“Alcosynth” - the Secret to Drinking Without Regret?

As Prohibition showed, taking booze away from the public is wildly unpopular with just about everyone but Bible-thumpers and bootleggers. But what if, instead of being banned, alcohol was simply replaced with something better? Something that makes you feel talkative and sociable without also making you throw up/fall down/feel hungover/get fat/make terrible decisions/get into fist fights or any one of the other things on the shockingly long list of downsides we all know alcohol has?

“Alcosynth” probably sounds too good to be true: A synthetic form of booze with all the fun parts of alcohol but none of its downsides. A world where a night out ends without a single tearful argument, and where not one person worries about how they’re going to deal with their 8 a.m. meeting because hangovers no longer exist. It’s a utopian ideal that for many is more important — and certainly more relevant — than colonizing Mars. It would be—for the first time in the history of a species that has been consuming alcohol for 10 million years (if you include our ape ancestors)—a night of drinking with no penalty the next day. Though it sounds like a fantasy, it is the actual goal of David Nutt, a British scientist who has been touting the virtues of so-called alcosynths since 2014.

Following his groundbreaking research into benzodiazepines (drugs similar to Valium) in the early 1980s, Nutt has lectured at Oxford University, headed up the psychopharmacology unit at Bristol University and been president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He has also garnered a reputation for campaigning vigorously — and sometimes controversially — for changes to current drug laws, which he claims are interfering with the scientific community’s ability to sensibly study the effects of most psychoactive drugs. One such controversy — in which he published a study claiming that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol — saw him dismissed from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). In response, Nutt formed the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs alongside several fellow ACMD members who had resigned in protest.

We spoke with Nutt about his ongoing quest to convince a skeptical public that, with the right mix of targeted chemicals, there really is a safer alternative to alcohol.

In a 2010 study, you determined that alcohol was more harmful to society than either heroin or crack (although those were found to be more harmful at an individual level). How do you go about measuring something like that?

We developed a 16-point scale to work out all the different variables for the ways drugs can harm you: It runs from whether it can kill you when you first take it, like heroin, through to how much social damage and destruction it does. It turned out that with alcohol, there were nine harms to the user and seven harms to society — the social harms of alcohol are so enormous that it came out at number one. Alcohol is associated with over 50 percent of all domestic violence and almost all child abuse; vast amounts of health-care costs; and huge amounts of policing costs. That’s in British society, at least, although the study was replicated in Europe and they came to the same conclusion.

The bottom line is, I’ve worked in the field of alcohol for my whole professional life — I’ve worked on treatments for alcohol withdrawal, I’ve worked on anti-craving agents — and you can never truly get rid of the harms of alcohol, because it’s a toxic substance. We use it to kill bugs on the skin, you know? You wipe your skin with alcohol when you’re doing injections. Then [when you drink it] it’s metabolized to formaldehyde, which is the sort of thing you pickle dead sharks in. It’s always toxic and you can’t get around that.

You’ve proposed that we replace alcohol with something less harmful — what you’ve termed an “alcosynth.” How would such a substance work?Since you can’t get round [the problems that come with alcohol], what we need to do is find a way of replicating the good effects — things like relaxation and sociability, maybe a bit of animation. Over the years, enough people have studied the effects of alcohol on the brain that we’ve got a pretty good idea how to target just the good effects, but not the bad bits.

You’ve patented more than 90 potential alcosynth compounds — do any of them look promising?
Alcohol is a difficult drug to mimic, but we’ve got three or four good candidates. It’s not just about how they make you feel; you’ve also got to consider the cost of production and other variables. There are two compounds in particular that I’d be perfectly happy to raise some money for.

What’s the experience of being “drunk” on them like?

It’s just like alcohol! We tested it on people who’ve spent their whole lives in the alcohol industry and they can’t tell it apart. They say it’s just like being drunk, only you’re not quite as unsteady (which is something we intended — it was designed not to make you unsteady so people are less likely to fall into each other and start fights). I’ve used it a lot and it is like alcohol, only you don’t have a hangover, you don’t have gut ache, it doesn’t seem to cause aggression.

It has all sorts of benefits: It’s got a very clever design in the molecules so the peak effect flattens out, unlike alcohol, which never plateaus out. With alcohol, the more you drink, the more effects you get — it just keeps going until it kills you. With alcosynth, eight drinks is the same as four drinks — you won’t get any more damaged from it. What I want to do is get people drinking alcosynth so they can do what they always wanted to do — sit and talk to each other, have fun and chat each other up — without getting drunk, falling under the table and vomiting. With this stuff, four drinks would be all you’d need for a whole evening.

by Nick Leftly, MEL |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Tokyo Plays Itself

On the top floor of @home cafe in Tokyo’s geek-friendly Akihabara district, in a low-ceilinged, brightly lit room that smelled of a poorly ventilated deep fryer, a coterie of frilly aproned maids were delivering wobbly, abstractly decadent Jell-O towers to their eager guests. Their up-pitched cries of "Okaerinasai goshujin-sama!" ("Welcome home, master!") pierced the air every time a new group of customers arrived, and clusters of middle-aged men queued up to get a picture with their favorite girls and a selection of oversized stuffed animals. It had been nine hours since I last ate, and my head spun as my friend and I took our seat. But with a quick glance around at the clientele, both male and female, all dazed under the spell of saccharine maid energy, it seemed like I was the only person in the room thinking about eating.

