Seattle: Congestion City

Seattle it's time we talked.

You’re not a kid anymore. People have lived in your footprint for thousands of years. But your recent growth spurt has been phenomenal. You will start to notice some changes, if you haven’t already: some of them terrifying, some of them delightful. You’ll feel things you never felt before. You’ll start hanging out with a faster crowd, and they won’t always be good for you.

With great change comes great responsibility, to paraphrase Marvel Comics. And it is time to take on some of that responsibility. It sounds daunting, but remember: We love you.

C’mon, Seattle. You’re growing into a big city.

It’s time to start acting like one.

Think of the city’s situation as your first day of kindergarten, or arriving on campus at a big college, or leaving a small family business to work at a big firm. Suddenly, you’re surrounded by others. Every time you turn over on your nap mat, somebody’s feet are in your face. There’s a line for lunch, then a line at the milk cooler, then a line to turn in your lunch tray. Years later, you’re crammed into a shoebox-sized dorm room at night, and in a lecture hall of 200-plus every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Seattle is that transition writ large. Between 2008 and 2017, our Emerald City added more than 100,000 people. It’s as if the entire population of Everett decided to move here in nine years. And all those people need space for their nap mats. (...)

Seattle cannot sprawl. Buildings have to be built closer together, and because they can’t get wider, they get higher. The roads and the sidewalks don’t get any wider, either. There certainly aren’t any more parking places for the people moving here. The bus stops that were placed just a few years ago were for a handful of people, not the crowds of 50 to 75 that jockey for space. This is “density,” and Seattle, you’re just not used to it.

I'm looking at you in particular, South Lake Union. A decade ago, a pedestrian was more likely to encounter rats and liquor bottles on the sidewalk than another person. Since then, Amazon added nearly 35,000 jobs, most of them in SLU. Now, the area is bustling with throngs of employees and their dogs; food trucks serving lunch to the employees and dogs; Ubers and Lyfts dropping off and picking up; cranes to build more high-rises; and construction workers trying to flag, drive and walk. The maze of streets that used to pass empty parking lots and shuttered commercial laundry buildings is carrying Ubers, Lyfts, buses, dump trucks and commuters. (Wait until Amazon reaches its goal of enough office space next decade for 55,000 workers. Does the plan say anything about where these people are going to fit amid closed-off streets and sidewalks? Doubt it.) It’s as if a giant vise had the city in its jaws and was slowly squeezing. And the people caught in it — all of us — are forced to get closer to one another.

Are we midtown Manhattan? By no means. The New York Times’ excellent 2016 article about sidewalk congestion noted that on one weekday, 26,831 pedestrians used a stretch of Fifth Avenue in three hours. However, the same article notes sidewalk crowding on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We’ve made the big time — kind of.

We have to take notice of others. There are so many of us now. Gone are the days when you could jump on the first bus that came by for your route and grab a seat, or go to Pike Place Market without dodging mobs of visitors and a stream of drivers who insist on motoring through the city’s most crowded thoroughfare. Driving I-5 south on a Friday night usually involves tears.

I’m not aiming this solely at residents; visitors, you need to adjust your expectations, too. If you haven’t been here in a while, this isn’t your mom and dad’s Seattle. The Kingdome is gone. Teslas are everywhere. Speaking of cars: Their numbers in the city have grown by about 1 jillion. (Well, OK; not a jillion. But, the number of car registrations grew by 7 percent between 2013 and 2015, while population grew just more than 2 percent, which was kind of a surprise.) Get it? Seattle is a big city now.

The squeeze really starts to pinch in places where we’re all thrown together a little more than we’re used to. Mainly, jammed public transportation, the region’s congested freeways and public thruways. This might be a little hard to swallow, Seattle, but frankly, you could do a little better when it comes to sharing the space you’ve become accustomed to over the years with a lot more people. And newcomers, there’s an awful lot of you all at once, but you’ve still got to share with those who were here already, no matter how many of those high-rises were built just for you.

Here's How:

by Melissa Davis, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Gabriel Campanario/The Seattle Times

[ed. See also: After 14 years, I’ve had it. I’m leaving Seattle]

T-Mobile to Buy Sprint for $26.5 Billion

T-Mobile’s loud, outspoken John Legere is not your typical CEO

[ed. Now this is an informed CEO! Great video with lots of good information on the mobile industry in general. There's a reason why T-Mobile employees and shareholders love John Legere. (Update: click on the link to watch on YouTube).]

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Jody Overstreet, Harvest Moon, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
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Moments of Truth: Life and Change on the Kobuk River

It's getting dark in my sod house. I'm alone, and the heaped snowdrifts out my windows make me feel more buried down in the ground than usual in this subterranean home. In the dimness, along the north wall, my Mason jars and hanging cups and the pinned-up photographs of my family's past here on this hill reflect the faint and fading glow.

I'm hoping my solar panel charged today; I'd like some light, maybe some music. And I promised myself I'd write this evening, about caribou. I promise that every day, but every day I just want to be outside, snowshoeing after rabbits, chipping a waterhole, hauling firewood, doing what I grew up doing, what I love — working and hunting and inhaling the land and wind and returning sun — not struggling with unruly words. Being alone is easier outside than inside, too.

Writing, for me, is tougher than all the toughest things I do, and lately there's a new hole in the trail — another added difficulty besides my dyslexia, bad spelling and jumbled thoughts — a steady blizzard of mixed messages in my head, questioning what matters most in these modern days, what will help, how will I write about caribou without making people mad? The most discordant voice demands: Why write? Who reads? Who out there is not on their phone, or busy buying a newer phone? Who has time or even cares anymore about caribou, or porcupine problems, how tall the Labrador tea has grown, or how thin the ice on the river is this year?

Speaking of ice, the traditional trail along this section of the river has been snowed-in this season, unused, buried. Finally, this week some travelers are passing, mostly because of the Kobuk 440 dog race. They are sticking to the fresh trail, though. That leaves me uneasy, strangely — feeling at home but a little out of place — to have almost no people out roaming the country for food and furs.

Beside me here, on the old table my dad made, under my stained coffee mug, a yellow sticky Post-It note says, "Tell a truth you didn't know." There are a lot of notes scattered on my table, like yellow leaves in the fall. I can't recognize most human faces, and have virtually no short-term memory; I live under the vague impression that I have a hundred sagacious thoughts each day, but I'm not at all sure about that, since I can't seem to remember any of them. Hence the yellow sticky notes. Lately, I've been threatening to get tattoos, too, to help remember essential stuff. The first one, on my chest — or better yet, my forehead — will say: nwob ti etirW.

I shift my coffee cup. Scrawled underneath: Do you still believe in heroes? Hunters? Humor? At the bottom corner is one more tiny word. kids. Hmm, I wish I could remember what I meant there, exactly.

I miss the old hunters stopping in when they were traveling the land. I miss one constant in my life, since I was a little kid — one as consistent as the north wind: Clarence Wood's face showing up at the door, at any hour, black, frostbitten, sun-cooked, often needing gas, wanting coffee — at any hour, of course — sitting awhile, joking, teasing, telling stories of hunting and the rough country he'd crossed, and then rising stiffly, aching from the miles but unable not to stare hungrily out at the landscape, and travel on.

All my life, Clarence has been the most persistent hunter on this land, here and traveling north to Point Hope, Anaktuvuk and beyond, traveling some of the wildest country left on Earth, in the worst weather, in every season — until his name grew to almost be more than a name, to be the epitome of a true hunter and that culture he came from — but I think these years might finally be catching Clarence. And I'm not sure there's a place anymore for anyone to take his place.

***

It's midnight now: This day has been another beautiful one, sunny and bright, white snow and blue sky, splendid traveling conditions, to the mountains and more mountains beyond. This evening I've done my countless chores, sharpened the chain saw, wired the split rusted stovepipe, filled the kettles, hauled in a last armload of wood, finished frying some caribou meat and muskox fat, and now the ice and the sky out there are bluish-gray, descending into night.

The spring light reminds me of half a century of Aprils on this hill. The sun returning, the long sun-drenched days; the slow letting-go of winter while still half-expecting more snow, still waiting on the first caribou herds to appear from the south and the first fat geese to fly overhead — both species navigating separate migrations north, their arrivals announcing the coming flood of birds, mosquitoes, green leaves, and that exhilarating, almost unbelievable transformation of Arctic winter melting back to summer.

Actually, I did see caribou last week. When I snowgoed to Ambler to buy gas and see the dog mushers, I was surprised to run into a small herd standing in the trail. I don't think they are part of the migration, though. The main herds have been far away, absent here most of the winter, and these likely are survivors from stragglers that wintered farther east.

