Saturday, April 18, 2015
Leafly: The "Yelp of Weed"
[ed. More relevant than ever. An indispensable resource.]
But Leafly isn't just for recreational pot smokers. Leafly prides itself on building a website and mobile apps with medical marijuana patients in mind—the site's polished look deviates from other marijuana-themed sites where flashing ads often border on the epileptic. Such base aesthetics might have been fine for potheads of another generation, but today's medical marijuana patients are more sophisticated, seeking a safe place to learn about their medicine.The brainchild of three former Kelly Blue Book employees, Leafly began as a side project in 2010, shortly after cofounder Scott Vickers received a doctor's recommendation to use medical marijuana to help with his insomnia. As a white-collar professional, he wanted to build a site for people like him. That meant no overt pot symbolism, no girls clad in bikinis, no flashing ads. Originally based in Newport Beach, California, he and his cofounders, Cy Scott and Brian Wansolich, met on weekends to design and build the site, eventually quitting their jobs at the end of 2011 to work full-time on Leafly. (...)
Before Privateer's acquisition, Leafly had clocked about 15,000 marijuana strain reviews. Today, it boasts more than 50,000 from 80,000 registered users, bringing in $100,000 in revenue each month. With its new editorial site, the company hopes to see revenue light up, blooming to $1 million a month in the next year. Leafly's Android and iOS apps are also seeing success, with 200,000 new iOS downloads a month and 5,000 Android installs each week.
Much of its success on the web can be attributed to Leafly's SEO dominance for strain queries, making it a high destination for people to learn about their herbal refreshment. In addition to reviews that range from the eloquent to the typo-ridden ("F#$%ING KILLL-ERRRR!!!!" one user wrote), people also rate how effective strains are for treating certain ailments, such as pain, stress, depression, and insomnia—as well as the drugs' effects, including euphoria, creativity, dry mouth, and paranoia. Leafly landing pages highlight which dispensaries in a vicinity carry particular strains—and their going rates. Leafly also has a feature called Cannabis Strain Explorer to aid with reefer discovery, organizing more than 500 types in a periodic table of sorts that users can filter by effects and nearby availability.
by Alice Truong, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Leafly
Design Experts Trash Hillary Clinton’s New Logo
To many graphic design experts of both political stripes, Hillary Clinton’s new logo would be better off in the trash bin.
The presumptive Democratic presidential frontrunner unveiled as her campaign logo a blue ‘H’ and a rightward-facing red arrow. It’s blanketed all over her website and sits at the top of her new Facebook page. On her revamped Twitter handle, the ‘H’ has even taken the place of the iconic picture of Clinton wearing dark shades and reading her Blackberry.
Some high-minded critics say it’s all wrong. The arrow’s direction and its Republican-minded red color, for starters, has raised alarm that she’s signalling an imminent political shift to the right.
Going with an abstract design has also opened the door to all manner of Internet fun: a new copycat font dubbed “Hillary Bold” and a do-it-yourself widget that lets anyone make their own Clinton-like logo, and plenty of odd interpretations, including a plane hitting New York’s Twin Towers and rip-offs of the Federal Express and Wikileaks logos.
“I think the Hillary logo is really saying nothing,” said Scott Thomas, the design director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and who later worked on the Whitehouse.gov website’s redesign. “It’s just a red arrow moving to the right.” (...)
Of course, campaigns are hardly won or lost on a logo. But political veterans say this remains a critical branding event – just think of the buzz surrounding Obama’s ‘O’ back in 2007 or even how donkeys and elephants during the 19th century came to be associated with Democrats and Republicans. A good logo can go a long way in the modern-day digital era where campaigns are desperately trying to reach attention-starved possible voters, volunteers and donors via their phones and Facebook feeds. Create an easy-on-the-eyes brand and it can pay big dividends as someone decides whether to open yet another email message from a politician, or just hit delete. (...)
The presidential candidates of 2016 are facing perhaps the toughest audience yet when it comes to their design elements. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 logos — an iconic ‘O’ that went through numerous iterations widely interpreted as a rising sun — loom as the best-in-class benchmarks. Twitter and other social media allow for instant criticism, and there’s the prospect that the reaction to a new logo can go even more viral than the logo itself.
Consider the response since Clinton unveiled her logo less than a week ago. On the online image hosting service Imgur, more than 1.1. million views have landed on a post featuring a “five-minute” redesign of Clinton’s logo that turns the image entirely to different shades of blue and adds in a more curved arrow which “gives the logo a feeling of energy and life.”
The presumptive Democratic presidential frontrunner unveiled as her campaign logo a blue ‘H’ and a rightward-facing red arrow. It’s blanketed all over her website and sits at the top of her new Facebook page. On her revamped Twitter handle, the ‘H’ has even taken the place of the iconic picture of Clinton wearing dark shades and reading her Blackberry.Some high-minded critics say it’s all wrong. The arrow’s direction and its Republican-minded red color, for starters, has raised alarm that she’s signalling an imminent political shift to the right.
