Category: Uncategorized

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.

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!)

Once again I’m not going to comment on the sexual abuser in chief, his tax fraud, his sex-creep pals and staffers and minions. I’m just not. Everyone else has said more and better. Consider the market for hot takes: supply has long since exceeded demand.

Twitter Commentary from Unlikely Sources
There’s social media marketing, and then there’s Steak-Umms, the discount frozen meat product, which has slowly amassed a huge following, and then exploded the other week with a lengthy disquisition on the sadness of youth, which contained only one meat pun:

why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I’ll tell you why. they’re isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems — Steak-umm (@steak_umm) September 26, 2018

And then there’s Madeline L’Engle, with some trenchant political commentary from YA fiction:

“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.” — Madeleine L’Engle (@MadeleineLEngle) September 27, 2018

Linguistic evolution
The word “gammon,” a British term for a type of ham, has only recently become a word used to describe a certain type of angry conservative man. Popula explains the origin, along with plenty of hilarious examples.

I’m taking Economics 101 here are my hot economics takes
(Yes this is going to be a recurring section now)

One of the things I’m struggling with in my econ homework is the way terms are defined so narrowly for economics purposes, but used in a general sense with such broad definitions. When something is hard to find and expensive, I think of it as a shortage, but economics defines that situation as scarcity. A shortage is an entirely different phenomenon, caused by prices being too low to make it worth the time of producers to produce.

And of course, “welfare” and “social surplus” are all defined in ways that make sense on a chart but get very, very messy in real life, because they only make sense in a perfect market. (This is true of every discipline, I expect — Physics 101 assumes zero friction and ideal gases, Chemistry 101 assumes reactions are always complete, Biology 101 assumes Mendel’s phenotype charts are close enough to accurate for now). In this perfect market, buyers and sellers make the choice to buy or sell based on how much they value a given product. This creates the maximum social surplus, in which buyers get what they want (products) and sellers get what they want (money). This works very well when there are plenty of sellers, plenty of buyers, everyone’s well informed, everyone knows what they want and how much they want it, and anyone can choose to exit the market or choose substitute products if they don’t like the deal. That, of course, almost never happens in the real world.

My first paper for class contrasts this fictional ideal market with the market for wheat in Ireland in 1845, and the market for insulin in the US today, something I’ve covered in this newsletter before. The economics textbook way of describing the famine was that blight caused a reduction in supply of potatoes (not a shortage, that’s different). This increased demand for a substitute, wheat. The English clearly valued wheat more than the Irish, since they paid more for it. Irish consumers then exited the market for wheat by emigrating or simply starving to death. This is, clearly, not the market distribution of goods envisioned when students chart the market for bottled water or iPhones.

My textbook insists that economics is not normative — that economics as we study it is purely a descriptive effort. We do not decide whether it is good to have a minimum wage or a government redistribution or price support. We describe the effects. It just so happens that the effects we model in our charts aren’t quite the ones that happen in real life. The answer, of course, is that three weeks of an introductory economics course isn’t nearly enough understanding to set global economic policy. (Sadly, that’s a good deal more than most policymakers will ever have…)

See also
If “the economy” is doing so well, how come American workers aren’t better off?

Cultivating joy
Send bread do not ask why
Kitten visits puppy.
Capybara and bunny.

I’ve been reading a lot, and worrying a lot, about the court, and rape culture, and all that. And I’ll say this: I don’t have a lot to say that hasn’t already been said. A friend of mine suggested that I write more about it. About how men and women both participate in, marinate in, the rape culture that surrounds us. But I think I don’t have anything to add. I think shutting the hell up and listening to other people is probably a better contribution to the conversation for right now.

I’m angry. I’m afraid. I’m thinking I should do something but I don’t know what. Emergency supply stockplies. Protests. Sharing angry memes on the internet.

The Republican party seems transparently pro-rape, pro-racism, pro-patriarchy. It seems to make manifest the idea, expressed by Frank Wilhoit, that “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Despite all this, Gallup says approval of the Republican party is the highest it’s been in 7 years.

