Month: December 2018

I Got 99 Stories and They’re All… Good News?

I just finished my economics 101 class, and coincidentally finally found an article that actually explains macroeconomics without oversimplifying. It asks a big question:

During the 20th century, the West suffered from two major economic crises. Each of these brought about a major revolution in economic thinking. After the 2008 financial crisis, no such shift has taken place. Economists are still using many of the same tools built to address the same questions as before. When is the revolution?

See also: What minimum-wage foes got wrong about Seattle. In my microeconomics unit, the minimum wage was the canonical example of the effect of a price floor: If there’s a minimum wage, it will reduce the total number of hours worked in the economy. But the point at which it actually has an impact is much, much higher than you’d expect. If the minimum wage were $100/hour, the job market would almost certainly get weird. But $15? Turns out it’s fine.

Climate update
An internal Amtrak analysis predicts that by 2050, rising seas could make portions of the Northeast Corridor lines impassible. The Northeast Corridor is the sole profitable segment of Amtrak’s operation. The report was kept private and revealed only through a public records request.

Meanwhile, in Miami, higher ground is starting to get more expensive… meaning poor people have nowhere to go.

Hot takes
Jack Shafer, writing for Politico, argues that racism is bad, but anti-racism is worse.

I sing of plums and of a man
William Carlos Williams plums-in-the-icebox jokes are where Twitter truly shines.

More year in review
Passionweiss best rap songs of 2018.
Eater’s most scathing reviews of restaurants.
Designboom’s top futuristic visualizations of 2018.
99 good news stories you may have missed this year.

Cultivating… the uncanny?
I don’t … just… this GIF.

Cultivating joy
Brushing kitty.
Lumpsuckers, or lumpfish, are  used as a sustainable source of caviar. They are called lumpsuckers because they look like weird little lumps and they cling to stuff. But if you you persuade them to cling to a balloon, they turn into adorable googly-eyed little lumps.
Dog trapped under blanket.
Oregon says a fond farewell to Eddie the Otter, known for basketball and masturbation.
Capybaras in a hot yuzu bath.
Tiny kitten and St. Bernard.
This epic photo of the sky at night.
Greyhounds in sweaters looking like the bad guys in an 80s movie.
Stephen Colbert’s Anxiety Baking Show is hilarious.

Hello, Shill

Not a week goes by that I don’t get called a paid shill for some shadowy conspiracy of gentrification-mongers. But I was amused to get doxxed on a neighborhood discussion list this week. I made the mistake of joining a conversation about housing policy in the next town over, and someone looked me up, found out that I live in Somerville and work in marketing, and accused me of being a paid spokesman for the real estate lobby, posting my home address and LinkedIn profile to the list. Joke’s on him, though, I’m unemployed and now everyone in Arlington knows I’m available for new marketing projects.

God, if I could get paid to be a shill.

Business strategy rabbithole
Vox explores the shrinking razor market:

It’s a classic example of capitalism working not quite the way that was promised but the way it does when put into practice by humans. We see it time and again — with the hotel industry, with cable TV, now with razors: Shrinking markets are not allowed to simply shrink, but instead inspire aggressive pandering, bizarre advertising, and nichification of products that have no reason to be so differentiated.

Related: Why does Marriott have 30 different hotel brands?

Related: The Baffler explores the explosion of mattress companies:

[M]arketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations. And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a CasperTM Essential…. Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.

Elsewhere
Bloomberg’s Pessimist’s Guide to 2019.

The Intercept on the absurdity of an Anti-BDS law in Texas, which led a speech pathologist to lose her job because she refused to take a pro-Israel oath.

Paul Ryan is pushing for extra visas for white people while refugees are teargassed at the border. Class act, that one.

Pushback Against Monopoly
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft: Daniel Oberhaus author quit all five for a month. Apple is pretty easy, as is Facebook, even including subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram.

Amazon’s a little harder: It’s not just that it’s cheaper and more convenient to shop there, but that’s a big thing. And dropping Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods means it’s harder to find decent cheese. And then of course you can’t use its other subsidiaries like Twitch, IMDB, or Goodreads. And if you’re really trying to cut back, you should also drop two enormous Amazon Web Services customers, Netflix and Spotify.

Getting rid of Microsoft means switching to Linux, of course, but also giving up Github and all the other Microsoft web services.

And getting rid of Google is far harder than switching to Firefox from Chrome, or using the almost-as-good but more private DuckDuckGo search engine. It means going back six generations of Samsung phones to install a homebrew not-Android OS and app store on a jailbroken Galaxy S3. It means switching your email address and email provider. It means switching from Google Docs and Hangouts and Calendar, which can be especially hard if you use those for work. And of course you’re giving up YouTube, which means giving up the instructional videos you need to figure out your new phone and operating system. And of course Google Maps and Waze are right out, so you have a hard time getting places and don’t know how long it will take to arrive.

