Author: Aaron Weber

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.

Mainstream Poison

I was in a meeting today, the way a middle aged white guy will be, with a rep from my local Chamber of Commerce. At the very beginning, he was sure to explain to all present that the the local CoC is not affiliated with the national Chamber. They’ve always been independent, he said, but it’s increasingly important to point that out, because the politics and brand of the national Chamber are increasingly toxic, especially in New England. We then discussed ways that the local business community could make greater efforts to engage with the local socialist party on issues of climate change and resilience and housing equity and transit access, and how developers could balance the needs of organized labor with a desire to recruit a diverse workforce, given that regional labor organizations are pretty white. And we discussed, the way middle-aged white guys will do, ways that we could try to bring people different from us into the conversation we wanted to have, and hear their perspectives.

And it occurred to me, in this meeting, that most of the people I interact with on a day to day basis are pretty good at reaching across divides. We don’t automatically write each other off over differences of opinion.

But there are people who aren’t worth engaging with. People whose “differences of opinion” are, in fact, reprehensible. So reprehensible, in fact, that merely associating with them taints you with their moral stain.

Like the US Chamber of Commerce.

Like mainstream conservative pundit Erik Erikson, who openly admires the way that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet used to have dissidents thrown out of helicopters into the ocean.

Like Jordan Peterson, the mainstream conservative intellectual and evolutionary pop-psych guru, who argues that Nazis were doing totally rational things at the time, so it was kind of OK.

Like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, beloved Republican political shitheels who knew about the DNC email hacks, and then persisted in claiming that Seth Rich stole the emails and that the Clintons murdered him for it.

Like the hardworking, well-respected law enforcement officials at ICE, who take glee in executing dehumanizing immigration policies and giving abusers free reign in tent-city concentration camps for migrant children:

The memo, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, says the former director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement personally signed off on sidestepping requirements for child abuse and neglect checks at the tent city in Tornillo, Texas.

Like like acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who says he felt conflicted when he was asked to prosecute someone who drove his car into a women’s health clinic and tried to set it on fire.

Like people who watch this video of cops beating protesters, and blame the protesters.

Like people who persist in denying that climate change is happening (see also, Five Ways to Adapt to Climate Change, see also The Insect Apocalypse is Here).

Like people who watch American life expectancy drop two years in a row and then still scaremonger about Obamacare and Socialism and the moral laziness of people struggling with substance abuse.

In other words, the mainstream Republican party. The thirty or forty percent of Americans who think Trump is doing a bang-up job. They bring nothing to the table. They will not or cannot speak in good faith and should not be trusted with power, or granted respect.

Engaging with them simply legitimizes their terrible, terrible ideas. It makes about as much sense to ask a mainstream Republican about public policy as it does to ask a young-earth creationist how a high school ought to teach biology. It’s worse than pointless, and bordering on unethical, to legitimize these ideas by giving them the time of day.

Twitter Curation

Cultivating Joy
kitteh
Profile of the illustrator behind the Great British Bakeoff.
This hedgehog having a bath.
These doggies catching treats.
This husky with a balloon.

Get off my lawn

When I was a teenager, sex was terrifying. The specter of AIDS was everywhere, even when the actual disease was a very long way off. And we didn’t have Tinder.

Today, HIV infection rates (and the danger of AIDS) are way, way down, and Tinder makes sex seem easy, but kids these days just aren’t doing it that much. The Atlantic says there are a number of reasons: Less willingness to settle for bad or coerced sex; more access to pornography and social media as a substitute for human interaction; teens being so over-scheduled that they don’t have any nonprofessional social interactions and reach their 20s without ever getting into bed with someone; a decline in childhood sexual abuse leading to a decline in pathological promiscuity; pornography creating incredibly skewed ideas about what sex is supposed to be…

Critics of the article, rightly, point out that the surveys are unreliable and the fluctuations are pretty close to being within the margin of error, and also apply mostly to heterosexuals, so the article is mostly just a subjective exploration of how sex and dating and romance are different from the way they used to be, better in some ways and worse in others. Just another Atlantic trend piece, in other words, but kind of interesting.

Politics Roundup
Look, I’m not saying Trump’s a racist, but white nationalists think he’s a racist. (Actually, I’m also saying he’s a racist).

White working class Democrat can’t get support from unions, for reasons.

This is totally fine.

The 4-H club tried to be more welcoming. It didn’t go over well.

Twitter Curation
Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression let them take elections. Should we pretend that didn’t happen to boost confidence in the system?

Under Trump, international students are avoiding the US. This is bad for numerous reasons detailed here.

Ohio legislators just passed a new anti-abortion bill that’s blatantly unconstitutional (also absurdly branded as “pro-life” despite implying a potential death penalty for doctors who perform abortions). Why on earth would they do that? It’s not just virtue-signaling for the base:

The New York Times article titled Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show The Police Framed Him sounds pretty bad. A Twitter thread from his attorney illustrates just how much the Times is soft-pedaling a vulgar display of power. I encourage you to read the whole thread, in which the attorney points out about a dozen common injustices, including adding charges when the suspect makes claims in his defense and alleging gang affiliation where none exists. And of course, locking a kid up for 2 weeks because he can’t make bail.

I’m taking economics 101 here are my hot economics takes
This is not a totally normal functional economy.

Today’s adults are stuck in their parents’ car-obsessed transportation system.

Cultivating joy
Baby llama (Or alpaca? Adorable camelid of some sort).
Corgis & hose.
Ted Danson learning a new dance.
CHICKENSLACKS.
Cat vs. rat… rat wins.
Frog on rocker.

Election Hangover

If you were starting to feel optimistic because of the election results from last week, here’s an editorial in Bloomberg warning us that World War III is totally possible.