@home, one of the most popular maid cafes in Tokyo, had been temporarily made over as the GudetamaX@home Collab Café, and was now adorned with the likeness of the "lazy egg" Sanrio character that's become wildly popular both in Japan and the States. The experience was only superficially different from what one gets at a regular maid cafe, which became established as a distinct genre of restaurant in Tokyo about 15 years ago: maids calling you master (or mistress, in my case), maids writing your name in ketchup on your omurice (a rice-filled omelet, the quintessential maid cafe dish), maids doing cutesy chants over your food to make it taste better. If you care to cough up more money, a maid will come play a game with you at your table and ask you about your hobbies and your favorite animal. None of this feels terribly unusual at first — it’s kind of reminiscent of a low-rent Disneyland cafe — until you start paying attention to the adult men who’ve all come here alone.

Maid cafes are still plentiful, especially in this part of town, having enjoyed a boom in the mid-aughts that has only very gradually subsided. The real marvel at the Gudetama pop-up was, of course, the eggs, which were so uncanny that they defied my ability to discern whether they were truly the spawn of a chicken: perfectly round little discs with something resembling an over-easy yolk resting in the center, stamped with the signature gude gude (lazy) face. When I cut into one, the yellow goo that oozed out was salty-sweet and room temperature, recalling the creamy, synthetic insides of a Cadbury egg. Mine came with an ungainly slab of (again, room temperature) bacon atop a club sandwich, and what seemed to be sloppily stamped grill marks in the shape of Gudetama turned out to be cocoa powder.

The cafe collaboration was a pure distillation of Akihabara, once Tokyo’s electronics district, and now the international capital of moe. Moe is a hard-to-define term that literally means "budding" or "burning" and is most commonly used to describe the hyper-adorability of teen idol groups and anime heroines, embodied IRL by the maids at places like @home. But it also connotes a kind of drop-out mentality, a refusal to take part in mainstream corporate culture: In other words, floppy, lethargic Gudetama, who never seems to have the willpower to face the day, is perfectly @home on the shoulder of a cafe maid.

Even theme cafes that don’t revolve around lazy eggs are riffing on a version of this self-aware worthlessness, consciously or not. If Japan has been going through an identity crisis since the onset of its more than two-decade recession — a declining corporate culture, fewer marriages, plummeting birthrates, and increased nationalism — there are few places where it plays out in starker relief than in the country’s photo-op dining experiences. There’s a sense of denialist deja vu at these places; elements of bygone modern glory — bubble-era ostentation, the Harajuku heyday — repackaged in the predictable, passive comfort of a cafe. And how better to distract yourself from political and economic uncertainty than at a cat cafe or with a colorful Sailor Moon-themed cocktail? Despite being a tourist draw, this isn't Tokyo talking to the world, this is Tokyo talking to itself. (...)

I don't care how highbrow or cultured you consider yourself; every foreigner is eventually lured in by some form of Wacky Random Japan. At a certain point, circa Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Girls era, businesses began actively catering to the exoticized imagining of Tokyo that was cultivated through endless re-watchings of Lost In Translation, and later, countless fashion-obsessed Tumblrs.

The theme cafe is one of the more viral-friendly aspects of Wacky Random Japan, and there are three major subcategories within it. First, and perhaps the most popular theme cafe export, are the animal cafes, most of which are less cafes than indoor petting zoos. The beverages are an afterthought, and an awkward one at that — it's actually pretty hard to sip your Hitachino Nest Ale, the owl logo pointed out toward the camera, when you have an actual owl on your shoulder, no matter how on-brand. Second are theme restaurants, which are full-service restaurants where the decor, the menu, and the servers' outfits all revolve around a certain aesthetic, and usually a pretty mall-goth one at that: the Vampire Café, the Prison Restaurant, the (many) Alice in Wonderland cafes. Lastly, there are the maid cafes and their descendants, including the butler cafes and the Macho Café pop-up, where the servers — and their, uh, service — are the stars.

The frivolity and almost willful pointlessness might seem like a leftover from the ’80s bubble era, but the contemporary theme cafe continues the lineage of Western-style cafes that emerged in the 1920s. After "modern" hangouts with names like "Café Printemps" had established themselves in Tokyo among the intellectuals and artists, they began to diversify for a growing middle class; "Europe" was the original theme of Japanese cafes, but once Western-style eateries became more of a norm, new establishments had to step it up. "Rather than small eating and drinking places with tables set with white tablecloths and Parisian or provincial German decor," writes Elise K. Tipton, a professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney, "the leading cafés became huge multistoried buildings glittering with neon lights, colored glass windows, light-reflective metallic surfaces, and rich furnishings."