This note from the centrist, sensible Noah Smith, a former finance professor and current Bloomberg columnist, chills me:

Possible ways that I see the current era of U.S. political turmoil ending:
1. Everybody calms down and things go back to normal
2. Coup/civil war/national breakdown
3. War with China and/or Russia (but probably China)

So, basically:
1. The 1970s
2. The 1850s
3. The 1930s

Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) September 26, 2018

Option 1, obviously, is still the most likely. But there’s a nonzero chance of the others.

Links

• Sickening: The drowning of two mentally ill inmates locked in the back of a police van during a hurricane.
• Thoughtful: A profile of a former Tea Party darling who got locked up and realized how terrible we are to the disadvantaged.
• Strange: Curious botanists uncover a murder. No, it’s not a cozy mystery novel. Yet.
• Alarming: Fox News edited their video of yesterday’s UN speech to cut out the part where the world laughed at our president for his lies and boasting.

Pop!
Trap isn’t necessarily the hip-hop subgenre you’d expect to get the literary-magazine treatment, but N+1 has an article titled “Notes on Trap” and it’s glorious.

See also: Pitchfork’s explanation of the history of autotune.

I’m Taking Economics 101 So Here are My Hot Economics Takes
My economics textbook describes the market for insulin as almost perfectly inelastic: A reduction in price won’t move more units, because people don’t use more than they need. An increase in price won’t move fewer units, because people can’t buy less than they need. Except, of course, that there are limits even to the near-perfect. Insulin prices keep going up. It’s killing people.

(After all, as I’ve quoted repeatedly, “If it isn’t making dollars then it isn’t making sense;
if you aren’t moving units then you’re not worth the expense…”)

Meanwhile, the exploitative app economy meets exercise compulsion meets community service: The CitiBike Angels.

Cultivating Joy
If you find stuff online you think should be in the newsletter please send it in. For example, our friend Dora sent in this dog imitating a person doing lunges.

• Current Affairs ranks paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes.
• Just a reminder that Comedy Wildlife Photography is a thing.
• Glow.cat is a real URL and a real product.
• Also this cat is pretty cool.
• Also these cats.

This semester I’ve signed up for an introduction to economics. My professor spent the first half-hour of this week’s class explaining the difference between a command economy and a market economy. In a command economy like the old USSR, he said, assets are theoretically allocated according to need, but in practice allocated according to proximity to power. In a market economy, however, assets are mostly allocated according to the individual contribution to production.

He actually managed to say this with a straight face.

I know economics 101 is a gross simplification of the actual functioning of an economy, but it’s so far from reality that it’s almost unrecognizable. If assets in the US economy were allocated according to individual contribution to productivity, teachers wouldn’t have to work multiple jobs, Disney wouldn’t have so much influence over copyright law, Betsy DeVos wouldn’t have so many boats, and her brother Erik Prince wouldn’t be marketing a privatized war service.

Euphemism and Dystopia
“Great reporting,” says Matt Yglesias about a recent Washington Post article, but “my God are we living through a golden age of euphemisms.” The euphemism in question is “racially charged.” It means “racist.”

For example, when we say the acting director of ICE attended a conference hosted by a “racially charged” group, we mean “the person in charge of immigrants in this country is a racist.”

Or when we say that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has been trying to fiddle with the census in ways that have racially charged implications, we mean that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is trying to stop Latinos from voting.

Even the wolves are getting radicalized:

YOU WILL NEVER BE A BILLIONAIRE BUT THERE’S STILL TIME TO SEE WHAT THEY TASTE LIKE

NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) September 14, 2018

On the plus side, we may yet avert the eco-pocalypse through infertility. Although probably not.

Willie Nelson has a good message for people who want to vote for Ted Cruz:

Twitter Interlude: Whale Facts

whales have fewer legs than most tables

whalefact (@awhalefact) August 28, 2018

Cultivating Joy
This very good dog watching herself win an agility competition.

This cartoon cat.

Ben Shapiro, a debate-team champion who peaked in high school, has challenged congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez to a debate. One generally debates another candidate, not some jabroni, especially one known for bad-faith rhetorical tricks like the Gish Gallop. But hey, the Times sure is determined to cover this controversy.

