I Will Miss What I Wanted to Lose

Near the end of my tour, in March, the coronavirus cases were rising back home in New York, and the emergency declarations kept coming, as we left California, as we left Colorado, as we got to Idaho. “I just want to go home,” I told John, my husband and musical partner, over and over. On the day of our Boise show, the Idaho governor declared a state of emergency. John and I got on the phone with my agent and my manager to discuss the risk—physical and professional—of canceling. But it was too late. Refunding tickets at that point would have been a nightmare, and I felt a responsibility to the audience. Ten minutes before the show, I had the driver drop me at the stage door. I didn’t go into the green room, didn’t look in a mirror and fix my hair, didn’t pace or make tea. I stood like a statue in the wings, then walked onstage, sang, walked off, got in the car, went back to the hotel, packed, and got the earliest flight back home the next day.

The Boise audience acted like they were at an end-of-the-world party. There were a lot of empty seats—the state of emergency had spooked people—but those who did show up were a little crazed, and really happy. Maybe they realized they weren’t going back out in public for a while. Even though I had a nagging sense of foreboding, my heart opened to them, and theirs to me. I still remember certain faces in that crowd.

I’ve long had a complicated relationship with touring, and the pandemic has made it only more difficult. I always knew what life on the road was costing me. But I didn’t fully appreciate what it gave me until suddenly it was gone.

This time last year, I was walking through an airport parking garage in Reno at midnight, pulling my bag behind me, following John and my tour manager, David, to a rental van, when I suddenly felt as if glue were pouring through the top of my head and working its way to my feet. I stopped and looked around at the rows of rental cars. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me. They didn’t even turn around. Touring musicians have a survivalist attitude.

Once, many years ago, I did a photo session with Annie Leibovitz on a beach on an island off the coast of Maine, in the dead of winter. It was 3 degrees below zero, and she had a team on hand as large as a film crew. There was one heater, powered by a generator, trained on me and no one else. Annie didn’t wear gloves, because she had to shoot. Not a single person commented on the unbearable conditions, not that day, not the next, not ever, although when I saw Annie a few months later she did tell me that she couldn’t bend her fingers for a week afterward.

That’s the essential attitude adopted by most touring musicians I know. Just show up and do it, and don’t whine about the lack of sleep, the equipment problems, the long drives, the missed meals, the airports, the delayed flights, the sometimes-weird audiences, the stalkers, the reviews, the food, or the hotel. As Charlie Watts said, in the early days of being in the Rolling Stones, “I’m not paid for the show. I’m paid for the other 22 hours.” (At least, I think Charlie Watts said that. The genesis of that aphorism is lost in the mists of rock-and-roll history.)

But in that parking garage, the veil lifted: How I was spending my time was how I was spending my life. I no longer wanted to find myself in an airport parking garage at midnight, exhausted and depressed, on the way to a hotel that looked exactly like the one I had just left. I had reached the point that when I got home and someone asked where I had been the week before, I couldn’t remember. It was starting to scare me.

I’ve been touring, on and off, for 40 years. I didn’t envision it, and it wasn’t in my life plan, if I even had a life plan in my early 20s. All I knew was that I wanted to write—prose, songs, poetry, nonfiction, everything. I was a writer from the age of 9. In my late teens, I started writing songs, then recorded demos of those songs; then I got a record deal and made records, and then I found myself in a parking garage at midnight. It was part of the package. You didn’t write songs just to play them in your living room.

I’m not addicted to the road, like many of my friends who are touring musicians. I don’t want to be in motion all the time. I regret time spent away from my children. I never bought a tour bus; the implication of that level of commitment was too much for me, so there have been a lot of airports and a lot of 14-passenger vans. I seldom even rented buses because I was always doing strategic strikes, since I had kids and I wanted to make the parent-teacher meetings and the school plays and help with the homework. Three days out, four at home. One week out, three at home.

by Roseanne Cash, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Roseanne Cash

Yamaha’s “Remote Cheerer” Brings Fan Applause Back to Empty Stadiums

This week, Yamaha announced a plan to put fans back in the stadiums for major sporting events this summer—virtually, at least.

The company's new smartphone application, Remote Cheerer, is designed to allow sports fans to cheer from home in a way their teams can hear in the stadium. The app itself looks and functions much like a typical soundboard app you might use to summon up a Homer Simpson D'oh!—but instead of just making a noise on your phone, it integrates the cheers of potentially tens of thousands of fans and plays them on loudspeakers at the stadium where their teams are playing.

When fully integrated at the stadium itself, the application does a better job of emulating normal crowd noise than the short description suggests. For Yamaha's field test at Shizuoka Stadium, there were amplified loudspeakers placed in each seating section of the stadium, and fans' cheers were localized to the section where they would sit, had they been able to attend the football match personally. The result is a much more diffuse and authentic-sounding crowd noise. (...)

In addition to a preset selection of cheers and boos—which can be customized by the venue to be applicable to the teams that are playing—the app offers repeated-tap options for the crowd to engage in rhythmic clapping or chanting, which should reproduce the imperfect timing of real-life chants and stomps.

by Jim Salter, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Yamaha

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Performance Anxiety

Will the Adult Film Industry Survive the Pandemic?

Like most businesses, the adult movie industry began to seriously discuss the COVID-19 crisis in late February. Keiran Lee, a veteran porn actor-director, relates an incident from that period before the lockdown. “We had a girl call in [who] said, ‘Hey, I’m not feeling too great this morning. I’ve got flu-type symptoms.’ The first thing we said was, `Don’t come to set.’ Because it’s not worth the risk – in our industry, we’re intimate, we’re up close and personal with each other, even the camera guys. So we just canceled the scene that day.”

Two weeks later the pandemic hit.

In a time when a simple touch can kill, one might think a pandemic might be the death knell for a business that relies on physical intimacy now that the industry has instituted a voluntary hold on video productions. But for the time being, this sector of the greater porn industry seems to have landed on its feet, thanks to a decade-long shift in content distribution that has favored performers over large video producers like Vivid Entertainment and Wicked Pictures. Today performers are increasingly able to disseminate their content directly to consumers on a variety of cam and so-called tube sites similar to YouTube, as well as on their social media accounts.

Lee sees the trend continuing through the pandemic – especially for women, who earn about twice what their male counterparts make. “Some of these girls are earning over $40,000 to $50,000 a month from their social,” he says. “Instead of going to work for these companies and being on set for 10, 12 hours a day, earning $1,500 to $2,000, they’re now staying at home and making maybe $1,000 or $1,500 – but they own that content and they make royalties on it.”

