It’s a Privilege

I don’t have a short essay for you this week, so let me just recommend this reflection on privilege and whiteness by Utah Jazz player Kyle Korver.

Now, on to the links.

Wait, what?
The March 18 episode of the War On Cars podcast features a surprising guest: Ray Magliozzi of NPR’s Car Talk. “My brother hated cars….He was against cars because of all of the things they do to our lives and to our world. And I agree.”

The medium is the message
Flat roofs have historically been more urban, and that may be related to why proposed suburban buildings with flat roofs seem to generate more opposition than peaked-roof buildings.

Twitter curation

prequels i’d like to see get made:
•Jaw
•Apocalypse Then
•The Blair Witch Assignment
•Snakes Getting A Ride To The Airport
•Dance Lessons With Wolves
•Star Disagreements

Kim beans (@KimmyMonte) March 22, 2019

Mainstream Republicans
Georgia Republicans try to establish a special oversight board for journalism they dislike.
Although previously criticized for saying “there aren’t enough white kids to go around,” an Arizona Republican legislator was finally forced to resign when it was discovered exactly what he’d been doing with those white kids.

ThisIsFine.gif
Students who protested a campus speaker will be charged with misdemeanors.
This man was just acquitted… after spending four years in jail awaiting trial.
From last spring but no less relevant: What happens when you kill a bicyclist? (Answer: nothing. It’s totally legal to kill cyclists. All my neighborhood Facebook and Nextdoor groups feature a great deal of victim-blaming for dead or injured cyclists, and often fantasizing about deliberately hitting them. Twitter wags often note that, for a white man, getting on a bicycle in a major city is a good educational experience about the lives of others, the way they have to be constantly aware that the world can get incredibly dangerous at any moment, and that when it does, everyone will say it’s their fault for being in the way.)

Cultivating oddity
The mystery of the Garfield phones.

Cultivating joy
The Jacobin Pigeon looks pretty aristocratic for something that shares a name with an edgy leftist magazine.
All these lovely cows.
This basketball-playing dog.
Dutch police have trained eagles to hunt drones.
Bear removes hot tub cover to take a nice soak.
Wild, wild horses.
In a previous newsletter, I included a link to a napping cat that didn’t work for everyone. Here’s another place it’s been posted. It’s pretty great.

The Death of the Rock Star

The other day, Spotify recommended me a playlist of new rock music, which is something of a reminder that rock music is now a specialty genre. Even before 2017, when hip-hop officially became the most popular genre in the US, rock was in a decline behind pop and hip-hop and r&b. But when the Coachella music festival didn’t even have any rock acts in the lineup, it was pretty clear that rock had lost its salience to the broad popular-music consumer audience.

They just don’t seem to be minting any new rock stars these days. Quick, name a rocker under 60. (Subscriber #7, I’m sure you can, but come on, Ty Segall is a niche artist.) Jack White, maybe? He’s well-known enough, I guess, but I bet you he can still walk down the street without being mobbed by fans.

So, rock stars are fading away. But the metaphorical “rock star” is still everywhere. Post Malone’s mumbled hip-hop anthem “Rockstar” was at the top of the charts for weeks, Rockstar energy drink is in every corner store, Rockstar Games is the video game company, and every other job listing describes what they want in a “rock star” contributor.

What do we even mean by “rock star” in the post-rock era?

Post Malone obviously means excess and debauchery (and the scene has definitely gotten excessive and debauched—this profile of flavor-of-the-week rapper Lil Pump is horrifying and sad). Rockstar energy drink just means everything’s turned all the way up: loud music, bright graphics, assertively gross energy drink flavors, and way too much caffeine. Rockstar games… yeah, also excess, both in the games themselves and in the long hours it takes to produce them.

What do employers mean by rock star? Not getting drunk and trashing the conference room, but still someone whose skills and performance earn them leeway for misbehavior. And obviously, a dude. (How many of you thought about Meg White when I mentioned her ex-husband Jack? Aside from subscriber #7?)