"Cafes of these sorts were like theme parks, where you could go to take on a different 'self,' a playful performance," Merry White, a Boston University anthropology professor and author of Coffee Life in Japan, told me via email. "The salaryman postwar generation was also looking for novelty, for self-expression in the ‘third space’ (not work, not home) of the cafe." While they show all the signifiers of a tourist trap, most theme cafes still function primarily as a diversion for locals; the range of glamour has stratified as well, from the flashy anime-themed meccas to some so-called cafes that feel barely any different than just walking into a stranger’s apartment.

by Emily Yoshida, Eater |  Read more:

Image: Ko Sasaki

JFK
via: here and here
[ed. Nice swing.]

Inside an Oscars Campaign: Everything It Takes to Get a Gold Statue

It takes a village to get to the Academy Awards. But not just any village: One that is made up of power players, savvy in strategy and who will stop at nothing to take home that prized gold statue. The road to the Oscars is almost as cutthroat as a presidential campaign, only this time it's without out all the fake news and email scandals.

And yes, when it comes to trying to nab an Oscar, campaign is the best adjective to describe the process. It involves scheming and brainstorming and gobs and gobs of money. There are no ulterior motives or backroom deals and, really, no secrets—because the end goal is completely transparent. Movie studios (and the actors they employ) are in it to win it, and they'll do everything that's legal, and within their power, to do so.

But just because the process is lacking in smoke and mirrors doesn't mean it's any less interesting or mind-boggling. As the 2017 show approaches, there are, quite literally, hundreds of people who have spent the better part of the last six months (and given up the better part of their sanity) to come out on top come Sunday at 9 p.m.

by Seija Rankin, E News |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Defensive Architecture For Libraries

The architect presented the landscaping plans for the library at a meeting in December. “It’s really going to be a defensive type of landscape,” she said to community members gathered at the library in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.

She enumerated the features that would make the outside of the library a harder place to spend time: railings on walls to prevent sitting, undulating rock formations to prevent encampments, benches with armrests to prevent people from lying down.

A local resident, addressing the room, said tough measures were crucial, complaining that the library is the “destination of choice for the transients that are causing so much trouble in our neighborhood”.

Of all the places associated in the popular imagination with homelessness – park benches, skid rows, the undersides of freeways – libraries are likely low on the list. Yet the Castro branch, like others across California and elsewhere in the western US, is treated by many homeless people as a sanctuary from streets that can be cold, wet and dangerous.

Some residents, however, have urged making libraries or their environs less attractive to homeless visitors.

There has been “a huge increase” in the number of libraries offering homelessness programs since the late 2000s, according to Julie Todaro, president of the American Library Association. “What is continuously upsetting to us is the condition in which people have to exist.”

The allure of libraries for people with no permanent home is obvious. There is no cost to enter. They are warm and safe. They offer internet, electrical sockets, and materials that provide a mental escape from everyday life. Nurses patrol libraries in Pima County, Arizona, while in Salt Lake City, residents opposed plans to open the main branch 24 hours a day, fearing it would become a de facto homeless shelter. San Francisco’s main library, in the city’s downtown area, has a full-time social worker. (...)

The proposals, not yet finalized, echo other attempts to make public spaces unappealing to homeless people: jagged rocks under a freeway bridge in San Diego, and iron spikes on planter boxes outside a San Francisco supermarket.

by Alastair Gee, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alastair Gee

Why Nothing Works Anymore

“No… it’s a magic potty,” my daughter used to lament, age 3 or so, before refusing to use a public restroom stall with an automatic-flush toilet. As a small person, she was accustomed to the infrared sensor detecting erratic motion at the top of her head and violently flushing beneath her. Better, in her mind, just to delay relief than to subject herself to the magic potty’s dark dealings.

It’s hardly just a problem for small people. What adult hasn’t suffered the pneumatic public toilet’s whirlwind underneath them? Or again when attempting to exit the stall? So many ordinary objects and experiences have become technologized—made dependent on computers, sensors, and other apparatuses meant to improve them—that they have also ceased to work in their usual manner. It’s common to think of such defects as matters of bad design. That’s true, in part. But technology is also more precarious than it once was. Unstable, and unpredictable. At least from the perspective of human users. From the vantage point of technology, if it can be said to have a vantage point, it's evolving separately from human use. (...)

The contemporary public restroom offers an example. Infrared-sensor flush toilets, fixtures, and towel-dispensers are sometimes endorsed on ecological grounds—they are said to save resources by regulating them. But thanks to their overzealous sensors, these toilets increase water or paper consumption substantially. Toilets flush three times instead of one. Faucets open at full-blast. Towel dispensers mete out papers so miserly that people take more than they need. Instead of saving resources, these apparatuses mostly save labor and management costs. When a toilet flushes incessantly, or when a faucet shuts off on its own, or when a towel dispenser discharges only six inches of paper when a hand waves under it, it reduces the need for human workers to oversee, clean, and supply the restroom. (...)

Once decoupled from their economic motivations, devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself. In so doing, they make that uncertainty feel normal.

It’s a fact most easily noticed when using old-world gadgets. To flush a toilet or open a faucet by hand offers almost wanton pleasure given how rare it has become. A local eatery near me whose interior design invokes the 1930s features a bathroom with a white steel crank-roll paper towel dispenser. When spun on its ungeared mechanism, an analogous, glorious measure of towel appears directly and immediately, as if sent from heaven. (...)

