[ed. ... and we will continue to work with our Republican friends in Congress to resolve this crisis. Thank you.]
via:

Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law

[ed. See also: Why the Health Care Law Scares the G.O.P.]

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states. (...)

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.” (...)

The law was written to require all Americans to have health coverage. For lower and middle-income earners, there are subsidies on the new health exchanges to help them afford insurance. An expanded Medicaid program was intended to cover the poorest. In all, about 30 million uninsured Americans were to have become eligible for financial help.

But the Supreme Court’s ruling on the health care law last year, while upholding it, allowed states to choose whether to expand Medicaid. Those that opted not to leave about eight million uninsured people who live in poverty ($19,530 for a family of three) without any assistance at all.

Poor people excluded from the Medicaid expansion will not be subject to fines for lacking coverage. In all, about 14 million eligible Americans are uninsured and living in poverty, the Times analysis found.

by Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times | Read more:

Image: James Patterson

via:

Andreas Feininger: Coney Island, 4th of July, 1949
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A Walk to Kobe

As a child, when I climbed the banks of the river, the sea was spread out right in front of me, with nothing blocking the view. I used to go swimming there in the summer. I loved the ocean and loved to swim. I went fishing, too, and took my dog for a walk there every day. Sometimes I just liked to sit down and do nothing. And sometimes I’d sneak out of the house at night, go to the sea with my friends and gather driftwood and light a bonfire. I loved the smell of the sea, its far-off roar, and all that it brought with it.

But now the sea isn’t there any more. They cut down the mountains, hauled all the dirt off to the sea with trucks and conveyor belts and filled it in. With both the mountains and sea so close by, this area is perfect for that kind of construction work. Neat little residential communities have sprung up where the mountains used to be, and similarly neat little residential communities have popped up on the landfill. All this happened after I moved to Tokyo, during the era of high growth in Japan, when the country was in the throes of a nationwide construction boom.

I own a house now in a town on the seashore in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, and travel back and forth between there and Tokyo. Unfortunately, or very unfortunately, I should say, this seaside town reminds me more of my home town than my home town does. The area has green mountains, and a wonderful swimming beach. I want to preserve these as best I can, because once natural scenery is gone, it’s gone forever. Once violence caused by humans is unleashed, it can never be reversed.

Past the banks of the river, the area around what used to be the Koroen seaside resort had been filled in to make a kind of cosy little cove, or pond. Windsurfers were there, doing their best to catch the wind. Just to the west,In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us.on what was Ashiya beach, stands a row of high-rise apartment buildings, like so many blank monoliths. On the shore, some families that have driven there in their station wagons and minivans are using small propane tanks to have a barbecue. So-called outdoor activities. They’re grilling meat, fish and vegetables, and the whitish smoke silently rises like a beacon into the sky on this happy Sunday scene. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. An almost perfect May tableau. Still, as I sit there on the concrete bank and gaze at where the real sea used to be, everything here, like a tyre leaking air, slowly, and quietly, loses its sense of reality.

In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us. One is a metaphor for the other. Or perhaps they are interchangeable. Lying here, asleep, like a pair of animals having the same dream. (...)

I’d managed to make it this far, so I decided to climb the steep slope that led to my old high school. A light sheen of sweat broke out on my forehead. In high school I always rode a packed bus to school, but now I walked the same road under my own steam. In the spacious playing field that had been carved out of the mountain slopes, girl students were playing handball as part of their gym class. There was an unearthly quiet all around, except for the occasional shouts of the girls. It was so completely still it felt like I’d stumbled into a level of space I shouldn’t be in. Why this utter silence?

I gazed at Kobe harbour, sparkling leadenly far below, and listened carefully, hoping to pick up some echoes from the past, but nothing came to me. Just the sounds of silence. That’s all. But what are you going to do? We’re talking about things that happened over thirty years ago.