I’m guessing that in a few years, we’ll think of that metaphor as yet another overlooked sign of something amiss in our culture. (Although not that overlooked, given the number of articles with titles like “You Shouldn’t Hire That Rock Star Candidate“).

Anyway, one of the new rock songs bouncing around is called Sawed-Off Shotgun. It’s about giving in to mental illness, addiction, and pointless violence. Good times. If it ever gets any radio play, I look forward to finding out whether they bleep the words “shotgun” and “oxycodone” the way they would in a hip-hop song.

Not Good

Hey you know the viral video of cops killing Eric Garner? Here’s what happened to the guy who shot the video. It’s… not good. Rat poison is involved.

Hey, you know ICE? Here’s how they do warrants. It’s… not good.

Some supervisors even gave their officers pre-signed blank warrants — in effect, illegally handing them the authority to begin the deportation process.

Hey, you remember what happened after Baltimore police were acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray? Cops rapidly decided that rather than comply with rules against brutalizing the citizenry, they’d just quit doing their jobs. Results were … not good.

The department’s officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as “the pullback”: a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union.
…
Batts admitted he was having trouble getting officers to do their job. “I talked to them again about character and what character means,” he told me and other reporters following a City Council hearing.

That’s the truly cruel thing about it. We actually do need law enforcement, and too many poor and minority communities suffer from a paradoxical combination of not enough law enforcement and too much policing.

Mainstream Republicans
Rob Bishop (R-UT) claims that a Green New Deal is tantamount to genocide.
Republican voters in Pennsylvania explain their fears: melanin and socialism.

Not Mainstream
A Seattle radio host claims that triplexes and zoning reform are a socialist conspiracy. (Oddly, socialists often oppose similar changes by claiming they’re part of a neoliberal developer conspiracy…)

Cultivating Joy
Library forced to close when a moose takes a lengthy nap near the door.
Fainting goats are always a good time.
This dog is not very good at agility, but he is a very good dog who brings joy to those who watch him wander off-piste to beg judges to pet him, then start lounging in the cozy tunnel obstacle.
The entire Instagram account Round.Boys is awesome but this almost globular little puffball of a puppy is so, so, so good.

Check Your Priors: Tragedy of the Commons

There’s a great deal of hype right now about the newest drug to treat depression: esketamine. Psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex isn’t convinced. Regular ketamine, at $10 a dose, seems to work great. But a pharmaceutical company can’t make money on that, so nobody’s paid the big bucks to run it through official clinical trials, so it’s never even been approved for depression. What do? Develop an isometric ketamine derivative you can patent and sell for $590-$885 a dose, of course!

Also it doesn’t seem to actually, you know, work. Not like the cheaper, off-patent, original. But hey, at least it’s profitable and comes in a convenient nasal spray!

Check Your Priors
Hey, remember the concept of the tragedy of the commons? Turns out it’s all a lie. BoingBoing pointed me to the Twitter thread about it, but it seemed so appalling that I had to check to make sure it wasn’t an exaggeration. So, here’s a couple paragraphs from the classic influential 1968 paper from Science:

Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of “dog eat dog”— if indeed there ever was such a world — how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line — then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Yes, that’s his argument that food aid and a welfare state are bad because they inhibit the natural order of those people starving to death when they breed too much.

And also, for crying out loud, the plural of millennium is millennia.

Papers, Please
A man is badly injured on the job, but employer’s worker’s compensation insurance has lapsed. Rather than comply with its obligations, the firm tries to have the injured man deported.

Mainstream Conservatives
Steve King (R-IA) gets an awful lot of support from the white nationalist hate group Identity Evropa.

New Hampshire has quite a large state legislature, so you can always find a handful of out-there examples, like the founder of the popular misogynist messageboard /r/TheRedPill. But this one is pretty impressive, because several Granite State Republican legislators decided that wearing pearl necklaces (as in “you’re clutching your pearls”) was a great way to mock people testifying in favor of a gun safety bill.