I stopped, and they watched me and then bolted up the hard-packed trail, sprinting straight for Ambler, a few miles away. In the next moments I experienced some dismaying realizations: Somehow I'd forgotten my wallet at home; Martin Cleveland at the Ambler city gas pump would be locking up in about 12 minutes; I was going to arrive late, broke and driving a herd of caribou into town — this on the big race day, with out-of-town visitors and villagers gathered and watching the river, waiting to greet arriving mushers — and with a hundred high-strung racing dogs already staked out behind the community building, resting. Or trying to.

Quickly, I did something I usually avoid: I gunned my snowgo and managed to zoom past just yards beside the fleeing animals. "Sorry, guys," I muttered. They were mostly girls, actually, bravely running their hearts out — sadly not in the wisest of directions.

At Don and Mary Williams' house, along the river at the lower end of town, I left my machine running, knocked and rushed in. "Oh! Hi!" Don shouted, alone, surprised, pleased to have a visitor.

I didn't have time for that. Gas is too important. I held out my hand. "Can I borrow some money?"

Later, over lunch in town with Don and Mary, I grinned at Mary and said, "I probably shouldn't tell you this …" She was slicing bread and glanced up, curious and expectant. She's in her 70s and has been sick, coughing, and had spent half the night at the clinic, but had just been prescribed Prednisone and now was bustling around, heating leftover caribou soup, making coffee. "I passed a bunch of nice-looking caribou, on the river, below your old igloo."

Her face lit up, shocked, thrilled, and then teasingly miffed that I hadn't shot any. "Ah! Ah, you!" She waved her hand, and then smiled acceptingly. That's something the elders here are amazingly good at: acceptance. It is kind of necessary, with the alien changes they've experienced in the last five or 10 or 20 decades, but still it's remarkable.

Mary has a perspective from the old culture. No matter the season, she's always excited to have fresh meat; she'll never say no to a fresh caribou. Picture yourself driving by $100 bills heaped along the side of the road and deciding to not pick up even one, and then stopping in and telling your Depression-era grandma about it. To Mary, that's how juvenile I can be at times. That was the surprise, excitement and then acceptance on her face.

Don just chuckled. He's from Ohio, a long, long time ago, and more pragmatic at this point, more inclined to think of the work involved, and the fact that their freezers are fairly full. He grinned, eating, gripping a marrow bone in his fingers, and pointed his knife over his shoulder. Beside the stove, the black hooves and gray furry ankles of four lower legs stuck out of a box, thawing. "She got them legs need skinning," he assured me. 

by Seth Kantner, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Seth Kantner

A Farewell to Free Journalism

Bloomberg, my former employer, is reportedly moving to a paywall. If that turns out to be true, I can’t say I’ll be surprised.

When I announced that I was leaving Bloomberg View for the Post Opinion section in February, many longtime readers gently reproached me for moving my writing behind a subscriber paywall. Some of them were not so gentle. How could I cut myself off from readers like that? Was I really so arrogant as to think they ought to pay for the privilege of reading me?

I couldn’t blame them for being miffed; some of them, after all, had been reading me since I was a young(ish) blogger writing from Ground Zero. The open Internet literally gave me my career, and for years, I’ve repaid that gift by seeking out employers that kept my writing free to readers. I really believed in the motto that “information wants to be free.”

But by the time The Post approached me, I’d already concluded that the battle for the open Internet was lost. Sooner or later, virtually everyone in the industry is going to put his or her content behind a subscription wall. And in general, you should bet on “sooner” rather than “later.” This week, Vanity Fair became just the latest in a long line of publications to say “If you want to read us, you’ll have to subscribe.”

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen noted on Twitter, Bloomberg already has “one of the greatest subsidy systems ever invented”: the terminals that it sells to financial companies at a cost of $20,000 per user per year. If they still want a paywall, we should be bearish on the chances that anyone else in the news business will make a go of the “free content” model.

So how did my industry make it work for so long? The answer is that we never did, really, which is why so many newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay afloat, and so many Web publications are burning through piles of investor money as they hunt for a viable business model. The more interesting question is why we couldn’t make it work. And the answer to that lies in the structure of the traditional media business.

Critics of the “mainstream media” (or if you prefer, the “lamestream media”) are fond of saying that we’re going to be put out of business by competition from “new media” upstarts. Indeed, as a young blogger, I might even have made a few such pronouncements. And I and those critics were wrong. Traditional media can survive competition for readers just fine. It’s competition for advertisers that’s killing us.

For more than a century, magazines and newspapers were what’s known as a “two-sided market”: We sold subscriptions to you, our readers, and once you’d subscribed, we sold your eyeballs to our advertisers. That was necessary because, unbeknownst to you, your subscription dollars often didn’t even cover the cost of printing and delivering the physical pieces of paper. They rarely covered much, if any, of the cost of actually reporting and writing the stories printed on those pages. And you’d probably be astonished at how expensive it is to report a single, relatively simple story.

But that was okay, because we controlled a valuable pipeline to reader eyeballs — a pipeline advertisers wanted to fill with information about their products. You guys got your journalism on the cheap, and advertisers got the opportunity to tell you about the fantastic incentive package available to qualified buyers on the brand-new 1985 Chevy Impala.

Then the Internet came along, and suddenly, we didn’t own the only pipeline anymore. Anyone can throw up a Web page. And over the past 20 years, anyone did — far more than could support actual advertiser demand.

The companies that won this rugby scrum weren’t the venerable old names with long experience marrying ads to winsome content. They weren’t even the new media companies with their frantic brigades of young staffers generating hot takes. The companies that are winning — mostly Google and Facebook — get content for free from their users, or other people on the Internet. Including us.

Providing the rope with which someone else will hang you is obviously not a very good business model. And in the words of economist Herb Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” Either we will find someone else to pay for the news and opinion and cartoons you consume, or we will go out of business.

That someone doesn’t have to be the reader. Some journalism can function as a sort of a loss leader for a conference business, or another associated product, like books or package tours. Some opinion writing can be produced by people who use it as a personal loss leader for their brand as a “thought leader” or “public intellectual” — or simply use it as a hobby to blow off steam. Outside of the “loss leader model,” there are a few other options: Some reporting can be financed by donors as a philanthropic project; some consumer product journalism can support itself through affiliate programs that provide rewards for selling merchandise; and some writing can be supported by “native advertising” sprinkled among the journalism so that it’s hard to tell them apart. All of those business models can produce good journalism.

But all of those strategies also have flaws. You need a pretty affluent demographic and a highly prestigious brand for the “loss leader” strategy to work. And while opinion writing is very important (she said, modestly), it’s not the only important work we do; academics and business executives are largely not going to pick up the unglamorous but necessary job of beat reporting. Philanthropic journalism can take up some of that slack, but it will be narrow in another way: Donor-funded journalism tends to largely be ideological, with donors looking for stories that flatter their opinions and produce measurable political “impact” beyond just keeping readers informed. A lot of that journalism is very valuable — but it’s not all that we need. And as for the last two models, I presumably don’t have to explain the dangerous incentives built into them.

But if you don’t like those options, then you, dear reader, are going to have to step up to the plate. Unfortunately, many of you have gotten used to the idea that news ought to be free, and resent being asked to pay for it.

by Megan McArdle, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I beg to differ. News media have already experimented with moving content over to Facebook (how'd that work out?) and paywalls will only hasten their demise. I suppose they could try taking a page from the airlines' playbook and begin charging for prime, extra prime, and really super-duper prime access to content (see here). But in the end it'll all be for naught because no one is going to pay for multiple individual subscriptions. In a sense, there's really no free will involved in these decisions, just sort of a technological determinism at work. I think the most likely outcome (after the media landscape is littered with dead paywalled companies) is that remaining news outlets will eventually get bundled into some type of aggregated subscription service (think cable tv), or Costco/Amazon Prime type membership model. Or, they might eke out a living on an alternative revenue stream like micro-payments and blockchain technology. Until then, these finger-in-the-dike solutions only spell doom for all but the largest media outlets. See also: The Bloomberg Paywall Does Not Make Sense]

Mental Health on a Budget

Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who have trouble affording their co-pays. This is a collection of tricks I’ve learned (mostly from them) to help deal with these situations. They are US-based and may not apply to other countries. Within the US, they are a combination of legal and probably-legal; I’ve tried to mark which is which but I am not a lawyer and can’t make promises. None of this is medical advice; use at your own risk.