Electioneering
Make your safe district more powerful: Gerrymander a prison into it! Prisoners count as residents, but can’t vote, so every voter in the same district gets more power. Surprise, it’s largely black and brown people in the prisons, and conservative whites outside it using their disenfranchised bodies to consolidate electoral power. It’s like the old 3/5 compromise, except they count 100%!

A history of racist political ads, and why the latest one is even worse than the notoriously terrible “Willie Horton” ad. Includes a screenshot of a transcript of a 60 Minutes interview in which Lee Atwater denies having anything to do with the ad, followed by, of course, the show cutting away to Roger Stone saying he’d warned Atwater against running it, and Atwater called him a pussy and ran it anyway. Atwater did go to his grave regretting it. Too little, too late.

An Indiana poll worker explains just how badly run the elections in her county were.

Cultivating joy
This very good boy.
(I am still accepting submissions & suggestions for the Joy section!)

Hot Garbage

I love dead metaphors, the little phrases and comparisons you repeat until they’re meaningless, but then sometimes notice as metaphors and have to think about. I love the way they drift and then return, like letting your eyes unfocus and then snapping the world back to clarity.

You always hear adolescents described as “coltish” but seeing the new crop of 9th graders at the high school down the street is a reminder that they really do run around like baby horses not quite sure what the hell to do with all their limbs. (Also, did I get older or did teenagers suddenly get really loud? Get off my lawn!)

Or, of course, the short leash, which you’ll recognize if you have a dog and a selection of leashes: the short one is for training and control.

The phrase “hot garbage” is often used to describe people’s opinions, usually in trivial disputes over taste in pop culture or music or decor. Google Trends says that it’s less common than “dumpster fire,” but both are common enough that you don’t really pause to think about what they mean.

dumpster-fire
But think about it for a minute. Imagine rot and maggots and leachate. Think about burning plastic and rotten food and greasy smoke that will never wash off. Think about the time you accidentally walked past the dumpster behind the grocery store on a Monday morning in August, when everything wasted and worthless had been there all weekend festering. Think about how close you came to actually vomiting.

Speaking of Congressman Steve King (R-IA), “If they were in America pushing the platform that they push, they would be Republicans,” he said recently, of an Austrian party linked with Nazism and far-right violence. He said this as praise. This was the same trip on which he visited Auschwitz and then wanted a second opinion from a less-Jewish source.

History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme
Late 19th/early 20th century political cartoons about Irish immigration part 1, part 2 and part 3.

It’s getting bleak in herre (so take off all your hopes)
Activists delivered an 11-foot-long sculpture of a bent and burned heroin spoon to the Massachusetts state capitol this week.

The Economist investigates how California manages to be simultaneously one of America’s richest and poorest states.

Profiles of people who left the country rather than pay student debts.

We are all disposable and when we are gone we will soon be forgotten. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with your corpse rotting in your car parked on a busy street for a week before anyone notices.

Cultivating joy
OMG this cat is amazing
Spookycat is adorable
Curious octopus investigates camera

Late capitalist showdown at the interactive corral

Video game developers are notorious for long hours in the “crunch” during the time before product releases… and “crunch” can last a year or more in some cases. For example, in boasting about how hard everyone worked on their latest release, Rockstar Games’ CEO boasted of 100-hour weeks from many staffers. Labor activists are, of course, outraged. The Outline investigates the danger of exploiting a desire for “meaningful work” in creative industries.

The game, a cowboy open-world adventure called Red Dead Redemption 2, does sound impressive. The article featuring that long-hours boastfulness from New York Magazine is worth a read. The game, scheduled for release next week, features 1,200 (unionized!) actors, 700 of them with dialogue– the CEO boasted that they were, for a while, the largest employer of actors in New York City. There are 300,000 distinct animations including hundreds of different kinds of individual plants and animals simulated and scattered around a vast western landscape. There’s a weather system, of course, so realistic weather patterns play out around you as your character wanders about with his six-gun. The weather affects everything else in the game, to the extent that the majestic stallions realistically majestic testicles which expand or contract with the temperature, and sway more in warm weather than cool weather.

Is it art? Is it art worth working 100-hour weeks for? Dying for?

I’m taking economics 101 here are my hot economics takes
Speaking of gross simplifications, here’s the introduction to a problem on international trade: “Suppose France and Spain produce only cloth and wine. Assume that each country uses only labor to produce each​ good, and that the cloth and wine made in France and Spain are exactly alike.”

In my personal economics microcosm, I’m fighting with the Mass Department of Unemployment Assistance. My claim from the 2017 layoff was closed when I got a second freelance gig this fall, but I still had 4 unused weeks of benefits. With my two freelance gigs slowing down, I should regain eligibility and be able to tap those last few dregs of my unemployment insurance.

Unfortunately, the temp agency I worked for still has me listed as an employee, even though it’s not giving me any work or money. So when I tried to re-open my claim, I was rejected and asked for additional proof of unemployment. They’re working on the review, but say that due to a large number of claims they may take a while.

unemployment-screenshot

I guess the economy is good enough that the Unemployment office can’t find enough staff to review claims. Or maybe there’s just a lot of people out of work?

Decline of the west

Twitter Curation
Jamelle Bouie reminds us of the incredible badassery of the flag of the 22nd Regiment of Colored Troops.

This cloud formation is incredible.

This sort of joke is one of the best things about Twitter:

Cultivating joy
This kitty
The charming restoration of this badly damaged vintage cast-iron pan.
From /r/natureisfuckinglit: The secretary bird has pretty dope eyelashes.
This watermelon-dog.
Goats in sweaters.
Owl sneezes.