The NYTimes and others are criticizing Alexandria @Ocasio2018 for not debating Ben Shapiro, but they’ve let Andrew Cuomo refuse to debate @CynthiaNixon for months without a single op-ed. I’m sure there’s a solid reason other than sexist double standards.

Abolish ICE and all borders (@markaprovost) August 10, 2018

There is a striking contrast between the scoldy, condescending tone of coverage of @Ocasio2018’s budget hand-waving and the decade of credulous-verging-on-worshipful coverage of the same from Paul Ryan.

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 11, 2018

NPR, that bastion of liberal bias, interviewed two different people on both sides of an important issue. On one side, an activist who wants cops to stop murdering black people. On the other, a white nationalist! Gosh, there really are two sides to every issue and they all deserve a lot of consideration!

And in addition
“Silent Sam,” the confederate monument erected in 1913 as part of a white supremacy movement at the University of North Carolina, has been taken down. The university administration is very concerned that someone could have been hurt during this rude, rude act of vandalism. (In contrast, the Classics department issued a statement almost a year ago, noting that the statue should have been long gone by now).

See also
Meanwhile, cities are freaking out about rideshare and app-based dockless bikes and e-scooters. There are risks! There are externalities!

… if you’re worried about a technology that occupies a lot of public space, undermines public transit, and sometimes injures pedestrians, I’ve got some bad news for you about normal cars.

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 11, 2018

Wholesome, yet slimy
Another look into the travails of the American snail-farmer.

The future
What happens when you can’t drive and can’t easily get yourself into a taxi or rideshare vehicle? Do you suddenly realize that building your entire geography around cars was a bad idea?

Careers
A word about the hiring process and what it reveals about how it is to work at your organization:

Conway’s law states that “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

Prince states “I guess I should’ve known by the way you parked your car sideways/That it wouldn’t last”

In other words, how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Cultivating joy
A thread about chubby pets rated on a scale from “A Fine Boi” to “O LAWD HE COMIN” 

Other Mainstream Republican Ideas

“The America we know and love is vanishing… Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.”

 Laura Ingraham, speaking for Fox News.

So, how shall we engage respectfully with these ideas? How shall we treat the statement “brown people made me sad” as a valid expression or idea with which polite society ought to engage?

(How does she manage to square it with her adoption of a Guatemalan daughter? Easy. She regards her as “one of the good ones.”)

Anyway, after this latest “gaffe” it might be time to re-evaluate her “accidental” Nazi salute to a supersize president on video.

Long reads
Modularity is “kind of a characteristic of modernity,” but modularity in our supply chains can lead to moral compartmentalization and moral blindness. How does that impact our interactions with the opaque systems around us, and the way those systems impact the people at the other end of those black boxes? 

Supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?
“It’s a staggering kind of undertaking,” said Bonnani. “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries.

Part four of a series on Cobb County, GA and its absurdly corrupt and counterproductive planning process:

The $400 million in public funds put toward the [Atlanta Braves baseball] stadium were not up for a vote, and there was hardly any opportunity for public comment. The deal also came with some unconsidered costs—not the least which was the bill for the stadium’s extensive parking… resulting in the creation of an $11 million dollar walking bridge over Interstate 285… The original agreement also overlooked the cost of police presence, saddling the county, rather than the team, with this mysteriously unforeseen expense.

(To close the shortfall, they’re closing libraries in poor neighborhoods. Surprise!)

That Grey Poupon that Evian that TED Talk
But seriously check out the Onora O’Neill TED talk on trust. Even if you hate TED talks, even if you don’t want to know about the theory or philosophy of trust and trustworthiness, listen to this one for the accent and vocabulary. Trust me. (Plus her official title is The Right Honourable Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve,CH, CBE, FRS, FBA, FMedSci. You can’t beat that legion of honors.)

Cultivating horror
The long-horned tick has arrived in the US and is spreading rapidly. 
A cop tased an 11-year-old. Tasing children as young as seven is allowed by police policy.

Cultivating joy
This mini horse running on a beach.
Animals interrupting nature photographers.
Cat feet fit perfectly.
Tiny kitten & giant dog.
Wholesome cowboy cartoon.