This is intended for people who already know they do not qualify for government assistance. If you’re not sure, check HealthCare.gov and look into the particular patchwork of assistance programs in your state and county.

I. Prescription Medication

This section is about ways to get prescription medication for cheaper. If even after all this your prescription medication is too expensive, please talk to your doctor about whether it can be replaced with a less expensive medication. Often doctors don’t think about this and will be happy to work with you if they know you need it. They may also have other ways to help you save money, like giving you the free sample boxes they get from drug reps.

1. Sites like GoodRx.com. This is first because it’s probably the most important thing most people can do to save money on health care. For example, one month of Abilify 5 mg usually costs $930 at Safeway, but only $30 with a GoodRx coupon. There is no catch. Insurances and pharmacies play a weird game where insurances say they’ll only pay one-tenth the sticker price for drugs, and pharmacies respond by dectupling the price of everything. If you have insurance, it all (mostly) cancels out in the end; if you don’t, you end up paying inflated prices with no relation to reality. GoodRx negotiates discounts so that individual consumers can get drugs for the same discounted price as insurances (or better); they also list the prices at each pharmacy so you know where to shop. This is not only important in and of itself, but its price comparison feature is also important to figure out how best to apply the other features in this category. Even if you have insurance, GoodRx prices are sometimes lower than your copay.

2. Get and split bigger pills. Remember how a month of Abilify 5 mg cost $30 with the coupon? Well, a month of Abilify 30 mg also costs $30. Cut each 30 mg pill into sixths, and now you have six months’ worth of Abilify 5 mg, for a total cost of $5 per month. You’ll need a cooperative doctor willing to prescribe you the higher dose. Note that some pills cannot be divided in this way – cutting XR pills screws up the extended release mechanism. Others like seizure medication are a bad idea to split in case you end up taking slightly different doses each time. Ask your doctor whether this is safe for whatever medication you use. Do not ask the pharma companies or trust their literature – they will always say it’s unsafe, for self-interested reasons. Contrary to some doctors’ concerns, this is not insurance fraud if you’re not buying it with insurance, and AFAIK there’s no such thing as defrauding a pharmacy.

3. Mail order from Canada. Canada has lower prices than the US for various prescription drugs. Canadian pharmacies are unlicensed and illegitimate and you should never use them, according to the same people who tell you that marijuana is a gateway drug and porn will fill your computer with Russian viruses. According to everyone else, including most doctors I know, they are fine as long as you avoid obvious scams. They are technically illegal but the FDA has a policy not to prosecute people who buy drugs there for personal use. The Canadian Internet Pharmacy Association maintains a list of ones they consider safe. If I try really hard, I can find a way to get the month of Abilify 5 mg for $4.58 from canadapharmacy.com, but this isn’t really that much better than the best American option. Some other medications do seem to be better, especially ones that are still on patent; if I want a month of Saphris 10 mg, the best I can find on GoodRx is $620, but on canadapharmacy.com there’s a deal for $196.

4. Pharma company patient assistance programs. As part of their continuing effort to pretend they are anything other than soulless profit-maximizing bloodsuckers who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, some pharma companies offer their drugs for cheap if you can prove you need them and can’t afford the regular price. These are most useful if for some reason you need a specific expensive brand-name drug; if you have any other options you’re better off just buying the generic. You can search for these programs at Partnership For Prescription Assistance, RXAssist, and NeedyMeds. Be very careful to read the fine print on these, because no matter what they pretend, drug companies are soulless profit-maximizing bloodsuckers who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, and sometimes these are just small discounts that aren’t as good as using one of the other methods. Occasionally a company will give you a great discount that knocks a brand-name medication costing $300 down to only $150 without telling you that there is a similar generic that costs $5. But if you need one specific very expensive thing, and you are lowish-income, and you don’t have government help, this is still your best bet.

5. Get 90+ day supplies. If your insurance charges you a co-pay of $30 per prescription, and you get a 90-day supply instead of a one month supply, then you’re paying $30 once every three months, instead of once a month.

II. Therapy

This section is on ways to do therapy if you cannot afford a traditional therapist. There may also be other options specific to your area, like training clinics attached to colleges that charge “sliding scale” fees (ie they will charge you less if you can’t afford full price).

1. Bibliotherapy: If you’re doing a specific therapy for a specific problem (as opposed to just trying to vent or organize your thoughts), studies generally find that doing therapy out of a textbook works just as well as doing it with a real therapist. I usually recommend David Burns’ therapy books: Feeling Good for depression and When Panic Attacks for anxiety. If you have anger, emotional breakdowns, or other borderline-adjacent symptoms, consider a DBT skills workbook. For OCD, Brain Lock.

2. Free support groups: Alcoholics Anonymous is neither as great as the proponents say nor as terrible as the detractors say; for a balanced look, see here. There are countless different spinoffs for non-religious people or people with various demographic characteristics or different drugs. But there are also groups for gambling addiction, sex addiction, and food addiction (including eating disorders). There’s a list of anxiety and depression support groups here. Groups for conditions like social anxiety can be especially helpful since going to the group is itself a form of exposure therapy.

3. Therapy startups: These are companies like BetterHelp and TalkSpace which offer remote therapy for something like $50/week. I was previously more bullish on these; more recently, it looks like they have stopped offering free videochat with a subscription. That means you may be limited to texting your therapist about very specific things you are doing that day, which isn’t really therapy. And some awful thinkpiece sites that always hate everything are also skeptical. I am interested in hearing experiences from anyone who has used these sites. Until then, consider them use-at-your-own-risk.

III. Supplement Analogues

This section is for people who can no longer afford to see a doctor to get their prescription medication. It discusses what supplements are most similar to prescription medications. This is not an endorsement of these substitutions as exactly as good as the medications they are replacing, a recommendation to switch even if you can still get the original medication, or a guarantee that you won’t go into withdrawal if you switch to these. They’re just better than nothing. Make sure to get these from a trusted supplier. I trust this site, but do your own investigation.

This doesn’t include detailed description of doses, side effects, or interactions; you will have to look these up yourself. These are all either legal, or in a gray area of “probably legal” consistent with them being very widely used without punishment. I am not including illegal options, even though some of them are clearly stronger than these – but you can probably find them if you search.

1. Similar to SSRIs: 5-HTP. This is a serotonin precursor that can serve some of the same roles that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors do, though this is still controversial and it is probably not as strong. Cochrane Review thinks that “evidence does suggest these substances are better than placebo at alleviating depression”. This may plausibly help with SSRI withdrawal, though not as much as going back on an SSRI. It can be dangerous if you are taking any other serotonergic medication, so check with the doctor prescribing it first. Cost is about $10/month. Definitely legal.

2. Similar to antidepressants in general: Tianeptine. This is a European antidepressant which is unregulated in the US, making it the only way I know to get an regulatory-agency-approved antidepressant without a prescription. Look up the difference between the sodium and the sulfate versions before you buy. Generally safe at the standard dose; higher doses carry a risk of addiction. Cost is about $20/month. Probably legal, widely used without legal challenges.

3. Similar to stimulants: Adrafinil. This is the prodrug of modafinil, a stimulant-ish medication widely used off-label for ADHD. Modafinil itself is Schedule IV controlled (though widely available online); adrafinil is unscheduled and also widely available. Look up the debate over liver safety before you use. Cost is about $30/month. Probably legal, widely used without legal challenges.

4. Similar to anxiety medications: GABA and picamilon. GABA is an endogenous inhibitory neurotransmitter, but it has questionable ability to cross the blood-brain barrier when taken orally (though see here for counterargument). Picamilon is the same neurotransmittor attached to a niacin molecule that helps it cross the BBB more readily. Both are sold as supplements. The evidence base is weak, and this is the entry on this list I am most skeptical of. Use at your own risk (of it not working; it’s probably pretty safe). Neither of these is as strong as a benzodiazepine and these will not significantly relieve acute benzodiazepine withdrawal. Cost is about $30/month. GABA is definitely legal. Picamilon is possibly legal; the FDA has tried to stop companies from selling it as a dietary supplement, but does not seem to be challenging users.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Fishing for Stories via Instagram

Every fish tale starts with a whopper. This one started with a photograph on Instagram.

I was researching a story on the actor Chris Pratt and was surprised that a photograph he posted to the social networking app with his son on a fishing trip had been liked more than 1 million times. Even by celebrity standards, that is a huge number.

Donald Trump Jr., another avid angler and Instagram user, whom I profiled last year, garnered tens of thousands of likes for his fishing pictures. And more and more, the people I follow were posting fish tales of their own.