Or, as Kevin Blatt, another longtime industry insider puts it: “Cam sites and tubes are absolutely proving that porn is 100 percent recession-proof.”

But not everyone in the adult film industry is recession-proof. Lee admits that “the average male performer is probably seeing his income drop 60 to 70 percent. The average scene rate is maybe about $900 to $1,000 a day, and [before the pandemic] he was probably doing a minimum of 20 scenes a month. So he’s losing a lot.”

The pandemic has completely shut down gay porn star Ray Diesel’s routine. A performer for six years, Diesel usually travels the world doing, he says, “live shows, hosting events and even escorting.”

“My subscriptions have doubled on [online sites],” says Diesel, “which is amazing, and fans are actually tipping me more, so that’s great, but I’m not making nowhere near what I usually will make a month. I would say I’m making a little less than half of what I was making.” The coronavirus has hit video crew members even harder. They have seen all their employment disappear virtually overnight. Former gay performer Leo Forte, who now works exclusively behind the camera, has had to try and find other ways to pay his bills. He’s helped his boyfriend do maintenance work on rental properties. He’s also one of the 489 people who have applied to get some help from the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the North American trade association for the adult industry. The FSC Emergency Fund was organized on March 23 to help the industry’s hundreds of out of work crew members.

As of May 12, the fund for this multibillion dollar industry had raised little more than $146,000, with 400 of 489 applicants each receiving a $300 stipend. “It’s probably unrealistic to expect adult businesses to be better than their mainstream counterparts in this respect,” says Frederick Lane, an attorney who has written about the porn industry for 25 years and is the author of the book Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. “It’s all reflective of an economic system that has gotten badly out of whack.”

“It’s not a lot, but it’s a grocery run for the week or couple of weeks,” says Forte of his stipend. “It’s better than nothing.”

by Alex Demyanenko, Capital & Main | Read more:
Image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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Ry Cooder

Dirty Tricks Of The Public Relations Industry

The birth of the public relations industry was one of the most quietly calamitous events in American history. While much derided and downplayed—try finding a movie or TV show where P.R. professionals aren’t repugnant slimeballs—the industry has been a massively influential presence in our lives since the turn of the 20th century, shaping our thoughts and feelings in ways that have caused immense damage to our environment, our fellow humans, and ourselves. The world would be better off if it simply didn’t exist. But like many unscrupulous activities, P.R. is both extremely profitable and useful to the interests of the wealthy, and for that reason it’s grown and prospered.

The metastasis of the P.R. industry came thanks to a number of simple-yet-effective tricks (more on those later) that most of us would prefer to believe are too obvious to work. Yet more often than not they do work, which is why few people remember that Coca-Cola hired death squads to kill unionized workers in Colombia or that Chiquita bananas are the product of a century’s worth of ecological devastation and human rights abuses. Some (especially the victims’ families) haven’t forgotten, yet their cries for justice have been drowned out by the cheerful, relentless hum of these companies’ powerful P.R. machines. To paraphrase Bob Marley, you can’t fool all the people all the time—but it turns out you don’t have to.

All you need to do is persuade—or bore—a critical mass of people into swallowing your message. Few have ever been adept at this as Edward Bernays, widely regarded as the father of public relations (and modern propaganda). The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays made his bones by helping to stir up public support for U.S. intervention in World War I, then parlayed that success into a long and lucrative career which included such accomplishments as convincing American women that cigarettes (which he dubbed “Torches of Freedom”) were empowering and good for their health, and convincing the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (which has since changed its name to Chiquita).

In his influential book Propaganda (1928), Bernays made a case for the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.” According to Bernays, while some bad actors might seek to manipulate the public for the wrong reasons, “such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life.” He laid out a vision of the world that is chillingly familiar today: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” In his view this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since it was people like him doing most of the governing, molding, forming, and suggesting.

Modern P.R. specialists are both strongly influenced by Bernays’ work and, in some cases, alarmed by its implications. Take Andrew Mckenzie, who penned an article for the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) that urged P.R. pros to be “the conscience of an organization,” and to insist that harmful actions “cannot be reframed or spun,” since this “is bad business, destroys shareholder wealth and ruins brands.” It’s a noble sentiment, but one that is fundamentally at odds with reality. As our editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson has written before, doing harm is often profitable, and the number of brands (personal or corporate) that have been irrevocably tarnished by their misdeeds is far smaller than those who have gotten off largely scot-free. Johnson & Johnson might have had to pay $4.7 billion in damages to women who developed ovarian cancer from using its baby powder, but that’s a tiny fraction of the company’s revenue ($81.5 billion in 2018 alone), and people are still buying Listerine, Neutrogena, and Band-Aids.

It’s clear that the idea of P.R. as a force for good is little more than wishful thinking. In the words of British journalist and author Heather Brooke: “Public Relations is at best promotion or manipulation, and at worst, evasion and outright deception. However, what it is never about is a free flow of information.” Today’s P.R. industry is exceptionally skilled at pretending otherwise. Whether its practitioners are working within an organization or as part of an outside agency, whether they’re representing individuals, businesses, or governments, the methods used are largely similar. None of these tricks are particularly complex at first glance, but that’s why they’re so effective—the best grifts are often the simplest ones.

We’ll now examine the three most important tricks in the P.R. professional’s repertoire. It’s worth noting that none of these tricks are intrinsically evil. In theory (and sometimes in practice) the same methods can be used to advance the goals of saving coral reefs or ensuring healthcare for all, just as easily as they can be used to advocate nuking Iran or using killer drones to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the rules of the P.R. game are much the same as those of college admissions: Those who start off with a big pile of money and know the right kinds of people have an all-but-insurmountable advantage.

Trick #1: “Media Placements”

The most valuable P.R. people in the world are those who can reliably secure their clients a platform in “A1” media outlets like the New York Times, Time magazine, and CNN. For customers who prefer to keep a lower profile, top P.R. pros can also seed favorable coverage of their preferred policies and positions in those same outlets while being careful to omit any mention of their involvement.

The firms who do this work are the crème de la crème of the P.R. profession, pulling in multi-million dollar retainers from ultra-wealthy clients. Take, for example, APCO Worldwide. One of the largest P.R. firms in the United States (it also claims to have 35 offices worldwide in cities from Paris to Tel Aviv to Shanghai), its website proudly proclaims: “We work for bold clients.” Many of those clients, like the Saudi Arabian royal family, are bold indeed—at least when it comes to beheading journalists, causing famines that kill millions of people, or torturing and murdering political opponents.

by Nick Slater, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The American Virus: Two Weeks in May

Week one:​ 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.

