds, athletes are raising side project funds, and scout programs are launching as standalone platforms to fund the early stage. Meanwhile, the late stage has similarly continued on a great fundraising run: there have been multiple multi-billion dollar funds closed, Softbank has committed $200B into the ecosystem, and the middle eastern sovereign capital pools are investing heavily into tech. And there seems to be no end to growth in the space: as global yield stays low, hundreds of billions of assets are looking for a home, and finding promise in the global tech sector. Startups. What’s more, after the global financial crisis in 2008, large corporations had shrunk, Millennials were graduating into uncertain job markets. Youth unemployment was startlingly high, from Spain to Iran to South Africa, and everything in-between. Necessity is the mother of invention. Of course, startups rushed in to fill the void.

Or have they? Take a look at this chart, published by the Kauffman Foundation in this great research report (pdf link) about new business creation in the United States:

It shows that the rate of business owners nationally has actually fallen by over 20% since 1996, with an even more precipitous decline in 2008. So first of all, more startups weren’t created after 2008. Dramatically fewer were. And while new business formation has rebounded since 2008, it is still lower than it was 30 years ago. But take a look at the chart below, from the U.S. Census Bureau, and you’ll see that, in fact, new business formation in the United States is at a 40-year low!

So what gives? I conclude a few things:

First of all, the word startup has taken on a special connotation, and implies the formation of a unique type of company. I’m not convinced by this formulation: 7-Eleven was venture-backed. Blue Bottle Coffee was a venture-backed company. The fastest growing company over the last five years, by revenue, was a Utah-based bootstrapped multi-level marketing company called Younique Products. It was founded in 2012, and had $400 million of revenue by the end of 2016. Seriously. Look it up. So– any business can grow fast and deliver 20x, 30x, etc. Any notion that there is a certain *type* of company that is venture fundable is flatly wrong. But this mindset is particularly relevant among venture capitalists lately. My friend Satya captured it well: 

while there is more money than ever in VC there is also more risk aversion and less independent conviction. stranding many companies that are building solid businesses in “out of favor” markets or in markets where “venture scale returns” are not a straight line path.

— Satya Patel (@satyap)

November 28, 2017

Word. In fairness to venture capitalists, liquidity has been particularly hard to find lately, which may be affecting how they think about deploying their capital. The hive mind is more intense in venture capital today than it has been in my 7 years in the business. Valuations have been blown out of proportion among “fundable” companies, while those with promising but early trajectories, those with ambitious but workmanlike metrics, are perennially struggling to raise capital. My favorite quotation to capture this phenomenon is: deals these days are badly undersubscribed until it is badly oversubscribed. 

Second of all, the United States is in a period of possibly the most intense consolidation in the innovation and technology ecosystems since the 1870′s –– when, in an effort to entice European businesspeople and workers to the United States, *massive* government contracts were granted to corporations to fund expansion of the United States project, leading to the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Look at the top companies in the United States by market capitalization: if you take out oil companies and investment corporations, you have Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon. Semil Shah covered how their presence affects startup investing (https://stratechery.com/2016/how-fangam-impacts-startups-how-startups-adjust-to-fangam-investing-in-a-fangam-world/), but it’s worth noting that the phenomena that have lead to these companies’ massive, immense success is not isolated to them. The network effect, and the focus on consumer surplus as a means of crowding out competition, is endemic to the software-enabled innovation company today. 

Competition and capitalism are actually not compatible, as Peter Thiel might say. And network effects, focused on consumer surplus, scalable demand generation, and very thin aggregation of crowds, are a *really* good manifestation of capitalism. Why start your own private practice, when economies of scale make lifestyle better to be part of a network? How do you open a small business when a big network-based company is offering a cheaper service? How do you find an edge in technology spaces that require data, when the incumbents have all the network effects and incredible expertise in attacking adjacencies?

Finally, given both of the former two points, there is a broad-based misunderstanding about startup formation today. People say: “Cloud-based services make it easier than ever”. “Pre-seed capital invests earlier”. “More funds than ever before”. But the truth is, the *vast* majority of capital that invests in startups comes after the critical period that matters most for startup founders: the “friends & family round”… the “just bootstrap it” round… As we all know, most Americans can’t afford an unexpected expense of $400. And as I’m sure most of us can intuit, the ability to raise a “friends and family round” is not evenly distributed according to talent. So taking a year, 6 months, or even a quarter, to quit your job and start a new business is simply a nonstarter for most Americans today. In a world where the small business bank loan has all but evaporated (particularly post-2008), many Americans – and others around the world – aren’t starting companies because they just can’t afford to. When we talk about diversity in tech, I’m interested in hearing about the structural impediments to startup success. Ultimately, many of them can be boiled down to access to capital. Large, urban coastal centers are attracting capital and resources aplenty, while mid-sized and middle-of-the-country towns are not keeping apace. Within those urban coastal centers, wealthy, well-connected, mostly white males are raising more and more capital at higher and higher valuations, while other demographics are not keeping apace. Even within the demographics that overindex in startup formation, there is a very strong sense of "haves" and "have-nots" which is intensifying, even in the midst of a lot of noise about diversity and startups. This is pushing inequality further, slowing our ability to innovate writ large, and keeping too many Americans outside of equity participation in this country. Economists across the political spectrum will agree that new job growth comes from new business formation. And businesspeople of all stripes will tell you that equity upside is the most important input for building wealth. This isn’t just a matter of building cool technology – though that is impacted, as well – this is a matter of how nations can grow to be healthy, and supportive of their citizens. I was pleased to read Sam’s post American Equity yesterday, as its clear he recognizes the same issue I do. The central planning and policy-prescriptions for this issue should range from ideas like his, to the varying universal basic income (UBI) concepts, to investing in incentives for banks to lend for small business formation. All of this is good.  But the market driven approaches will need to supplement these – frankly, the central planning approaches will need to supplement the market driven approaches. And this starts with recognizing where we *actually* are. I’ve spoken to too many people in the tech world who say there are “too many funds” or “not another app”.

Quite the opposite, if you ask me.

[cringeynews]

New Post has been published on

New Post has been published on http://cringeynews.com/featured/the-audacious-plan-to-bring-back-supersonic-flight-and-change-air-travel-forever/

The audacious plan to bring back supersonic flight — and change air travel forever

One of the odd aspects of modern air travel is that it’s not really getting any faster. Ever since British Airways retired its money-losing supersonic Concorde in 2003, airlines have generally stuck to top speeds of around 615 miles per hour. That’ll get you from New York to San Francisco in five or six hours, depending on the winds, but you can’t find a plane that will get you there significantly sooner.

We’ve largely learned to tolerate our slow, boring aircraft. But there’s a compelling case that we shouldn’t — that air travel should actually be much, much quicker.

Right now there are a host of energetic startups and NASA engineers working on sleek new supersonic jets that could fly twice as fast as today’s commercial planes, if not faster. These jets would be major upgrades on the noisy, fuel-squandering Concordes of old, and they could be ready within the decade.

When you talk to people working on these super-fast planes, it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement. Take Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom, a startup that’s working with Virgin Galactic to put a new supersonic business jet into service by the early 2020s. He envisions a day when anyone could cross the Pacific or Atlantic in just a few short hours. “It changes how you think about the world,” he tells me.

“In aerospace, there are two great passions,” Scholl says. “You either want to build rockets and go colonize Mars — or you want to go really, really fast. People like Elon Musk are focused on the former. We’ve built a team that’s obsessed with the latter.”

So what’s the holdup? For some, it’s mostly politics. In a new paper for the Mercatus Center, titled “Make America Boom Again,” policy analysts Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond make the case that outdated regulations are hindering innovation in air travel. Since 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned civilian aircraft from flying faster than sound over land, to avoid the house-rattling sonic booms that the Concorde use to make. Yet recent technological advances have enabled supersonic designs that don’t create loud booms. So why not replace the FAA’s blanket ban with a simple noise standard, and let supersonic travel flourish?

Yet there are also skeptics who argue that regulations aren’t the only thing holding back our supersonic future. In practice, faster air travel isn’t always worth it, and airlines have excellent reasons for preferring those slow, boring planes — from fuel efficiency to airport noise to concerns about climate change. “I wish them all the best!” says longtime aviation consultant Robert W. Mann Jr. of the push for supersonic flight. “But it’s still not clear that there will be a market for this.”

That is to say, there are two tricky questions to explore here: Can we actually bring back supersonic flight? And even if we can — should we?

The Concorde, revisited: Why early attempts at supersonic flight failed

Anyone who wants to build a supersonic plane today first has to grapple with the tragic failure of the Concorde jet, a joint venture between Britain and France that began carrying passengers in 1976.

The Concorde was a technical marvel, flying at at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound, or 1,512 mph) to go from New York to London in just 3.5 hours, instead of the usual seven or eight. But it suffered its share of economic woes, and British Airways finally retired the jet in 2003:

[embedded content]

The Concorde’s demise is a complicated tale, but it suffered from two mortal flaws. First, it was a horrendous fuel-guzzler and expensive to operate. Under the laws of physics, the air resistance or drag that a given object faces in flight increases rapidly as you approach Mach 1. So a plane flying supersonic requires a lot more energy than one flying below the speed of sound.