The common response to precarious technology is to add even more technology to solve the problems caused by earlier technology. Are the toilets flushing too often? Revise the sensor hardware. Is online news full of falsehoods? Add machine-learning AI to separate the wheat from the chaff. Are retail product catalogs overwhelming and confusing? Add content filtering to show only the most relevant or applicable results.

But why would new technology reduce rather than increase the feeling of precarity? The more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability. Things already don’t quite do what they claim. The fixes just make things worse. And so, ordinary devices aren’t likely to feel more workable and functional as technology marches forward. If anything, they are likely to become even less so.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kala /Getty

Gil Scott Heron

[ed. Still can't believe he's gone... 5 or 6 years now? See also: I'm New Here.] 

The Anatomy of Charisma

For weeks I had been researching what science has to say about the power of charisma. Why do some people so clearly have it and others don’t? Why do we fall so easily under its influence? Charismatics can make us feel charmed and great about ourselves. They can inspire us to excel. But they can also be dangerous. They use charisma for their own purposes, to enhance their power, to manipulate others.

Scientists have plenty to say about charisma. Individuals with charisma tap our unfettered emotions and can shut down our rational minds. They hypnotize us. But studies show charisma is not just something a person alone possesses. It’s created by our own perceptions, particularly when we are feeling vulnerable in politically tense times. I’m going to tell you about these studies and spotlight the opinions of the neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists who conducted them.

But first I want to tell you about a magnetic preacher who spent decades wowing audiences in churches across America with the holy words of Jesus. Then he lost his faith and now preaches about how to live happily without God. What scientists study about charisma, Bart Campolo lives.

I first read about the newly non-believing Campolo in The New York Times Magazine last December. “An extreme extrovert, he was brilliant before a crowd and also at ease in private conversations, connecting with everyone from country-club suburbanites to the destitute souls he often fed in his own house,” wrote Mark Oppenheimer. Campolo’s father is Tony Campolo, one of America’s superstar evangelists for the past 50 years, who counseled Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and today continues to mobilize people into a movement for Jesus’ messages of love and redemption.

Who would know more about the power of charisma to both charm and deceive than a preacher’s son gone rogue? Campolo, 53, who today volunteers counseling young people as a “humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, didn’t disappoint. He was wonderfully frank and engaging, energetic and insightful, just like a, well, evangelical preacher.

The early 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber wrote charisma is a quality that sets an individual “apart from ordinary men,” and causes others to treat him as “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Such qualities, Weber wrote, “are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”

Campolo had long believed that was true. “I was convinced charisma flowed directly from God,” he told me. “It was a gift.” As he began to lose his faith, he said, “I passed through every stage of apostasy on my way to heresy, I slowly left my ability to believe in all this stuff.” He began to preach that charisma may be something you’re born with, but it wasn’t supernatural; you could employ it at will. “You can use it to get women in bed, you can use it to win people down the aisle for Jesus, or you can use it to sell insurance,” Campolo said. What’s more, it was a quality that could, at least in part, be learned and perfected.

That was precisely what John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior, and the director of the doctoral program in management at the University of Lausanne who has spent years studying charismatic speakers, told me. “Charismatic techniques can be taught,” he said. Antonakis has identified a series of what he calls Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs), which range from the use of metaphors and storytelling to nonverbal methods of communication like open posture and animated, representative gestures at key moments. When taken together, he has shown, they have helped decide eight of the last 10 presidential elections. “The more charismatic leadership tactics used, the more individuals will be seen as leader-like by others,” he said. (Read here how Antonakis breaks down the CLTs of super-popular TV preacher Joel Osteen.)

Tony Campolo had mastered all the tactics. In the 1970s and ’80s, Bart Campolo and his father traversed the country in a beat-up, sky-blue Dodge Coronet, giving sermons wherever they could. Campolo marveled at his father in action. “My dad was one of the most charismatic people in the world,” Campolo said. “I’ve been around black preachers and people like my dad, who can go up and down the spectrum, do the whisper that you can’t help but listen to, tell the joke, then tell the tear-jerking story, and then the fiery fulmination. He can do it all over the map.”

by Adam Piore, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Hiroshige, “Yellowtail, Blowfish, and Plum Blossoms”
via:

Politics 101

White House Management 101

Inventing Non-Existent Crises

'They’re Trying to Turn Elizabeth Into a Boogeyman'

Trump Voters Are Not the Enemy

In Venezuela, Short on Food, Short of Hope

The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook

Donald Trump is Dangerous When He's Losing

The Big Idea for America: Think Small

The President of Our Dreams (Russian perspective)

What on Earth Is Going On With the Stock Market?

How the Story of “Moana” and Maui Holds Up Against Cultural Truths

I've said it before and I will say it again: the colonization of Pacific Islands is the greatest human adventure story of all time.

People using Stone Age technology built voyaging canoes capable of traveling thousands of miles, then set forth against the winds and currents to find tiny dots of land in the midst of the largest ocean on Earth. And having found them, they traveled back and forth, again and again, to settle them—all this, 500 to 1,000 years ago.

Ever since Captain Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands and realized that the inhabitants spoke a cognate language to those of the South Pacific islands, scholars and others have researched and theorized about the origins and migrations of the Polynesians.

The Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe has proved the efficacy of traditional Oceanic navigation since 1976, when it embarked on its historic maiden voyage to recover the lost heritage of this ocean-sailing tradition. The general scholarship on migrations seems well established, and most current researches now seek to understand the timing of the various colonizations.

But one huge mystery, sometimes called “The Long Pause” leaves a gaping hole in the voyaging timeline.

Western Polynesia—the islands closest to Australia and New Guinea—were colonized around 3,500 years ago. But the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia were not settled until 1,500 to 500 years ago. This means that after arriving in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Polynesians took a break—for almost 2,000 years—before voyaging forth again.

Then when they did start again, they did so with a vengeance: archaeological evidence suggests that within a century or so after venturing forth, Polynesians discovered and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the central and eastern Pacific.

Nobody knows the reason for The Long Pause, or why the Polynesians started voyaging again.

Several theories have been proposed—from a favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño, to visible supernovas luring the stargazing islanders to travel, to ciguatera poisoning caused by algae blooms.

Enter Moana, the latest Disney movie, set in what appears to be Samoa, even though most American audiences will see it as Hawaii.

Moana—pronounced “moh-AH-nah,” not “MWAH-nah” means “ocean”—and the character is chosen by the sea itself to return the stolen heart of Te Fiti, who turns out to be an island deity (Tahiti, in its various linguistic forms, including Tafiti, is a pan-Polynesian word for any faraway place).

The heart of Te Fiti is a greenstone (New Zealand Maori) amulet stolen by the demigod Maui. An environmental catastrophe spreading across the island makes the mission urgent. And despite admonitions from her father against anyone going beyond the protective reef, Moana steals a canoe and embarks on her quest.

But as should be expected whenever Disney ventures into cross-cultural milieus, the film is characterized by the good, the bad and the ugly.

Moana’s struggle to learn to sail and get past the reef of her home island sets the stage for her learning of true wayfinding. It also shows traces of Armstrong Sperry’s stirring, classic book Call It Courage, and Tom Hanks's Castaway.

But the film's story also has a different angle with a powerful revelation: Moana’s people had stopped voyaging long ago, and had placed a taboo—another Polynesian world—on going beyond the reef.

With the success of Moana’s mission and her having learned the art of wayfinding, her people start voyaging again.

And so the Long Pause comes to an end, Disney style, with a great fleet of canoes setting forth across the ocean to accomplish the greatest human adventure of all time. I admit to being moved by this scene.

As someone who lectures on traditional oceanic navigation and migration, I can say resoundingly that it is high time the rest of the world learned this amazing story.

But then there is much to criticize.

by Doug Herman, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: Phil Uhl/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. Uh, Mr. President? Sir?...]
via:

The GOP's Obamacare Replacement Plan

S. 107

THE SELF-CARE ACT

To replace the Affordable Care Act of 2010 with affordable, quality self-care tips for all Americans.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

Mr. CRUZ (for himself, Mr. McCONNELL, Mr. RUBIO, and Mr. PAUL) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.

A BILL

That is way better than the Affordable Care Act of 2010. We promise.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; INTRODUCTION, TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, AND SUBTITLES.

a.) SHORT TITLE. — This Act may be cited as the “Self-Care Act of 2017.”

b.) INTRODUCTION. — The Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111–148) will be replaced with the Self-Care Act. Americans surviving under the SCA will be provided with helpful and cost-effective self-care tips that can be performed without the assistance of medical professionals. Tax-paying Americans will no longer be burdened with paying for a broken healthcare system (cough, Obamacare, cough). Those insured under the Self-Care Act cannot be denied health care for pre-existing conditions because they will be their own healthcare providers. Think of this bill as providing assurance instead of insurance.

c.) TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, AND SUBTITLES. —This Act is divided into divisions, titles, and subtitles as follows:

DIVISION A—AFFORDABLE SELF-CARE TIPS 

TITLE I—SELF-CARE FOR MINOR INJURIES AND AILMENTS
Subtitle A—Walk It Off
Subtitle B—Get Some Rest
Subtitle C—Read the Bible
Subtitle D—Shoot a Gun
Subtitle E—Suck It Up, Crybaby
Subtitle F—Mrs. McConnell’s Chicken Soup Recipe 

TITLE II—SELF-CARE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS
Subtitle A—Happiness is a Choice
Subtitle B—Just Be Normal
Subtitle C—Pray the Gay Away
Subtitle D—Make Love to a Gun
Subtitle D—Snap Out of It, Snowflake
Subtitle E—Mrs. Cruz’s Bathtub Zoloft Recipe 

TITLE III—SELF-CARE FOR PRENATAL AND NEONATALCARE
Subtitle A—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle B—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle C—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle D—You Have a Baby Now! 

TITLE IV—SELF-CARE FOR WOMEN’S HEALTH
Subtitle A—Listen to Your Dad
Subtitle B—Listen to Your Brother
Subtitle C—Listen to Your Husband
Subtitle D—Listen to Your Son
Subtitle E—Listen to Jesus
Subtitle F—Listen to Your Male Teacher
Subtitle G—Listen to Your Mailman
Subtitle H—Listen to That Homeless Man
Subtitle I—Take a Bubble Bath, Or Something 

TITLE V—SELF-CARE FOR DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT
Subtitle A—Sending Thoughts and Prayers!

by Leah Slater, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber

[ed. See also: For the Want of a Leather Jacket, Is Uber Lost?]

