Full Transcript: The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern Talks Wireless Data Plans

Trying to figure this stuff out, but what would you say is the best all-around wireless plan you think you can get right now from the four big carriers in the U.S.?

Yeah, it is a really tough question. I think T-Mobile has done some really great things. What you see happening in the industry — and this is sort of T-Mobile’s biggest problem — they certainly had a huge jump in subscribers, at least they did last year in, I think it was the fourth quarter. They had a huge jump in subscribers, but you shouldn’t switch, and I make this point in the column. You should not switch to a different carrier for a deal. It’s just the worst thing you can do.

You only want to switch if you know that that has the best service in the places you are. That’s what’s most important. Saying something has the best plan can be a little misleading to readers or people that follow this podcast. I don’t like to say that because I don’t want people to go run and get T-Mobile and then find out, “Oh no, I don’t have service, my vacation home or my office is a T-Mobile dead spot.” That’s one of the biggest problems with T-Mobile and also Sprint. AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. have, I wouldn’t say superb coverage but they have the best coverage that you can get. That’s what’s made them more of a premium offering.

All this said, I feel like I’ve couched this all. T-Mobile does have some great deals, now you see Verizon, specifically this week, trying to catch up with an unlimited deal. You have Sprint also just hustling with the old Verizon guy all over the place saying, “We are the best, and we will basically give you everything for free. We’re so desperate for customers.” AT&T has also followed.

What’s great about T-Mobile is they have now switched to “all-unlimited plans.” You get a very big bucket of data, and we can talk about this in a few minutes. You get a very big bucket of data but they also have put the fees inside that. There’s no hidden fees on your bill, I think that’s actually really important because I think everyone needs to understand what’s happening on their bill. Even if you don’t think you can save any money, just understand where your money is going. These companies will take you for everything.

Oh yeah.

They do take you for everything.

Absolutely.

It makes me feel better to just know where the money is going. For instance, in this process I called Verizon or went into a Verizon store and found out about like three things I didn’t know Verizon was offering, because it’s such a mess in their app and everything like that. Just understand what’s going with your bill.

First thing is to look up what the coverage is like in your area. You can do that using, what was that you mentioned? RootMetrics.

Yeah, RootMetrics is a great way to do that.

Do that, find out who offers the best coverage where you are.

Exactly, ask people. For example, one of the reasons I stay with Verizon is because my parents just got a house upstate and I know that Verizon has good service there, because I’ve seen other people with T-Mobile where there is no good service. That’s not something that would’ve come up on RootMetrics. Just ask around, or when you go to those places, see if anybody has that type of service or that carrier and decide then what you’d feel comfortable with.

This is a real tech reviewer problem, by the way but I also am on Verizon and then you know we’re constantly cycling through these loaner phones or these new devices that come through, and a lot of times some of the brand new unlocked cool phones that I’m trying to test are only operating on a GSM network and not CDMA. I have to basically get a different SIM card and something that will operate on that network as well. It seems like it’s still a little bit easier to switch from device to device is you’re on GSM.

It does, but some of the phones have both of the radios in it, so iPhone you shouldn’t have that problem. Also the Pixel, the new Pixels have both the radios so you should be fine. Yeah, totally, AT&T and T-Mobile are going to be more compatible with more phones, especially if you travel internationally.

Right. What are some of the catches in these plans? I was reading through the Verizon fine print the other day after they announced they were bringing out this $80-per-month unlimited plan back. It seems there are some instances where throttling is going to come into play. Some people may not even understand what throttling really means: They’re going to limit your data speeds on hotspots and tethering, which I do all the time.

Yeah.

What are some things that people should definitely be aware of if they’re thinking of some of these newer plans?

Let me try to describe it this way: With all of these plans now, all four of the big networks in the U.S. offer unlimited plans. Let’s use “unlimited” in quotes, because there really is no such thing as an unlimited plan. Just like there’s no such thing as anything in life is free, right? Nothing is free, nothing is truly unlimited. (...)