The Concorde’s designers tried to reduce drag by giving their plane a sleek body and short, slender delta wings. Even so, the Concorde required staggering amounts of fuel, burning roughly eight times as much oil per passenger mile for a trans-Atlantic trip as a modern-day 777. That made tickets forbiddingly expensive: $10,000 or more for a New York–London round trip. As oil prices rose, British Airways and Air France (which operated the jets) struggled to consistently fill the jets’ 100-125 seats. Bad for profits.

A second problem, meanwhile, is that whenever the Concorde traveled faster than the speed of sound — about 767 miles per hour — it created noisy sonic booms in its wake. To put it simply, the air in front of the Concorde couldn’t get out of its way fast enough, so it bunched up into large shock waves in a cone trailing the plane. Wherever those shock waves reached the ground below, they’d be heard as a loud “BANG, BANG” that could rattle windows, shake structures, and startle people.

A sonic boom is a cone-shaped shock wave produced by supersonic aircraft, heard the entire length of its flight path. Image from the US Air Force pamphlet “The Sonic Boom” (n.d.), modified by David Suisman. (Suisman, 2015)

Opposition quickly mounted, and in 1973 the FAA banned civilian aircraft from traveling at supersonic speeds over the United States. The Concorde could only exceed Mach 1 over water, limiting its market. British Airways and Air France mainly flew the Concorde out of New York and Washington DC to London and Paris, though there were a number of other international routes over the years.*

After the Concorde went bust, airlines shied away from supersonic flight. The extra speed didn’t seem to justify the hassle. At least, until recently.

How new technology could make supersonic flight viable again

Over the past decade, a number of aerospace engineers and entrepreneurs have been revisiting the Concorde’s demise. And some of them have walked away thinking that supersonic flight could work today — with just a few important (if difficult) tweaks.

A few years ago, Blake Scholl, a former coder and longtime amateur pilot, was messing around with spreadsheet models and realized that a number of recent advances in aerodynamics and engine technology could, in theory, allow engineers to build a plane that was far more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. “If you could do that, you could have a plane that was competitive with existing business travel,” he says. “I started running these numbers by various experts and realized it wasn’t just science fiction.”

In 2014, Scholl founded Boom, an aviation company based in Denver, Colorado. He has since assembled a team that includes accomplished former NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin engineers to design a working successor to the Concorde.

A large model of Boom’s new XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator at the company’s hanger at Centennial Airport. (Boom)

They’re not alone. Back in 2002, a group of investors led by Robert Bass formed a company called Aerion that aimed to harness innovative new drag-reducing technology to create a much more efficient supersonic business jet. Aerion is pretty far along in this task: In 2014, the company announced a partnership with aerospace giant Airbus to build and certify a supersonic craft within the decade. (Gulfstream, an established jet manufacturer, is also working with NASA on its own designs for supersonic flight.)

The race is on.

So what makes these companies think they can do better than the Concorde’s designers and build a vastly more fuel-efficient plane? In interviews, Boom and Aerion pointed to three broad technical advances that make this all seem feasible:

First, modern-day computer modeling makes exploring new aircraft designs far easier than it was in the 1960s. If the Concorde’s designers wanted to test a new shape to see how it affected drag, they had to build a scale model and put it through large wind tunnels — a clumsy process that could take months. Nowadays, genetic algorithms can explore and tweak new shapes much more quickly and effectively.

Newer composite materials, like carbon fiber, allow aircraft designers to pursue shapes and contours that weren’t possible for the Concorde’s designers, who worked with aluminum. (These materials can also better deal with the serious heat that builds up on the leading edge of the plane’s wing at speeds above Mach 2.)

Today’s jet engines are far more efficient than they were in the Concorde’s heyday.

“The breakthrough will be in the sum of those parts, not any one invention,” Scholl says. Put those three factors together, and he thinks Boom can build a plane that goes at top speeds of Mach 2.2 while being 30 percent more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. It will still create sonic booms, though quieter than the Concorde’s.

The proof, of course, will be in the testing. Boom unveiled a design for its supersonic XB-1 jet in mid-November. The company will then team up with Virgin Galactic to build and test a prototype at Edwards Air Base in California by the end of 2017. The hope, Scholl says, is to have a working plane in service by “the early 2020s.”

Aerion, meanwhile, is pursuing a different design that harnesses supersonic natural laminar flow, a concept it developed (and tested with NASA) to reduce the turbulent airflow around wings and reduce drag. Aerion will work with Airbus on the engineering and is in the process of selecting suppliers to manufacture the engines. The plan, says spokesperson Jeff Miller, is to get the plane into service by 2021:

(Aerion)

Assuming these planes work, the next challenge will be finding a market. Scholl’s goal is to introduce a plane that will cost just $5,000 to fly round-trip between, say, New York and London. At that price, his market research suggests, there will be enough business travelers willing to pay a premium for speed that he can fill small 45-seat jets. (As part of their deal, Virgin has an option to buy 10 of Boom’s planes.)

Consider the advantages: A flight between San Francisco and Tokyo might take just four hours instead of 11. A flight between New York and London, three instead of eight. “You could leave early in the morning from New York, have afternoon meetings in London, and be back home in time for dinner,” Scholl notes.

Still, it’s far from clear that Boom and Aerion can succeed in luring enough passengers to turn a profit. For one, notes Mann, the aviation consultant, their planes will still be less fuel-efficient than conventional planes, which means they could be more vulnerable to sharp swings in oil prices. Plus, there are market risks. The most profitable Concorde route lay between the great financial centers of New York and London. But what happens if, say, Brexit ends up shrinking the size of London’s banking industry?

“Obviously we’ll have to see,” says Mann. “But those are just examples of the sort of external shocks that could impinge on the practicality of supersonic travel.”

Boom and Aerion remain optimistic. The broader hope is that if supersonic flight gains a foothold with business travelers, costs will eventually come down as technology improves. Scholl’s ultimate goal is to make supersonic flight affordable to everyone. “It’s the same thing that Tesla did,” he says. “They started with the luxury Roadster and are now focused on mass-market cars.”

Because Boom and Aerion’s planes would only fly supersonic over water at the start, they could coexist with the FAA’s current ban on overland travel (although both companies could face regulatory hurdles around the noise their planes will make on takeoff and landing; more on that below).

That said, oceanic flights are still a relatively limited market. For supersonic travel to truly conquer the entire world, someone would have to take the next step and develop a plane that doesn’t produce terrifying sonic booms over land.

And that’s where NASA comes in.

The next big challenge: silencing sonic booms to allow overland flights

Ever since the 1970s, NASA has been wrestling with the math around the pressure waves that create aircraft sonic booms, trying to figure out how to reduce them. And, over the past decade, its engineers think they’ve finally cracked the problem.

“We’re at the point where we think we can design a quiet supersonic airplane,” says Peter Coen, the commercial supersonic technology project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center. His team is currently working with Lockheed Martin on a $20 million project to design a prototype X-plane with much, much softer booms.

The science of what Coen’s team is doing gets a bit complicated (see this report for the gritty details), but here’s a very basic explanation. When a plane like the Concorde travels at supersonic speed, it creates a bunch of invisible shock waves, sharp pressure disturbances emanating from all the objects that stick out of the plane — the nose, the windshield, the wings, the tail. They’re shaped like this:

Although shock waves aren’t usually visible to the naked eye, NASA used schlieren imagery to see the disturbances made by a USAF Test Pilot School T-38C aircraft flying at supersonic speeds over the Mojave Desert. (NASA)

These shock waves are all different strengths, and they as they travel through the air, they coalesce into just two powerful waves — a strong positive pressure wave at the nose and a strong negative pressure wave at the tail. This “N-wave” configuration is highly stable and doesn’t decay much as it travels toward the ground. When this wave hits people below, our ears register it as two noisy bangs from each of the two sharp swings in pressure.

“So the trick,” Coen says, “is to keep those shock waves from coalescing into a N-shaped signal.” In theory, a plane with a different shape would create shock waves of more uniform strength that coalesce more gradually as they move through the air. If done successfully, people on the ground would experience a gentle rise in pressure when the wave hits rather than two sharp pressure changes.

Recent experiments have been promising. The Concorde created booms that were perceived to be as loud as 135 decibels on the ground — about as loud as the sound a jet engine makes from 100 feet away. But by experimenting with different shapes, NASA has developed aircraft models that, in wind-tunnel tests, create booms as soft as 79 perceived decibels, roughly comparable to a car passing 10 feet away. Eventually, NASA would like to get that down that to 70 decibels.

The goal is to design an actual plane using these concepts. Here is an artist’s conception of what the new X-plane might look like.

