Secretly Ironic

Old-school blog maestro Jason Kottke occasionally posts a list of what he calls his recent media diet. Just, here’s what he’s been interested in, and he hopes you might be too. He usually chooses pretty interesting stuff, which is sometimes intimidating. A lot of what I’ve been consuming recently is deliberately not that interesting.

But after a long day of global insanity it’s terribly nice to shut out the outside world. The Guardian says that “comfort TV” is a legitimate trend, and I am completely unsurprised.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a sweeping space opera series called The Expanse. It’s been bumbling around in my awareness for ages and is now more widely known because of a somewhat-popular TV adaptation from Syfy and (ugh) Amazon.

I’m obsessed. Right now I’m waiting for two more volumes of the series to arrive at my library. But it’s not a media food I can recommend unreservedly, in the way I recommend Becky Chambers to everyone even if they don’t like sci-fi. For one thing, the first book is heavily macho, featuring a hard-boiled detective dude, a washed-up military dude with lofty ideals, and a young woman in peril. Second, it’s enormous: eight volumes so far, each thick enough to stun an ox. By the time the novels begin to interrogate and mock the macho tropes laid out in the first volume, you’re already seven or eight hundred pages in. Key bits of the universe – the actual expanse of the title – don’t even begin to show up until volume four. “Give it two or three thousand pages” is a pretty big ask for most folks skeptical about the premise of intergalactic political intrigue.

On to the linkings.

How We Live Now
Briefings from the Justice Department have included articles from noted white nationalist website VDare
A Falun-Gong affiliated group has been spending heavily on pro-Trump ads on Facebook
Sydney Morning Herald: US in the Midst of a White Nationalist Terrorism Crisis
Dallas police recorded laughing as they killed a man they had arrested
An incoming Harvard freshman was deported on arrival because he’s Facebook friends with someone who has opinions that CBP didn’t like
Someone has felt the need to develop a fashion line designed to confuse automated license plate readers

Cultivating Joy
This very round bird is adorable
This kitten and dog are friends
There were once giant parrots in New Zealand
The “glamorous opossum lady” is living her truth and we should respect that
 

A co-worker of mine recently needed to find a new primary care physician, as one does when moving to a new town and getting a new insurance company. So I got to hear her call number after number on her insurance company’s guide to available doctors and have various versions of the following conversation:

“Hello, is this Dr. So-and-so’s office? Yes, I’d like to make a new patient appointment. Well, you’re listed as taking new patients. Gargantuan Health Insurance Corp. You’ve never even heard of them? Well, they’ve heard of you. They said you were in-network!” 

I am not surprised that a list is wrong or woefully out of date. After all, patient lists fill up, people switch jobs, practices change their insurance policies. So it wouldn’t be a surprise to have a few outdated items in a directory.

But apparently that incredibly frustrating process is more or less deliberate.

Providing accurate and up-to-date guides is not easy, but it’s not impossible. But an insurer has every reason to avoid doing it. An incorrect and woefully out-of-date list is a barrier to access, and putting up barriers to access is good for the bottom line. What better way to prevent people from using expensive medical services than by making it hard for them to find a doctor?

The problem is especially acute for mental health care, because it’s more expensive to provide, and people in psychiatric distress find it especially difficult to navigate actively hostile processes, meaning that dark pattern of bad lists is especially good at keeping them from using their insurance. 

But it’s good for the stock price, right?

Kind of cool
How prison tattoos are made.
Everything that’s wrong with Uber.
A list of names of kinds of wind.

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Diabetics risking their lives for discount insulin.
Record-breaking melt event in Greenland and Arctic Ocean.
A nine-year-old used his allowance to pay for the lunches of his impoverished classmates.

Normal Mainstream Republicans
Republican legislators in Oregon have walked out in order to break quorum and avoid voting on a climate change bill. That’s an OK, if extreme, stunt in support of impending climate disaster. They have been ordered to return and will be pursued by the state police. This is an escalation, but it’s sort of part of the game. One legislator has gotten an antigovernment militia to provide security and has told the police they’d better be sending heavily armed men who are willing to die if they expect to drag him back to his job to vote on a climate change bill. Yeah.

Meanwhile, Pew Social Trends notes that “There is a sharp partisan divide in attitudes about interracial marriage… Only 28% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents” believe that interracial marriage is a good thing.

And there’s that republican operative melting down over metric system conspiracy theory.

Cultivating joy
Big cat surprised by small cat.
This very round bird.
Orphaned kittens need to be taught how to groom themselves. This is how that’s done.
Dogs who eat too fast can be given special bowls that slow down their gulping. Some dogs who eat too fast will have none of that.
This chinchilla.
This small bird with a giant schnozz.
This incredible gymnastic cat.