Twitter Curation

This thread, about a high school police officer who assumed a brown kid had stolen a missing calculator:

And this thread, about… corn:

Cultivating joy
Man plays piano while a cat vies for attention.
I did not expect these toads to be very cute. The sound is a little unnerving though.
Dogs dining in a busy restaurant.
Very sleepy kitty.
Terrible maps, including “Super Bowl Wins By Country” and “Roman Air Bases in Europe.”
Stack your cats neatly.
SMBC Comic: What’s the Most American Movie?

Year in Review in Review

One of my favorite parts of the end of the year is the “best-of-the-year” and “year in review” articles. It’s just a fun way of looking back at the year, taking stock, and wondering what the hell is wrong with other people.

Of news summaries I most like the image-heavy ones like the CNN Year in Photos or the AP Year in Photos.   There are the really short ones, like the Dictionary.com Word of the Year (“toxic“), or the all-Japan Kanji of the Year (“disaster“).

And of course there are the top-ten or top-hundred lists, the recommendations like the Times best books, or Globe best cookbooks/children’s books and Slate’s Best Audiobooks, and so on. That’s sort of expected.

But have you seen the list of the year’s best book covers, selected by book design professionals?

Where there’s a list or a review or a recap, there’s bound to be a controversy, and Spotify has stepped in it with one of theirs. They give you a personalized list of what you listened to most this year in the form of “wrapped,” but the anger is directed at their all male list of the most popular streaming artists, which of course was influenced heavily by their recommended playlists all year long. (For balance, check out NPR’s top recommended artists, all female).

I love the niche recaps, like Strong Towns reposting its ten best zoning and housing articles, including “Most Public Engagement is Worthless” and “Why Developers Are Only Building Luxury Housing.”

And I love giant data-driven retrospectives. The Google Year in Search is the king of them all (in the food category, people were looking for recipes for low-carb cheesecake and CBD gummies), but the social media notes from Twitter (K-pop music factory BTS is the hottest band in the world, duh) and Instagram (major trend: ASMR and other calming videos) are fascinating.

And when you get to the end of the internet, there’s Pornhub.

Pornhub’s review is at pornhub.com and is obviously not safe for work, but it’s also very (ahem) revealing. They have a rather impressive set of infographics covering all sorts of notable details: They moved over 4,000 petabytes of filth, more data than the entire internet transmitted in just 2002. The top searched categories didn’t change much, but most-trending searches included “Fortnite” and “Bowsette,” so … that’s… I’m sorry I know that now, but once I learned it, I had to subject you to that horrible knowledge as well. Anyway, there’s a ton of kind of neat global and regional data there, illustrating the pantsfeelings of the world.

Virtue signaling
Right-wingers love to accuse “SJWs” (social justice warriors) of “virtue signaling.” By this they mean saying things, or doing things, primarily to show off how virtuous you are, especially when those statements or actions don’t actually accomplish anything or solve anything.

So what do you call it when the president says we should deport refugees from the Vietnam war?

Longreads
This article, titled “Life in the Psych Ward,” is haunting. I do not recommend reading it in public, and I do not recommend reading it when you will be alone for a long period of time afterwards, but I recommend reading it.

Twitter Curation

You’re only allowed to call it a Monster Energy Drink if it comes from the Monster Energy region of France

Jamesgle Bells (@cashbonez) December 11, 2018

Doomsaying
“Goodbye, Miami. Goodbye, Boston.” The Thwaites Glacier is melting faster every day.

Cultivating Joy
The rusty spotted cat is the world’s smallest wild cat. Here’s a YouTube video featuring the world’s most adorable apex predator.

Letter to the Somerville Board of Aldermen re: 11 Fiske Ave

To the Board of Aldermen:
The Somerville Board of Aldermen must balance the big picture needs of our city, our region, and our planet on the one hand, and the minutiae of individual neighborhoods on the other. At the biggest macro level, we have a climate crisis that we should respond to by encouraging transit-oriented, rather than car-oriented, living patterns. We have a regional housing crisis demanding more housing, especially near transit nodes. And we have a city that needs taxpaying residents and workers to continue to fund its ongoing operations.
Last night, at a community meeting about a small project, I saw a small group of neighbors standing up to oppose all of those things. “You people,” said one of them, pointing at the only person of color in the room, a man representing a business based in Somerville, “come into our city, and build things that look like projects, and ruin what we have.” The “we” in this statement was about twelve white property owners over the age of sixty. “This neighborhood has never changed,” she continued. “It has always been like this. And I don’t like the changes that are happening in my city.”
“Not in my yard,” said another, demanding that detailed professional snow removal plans be written into the building’s condominium documents, and asking for a third-party specialist to determine whether shadows would cause structural damage to his walls.
The participants imagined that workers would vandalize their homes in retaliation for parking tickets; they imagined that pickup trucks would be too large to fit down their narrow street; they imagined that the residents of their street who were minorities agreed with them even though they were not present and hadn’t been asked; they imagined that a slight change in lighting would cause mold which would destroy their siding. They could not imagine a neighbor who did not own a car.
When I spoke up to note that transit oriented development is better for the world and for our community, I was told “go back to Prospect Hill.” Living as I do just a five minute bike ride away, I was deemed an outsider with no stake in the matter, trying to apply out-of-touch abstract principles to support greedy developers.
I go to a lot of these community meetings. At most of them, I see older, whiter, wealthier residents opposing all kinds of changes for all kinds of reasons. But this meeting was the most explicitly racist one I’ve been to. I am ashamed that I did not push back harder against the racism and xenophobia I witnessed last night.
I hope that the board will acknowledge that the concerns of the dozen or so opponents of the project are based entirely on irrational fear of change, and that they will allow a totally normal, entirely reasonable project to move forward.
Sincerely,
Aaron Weber