Artist’s conception of a low boom flight demonstration quiet supersonic transport (QueSST) X-plane design. (NASA/Lockheed Martin)

NASA will then plan to build a one-third-scale prototype and conduct the first test flight in 2020.* The idea is that they’ll gather data on what sorts of sonic booms the planes actually make, and then the FAA can use that data in deciding whether it makes sense to replace the blanket ban on overland supersonic travel with a noise standard — saying, for example, that supersonic flight is acceptable overland so long as the booms are below a certain threshold. (If that actually happened, Gulfstream says planes with quiet booms might be a possibility by 2025 or 2030 or so.)

But changing those rules will require wading into the murky world of politics — which is never easy.

The US government could still put the kibosh on supersonic flight

In theory, the FAA is open to the idea of revising its blanket ban on supersonic flight over land. In 2011, an FAA official gave a public presentation explaining that research on silencing sonic booms has progressed far enough that it may be time to consider a noise standard.

But the FAA is moving very slowly on revamping the rules — in part because it’s focused on other challenges, like overhauling the nation’s air traffic control system. The agency is also waiting for NASA and other companies to demonstrate their quiet-boom technology before crafting fresh regulations.

In their paper for the Mercatus Center, Dourado and Hammond argue that the FAA’s current approach is precisely backward. It would be much better for the agency to set guidelines ahead of time on what type of overland sonic booms would be acceptable — so that companies can have some certainty and know what to aim for in developing new designs. “Right now, the FAA is saying we’ll accept supersonic when we hear what’s acceptable,” says Hammond. “We’re trying to point out the absurdity in that.”

Even if the boom issue gets sorted out, however, there’s still another hurdle for supersonic planes: takeoff and landing. While all supersonic planes would fly at less-than-supersonic (or “subsonic”) speeds around airports, they’d still make a fair bit of noise on takeoff and landing. And that’s where things get a little tricky.

Over the years, the FAA has developed strict standards for the noise that airplanes can make around airports. Aircraft manufacturers have responded to these rules, in part, by doing things like building high-bypass engines with large-diameter fans that propel air out of the engine more slowly and hence reduce the noise from the exhaust.

The trade-off with these high-bypass engines is that they’re not as fuel-efficient at takeoff and the large fans create more drag while the plane’s in the air. That’s not a huge deal for normal aircraft, but it could be ruinous for supersonic jets. If the FAA requires supersonic jets to adhere to the newest, strictest noise standards coming into effect by 2018 (known as Stage 5 standards), those jets will take a major fuel efficiency hit. By contrast, if the FAA merely asked supersonic aircraft to adhere to the standards that were in place back in 2006 (known as Stage 3 standards), Scholl estimates, that would reduce supersonic ticket costs by some 15 percent.

Dourado and Hammond argue that the FAA should allow looser airport noise standards for supersonic jets in the very beginning, at least, to allow the technology to get to market. Engineers can then work on making them quieter. The companies making the supersonic planes agree. “The physics of supersonic aircraft are just so different, so saying you need to meet the standards of subsonic regulations could put a damper on development,” says Aerion’s Miller. “We’re hoping to reach a compromise with the FAA on this, since we’re talking about a new industry that could be beneficial.”

This could prove a contentious subject, however. The politics around airport noise can be extremely dicey (in separate research, Dourado and Raymond Russell have found that most airport noise complaints to the FAA come from just a small handful of people). While a strict airport noise rule wouldn’t necessarily kill supersonic flight, it could increase prices and dampen the market, particularly in the early days.

The deeper question: Do we really want supersonic flight?

Good old Concorde. Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images

The noise issue raises a bigger philosophical question around supersonic flight: How much do we really value speed, anyway? After all, the structure of our current aviation industry is the result of a series of compromises around competing values. And over the past 30 years, airlines have shown that there are a lot of other things we value more than simply going really, really fast.

Back in the 1970s, Mann explains, the industry realized that if it wanted to keep growing, it needed to be a good neighbor. That meant replacing their existing fleet of loud and dirty airplanes with much quieter models — even if it meant some trade-offs in terms of performance. Similarly, ever since the oil shocks of that decade, the industry has made a point of valuing fuel efficiency over raw speed.

“The optimal cruise speed has basically declined over the years,” Mann says. “Above about Mach 0.8, you pay so much for that speed in terms of fuel.” Today, a flight from New York to Denver or from DC to Miami actually takes longer than it did in the 1970s — because airlines have realized that the fuel savings are worth the delay.

Going forward, there’s another important value to weigh on the scale: climate change. Aviation is already the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and the world’s airlines just agreed to a sweeping deal under the International Civil Aviation Organization to offset the growth of their emissions starting in 2020. Conventional aircraft manufacturers have worked hard to reduce fuel burn by 45 percent since 1968, and companies like Boeing and Airbus are now pushing to cut fuel use even further, through the use of lighter materials and novel engine designs. Still, this remains one of the toughest sectors to decarbonize.

And new supersonic jets that burn fuel at higher rates than conventional planes seem to go in precisely the opposite direction — even if they do save travelers time. True, a few supersonic business jets flying around wouldn’t have a major impact on emissions. But if cheap supersonic flight became ubiquitous, the global warming impact could be staggering (particularly if the planes fly at higher altitudes, due to the contrail effect). With the world already struggling to avoid dangerously large temperature increases, a new fuel-inefficient plane seems like a luxury the planet can ill afford.

When I asked NASA’s Coen about the climate consequences of a world filled with supersonic jets, he agreed that it was a real concern. But he also pointed out that there might be ways to square these different values. Future caps on aviation emissions could, for instance, spur supersonic jets to adopt low-carbon biofuels. (Or there’s another way this could all go: As Mann pointed out, it’s possible that stricter carbon caps could simply make supersonic flight unviable.)

It’s still too early to say how these issues will play out, but it’s a good reminder that our slow, boring planes have quite a few things going for them.

Even so, at the end of the day, the prospect of faster flight will remain forever tantalizing. The reduction in travel times has been one of the great technological breakthroughs of the past 200 years. This isn’t merely convenient; in some ways, it’s been the very marker of progress. Humans have long been obsessed with breaking new barriers, with going faster and faster. Even if on a purely romantic level, it would be a shame if we’re currently stuck going about as fast as we’ll ever go.

——

* Correction: I originally wrote that NASA and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a prototype of a quiet supersonic plane. That’s not quite accurate. Lockheed Martin has a contract to design a plane. But NASA hasn’t yet selected a company to actually build the prototype.

Further reading:

Via

[skrisiloff]

What CEOs said on this week’s earnings calls

Each week we read dozens of transcripts from earnings calls and presentations as part of our investment process. Below is a weekly post which contains some of the most important quotes about the economy and industry trends from those transcripts. Click here to receive these posts weekly via email.

The first week of earnings season showed a continued abundance of optimism.  Expectations have definitely risen for the economy.  Curiously though, expectations have not risen for interest rates.  Citigroup's CEO mentioned that he only expects one rate hike per year through 2020.  Banks were prominent this week and credit quality remains strong, but CRE is an area where there appears to be a growing mismatch between risk and reward.

The Macro Outlook:

Optimism abounds

"Main Street continues to rebound. Our confidence is up. I’ve been in 23 of our 26 regions in the last few months...everyone is talking about increased optimism on the part of small- and medium-sized businesses...I’ve had 23 lunches where I’m sitting and talking to six to eight business people over the last few months. I’ve gotten this across our entire footprint...All of that is very, very positive." --BB&T CEO Kelly King (Bank)

CEOs are confident

"I would say the CEOs are confident, the conversations are happening all the time and strategic M&A in the U.S. those discussions are occurring especially in technology and consumer retail and natural resources." --Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez (Investment Bank)

Consumers and investors are bullish on America

"across all the years since the crisis there has been ebbs and flows in customers’ views about where they want to invest and the cash portion of our balances has come up and down. But I think the consumer and the investor are very bullish on America and they continue investing" --Bank of America CFO Paul Donofrio (Bank)

Retail investors are highly engaged with the market

"We are seeing this quarter very broad-based engagement in the market, so everyone from brand-new customers opening their first account to very active traders seem to be engaged in the market. We saw a good activity across pretty much all of our products...So on the other end, the conundrum part is, as we said, we’re at multi-decade lows in the VIX, which tends to drive more trading activity." --TD Ameritrade CEO Tim Hockey (Broker)

Voices of warning are few and far between

"…don’t be mesmerized by the blue skies created by central bank QE and near perpetually low interest rates. All markets are increasingly at risk….Strategies involving risk reduction should ultimately outperform “faux” surefire winners generated by central bank printing of money. It’s the real economy that counts and global real economic growth is and should continue to be below par." --Janus Portfolio Manager Bill Gross (Investment Management)

Yet the expectation of low yields persists

"while markets have started to anticipate a normalization, a policy in the environment of sustained expansion, negative yields remain a reality in some countries and expectations for a continued low yield environment persists." --Blackrock CEO Larry Fink (Investment Management)

Central banks aren't very hawkish

"The incoming information confirms a continued strengthening of the economic expansion in the euro area, which has been broadening across sectors and regions…While the ongoing economic expansion provides confidence that inflation will gradually head to levels in line with our inflation aim, it has yet to translate into stronger inflation dynamics." --ECB President Mario Draghi (Central Bank)