As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.’ A Twitter wit writes that, for the massive marble sculpture looming above, ‘It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched.’

Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end of May. The president tweets: ‘Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic.’ He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf World magazine as the best golf course in the UK and Ireland for 2020.

The Senate reconvenes, but not for further pandemic legislation or to consider the more than six hundred bills that have already been passed by the Democrat-controlled House, which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician says that he does not have enough coronavirus tests for all of them.

Republicans continue the fight against voting by mail. (The president has said that if this were universally allowed, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,’ though he himself mails in his ballot.) In Wisconsin in April, the Republican-majority Supreme Court had demanded that voters appear in person, leading to a spike in infections. In Texas, which permits voting by mail for the ill, the attorney general rules that fear of Covid-19 is an ‘emotional reaction ... and does not, by itself, amount to a “sickness”’. (...)

In the ten days after the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, reopens gyms, spas, hair salons, tattoo parlours and other essential services, confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rise by 42 per cent.

Ohio representative Nino Vitale explains why he is opposed to face masks: ‘We’re created in the image and likeness of God. When we think of image, do we think of a chest or our legs or our arms? We think of their faces. I don’t want to cover people’s faces ... That’s the image of God right there and I want to see it in my brothers and sisters.’

As part of the Republican strategy to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment as a rallying point for the presidential election and distraction from the pandemic, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo (who, like many Republicans, calls Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’), says: ‘There is a significant amount of evidence that [the virus] came from that laboratory in Wuhan. The best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.’ When it is pointed out that the director of national intelligence has said that the scientific consensus is that the virus was not artificial or genetically modified, Pompeo says: ‘That’s right. I agree with that. Yeah. I’ve seen their analysis ... I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate.’

Asked by an interviewer what lessons have been learned from the coronavirus, the president replies: ‘Now, the one thing that the pandemic has taught us is that I was right.’ He explains: ‘You know, I had people say, “No, no, it’s good. You keep – you do this and that.” Now those people are really agreeing with me. And that includes medicine and other things, you know.’

by Eliot Weinberger, LRB |  Read more:
[ed. See also: Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over (The Guardian).]

How to Make a Virtual Choir Music Video

Assignment: Select a vocal arrangement, have your group of singers and/or instrumentalists record their performances on their phones, have them send you the videos, edit them together into a virtual choir performance, and post the final video online. Sounds simple, right? Well, I decided to try. Here’s what I discovered along the way.

What are the steps involved in making one of these music videos? Here you go.

Contact Your Musicians

You can use any means you are comfortable with such as email, Facebook Messenger, etc. I would recommend not texting, so you aren’t overwhelmed with messages!

Choose a Song

You can open up the song-selection process and allow everyone on the project to give suggestions. Once you decide on the song, you can purchase a vocal arrangement or write your own. You can create a backing track for the musicians to use when recording or just have everyone record to a metronome or a click track. Since you’re going to blend them all together, you’ll definitely need a pitch reference, so some musical guide track is recommended. It would be wise to select a constant tempo. This will allow you to edit to a grid and make post production much, much easier.

Instruct Your Musicians on How to Record

Your musicians will likely have varied experience with recording and will probably be using their phones to capture both audio and video. In that case, you need to give clear instructions to ensure everyone captures the best recording possible. Here’s a list of guidelines to pass on to your musicians.

1. Ask everyone to record to your backing track or click track. Have them use earbuds/headphones to ensure there is minimal bleed from the track into the phone microphone. Ask people to not turn up the volume of the track too loud so it isn’t picked up by the mic.

2. Ask everyone to find the quietest place in their house. Remind people not to run major appliances while recording and to limit other sources of noise like dogs, children, etc. Even then, there will be some unwanted noise and an audible hiss from the phone mics. This can be minimized with noise reduction software, which I will discuss later on.

3. Have all your musicians select the part they want to sing (e.g., soprano, alto, tenor, bass, solo, etc.). If you lack enough singers for a section, you can always have some singers record two parts.

4. Ask everyone to find a neutral backdrop, such as a blank wall, with decent lighting for their video. You may wish to send them a screenshot of another virtual choir video to use as a reference.

5. You may want to ask everyone to shoot their videos in portrait mode (vertical) rather than landscape (horizontal). This will make video editing simpler and cleaner. The above screenshot is a good example of that.

6. Remind people not to hold their phones while recording. It will be moving around and distracting. You can rest the phone on a solid surface or use a cheap phone tripod. I like using an iKlip Xpand Mini attached to a mic stand when I record with my phone.

7. Ask everyone to upload their videos to a shared folder through a service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Alternatively, using services like WeTransfer or Hightail will work, but uploading all of them to a single location will allow you to be more organized throughout the editing process.

8. Once everyone has uploaded their videos, download them to a designated folder on your computer or hard drive.

Now for the fun part: editing!

by Jacob Dupre, Sweetwater |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jonathan Wateridge, Another Place: Valley Home, 2009
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Stig Claesson, Composition with Moose and Fir Tree
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Corporate Rescue

March 23, 2020 was a critical day in U.S. history, though at the time it felt like another 24 hours on the road to pandemic apocalypse. Over 47,000 Americans had contracted the coronavirus by official count, and hundreds of thousands more were walking around with it undiagnosed. Deaths were just starting to spike. Historic job losses had commenced, as lockdowns cascaded across America with no end in sight. The stock market closed more than 35 percent off its peak, continuing an epic slide that had started a month earlier.

But two actions on March 23 would swing investors from despair to relief, and reveal who really matters in America.

That morning, the Federal Reserve announced the deployment of additional “tools to support households, businesses, and the U.S. economy overall in this challenging time.” The measures included many actions taken during the 2008 financial crisis, with one new wrinkle: Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

Backstopping corporate bond markets would support investors and capital owners. By the evening of March 23, investor confidence was lifted even further; reports announced progress on a record $2.2 trillion congressional rescue package, a large chunk of which would go to support the Fed’s interventions in corporate bond and other markets.

What would become known as the CARES Act became law on March 27, and the investor class has never looked back. While Americans struggle to file unemployment claims and extract stimulus checks from their banks, while small businesses face extinction amid a meager and under-baked federal grant program, the Fed has, at least temporarily, propped up every equity and credit market in America. And in a testament to its strength, it did so without spending a single cent.

The mere announcement of future spending heartened investors, who have relied on Fed support since the last financial crisis. This explains the shocking dissonance between collapsing economic conditions and the relative comfort on Wall Street. Between March 23 and April 30, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketed nearly 6,000 points, a jump of nearly 31 percent, creating over $7 trillion in capital wealth. The April gains were the biggest in one month since 1987.