Going with an abstract design has also opened the door to all manner of Internet fun: a new copycat font dubbed “Hillary Bold” and a do-it-yourself widget that lets anyone make their own Clinton-like logo, and plenty of odd interpretations, including a plane hitting New York’s Twin Towers and rip-offs of the Federal Express and Wikileaks logos.
“I think the Hillary logo is really saying nothing,” said Scott Thomas, the design director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and who later worked on the Whitehouse.gov website’s redesign. “It’s just a red arrow moving to the right.” (...)
Of course, campaigns are hardly won or lost on a logo. But political veterans say this remains a critical branding event – just think of the buzz surrounding Obama’s ‘O’ back in 2007 or even how donkeys and elephants during the 19th century came to be associated with Democrats and Republicans. A good logo can go a long way in the modern-day digital era where campaigns are desperately trying to reach attention-starved possible voters, volunteers and donors via their phones and Facebook feeds. Create an easy-on-the-eyes brand and it can pay big dividends as someone decides whether to open yet another email message from a politician, or just hit delete. (...)The presidential candidates of 2016 are facing perhaps the toughest audience yet when it comes to their design elements. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 logos — an iconic ‘O’ that went through numerous iterations widely interpreted as a rising sun — loom as the best-in-class benchmarks. Twitter and other social media allow for instant criticism, and there’s the prospect that the reaction to a new logo can go even more viral than the logo itself.
Consider the response since Clinton unveiled her logo less than a week ago. On the online image hosting service Imgur, more than 1.1. million views have landed on a post featuring a “five-minute” redesign of Clinton’s logo that turns the image entirely to different shades of blue and adds in a more curved arrow which “gives the logo a feeling of energy and life.”
by Darren Samuelsohn, Politico | Read more:
Images: Clinton and Obama Campaigns
Friday, April 17, 2015
Serving All Your Heroin Needs
Fatal heroin overdoses in America have almost tripled in three years. More than 8,250 people a year now die from heroin. At the same time, roughly double that number are dying from prescription opioid painkillers, which are molecularly similar. Heroin has become the fallback dope when an addict can’t afford, or find, pills. Total overdose deaths, most often from pills and heroin, now surpass traffic fatalities.
If these deaths are the measure, we are arguably in the middle of our worst drug plague ever, apart from cigarettes and alcohol.
And yet this is also our quietest drug plague. Strikingly little public violence accompanies it. This has muted public outrage. Meanwhile, the victims — mostly white, well-off and often young — are mourned in silence, because their parents are loath to talk publicly about how a cheerleader daughter hooked for dope, or their once-star athlete son overdosed in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.
The problem “is worse than it’s ever been, and young people are dying,” an addiction doctor in Columbus, Ohio — one of our many new heroin hot spots — wrote me last month. “This past Friday I saw 23 patients, all heroin addicts recently diagnosed.”
So we are at a strange new place. We enjoy blissfully low crime rates, yet every year the drug-overdose toll grows. People from the most privileged groups in one of the wealthiest countries in the world have been getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to numb pain. Street crime is no longer the clearest barometer of our drug problem; corpses are.
Most of our heroin now comes not from Asia, but from Latin America, particularly Mexico, where poppies grow well in the mountains along the Pacific Coast. Mexican traffickers have focused on a rudimentary, less-processed form of heroin that can be smoked or injected. It is called black tar, which accurately describes its appearance. Cheaper to produce and ship than the stuff of decades past from Asia, heroin has fallen in price, and so more people have become addicted.
The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery.
Dealers circulate a number around town. An addict calls, and an operator directs him to an intersection or a parking lot. The operator dispatches a driver, who tools around town, his mouth full of tiny balloons of heroin, with a bottle of water nearby to swig them down with if cops stop him. (“It’s amazing how many balloons you can learn to carry in your mouth,” said one dealer, who told me he could fit more than 30.)
The driver meets the addict, spits out the required balloons, takes the money and that’s that. It happens every day — from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because these guys keep business hours.
The Xalisco Boys, as one cop I know has nicknamed them, are far from our only heroin traffickers. But they may be our most prolific. As relentless as Amway salesmen, they embody our new drug-plague paradigm.
Xalisco dealers are low profile — the anti-Scarface. Back home they are bakers, butchers and farm workers, part of a vast labor pool in Xalisco and surrounding towns, who hire on as heroin drivers for $300 to $500 a week. The drug trade offers them a shot at their own business, or simply a chance to make some money to show off back home — kings until the cash goes. Meanwhile, in the United States, they drive old cars with their cheeks packed like chipmunks’, and dress like the day workers in front of your Home Depot.