Citigroup is only expecting four more rate hikes through 2020

"we’ve got one more rate hike for the US built in and its December of this year. And quite frankly we’re assuming one more rate hike in ’18, one more rate hike in ’19 and one more rate hike in ’20." --Citigroup CEO Miles Corbat (Bank)

A lot is still riding on a tax cut

"And can I guarantee that all the craziness in Washington will not derail that? No. But I’ll be honest with you as I’ve talked to business people out there, they’re not worried about all this craziness going on in Washington. They’re just focusing on growing their business. Now I will say I think they are expecting a tax reduction deal and, to a lesser degree, they’re counting on infrastructure. But if we get the tax reduction deal, they’ll continue" --BB&T CEO Kelly King (Bank)

International:

Emerging markets have been weak for a long time

"since the financial crises, interest rates, currencies etcetera, we’ve had a prolonged period of about eight, nine years now where we have seen significant weakening of emerging market currencies...you actually see the volume component of these emerging markets continuing to be very, very low, while historically it was all volume-driven growth. I am convinced that that is coming back now." --Unilever CEO Paul Polman (Packaged Goods)

China may be stabilizing

"China for example is actually much more stable than the last 12 to 18 months. I like what I’m seeing in China right now." --Abbott CEO Miles White (Medical Device)

Chinese are still buying international assets

"we’re still seeing the trend of Chinese buying and international assets. " --Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez (Investment Bank)

Financials:

The Fed should start shrinking its balance sheet in September

"So on the balance sheet, it is still the case that we expect to start seeing normalization in the balance sheet, in September, if not in September by the end of this year with the actually calling for the next rate hike in December the market is calling for March of next year." --JP Morgan CFO Marianne Lake

No one knows how it will affect banks

"I mean the Fed has never had a balance sheet of this size. We’ve never been through a situation where they’re talking about reducing a balance sheet. We can talk about history all day long, but since we’ve never been through that, nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen." --Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan (Bank)

There will likely be an increase in competition for deposits

"we think as excess liquidity comes out of the market you could expect to see and you will expect to see more competition with respect to deposits, I would also expect that the long end of the curve on a relative basis would be a little bit higher" --US Bancorp CFO Terry Dolan (Bank)

Consumers may not shift deposits until rates are higher

"I think we are a couple of moves away from the Fed before you start really seeing the positive beta shift on the consumer side." --PNC CEO Bill Demchak (Bank)

CRE lenders see unfavorable risk and return

"there’s a fair amount of competition in stabilized commercial real estate projects, I mean there’s lots of liquidity out there. And so this quarter there just happen to be more transactions that we’ve looked at where we said, gosh, another risk return it just isn’t there" --Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan (Bank)

"[we] remain cautious in commercial mortgage markets where the competitive environment has created unfavorable conditions from a risk and return standpoint." --US Bancorp CFO Terry Dolan (Bank)

So far credit quality in CRE has remained pristine

"As far as the credit quality within commercial real estate has been pristine...as far as the strength of our commercial real estate portfolios, it’s performing extremely well." --Comerica CCO Pete Guilfoile (Bank)

Technology:

AI is becoming ubiquitous

"AI is going into every segment of our growth sectors. AI is getting to mobile. AI is getting to high-performance computing like deep learning. AI will go into automotive...And AI will go to simple IoT, MCU also...it is ubiquitous." --Taiwan Semiconductor Co-CEO Mark Liu (Semiconductors)

Financial service companies are adopting it

"Technology will impact all aspects of our business...Our investment teams are combining big data and machine learning with traditional fundamental human analysis to generate better sustainable alpha for our clients." --Blackrock CEO Larry Fink (Investment Management)

"We are focused on our digital agenda on advancing the way we leverage data on exploring and piloting smart investments and things like AI and robotics on setting the standard in terms of the experience for our customers and distribution partners and as always on being as productive and efficient as possible." --Travelers CEO Alan Schnitzer (Insurance)

"We have a number of expense initiatives. We are using, for example, artificial intelligence, AI, robotics...we will be going enterprise-wide in terms of finding ways to take these repetitious activities and apply good digitization and artificial intelligence to find more efficient and effective ways to reduce our cost." --BB&T CEO Kelly King (Bank)

Robots are not necessarily that much cheaper than people

"If you look at the average basis points paid from the various robo platforms, they range in general like things from something like 20 to 40 basis points. If you look at the average basis points for a full service advisory like us, just divide our revenue into our assets including everything, you get somewhere in the 70s, low 70 basis points. So the value added of the financial advice and the institutions behind it and the research, the product offering, the new issued calendar you could argue is being put out there for 30 to 40 basis points. It’s not clear to me that, that is such an expensive gap that that’s going to lead to the cannibalization issues" --Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman (Investment Bank)

80% of the world's data isn't public

"80% of the worlds data is owned by enterprises, it’s not searchable on the worldwide web, it’s customer data, and patient data, clinical data, supply chain data, transaction data and companies want to unlock and exploit that data." --IBM CFO Martin Schroeter (Technology)

John Legere had nice things to say about Masayoshi Son. Trying to butter him up?

"let’s remember that [Masa] is one of the richest, biggest dealmakers in the world and his moves are significantly tracked and I dare any of you to dissect when he is working on vision fund and when he is working on, the guy is one of the biggest players in the world. And what he has been doing makes sense. That’s Masa. Sprint is very lucky to have him as an owner." --T-Mobile CEO John Legere (Telecom)

3G/4G market growth is now just 6%

"For calendar 2017 3G, 4G device shipments, we continue to estimate shipment of 1.75 billion to 1.85 billion devices globally, up approximately 6% year-over-year at the midpoint." --Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf (Semiconductors)

Industrials:

Manufacturers are trying to increase prices

"we are increasing our price that we are realizing out there in the marketplace...so we are seeing improved pricing versus where we were last year when we said sort of said hey guys enough is enough, we need to start getting some price back into the market...I think it’s moving in the right direction." --Textron CEO Scott Donnelly (Conglomerate)

Transportation markets seem sluggish

"a few of our markets will experience year-over-year volume declines in the third quarter due to market specific headwinds you’re very familiar with. Auto shipments will be impacted by softening production." --CSX CFO Frank Lonegro (Railroad)

"Truckload volume growth has slowed from the second quarter. The holiday timing makes precise comparisons difficult this early in the month but truckload volume growth has been in the low single digits." --CH Robinson CEO John P. Wiehoff (Trucking Logistics)

Miscellaneous Nuggets of Wisdom:

It's ok to fail. It means you're trying.

"Failure is not such a bad thing and if you’re not failing maybe you’re not trying hard enough...you want to be introspective and look at that and say, are we being adventurous enough?" --Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos

Press your winners

"You ask about how we prioritize? Generally, when we see success, we try to add on to that until we reach a point of diminishing returns. And so, if we’re going to see success in some markets, we may up the content budget in those markets." --Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (SVOD)

Full transcripts can be found at www.seekingalpha.com

[meraenthusiast]

7 Lessons Learned During The Coronavirus Pandemic

7 Lessons Learned During The Coronavirus Pandemic

I can still remember that night like it was yesterday. My son and I were watching his favorite NBA team play on TV, the Dallas Mavericks. That Wednesday was only 3 days away from his birthday trip/gift – (near)court side seats to watch his favorite player, Luka Doncic play.

Then the announcement came, the NBA season was cancelled until further notice due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus.

I honestly don’t remember when I’ve seen him more upset as he kept asking, “How could this happen? How can they cancel the ENTIRE NBA over a virus?”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have an answer.

At that time, we didn’t realize just how serious this pandemic was going to get and how much it was going to affect everyone’s lives, both personally and financially.

Heck, I sure didn’t see it coming. I thought I had it all under control with a plan taking me to financial independence focused on saving, investing and retiring early (using passive income).

But now you know plans can change in the blink of an eye.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had broad impacts on both the medical world and the economy.

I told my wife early on that this virus was going to “kill many more people financially than anything else.”

I’m a firm believer that EVERYTHING happens for a reason. It took me years to realize why I lost out on a job opportunity straight out of residency but now I know why. It’s put us in a MUCH better place. Maybe this pandemic will do the same.

So recently, during one of our family walks (yes, we actually started taking walks together), I posed the question to all of us, “What has COVID-19 taught us?”

Here’s the lessons learned we came up with….

7 Lessons Learned During The Coronavirus Pandemic

#1 Always be prepared for an emergency

One of the first lessons learned that the COVID-19 pandemic taught all of us was actually not a health lesson but one about money.

It taught us what an emergency fund was actually for – emergencies.

You see, I hear about too many people that supposedly have an emergency fund that use it for “emergency” vacations or an “emergency” outfit for an upcoming surprise party.

Unfortunately, many financial advisors consider emergency funds to be wasted assets with today’s low interest rates and thus a bad idea. Their reasoning behind this is that the emergency fund is supposed to be in an account that is liquid and easily accessible such as a savings or money market account.

Because of this, they state that these types of accounts don’t keep pace with inflation and that the emergency fund is set up to be a money-losing proposition over the long term.