The same month, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs.

Similarly, the Fed’s promises to purchase corporate and municipal bonds and asset-backed securities and really anything else uplifted credit markets and made corporate borrowing cheaper, a tangible subsidy for large companies. March ended up setting a record for issuance of investment-grade corporate debt — the safest kind of corporate debt. Two hundred and sixty eight billion dollars traded hands that month, according to a Moody’s Analytics study, and April surpassed it, at $296 billion. Overall, $1 trillion in investment-grade bonds have been issued this year, nearly as much as all of 2019, along with tens of billions more in junk bonds from risky companies, which the Fed has also signaled that it would purchase.

Dozens of companies, from troubled aircraft maker Boeing to airline Delta, from Exxon Mobil to T-Mobile, have been tapping credit markets they might never have been able to access, at lower rates than previously offered. The American Prospect and The Intercept have identified at least 49 large companies that have issued corporate bonds since the Federal Reserve announced that it would purchase them. For some, the benefit of cheaper borrowing was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is meaningfully changing the way investors are evaluating the risks for a swath of companies,” said Kathryn Judge, a law professor at Columbia University and expert in financial markets and regulations. The Fed’s support disproportionately flows to large corporations with access to credit markets, Joyce pointed out. “Small and midsized businesses with much more need are more likely to struggle.”

Unlike in 2008, the large corporate entities in line for a bailout didn’t create the crisis in the first place. The Fed’s actions to save corporations from instant bankruptcy, simply by nodding in their direction, beats the alternative. The problem is that this same level of thunderous rescue hasn’t been extended beyond the biggest firms, which could lead to an economic landscape where they dominate society in the very near future. We have a system for central bankers to throw a life preserver to any large corporation, while everyone else must swim several miles to shore themselves.

Congress made the choice to empower the Fed, rather than figure out how to adequately support the rest of the economy and its citizens. And it gave the central bank wide discretion over the process, absolving members of Congress from blame but introducing the Fed’s bias toward large corporations and banks into who gets saved and who doesn’t.

In short, while activists nitpicked about which companies got small business grants worth $10 million, the real bailout, with trillions on the line rather than millions, was happening, quietly, at the Fed.

Investors are supposed to be risk-takers, who earn outsized returns because they put their money on the line. The Fed’s extraordinary support completely flips that, giving a safety net to those who don’t need it and making a mockery of the alleged virtues of free-market capitalism. If nothing the wealthy ventures can be lost, the only people who bear risks in our society are those who don’t have any money to begin with. That’s a recipe for soaring sales in pitchforks.

But what the Fed is doing may not even be sufficient to protect capital. The week of May 11 saw the biggest percentage drop in the stock market in nearly two months. As the Fed actually starts to actually outlay money, even it recognizes that not every crisis can necessarily be solved by lending gobs of money to General Electric. Not only is it socially unsustainable to protect just the rich from a crisis of this magnitude, it may not even work.

by David Dayen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

Existence

If and when our civilization expires, we may not even agree on the cause of death. Autopsies of empires are often inconclusive.

Sixty years ago, a German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class-divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tuckered out after a while.

Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety vs. too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance vs. the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.

Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end. (...)

The Great Filter

Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunchbreak from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be with others to talk to!

Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others ... where are they?”

His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.

Astronomers now use planet-hunting telescopes to estimate how many stars have companion worlds with molten water, and how often that leads to life. Others cogently guess what fraction of those Life Worlds develop technological beings. And what portion of those will either travel or transmit messages. Most conclude -- we shouldn’t be alone. Yet, silence reigns.

Eventually it sank in -- this wasn’t just theoretical. Something must be suppressing the outcome. Some “filter” may winnow the number of sapient races, low enough to explain our apparent isolation. Our loneliness.

Over 10 dozen pat “explanations for the Fermi Paradox” have been offered. Some claim that our lush planet is unique. (And, so far, nothing like Earth has been found, though life certainly exists out there.) Or that most eco-worlds suffer more lethal accidents -- like the one that killed the dinosaurs -- than Earth has.

Might intelligence be a fluke? Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said -- “Nothing demonstrates the improbability of high intelligence better than the 50 billion earthly species that failed to achieve it.” Or else, Earth may have some unique trait, rare elsewhere, that helped humans move from mere intelligence to brilliance at technology.

Sound gloomy? These are the optimistic explanations! They suggest the “great filter” -- whatever’s kept the numbers down -- lies behind us. Not ahead.

But what if life-bearing planets turn out to be common and intelligence arises frequently? Then the filter lies ahead. Perhaps some mistake that all sapient races make. Or several. A minefield of potential ways to fail. Each time we face some worrisome step along our road, from avoiding nuclear war to becoming skilled planetary-managers, to genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and so on, we must ask: "Is this it? The Big Blunder? The trap underlying Fermi’s question?”

That’s the context of our story. The specter at our banquet, slinking between reflection and foresight, as we turn now to examine a long list of threats to our existence.

Those we can see. (...)

The Enemy Of Wisdom

Suppose we manage to avoid the worst calamities. The world wreckers, extinction-makers and civilization destroyers. And let’s say no black holes gobble the Earth. No big wars pound us back to the dark ages. Eco-collapse is averted and the economic system is kept alive.

Let’s further imagine that we’re not alone in achieving this miraculous endurance. That many other intelligent life forms also manage to escape the worst pitfalls and survive their awkward adolescence. Well, there are still plenty of ways that some promising sapient species might rise up, looking skyward with high hopes, and yet -- even so -- fail to achieve its potential. What traps might await us because we are smart?

Take one of the earliest and greatest human innovations -- specialization. Even way back when we lived in caves and huts, there was division of effort. Top hunters hunted, expert gatherers gathered, and skilled technicians spent long hours by the riverbank fashioning intricate baskets and stone blades. When farming created a surplus that could be stored, markets arose, along with kings and priests, who allocated extra food to subsidize carpenters and masons, scribes and calendar-keeping astronomers. Of course, the priests and kings kept the best share. Isn’t administration also a specialty? And so, soon a few dominated the many, across 99% of history.

Eventually though, skill and knowledge spread, increasing that precious surplus, letting more people read, write, invent ... which created more wealth, allowing more specialization and so on, until only a few remained on the land, and those farmers were mostly well-educated specialists, too.

In the West, one trend spanned the whole 20th Century: a steady professionalization of everything. By the end of the millennium, almost everything a husband and wife used to do for their family had been packaged as a product or service, provided by either the market or the state. And in return? A pilot had merely to pilot, and a firefighter just fought fires. The professor simply professed, and a dentist had only to dent. Benefits abounded. Productivity skyrocketed. Cheap goods flowed across the globe. Middle-class citizens ate strawberries in winter, flown in from the other hemisphere. Science burgeoned, as the amount that people knew expanded even faster than the pile of things they owned.