Misc
NPR: White suburbanites cause an awful lot of the air pollution in minority urban neighborhoods.
MassLive: Robot bartenders are coming for our jobs.
Paris Review: The tragic tale of the Phantom Gambler… and how it’s been co-opted to advertise casinos.
BoingBoing: Pentagon’s new robot tank “adheres to all legal and ethical standards” for automated death robots.
Twitter: This is a rather callous series of jokes about the “Fake Melania” conspiracy theory but also I laughed, so… I guess, to me, the real Melania is the friends we ate along the way.

Cultivating Joy
Timelapse of cat napping all day. Watch to the end.
Baby albatross! 
Vincent D’Onofrio does not like monkeys.
These puppies trying to howl.

A few words about the economy

A brilliant little essay came across my feeds last week, from a fashion/not-fashion blog called Man Repeller. It’s about this temptation to “rise & grind,” to monetize every hobby and make it a side-hustle:

We live in the era of the hustle. Of following our dreams until the end, and then pushing ourselves more. And every time we feel beholden to capitalize on the rare places where our skills and our joy intersect, we underline the idea that financial gain is the ultimate pursuit. If we’re good at it, we should sell it. If we’re good at it and we love it, we should definitely sell it.

As it turns out, turning a passion into a career is not always a path to happiness. It can be a path to an unbalanced life.

I hadn’t thought about it much, to be honest, but it resonates with me. When I was writing a lot of poetry, I didn’t try to get it published. When I started this newsletter, I didn’t even consider signing up for Patreon and asking people to contribute. I already have several jobs. I don’t need another. Yet.

Polarization
I have a recurring disagreement with one of my subscribers (hi Dad!) about whether it’s important to respect  conservatives and engage seriously with their ideas, since they’re our fellow countrymen and we owe it to them, even if we disagree.

But major conservative donor and influencer Jerry Falwell Jr. came up on stage at a major convention recently and threatened to shoot Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a cattle rustler. He’s also known for wishing more people carried guns to shoot Muslims. So, maybe let’s not?

I’m not the only one saying this. Brad DeLong, a self-described “Rubin Democrat” and well-known moderate Democrat, says the Democratic Socialists should drive the bus now, since being a moderate requires a good-faith negotiator on the right side of the aisle, and his team of moderates were clearly wrong when they thought they could find a middle path through compromise:

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

Longreads, Shortreads
Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

Don’t trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn’t. Not Working is about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.

Now from The Onion: Pros & Cons of Congestion Pricing. (Market urbanism is hilarious don’t @ me).

WTF, Possibly NSFW
CES, the global consumer electronics expo, issued an award to a woman-led company for its groundbreaking work on female sexual health. Then they rescinded the award, claimed the product was obscene, and banned the company from even attending the expo. Par for the course in the consumer electronics space.

(Yes, I’m aware that I am linking to an article about the downsides of entrepreneur-obsessed hustle culture and to an article from a newsletter about entrepreneurship called The Hustle. I contain multitudes).

See also: Fake doctor sex expert.

Papers, Please
Mentally ill veteran born in the US was carrying his passport when arrested but still spent 3 days in ICE custody.

Cultivating Joy
This bird is very odd looking. (Twitter)
These blokes arguing about a pet emu (click for sound) (Twitter)
Puffin with a rainbow full of tiny fish in its beak. (Nat Geo)
These cats sitting on glass tables are just the best. (Insta)
A dog thrilled to go on a walk after leaving a shelter. (Twitter)

Ineffective surveillance, Apartment Construction Trends, Pangolins, Prince

The best thing I read this month was titled Forget privacy, you’re terrible at targeting anyway.

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There’s no magic here.
…
Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.

You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business… for this?

Housing policy rant
All these new apartment buildings look the same! Why the hell is that? Part of it, it turns out, is that a combination of flame-retardant lumber and sprinkler systems make wood-frame midrise construction allowable in many building codes, and the financing works out in areas with moderate-to-high demand, and that’s why we have this particular shape of 3-5 story building with parking and/or retail on the ground floor.