As someone that followed Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps, Step #1 is to establish an emergency fund for emergencies!

Financially speaking, I understand that these low interest accounts aren’t going to make the investor money over the long term. But I think they’re missing the big picture.

4 purposes of the emergency fund is to:

#1 Bridge the gap in time periods when unemployment strikes.

#2 Help to supply income during a disability as most disability policies don’t kick in for 60-90 days after you become disabled.

#3 Kick in during desperate times (such as a pandemic) to purchase essential items that are needed to stock up on (not 3 cases of toilet paper!) or if an emergency expense such as an AC unit goes out.

#4 Act as a form of financial insurance, not an investment.

The book of Proverbs 21:20 states, “there is desirable treasure and oil in the dwelling of the wise” or in other words, the wise have an emergency fund.

Would the stress caused by an uncertain job situation be decreased if you had three to six months of basic living expenses readily available in your savings account?

#2 When a crisis strikes, we’re all in it together

I’ve had more time to reflect on life during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the things I was reminded of was the 1984 movie, Red Dawn starring Patrick Swayze.

If you don’t remember it or haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer:

In the movie, the U.S. was invaded by the Russians. The adults were placed in concentration-type camps set up in the downtown areas. A handful of teens escaped the initial invasion and learned to survive living on the basics in the wilderness.

They banned together and decided to take on “the enemy” themselves calling their group the “Wolverines” after their high school mascot.

Just like in Red Dawn, for us during the COVID-19 crisis, the entire world fought an enemy, an invisible one.

At first we heard and saw stories of people panicking and buying up essential items in stores such as bottled water and toilet paper.

This is an example of loss aversion. It reflects the negative emotions of fear and anxiety. Humans react more strongly to the fear of losing something versus the benefit of gaining.

Remember what Lance Armstrong said years ago during his doping scandal?

“I like to win, but more than anything, I can’t stand this idea of losing. Because to me, losing means death.” – Lance Armstrong

So when the public saw toilet paper flying off of the shelves on the news then it was only natural to react…even if they didn’t really need to.

But as the crisis continued to loom, we started to see a shift in the public even though the news didn’t talk about it much. That shift was towards selflessness.

Deep down, humans really want to do good. And we started to see and realize that we were all in this thing together as the Coronavirus affected rich, poor, black, white, middle, upper and lower class. The virus did NOT discriminate.

Occasionally I noticed a story about specific ways that Republicans and Democrats were putting down their boxing gloves and actually trying to work together for the good of our nation.

We also saw this during the 9/11 crisis.

Sometimes it takes something bad happening to all of us to make us stronger and work together.

#3 Debt is stressful

This crisis has shown me just how stressful debt has made people feel.

Dave Ramsey answered a question of whether or not someone should borrow money at 0% to buy furniture.

He stated that in his book, Everyday Millionaires, they surveyed over 10,000 millionaires and none of them claimed that they obtained wealth from buying furniture at 0%.

Just because something is 0% doesn’t mean it’s free. When a crisis strikes, guess what? These loans still require regular monthly payments. And if you can’t make a payment on time then your interest rate sky rockets.

One of the main reasons I’m a big advocate for being consumer debt-free is that the need to make debt payments can add to your financial stress during times of income uncertainty.

#4 Invest in relationships

One of the biggest things the Coronavirus pandemic has taught me is what’s really important in life.

It’s also made me see a glimpse of what retirement life might be like without the day to day grind of going to work and everything that goes along with running a practice.

It seems that most of us don’t realize that when we’re in the rat race, we focus on making money to buy stuff. Yes, it’s nice to have things such as a nice home, cars, clothes and take great vacations.

However, there is a difference between enjoying these non-essential things and putting value into them. THINGS are not valuable.

Honestly, I like all of the above but the pandemic made me take a step back and realize what I really value – relationships.

Money isn’t the most important thing…people are (yes, even my in-laws 🙂 ).

During the crisis downtime I realized what was most important to me:

Spending time with my wife and kids

Exercising outdoors and eating healthy (I’ve lost 8 lbs)

Helping others during a time of need

Empathizing more with patients that are in pain

Enjoying pursuing entrepreneurial pursuits

#5 Additional sources of income is a must

Let’s face it. We’re all busy working professionals so who has time to develop a side gig/hustle or something that’s going to provide additional income?

For the longest time, this was my thinking too. After becoming consumer debt-free when I reached 40 and meeting some other financial goals, I realized that I only had ONE source of income at that time, my practice.

Unfortunately, most of us only have active/earned income which is the highest taxed income of them all. Don’t believe me? Check out what Robert Kiyosaki has to say about it when he explains his CashFlow Quadrant.

When the Coronavirus took a hold of our country and many of us lost some or all of our income sources (from our active income), we began to feel its effects very quickly.

But for those that had additional income sources, they were able to keep their heads above water during the worst of it.

The passive income from our real estate investments certainly helped supplement our income but I sure I wish I’d started investing earlier in my career.

Yes, developing these additional sources of income does take time and work (want doesn’t?). But as soon as our paychecks are threatened, it sure makes it all seem worthwhile that we put in the extra time for extra income.

#6 Take time to smell the roses and be appreciative to all workers

I admit, during the normal day to day activities that I partake in (pre-pandemic) such as: taking the boys to school (Waffle House on Fridays 🙂 ), going to work, lifting weights, playing tennis, eating out with my lovely wife, etc, I tend to not appreciate all of the workers that I come in contact with.

Not that they aren’t important but I just didn’t ever think about them much…until now! Jobs that we may have once considered as “lower-skilled” are the ones that are MOST crucial during the pandemic.

Think about all those that continue working when we MOST need them during the COVID-19 crisis such as:

custodians

cashiers

restaurant servers

mail carriers

UPS, FED-EX workers

grocery store employees

They are putting their lives and their families’ lives in danger as their sacrifice prevents our community from shutting down completely.

I’m going to make sure that I appreciate them now and in the future for all they do.

#7 Don’t make short-term decisions that hurt you long-term

You may have heard the phrase, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” I think I remember one of my old football coaches yelling that at me during a 100+ degree practice in August.

But something that you may not have heard is from Vanguard’s late founder, Jack Bogle, who suggested, “Don’t do something. Just stand there.” I think this is perfect advice when we’re faced with a situation, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, that causes a sharp decline in the market or even a bear market.

One of the earlier lessons learned in #2 above was that it’s human nature to avoid pain. So when we’re faced with a situation that causes both job losses and falling markets, then it’s understandable that we want to make some short-term decisions rather quickly to ease the pain.

But during these times, we shouldn’t lose sight of the long-term impact of those decisions, especially on our finances.

It may feel good to sell your stocks to stop the bleeding, but doing so means you’ll miss some of the upside when the markets begin to rise again.

Don’t believe me?

Check out what the Physician On Fire thinks about:

How To Get Wealthy Investing In A Bear Market

Pay special attention to the Market #2 scenario.

I get it. Long-term investing is tough, especially when a pandemic causes your 401k to decline. But if you have an investment plan/policy then you should have known what to do during a market decline long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

If not, then chalk it up as lessons learned.

Take Home

The Covid-19 have given us many lessons learned. To sum it all up in a few sentences:

Money is not that important. Relationships are. The financial freedom from having money provides more time that can be used for the greater good for others.

What lessons learned has the COVID-19 pandemic taught you?

Leave a comment below.

The post 7 Lessons Learned During The Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Debt Free Dr..

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[belaborthepoint]

Nevada Debate Transcript

HOLT: Good evening, everyone. Since last time, Bernie seems to be winning, but also he is still a socialist? Don't know what's going on there. We have a new addition to the race, a Republican who spent millions of dollars to run as a democrat despite being universally hated by the left and most everyone else. The first question goes to you, Senator Sanders. Why should we choose you as the Democratic nominee rather than the racist and misogynistic Republican who paid to be here?

BERNIE: Because he has attacked like any marginalized group you can think of and no one will want to vote for him and my policies will help people who aren't just rich white men.

HOLT: Mayor Bloomberg, what's your take on that?

BLOOMBERG: I know that Bernie is in the lead right now, but there's literally no chance that he can win. You can't win by taking away people's insurance and then giving it back to them for free, that's ridiculous.

WARREN: You're a billionaire who calls women "fat broads" and "horse-faced lesbians" and you call trans people "it." You're a racist and you sexually harass women and no one wants to vote for you.

KLOBUCHAR: I was going to welcome Bloomberg here tonight until I remembered who he was and then I was like "wait what?"

BLOOMBERG: Look. I'm a New Yorker. Pizza, fuhgeddaboudit. I'm from New York City and there are black people who live in there and I know how to deal with that. Remember 9/11? I was there for that. I was all like, "this is bad and everyone who isn't white is a terrorist." I have spent a lot of money on my campaign.

BIDEN: NBC thinks I'm going to win despite the fact that Bernie is clearly winning. NBC said it. So there you go.