Over thirty years ago. There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It’s true for everyone. But maybe that isn’t wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there’s no reason to complain. And besides, who would we complain to, anyway?

by Haruki Marukami, Granta |  Read more:

Image: Granta

The Stranglehold on Our Politics

Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences—none of them good—for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects.

In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans made their greatest gains: in 1994, when Clinton was president, it was 41.1 percent and in 2010 it was 41.6 percent. In 2006, when Bush was president, the Democrats took over the House and Senate and won most of the governorships, turnout was the next highest, 40.4 percent. The quality of the candidates, the economy, and many unexpected issues of course determine the atmosphere of an election; but in the end turnout is almost always decisive.

The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.

The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.

Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives—but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.

As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level—but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t—mainly doesn’t—happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.

The 2010 elections were the single most important event leading up to the domination of the House by the Republican far right. Both the recession and organized agitation by the Tea Party over the newly passed health care law—“spontaneous” campaigns guided from Washington by the old pros Karl Rove and Dick Armey, and funded by reactionary business moguls—helped the Republicans, and especially the most radical elements in the party, sweep into the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of twelve additional states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Republicans who took over states in 2010 reset our politics. Among other things, they made the House of Representatives unrepresentative. In 2012 Democrats won more than 1.7 million more votes for the House than the Republicans did, but they picked up only eight seats. (This was the largest discrepancy between votes and the division of House seats since 1950.)

Thus, while Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.

The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times. Their approach was so different in degree as to be a difference in substance—and the post-2010 politics in Washington resemble nothing that has gone before. There has been something of a war raging among students of electoral politics over the role of redistricting in our current situation. But Sam Wang of Princeton, a neuroscientist who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year:

Political scientists have identified other factors that have influenced the relationship between votes and seats in the past. Concentration of voters in urban areas can, for example, limit how districts are drawn, creating a natural packing effect. But in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor.

Moreover, the redistricting has become different from the process that we learned about in civics classes. Traditional “gerrymandering,” which had been practiced since the early 1800s, involved drawing weirdly shaped districts for the purpose of protecting incumbents. But in recent years redistricting has developed into a vicious fight for control of redistricting—though the shape of the districts can be just as weird.

The Republicans have made the greater effort to shape the House to their benefit, through a deliberate two-step process: first, win state elections so as to control the redistricting, and then redistrict to give the party as much advantage as possible in the House. Though they’ve done their own self-interested redistricting, Democrats haven’t been as zealous about controlling reapportionment. Still, through the combination of both parties’ actions, they have ended up with more safe seats than before.

There was just one problem: when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.

by Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

So a cou­ple of months ago Dou­glas Atkin, head of Com­mu­nity and E-staff Mem­ber at AirBnB, took to the stage of the Le Web con­fer­ence in Lon­don (video) to announce the for­ma­tion of Peers: “a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports the shar­ing econ­omy move­ment.” I like grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions and I like the co-operative impulse, but this… Well here is his speech in its entirety (in ital­ics) with com­ments from yours truly.

I joined AirBnB about four months ago, but I’m going to talk about a dif­fer­ent organization.

He means Peers.

In fact I’d like to talk about a move­ment for the shar­ing econ­omy. By “a move­ment” I mean exactly that. I mean huge num­bers of peo­ple, with a shared iden­tity, mobi­lized to take action to do two things: to grow the peer shar­ing econ­omy, and to fight for their col­lec­tive inter­ests against unfair and unrea­son­able obstacles.

A grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion with 40 cor­po­rate “part­ners”, with unspec­i­fied but sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing, formed with guid­ance from a set of high-profile “thought lead­ers”, with­out local chap­ters, and with noth­ing much for the grass­roots to do, but with an Exec­u­tive Direc­tor on day one.

Andrew Leonard from Salon has been fol­low­ing the story, and tells us that fund­ing comes from “mission-aligned inde­pen­dent donors”. So that’s wealthy back­ers with a finan­cial inter­est in the shar­ing econ­omy. This is not grass­roots, it’s astroturf.