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense"). (...)

Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done. (...)

When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.

Things were beginning to get even more comically absurd with each passing day. Every time something ridiculous happened, every time a sexist email was sent, I'd sent a short report to HR just to keep a record going. Things came to a head with one particular email chain from the director of our engineering organization concerning leather jackets that had been ordered for all of the SREs. See, earlier in the year, the organization had promised leather jackets for everyone in organization, and had taken all of our sizes; we all tried them on and found our sizes, and placed our orders. One day, all of the women (there were, I believe, six of us left in the org) received an email saying that no leather jackets were being ordered for the women because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order. I replied and said that I was sure Uber SRE could find room in their budget to buy leather jackets for the, what, six women if it could afford to buy them for over a hundred and twenty men. The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men's jackets but not on the women's jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men's jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets.

I forwarded this absurd chain of emails to HR, and they requested to meet with me shortly after. I don't know what I expected after all of my earlier encounters with them, but this one was more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined. The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem. I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn't the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them - she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie). She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc. - an absurd and insulting request that I refused to comply with. When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.

by Susan J. Fowler |  Read more:

Smash Putt's Reign of Anarchic Mini-Golf Is Nearly Over

For a miniature-golf entrepreneur, Jeremy Franklin-Ross has a unique aversion to concepts like points and pars.

Since 2009, he and a team of fellow artists, woodworkers, and hackers have organized Smash Putt, an adult-only, self-proclaimed "miniature golf apocalypse" that pops up for a few weeks every year.

Putt-putt courses don't need to have a point; he believes they can be art. Instead of offering a score, holes can show how cruel people can be or how people find meaning in life. "We think about the social-experiment aspects of putt-putt a lot around here," he says.

Smash Putt has been hosted in a former plumbing store, government building, and walnut storage facility, among other locales. It's currently inside a former Mexican restaurant in Post Alley until April 30, when its creators will retire it permanently.

On a bustling Saturday night, Franklin-Ross, a slim fortysomething with a short beard, is sipping bourbon in his makeshift office, speaking with preemptive nostalgia for the putt-putt holes now on their final display. There's the Mission Impossible hole, a dark, foggy little room packed with red lasers that trigger alarms. There's the hole that lets you sabotage your friends, offering a button that closes the hole just as their ball is rolling toward it. There's the final hole, which chews your ball up with a buzz saw.

Smash Putt's 18 holes change every year; some get retired and some get added. Many of the retired holes have been of the "social experiment" variety, lacking specific directions. Many people, he says, will "get vocally angry when they're not provided an experience with a clear goal."

Outside his office door, thundering booms can be overheard from what he calls the event's "must-have hole" and its most defiantly pointless creation.

Called the Driving Range, the hole consists of a long metal cage with an air-powered cannon at one end. Patrons use the cannon to shoot high-velocity golf balls at objects inside the cage, which range from propane tanks to circular blades. That's it—there are no rules or scoring criteria.

The Driving Range, a hole requiring no putter, is quintessential Smash Putt—total anarchy. In the event's early years, the hole confused and upset people so much that they eventually hired someone to stand next to it, assigning random points and goals on the fly.

"For people not ready to create their own games, the person tells them to shoot at this object, shoot at that object," says Franklin-Ross. "You get a million points, you get a hole in one, fuck you."

There's also the primal destructive bliss the hole provides, somewhat diminished this year. For the first time in the event's history, there are no upright pianos to destroy. Due to the new venue's size, the Driving Range must be suspended above patrons, on the restaurant's second floor, to fit.

Objects can't be breakable now, for fear of small materials raining down on people's heads through the cage.

"As much as people are coming here at their own peril, we try to make things as safe as we can, within our means," he says, while admitting he finds it "odd" that the golf-ball cannon isn't pulverizing things. Pianos tended to last four days in the cage before they were reduced to shards and a new one had to be wheeled in.

Franklin-Ross estimates that roughly 100,000 people have attended Smash Putt since its inception. At one point, its creators considered turning it into a full-fledged business and taking their show on the road. They organized a Smash Putt in Denver to test the concept. But, he says, "being a carnie is a heartbreaking life, and we don't want to do it."

by Drew Atkins, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Uysess Curry

Otto Freundlich, Head (Self Portrait), 1923.
via:

[ed. See also: MF Doom and Gorillaz, November Has Come.]

via:

We All Want Healthcare To Cost Much Less — But We Are Asking The Wrong Question

Imagine this: Healthcare — the whole system — for half as much. Better, more effective. No rationing. Everybody in.

Because we all want that. And because we can. This can be done. Let me tell you how.

I’m an industry insider, covering the industry for 37 years now, publishing millions of words in industry publications, speaking at hundreds of industry conferences, writing books, advising everyone from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, the Defense Department, and the Centers for Disease Control to governments around the world to, probably, your local hospital, your doctor, your health plan.