How big is the fishing crowd on Instagram, I wondered.

It is indeed an active community; #fishing alone has nearly 20 million posts.

As I scrolled through hundreds of photographs, I noticed that many anglers posing with their catch exhibited a studied flair, much like fashionistas promoting designer clothes in the early days of Instagram. (A few years ago, models had their own selfie pose called the “fish gape.”) (...)

The genre had all the hallmarks of a mature social media phenomenon. A lot of people were promoting brands. So much so, one Twitter commenter asked if the fishing industry now had “influencers.” Noelle Coley of Colorado said she worked with a number of companies, receiving free fishing equipment or apparel in exchange for social media mentions. (Some outlets, like Orvis, a maker of fly fishing equipment, are seeking to increase the number of women in the sport. That’s no surprise, given that recreational fishing is on the rise in the United States and women are an untapped market.)

What was most striking, though, were the photographs themselves, which were colorful, immediate and engaging. I reached out to a number of the featured men and women from across the country and asked them to tell me their back stories.

While much of America is divided between red and blue states, these anglers recounted experiences that transcend geography and politics. They said they had friends on both coasts, as well as in the middle of the country.

Could fishing be the great uniter? That would be no small feat these days, when everything seems politicized.

They even wanted to take me fishing. But that’s another story. (A brother once chided me for catching a trout smaller than the purse I owned.)

Most of all, though, these fishing enthusiasts were eager to describe how social media helped them document their pastime so they could share it with others.

by Laura M. Holson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Patrick Duke

Julie Backmon, Garage Sale
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Cafe Quijano

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Why is Modern Pop Music so Terrible?

[ed. See also: How a Pop Hit is Made (NY Times).]

The Operating Theatre: Contemporary Fiction & Las Vegas

Las Vegas is known for a multiplicity of things. Gambling. Transience. Heat. Solitude and isolation. Freakery. Global tourism. Indulgence. The triumph of spectacle, celebrating the celebratory. Somewhat recently, in the last five to ten years, prior to the November 2016 election of President Donald Trump and the October 2017 tragedy of the Mandalay Bay mass shooting, in the realm of literature the Nevadan metropolis of Las Vegas has become an examination room and a battleground, a kenoma in which writers have elucidated an elegiac donnée, one that refracts the soul (or soullessness) of an America enamored with the effervescence of the eternal present.

The city’s literary history is rarely insular, often regionally inscribed by its proximity to Los Angeles, an hour by plane or four hours by car, calling to mind Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970). It is the consummate desert city, defined by long, scorching summers and unremitting drought, essentially adjacent to the Southern Californian high desert, Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, and the Colorado River. It is a one-of-a-kind oasis, but it is also part of the American southwest. Book-wise, it is most readily associated with Hunter S. Thompson’s much-loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), novel-ish in structure, avant-garde in execution, a cult-classic exercise in self-invention. The genesis of gonzo journalism, a freakier version of the non-fiction novel in the aftermath of Capote and Mailer, but drug-doused, thus kin to Kesey, Thompson’s opus can also be categorized as Social Criticism. The nineties saw the success of John O’Brien’s 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas, followed by a film adaptation five years later that brought the author’s distinctively bleak semi-autobiographical stylings to the screen. In recent years, three major works employ Las Vegas as a setting for literary fiction: Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), and the tentpole of the New Vegas novel, Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (2008). (...)

Uniforms of all types, not just military ones, proliferate more in Las Vegas than in most cities. Remembering Thoreau’s dictum, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” Abani takes pleasure in blurring, puncturing, and deconstructing clearly identified roles. The casino/hotel/resort employees are decked out in the trimmings of their trade as bellhop or desk clerk, pit boss or baccarat dealer, maid or gift shop employee. The female self-objectification-for-money hierarchy runs from cocktail waitress to stripper to hooker, each with her own particular costume. The tourists also love to play dress-up in the Southern Nevadan citadel, women donning a mini-skirt or a cleavagy black dress, men sporting a blazer and jeans at the steakhouse with the fellas, or visor and fanny pack at the pool with a little age hampering their gait but never dimming their glad-to-be-there grins. As one can imagine, Halloween on the Strip is a singular and revelatory forum for revelry. And of course, the other type of raiment that is every bit as prevalent as that of the scantily clad over-the-top get-ups or the soldier boys in their finery, is that of the brides and grooms, wedding parties trailing behind, whether lavish and quasi-celebrity at a ballroom inside The Wynn, or cheap and fast—like the subjects of Didion’s Saturday Evening Post essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)—at one of the old downtown chapels all wicker and white paint, kitschy and pseudo-quaint. (...)

Las Vegas is a sunny place, hardly ever even cloudy or overcast, but its landscape and its paradigms are rarely clear. It is hard to find reality. The superficial is as rampant as the heat, and the constant commerce is as much of a glut as the slow-moving pedestrians and the always waiting lines of cabs and limos, and even the Strip itself, the literal sidewalk, is often buried beneath discarded handouts, fliers, and baseball card–sized advertisements for escorts. Las Vegas as a setting for the literature of social comment has only been lightly studied; it remains under-utilized, far from exhausted.

In an August 2014 issue of LA Weekly, Henry Rollins writes, “In many ways, Las Vegas is the ultimate statement of Homo sapiens. Not Coltrane, not NASA or literacy. This assault on nature is one of the most obscene attempts to tame the wild. It is a massive concrete, steel and pavement tantrum.” It is as if everybody knows that Washington D.C. isn’t really the capital anymore. Sure, there’s still a plentitude of power suits, the agglomeration of mid-Atlantic wealth, the Machiavellian allure of politics typified by Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards, but it’s not the most American of cities, it’s not the most popular or the best-known. It’s a relic, a studio lot for CNN, talking heads with landmarks hovering in the background like something out of a much-reused sixth-grade textbook. The modern-day United States is condensed into instantly recognizable symbols, as portrayed through the media, social or traditional, old or new, in all their hyper-linked and instantly gratifying versions. And though the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and the White House are well-known edifices, they don’t quite encapsulate or semiotically signify, not in the way that the Manhattan skyline or the Hollywood sign serve as American archetypes.

For the latter half of the twentieth century, those two port cities, N period Y period and L period A period, were America’s benchmarks and bookends, but the twenty-first century may more appropriately be compared to Las Vegas, Nevada and all its cartoonish glory. Where the booms and busts hit first and hardest (chronicled in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (2010) and its 2015 film adaptation). Where the American empire sends you on vacation or to a conference. William Chalmers’s book America’s Vacation Deficit Disorder (2013) stipulates, via a citation of the MMGY Global/Harrison Group’s 2012 Portrait of American Travelers, that only 9 percent of U.S. residents are even interested in international destinations, so Las Vegas provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the world, a more comfortable brand of tourism, without the massive time shifts, language barriers, and xenophobic fears inherent to international travel. “L.V.” says you don’t have to go to Paris and put up with those snooty French people to see the Eiffel Tower or to order a baguette from an ersatz boulangerie. You can experience the thrill of a tropical isle without the interference of child beggars and that depressing drive through the dilapidated slums on the way from the airport. The photogenic amenities of Venice are available without the stink of the canals, and the gondoliers backgrounded in selfies kick back for a Krispy Kreme donut or a Coors Light after work.

Las Vegas has acknowledged America’s fame obsession and is vending it. The illusion of being a somebody. You get to be whatever you want and, better yet, you get to leave it there. Hide from your job and your boss and your kids, shed your skin and let out that inner slouching beast. Yeats got the city wrong, but he was right about the desert. Las Vegas is a place where the temporal and the ephemeral are morphed into insta-culture, a palace of assimilation that’s open twenty-four/seven. There is no past or future, no need for perspective or long-range thought, there is only the unending now, the new promised land, a most codified place, a domain of myth and ritual.

by Sean Hooks, 3:AM Magazine |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

New Spotify Free Version

Spotify, long the leader in streaming music, has found itself in a precarious position: Analysts project it is about to lose the top spot. In February, a report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that while Spotify had 70 million subscribers to Apple Music’s 30 million (a stat last updated in September), Apple Music’s growth rate far surpassed Spotify’s—so much so that Apple Music was on pace to become the top music streaming service by summer’s end. It would seem that having its devices in the hands of consumers has been a huge boon to the adoption of Apple’s streaming service. But Spotify has been working on its own strategy for remaining on top. While Apple offers a free trial of Apple Music, its app is largely inaccessible without a paid subscription. With a free app, Spotify can give users a taste of the full premium app experience, a strategy that has been one of its primary means in acquiring new subscribers.