And that is where -- to some of us -- things started to look worrisome. (...)

You see, science kept making discoveries at an accelerating clip. Already, a researcher had to keep learning ever-increasing amounts in order to discover more. It seemed that just keeping up would force each of us to focus on ever-narrower fields of study, forsaking the forest in order to zero-in on tiny portions of a single tree. Eventually, new generations of students might spend half a lifetime learning enough to start a thesis. And even then, how to tell if someone else was duplicating your effort across the world or down the hall?

That prospect -- having to know more and more about less and less -- seemed daunting. Unavoidable. There seemed to be no way out ...

... until, almost overnight, we veered in a new direction! Our civ evaded that crisis with a technological side-step that seemed so obvious, so easy and graceful, that few even noticed or commented. There were so many exciting aspects to the Internet Age, after all. The old fear of narrow over-specialization suddenly seemed quaint, as biologists started collaborating with physicists and cross-disciplinary partnerships abounded. Instead of being vexed by overspecialized terminology, experts conversed excitedly, more so than ever!

Today, hardly anybody speaks of the danger that vexed us so. It’s been replaced by the opposite concern -- one that we’ll get to next time.

Only first consider this.

Sure, we may have escaped the specialization trap, for now, but will everyone else manage the same trick, out there across the stars? Our solution now seems obvious -- to surf the tsunami! To meet the flood of knowledge with eager, eclectic agility. Refusing to be constrained by official classifications, we let knowledge bounce and jostle into new forms, supplementing professional skill with tides of zealous amateurism.

But don’t take it for granted! The approach may not be repeated elsewhere. Not if it emerged out of some rare quality of our natures. Or pure luck.

Nor would it have been allowed in most human cultures! Which of our past military or commercial or hereditary empires would have unleashed something as powerful as the Internet, letting it spread -- unfettered and free -- to every tower and hovel? Or allow so many skilled tasks to be performed by the unlicensed?

One can imagine countless other species -- and our own fragile renaissance -- faltering back into the dour scenario that we students mulled on those gloomy nights. Slipping into an endless, grinding cycle where specialization -- once a friend -- becomes the worst enemy of wisdom.

The Opposite Extreme

We just talked about one more way that civilizations might fail to achieve their dreams -- not because of calamity, or war, or ecological collapse, but at the hands of something mundane, even banal. (...)

Much has been written about the problems that accompany Continuously Divided Attention. The loss of focus. A susceptibility for simplistic/viral notions. An anchorless tendency to drift or lose concentration. And these are just the mildest symptoms. At the extreme are dozens of newly named mental illnesses, like Noakes’s Syndrome and Leninger’s Disease, many of them blamed on the vast freedom we have won -- to skitter our minds hither and yon.

Have we evaded one dismal failure mode -- the trap of narrow overspecialization -- only to stumble into the opposite extreme? Shallow-mindedness? Pondering thoughts that span the farthest horizons, but only finger-deep?

Listen to those dour curmudgeons out there, decrying the faults of our current “Age of Amateurs.” They call for a restoration of expertise, for a return to credentialed knowledge-tending, for restoring order and disciplined focus to our professions and arts and academe. Is this just self-interested guild-tending, as some call it? Or are they prescribing another badly needed course correction to stave off disaster?

Will the new AI systems help us deal with this plague of shallowness ... or make it worse?

One thing is clear. It isn’t easy to be smart in this galaxy of ours. We keep barely evading a myriad pitfalls along our way to ... whatever we hope to become.

When you add it all up, there’s not much surprise that we seem so alone.

by David Brin, Salon (excerpted from his novel Existence) |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Geez... I just finished one of the most uplifting novels one could read in a quarantined pandemic and then started this one. Bad choice. If you're unfamiliar with the Lifeboat Foundation, check out this FAQ. Plus, can I say I detest all the damn ads on this site? (usually have Adblocker working, but can't read the article with it on - a good reason to avoid Salon in the future.)]

via:

via: here and here

Gary Busey: 'I Passed Away After Brain Surgery. Then I Came Back'

Gary Busey promises I won’t have come across anything like his new show, Pet Judge. He’s right; I haven’t. But, to be fair, I’ve never come across anybody like Gary Busey. He really is a one-off – Hollywood legend, coke fiend, brain-damage survivor, sobriety champion, spiritualist and reality-show winner. When he was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice in the US, Donald Trump concluded: “He’s either a genius or a moron and I can’t figure it out.” Well, I know which side I come down on.

Pet Judge is a new Amazon Prime series, with Busey playing himself – only this Busey is presiding over a court in which litigants resolve quarrels about their pets. One couple are in dispute over the death of their cat; the wife wants it buried in the family mausoleum and the husband wants a Viking funeral, with the cat sent out to sea on a flaming boat. Then there is the woman convinced that her dog is her reincarnated husband – she’s at war with an insurance company that is refusing to include the dog on the family policy. Every so often, Busey bangs his gavel, barks: “PET JUS-TICE!” and brings the court to order. Pet Judge is a fake reality show, cast with actors, largely improvised, sometimes very funny and every bit as bonkers as it sounds. “None of the other judge shows hold a candle fire, bonfire or rocket to this Pet Judge show,” Busey says.

Busey has appeared in more than 150 movies, specialising in unhinged hard men, from Leroy the Masochist (“I like pain. Any kind of pain”) in John Milius’s wonderful 1970s surfer bromance, Big Wednesday, to Mr Joshua in Lethal Weapon, who simply doesn’t feel pain. He is best known for another surfer movie, 1991’s Point Break, in which he plays Angelo Pappas, an FBI agent with a penchant for destruction.

He started out as a musician, however, playing drums with the great singer-songwriter Leon Russell. Perhaps his finest film performance came in 1978’s Buddy Holly Story. Busey was superb as Holly – singing, playing guitar and showing heart and soul, as well as the customary flashes of temper. He lit up an otherwise unremarkable biopic and deservedly won an Oscar nomination.

Today, he’s at home in Malibu, California, when we Zoom. Busey, aged 75, is hard of hearing, so his wife, Stefanie, a hypnotherapist and standup comedian, is here for support. He still has a magnificent nest of ash-blond hair, great blue eyes and huge white teeth that wouldn’t look out of place in Yosemite national park. Cancers have nibbled away at bits of his face (he has no tear ducts or sinuses), but he is still strikingly handsome in his own chewed-up, spat-out, hard-living kind of way. (...)