The heroin delivery system appeals to them mainly because there is no cartel kingpin, no jefe máximo. It is meritocratic — so unlike Mexico. They are “people acting as individuals who are doing it on their own: micro-entrepreneurs,” said one phone operator for a crew who I interviewed while he was in prison. They are “looking for places where there’s no people, no competition,” he said. “Anyone can be boss of a network.” Thus the system distills what appeals to immigrants generally about America: It is a way to translate wits and hard work into real economic gain.
If these deaths are the measure, we are arguably in the middle of our worst drug plague ever, apart from cigarettes and alcohol.
And yet this is also our quietest drug plague. Strikingly little public violence accompanies it. This has muted public outrage. Meanwhile, the victims — mostly white, well-off and often young — are mourned in silence, because their parents are loath to talk publicly about how a cheerleader daughter hooked for dope, or their once-star athlete son overdosed in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.The problem “is worse than it’s ever been, and young people are dying,” an addiction doctor in Columbus, Ohio — one of our many new heroin hot spots — wrote me last month. “This past Friday I saw 23 patients, all heroin addicts recently diagnosed.”
So we are at a strange new place. We enjoy blissfully low crime rates, yet every year the drug-overdose toll grows. People from the most privileged groups in one of the wealthiest countries in the world have been getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to numb pain. Street crime is no longer the clearest barometer of our drug problem; corpses are.
Most of our heroin now comes not from Asia, but from Latin America, particularly Mexico, where poppies grow well in the mountains along the Pacific Coast. Mexican traffickers have focused on a rudimentary, less-processed form of heroin that can be smoked or injected. It is called black tar, which accurately describes its appearance. Cheaper to produce and ship than the stuff of decades past from Asia, heroin has fallen in price, and so more people have become addicted.
The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery.
Dealers circulate a number around town. An addict calls, and an operator directs him to an intersection or a parking lot. The operator dispatches a driver, who tools around town, his mouth full of tiny balloons of heroin, with a bottle of water nearby to swig them down with if cops stop him. (“It’s amazing how many balloons you can learn to carry in your mouth,” said one dealer, who told me he could fit more than 30.)
The driver meets the addict, spits out the required balloons, takes the money and that’s that. It happens every day — from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because these guys keep business hours.
The Xalisco Boys, as one cop I know has nicknamed them, are far from our only heroin traffickers. But they may be our most prolific. As relentless as Amway salesmen, they embody our new drug-plague paradigm.
Xalisco dealers are low profile — the anti-Scarface. Back home they are bakers, butchers and farm workers, part of a vast labor pool in Xalisco and surrounding towns, who hire on as heroin drivers for $300 to $500 a week. The drug trade offers them a shot at their own business, or simply a chance to make some money to show off back home — kings until the cash goes. Meanwhile, in the United States, they drive old cars with their cheeks packed like chipmunks’, and dress like the day workers in front of your Home Depot.
The heroin delivery system appeals to them mainly because there is no cartel kingpin, no jefe máximo. It is meritocratic — so unlike Mexico. They are “people acting as individuals who are doing it on their own: micro-entrepreneurs,” said one phone operator for a crew who I interviewed while he was in prison. They are “looking for places where there’s no people, no competition,” he said. “Anyone can be boss of a network.” Thus the system distills what appeals to immigrants generally about America: It is a way to translate wits and hard work into real economic gain.
by Sam Quinones, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jesse Draxler
The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age
Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.
Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.
One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.
The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible. (...)
Many of my colleagues believe that if we just explain our plight clearly enough, legislators will come to their senses and give us enough money to save us from painful restructuring. I’ve never seen anyone explain why this argument will be persuasive, and we are nearing the 40th year in which similar pleas have failed, but “Someday the government will give us lots of money” remains in circulation, largely because contemplating our future without that faith is so bleak. If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.
Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.
The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible. (...)
Many of my colleagues believe that if we just explain our plight clearly enough, legislators will come to their senses and give us enough money to save us from painful restructuring. I’ve never seen anyone explain why this argument will be persuasive, and we are nearing the 40th year in which similar pleas have failed, but “Someday the government will give us lots of money” remains in circulation, largely because contemplating our future without that faith is so bleak. If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.
by Clay Shirky | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
The Right Diagnosis and the Wrong Treatment
Steven Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system. In his account of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (now known as Obamacare), he manages to transform a subject that usually befuddles and bores into a political thriller. There was reason to think he might pull it off; his lengthy 2013 Time magazine exposé of the impact of medical bills on ordinary people was engrossing. But his success also owes much to the Bob Woodward method of writing best sellers about government policy: interviews with hundreds of insiders, many anonymous, some evidently willing to talk to him to increase their chances of being shown in a favorable light.