On Tuesday, Spotify introduced a new look and new features for the free version of its app. While the paid version offers a wide range of capabilities—playlist creation and curation, the ability to build and listen to artist or song radio stations, and the option to follow public playlists—the free app was more limited. Non-paying customers could do little more than listen to a selection of the app’s playlists on permanent shuffle mode. With Tuesday’s update, they gain access to 15 customized playlists. Before, they could only listen to whatever song Spotify’s algorithm happened to churn out next; now, they can listen to any song on that playlist whenever they like. These 15 playlists, which include the popular Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlists, are curated by Spotify based on your listening habits. They jointly contain more than 750 songs and are typically updated with new selections daily.

Spotify is also updating the onboarding experience for new free users, allowing them to select artists that they like so the app can start customizing playlists immediately. And for those who want to ensure they don’t bust through their monthly data plan in a day of frenzied streaming, there’s now a “data saver” option that minimizes the app’s impact on your usage. While the app’s premium version has seen numerous updates over the years, this is the free app’s first major overhaul since 2014, and it could prove an important update: Spotify’s free app is, for many, the gateway into a paid subscription. The free app currently has 90 million listeners, and according to the company, 60 percent of the company’s paying subscribers originated as users of the free version. By giving free users a bigger taste of what the premium Spotify experience offers—as well as a more prominently placed button to subscribe to the service in the bottom right of its navigation menu—Spotify likely hopes to boost its growth numbers and derail Apple’s march towards streaming music domination.

by Christina Bonnington, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Spotify and Apple

Rooting for Elon

Over the past year, in pursuit of his ambitious goals to transform U.S. auto and energy markets, Elon Musk has met critics from all directions: customers, stockholders, and workers. After Tesla recently missed its Model 3 production quotas for the third time in three quarters, the South African playboy entrepreneur offered a rare glimpse of contrition: the “car biz is hell,” he tweeted, adding that he was sleeping in the Tesla factory to overcome production shortfalls.

The week before, a Delaware court allowed a class action suit against the company to move ahead. Shareholders are alleging Tesla management engaged in a “self-dealing” breach of fiduciary duty. From a historic peak of $360, Tesla share prices fell by nearly a third to $250 in April. The New York Times ran the headline “Tesla Looked Like the Future. Now Some Ask if It Has One,” while The Economist warned that “Tesla is heading for a cash crunch.”

This is a hard pill for many to swallow. For years now, Musk has come to stand in for something more than each of his three manufacturing companies: Tesla, the plug-in electric car manufacturer; SolarCity, the solar-panel and battery manufacturer that merged with Tesla in 2016; and SpaceX, the federally financed private rocketry firm. In his heroic gleam and boyish daring, many Americans see something as close to a leader as they are likely to have experienced in recent memory. (...)

But what is the substance of this vision? With Musk entering a new phase in his manufacturing career, it is a question worth considering. While the headlines, stock prices and investor ratings (Moody’s just downgraded Tesla) follow the production numbers and profit margins, the rest of us should examine just what it is we expect Musk to do.

What would success look like? Can it be done within the constraints of a private business firm? And, if so, as the debts come due, who is willing to sacrifice to help Musk achieve it?

What we often mean when we root for Musk is that we want to hasten the coming business-directed energy transition of our industrial system away from fossil fuels. In this, he embodies both a widely-popular yearning for social transformation and the businessman’s stolidity restraining it.

For those condemned to life on Earth, what Musk represents above all is the possibility of a “green” or “renewable”—and therefore “sustainable”—capitalism.

Species survival is one way of putting it, but this elides all the details relevant to our political lives. That ambiguity is precisely why the vision is so appealing: it can be both revolutionary and ostensibly consensual. For the past fifty years, after all, among the easiest and most widely accepted formulas for people to work together to change their futures has been through patterns of personal consumption. We invest our savings, purchase private equipment, place our bets in the enthralling spectator sport that is the clash of powerful personalities and organizations—and then we wait.

It is this sleek, efficient temple of opportunity and security that Musk has cultivated and we have bought in to that justifies the massive government spending behind his projects. Indeed, the most potent collective action behind Musk’s success has come from the state. In today’s political climate, projects such as his, which promise a return on investment and private-management practices, are the only ones deemed worthy of public investment. The states of California, Nevada, New York, and Oregon, have all joined the federal government in offering direct grants and loans to Musk’s companies, and hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer rebates are ultimately paid into Tesla through consumers (the federal government, for example, pays a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of electric cars; California pays a further $2,500). As early as 2015, the Los Angeles Times attempted to sum the total public aid to Musk’s operations and arrived at $4.9 billion.

Yet Musk’s profitability—his success by the conventional standard—still hasn’t materialized. Tesla was run at a $671 million loss in the third quarter of 2017—$117 million paid in interest on the company’s debts alone. In fiscal year 2017, losses summed to $2.2 billion, about three times what the company lost in 2016.

Moreover, Tesla has repeatedly missed every deadline promised to its customers and is currently under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board for denying employees the right to collective bargaining. The company faces numerous shareholder lawsuits alleging managerial violations of fiduciary duty, with a raft of class-action suits following a recent investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk’s career thus illustrates the central challenge of U.S. industrial planning. Because of taboos against government ownership and income-tax financed public services, the public must find ways of persuading businessmen to manage private property to meet public objectives. Often this leaves us choking at an ideological and political impasse. Rather than have government authorities spend billions to own and operate their own plant under public oversight and administration, we are trapped debating which private profit-making groups the government should support in pursuit of its public-interest goals.

If there is a coherent strategy, it is to underwrite the financing of uncertain companies that operate largely to generate capital gains for insiders, while unloading risk to savers on the outside. But when these companies threaten savers, the vainglory of businessmen loses much of its utility as an instrument of public policy.

Meanwhile, the effect of this style of industrial policy in the labor market is palpably unpleasant. To avoid becoming Ponzi schemes, companies such as Tesla and SolarCity must compete in product markets by undermining existing, middle-class jobs. The brazen fact here is that the assemblage of jobs and green-energy programs behind Tesla use public expenditure, but they guarantee little employment income and no production targets.

by Andrew Elrod, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: SpaceX

What Is a DJ's Role in Today's Dance Music Festivals?

It's no secret that festivals have a crucial place in today's dance music culture. These super-sized events aren't just an entry-level gateway for new fans; they're also a powerful platform for the spread of new ideas and sounds, and a glimpse into where the culture is heading. Plus, they are a reliable stream of revenue for both independent promoters and major corporations.

But as festivals continue to grow in scale and importance, their most central attraction—celebrity DJs— are experiencing an existential crisis. Specifically, about what the hell they should be doing when they're up on stage. In recent interviews with the New York Times, MTV, and other outlets, several top DJs seem to be in disagreement, or at least hold vastly different views, on what their role at a dance festival should be.

In a New York Times feature last week, Swedish House Mafia alums Axwell and Sebastian Ingrosso provided a treasure trove of fun facts about their post-SHM career as duo Axwell /\ Ingrosso. (My personal fave: that Axwell likes to mutter "turnt up, turnt up" to himself before he gets on stage.) While the dance music media honed in on Axwell's comment that "underground dance music [is] amateur," what the interview really focused on was the Swedish duo's live show.

"The most important thing is not what we play, but the personality and how we interact with the crowd," said Ingrosso. In one fell swoop, he summed up the mentality of DJs like Avicii and Steve Aoki, who have been criticized for playing predictable or possibly pre-recorded sets, to coordinate with the deployment of pyrotechnics (or baked goods).

As Axwell and Ingrosso explain, their coveted 90 minutes on a main stage surrounded by a blur of fireworks, lasers, and LEDs is like a "victory lap" after years of grunt work in the studio. So what if the extent of their effort is doing Jesus hands and twiddling a few knobs? "They don't know what we do before the shows," said Axwell, "A guy with a guitar might know how to play the guitar, but does he know how to produce a whole song?"

This is, perhaps, the official recasting notice for the role of the DJ from skilled track selector to adulated player of big hits, downplaying the importance of improvisation and surprise in sets in favor of familiarity and spectacle.

It's easy to imagine seasoned DJs like Paul Van Dyk and John Digweed gnashing their teeth over these comments. Last week, they both spoke out against the current crop of top DJs playing the same tired hits over and over again at festivals.

"If you're the biggest DJ in the world, you're in a position where you can play stuff that people don't know and blow people's minds," Digweed said to MTV. "But if you just chose to play stuff they know just to get a reaction, that's just being lazy."