Okay, so let’s picture it this way: They give you an unlimited plan, right? That means you should have as many gigabytes in the world to stream video all day long and all night long. And I don’t know, watch all of Lauren’s videos and all my videos and download millions of files and all of these things, right? You should have enough to do all of that all through the month. Except that’s not really true.

The best way to think of it is like you have a highway and you’re cruising down the highway and you can go as fast as you can on that highway. You’re going to get as fast speeds when you’ve got this unlimited data, but if you hit a cap when there’s a lot of people on the network — if you’re in a place where there’s a lot of people using their phones and you’ve used a lot of data that month — the carrier will deprioritize your phone.

They might say, “Oh in this one area,” — could be a concert, could be some place, I don’t know, a train station, lots of people are on their phone and are on our network right now — “Oh, Joanna over there, she used 50 gigabytes this month of data. We are going to take her down right now, because the network is so busy. We’re going to throttle her speeds down.” Her LTE speeds are not going to be as fast as Lauren over there who is one of our customers who doesn’t have unlimited data and she’s only used two gigabytes this month. When there are these times of heavy traffic on these networks, they take the people who have unlimited data and have used a lot of data and bring down their speeds. Does that make any sense? (...)

Oh, okay, interesting. Where do products like Google Fi or a company like Republic Wireless fit into this landscape? We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the four big carriers so far.

Yeah, I think these are fascinating, and I think unfortunately there’s such a monopoly by these four big carriers and that’s what most people think to go to when they’re getting their service. Google Fi is really interesting for two reasons: It’s sort of the model that you pay what you use, and so here we’re buying like unlimited data or we’re buying eight gigs of data and you get 10 gigs because you get bonus data like who the hell knows what that means. There’s this model of you pay what you use that makes a lot of sense. If you know what one gigabyte costs a month or whatever and you paid that and then you just kept going and you paid for what you used, it would make sense. I think that’s a really interesting model, and Google doesn’t really have much to lose because they don’t have the major many years of what the other traditional carriers have offered.

I think there’s another interesting thing with wireless or Wi-Fi built into the plans. I think more and more obviously we have 5G on the horizon and other types of things. We are more and more around great and fast Wi-Fi, the handoff, making the handoff between Wi-Fi networks and mobile data makes a lot of sense. A lot of that engineering also has to happen in the phone. That’s what Republic Wireless is so good at. Also Wi-Fi calling, Wi-Fi phone calls can sound so much better than the traditional carrier phone calls. They have HD voice and things like that. I’ve thrown a lot in at this. I think they’re really interesting and you should look at them but also of course come back to where’s that coverage and does your device work with these companies?

by Recode Staff, Recode |  Read more:

Image: Morris MacMatzen - Pool/Getty Images

Eleven Thousand Bowls of Soup

It was almost noon on a Friday in the working-class Hong Kong neighborhood of Jordan, and Chiu Wing Keng was tired. The 28-year-old chef had been up until 6 that morning prepping ingredients in anticipation of a busy weekend at Kai Kai Dessert, his family’s two-floor storefront on Ning Po Street. Chiu’s father, Chiu Wai Yip, started Kai Kai nearly four decades ago, having learned the craft from his uncle. The family specializes in the kind of traditional Cantonese dessert soups that my mom, who immigrated to New York from Hong Kong in 1969, made when I was a kid: sweet red-bean soup with lotus seeds, silky egg-­custard pudding, glutinous sesame rice balls drowned in ginger syrup.

In 2015, the Michelin Guide almost caused the family business to close. Kai Kai Dessert was one of two dozen establishments honored in the prestigious culinary guide’s first-ever listings for street food, introduced in the Hong Kong and Macau guide. It’s a nice idea: giving international attention to a longtime local shop so it can bring old-fashioned, painstakingly crafted flavors to a new audience. But the downside came quickly. Customer traffic went up 30 percent in the first month, and a few weeks later, the Chius’ landlord more than doubled their rent, to $27,000 — the equivalent of about 11,000 bowls of soup. That’s more than half the restaurant’s total monthly income. (...)