Remember, as long as you can take solace from thinking things can’t get any worse, they can definitely get worse.

Theory
A treatise on Urgent Earnestness. It’s the new defensive cynicism? It’s a … thing, anyway. Maybe.

In case you don’t automatically read every post there, check out the most recent one at Gin & Tacos, about the Museum of Communism in Prague. (I think he’s oversimplifying and exaggerating to make the point, but it’s an interesting point).

Oh, under communism lots of people were imprisoned? People
didn’t feel free? Government was corrupt and unresponsive? Wow interesting tell me more. Through that lens even the line of argument that capitalism is awesome for consumption looks a little wobbly; “Most people couldn’t get the things they wanted or needed” sounds an awful lot like “Most people can’t afford the things they want or need” and the difference is semantic. I guess if the reason people end up under-provided for is the most important thing to you, that argument is
worth having. In practice it isn’t.

Finance
Where did all the money go? Duh, it went to offshore tax havens.
(TLDR: “Wealth inequality measures have been grossly understating
concentration because of tax evasion and tax avoidance in tax havens.”)

Longform
A Medium article about the latest bits of the Nixon tapes to surface. Turns out Nixon and Billy Graham were even more antisemitic than you thought. Surprise. 

A Motherboard article about a group of anarchists who distribute instruction kits for making your own epipens, HIV drugs, and more.

Brad DeLong posted a chapter or so that he’s cutting from a book he’s writing, addressing why China was not as wealthy and powerful in the 20th century as
it might have been. Long, digressive, unpolished, unedited, and kind of
fascinating anyway. If this is the part that’s left on the cutting room
floor, it should be quite a book.

Stranger than fiction

A mind-controlling parasite found in cat feces may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs, researchers reported. https://t.co/ZL5WgbxzW4

NBC News (@NBCNews) July 25, 2018

Yep, this little guy is definitely a mind control vector.
As is this one, which appears to be growing right out of the ground.

Cultivating joy
Dog hides under other dog
Dog steals camera
Hedgehogs: not cats, but also very cute, and therefore possible mind-control vectors.

Buckminster Fuller in 1970, complaining about “this nonsense of earning a living,” seems to have been prescient. Or perhaps he was just rehashing Keynes from way back in ’28. Anyway, anthropologist David Graeber’s 2013 article on bullshit jobs, a piece I mentioned a few months back, is now a book that’s getting quite a lot of press.

The Economist has an interview with him discussing the yoke of managerial feudalism. The New York Times, which can’t bear to spell out s-h-i-t in the article copy, distinguishes itself by using the word “bullshit” only in the article URL of the online edition. And of course Bloomberg tries to out-hip its media rivals by using the word LOLOLOLOL as a complete sentence.

The New Yorker has a take which is somewhat different from the others, and worth noting:

It leads to a realization that Graeber circles but never articulates, which is that bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury, either.

Anyway. Six months into unemployment, I’m still looking for work. Even in a low-unemployment economy, employers are incredibly demanding and stingy. Just yesterday I spotted a junior marketing communications job that requires at least an MS, and ideally a PhD, in biochemistry. 

I suppose it makes sense. If it’s a bullshit job, then it doesn’t actually need to be done, so there’s no need to hire people based on their ability to do the work. Instead, they hire based on shiny credentials that make their bosses look impressive. “Check out the PhD in the cube over there! We’ve got highly-credentialed research scientists doing direct mail!”

LOLOLOLOL.

Politics
Look up who makes money from ICE in your state. Give ’em a call. Let ’em know you think they should stop.

Sarah Kendzior has a podcast.

A journalist was arrested for his reporting about ICE abuses. Criminal charges were dropped but because he’s an immigrant he’s now in ICE custody.

A college professor was tasked with making a parade float in addition to his regular duties. Someone didn’t like the float and now he’s out of a job.

Cuteness
This very cute dog.
This very brightly colored bird and its very black-and-white partner and their subtly tinted offspring.
Adding robot legs to help your plant move around in search of sun and water seems fun, but also potentially a sign of the apocalypse.