If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is peo­ple appro­pri­at­ing the lan­guage of col­lec­tive and pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics for finan­cial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the shar­ing econ­omy: well-intentioned peo­ple end up con­tribut­ing to immis­er­a­tion and injus­tice when they think they are doing the opposite.

So what we’re talk­ing about here is not just peo­ple shar­ing their skills, or their apart­ment, or their car, but also their col­lec­tive power to expand the shar­ing econ­omy together, and to stand up against entrenched inter­ests who stand unfairly in their way. So “peo­ple power” if you like, or more accu­rately “peer power”.

And what we’re not talk­ing about here is ven­ture cap­i­tal. Going through Crunch­base tells me that the total fund­ing for the 40 part­ners is over $600M. AirBnB has received $120M, includ­ing fund­ing from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Ash­ton Kucher. You know, peo­ple stand­ing up against entrenched interests.

At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the fund­ing is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this orga­ni­za­tion are being taken for a ride by the appeal­ing anti-establishment lan­guage of Sil­i­con Val­ley . They need to take a look at who their bed­fel­lows are and what the real agenda is.

Ven­ture Cap­i­tal funds are not inter­ested in peo­ple power, they are inter­ested in an invest­ment with a good return. The fact that Dou­glas Atkin doesn’t once men­tion the finan­cial moti­va­tions of the forces behind the shar­ing econ­omy is either dis­hon­est or unbe­liev­ably self-deceiving.

Now why would there be a need for such a thing? The shar­ing econ­omy seems to be bar­relling along pretty hap­pily. Why do we need another orga­ni­za­tion? Well, firstly the oppor­tu­nity. This was brought home to me a week ago in San Fran­cisco where I attended a meet­ing of shar­ing econ­omy par­tic­i­pants. So there were dri­vers, pas­sen­gers, hosts, guests, and tour guides from RelayRides, Lyft, AirBnB, Vayable and Side­car, and they were lit­er­ally bounc­ing up and down with enthu­si­asm about the oppor­tu­nity to col­lab­o­rate together — with each other. 

So they were devel­op­ing ideas — bril­liant ideas actu­ally — to share cus­tomers with each other, across ver­ti­cals. One per­son even sug­gested that there could be a peer econ­omy cur­rency — maybe Bit­coin. Or even points to encour­age peo­ple to cross ver­ti­cals and recruit new peo­ple into this new economy.

The lan­guage changes, the mask slips. Par­tic­i­pants become cus­tomers, shar­ing becomes buy­ing. The phrase “across ver­ti­cals” reminds us that Dou­glas Atkin is an adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive. Now the shar­ing econ­omy is about loy­alty pro­grams and cross mar­ket­ing? Not the kind of shar­ing I want to be part of. I don’t have a prob­lem with com­merce, but what I do object to is com­merce wrapped up in, and appro­pri­at­ing, the lan­guage of solidarity.

by Tom Slee, Whimsley |  Read more:

Image: FastCompany

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Prescription Heroin

[ed. See also: Heroin, cocaine and weed are stronger, cheaper and easier to get than they've ever been.]

British Columbia, Canada, has had a heroin problem for years. Statistics are hard to come by, but in 2008, a former user described use of the drug in the province as an "epidemic," and a 2010 BBC story called Vancouver, the province's largest city, the "Drug Central of North America." But a new strategy in the fight against addiction and the host of societal problems that come with it is emerging: let doctors prescribe addicts heroin so they get the drug they need without resorting to crime. Studies have shown this approach can help many longtime users, but the Canadian gonvernment wants it shut down.