High-end restaurants across the globe fret over the perks and perils of inclusion in the widely recognized Michelin food bible. How can I take advantage of the attention? Can I handle the increased business? Do I hire more people? Do I expand? Do I franchise? Do I do something — anything — different? But the new street-food category can threaten a restaurant’s very survival: For a hole in the wall serving $3 soups, a rent hike is disastrous. (...)

The Michelin recognition came as a surprise to the family. “We always thought the Michelin award was for fancy, high-class restaurants, not our kind of food,” Chiu the younger told me. The announcement of the street-food category — “a first in the history of the Michelin guides,” said Michael Ellis, the guides’ international director — also surprised many in the food world. Historically fine-dining focused, Michelin has been criticized in recent years for lacking relevance in a world where meals are exhaustively documented by the likes of Yelp, Eater, and any number of opinionated online food guides. Ellis explained the launch as specific to Hong Kong: “Street food is part of the local way of life. The city never sleeps, the streets are constantly bustling, and Hong Kong residents love to eat out, without necessarily sitting down and spending a lot of money.” Some observers, like the guide Lifestyle Asia, accused Michelin of getting gimmicky with “a ploy to show that they actually are in touch with how Hong Kong eats.”

In many ways, the listings are a natural culmination of the worldwide fetishization of street food: Places like Kogi BBQ, the L.A. taco truck that launched the Roy Choi mega-empire, have elevated humble foods to the status of haute cuisine. But they also reflect Michelin’s savvy investment in Asia.Originally focused on Europe, Michelin now has guides covering nearly 50 regions around the globe. The 2017 debuts include guides to Seoul and Shanghai, also street-food meccas, and the street-food category has expanded to Singapore.

Chiu told me that the street-food designation doesn’t bother him, mostly because he doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to mean. “Does ‘street food’ mean a lesser thing?” he asked. In any case, he said he would never dream of getting a star — it’s too much pressure. When I visited, the mood at Kai Kai was one of cheerful relief; two days before, Michelin had handed out the second year of Hong Kong street-food awards, and Kai Kai had made the list again. “Now I wonder about what happens if they stop giving it to us — that people will say, ‘What happened? They must have done something wrong.’”

by Bonnie Tsui, California Sunday Magazine | Read more:
Image: Pierfrancesco Celada

Now That We Can Alter Our Genetic Code, Should We?

A few days ago, I had just stepped off a podium at a cancer conference when a 50-year-old woman with a family history of breast cancer approached me. I had been discussing how my laboratory, among hundreds of other labs, was trying to understand how mutations in genes unleash the malignant behavior of cancer cells. She told me that she carried a mutation in the BRCA-1 gene—a mutation that she had likely inherited from her father.

Diagnosed with cancer in one of her breasts when she was 30, she had undergone surgery, chemo, radiation and hormonal therapy. But that grim sequence of diagnosis and treatment, she told me, was hardly the main source of her torment. Now, she worried about the development of cancer in her remaining breast, or in her ovaries. She was considering a double mastectomy and the surgical removal of her ovaries. A woman carrying a BRCA-1 mutation has nearly a 60-70 percent chance of developing cancer in her breasts or ovaries during her lifetime, and yet it's difficult to predict when or where that cancer might occur. For such women, the future is often fundamentally changed by that knowledge, and yet it remains just as fundamentally uncertain; their lives and energies might be spent anticipating cancer and imagining survivorship—from an illness that they have not yet developed. A disturbing new word, with a distinctly Orwellian ring, has been coined to describe these women: previvors—pre-survivors.

The uncertainty and anxiety had cast such a pall over this woman's adult life that she did not want her grandchildren to suffer through this ordeal (her children had not been tested yet, but would likely be tested in the future). What if she wanted to eliminate that genetic heritage from her family? Could she ensure that her children, or her grandchildren, would never have to live with the fear of future breast cancer, or other cancers associated with the BRCA-1 gene? Rather than waiting to excise organs, could her children, or their children, choose to excise the cancer-linked gene?