BUTTIGIEG: Come on, people, wake up. Because what if Bernie and Bloomberg are our only options? Then we'll have someone who likes capitalism and someone who thinks that it's bad. We need to elect someone who thinks that capitalism is sort of okay. I know that it's destroying the lives of 99% of the country, but I'm pretty out of touch with those communities so it doesn't really matter to me. I do live in a middle-class neighborhood though so sometimes I see middle-class people on the sidewalk.

HOLT: Bernie, are you polarizing?

BERNIE: I care about the working class if that's what you're asking.

BUTTIGIEG: Blah blah blah I'm Bernie and I looOOOoove poor people!! Look at me!! I have class consciousness!! Blehh!!! Guess what?! You're not special. Lots of people want to empower workers. Just because you're the only person on this stage who will seriously advocate for them doesn't mean that, uh...well...the Culinary Union doesn't like you!! No one likes you!!

BERNIE: ExCUSE me, we have more union support than you can even imagine in your wildest dreams. Unions will always like me better!! They will never love you!!!!!!!!

JACKSON: One time a Bernie supporter said mean stuff on the internet though. Everyone else's supporters are all Buddhist monks who are volunteer dentists in the Peace Corps. Every single one of them.

WARREN: Bloomberg is still a racist.

BUTTIGIEG: But WHY did a Bernie supporter say a mean thing? We really need to think about why this is happening and why Bernie is the only person who has supporters who are not volunteer Buddhist dentists.

BERNIE: I don't know if that's-

BUTTIGIEG: IT IS. You are responsible for everything that any of your supporters say on twitter.

KLOBUCHAR: But if we nominate a woman, sexism will end.

(APPLAUSE)

KLOBUCHAR: We need to show our stuff. Sweat and blood. And that is the truth.

TODD: Senator Sanders, will everyone lose their health insurance and die if you are president?

BERNIE: No. We have the worst healthcare of any major country and I want to change that because healthcare is a human right.

WARREN: We should talk about everyone else's "plan" for healthcare. Mayor Pete doesn't have a plan, he has a PowerPoint. Amy's plan is like a Post-It note, "Insert Plan Here." Biden's plan is like some doodle he did on the back of a receipt. Bloomberg's plan is an ethnic joke that he heard on a cruise ship once and wrote on a napkin. Bernie's is actually sort of okay.

BERNIE: I feel attacked.

TODD: Okay, your turn.

BERNIE: I just want the goal to be actually providing healthcare to people and not just creating profits for the pharmaceutical industry and drug companies.

BIDEN: OBAMA. OBAMA. I WAS VICE PRESIDENT UNDER BARACK OBAMA.

(APPLAUSE)

TODD: Senator Warren, go ahead.

BLOOMBERG: What am I, chopped livah???? I'm from New York.

WARREN: Amy, the plan on your website is two lines from a self-help book.

KLOBUCHAR: That's IT!!! I've HAD IT!!

HOLT: This is getting juicy! Let's talk about Bloomberg being a racist. Mayor Bloomberg, your policing policy was to put all the cops in minority neighborhoods because you said that's where all the crime is, and that we should throw kids against the wall and frisk them. What do you think that says about you being vehemently racist or not?

BLOOMBERG: Yeah, it is unfortunate how it turned out, and frankly, a little bit embarrassing. But I just didn't want people of color to murder everyone, and I think that's fair. Stop-and-frisk was essentially a good thing, it just happened too much.

BIDEN: No one cares if you're sorry, you still did it! The policy was abhorrent.

BLOOMBERG: But I APOLOGIZED. This is just a complicated issue and there's no easy answer. It's like, should our criminal justice system target black and brown people? I don't know. But yes, it should. Look, nobody's perfect, okay?

WARREN: That was the shittiest apology I've ever heard.

TODD: Relatedly, Senator Klobuchar, you haven't really done much about police brutality and you prosecuted a black teenager who was sentenced to life in prison despite serious doubts about the evidence. Why should black and Latino voters trust your judgement?

KLOBUCHAR: I actually have strong support of African-Americans. Because I earned it. Because I am a leader and I have done the work.

JACKSON: Let's talk about transparency. Senator Sanders, why are you hiding the fact that you're too old and frail to be president without dying from being old?

SANDERS: Um. What?

BUTTIGIEG: I am young and in good health. I do so many planks every single day and I honestly think that I'm the hottest candidate on this stage tonight. I think Bernie should do the responsible thing and admit that he will die from being so old. He's like a million years old.

JACKSON: Bloomberg, why won't you release your tax records?

BLOOMBERG: It's hard to do taxes when you're so rich. And math takes a long time. Not everyone is Andrew Yang, not everyone loves math. It's hard to add up numbers and do charts. And I should not be penalized for that. Also, I give all my money to charity. I don't know why I still have billions of dollars, it really just appears and I don't know where it comes from. I keep giving it all away but somehow I'm still rich. I don't know, okay?

JACKSON: You've sexually harassed women and many former employees have said that your company was a hostile workplace for women. Should we nominate someone who isn't a misogynist?

BLOOMBERG: I might be hostile towards women, but the main point is that I HIRE women. We have tons of women in my company, and they do things and get paid for them. There are lots and lots of women, and some of them even had leadership roles and got paid the same as men. Hashtag me too.

WARREN: Are you serious? You've gotten dozens of women to sign nondisclosure agreements for sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Would you release them from the nondisclosure agreements so we can hear their side?

BLOOMBERG: There are only a few of them.

WARREN: How many is that?

BLOOMBERG: Let me finish.

WARREN: How many is that?

BLOOMBERG: None of them accuse me of anything other than making a joke that they didn't think was funny because they have a bad sense of humor because women aren't funny.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TODD: Let's talk fracking. Senator Sanders, I know that fracking is bad, but it also creates jobs, kind of like how sweat shops create jobs and that's why they're good. What do you say to the people whose employment is contingent on destroying the planet?

SANDERS: That I don't want the entire world to collapse? Do you like, get climate change, Chuck? Also, the Green New Deal will create 20 million jobs. You can work in sustainable energy and still have a good-paying job.

TODD: Senator Klobuchar, you don't really mind fracking, right?

KLOBUCHAR: Yeah, we can get to carbon neutral eventually. No rush!

WARREN: I wanna reiterate that the Green New Deal will create jobs. We need infrastructure, we need manufacturing-

TODD: But what if we stop fracking and everyone loses their jobs and they're on unemployment for years and then they die? What if we can't employ people in renewable energy until 2050 for some reason?

WARREN: We can have those jobs now.

HUAC: Vice President Biden, you said you might put oil and gas executives in jail. Which companies are you talking about?

BIDEN: I'm going to go far. I'm going to eliminate subsidies and help the minority communities affected by climate change. I have a plan. And it will change -- look, my point is, and here's my point, before my time runs out, my point. My point is that I know about international relations and I will get them to up the ante in a big way.

HAUC: You didn't answer the questions.

BIDEN: I thought I did.

HAUC: Nope.

TODD: Mayor Bloomberg, are you a fan of red-lining?

BLOOMBERG: I am the only here that started a business.

TODD: Okay? You said that stopping red-lining has somehow contributed to the financial crisis, can you speak to that?

BLOOMBERG: No. I did not say that. That is wrong.

TODD: Would you like to clarify what you meant then?

BLOOMBERG: I have always been against red-lining. I hate red-lining. Red-lining is my least favorite thing. I don't think it is cute or sexy at all and I don't wear a t-shirt underneath all my clothing that says "I love red-lining" or even own hand-embroidered pillows with sonnets I've composed for red-lining, because I do not like red-lining even a little bit. Some people practice red-lining, and I'm just like "cut it out!" I think the main point is that I'm the only one that's ever started a business. Is that fair? Is it? Hello?? Okay. The point is that we need to teach young businesspeople how to start banks.

TODD: Senator Klobuchar, Senator Sanders one time said on twitter that billionaires should not exist. What do you think?

KLOBUCHAR: I like capitalism. We should just regulate it. But also a few people should be able to hoard the wealth of half the country and I think that's fine.

TODD: Senator Sanders, do you think we should systematically drag rich people out of their homes and publicly execute them in the town square and do weird things with their entrails? Do you have a fetish related to murdering rich people?

BERNIE: No...I just think that there's something wrong with half a million people sleeping on the street while Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans.

TODD: Mayor Bloomberg, do you think your mother should have aborted you so that you never existed?

BLOOMBERG: Billionaires' lives matter. I've made a lot of money and given it all away to make the world better.

TODD: Should you have more wealth than 125 million people combined?

BLOOMBERG: Yeah, of course. Unlike most Americans I actually work up to 40 hours a week. That's a lot of hours of work. I deserve every cent.

JACKSON: Mayor Buttigieg, Senator Sanders thinks that workers should have some ownership over the profits of their own labor. Is that like the most effed up thing you've ever heard or what?

BUTTIGIEG: Stop forcing corporations to do things that they don't want to do. They're people too. And you know, I'm the only person who's not a millionaire and I represent all working-class people.

BERNIE: I just think that workers should be making money from their own work. Bloomberg, do you think your workers played no role in making all that money? Workers should share the benefits and have some agency in what happens in their lives.