Prescription heroin is used in some European countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, but it's been a long time coming to North America. The first Canadian study that tested the effectiveness of giving addicts heroin under the supervision of doctors was the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI), which started in 2005. It eventually recruited 251 addicts in Vancouver and Montreal who had unsuccessfully attempted to kick smack numerous times. A control group was given methadone, which is commonly prescribed to heroin addicts so they can wean themselves off hard drugs.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, showed that injectable heroin—known in medical-speak as diacetylmorphine—was a far more effective and efficient treatment than methadone in getting users out of the vicious and costly cycle of crime, infection, overdoses, and hospital visits that are a way of life for those in the grips of long-term, hardcore addiction. Compared to those trying to kick heroin using methadone, participants used street drugs less often, committed fewer crimes, and were employed more often, more connected to their families, and straight-up happier. A "cost of illness" analysis from 2000 found that severely addicted individuals can cost society over $43,000 per year, so getting addicts off the streets and into roles as members of productive society is good for all of Canada.

Dave Murray participated in the study and went on to found the NAOMI Patients Association in 2011. But in 2005 he was in his 50s and addicted seemlingly for life.

“I’m living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in a single-room-occupancy hotel, I’m down on my luck and I’m down to nothing," he told me over the phone. "I’m dealing drugs to support my habit and committing crimes. Doing various horrible things that I don’t even want to talk about. I often describe the addiction like if you can picture a dog chasing his tail, round and round and round and then finally it falls asleep. And then when it wakes up, and it’s back to chasing its tail around. That’s the stress of addiction. That’s the life of an addict.” (...)

“If you’re going to pull someone out of the ditch, you don’t pull them halfway out and leave them on their own," he said. "You’ve got to pull them out and really start helping them, and you’ll be amazed how resourceful these people are. I mean, think about if you had to go out there and come up with a hundred or two hundred bucks every day without a job, you’re quite a resourceful character—if you can give them some other direction to use that resourcefulness to become successful in some other field other than obtaining enough money to buy their heroin every day, I think you’d be amazed how far some people could go if you gave them a hand.”

by Dave Dean, Motherboard |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Myths of the Golden Age

Over the last 15 years, many people have adopted the view that television has entered a “Golden Age.” This view first emerged in 1999, when The Sopranos made its darkly comedic debut on the subscription cable station HBO, and it gathered strength as The Wire enjoyed its five-series run on the same station. These shows became possible because of dramatic changes in the structure of the television industry, shifts in the character of white-collar work, and the increasing homogenisation of Hollywood films, which opened up exciting new space for artistic ambition on the small screen. On police dramas like The Wire and The Shield, the depiction of violence and moral ambiguity suggested that uncompromising realism had finally made a place for itself on TV, while violent fantasies like Dexter seemed to provide the medium with unprecedented psychological surrealism and depth. These fictional worlds, fleshed out in meticulous detail, populated by minor characters who proved to be as memorable as the protagonists, were immersive and multifaceted in a way that earlier shows, with their casts of rotating, disposable characters, could only dream of. Today, with Mad Men and the violent psychodrama, Breaking Bad, nearing their conclusion, television is widely regarded as the 21st century’s most exciting form of popular art. (...)

The key shows in this new wave have been collectively dubbed “prestige TV,” a term which neatly captures the importance of reputation and cultural cachet to their success. Prestige television’s supporters are fond of the idea that the morally complex protagonists of their favourite shows are unsympathetic, and that it is a testament to the shows’ writing that audiences have always managed to root for them. The typical protagonist of prestige shows is a middle-aged American man, almost always a father and husband, who carries out a semi-secret double life in crime or some other form of deviance, like serial adultery. For all their flaws, these characters have been admired, even loved. The Sopranos made James Gandolfini, with his hulking frame and reedy voice, into a sex symbol, and no amount of lies, alcohol, or moping seems to be able to dim Don Draper’s appeal in the eyes of Mad Men’s fans. The adulterous ad man, the cop who dips into the drug trade himself, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer—this kind of protagonist has become so popular that some networks now prefer “anti-heroes” to the more traditional kind.