He proudly confessed that his set at Ultra, where he played on Carl Cox's stage, was based on tracks he'd downloaded that same afternoon. Playing a record no one knows and hearing them go crazy is a "better buzz," he added.

Similarly, Van Dyk told MTV: "I think it is our responsibility as DJs to dig through all those thousands and thousands of tracks that come out each week and pick out the ones that actually mean something."

Both Digweed and Van Dyk are a half generation older than Axwell and Ingrosso, having first found success in the 90s and reached the mainstream zenith of their careers during the first electronic wave of the early 00s, a decade before the EDM craze washed over America and ebbed on shores abroad. In the last five years, Van Dyk has largely stayed out of the festival circuit, while Digweed has maintained a low key presence on side stages only. In other words, both of them have effectively opted out of the EDM festival bonanza that Axwell and Ingrosso are leading the charge on.

Digweed and Van Dyk's comments are therefore emblematic of an older school of DJing—one that puts the dynamics of the dancefloor as utmost priority. The explosion of dance music into the mainstream has changed the nature of its performance. Festivals now blithely take on the characteristics of pop and rock shows. While Digweed and Van Dyk used to play sets that stretched for hours, Axwell and Ingrosso's sets usually hit about an hour and a half. Dance music academic and cultural critic Luis-Manuel Garcia called this process the "concertization" of electronic music.

"A newer breed of EDM musicians have mostly abandoned the performance practices of the DJ booth to adopt those of a pop or rock stage artist: short, high-intensity musical sets that are paced like a rock concert, larger-than-life stage personae and a seemingly endless investment in visual spectacle to accompany the sensory overload of 'brain-melting' sound," Garcia wrote in a feature for Resident Advisor. He could have easily been talking about Axwell /\ Ingrosso's main stage finale at Ultra.

by Michelle Lhooq, Thump | Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Yes, but what does a DJ actually do? See here:]

Art Deco Lawnmower
via:

How My Nobel Dream Bit the Dust

“You may speculate from the day that days were created,
but you may not speculate on what was before that.”
—Talmud, Tractate Hagigah 11b, 450 A.D.

To go back to the beginning, if there was a beginning, means testing the dominant theory of cosmogenesis, the model known as inflation. Inflation, first proposed in the early 1980s, was a bandage applied to treat the seemingly grave wounds cosmologists had found in the Big Bang model as originally conceived. To call inflation bold is an understatement; it implied that our universe began by expanding at the incomprehensible speed of light ... or even faster! Luckily, the bandage of inflation was only needed for an astonishingly minuscule fraction of a second. In that most microscopic ash of time, the very die of the cosmos was cast. All that was and ever would be, on a cosmic scale at least—vast assemblies of galaxies, and the geometry of the space between them—was forged.

For more than 30 years, inflation remained frustratingly unproven. Some said it couldn’t be proven. But everyone agreed on one thing: If cosmologists could detect a unique pattern in the cosmos’s earliest light, light known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a ticket to Stockholm was inevitable.

Suddenly, in March 2014, humanity’s vision of the cosmos was shaken. The team of which I had been a founding member had answered the eternal question in the affirmative: Time did have a single beginning. We had proof. It was an amazing time indeed.

For weeks I had known it was coming. Our entire team was furiously working to finalize the results we would soon make public. We had relentlessly reviewed the data, diligently debating the strength of the findings, discussing what could be one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. In the intensely competitive world of modern cosmology, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. If we were right, our detection would lift the veil on the birth of the universe. Careers would skyrocket, and we would be forever immortalized in the scientific canon. Detecting inflation equaled Nobel gold, plain and simple.

But what if we were wrong? It would be a disaster, not only for us as individual scientists but for science itself. Funding for our work would evaporate, tenure tracks would be derailed, professional reputations ruined. Once gleaming Nobel gold would be tarnished. Glory would be replaced by disappointment, embarrassment, perhaps even humiliation.

The juggernaut rolled on. The team’s leaders, confident in the quality of our results, held a press conference at Harvard University on March 17, 2014, and announced that our experiment, BICEP2, had detected the first direct evidence of inflation—evidence, albeit indirect, of the very birth pangs of the universe. (...)

For years BICEP2 looked for a swirling, twisting pattern (called a B-mode polarization pattern) in the CMB that cosmologists believed could only have been caused by gravitational waves squeezing and stretching space-time as they rippled through the infant universe. What could have caused these waves? Inflation and inflation alone. BICEP2’s detection of this pattern would be evidence of primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation, all but proving that inflation happened.

Then we saw it. There was no going back.

The broadcast from Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics captivated media around the world. Nearly 10 million people watched the press conference online that day. Every major news outlet, from The New York Times to the Economist to obscure gazettes deep within the Indian subcontinent, covered the announcement “above the fold.” My kids’ teachers had heard about it. My mother’s mahjong partners were kvelling about it.

Watching the live video, I could see MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark reporting the event. He wrote, “I’m writing this from the Harvard press conference announcing what I consider to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Within the hour, it will be all over the web, and before long, it will lead to at least one Nobel Prize.”

Finally, we’d seen what we, and the whole world apparently, had wanted to see. The BICEP2 team’s announcement was that we had read the very prologue of the universe—which, after all, is the only story that doesn’t begin in medias res.

Still, doubts plagued me. It sure seemed to be a discovery for the ages. But was it? No one is immune from confirmation bias. And scientists, despite what you may think, are rarely mere gatherers of facts, dispassionately following data wherever it may lead. Scientists are human, often all too human. When desire and data are in collision, evidence sometimes loses out to emotion. It was impossible to rule out every possible contaminant. Had we fretted enough?

The most worrisome aspect of BICEP2’s signal was how huge it was. It was shockingly big, more like finding a crowbar in a haystack than a needle, as one team member phrased it. At the time of our announcement, we were worried about being beaten by our chief competitor, a $1 billion space telescope called the Planck satellite with the perfect heavenly perch from which to scoop us. Prior to BICEP2’s press conference, Planck had already ruled out a B-mode signal half as big as the one we claimed to have observed. Cosmologists were expecting a whisper. We claimed BICEP2 had heard a roar. (...)

***

Within three weeks of the press conference, 250 scientific papers had been written about our results. That was astonishing; a paper is considered “famous” if it has 250 citations over the course of decades! Then, in early April, I got an email from the physicist Matias Zaldarriaga. How many times can he be congratulating me, I wondered?

“When the dust is low, but spread over a wide area, it betokens the approach of infantry.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Matias’s April email was no “attaboy.” He was disturbed. He wanted to talk details. What did I know and when did I know it? It was the beginning of a trial I had long feared. Rumors were swirling at Princeton about the way we had used the infamous Planck slide. “People here in Princeton are very concerned about dust,” he said, ominously adding, “In fact they have managed to convince me that there is not a very good reason for me to believe it is not just dust. Have you looked into the foregrounds yourself?” Of course I had looked at the foregrounds—potential sources of contamination such as polarized emission from the Milky Way’s dust. The whole team had been worried about our galaxy producing spurious B-mode polarization that would masquerade as primordial gravitational wave B-modes. But data at low frequencies from BICEP1 and at high frequencies from Planck’s scrubbed PowerPoint slide convinced us we were okay.

A few days later, I got wind of a colloquium that Princeton University’s David Spergel had given just after the Harvard press conference. David said he had spotted a blunder in our results, that our data were contaminated by dust within the Milky Way galaxy. Soon, I found out there were others at Princeton laser-focused on the way we modeled dust. The BICEP2 leadership had anticipated an onslaught, perhaps even a backlash, from the Princeton folks, who were working on several competing B-mode experiments. Maybe they were just frustrated after being scooped on another major CMB discovery.

I asked Matias if it was David Spergel alone causing his concerns. Ominously, Matias said, “I think there is nothing else people here talk about.” My heart stopped. Princeton’s cosmology program is the top-ranked in the country—cosmology’s own Holy See, comprised of the world’s best experimentalists and theorists, among them multiple members of the National Academies of Sciences. It felt like an inflationary Inquisition, one that could put the BICEP2 results on a modern-day Index of banned pre-prints.

Imagine finding out the entire IRS is obsessed with your tax return. Not just one rogue auditor, but everyone, from the Secretary of the Treasury on down, fixated on your Form 1040! It was petrifying.

by Brian Keating, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Amble / Wikipedia

[ed. How science works.]

Understanding the Cinematography of Christopher Doyle

Interactive Nuclear Blast

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Who is Watching Wall Street?