BLOOMBERG: Having a more equal distribution of wealth in this country will appeal to absolutely no one. That's absurd. The only alternative to capitalism is the specific way that communism played out in Soviet Russia. Communism clearly didn't work and capitalism clearly does work, as evidenced by the way a few billionaires have benefited from it at the expense of the rest of the country. Literally no one wants anything to change.

HOLT: Senator Sanders, it's true that socialism makes a lot of people uncomfy. Most people are all like "ack!" Ya know? In the polls?

BERNIE: The polls show me winning. So no, I don't know. And let's go over a very basic concept that you could understand in one google search. Democratic socialism is not the same thing as communism. And we sort of have socialism right now, but just for the very rich, and rugged individualism for the poor. We have to subsidize Walmart workers who are on Medicaid and food stamps because they get starvation wages. We need a government that works for people besides Bloomberg.

HOLT: But what about how socialism makes me uncomfy?

BLOOMBERG: HE OWNS A CABIN!! BERNIE OWNS A CABIN!!!!

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JACKSON: Mayor Buttigieg, why is Mayor Bloomberg's money a problem?

BUTTIGIEG: Oh, it's actually mostly just who he is as a person and his values and his personality and everything he represents and everything he has said or done.

TODD: Okay, we're almost done, so last question. Should the person with the most votes become the nominee?

SANDERS: Yes...???

BLOOMBERG: No.

WARREN: Nada.

BIDEN: Nopedy nope.

BUTTIGIEG: No siree.

KLOBUCHAR: Nah.

HOLT: Alright! Thanks, folks! That's all for now! Bye bye!

[hub-pub-bub]

Vanschoonbeek: ‘A Spirit of Consensus’

In a statement issued today from the Brussels offices of the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), the organization’s president, Rudy Vanschoonbeek hails the new action today (April 15), in which European ministers have given the final approval to the Single Digital Market framework’s controversial copyright directive.

It’s worth noting that it was not a unanimous ratification. As Laura Kayali is reporting at Politico, “Italy, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden voted against the measure, while Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained.”

Vanschoonbeek at the FEP is quoted, saying, “After two-and-a-half years of discussions and votes on the directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, the council has approved the text adopted [on] March 25 by the European Parliament.

“Upon signatures by the presidents of the council and the parliament, it will be published in the official journal and come into force 24 months later.

“If you are looking to develop solutions for your authors and readers, the adoption means that you can work constructively with researchers, teachers, libraries, and of course your authors to establish, if they don’t exist yet, results that will benefit all.

“As president of FEP, I wish to thank everyone who has contributed to the debate with a spirit of consensus and driven by the will to bring forward solutions.”

Of course, as has been part of our coverage of the issue, the book publishing industry in Europe, on the whole, has seen the advent of the copyright directive as a boon, rather than as a negative event, not least because it allows member states the chance to direct copyright collection agencies to distribute copyright revenues to publishers as well as to authors–something that was practiced in some parts of the union but not codified in its laws until now.

As Ryan Browne is writing this morning at CNBC, the backing today from 19 of the EU’s member-states brings into law provisions that Internet freedom activists and tech platforms have complained could result in censorship.

“One of the most heavily scrutinized aspects of the law, Article 13 — or 17 as it’s now numbered,” writes Browne, “would make tech firms liable for copyright breaches. This means they will have to acquire licenses from rights holders to be able to host such content in the first place. Opponents of the law say this will lead to filtering systems that block everything from memes to GIFs before they’re even uploaded.

“The EU, however, says this won’t be the case, claiming that people will still be able to share such content freely. Either way, it’s expected to hit platforms that rely on user-generated content—like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram—hard.”

What’s more, as Kelvin Chan of the Associated Press in London is writing (here carried by The Washington Post), “Another section of the bill that caused concern requires search engines and social media sites to pay for linking to or offering up snippets of news articles.”

Member-states of the European Union now have two years to comply with the directive, “transposing” it, as it’s called, to their specific markets’ needs, and placing it into their national laws.

Because of the six-nation opposition in today’s vote in particularly, court challenges are anticipated.

Sänger: ‘Difficult Questions’

As regular readers of Publishing Perspectives know, we’ve had many useful inputs from Dr. Jessica Sänger of Germany’s Börsenverein—its publishers’ and booksellers’ association—as the issues and various stages of negotiation have progressed.

Particularly because of earlier controversy around the copyright-revenue issues in Germany, Sänger and her colleagues have been closely engaged with the campaign to see the copyright directive clear its legislative hurdles.

We’re glad to look back with her now and assess where things have ended up at this point, not least because there’s enormous energy in the debate round tech platforms’ handling of copyrighted content, and for the most part, this has not affected the discussions in book publishing, at least for its own needs and operations in the field.

We being by asking Sänger about her and her associates’ feelings in the wake of a protracted period of negotiation and effort on this.

Jessica Sänger: We are very happy with this result which shows that the European Parliament is willing to tackle difficult questions in order to ensure that creators and their publishers and producers are rewarded for their work and investments. The directive covers a broad spectrum of copyright-related questions and will bring a good deal of legal certainty in areas that are important to us.

From the point of view of German publishers, of course the legal basis for re-introduction of a publisher share in CMO [copyright management organizations] revenues is the most important achievement. We hope that this can be transposed into national law very quickly.

But the directive also clarifies what is permissible for teachers and educational institutions when it comes to uses for illustration for teaching in cross-border contexts. Important questions around uses by libraries of works which have fallen out of commerce have been addressed. These are just a few of the subjects in this piece of legislation that matter to publishers.

It’s fair to say that the directive is not perfect for us, nor probably for anyone. But it represents a set of hard-fought compromises that overall seem acceptable. Years of work went into this project, so it’s a relief that the first reading was completed before the European Parliament’s legislative period ends in April.

We would not have been able to get here without very close collaboration between authors and publishers.

Publishing Perspectives: While the most heated debate around the directive hasn’t been based in the parts that most affect book publishing, can you speak to the controversy from your perspective?

JS: Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a tremendous public debate erupt around the directive in Germany. While the provisions addressing the “value gap” and introducing a publisher’s right for [news and entertainment] publications were controversial all along, there was not a great deal of public attention until quite late in the process. This was focused mainly on Article 13, the value gap provision, which turned into Article 17 of the final document. As heated debate in the chamber showed, this issue has proven tremendously divisive. Parliamentarians and European Commission officials alike have told us that this is the hardest-fought policy battle they’ve ever witnessed in the EP.

Given that a vast majority of MEPs [members of the European Parliament] claim to be in favor of rewarding creative work, this may seem surprising. But it’s the way in which such remuneration is put into practice that’s been so fiercely debated. The campaigning term “upload filters” was used to describe mechanisms allowing not just takedown of infringing material, but “stay down,” something that has been quite burdensome for rights holders to achieve in practice by way of litigation.

The directive essentially sets out that certain platforms whose commercial business model is built around massive amounts of copyright protected material being posted on their services by users who do not hold the rights to the content shall be liable for copyright infringement under a certain set of conditions. The stated aim is for platforms to agree [to] licensing deals with rights holders or CMOs to cover the uploads by users. This way, uploaders are no longer at risk, since the liability is borne by the platform.

A massive campaign against this provision has been underway for months, specifically addressing millennials, claiming that it would mean the “end of the Internet as you know it” and calling on them to “save your Internet”. Much misinformation was spread, and soon enough, young protesters were out in the streets, in fear of “censorship” across the web.

I’ve spent the past weeks speaking to many critics of the reform, explaining precisely why there’s no such danger and how Article 13, now 17, is actually a compromise that carefully protects freedom of expression. Unfortunately, the mainstream media in Germany painted a very one-sided picture of the reform, sometimes casting the debate as a generational conflict in which the old guard that supposedly does not understand modern technology is failing young voters. I’m very relieved that most MEPs remained calm in the face of what has been quite a hysterical debate in Germany–though not in the same way in other countries–and have adopted this important directive.

PP: And as for today’s final assent from the council in Brussels?

JS: Some opponents were casting this vote as the last chance to avert “disaster” for a “free Web,” but politically speaking, a result differing from the vote in February would be something of an earthquake. …  Member States will now have two years to transpose the new rules into national laws.

More on the EU’s Digital Single Market legislative efforts is here, and on copyright in general is here.

[rolandfontana]

‘He’s Not Just a Number’: Are Gun Deaths Eclipsed by Opioid Crisis?

On Oct. 30, 2018, Trevonte Kirkwood, 27, of Bloomington, Illinois died of multiple gunshot wounds. He was one of nine people shot and killed in the Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area in 2018.

That’s up from one gun death in 2017, and zero in 2016.

For Trevonte’s mother, Dameca Kirkwood, the official silence surrounding the deaths, in a community rocked by the deadliest year for gun violence in its recorded history, is almost as awful as the tragedy itself.

Trevonte Kirkwood was shot and killed in October. 2018. The 27-year-old had two young children. Photo courtesy Dameca Kirkwood via The Pantagraph.

“Someone has lost a life,” Kirkwood said, fighting back tears. “I feel empty that as a community we have to come to this, where we’re not talking about it. Where we’re not coming together about it.”