The economic fundamentals of healthcare in the United States are unique, amazingly complex, multi-layered and opaque. It takes a lot of work and time to understand them, work and time that few of the experts opining about healthcare on television have done. Once you do understand them, it takes serious independence, a big ornery streak, and maybe a bit of a career death wish to speak publicly about how the industry that pays your speaking and consulting fees should, can, and must strive to make half as much money. Well, I turn 67 this year and I’m cranky as hell, so let’s go.

The Wrong Question

We are back again in the cage fight over healthcare in Congress. But in all these fights we are only arguing over one question: Who pays? The government, your employer, you? A different answer to that question will distribute the pain differently, but it won’t cut the pain in half.

There are other questions to ask whose answers could get us there, such as:

• Who do we pay?
• How do we pay them?
• For what, exactly, are we paying?

Because the way we are paying now ineluctably drives us toward paying too much, for not enough, and for things we don’t even need.

A few facts, the old-fashioned non-alternative kind:

Cost: Healthcare in the U.S., the whole system, costs us something like $3.4 trillion per year. Yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T”. If U.S. healthcare were a country on its own it would be the fifth largest economy in the world.

Waste: About a third of that is wasted on tests and procedures and devices that we really don’t need, that don’t help, that even hurt us. That’s the conservative estimate in a number of expert analyses, and based on the opinions of doctors about their own specialties. Some analyses say more: Some say half. Even that conservative estimate (one third) is a big wow: over $1.2 trillion per year, something like twice the entire U.S. military budget, thrown away on waste.

Prices: The prices are nuts. It’s not just pharmaceuticals. Across the board, from devices to procedures, hospital room charges to implants to diagnostic tests, the prices actually paid in the U.S. are three, five, 10 times what they are in other medically advanced countries like France, Germany, and the U.K.

Value: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to value. If you pay $50,000 for a car, chances are very good that you’ll get a nicer car than if you pay $15,000. If you pay $2200 or $4500 for an MRI, there is pretty much no chance that you will get a better MRI than if you paid $730 or $420. (Yes, these are real prices, all from the same local market.)

Variation: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to the producer’s cost. None. How can you tell? I mean, besides the $600 price tag on a 69-cent bottle of sterile water with a teaspoon of salt that’s labeled “saline therapeutics” on the medical bill? (Yes, those are real prices, too.) You can tell because of the insane variation. The price for your pill, procedure or test may well be three, five, even 12 times the price paid in some other city across the country, in some other institution across town, even for the person across the hall. Try that in any other business. Better yet, call me: I have a 10-year-old Ford F-150 to sell you for $75,000.

Inefficiency: We do healthcare in the most inefficient way possible, waiting until people show up in the Emergency Department with their diabetes, heart problem, or emphysema completely out of control, where treatment will cost 10 times as much as it would if we had gotten to them first to help them avoid a serious health crisis. (And no, that’s not part of the 1/3 that is waste. That’s on top of it.)

So who’s the chump here? We’re paying ridiculous prices for things we don’t necessarily need delivered in the most inefficient way possible.

Why?

Why do they do that to us? Because we pay them to.

Wait, this is important. This is the crux of the problem. From doctors to hospitals to labs to device manufacturers to anybody else we want to blame, they don’t overprice things and sell us things we don’t need because they are greedy, evil people. They do it because we tell them to, in the clearest language possible: money. Every inefficiency, every unneeded test, every extra bottle of saline, means more money in the door. And they can decide what’s on the list of what’s needed, as long as it can be argued that it matches the diagnostic code.

That’s called “fee-for-service” medicine: We pay a fee for every service, every drug, every test. There’s a code for everything. There are no standard prices or even price ranges. It’s all negotiated constantly and repeatedly across the system with health plans, employers, even with Medicare and Medicaid.

We pay them to do it and the payment system demands it. Imagine a hospital system that bent every effort to providing health and healthcare in the least expensive, most effective way possible, that charged you $1 for that 69-cent bottle of saline water, that eliminated all unnecessary tests and unhelpful procedures, that put personnel and cash into helping you prevent or manage your diabetes instead of waiting until you show up feet-first in diabetic shock. If it did all this without regard to how it is paid it would soon close its doors, belly up, bankrupt. For-profit or not-for-profit makes little difference to this fact.

If we want them to act differently, we have to pay them differently.

Paying for Healthcare Differently

But wait, isn’t that the only way we can pay? Because, you know, medicine is complicated, every body is different, every disease is unique.

Actually, no. There is no one other ideal way to pay for all of healthcare, but there are lots of other ways to pay. We can pay for outcomes, we can pay for bundles of services, we can pay for subscriptions for all primary care or all diabetes care or special attention for multiple chronic conditions, on and on, the list of alternative ways to pay for healthcare is long and rich.

There are now surgery centers that put their prices up on the wall, just like McDonalds — and they can prove their quality. There are hospital systems that will give you a warranty on your surgery: We will get it right or fixing the problem is free.