That same morning, a National Academies of Sciences panel issued a report on the future prospects of "gene editing" in human embryos. Gene "editing" (more on this below) refers to a set of techniques that enables the deliberate alteration of the genetic code of a cell. In principle, if the BRCA-1 mutation could be altered in egg cells or in sperm cells bearing that genetic mutation, the gene would be "fixed" (or restored to its non-mutant form) forever.

To understand what the report proposes, we need to understand how genes function, and how we might be able to manipulate genes in the future. First, though, a quick primer: A gene, crudely put, is a unit of hereditary information. It carries information to specify a biological function (although a single gene might specify more than one function). To simplify somewhat: You might imagine genes as a set of master-instructions carried between cells, and between organisms, that inform a cell or an organism how to build, maintain, repair and reproduce itself.

The BRCA-1 gene specifies a protein that allows cells to repair other damaged genes. For a cell, a damaged gene is a catastrophe in the making. It signals the loss of information—a crisis. Soon after genetic damage, the BRCA1 protein is recruited to the damaged gene. In patients with the normal gene, the protein launches a chain reaction, recruiting dozens of proteins to the knife-edge of the broken gene to swiftly repair the breach. In patients with the mutated gene, however, the mutant BRCA1 is not appropriately recruited, and the breaks are not repaired. The mutation thus enables more mutations—like fire fueling fire—until the growth-regulatory and metabolic controls on the cell are snapped, ultimately leading to breast cancer. Breast cancer, even in BRCA1-mutated patients, requires multiple triggers. The environment clearly plays a role: Add X-rays, or a DNA-damaging agent, and the mutation rate and cancer risk climbs even higher. And other gene variants can change the risk: If a BRCA-1 mutation is present with other gene-variants that increase cancer risk, then the chance of developing cancer multiplies.

Until recently, a woman carrying a mutation in the BRCA-1 gene had the means to alter her personal genetic destiny, but no means to alter the transmission of that destiny in her children. She could choose to undergo intensive screening for early breast cancer, and intervene only if and when cancer is detected. She could choose to take hormonal medicines to reduce her risk. Or she could choose to remove her breast and ovaries, thereby drastically reducing the future chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer (although the mutations also increase the risk of other cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, or prostate cancer in men). But notably, until the 1990s, she could not prevent the transmission of the mutated gene to her children.

In April 1990, Nature magazine announced the birth of a new technology that raised the stakes of human genetic diagnosis. The technique relies on a peculiar idiosyncrasy of human embryology. When an embryo is produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF), it is typically grown for several days in an incubator before being implanted into a woman's womb. Bathed in a nutrient-rich broth in a moist incubator, the single-cell embryo divides to form a glistening ball of cells. At the end of three days, there are eight and then sixteen cells. Astonishingly, if you remove a few cells from that embryo, the remaining cells divide and fill in the gap of missing cells, and the embryo continues to grow normally as if nothing had happened. For a moment in our history, we are actually quite like salamanders or, rather, like salamanders' tails—capable of complete regeneration even after being cut by a fourth.

A human embryo can thus be "biopsied" at this early stage, the few cells extracted used for genetic tests. Once the tests have been completed, cherry-picked embryos possessing the correct genes can be implanted. With some modifications, even oocytes—a woman's eggs—can be genetically tested before fertilization. These techniques together are called "preimplantation genetic diagnosis," or PGD. (...)

For a woman carrying a BRCA-1 mutation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis offers a new way to think about genetic selection in the future. An embryo (or even an egg) might be biopsied and diagnosed as a carrier for the BRCA-1 mutation, and the woman might choose not to implant that embryo. Some mathematics might put the choices into perspective: If a woman carrying the BRCA-1 mutation conceives a child with a man carrying no mutation, then the chance of having a child with the mutation is one in two. If the father also happens to carry the BRCA-1 mutation, then the chance increases to three in four (actually, for complicated reasons, the figure is closer to two in three). But with gene sequencing and PGD, a woman might be able to reduce the risk to zero—essentially erasing the BRCA-1 mutation from her future lineage.