I’ve finally gone and joined a book club, and the book we’re reading is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and it’s every bit as heartbreaking as you’d expect — lapse after lapse of medical ethics, multigenerational trauma, all the inequalities of American society laid bare. And the author keeps inserting herself into the story in a way that just underscores the shortcomings of every well-meaning white liberal endeavor. It’s kind of a slog.

Anyway, here are some links.

Callbacks
The other week I mentioned the Burger King Angry Meals… Lauren Oyler has a more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of advertising that admits that life is terrible so you might as well consume these terrible products to go with it. The article is titled “This Is What it Sounds Like When Brands Cry.”

I also wrote about the temptation to identify yourself so strongly with your job that you’re uncertain who you are without it. Again in the Times, there’s a more thorough set of guidelines to how to address that issue. And of course, because nothing is complete without the Times making a condescending visit to a midwestern white male manufacturing worker who voted for fascists, a profile of a white male manufacturing worker wondering who he is without his job.

Also, because I can’t resist dunking on David Brooks: David Brooks Decries Incivility Of Modern Plumbing After Tripping On Feet And Falling Headfirst Into Toilet.

Heartwarming Capitalist Dystopia

SO HEARTWARMING! When this little boy’s family couldn’t afford lifesaving surgery his local Home Depot gave him a free shovel and drove him out to the desert to dig his own grave — pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) May 30, 2019

Semantics

minor 2019 semantic nit: now that all the fascists have come out of hiding, we should use that term “cryptofascists” just for fascists who also happen to own Bitcoin — welcome to dot 🏳️‍🌈 (@WelcomeToDot) May 28, 2019

Mainstream Republicans
Records prove clearly what we already kind of knew: Republican operatives are trying to fiddle the census to increase the electoral power of white people.

Not a drill: natural gas is now “molecules of freedom.” This is from the BBC. I am not making this up.

Elizabeth Warren is the Hermione Granger of this Timeline

Mueller: Did ANYONE do the reading assignment?
Warren: [raises hand]
Mueller: Anyone OTHER than Elizabeth? — Valerie Aurora (@vaurorapub) May 29, 2019

Cultivating Joy
These very round seals.
A neural net tries to name cats.
A very smol … dog? buffalo? Tiny thing anyway. Very cute.
Frog & Toad x NWA is the hot new streetwear collab of the season. Yes, it’s available in baby sizes.

In my economics class this week we learned about asymmetric information and adverse selection, as exemplified by the lemon problem. The classic example is used cars: if someone has a good car to sell, they know it’s a good car and want to get the best price for it. But the buyer can’t know whether it’s good or not, and won’t pay top dollar for it. Therefore, only sellers of lemons enter the market, driving down prices and driving out sellers with good products. This is resolved with market signals like guarantees, which are costly to sellers of low-quality products and cheap for sellers of good-quality products.

The second example we got was education. Your extension school degree, our professor says, may or may not improve your actual productivity or value as a worker. There are people who argue that educational attainment doesn’t actually improve productivity. But it demonstrates your productivity. It is theoretically more time-consuming and therefore more expensive for a low-productivity worker to pursue a degree.

Your degree, in other words, is a badge saying you can jump through arbitrary hoops. It’s an expensive piece of paper that demonstrates how hard you can work to get expensive pieces of paper. (This model does not, of course, take into account any of the other reasons that some people might find it harder to attend and graduate from college).

It was not exactly the most inspiring motivation to study for my exam.

Mainstream Republicans
Iowa’s longest-serving Republican has renounced his party, saying that today’s mainstream Republican party is repugnant.
Twitter will have a hard time cracking down on white nationalism because algorithms can’t tell it apart from mainstream Republican talking points.
A video of a random dude at a Trump rally wearing a “Hillary for Prison” shirt and shouting “Jew-S-A” at the “Jew media” has not gone viral because it’s kind of par for the course.
Standard Republican talking point: Democrats promote infanticide. I’ve actually gotten Facebook ads accusing Mass Democrats of supporting an “infanticide bill.” This rhetoric is both nonsensical and dangerous and will lead directly to the murder of physicians.
White nationalist Steve Scalise was exposed as such in 2015, but is still in office.
Republican-led campaigns in Texas and Tennessee are trying to make voter registration harder in the face of increasing minority voter turnout.

Cultivating joy
A classic: Slime eels in highway crash.
Red Pandas are pretty cute.
Unlikely kitten/mouse friendship.