Look: You get in an accident and take your crumpled fender to the body shop. Every fender crumples differently, maybe the frame is involved, maybe the chrome strip has to be replaced, all that. So there is no standard “crumpled fender” price. But it is not the first crumpled fender the body shop has ever seen. It’s probably the 10,000th. They are very good at knowing just how to fix it and how much it will cost them to do the work. Do you pay for each can of Bondo, each disk of sandpaper, each minute in the paint booth? No. They write you up an estimate for the whole thing, from diagnosis to rehab. Come back next Thursday and it will be good as new. That’s a bundled outcome. It’s the body shop’s way of doing business, its business model.

There are new business models arising now in healthcare (such as reference prices, medical tourism, centers of excellence, “Blue Choice” and other health plan options) that force hospitals and surgical centers to compete on price and quality for specific bundles, like a new hip or a re-plumbed heart.

Healthcare is a vast market with lots of different kinds of customers in different financial situations, different life stages, different genders, different needs, different resources, yet we have somehow decided that in pretty nearly all of that vast market there should be only one business model: diagnostic-code-driven fee for service. Change that, and the whole equation changes. It’s called business model innovation. If we find ways to pay for what we want and need, not for whatever they pile onto the bill, they will find ways to bring us what we want and need at prices that make sense. That’s called changing the incentives.

by Joe Flower, Healthcare in America |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Fatal Flaw in Subscription Models

[ed. At one time I thought micro-payments might be the answer but I'm not so sure anymore. It seems any subscription service has to provide some additional 'value added' benefit, beyond the quality of its reporting. Think Amazon Prime, which besides free shipping also provides music, streaming tv and original programming. Not sure what the answer is, but if recent trends are an example I expect aggregation or consolidation among numerous news sources to be the most likely option. What that means for a blog like Duck Soup is probably eventual extinction (or a more restricted focus on topics that don't require subscription services.]

Many column inches both here at TheMediaBriefing and elsewhere have been dedicated to revenue models, and how individual publishers can monetise their audiences.

Subscriptions are nothing new. Most of the media industry seems to have it all worked out, with millions paying out for Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple Music and more.

But one industry segment hasn’t quite grasped it yet. In a period of rapid change and disruption, news publishers grapple with putting paywalls up, taking them down, growing subscribers and trying to convince people that their content should be paid for.

Subscription’s fatal flaw

Various studies have been done on how people consume news, particularly in the US, but there is very little information on how many different outlets a user will read from. Increasingly, it is the article rather than the source itself which garners attention, with the most widely-known publishers being those who have mastered social distribution.

We put out a snap poll to followers of @mediabrief asking how many different sources they read a day, and the results were telling: (...)

If every publisher put up a hard paywall overnight, and these people then took out subscriptions to each of these sources, the cost could be anything from £80-£120 a month, if not more.

Paywalls rely on publishers assuming that an individual will only have one or two subscriptions, and therefore that theirs is the only content worth paying for. Yes, on a publisher-by-publisher basis, it is critical that the content they produce is valued and paid for. But on an industry level, it isn’t sustainable.

Paying subscribers to these outlets are skewed in terms of age, and the younger generation have never grown accustomed to handing over money for content, according to Business Insider’s Publisher Paywall Report. I would suggest this is because we now read news and content from a huge variety of sources (both reputable and otherwise). The age of loyalty to a single newsbrand is long gone; digital signalled the death of brand monogamy.

Industry parallels

Many people draw comparisons between publishing subscription models and the success media companies like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify have found.

There is, however, a key difference. Imagine 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros each charged users a monthly fee to access their films. Very quickly, the model would fall over, and smaller film studios would be unable to compete.

Instead, these studios all come together in an aggregator, like Netflix. Paying a monthly fee becomes a lot more valuable for film fanatics, as they can watch as much as they like from different sources.

Pure social distribution isn’t the answer for publishing. The catch in the current situation is that Facebook doesn’t pay publishers to distribute articles on their platform. If Netflix refused to pay its content creators, or even charged them to reach their audience, studios would quickly take their films elsewhere.

Yet the point still stands. The average consumer cannot afford to ‘subscribe’ to individual film studios, no matter how good their films are. Similarly, people listened to a much narrower range of music when it cost £10.99 for an album – a luxury purchase. The music industry was disrupted, and Spotify emerged as a way to listen to artists, and more importantly, discover new music from small labels and independent artists. It’s taken almost a decade for the industry to right itself, but it’s getting there.

It’s not all plain sailing for consumers. Many are happy to sacrifice the tangibility of paying a one-off fee for a physical product (DVDs or CDs) to access unlimited content from different sources (films and music) for a monthly fee. There is no sense of ownership – should Spotify close, all the music and years of accumulated monthly payments disappear. But that is the price many have chosen to pay.

Music and films (for the most part) are also valuable in their exclusivity. No one else is legally reproducing Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ for free. To watch it, and keep up with the water-cooler talk, you must have a subscription to Netflix.

This is another area publishing struggles with. Unless the content is niche or special interest, many stories, particularly in news, are easily replicable and available elsewhere for free.

Subscriptions won’t provide a long-term, sustainable solution. Consumers no longer pay for a physical product, and many read across a variety of sources. Publishers with paywalls have implemented them because they value their content and don’t believe it should be given away for free, and they are right in their belief, but not in the isolationist solution.

by Esther Kezia Harding, Media Briefing | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Dan Bern

[ed. I woke up this morning with this song in my head. Go figure.]