In the spring of 2011, Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist, and a bacteriologist, Emmanuelle Charpentier, discovered yet another powerful mechanism to manipulate the human genome. Doudna and Charpentier were working on a mechanism by which bacteria defend themselves against invading viruses—"the most obscure thing I ever worked on," as Doudna would later put it. Building on earlier work by microbiologists, Doudna and Charpentier began to dissect the way bacteria could inactivate viral genes. Some microbes, they found, encode genes that can specifically recognize viral DNA and deliver a targeted cut to it.

In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier realized that the system was "programmable." Bacteria, of course, only seek and destroy viruses; they have no reason to recognize or cut other genomes. But Doudna and Charpentier learned enough about the self-defense system to trick it: They could force the system to make intentional cuts in other genes and genomes. The same bacterial defense system might, in principle, be "reprogrammed" to deliver a cut to the BRCA-1 gene, or to any gene of choice. Scientists working at Harvard, MIT and other institutions refined the system further, enabling its use in human cells.

The system could be manipulated even further. By tweaking a cell's own repair mechanism in conjunction with cutting a desired genetic sequence, researchers found, they could introduce a genetic sequence to a gene. A defined, predetermined genetic change could thus be written into a genome: The mutant BRCA-1 gene can be reverted to normal gene. The technique has been termed genome editing.

The method still has some fundamental constraints. At times, the cuts are delivered to the wrong genes. Occasionally, the repair is not efficient, making it difficult to "rewrite" information into particular sites in the genome. But it works more easily, more powerfully, and more efficiently than virtually any other genome-altering method to date. Only a handful of such instances of scientific serendipity have occurred in the history of biology. An arcane microbial defense system has created a trapdoor to the transformative technology that geneticists had sought so longingly for decades, a method to achieve directed, efficient, and sequence-specific modification of the human genome.

Can gene editing be used to change the genetic information of a human embryo in a permanent, heritable manner? In other words: Could we envision using it to revert the dysfunctional BRCA-1 gene, say, to functional version? The quick answer is yes, but only if we can overcome some strong technical hurdles. 

by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Tonic |  Read more:
Image: Kitron Neuschatz

Politics 101

How the baby boomers destroyed everything

America last: The case for moral disengagement from politics in the age of Trump

President Trump Has Done Almost Nothing

‘He’s a Performance Artist Pretending to be a Great Manager’

The State of Trump's State Department

Assailing the White House From Hollywood’s Glass House

Growing up Poor, With Trump on TV

Trump’s handling of the Ryan Owens affair was contemptibly cynical

[ed. Re: Trump's first speech to Congress (2/28/17). Generic, unmemorable, but surprisingly coherent (for a change). Not much hyperbole, not many details either. Somebody finally got him to use a teleprompter and stick to it. It's sad that our expectations have fallen so low these days that anything short of another vein-popping, finger-pointing, bug-eyed rant seems like a relief.] 

Frozen Alive

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.

But now you’re stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.

You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.

Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map. It’s maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast. You’ll just put on your skis. No problem.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it’s lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of Europe’s worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive walk on a windy, rainy English moor; three of the racers died from hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45.

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike—and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

The process begins even before you leave the car, when you remove your gloves to squeeze a loose bail back into one of your ski bindings. The freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops.

Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into your torso. Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep its vital organs warm.

You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly. Then you kick boots into bindings and start up the road.

Were you a Norwegian fisherman or Inuit hunter, both of whom frequently work gloveless in the cold, your chilled hands would open their surface capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them and maintain their flexibility. This phenomenon, known as the hunter’s response, can elevate a 35-degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within seven or eight minutes.

Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks can raise the skin temperature of their hands and feet by 15 degrees through meditation. Australian aborigines, who once slept on the ground, unclothed, on near-freezing nights, would slip into a light hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed them.

You have no such defenses, having spent your days at a keyboard in a climate-controlled office. Only after about ten minutes of hard climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back into your fingers. Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.

By now you’ve left the road and decided to shortcut up the forested mountainside to the road’s next switchback. Treading slowly through deep, soft snow as the full moon hefts over a spiny ridgetop, throwing silvery bands of moonlight and shadow, you think your friends were right: It’s a beautiful night for skiing—though you admit, feeling the minus-30 air bite at your face, it’s also cold.