Since the ink dried on the GOP tax plan, officially known as the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, back in December 2017, companies have spent over $218 billion dollars re-purchasing their own stock at the going price on the open market. The point of the tax law, according to Republicans, was to free up corporate cash so that companies could create jobs. Instead, it seems, companies are using the cash windfall to reward shareholders. Daily spending on buybacks has doubled from just a year ago and could reach a record high of $800 billion this year.

Why do companies buy back their own shares? Because buying back shares raises the price of the remaining shares—each share is now a slightly bigger slice of the corporate pie. Share buybacks push up share prices easily and instantly without the hard work of companies making improvements in how they attract customers or create their products.

They are also a perfectly legal way for corporate executives, who hold huge chunks of stock, to juice their own pay. Executives decide which days to buy back shares and can then sell their own shares at the newly bumped up price. Top executives generally make the majority of their compensation through performance-based pay, which is either directly or indirectly tied to stock prices. Even though the rules of performance-based pay changed under tax reform, it is likely that executives will remain large shareholders.

But the problem with stock buybacks isn’t just frustration with the 1 percent getting even richer. Nor is it just the hypocrisy of how the tax bill was sold by the Republican Party—though there is plenty of that. While Republicans promised the bill would raise worker wages, all of the analyses about the ratio of spending on buybacks to spending on workers tell the same story: massive amounts of money are moving out to shareholders while very little is trickling down to workers. Moreover, Republicans promised improved innovation, but it should surprise no one that corporate investment as compared to profits has declined compared to historical levels—hurting corporate potential in the long-run—just as stock buybacks are on the rise.

Ending stock buybacks could be straightforward. Congress could amend the Securities and Exchange Act to simply make open-market share repurchases illegal. Or it could impose limits on buybacks for companies that aren’t investing in their employees or funding their pension commitments, or it could only allow buybacks when workers also receive a dividend. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could also repeal the “safe-harbor” rule, which lets companies spend massively on buybacks, or at the very least make companies justify why buybacks are a good use of corporate cash.

But the current surge of stock buybacks is a symptom of a much larger problem: how deeply corporate leaders are able to manipulate our economy for their own gain, without oversight from those who are supposed to hold them accountable. We’re in the grip of a shareholder primacy ideology, which posits that the purpose of corporate tax reform is to benefit shareholders because shareholders have the only right to the spoils.

To find our way out of this mess, we must first understand how we got here.

Shareholder primacy as a framework for corporate behavior only became entrenched in the 1980s. The postwar era was dominated by “managerial capitalism,” in which the management of big corporations focused on sales growth and, in some cases, labor peace to ensure growing productivity. For a white male worker, you could get a steady job that paid the bills, promised a pension, and was all but guaranteed for life. Shareholders were an afterthought.

In the 1960s, the big firms grew into conglomerates—highly diversified companies that by the 1970s ended up being worth less than the sum of their parts. Shareholders grew restless in the 1970s as the economy slowed and interest rates rose, but they were stymied from takeovers because of prohibitive state corporate law and anti-trust regulation at the federal level that still held back some industry consolidation. As the 1970s came to a close, prominent economists reframed the responsibility of executives from ensuring rising sales to maximizing shareholder value. Further they claimed that the ideal executive compensation package should include large chunks of shares to align executives’ interest with shareholders.

This has—not surprisingly—led to an obsessive focus by corporate leaders on short-term share prices and cost-cutting, with the workforce as the first cost cut. There has been a significant shift—in power and in material rewards—away from workers and towards shareholders since shareholder primacy rose to dominance in the 1970s. But it wasn’t a gradual or cultural shift—key policy interventions under Ronald Reagan broke the back of managerial capitalism and ushered in shareholder primacy.

In 1982, four key policy changes occurred that allowed shareholders to take over, or threaten to take over, companies, and pushed executives to focus on the share price or get out of the way. The first was an overhaul of the Department of Justice’s antitrust merger review guidelines so that industry consolidation was welcomed, not forbidden. The second was a Supreme Court case, Edgar v. MITE, which made state antitakeover statutes unconstitutional and allowed for the rise of the hostile takeover. Third, Reagan’s wholesale attack on unions ended an era of fragile labor peace.

The fourth policy change was Rule 10b-18, a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that ushered in the era of stock buybacks. Back in 1968, Congress gave the SEC the authority to prohibit buybacks if they so choose under the Williams Act Amendment. The SEC never prohibited them, but throughout the 1970s, it proposed a rule that would have limited buybacks to 15 percent of the volume of a company’s shares that were trading on the open market, and, more importantly, presumed that any buybacks over this limit were stock price manipulation and therefore likely illegal.

But the rule never passed. And in a turnaround that is familiar today, the Reagan Administration came in and promulgated a new rule that allowed companies to do whatever level of buybacks they liked. In 1982, under the leadership of John S. R. Shad—the first SEC Chair from Wall Street since the Great Depression—the Commission passed Rule 10b-18, the “safe harbor rule,” which limits corporates to a daily limit of buying back only an amount of shares equal to 25 percent of what’s trading on the open market. But the rule is superficial—companies do not have to disclose how many shares they buy back each day—only per quarter—and even if they exceed that limit, there is no presumption that the purchases are market manipulation.

The safe harbor rule is akin to driving rules, in that you have to stay within a certain speed. But imagine if no one ever sat by the side of the road to see how fast you drove. What would you do?

The answer is buy back a huge volume of stock in order to keep those share prices rising. Economist William Lazonick, who has done the most to bring attention to the harm of stock buybacks, calculated that from 2003-2012, public companies in the S&P 500 index spent over 90 percent of their earnings on buybacks and dividends. You might think the Obama Administration’s SEC would have given more attention to this practice, but you’d be wrong. In 2015, former SEC Chair Mary Jo White admitted that the agency does not collect the data to know if companies are staying within the daily volume and timing limits. All of this precedes the avalanche of buybacks we’re seeing now.

This practice is the heart of “shareholder primacy”—executives claim that they’re helpless to raise wages, slow down the scale of stock buybacks, or stop the fissuring of the workplace because they have to meet the insatiable demand for an ever-rising share price. The dollar amount that companies spend on buybacks shows just how easily corporations could raise pay for decent wages. Walmart’s base wage, for instance, rose from $10 to $11 this year and was announced to great fanfare after tax reform. But for a starting worker, it still means that he or she earns $19,448 a year. Meanwhile, Walmart authorized a buyback program of $20 billion in 2017.

by Lenore Palladino, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Sam Valadi

Bolivia’s Quest to Spread the Gospel of Coca

One thing about chewing coca leaves that is weird to the neophyte is their specific, sylvan kind of taste. Unlike the chemical stain that cocaine burns on the back of the throat, coca can seem like a hippie cleanse for the mouth. To start, there is the inescapable fibrousness; even with some dexterous tongue and tooth work, little twig-like stems end up pressed against the inside of the cheek or stabbing at the gums. Then there is the flavor, a musty piquancy of autumn leaves suffused with a tannic tang. The effect is slightly astringent. Chewing is generally a misnomer, since coca is piled up into a wad on one side of the mouth and sucked on, but some people gnash at the lanceolate leaves until tiny green specks garnish the teeth like dried parsley.

When a person chews coca, a cocktail of compounds is secreted from the leaves and absorbed into the body. This contains dozens of alkaloids that include the cocaine compound, and it has mild psychotropic effects in its unprocessed form. Its processed form, obviously, is a different matter. People from Andean countries like to say that coca’s relationship to cocaine is like the grape to wine. The equivalence isn’t totally precise, but coca is a centerpiece in traditional ceremonies and has the status of a sacred substance and so it enjoys, like the Holy Eucharist, a certain factual leniency.

Of course, neither its natural consumption nor its spiritual status has saved the coca plant from becoming a harbinger of bloodshed. Coca garnered its peculiar status when a German graduate student isolated a pure form of its electrifying alkaloid from a fresh shipment of leaves in 1859 using alcohol, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate and ether. Cocaine’s global market is now worth around 80 billion dollars per year. It is also illicit. An untold number of people have been killed for having some connection, tenuous or not, to the trade. Drug-related violence has made parts of Latin America among the most dangerous places on the planet.