Seven others were wounded by gunfire last year. Neighborhoods and businesses are being traumatized by shots-fired calls and armed robberies, even when no one is actually hit.

In early February when Trevonte Kirkwood’s daughter celebrated her 6th birthday, four months after her father’s death, children took cover after shots rang out outside an apartment where she now lives with an aunt, Neise Kirkwood, who adopted her.

“We can do better than this,” Neise said.

The community’s muted response to gun violence stands in contrast to its full-throated reaction to the opioid crisis. Forty people overdosed in McLean County in 2017, and another 28 last year.

A task force was created for the opioid crisis, bringing together law enforcement, public health officials, and social service providers. A new program called Safe Passages made it easier to get addiction treatment without fear of repercussion.

Local officials welcomed input from state and national leaders on solutions to a complex problem, with numerous press conferences and public forums.

But for gun violence, reaction has come from unelected community members—like Kirkwood—as well as faith leaders and newly formed grassroots organizations such as Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense and BN Youth Activists.

There have been vigils after each shooting but, other than the arrests in eight of the nine gun deaths, no broad response.

There’s no McLean County Gun Violence Task Force.

Karen Irvin, a retired teacher and co-leader of the local Moms Demand Action chapter, said the group would welcome being part of an ongoing community-wide effort.

“I can’t wait to be part of a conversation that goes deeper than vigils and monthly meetings and canvassing for elected officials,” said Irvin, who lost one of her former fourth-graders, Egerton Dover, to gun violence in December.

“We had a unique year in 2018. And we don’t know if that’s an outlier.”

The different reactions trace back to two of the thorniest issues in American life—a constitutionally protected right to own a gun, and race—according to more than a dozen interviews conducted by The Pantagraph and GLT.

The gun lobby has successfully made guns a central part of what it means to be American, said Julie Webber, a professor of politics and government at Illinois State University who has studied gun violence.

That’s despite nearly 40,000 people killed by guns in the U.S. in 2017, the highest number in decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“They’re just very good at telling that story,” Webber said. “Gun control advocates have not been able to find something equally compelling.”

The Factor of Race

Race is another factor explaining the different reactions to gun violence and opioids, Webber said.

Dameca Kirkwood sees it too.

If Trevonte had been white, his unsolved murder would be all over the news every night, she said. All nine of the people killed last year were black or Hispanic, in their 20s and 30s.

“He is not a case number,” she said of her son. “He is not just an African American…He was my son. And as his mother, until I take my last breath, I will do whatever. I will keep preaching. I will keep speaking. Until the bastards who done this have been brought to justice.”

The local, state, and federal response to the opioid epidemic has been a rare bipartisan one, triggering an outpouring of resources, such as more doses of the opioid-overdose antidote Narcan for police officers.

The focus on expanded opioid treatment differs from what those addicted to other drugs experience: a path to the criminal justice system.

“It’s because of the amount of people it’s touched, and the fact that it’s not just one socioeconomic group,” said McLean County Sheriff Jon Sandage, who launched his Safe Passages program last year.

“It touches everybody from all walks of life. It’s just a devastating disease. Politically, who would be against that?”

The demographics of those killed locally by guns versus opioids illustrates that race is a factor here too. Those who overdose in McLean County tend to be white, with an average age of 42, across all income and education levels, said Coroner Kathy Yoder.

“The politicians know that for every one of these people that are going to be helped by having an understanding approach to the opioid crisis, they’re related to some middle-class Caucasian-American who’s going to vote somewhere,” said Webber.

Not everyone sees the difference between the two responses. Bloomington Police Chief Clay Wheeler pointed to last summer’s summit at Miller Park, attended by police, convening community leaders and local youths to talk about solutions to the rise in gun violence.

 Wheeler said the guns-opioid comparison was unfair.

“Police departments looked toward community partners,” he said. “There were several events where community partners (and) social service agencies looked at what services they had available. There were discussions publicly and behind the scenes about the issue.”

Added McLean County Sheriff Sandage: “I think we’re giving just as much attention to the guns as we are the drugs, because when you find drugs you find guns and vice versa, usually. .

Nevertheless, part of the response to the opioid epidemic has focused on the supply, with efforts to stop doctors from over-prescribing painkillers that can be stolen and sold illegally.

There’s no parallel for the supply of guns in America.

Local elected officials and law enforcement are reluctant to tread into what could be Second Amendment territory. That’s despite evidence that stolen weapons are often used in crimes, including homicides.

In July, Bloomington Police arrested a 17-year-old woman who allegedly stole three guns from a friend’s apartment in Normal and sold one to Hammet Brown. He’s accused of using it to kill Taneshiea Brown, 20, and Steven Alexander Jr., 18, on Bloomington’s east side in June.

“By and large, all of our gun owners in McLean County are responsible. We’ve not had any cases of those being irresponsible,” Sandage said. “There are the burglaries that happen and guns get stolen. It’s always a message we have out there to lock up your weapons, and hopefully people listen.”

That reluctance to talk about easy access to guns may be changing. The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police (ILACP) is considering creation of a new subcommittee focused on gun violence, to help inform policy debates in Springfield.

“With guns in general over the years we’ve really had no opinion on it, no response to it, unless it affected law enforcement. So it’s time we need to have the conversation,” said ILACP President Brian Fengel, who is chief of police in Bartonville.

Other communities have been more proactive to stop gun violence. Champaign, Peoria, and Springfield all have task forces on the issue. Champaign’s Fresh Start and Peoria’s Don’t Shoot initiatives are both “focused deterrence” programs, using a U.S. Department of Justice model that brings community stakeholders together and reaches out directly to at-risk youth.

The U.S. attorney’s office, based in Springfield, the Illinois capital, is often a partner in these initiatives. Sometimes it convenes the stakeholders; sometimes it’s just one of the partners. John Milhiser, the U.S. attorney for central Illinois, said he’s willing to be a partner with McLean County too if asked.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s a community that couldn’t benefit from the more comprehensive approach to gun violence, violence in general,” said Milhiser, whose 46-county district includes Bloomington-Normal.

The McLean County Juvenile Justice Council (JJC) recently appointed a subcommittee on the issue of gun violence, said JJC chairman and Normal Police Chief Rick Bleichner. Camille Rodriguez, director of the McLean County Health Department, will chair that subcommittee.

Reaching Out to At-Risk Youth

Youth outreach will be key, Bleichner said.

“Although not all the people involved are juveniles, they didn’t just pick up a gun when they were 25,” Bleichner said.

Rodriguez said her department has researched the effectiveness of outreach programs on gun violence. She said one approach might be messaging that targets kids using YouTube.

“The jury is out as to the best approach. Sometimes it’s reaching out to parents. Sometimes it’s reaching the young people directly. And we want to meet and decide which is best,” Rodriguez said.

Sandage said he’d be open to a more comprehensive approach to gun violence.

“We do have a lot of different groups trying to get their message out. Maybe it would be a good idea to get them all together, in one unified message,” Sandage said.

Other things are happening more informally. McLean County State’s Attorney Don Knapp recently teamed up with Pastor Andrew Held from Bloomington City Life, a youth ministry based on Bloomington’s west side, to work directly with at-risk youth.

Last month, they took a group of 17 kids to play virtual reality games and mingle with police, prosecutors, and Public Defender Carla Barnes.

In the short term, Knapp said he hopes it makes them less reluctant to talk to police if they witness a crime.

“In the long term, whatever I can do to change what I believe to be a false narrative of distrust of law enforcement, that’s what I want to do,” Knapp said.

In the decade he’s been working in youth ministry, Held has seen a change in the attitudes of teens, many of them on the brink of committing their first crime.

“Today’s youth are apathetic. They’re not really motivated towards work or an education,” said Held.

The numbers of teens in Held’s program dropped last year as the gun violence escalated. Fear and trauma kept youth close to home, he said.

Separately, Not In Our Town, Boys & Girls Club of Bloomington-Normal, and the United Way of McLean County are working with a small group of at-risk youths in hopes of keeping them on the right track. That grew out of last summer’s summit at Miller Park.

For Dameca Kirkwood, her role of unwilling advocate took her to the steps of the McLean County Museum of History earlier this month, for an event marking the one-year anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

She connected one of the country’s worst mass shootings to how everyday gun violence snatched away her son—a 27-year-old father of two who loved fashion, music, and was nicknamed “Goof Troop” because of his infectious smile.

Kirkwood said stopping gun violence will require a multipronged approach, including laws that make it harder to get a gun and keep them “only in the right hands.”

Stronger family structures and better mental health services are also needed, she said.

“If you know better, you do better,” she said. “And if someone knew better, they would’ve done better, and maybe my son would still be here.”

This is a condensed and slightly edited version of a story completed for the John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Justice Reporting fellowship, which appeared in The Pantagraph and was broadcast on GLT, an NPR station in Bloomington. GLT’s  Eric Stock also contributed to this report. The full version can be accessed here.

‘He’s Not Just a Number’: Are Gun Deaths Eclipsed by Opioid Crisis? syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/