For example, one of Brill’s principal sources and a great favorite is Liz Fowler, chief health counsel to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversaw the legislation. Brill credits her with being “more personally responsible than anyone for the drafting of what became Obamacare.” He is unbothered by the fact that she was vice-president for public policy at WellPoint, the country’s second-largest private insurance company, before taking her job with Senator Baucus, or by the fact that shortly after passage of the law (and a brief stint with the administration), she became head of global health policy at the drug company Johnson & Johnson—even though both of these industries benefited greatly from Obamacare. (...)
Here are a few items in Brill’s indictment. “Healthcare,” he writes, “is America’s largest industry by far.” It employs “a sixth of the country’s workforce. And it is the average American family’s largest single expense, whether paid out of their pockets or through taxes and insurance premiums.” He estimates that the health insurance companies employ about 1.5 million people, roughly twice the number of practicing physicians. Hospital executives preside over lucrative businesses, whether nominally nonprofit or not, and are paid huge salaries, even while they charge patients obscene prices (Brill cites $77 for a box of gauze pads) drawn from “what they called their ‘chargemaster,’ which was the menu of list prices they used to soak patients who did not have Medicare or private insurance.” He tells us that the CEO of New York–Presbyterian Hospital, where he had major surgery shortly after his article appeared in Time, had an income of $3.58 million. And finally, he gives us the really bad news: “All that extra money produces no better, and in many cases worse, results.”
When Barack Obama became president in 2009, reforming the American health system was at the top of his domestic agenda—ahead even of the banking crisis, housing foreclosures, and unemployment. And he was candid about the reason: soaring health costs were undermining nearly everything else. As examples: Medicare—the government program for Americans over age sixty-five—was a growing contributor to federal deficits; businesses that offered health benefits to their workers were at a competitive disadvantage, both domestically and globally; workers were afraid to leave jobs because they would lose health insurance if they did; and medical costs had become the chief cause of personal bankruptcy. In short, the American health system was no longer supportable.
When Obama was a state senator in Illinois, he was on record as favoring a single-payer health system—that is, one in which the government ensures health care for all residents of the country and regulates the distribution of resources in a predominantly nonprofit system. That’s the sort of system every other advanced country has. Even after he became president, Obama acknowledged in a press conference on July 22, 2009, that a single-payer system was the only way to achieve universal health care. Even so, except for that one admission, there was no further consideration of single-payer health care—by Obama or, crucially, by Senator Baucus—during the year Obamacare was crafted.
Instead, the launch of the reform effort was a White House media event in March 2009 that featured spokespersons for the for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who pledged to work with the president to reform the system. But not for nothing. As a condition of its support, the insurance industry demanded that all Americans—except those in Medicare and other government programs—be required to purchase private insurance. The central role of the insurance industry would thus be not only preserved, but expanded and enshrined by law. As a condition of its support, the pharmaceutical industry demanded the continuation of two laws that Obama, as a candidate, had promised to try to overturn—one that forbids Medicare from using its purchasing power to control drug prices, and another that forbids Americans from importing cheaper drugs from other countries.
After these deals were struck, there followed a year of congressional wrangling, replete with further deals to mollify conservatives and the health industries. For example, the idea of a “public option,” that is, government-sponsored insurance to compete with private insurers, was scuttled. The final product—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—was signed into law on March 23, 2010, and scheduled to go into effect over ten years, with the major provisions in effect by 2014. (...)
by Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: John Springs
For example, one of Brill’s principal sources and a great favorite is Liz Fowler, chief health counsel to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversaw the legislation. Brill credits her with being “more personally responsible than anyone for the drafting of what became Obamacare.” He is unbothered by the fact that she was vice-president for public policy at WellPoint, the country’s second-largest private insurance company, before taking her job with Senator Baucus, or by the fact that shortly after passage of the law (and a brief stint with the administration), she became head of global health policy at the drug company Johnson & Johnson—even though both of these industries benefited greatly from Obamacare. (...)Here are a few items in Brill’s indictment. “Healthcare,” he writes, “is America’s largest industry by far.” It employs “a sixth of the country’s workforce. And it is the average American family’s largest single expense, whether paid out of their pockets or through taxes and insurance premiums.” He estimates that the health insurance companies employ about 1.5 million people, roughly twice the number of practicing physicians. Hospital executives preside over lucrative businesses, whether nominally nonprofit or not, and are paid huge salaries, even while they charge patients obscene prices (Brill cites $77 for a box of gauze pads) drawn from “what they called their ‘chargemaster,’ which was the menu of list prices they used to soak patients who did not have Medicare or private insurance.” He tells us that the CEO of New York–Presbyterian Hospital, where he had major surgery shortly after his article appeared in Time, had an income of $3.58 million. And finally, he gives us the really bad news: “All that extra money produces no better, and in many cases worse, results.”