Busey has become known for his acronyms. Which Buseyism is most relevant to his life? “What? That’s a difficult one. The word to spell is faith. Faith – those letters stand for Fantastic, Adventurous in Trusting Him. And the second Buseyism I consider spiritually profound is hope. Hope stands for Heavenly Offerings Prevail Eternally.”

The Buseyisms, like his tics and other mannerisms, go back to his life-changing motorbike accident and subsequent brain surgery for a subdural haematoma, during which he says he briefly died. “About 25 years ago, I had an accident on a Harley-Davidson. I went off the bike without a helmet, hit my head into a kerb, split my skull, passed away after brain surgery and went to the other side – the spiritual realm where I got information. And I came back, and these messages, these definitions, came to me first-class. I’ll think of a word and write the word down without thinking.” (...)

Before his accident, Busey hardly led a conventional life. He seemed more dedicated to feeding his drug addiction than working. “My drug of choice is cocaine.” After the accident, he briefly returned to the drugs. “I OD’d on 3 May 1990, and thank God, because I realised I’d been dancing with the devil in a very small circle and the devil was leading the dance,” he says in his deep Texas drawl. “I left the dance and said: ‘You kick on from here – I’m gone. I’m dancing on my own.’ When you do a drug like cocaine, you want to get that first hit back, but you never will. That’s gone. It’s a chase to the death when you’re addicted to cocaine.”

Is he surprised he’s still alive? “What? Oh, no. You know what? You never die. Death stands for Don’t Expect a Tragedy Here. It is one transformation from one dimension to another and it is painless, free and lovely. I’ve experienced it, so I can say that.”

Back in the day, he and his close friend (and doppelganger) Nick Nolte were regarded as the hardest-partying men in Hollywood. “We were like two perfectly twin-cloned entities. We’d go to parties in Malibu and were always the last to leave. We’d be sitting under the dinner table with our panama hats on and we got known as ‘the things who will not leave’.”

by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
[ed. A true original. And totally nuts.]

A Brooklyn Guitar Hero

I remember thinking, first instinct, This will affect piano sales,” Brian Whiton said the other day, describing the moment, this winter, when he heard about the coronavirus. Whiton, the owner of Brooklyn Fine Guitars and Big Wrench Piano Care, is a piano technician by training. He started stocking guitars in his Carroll Gardens shop only because people kept wandering in asking for them.

As the outbreak reached the city, Whiton began disinfecting his merchandise. “People seemed so relieved when I would wipe a guitar down right in front of them,” he said. Initially, he didn’t think it was necessary to restrict the number of customers inside the store, crowds being a rarity. But he eventually began having customers e-mail or text him their orders, and he carried guitars out to the sidewalk for them to try. Payment was via Venmo, or Zelle. Whiton even offered to put guitars into Ubers or Lyfts and send them off to their new owners, although no one took him up on it.

When, on Friday, March 20th, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all “non-essential businesses” to close by Sunday, the news prompted a run on guitars. On a normal weekend, Whiton sells between one and four of the instruments. That weekend, he sold sixteen. “Most of the people who were buying were beginners,” he said. Customers would say, “I’m looking for something entry-level to get through this.” Carmen Tellez, a twenty-seven-year-old who recently graduated from law school, was one of them. She faced the prospect of being cooped up with her boyfriend in their one-bedroom near Barclays Center. “I thought about whether I could just be content watching YouTube videos all day, which often I am,” she said. “Or what kind of crafting skills I have.” She’d played a little guitar as a teen-ager. “I was, like, Oh, maybe that’s something I could do.”


Tellez e-mailed Whiton. “I had my eye on the Yamaha JR1 3/4-size,” she wrote, and asked for curbside pickup. “I am healthy, social-distancing, and avoiding public transportation!” When she arrived, he was on the corner, handling a ukulele sale. “I Venmoed him the money, and he brought out the guitar, and he said he had sanitized it,” she recalled. Tellez consecrated her new axe by plucking out a little “Smoke on the Water.” She has been watching YouTube video tutorials, and during FaceTime calls with her mother she looks over notebooks from the lessons she took as a kid. She’s nearly finished learning the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Next up: “Wish You Were Here,” by Pink Floyd. Tellez’s boyfriend has pronounced the new hobby “less annoying” than he expected.

by Eric Lacsh, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: João Fazenda
[ed. See also: YouTube Guitar Teachers You Might Want to Check Out (Duck Soup).]

Billionaires Cowboy Up and Turn Wyoming Into a Gated Community

Of the 3,144 counties in the United States, the one with the highest per capita income is Teton County, Wyoming. It’s also the most unequal: Ninety percent of all income is made by 8 percent of households. Its average per capita income is $194,485, and the average income for the top 1 percent in the county is an astonishing $28.2 million.

Justin Farrell, an associate professor of sociology at Yale and a Wyoming native, spent six years interviewing the ultra-wealthy as well as the working poor in Teton County and studying the effects of wealth on this community. The result of his research is an illuminating and provocative new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. He spoke to reporter Nick Romeo.

Most people do not associate wealth inequality and environmentalism. What’s the connection you found?

The ultrarich use nature to solve dilemmas they face. The first dilemma is economic. So you made all this money: How much should you share it, how should you enjoy it, and how should you protect and multiply it? Conservation has all sorts of benefits economically. People say that they move to Teton County for the beautiful ecosystem, the wildlife and all that, but the other major reason, the primary reason really, is it’s a tax haven. I try to show that not all tax havens are off in these faraway islands, some of them are right here in the pristine mountains of the American West: Wyoming does not have corporate tax or income tax and often sits atop Bloomberg’s wealth-friendly states rankings. So you see dollars flooding in, which impacts the fabric of the community itself. In Teton County in 1980, only 30 percent of income came from financial investments, but by 2015, $8 out of every $10 in this community was made from financial investments.

I’m a big proponent of conservation, but I don’t think we look enough at who benefits from conservation, not only in terms of tax breaks but in terms of how it affects property values and low-income people who can no longer live anywhere near where they work. Some people have to drive over an 8,000-foot mountain pass every day to get to work in the dead of a Wyoming winter. So the area is transformed into an ultra-exclusive enclave, where you need the money to buy entry. It’s basically become a gated community to the extreme.

What are the other dilemmas that the rich use nature to solve?

The second dilemma is social: How do they wrestle with the stigma of being ultra-wealthy? They are burdened by a social stigma that they are greedy, and they often feel like they’ve sacrificed something along the way to wealth. So they use nature combined with a romantic view of rural people as a way to transform themselves. I found this pattern where they create versions of themselves that they view as more authentic, more virtuous, more small-town and community-minded.

