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.

The New Day

Well, here we are. Winter is looming. The days are shorter and the nights are colder. Not as cold as they used to be.

Ocean acidification, megastorms, megadroughts, climate genocide, dismembered journalists, global kleptocracy, the world literally on fire. It’s all out there. We can look back at the predictions from James Howard Kunstler and Sarah Kendzior and note where they got a few details wrong, but it’s roughly shaking out like they said it would.

And still, here we are. Getting up in the morning. Going to work. Saving for retirement. Putting children through school. Cleaning the house for company. Making a meal for friends and family. Planning for the future, as though there were a future to plan for.

Humans are nothing if not optimistic. Or just carried by inertia. One or the other. The motivation hardly matters if the result is the same.

Twitter rewind
From September, a Noah Smith thread on elite disaffection and the rise of socialism.

From 2015, AV Flox on the difference between being a freelance writer and a sex worker. (One of them gets no respect, and the other one has sex for money).

From 1929, a note about a force of convicts building US Route 29. (“Convicts” in this article means black laborers enslaved on a pretext.)

Rain of Blood
Indian medtech startup idea: Blood delivered by drone. What could possibly go wrong?

International Relations
Two New Zealand women wrote a letter to Kiwi pop star Lorde urging her to cancel a planned concert in Israel. Lorde canceled her show. A handful of Israeli teens who had planned to attend the show sued the letter-writers. An Israeli court awarded them a judgement of NZ$18,000. It’s not clear what this means, although the Kiwis aren’t likely to be welcome at the Tel Aviv Lorde Fan Club meeting next month.

I’m taking econ 101 here are my hot economics takes
One of the key concepts in economics 101 is opportunity cost: The thing you don’t do while you’re doing something else. Once you start thinking about it, it’s everywhere. The cost of a deli sandwich isn’t simply $8, it’s everything else you could have done with that $8, everything else you could have done with the time you were waiting in line at the sandwich shop, everything you could have done while you were eating. You could have worked harder. You could have changed the world. Instead you were eating some overpriced unsatisfying sandwich. (This message brought to you by Soylent, the food that provides nutrition and convenience and nothing else; the opportunity cost is joy and the possibility of human connection while eating a meal together).

Cultivating joy
Bunny eating a strawberry.

Hey: send me some joy, guys. It’s getting pretty bleak in here.

Literally Orwellian

Here’s a special edition of the newsletter because I’m just so angry. I can’t even get into the Brazilian fascists, the Facebook-vectored communal violence in Sri Lanka, the approach of “category 6” hurricanes, the deafening silence of our leaders in the face of catastrophic climate change, Nikki goddamn Haley, the fundamentally undemocratic institutions of the Senate, or that Saudi journalist who has allegedly been dismembered inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey.

Literally Orwellian
Kamala Harris wanted to know about children in detention, and why they’re being detained for as long as a month, separated from families. So she asked Kristjen Nielsen, who says there are no children in detention! They’re being held for processing in a secure facility. But they’re not detained.

Because the USPS doesn’t provide street addresses on a lot of rural native reservations, so a lot of tribal IDs have PO boxes instead. Guess what you need on your ID to vote in North Dakota?

Brian Kemp is running for Governor of Georgia. He’s also the Secretary of State of Georgia, and as such is responsible for voter registration. He’s also a Republican. Guess what he’s doing with minority voter registration? Yeah, 53,000 voter registrations are on hold in his office, most of them from minority voters. It’s expected to be a tight race, and the suppression could very easily be within the margin of error. (Gin & Tacos goes into a little more detail on how the “Exact Match” scam works … and notes that Kemp has also tried to close some polling locations in Black neighborhoods).

A Democratic campaign worker was arrested for no apparent reason while delivering documents to a courthouse in Austin, Texas.

USA Today published an op-ed full of lies and slander. It was written by the president.

Cultivating Joy
This tiny mammal looks like it’s reading.

Gravedigger of American Democracy

Conservatives love to say that liberals try to make everything about race. But it seems to me that they have an entire vocabulary of racial codewords that they may not even realize they’re using. “Suburban” always means “white.” “Urban” always means black and poor. “Hardworking” always means white and rich. “Working class” always means white and middle-income. White people with jobs who live in the city? Elitists. Black people who live in the suburbs and work in kitchens or factories? Not really mentioned.

This is true of sports commentary, as well (For a look at how sports commentary and right-wing media are basically drawing from the same well, check out this article by the founder of Deadspin): Black athletes are praised for their instincts, their physicality, their natural talent. White athletes get praised for their smarts, their hard work, their approachable personality, their looks.


And speaking of national politics… it ain’t good. Notable scholars are calling Mitch McConnell “the gravedigger of American Democracy.” And as we all know, and should have known for some time, moderate Republicans cannot save us. Our only hope is that they’re as incompetent as they are evil.

Rep. Jim Renacci, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, defended flying in a strip-club owner’s private plane to a meeting earlier this week with faith leaders. As one does. https://t.co/RWAEFp8Y2K — Catherine Rampell (@crampell) October 6, 2018

I’m taking Economics 101 here are my hot economics takes
Despite it not being part of my homework, I’m slogging my way through the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2018 report titled “Power, Platforms, and the Free Trade Delusion.” It’s very dense. It may make more sense after the macroeconomics portion of the course. But the introduction is pretty sharp:

[In] the end, social and political actions – in the form of rules, norms and policies – will determine how the future unfolds.
In this respect, the digital revolution has the misfortune of unfolding in a neo-liberal era. Over the last four decades, a mixture of financial chicanery, unrestrained corporate power and economic austerity has shredded the social contract that emerged after the Second World War and replaced it with a different set of rules, norms and policies, at the national, regional and international levels. This has enabled capital – whether tangible or intangible, long-term or short-term, industrial or financial – to escape from regulatory oversight, expand into new areas of profit-making and restrict the influence of policymakers over how business is done.
This agenda has co-opted a vision of an interconnected digital world, free from artificial boundaries to the flow of information, lending a sense of technological euphoria to a belief in its own inevitability and immutability. Big business has responded by turning the mining and processing of data into a rent-seeking cornucopia

Art/Transit Criticism Twitter
Cultivating joy
French bulldog puppy discovers mud.
Ladybug as hat.

What if… movie posters from an alternate universe.

Dog abandons obstacle course for hugs.

Consider the Market for…

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.

The Cold Frisson of Franklin Morbidly Displacing the Erotic Potential of Sexual Attraction

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

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.

Golden Age of Euphemisms

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.