Nowhere has coca been more important than in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. Though its governments have traditionally toed the line of U.S. foreign policy on drugs since at least the 1980s, Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, threw out the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) nearly a decade ago while vowing to resuscitate coca’s sullied reputation. “Coca,” Morales has said so often that the phrase could be printed on the currency, “is not cocaine.” After decades of sweaty counter-narcotics operations, during which U.S.-trained soldiers scoured the jungle uprooting coca bushes and Americans and Europeans snorted cocaine anyway, Morales called a stop to eradication campaigns in his country. Instead, the cocaleros of Bolivia have cultivated the conviction that they can spread the gospel of coca. “Our philosophy is clear,” the country’s leading anti-drug official, Sabino Mendoza, told me. “Coca should be consumed, in its natural state.” To that end, the Bolivian government has spent millions of dollars and put forward a law to support its coca market. It has shunned the War on Drugs and sought instead to create alternate markets for coca leaf by supporting industrialization. Teas, shampoos, wines, cakes, liquors, flour, toothpastes, energy drinks and candies that feature the leaf have been produced, some in government-backed factories.

It sometimes seems like Bolivians will market anything that contains their quasi-magical plant. Anything that could lure investors. Anything that could trade internationally. Anything, anything but cocaine. (...)

Coca, especially in the highlands, enjoys near panacea status. It had deep ties to indigenous culture, and the 30 percent of Bolivians who chew it regularly believe that it can alleviate most ills. In the new and growing coca product market, this tonic-like reputation is its most marketable aspect. “With Coca Real, it’s just the same,” one of Bolivia’s rising coca entrepreneurs, Juan Manuel Rivero, told me, referring to his flagship product, a carbonated energy drink containing coca extract. “A healthy beverage that will effectively combat sorojchi, alleviate exhaustion, and eliminate physical or mental fatigue.” Rivero is one of a dozen or so entrepreneurs who have obtained permission from the government to purchase coca for industrial development. While it’s not illegal to have coca in Bolivia, there is a limit on the amount that can be transported without a permit, and the movement of leaves is closely monitored. His Coca Real drink is one of the products that have entered the market seeking to capitalize on a sympathetic regime and shifting global attitudes about regulating certain kinds of substances.

At Rivero’s factory, where he produces soda concentrate, he offered me some of the finished, neon-green liquid product in a glass to try. It tasted like coca’s distant cousin, just arrived from Miami smacking bubble gum and raving about party yachts. Sweet, bubbly; the unmistakable descendant of Red Bull. I drank it quickly, and recognized an afternote redolent of coca’s tang. “Coca has one bad alkaloid, which is cocaine, and the rest of its alkaloids are good,” Rivero said. (The white powder cocaine is usually the cocaine alkaloid isolated in hydrochloride salt form, occasionally cut with other substances.) “We are sure that our product does not contain a single bad alkaloid. We want to show Bolivia and the world that it’s possible to make appealing derivatives that can be consumed and don’t cause addiction.” (...)

In July 2017, I travelled to the Chapare, a tropical province north of Cochabamba and one of Bolivia’s two major coca-growing regions, to meet Rivero’s outreach team. The road from the highlands down to the rainforest river basin traces its way along mountain saddles overhung with clouds and neon panicles of lobster claw flowers. It is also punctuated by checkpoints. Just a few decades ago, growing coca in the Chapare was prohibited. The area became ground zero in the U.S. War on Drugs. Interdiction forces conducted merciless campaigns against coca growers, who still bitterly resent the authors of their suffering.

I was going to the annual coca fair, where Coca Real was making a pitch, held just up the road from a mirrored glass-plated factory that was built to produce coca products. Flanked on all sides by the hyper-green rainforest, the fair stalls created haphazard corridors where revelers wandered, their cheeks bulging with coca. One vendor, selling frosting-smeared cupcakes topped with decorative coca leaf, told me that she had experimented for months to get the flavor right–there can’t be too much coca, she said, or the cake turns bitter. A man hawked coca shampoo as a cure for hair loss.

Nowhere in Bolivia has the impact of President Evo Morales’s 2005 election been felt more dramatically than the Chapare, where his activism leading one of the major coca unions thrust him into the national political spotlight and ultimately carried him to electoral victory thirteen years ago. Morales, who is the country’s first indigenous president and who was raised in poverty in the highlands before moving to the Chapare as a young man, has remained loyal to his base. Duly, he had promised to make an appearance at the fair. On the day of his scheduled arrival, farmers stood in their mud-splattered shoes and Sunday shirts with eyes turned skyward waiting for a sign of his helicopter.

Morales has increasingly become a subject of controversy in Bolivia, ever more with his recent efforts to massage the constitution to extend his long tenure in the presidential palace. But in the Chapare, support for him is unflagging. Asterio Romero, Morales’s friend and union colleague and currently the mayor of one of the region’s largest cities, told me he believed Morales was sent by God. That, he said, was the only explanation for Morales’s famous work ethic–the president sleeps little, and has been known to call ministers to the palace for meetings at 5 o’clock in the morning. To the people of the Chapare, he also represents someone who understands the pain of the drug war years.

For Morales, the piecemeal documentation of atrocities committed in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of eradicating coca plants is not jarring. He was there for clashes that produced albums filled with grainy photos of men and women with lash-like bruises and gaping bullet wounds, undergoing emergency outdoor surgeries or building barricades to block police trucks; the medical certificates of hematomas, contusions, puncture wounds and edemas; the autopsy reports documenting bullet trajectories. One report from 2008, published by Bolivian government agencies, in which Morales says he was tortured during his many detentions by anti-narcotics squads, includes photographs of the president himself. In them, he has the same mop-top haircut, but his face has the sheen of youth, and he is propped on a medical examining table with purple lesions crisscrossing his back and snaking over his shoulder.

By the time the report was published, Morales had been elected to his first presidential term, and he would with short shrift expel the U.S. Ambassador and the DEA from the country. Although many of the boots-on-the-ground anti-narcotics campaigns were carried out by special Bolivia police and military forces like UMOPAR, the Chapare was one of the first places where the DEA began its foreign War on Drugs operations, and many Bolivians still hold the U.S. responsible for the squads’ violence and corruption. “From the U.S., they made the DEA pressure us at gunpoint and with gas,” a coca union leader named Isidora Coronado told me. “It was a difficult time. A lot of women, especially, were traumatized; there were assaults, and the men in uniform could do whatever they wanted. But from the moment [Morales] became president we haven’t had those kinds of clashes anymore.”

If anything, the coca fair was celebration of the victories won, and by extension, each artisanal coca product on offer seemed a small tribute to the struggle (Coca Real’s stand, with its flashy cardboard cutout of a life-sized bottle, was nearly alone in its unabashedly commercial design). Wherever Morales goes, he is greeted by garlands of flowers; shortly after his helicopter landed on the afternoon of the fair and he emerged from a black SUV among a flock of bodyguards, Morales was garlanded with coca leaves and presented with a shamrock-colored cake made from ground leaves and varnished with white icing. Farmers with pleated skirts and long braids presented him with baskets of guava and sweet potatoes. He spoke for 15 minutes, praising the new coca policies and promising more industrialization. To finish his speech, he chanted a famous slogan in Quechua, joined by hundreds of voices: “Kawsachun coca! Huañuchun Yanquis!” Long live coca. Down with the Yankees.

About 17 million people around the world used cocaine at some point in 2015, according to the latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). A third of those people were in North America. While the DEA estimates that cocaine use is increasing in the U.S., most of its field divisions don’t consider the drug to be as urgent a threat as other controlled substances. Cocaine-related deaths have spiked, but this is largely due to a fad of speedballing it with fentanyl. In any case, the agency’s laboratory analyses conclude that 92 percent of cocaine in the U.S. market originated in Colombia and six percent in Peru–two countries where American interdiction programs are still robustly in place.

Bolivia, however, has been singled out by the U.S. government as being a special pain in the ass. Its truculence has earned it repeat mention on the White House’s annual presidential memorandum on illicit drug producing countries, where it is rebuked for having “failed demonstrably” to adequately enact counternarcotics policies. Since it’s an illegal market, drug production can only be measured by proxy, and so the UNODC calculates the number of hectares of coca cultivated using satellite and aerial imagery to guess at the amount of cocaine produced (it also looks at police seizures of finished cocaine and of the intermediary butter-like paste product). Its most recent data for the three major coca producing countries put cultivation at 146,000 hectares in Colombia, 43,900 in Peru, and 23,100 in Bolivia. The U.S. Department of State disagrees with the methodology and says there are more hectares in cultivation, though still less than in Colombia or Peru. But in September’s memo, the White House exempted Colombia, reasoning that its police and army are close security allies.

Bolivia is something else entirely.

by Jessica Camille Aguirre, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Ansellia Kulikku