The interesting thing is that they model their personal transformation on this notion of the working poor in the rural West, especially in outdoors-oriented places. They tend to romanticize them. The image is of someone with a low-status career who doesn’t have a lot of material goods but is living close to the earth, in nature, and maybe they’re going skiing or hiking, or maybe they live in a camper van, and they are free from the traps of wealth and power that the rich have had to navigate their whole careers. The rich imagine that the working poor live more of an outdoor life of contentment, are more authentic, simpler, and that they enjoy a special kinship with nature and integration into the small-town community. All that becomes central to how the ultra-wealthy transform themselves—it’s a yearning among the ultra-wealthy for this love of a bygone small-town character kind of mixed with the cowboy ethos.

You talk in the book about how the ultrarich basically play dress-up—they wear Wranglers and plaid shirts. They pull on leather cowboy boots and drive rugged trucks.

Yeah, the dress was very surprising to me. I did not go into this project focused on how those folks dressed, but it turned out to be such a communicator of something deeper and more important. Dress was an outward performance of their conversion to this way of life, of what they view as this way of life. The image is built on half-truths and a really romanticized view of the working poor, especially in this community, where the reality of the working poor tends to be two immigrant families living in a single trailer, with the adults working two or three jobs. But that’s not how the wealthy see it. This performance also includes making friends with people who are just scraping by and going out into nature with these people, whether it’s their ski guides or fishing guide.

by Nick Romeo, Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: Brownie Harris/Corbis via Getty

Hiroshige, Bowl of Sushi (1797-1858)
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How to Fix Globalization—for Detroit, Not Davos

Irwin Stelzer and TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin recently spoke with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers in a wide-ranging conversation. They discussed the debate over “decoupling” with China, how to reform capitalism to address legitimate grievances, what an effective response to COVID-19 might look like, and the shape of a post-pandemic U.S. fiscal policy. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Irwin Stelzer & Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: Let’s start with China, Secretary Summers. There’s a “decoupling” debate emerging now, about whether we should economically disengage from China and diversify our supply chains. If you were advising a new administration, would you keep the tariffs in place? Would you subsidize U.S. production of essential goods? How do you think about this challenge?

Lawrence H. Summers: I think that there’s no more important task for a new President than reconceptualizing the U.S.-China relationship. The strategy of “engagement and hedge” that was conceptualized during the Cold War as a way of gaining leverage against Russia is no longer viable at a time when China and Russia are closer to each other than either is to the United States, when China exists on a very different scale than it did 50 years ago, and when so many of the most pressing security challenges involve cooperating globally rather than balancing powers.

It certainly has not happened that continued economic engagement has led to the convergence of China towards the United States, nor has it led consistently to greater bilateral cooperation. That has to be acknowledged as a starting point. At the same time, there is an American tendency to glom onto prime threats and overreact in ways that can be problematic. The hysteria that prevailed in the United States post-Sputnik was in some ways constructive, but also contributed to fears in Moscow that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis and brought the world closer to nuclear war than it has ever been. The Japan hysteria of the late 1980s looks vaguely ridiculous today, but at the time, it was a commonplace within both political parties that the Cold War had ended and Japan had won. Russia was not an economic threat, and Japan was not a security threat. China is potentially both, and so the alarm in the United States is that much greater.

The challenge for a new administration is to harness that alarm constructively to support necessary renewal in the United States, and to assure that our deep security interests are well protected, without succumbing to paranoia that could generate a cycle of hostility between the United States and China, without lapsing into a desire for a degree of U.S. control that’s not plausible given the economic reality, and without putting at risk the capacity to cooperate on the issues that are most important—like pandemic, like climate change, like the risks and opportunities associated with Artificial Intelligence.

We do need to develop our own capacity so that we are much less vulnerable to others in terms of our procurement capacity for key materials. We need the kind of thought that has traditionally gone into export controls and the review of foreign investment to go into the issue of supply chains and U.S. dependence.

In general, economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency. Going forward we will need more emphasis on “just in case” even at some cost in terms of “just in time.” More broadly our economic strategy will need to put less emphasis on short-term commercial advantage and pay more attention to long-run strategic advantage.

A great deal of what was in the Trump program was fundamentally irrelevant. Who cares whether China buys soybeans from us or whether Brazil buys soybeans from us? It was rearrangement of trade flows around the bilateral deficit to no particular purpose. Some of the tariffs that were placed on China had the effect of diverting production from China to Vietnam. I think that was to no real purpose.

But I do think that it is incumbent on us to make sure that we have the resilience to not be dependent on China and potential adversaries of the United States for goods that are going to be crucial for us, just as companies do contingency planning around situations where their revenues go to zero for some interval. Now there are many ways to respond. There’s the accumulation of inventories; the kind of thinking that’s behind the Strategic Petroleum Reserve should probably be applied to a much wider range of goods. There are contingency plans to build manufacturing facilities in more flexible ways so that they can be repurposed if need be.

The challenge for the U.S. system will be to implement these policies in a way that is genuinely strategic and in which the national security rationale doesn’t let itself be captured by those whose real motives are protectionism for a particular business interest. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has done this relatively well, and I think that’s the model that we should be looking to. But there’s no question that the spectacle of the Chinese airlifting masks to the United States should be a spur to much more thought about our own resilience.

Dependence as a concern goes beyond supply chains. We need to assure that we remain central to global standard setting as technologies develop, to assure that our allies are not unduly dependent on China and that there are American companies at the forefront with respect to key technologies. I am no fan of industrial policy generally, but somebody should have done something that assured that there was a serious American competitor in the 5G space.

At the broadest level, we need to craft a relationship with China from the principles of mutual respect and strategic reassurance, with rather less of the feigned affection that there has been in the past. We are not partners. We are not really friends. We are entities that find ourselves on the same small lifeboat in turbulent waters a long way from shore. We need to be pulling in unison if things are to work for either of us. If we can respect each other’s roles, respect our very substantial differences, confine our spheres of negotiation to those areas that are most important for cooperation, and represent the most fundamental interests of our societies, we can have a more successful co-evolution that we have had in recent years.

TAI: You’ve written about the need for “responsible nationalism.” What does that actually mean in terms of economic policies? How do we reform capitalism but preserve it, while making it more popular and sustainable in a democracy?

LHS: Let’s take the global dimension first. We have done too much management of globalization for the benefit of those in Davos, and too little for the benefit of those in Detroit or Dusseldorf. (...)