These characters began to appear precisely when premium cable stations—for which viewers pay monthly “subscription” fees, as with magazines—stopped pursuing the largest possible audience. Instead, as Martin writes, “Networks now targeted specific demographics: rich, young, educated, male, and so on.” An audience that fit this profile could be attractive to advertisers despite its modest size, and so prestige television dramas have all been targeted at educated professionals. These are people who work long hours and invest much of their social identity in their careers. It is not surprising, then, that they have no trouble relating to television’s anti-heroes. These characters, after all, are defined by their intelligence and success at their jobs. Don Draper’s infidelities are forgiven on the grounds of his ability to sell an unconventional advertising slogan to a cigarette company. Breaking Bad’s wildly inaccurate portrayal of the drug trade is overlooked in exchange for the pleasures of watching a middle-class suburban male outsmart scores of adversaries. The truth is that prestige television actually makes its protagonists a little too easy to sympathise with.

But perhaps there is another reason why television’s anti-heroes have been such a hit. In a conversation recently published by the website Slate, Stephen Metcalf proposed a theory about our obsession with the middle class father living a double life in crime. The economic collapse of 2008, he argued, revealed the hollowness of the economic promises made to the middle class. A responsible life of white-collar work no longer guaranteed you a retirement or a house of your own (at least not a house with any value). What’s more, the middle class was destroyed by a group of plutocratic investment bankers whose behaviour is widely regarded as criminal in its own right. With the rules degraded to the point of cruel uselessness, why should it be any surprise that TV viewers find themselves hungry for shows in which middle class dads break the laws that were not really protecting them in the first place?

It’s a compelling argument, but it misses an important aspect of the genre, which is its aggressive and resentful masculinity.

by Richard Beck, Prospect |  Read more:

Image: Breaking Bad

Bruce Davidson
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‘‘It Was the Biggest Game of Chicken I’ve Ever Seen.’’

[ed. From the series: Launch. Hack. Meow.]

In mid-May, a few days before Yahoo announced it would be acquiring Tumblr, there was a housewarming party in Greenpoint. A Tumblr employee was moving into an apartment with a friend who happened to be dating another ­Tumblr employee, and the overlapping social circles resulted in a room full of Tumblr people. It was Saturday night. Late the previous afternoon, a cluster of posts had appeared on tech blogs with the announcement that Yahoo’s board would be meeting on Sunday to approve a $1.1 billion offer for Tumblr, and though everyone at the party had read the posts—or fielded texts from someone who had—nobody had really paid attention. Rumors skittered around the office on a weekly basis. Employees always joked that it didn’t matter what kind of options you had because Tumblr was never going to sell.

Plus: Yahoo? Really? When a similar idea circulated back in 2009, Tumblr’s then–lead developer, Marco Arment, summed up the party line in a scornful blog post: “I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo … I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can’t make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.” Thanks, but no thanks. Yahoo was a lumbering Sunnyvale company with irrelevant products that no one used. Tumblr was a nimble startup in the nation’s greatest city with a boy-genius founder. An acquisition wasn’t just unlikely, it was insulting. The only company to whom they might have sold, an early employee said, was Apple (if Apple had asked).

Yahoo’s reputation as a wet blanket may have been allayed by the arrival of Marissa Mayer as CEO, but an acquisition still struck employees at the party as too icky to be true. (One guest summed it up: “No one who works in tech wants to work at Yahoo.”) As more wine and whiskey were consumed, however, the incredulity turned into fidgety speculation. One employee pointed out that Mayer had been dropping into the Tumblr office as far back as December; he remembered peering into the fishbowl conference room to see her meeting with their CEO, David Karp, and head of product, Derek Gottfrid. Nothing secret about it. Other employees were aware that after a hiring spree and floor-to-ceiling office remodel, the amount of cash left in ­Tumblr’s coffers was dwindling. At some point, partygoers who worked on the engineering side began forecasting how shitty the company would become if Yahoo were to buy it, and by the end of the night, guests were running numbers, trying to figure out how much their options might be worth. On Monday, Karp called an all-team meeting to announce the deal.