When Barack Obama became president in 2009, reforming the American health system was at the top of his domestic agenda—ahead even of the banking crisis, housing foreclosures, and unemployment. And he was candid about the reason: soaring health costs were undermining nearly everything else. As examples: Medicare—the government program for Americans over age sixty-five—was a growing contributor to federal deficits; businesses that offered health benefits to their workers were at a competitive disadvantage, both domestically and globally; workers were afraid to leave jobs because they would lose health insurance if they did; and medical costs had become the chief cause of personal bankruptcy. In short, the American health system was no longer supportable.
When Obama was a state senator in Illinois, he was on record as favoring a single-payer health system—that is, one in which the government ensures health care for all residents of the country and regulates the distribution of resources in a predominantly nonprofit system. That’s the sort of system every other advanced country has. Even after he became president, Obama acknowledged in a press conference on July 22, 2009, that a single-payer system was the only way to achieve universal health care. Even so, except for that one admission, there was no further consideration of single-payer health care—by Obama or, crucially, by Senator Baucus—during the year Obamacare was crafted.
Instead, the launch of the reform effort was a White House media event in March 2009 that featured spokespersons for the for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who pledged to work with the president to reform the system. But not for nothing. As a condition of its support, the insurance industry demanded that all Americans—except those in Medicare and other government programs—be required to purchase private insurance. The central role of the insurance industry would thus be not only preserved, but expanded and enshrined by law. As a condition of its support, the pharmaceutical industry demanded the continuation of two laws that Obama, as a candidate, had promised to try to overturn—one that forbids Medicare from using its purchasing power to control drug prices, and another that forbids Americans from importing cheaper drugs from other countries.
After these deals were struck, there followed a year of congressional wrangling, replete with further deals to mollify conservatives and the health industries. For example, the idea of a “public option,” that is, government-sponsored insurance to compete with private insurers, was scuttled. The final product—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—was signed into law on March 23, 2010, and scheduled to go into effect over ten years, with the major provisions in effect by 2014. (...)
Practically every serious economic analysis of the American health system has concluded that the most efficient way to provide care to everyone is through some form of single-payer system, such as Medicare for all, and that any other approach will eventually be unsupportable. Why, then, was a single-payer system excluded from consideration and its proponents almost entirely barred from the discussion during the year Obamacare was written? That rejection can only reflect the enormous power of the health industry, which Brill reminds us has the largest lobby in Washington, D.C., and gave millions in campaign contributions to the key legislators. Indeed, Senator Baucus received more money from the health industry that year than anyone else in Congress.
by Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: John Springs
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Eating Well at the End of the Road
Emily Garrity only had to shoot one pig before she figured out that the best way to kill them was publicly, in front of all the other pigs at the trough. I thought it sounded barbaric on the face of it but, she told me later, it’s actually not so bad.
In the beginning, when she was teaching herself to slaughter and butcher, she sequestered the animal before delivering a bullet to its brain. She thought it would be more respectful to let it face its end privately. Plus, there were the feelings of the other pigs to consider. What would it do to them to see one of their own go out by gunshot?
It turned out that being alone with the doomed animal just made both Emily and the pig nervous, like an awkward first date with a homicidal conclusion. And, they say, adrenaline isn't good for the meat.
Emily, who is my wife's cousin, lives in Homer, Alaska. I'm from Anchorage. I've been coming to Homer every summer since I was a kid, but I've never lost a visitor's appreciation for it. To get a sense of the natural setting, picture every postcard you've seen from Alaska. Eagles swooping over a sparkling ocean. Glaciers cascading down snow-capped mountains. Otters cracking oyster shells. In Homer, you see all that on a five-minute walk. Sometimes I get so scenically saturated I think my eyes can't absorb one more wild, gorgeous detail. And then the sun goes down, a full moon rises over the water, and the air turns herbal with spruce sap and pushki weed.
People don't end up in Homer the way they might end up in Cleveland or Minneapolis or even Anchorage. There isn't one big economic draw. My mother, who has lived most of her life in Anchorage, says Homer is a place people go to manifest dreams. It sounds New Agey, but she's right. There was a time when all of Alaska was like that; I'm sure my grandparents felt that call when they drove their Buick up here from Illinois fifty years ago. Some of the state's frontier glow may have faded since then, but in Homer, it's been preserved. I can't think of a Homer person I know who is not right at this moment industriously manifesting. Pottery. Books. Peony farms. And so many dreams in the community seem to revolve around food: In this town of 5,000 there's a brewery, three from-scratch bakeries, two coffee roasting companies, a robust fishing industry, oyster farms, a lush farmers market, and a dozen restaurants, many of their menus seasonal and local. (...)