Before you begin calling the 5-over-1 or 3-over-1 buildings “monstrosities,” note that they’re not. Here’s a Twitter threat touring some of the most beautiful ones around the world.

Or take it from the English, who have been dealing with 3-4 story buildings for quite some time:

Meanwhile, exlusionary zoning requiring only single-family homes is just segregation by another name.

Anyway, legalize apartments.

Data visualization

Jackson Pollock dataviz.
W.E.B. Dubois’ beautiful hand drawn charts about African-Americans, presented at the 1900 Paris Expo.

Zoom Zoom
A record number of Americans are more than 90 days behind on car payments.

“Predatory lending practices and a lack of real transportation options leave many households trapped in debt with few ways out,” said Faye Park, president of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which advocates for consumer protections.

Meanwhile, CityLab asks us: As the planet warms, who gets to drive? Why do so many jobs require us to own cars?

Social Media Curation
Reminder: Batman is actually bad.
Sing along with “My Neck, My Back, We Tried This In Iraq…”

Cultivating Joy
Rough neighborhood: This crow has an ankle monitor and a knife.
Which is better? The tiny dog winning the agility championship? Or the slightly-larger dog just sort of chillaxing along the agility course?
Cat ladders!
This dude who just really enjoys growing prize-winning giant vegetables.
Pangolins. Just…. pangolins.
There is now an official archive of Prince gifs.

This Field is Required

It’s not at all original to note that gender-based product marketing is weird as hell. A friend who has a toddler recently posted a picture on social media of two packs of children’s underpants, pointing out that even for toddlers there’s a pink tax, with the girl’s parents expected to pay a substantial surcharge for a
seven-pack of day-of-the-week underpants. That goes on for years. Razors. Deodorant. Whatever.

Over-gender-determined product marketing is also really weirdly condescending to men, with hundreds of products designed to reassure Mister Man about his massculinity. It’s almost hard to parody, although Twitter usually rises to the challenge:
And this follows us everywhere. You get sort of blind to it, the way you
stop noticing the way something smells, until you pay attention, and
then it’s overwhelming.

I had to edit a page at work this week about about Botox For Men. It’s
exactly like regular Botox, but there’s a Sports Illustrated in the
waiting room and it says it’s For Men. Every nonsurgical cosmetic
procedures clinic in America needs a special page on its website about
Botox For Men because too many men won’t do a thing they suspect is
feminine. We’d probably all be better off if everyone quit worrying
about eye-wrinkles, but it’s revealing and kind of sad that some men are
afraid to do anything about theirs without a sign that says CAMO PRINT,
NONSURGICAL COSMETIC PROCEDURES, & TRUCK NUTS IN AISLE THREE.

We have a long way to go, brothers and sisters.

Billionaire Boys Club
Peter Thiel funds a science magazine called Inference. It includes a ton of junk science in with some decent stuff. Apparently that’s deliberate.

The Future
“Riverbed,” a short story from a new collection called A People’s Future of The United States.

What the Future of Work Means for America’s Cities.

Won’t repeat, might rhyme: a history of how the car industry invented the crime of jaywalking and stole the streets from pedestrian.

Twitter Curation
The Duck Dynasty guy is back and opposed to health care because we’ll all live forever in Jesus.

Cultivating … Something
Hey remember the neon-colored joy of Lisa Frank? It’s back, in 21st century nihilist despair form! (There’s also merch!)

The spider-tailed viper has a tail that looks like a spider. Which it
uses to attract things that eat spiders. So it can eat them. It is terrifying.

Cultivating Joy
This spider is cute though.
This dog encountering a glass floor very cautiously.
A very cute bun with very cute mini-buns inside it.
These amazing photos of Jupiter from this past summer.

I’m a Real Boy!