Someone put it to me this way: First, we said that you are going to lose your job, but it was okay because when you got your new one, you were going to have higher wages thanks to lower prices because of international trade. Then we said that your company was going to move your job overseas, but it was really necessary because if we didn’t do that, then your company was going to be less competitive. Now we’re saying that we have to cut the taxes on those companies and cut the calculus class from your kid’s high school, because otherwise we won’t be able to attract companies to the United States, and you have to pay higher taxes and live with fewer services. At a certain point, people say, “This whole global thing doesn’t work for me,” and they have a point.

by Irwin Stelzer and Jeffrey Gedmin, The American Interest | Read more:

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Too Little Or Too Much Time With The Kids? Grandparenting Is Tough In A Pandemic

Back in pre-pandemic times, Richard and Denise Victor would get to see their four grandchildren almost every day. One set of kids lives around the block from them in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; the others are half an hour away, all close enough for frequent visits and sleepovers.

"With the younger ones, we have a routine of stories when they spend the night," Richard Victor says.

But when the coronavirus hit, the couple were at their vacation home in Florida, and suddenly it wasn't safe to leave. They've been sheltering there for three months, missing their grandkids and struggling with an absence that FaceTime just can't fill.

"It's very, very difficult," says Victor, a 70-year-old lawyer and founder of the nonprofit Grandparents Rights Organization. "You have to try your best, because we don't know when this will be over with."

Of all the hardships imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, among the most poignant is the reshaping of relationships between children and the grandparents who love them.

Across the U.S., where more than 70 million people are grandparents, the effort to prevent infection in older people, who are most at risk of serious COVID-19 illness, has meant self-imposed exile for many. On the other hand, some grandparents have taken over daily child care duties to help adult children who must work.

"All the grandparents in the country are aching," says Madonna Harrington Meyer, a sociology professor at Syracuse University in New York. "Some are aching because they can't see their grandchildren — and some are aching because they can't get away from them."

Both situations are the result of a fast-moving pandemic that forced families to decide quickly whether to isolate with grandparents "inside the bubble or out," Harrington Meyer says. Three months later, many are still grappling with those decisions — and worrying about an uncertain future.

"I think we all have the exact same set of issues," says Harrington Meyer, author of the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work: Juggling Families and Jobs. "What will August bring? All of us need to be prepared for this to be fluctuating."

Even as some regions begin easing restrictions, the risks posed by gathering in person haven't changed for grandparents separated from their grandchildren, says Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an affiliated clinical assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at Stanford University. Rates of serious illness and death caused by COVID-19 remain much higher in older people than among the young, and children can easily spread the disease.

"It's hard to know if a child has been exposed or whether they have an asymptomatic infection," Kuppalli says. "I would definitely recommend staying away or definitely continuing to wear masks and perform good hand hygiene."

At the same time, maintaining a connection with grandkids is important for the well-being of everyone, says Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"There's an incredible health benefit to them to interact with their grandparents," she says. The bond is special.

by Jonel Accecia, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Victor Family

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.

It all adds up.

So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).

Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the Third World out of poverty, or science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal disease, conquering hepatitis C or, curing deadly cancers with genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are, and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so one hopes). Small stuff matters too.What about the little things in an ordinary life?

The seen and the unseen.When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it.

These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list of improvements to my ordinary life.

COMPUTERS

TECHNOLOGY

SOCIETY

FOOD

by Gwern, Gwern.net |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dredging Up the Past

Growing up on the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans, it was not uncommon for a spring deluge to turn our deadend street into a waist-high pool. Just like rings on a tree, hurricane events marked the passing of generations. My parents each had their various tales from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. My own childhood was shaped, in large part, by more recent storms and evacuations. Ask any Gulf Coast resident about that “pre-hurricane feeling” and you’ll likely hear a description of anticipation, giddiness, and dread.

In May 1995, a massive flood inundated our home with three feet of water. All summer long, as workers piled moldy sheetrock and insulation along our street, my twin sister and I explored the strip of woods between our house and the Mississippi River. Drinking cans of Dr. Pepper, we imagined ourselves explorers as we watched the barges and container ships float pass us. I was fascinated by the parade of river traffic—and that fascination stuck with me throughout my childhood. As I grew, so did the size of maritime vessels. Globalization increased the amount of freight traversing the oceans and entering the Port of New Orleans. Larger boats needed deeper ports to safely dock and unload cargo. But this was somewhat of a Sisphyean endeavor, because the Mississippi River is akin to a fire hose of mud and silt. To prevent shoaling (the buildup of sand and sediment), boats called dredge vessels were needed to keep waterways navigable and ports deep enough for vessels to dock.

Dredge vessels are also ships that (literally) shape the land we live on, at least in coastal areas. They were used to build the Palm Islands off the coast of Dubai, and they’re how the low-lying Netherlands fight off the North Sea. There are many kinds of dredge vessels, but for the purposes of this story, the ones we care about are trailing suction hopper dredges, commonly known as “hopper dredges.” These are ocean-going vessels that can endure fierce currents. They do their work by deploying long pipes that suck up sediment on the seafloor, which is then deposited into a large bin, or “hopper,” and then transported to a site for restoration or land-building. I’ve always felt it helpful to think of hopper dredges as the Megamaid from Spaceballs.

By building up the shoreline, hopper dredges help keep Louisiana safe from the sea, but we don’t have nearly enough of them to protect the coastline of my home state, let alone the rest of the country. Currently, the United States’ hopper dredge fleet consists of just 19 vessels, four of which are mothballed by Congress. The other 15 are owned by five private companies. Compare this to the 55 hopper dredges in the Netherlands’ private fleet or China’s ever-growing land-building fleet. With such a paltry collection of vessels, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which we’ll refer to as “the Corps” going forward) is responsible for maintaining 12,000 miles of inland and intracoastal waterways, 180 ports, and 95,471 miles of shoreline.

History shows the Corps does not have the tools it needs to do its job. Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s and is projected to lose another 674 square miles before 2050. This is land that slows hurricanes down—land that could have slowed Hurricane Katrina down, for example. Louisiana is not the only place in need of dredge vessels, but as with other poor coastal states, many communities are forced to languish on a waiting list that moves too slow to address these emergencies in time. At the time of this writing, most of the nation’s dredge vessels were either drydocked for repairs or deployed across eight far-flung states. (...)

Since the 1970s, the private dredging industry has fought a relentless war to eliminate competition from the public sector. Between 1899 and 1949, the Corps built 150 dredges which were used to develop waterways and ports. But when it came time to replace these aging vessels in the mid-1960s, private businesses saw an opportunity to seize those lucrative contracts for themselves.

by Megan Milliken Biven, Current Affairs | Read more:
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