If low- and mid- and even some high-level employees were shocked—“I don’t think anyone saw it coming necessarily,” says Gottfrid—anyone paying attention to Tumblr’s burn rate should have been expecting an exit. Despite its popularity (it is the fourteenth-most-visited site in the U.S., according to Quantcast, a few slots above Wikipedia), Tumblr was a six-year-old blogging platform with disappointing revenue targets, no clear path to profitability, and alarmingly little cash in the bank (just $16.6 million when it was purchased). To stay afloat without selling, it would have needed a sixth round of funding, which, given the situation, might have led to a “down round,” and to Karp ceding a substantial chunk of his equity. As one person watching the deal unfold put it: “It was the biggest game of chicken I’ve ever seen in a startup. Literally months away from bankruptcy, and he manages to find an angel in Marissa Mayer.”’ (...)

Tumblr’s appeal can be summed up in one word, which is “easy.” If you traveled back in time to 1996 and took a grandmother whose understanding of the web was AOL and wormholed her to 2013, she’d be able to create a Tumblr blog in less than three minutes with no direction. The site’s posting icons are big, the fonts are big, everything is big: The whole thesis is that there’s no fine print and no learning curve. Generating new blogs is so easy that Tumblr limits the number that users are allowed to create in a single day. (The limit is ten.)

If the “easy” mandate feels unimaginative today, it was less so in 2007. Karp has talked a lot about his frustration with tools like Wordpress and Blogger, and he is shrewder these days in his framing of Tumblr as “a novel alternative” rather than a middle finger. Blogging in 2007 required too much work: “I had all sorts of things I wanted to share, but they were screenshots, jokes, poorly formed ideas, videos that I had just watched that were hilarious, and things that I was working on.” Karp’s idea was to create a little portal to Internet heaven, with George Takei videos, Homer Simpson quotes, pictures of Italian luxury cars, dream logs, self-portraits, observations, Lost trailers, and porn (which makes up around 11 percent of the site’s content). The new blogging would be less about writing and more about declaring a personal sensibility. Thanks to an innovation called the reblog, users wouldn’t even need to create anything themselves; they could just post what they scavenged elsewhere and, Karp says, “use that curation to tell their stories.” He sees Tumblr as a tool for “the most talented people in the world.”

by Molly Young, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Platon. Grooming by Marco Braca at Kramer + Kramer.

Let Me Tell You About the Most Heartfelt $200 I Ever Made

Michael Bloomberg’s first term actually ended on February 8, 2004, on the occasion of Sex and the City’s ante­penultimate episode, not long after Samantha pretended to be British to sneak into Soho House, the then-new private club with the kitchen-sponge-size rooftop pool. This was the episode in which gauche, chain-smoking “Page Six” staple “Lexi Featherston” did some coke at a geriatric party, yelled, “This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window,” and then took a header out said window. The “girls” went to her funeral at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, once known as the site of the first performance by Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye and then suddenly an HBO backdrop. Manhattan had become a stage set of itself. Carrie Bradshaw was the Bernie Goetz of the Bloomberg era, shooting at the walls of heartache, bang-bang.

The hook was baited perfectly, and now, for the first time since the O’Dwyer administration—look it up!—more people are coming here than are leaving. But if New York City is better than ever—and we think it is—then why does it suck so bad?

The money, yes. And the cupcakes, and the ATMs, and all these apartments that somehow are in clock towers, which are all also just money. Among the young set, it’s newcomers’ parents paying up at our phantom tollbooth. There is now a class of New Yorkers with the luxury of not just money but also plenty of time. Once you got a crappy coffee at the deli or you didn’t get coffee. Now the city is a wonderland of delicious pour-over. Every day is choose-your-own-adventure when you’re not dying over the rent. Now there’s a substantial population who thinks New York’s a lark, or college 2.0, or an indie-lectual Rumspringa, a lazy not so Grand Tour before packing it in to get married in Dallas. Not to pick on the millennials: The olds aren’t suffering either. Now a vast number of them pretend to live in the city while gardening at their second homes, in the sweet spread from Germantown to Ghent to Kinderhook. The result: New York has fewer who’d bleed for her. Once the city was for people who craved it with the stridency of a young Madonna. The result was entertainment, friction, mayhem, disaster, creation, magic. (...)

Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. New York City wasn’t the inventor or progenitor of wealth inequality, the great national trend of the last dozen years, but we do it best. It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.

I couldn’t help but wonder, like an aging Carrie Bradshaw: Does everyone else daydream about the New York That Got Away? An afternoon in an art dealer’s enormous apartment, when he carelessly shuffled Warhol Polaroids, and they were all a grand. The apartment in the West Thirties was $380,000, but there were hookers. Now New York seems like every little thing in it is beyond priceless, and nothing will ever be yours. That’s absolutely true, and you never will have the things that you helplessly crave—but also it has always been like that.

by Choire Sicha, NY Magazine | Read more:

Image: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

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Bill Evans Trio

Million-Dollar Babies

Elisa and Dave Santiago bought a two-bedroom condo with a den in a trendy neighbourhood in uptown Toronto in 2009 with plans to eventually start a family. Then they found out they were pregnant—with twins. When daughters Micah and Yuna arrived eight weeks ago, the joy of becoming new parents clashed with the new reality of what it meant to raise a family in a high-cost city.

As a self-employed naturopath, Elisa, 35, wasn’t eligible for maternity-leave benefits. Dave, 36, had recently left his well-paying accounting job to start his own consulting business, leaving the couple with little in the way of a steady income in the short term. So, four years after they purchased their dream home, the couple put their condo up for sale and moved back in with Elisa’s parents. While Elisa says the decision was largely driven by her need for her mother’s help in raising newborn twins—a huge benefit in a city where daycare costs can reach $2,000 a month per child—the nearly $3,000 a month in mortgage payments and maintenance fees meant their condo had started to look less like a family home and more like a financial burden. “It’s hard to let go of that condo, because I love it,” Elisa says. “But this is the choice we had.” (...)

Exactly how much it costs to raise a child is the subject of much debate. A Fraser Institute study last month pegged it at $3,000 to $4,000 a year—or $72,000 to raise a child to 18. It’s a figure that excludes both housing and child care costs, emphasizes scrimping and saving, government child benefits and borrowing from family or friends. Meanwhile, an analysis by MoneySense in 2011estimated it would cost considerably more: $243,660, or close to the $241,080 calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Yet even such huge figures are “woefully insufficient,” says John Ward, a Kansas economist who consults on economic damages for legal disputes, including wrongful death cases involving children. For one thing, Ward says, most of these analyses do not take into account societal costs, such as the property taxes all homeowners pay to support public education. While they do take into account some of the added housing costs associated with growing families, they don’t include a host of other expenses, such as the cost of saving for a university education. Tuition is expected to reach close to $40,000 for a four-year degree in Canada by the time today’s infant heads off to university—or as much as $110,000, including the cost of textbooks and accommodation. Add to this the opportunity costs of raising children: the investment returns that parents could have earned if they had taken the money they spent on kids and saved it instead—at five per cent interest, that comes out to roughly $280,000—and the lost income from having one parent take time off work to care for a child. “If mom was a lawyer and dropped out of the labour force for four or five years, the family gave up the opportunity cost of maybe $60,000 to $100,000 a year in order to bring that child to a point where he could enter the education system,” says Ward. Statistics Canada estimates that even mothers who work full-time stand to earn 12 per cent less over their careers than women who have never had children, a “motherhood penalty” equal to roughly $108,000 over 18 years on a $50,000 salary.

Ward pegs the all-in cost of raising a child to 18 in the U.S. at around $700,000, or closer to $900,000 to age 22, which is a more realistic picture for today’s families. The calculations work out similarly in Canada, where the total cost of raising a child to 18, including lost income, forgone investment savings and the price of a college education, comes out to around $670,000. For those dreaming of two children, that’s likely to cost well over $1 million.