This week I finally rejoined the full-time workforce, albeit on a 6-month temp contract. I did not miss the phenomenon of rush hour but everything else has been very nice. I get up each day and see the same bus driver on the 88 bus, and there’s work to be done and I’m helping organize a giant pile of information and learning all kinds of weird and novel stuff.

Still, there are unpleasant reminders everywhere of my inferior contingent status, beginning with an ID badge branded NON-EMPLOYEE, and continuing with a note that since Monday is a federal holiday, I am welcome to take the day off, but I won’t get paid. I now have a company email address as though I were an employee, which means that when HR sends out an all-hands note reminding employees that they have access to discounted event tickets and assorted fringe benefits, I get it. But when I click on the offer, I’m blocked from the section of the intranet that describes those benefits. Sorry, when I invited everyone to the party, I meant only the real people. Not you.

Our Current Political … Whatever
Quick roundup: Cardi B has the best political commentary on the shutdown (seriously, listen to what she has to say, especially if you’re too old to know, or think you don’t care, who Cardi B is) followed closely by the actual Yahoo! News! Headline! “TSA Workers, No Longer Giving A Fuck, Play Uncensored Rap Music In Airports.”

And just as a reminder of what the Republican party is, notorious holocaust denier Chuck Johnson was spotted in close company with two Republican representatives. He had apparently been visiting with them to talk about genetics. You know. Like you do.

And of course, plus ça change.

About the investigation of Individual 1, I have only this to say:

In the UK, the Daily Show has a Great British Bake Off/Brexit Crumble joke that is almost too on the nose.

Cultivating Joy
I don’t have anything cute today, but on the plus side, scientists have genetically engineered spicy tomatoes. Add in some lime and cilantro genes and you have something that becomes salsa when you put it in a blender.

Plus, these very good photos are really neat.

JACKCHOP!

The Unasked Question

I read a lot of college application essays these days. And one of the most common pieces of advice I give to students is to look at the essay prompt from the perspective of the admissions committee, and remember that they have a second question, one they’re not asking. They ask “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?” but what they mean is “What does your story show us about why you should be on our campus? How does it reveal you to be a student we want around?”

Unasked questions are everywhere if you look for them. Buzzfeed hosted a chat with a bunch of advice columnists and they said that, especially in relationships, there’s often an unasked question. In these cases, the asker doesn’t even know they’re asking the wrong question. They ask “how do I get my partner to…” and they mean “how do I get what I need without inconveniencing or offending anyone?” and the answer is “You will have to speak up and inconvenience or offend someone.” And sometimes, if not usually, it’s far worse. As Nicole Cliffe, of Care & Feeding, says: “The asked question is “How can I tell my stepdad not to talk about Alex Jones in front of my children?” and the question I need to actually answer is “Is it possible for me to bar my door to a man who physically and emotionally abused me for six years, even if it makes my mother sad?”

Please send me further unasked questions you encounter.

This truly is a bizarre timeline
This week’s “are you kidding me” headline comes to you from Newsweek: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fake Nude Photos Debunked By Foot Fetishist. Yep. Someone Photoshopped AOC’s face onto a photo of Sydney Leathers, best known for sexting with formerly respected person Anthony Weiner. And of course someone recognized her toes. Like you do.

Thoughtful reads
The psychology and architecture of science fiction, submarines, cities, towers, and alienation: “…as if those structures’ bewildered new residents are encountering not a thoughtfully designed building but the spatial effects of an algorithm, a code stuck auto-suggesting new floors, supermarkets, and parking lots when any sane designer would long ago have put down the drafting pen.”

The Burnout Generation: I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset.

The Skills Gap was a Lie: In other words, the skills gap was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause. With workers plentiful, employers got choosier. Rather than investing in training workers, they demanded lots of experience and educational credentials.

An article I wrote for the MIT Energy Initiative house magazine has been adopted and promoted by the main MIT News Office, which is kind of cool.

Cultivating joy
Horse plays with giant soccer ball.
Dachshunds … well, just check the Twitter caption.
This feat of bricklaying/domino-toppling must be watched all the way through and with sound on.

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?