As a town, Homer had a great affinity for the culture and cuisine of Louisiana, and last month my family and I were heading down from Anchorage for Emily's boucherie—a big, weekend-long pig-butchering party very loosely modeled after community-wide parties held in the Southern state, at which people dispatch a pig together and cook up the whole thing. As my wife and I hustled our two boys out of the car, a fog had settled over the vegetable field, and I could feel winter in the September air. We were late to the slaughter: by the time we arrived, the 330-pound hog called Juvenile Delinquent, Joovy for short, was already deceased, subject to Emily's revised pig-killing protocol.
Pig meets pistol according to size, Emily explained, and size is influenced by personality. Alpha pigs, the pushier ones, get fatter quicker. Joovy was the second-pushiest in the pen, after Big Bertha, who Emily had already slaughtered and sold earlier that year. Two more hogs, Lil Red and Lucy Patch, were still happily snorting around in the mud past the field.
Of all Emily's pigs, Joovy was the only male, and she liked him best. He got his name because he was curious, always biting her tools and knocking over the water bucket. He had a thing for head rubs. "I liked his spunk," she said. "I would have kept him forever if I thought I could handle a year-round 700-pound hog."
She told me that before she shot him in the pen, she'd given a little speech about him to the assembled people who came to help. She'd carried a pistol out to the middle of the pig yard as a friend filled the trough with sprouted grain and a little molasses. All the pigs came running and buried their faces in the mush. She moved in.
"I set my intentions really sturdy first," she told me later of her process. "I say a little prayer, and then I shoot it in the head and thank it for what it is doing."
The emotional constitutions of the other pigs remain intact, she explained. In fact, they don't even flinch. "They just go right back to the food trough," said Emily. "And they're like, ‘Sweet, we get more food now.'"
In the beginning, when she was teaching herself to slaughter and butcher, she sequestered the animal before delivering a bullet to its brain. She thought it would be more respectful to let it face its end privately. Plus, there were the feelings of the other pigs to consider. What would it do to them to see one of their own go out by gunshot?It turned out that being alone with the doomed animal just made both Emily and the pig nervous, like an awkward first date with a homicidal conclusion. And, they say, adrenaline isn't good for the meat.
Emily, who is my wife's cousin, lives in Homer, Alaska. I'm from Anchorage. I've been coming to Homer every summer since I was a kid, but I've never lost a visitor's appreciation for it. To get a sense of the natural setting, picture every postcard you've seen from Alaska. Eagles swooping over a sparkling ocean. Glaciers cascading down snow-capped mountains. Otters cracking oyster shells. In Homer, you see all that on a five-minute walk. Sometimes I get so scenically saturated I think my eyes can't absorb one more wild, gorgeous detail. And then the sun goes down, a full moon rises over the water, and the air turns herbal with spruce sap and pushki weed.
People don't end up in Homer the way they might end up in Cleveland or Minneapolis or even Anchorage. There isn't one big economic draw. My mother, who has lived most of her life in Anchorage, says Homer is a place people go to manifest dreams. It sounds New Agey, but she's right. There was a time when all of Alaska was like that; I'm sure my grandparents felt that call when they drove their Buick up here from Illinois fifty years ago. Some of the state's frontier glow may have faded since then, but in Homer, it's been preserved. I can't think of a Homer person I know who is not right at this moment industriously manifesting. Pottery. Books. Peony farms. And so many dreams in the community seem to revolve around food: In this town of 5,000 there's a brewery, three from-scratch bakeries, two coffee roasting companies, a robust fishing industry, oyster farms, a lush farmers market, and a dozen restaurants, many of their menus seasonal and local. (...)
As a town, Homer had a great affinity for the culture and cuisine of Louisiana, and last month my family and I were heading down from Anchorage for Emily's boucherie—a big, weekend-long pig-butchering party very loosely modeled after community-wide parties held in the Southern state, at which people dispatch a pig together and cook up the whole thing. As my wife and I hustled our two boys out of the car, a fog had settled over the vegetable field, and I could feel winter in the September air. We were late to the slaughter: by the time we arrived, the 330-pound hog called Juvenile Delinquent, Joovy for short, was already deceased, subject to Emily's revised pig-killing protocol.Pig meets pistol according to size, Emily explained, and size is influenced by personality. Alpha pigs, the pushier ones, get fatter quicker. Joovy was the second-pushiest in the pen, after Big Bertha, who Emily had already slaughtered and sold earlier that year. Two more hogs, Lil Red and Lucy Patch, were still happily snorting around in the mud past the field.
Of all Emily's pigs, Joovy was the only male, and she liked him best. He got his name because he was curious, always biting her tools and knocking over the water bucket. He had a thing for head rubs. "I liked his spunk," she said. "I would have kept him forever if I thought I could handle a year-round 700-pound hog."
She told me that before she shot him in the pen, she'd given a little speech about him to the assembled people who came to help. She'd carried a pistol out to the middle of the pig yard as a friend filled the trough with sprouted grain and a little molasses. All the pigs came running and buried their faces in the mush. She moved in.