Technological Dysphoria as Metaphor

You know how targeted ad networks follow you around the web with stuff they think you’ll be interested in? The sensation that you’re being watched, that there is a shadowy surveillance operation, is unnervingly similar to the hallucinations many people with schizophrenia have.

Schizophrenic hallucinations are, in many ways, informative. You don’t have to believe them to be real to understand that they forms they take, the interpretations the mentally ill make of what’s going on around them, are a reflection of … well, what’s going on around them. People who claim to be ‘targeted individuals’ may not be persecuted in the way they imagine, but they’re not wrong to think there’s someone, many someones, watching them, trying to manipulate them, and not generally with their best interests at heart.

So, yeah, we’re targeted. We’re all targeted. Of course, we kind of did sign up for it. It’s not the CIA watching us, it’s Facebook. (Although, yeah, probably also government officials. The NSA for sure.) And in China, internet users definitely know the Party is watching their Weibo posts and updating their Social Credit Score to make sure they stay in line. There isn’t much difference from the way Instagram and Shopify and Experian are doing the same thing to try and extract more clicks from our browser and dollars from our wallet.

See also: The worst part of being managed by algorithm is probably the constant surveillance.

See also: A trip through the mental and physical health systems. Bonus: “A nurse said that they had all believed I was uninsured and had given me “different” treatment because of it.”

The Divide
Wisconsin Republicans are still trying to diminish the power of the Dems who are coming into office next month. Their justification is, well, frankly ethno-nationalist: People in cities don’t count. Literally, this is what Robin Vos, the Republican house speaker, said: “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority.” Yeah. As Ed Burmila notes, that boils down to “rural Wisconsin voters are the ones who actually matter so they should get what they want. They don’t think people in cities count. And you know who those people are.

This is, of course, an ongoing problem nationwide.  And it’s especially a problem in the senate, where we are rapidly approaching “rotten-borough” status. By 2040, according to the Washington Post, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate.

Washington DC has several times more residents than Vermont or Wyoming. It should be a state. Puerto Rico has several times more residents than Vermont or Wyoming. It should be a state.  Ed Burmila explains on Twitter, with historical antecedents:

Lost Cause
The UNC Silent Sam debacle has grown worse. This statue of an unnamed Confederate soldier, put up at the University of North Carolina in the early 20th century to reinforce white supremacy on campus, was toppled by protesters earlier this year. The university has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to spend millions of dollars to build a new shrine to slavery and white supremacy, and also spend additional money to build a more militarized campus police force to respond to any protests that might occur on campus.

You know, to ensure that protests are … dealt with.

pepper-spray-cop

Img Source: Wikipedia (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, Link

Faculty are, of course, not pleased, and have responded with an open letter. It’s not clear what else they can do. The university can run pretty well without them, so it’s not like they have any real power.

This ties in neatly to a Smithsonian article covering how US taxpayers spend over $4 million every year supporting, maintaining, and enhancing the legend of the slave power.

Cultivating Joy
This hawk is epic
Watch all fifteen seconds of this GIF. You will not be disappointed.

Content Moderation Policy

[Pithy analysis TK]

Respecting people who disagree
“Damn right I’m a white nationalist,” says a member of the Texas Republican Party Platform Committee.

VA secretary Robert Wilkie, while speaking at a pro-confederate conference a few years back, gave a great deal of praise to Robert E. Lee and the morality and honor of the Lost Cause.  Sure, that was 1995, which was whole different century, when people didn’t really know that the pro-slavery side were the bad guys in the civil war. But he also gave a similar speech at a Sons of Confederate Veterans event in 2009, so, maybe he actually believes it.

And all of this nonsense from outgoing losers.

And this very sarcastic comic.

Misc
Teaching high school students in Mississippi how to use primary documents to understand the legacy of the civil war.

I’m in the Boston Globe today, talking about the importance of compromise and figuring out what’s good enough.

An analysis of sales of expensive winter coats in Korea and the window it gives into class structure and inequality in Korea these days.

Happiness economics and the midlife crisis.

From YouTube, a very fun DJ set of Japanese funk & soul records.

From Twitter, this comment on recent heavily redacted memos:

And this heartwarming/horrifying piece of DIY advice:

Cultivating joy
Helpful dog at Christmas
You know how sometimes you sneeze while eating pasta? Imagine being a seal.
Corgis in snow.