It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that young parents are the most financially squeezed of any families in the country. Statistics Canada estimates that couples with children account for 30 per cent of households, but more than half of all of Canada’s household debt. Two-parent families with children under the age of 24 averaged $157,000 in debt, or $33,000 more than couples without children.

by Tamsin McMahon, Maclean's | Read more:
Image: Evan Kafka / Getty Images

Food Waste: The Next Food Revolution

How are we going to feed 9 billion people by 2050? The answer to this question — or the lack thereof — is one of the biggest issues in agriculture today. Experts estimate that we need to grow 60 percent more food than we currently produce. And as a result, there is a push to constantly create more. More miracle crops. More monocultures. More monocrops. More seeds. More food.

But are we missing the point? Currently, in the U.S., almost half of our food — 40 percent of what we grow— ends up in the garbage. Globally, food waste is rising to 50 percent as developing nations struggle with spoilage and Western nations simply toss edible food away. Instead of turning our food system inside out to meet that 2050 deadline, why don’t we simply waste less? (...)

Farm to Table to Landfill

In Hackettstown, New Jersey, vegetable farmer Greg Donaldson leads informal tours around his fields to show visitors a large rotting pile of mostly edible produce.

The pile is a hub for perfectly good cucumbers (bent), strawberries (overripe but delicious), tomatoes (small blemishes), peaches (bruised) and garlic (split cloves). Stalks of broccoli, ears of corn, full heads of lettuce, eggplants, pears: It’s a perverse cornucopia, left to decay in the sun. At the beginning of summer, the pile fits in a dumptruck bed; By fall, it needs multiple tractor-trailers to haul it away.The sight of so much wasted produce used to eat at Donaldson, make him feel bad. But he and other farmers have learned to live with it as part and parcel of being a farmer. According to the charity Feeding America, more than 6 billion pounds of fruits and vegetables go unharvested or unsold each year. It’s because much of the food on a farm falls victim to aesthetic trifles: the misshapen peach, the tomato too large to fit in a three-pack. Or in an uncertain economy, a farmer grows more than he market demands, then leaves entire fields and orchards unharvested. We are growing more food than we know what to do with.

And this early-stage waste is only the beginning. From transport to processor to retailer to consumer, food waste affects every step of the supply chain between farm and fork. In developing countries, nearly 50 percent of the loss happens early in foods’ life: inefficient harvesting, spoilage, inadequate processing, obsolete transport technologies and other systemic problems. In Western nations, the problems are heavily weighted toward consumer and retail waste. A comprehensive 2012 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that a whopping 43 billion pounds of food in the U.S. was thrown away just on the retail level in 2008. Reducing food losses by only 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans each year. But supermarket food is marketed with an eye toward bulk, convincing shoppers to take home more than they can use. “There is a terrible push to make consumers buy more than they need, through family-sized packaging and buy-one-get-one-free promotions,” says Tim Fox, co-author of “Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not,” a report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

Still, all this pre-consumed food waste doesn’t let consumers off the hook. Think of your own fridge right now — the unappealing leftovers, the wilted lettuce, the expired milk and yogurt. A quarter of those items, according to the NRDC, will ultimately end up in the trash. (...)

The environmental toll for throwing away so much uneaten food is also costly. Of the millions of tons that we waste in America each year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 96 percent ends up in landfills. And currently, food waste is the number one material taking up landfill space, more than paper or plastic. This produces methane gas, one of the most harmful atmospheric pollutants. It’s true that some food waste is inevitable. There will always be a percentage of food grown that is not consumed. But there are also many ways to prevent unnecessary loss.

by Jesse Hirsch and Reyhan Harmanci, Modern Farmer | Read more:
Image: Grant Cornett

Carl Moser, Pavone con tre ciliegie 1905-06
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