"I set my intentions really sturdy first," she told me later of her process. "I say a little prayer, and then I shoot it in the head and thank it for what it is doing."
The emotional constitutions of the other pigs remain intact, she explained. In fact, they don't even flinch. "They just go right back to the food trough," said Emily. "And they're like, ‘Sweet, we get more food now.'"
by Julia O'Malley, Eater | Read more:
Image: Marc Lester
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Meh!-lennials
We live in an age of ceaseless generational analysis. Among certain classes, especially business elites, it is considered a sign of profound insight to speak only in terms of youth and its consumer preferences. The jargon once endemic to Ad Age (which coined the term “Generation Y”) now peppers style sections and business books, earnest organizing meetings and talk shows, such that no one of any age can open a newspaper or a website without reading about the “millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2004 — and their doings, interests, and needs.It seems not to matter to the proliferation of writing about millennials that so much of it has been internally contradictory. In the year 2000, the sinister David Brooks said that stats suggested the boomers were raising friendly, sociable, and altruistic kids. In 2012, Jean Twenge at the Atlantic retaliated with fresh stats that revealed them to be inveterate narcissists profoundly uninterested in social problems. “Politicians: Millennials Won’t Vote Because They Hate You” declaimed Bloomberg, prompting an older Huffington Post correspondent to wonder ruefully, “Millennials: Why Do They Hate Us?” All this despite evidence that millennials vote in the same numbers as young people of previous generations. Millennials, according to Business Insider, are disaffected with workplace authority and value flexibility, but an IBM study written up in the Washington Post suggests that in this respect, too, millennials are indistinguishable from other generations. Reading around, you can form a picture of millennials either as great disrupters, creating massive discontinuities in civilization, or as essentially the same as everyone else. In this way generational analysis resembles astrology: ascribe any quality to a certain sign and your claims are guaranteed to be neither true nor false.
It’s easy, of course, to make fun of generational analysis. For many years generations have been the favored category of social pseudoscientists, not to mention marketing gurus and breathless lifestyle journalists. But much of the oxymoronic character of millennial-speak derives from its pairing claims to statistical rigor with an utterly unscientific fondness for making wild predictions. Behind this is a confusion of logic, according to which the present desires of humans create the future: once you know what young people want, you know what tomorrow will be like (and how to make a buck off it). Institutions, classes, and environments play hardly any role in this view. One influential example is Richard Florida’s theory of the “creative class,” which imagined the salvation of postindustrial cities resulting from young people choosing to live in them. If millennials like cities, the thinking went, then cities will be rejuvenated. In 2012, Florida sheepishly qualified some points of this theory in a new introduction to 2002’s The Rise of the Creative Class, but his original thesis was so persuasive that it’s still regarded as common knowledge. Meanwhile, the cities that banked on this kind of thinking, like St. Louis or Baltimore, have foundered spectacularly.
The abundance of such lazy analysis may seem reason enough to dismiss “generations” as a meaningful tool for understanding history. What are generations, one might say, but an ingenious marketing rubric we have come to treat as natural? But the fact remains that generations capture everyday divides that everyone recognizes intuitively. People are born into spans of time, into worlds that precede them and survive them. If it makes sense to segment history into periods, it follows that those periods have something to do with the people growing up and dying within them. (...)
But millennials grew up not self-making but defined and redefined by people several decades older. When the term was coined in 1991 by demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe, a great deal of hope was placed in millennials (the oldest of whom were around 8, and not especially responsive to polls). Nurtured by caring parents, Strauss and Howe argued, this new generation would be civic-minded and ethical. Not only would they be less interested in TV than their parents, but “what programs Millennials do watch will be sanitized and laden with moral lessons.” This hopeful portrait was a reaction to its time. It was the close of the Reagan era, when the once socially minded boomers were seen (even by themselves) as having become irremediable narcissists, and twentysomethings were portrayed as Patrick Bateman–type sociopaths. A crazy messianism attached itself to the youth: millennials were going to save this involutionary, belligerent, and vacuous country from itself. And in the years that followed, proliferating urban farms and community-supported agriculture and bike-shares — all faithfully chronicled in GOOD, the echt-millennial, nonprofit-loving magazine of the larger, for-profit Good Worldwide Inc. — began, if you squinted and cherry-picked, to prove the point. The religious fervor peaked with the election of Obama in 2008 — proof, it seemed, that millennials would change the world (66 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted voted for Obama, though nearly half that group declined to vote at all).
Subsequently, the narrative changed. As the economy went into free fall, the fascination with millennials reached a new intensity, and the think pieces proliferated. And, increasingly, the think pieces disagreed. Who are the millennials, and how do we explain their behavior? What do they stand for? (As if 100 million people ever stood for a uniform thing.) The answers differed greatly depending on the writer and the poll, but the pitch of anxiety was constant. Much of the obsession came from the business world — from the older, wealthy, mostly white decision makers who longed for a master key to understanding the needs and attitudes of the young people who would make and consume their products. For their analysis, these businessfolk looked to the major media institutions — which, racked by the recession, in a panic to figure out the internet, and acutely aware that no one under 90 read the newspaper, were themselves obsessed with what young people wanted. So the papers and magazines catered to their loyal readership — wealthy older people — by feeding them piece after piece about millennials, who seemed less promising than they once had.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Google
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?
Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours.
It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the private sector — specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country.
For more than a decade, Mr. Bankman and a small group of tax experts have called on the government to create a tax preparation method that they say would vastly reduce the time and cost of tax-filing for most people. Intuit has been a primary obstacle to the effort.
The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.
To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?
“Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.” (...)
Dennis Ventry, a professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Davis who has studied the issue, said that while Free File and Intuit’s integrations with private companies were beneficial, they won’t be nearly as helpful as a government program to reform tax filing.
Mr. Ventry said that if return-free filing were operated nationally, tens of millions of people with simple tax situations might have to do just a few minutes of work at tax time every year. The I.R.S. would send them a tax return that had already been filled in with their financial data, and if everything looked in order, they would file it either through the mail or electronically. The return would be completely voluntary. People who disputed the I.R.S.’s calculation would be able to do their taxes the old-fashioned way. Tens of millions of additional taxpayers with more complex returns would be able to save time by downloading all the financial information that the government has collected about them during the year. You would be able to do your return without hunting for every stray W2 or 1099 in your household.
“It can help all 145 million taxpayers,” Mr. Ventry said.
But Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious.
It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the private sector — specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country.For more than a decade, Mr. Bankman and a small group of tax experts have called on the government to create a tax preparation method that they say would vastly reduce the time and cost of tax-filing for most people. Intuit has been a primary obstacle to the effort.
The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.
To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?
“Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.” (...)
Dennis Ventry, a professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Davis who has studied the issue, said that while Free File and Intuit’s integrations with private companies were beneficial, they won’t be nearly as helpful as a government program to reform tax filing.
Mr. Ventry said that if return-free filing were operated nationally, tens of millions of people with simple tax situations might have to do just a few minutes of work at tax time every year. The I.R.S. would send them a tax return that had already been filled in with their financial data, and if everything looked in order, they would file it either through the mail or electronically. The return would be completely voluntary. People who disputed the I.R.S.’s calculation would be able to do their taxes the old-fashioned way. Tens of millions of additional taxpayers with more complex returns would be able to save time by downloading all the financial information that the government has collected about them during the year. You would be able to do your return without hunting for every stray W2 or 1099 in your household.
“It can help all 145 million taxpayers,” Mr. Ventry said.
But Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious.
by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stuart Goldenberg
One Company’s New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year
The idea began percolating, said Dan Price, the founder of Gravity Payments, after he read an article on happiness. It showed that, for people who earn less than about $70,000, extra money makes a big difference in their lives.
His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.
“Is anyone else freaking out right now?” Mr. Price asked after the clapping and whooping died down into a few moments of stunned silence. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
If it’s a publicity stunt, it’s a costly one. Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
The paychecks of about 70 employees will grow, with 30 ultimately doubling their salaries, according to Ryan Pirkle, a company spokesman. The average salary at Gravity is $48,000 year.
Mr. Price’s small, privately owned company is by no means a bellwether, but his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.
The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.
“As much as I’m a capitalist, there is nothing in the market that is making me do it,” he said, referring to paying wages that make it possible for his employees to go after the American dream, buy a house and pay for their children’s education. (...)
Mr. Price said he wanted to do something to address the issue of inequality, although his proposal “made me really nervous” because he wanted to do it without raising prices for his customers or cutting back on service.
Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
by Patricial Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matthew Williams
His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.“Is anyone else freaking out right now?” Mr. Price asked after the clapping and whooping died down into a few moments of stunned silence. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
If it’s a publicity stunt, it’s a costly one. Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
The paychecks of about 70 employees will grow, with 30 ultimately doubling their salaries, according to Ryan Pirkle, a company spokesman. The average salary at Gravity is $48,000 year.
Mr. Price’s small, privately owned company is by no means a bellwether, but his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.
“As much as I’m a capitalist, there is nothing in the market that is making me do it,” he said, referring to paying wages that make it possible for his employees to go after the American dream, buy a house and pay for their children’s education. (...)
Mr. Price said he wanted to do something to address the issue of inequality, although his proposal “made me really nervous” because he wanted to do it without raising prices for his customers or cutting back on service.
Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
by Patricial Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matthew Williams
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