After an hour, there’s still no sign of the switchback, and you’ve begun to worry. You pause to check the map. At this moment, your core temperature reaches its high: 100.8. Climbing in deep snow, you’ve generated nearly ten times as much body heat as you do when you are resting.

As you step around to orient map to forest, you hear a metallic pop. You look down. The loose bail has disappeared from your binding. You lift your foot and your ski falls from your boot.

You twist on your flashlight, and its cold-weakened batteries throw a yellowish circle in the snow. It’s right around here somewhere, you think, as you sift the snow through gloved fingers. Focused so intently on finding the bail, you hardly notice the frigid air pressing against your tired body and sweat-soaked clothes.

The exertion that warmed you on the way uphill now works against you: Your exercise-dilated capillaries carry the excess heat of your core to your skin, and your wet clothing dispels it rapidly into the night. The lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that much closer to your warm blood.

Your temperature begins to plummet. Within 17 minutes it reaches the normal 98.6. Then it slips below.

At 97 degrees, hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your neck and shoulders tighten in what’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone. Sensors have signaled the temperature control center in your hypothalamus, which in turn has ordered the constriction of the entire web of surface capillaries. Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold. Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow; another ten minutes pass. Without the bail you know you’re in deep trouble.

Finally, nearly 45 minutes later, you find the bail. You even manage to pop it back into its socket and clamp your boot into the binding. But the clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into your body’s core.

At 95, you’ve entered the zone of mild hypothermia. You’re now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response, an involuntary condition in which your muscles contract rapidly to generate additional body heat.

It was a mistake, you realize, to come out on a night this cold. You should turn back. Fishing into the front pocket of your shell parka, you fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here; it should be able to guide you back to the warm car. It doesn’t occur to you in your increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply follow your tracks down the way you came.

And after this long stop, the skiing itself has become more difficult. By the time you push off downhill, your muscles have cooled and tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily, and once contracted, they won’t relax. You’re locked into an ungainly, spread-armed, weak-kneed snowplow.

Still, you manage to maneuver between stands of fir, swishing down through silvery light and pools of shadow. You’re too cold to think of the beautiful night or of the friends you had meant to see. You think only of the warm Jeep that waits for you somewhere at the bottom of the hill. Its gleaming shell is centered in your mind’s eye as you come over the crest of a small knoll. You hear the sudden whistle of wind in your ears as you gain speed. Then, before your mind can quite process what the sight means, you notice a lump in the snow ahead.

Recognizing, slowly, the danger that you are in, you try to jam your skis to a stop. But in your panic, your balance and judgment are poor. Moments later, your ski tips plow into the buried log and you sail headfirst through the air and bellyflop into the snow.

You lie still. There’s a dead silence in the forest, broken by the pumping of blood in your ears. Your ankle is throbbing with pain and you’ve hit your head. You’ve also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy snow is packed down your shirt. Meltwater trickles down your neck and spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your head.

This situation, you realize with an immediate sense of panic, is serious. Scrambling to rise, you collapse in pain, your ankle crumpling beneath you.

As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away at an alarming rate, your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the loss. The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears so sharply that you root about in the snow until you find your hat and mash it back onto your head.

But even that little activity has been exhausting. You know you should find your glove as well, and yet you’re becoming too weary to feel any urgency. You decide to have a short rest before going on.

An hour passes. at one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can’t keep the numbers in your head. You’ll remember little of what happens next.

Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.

You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.

By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.

At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.

You hear jingle bells. Lifting your face from your snow pillow, you realize with a surge of gladness that they’re not sleigh bells; they’re welcoming bells hanging from the door of your friends’ cabin. You knew it had to be close by. The jingling is the sound of the cabin door opening, just through the fir trees.

Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles. That’s OK. You can crawl. It’s so close.

Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize the cabin still sits beyond the grove of trees. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.

When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.

At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.

But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.

And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.

There’s an adage about hypothermia: “You aren’t dead until you’re warm and dead.”

by Peter Stark, Oustside |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

The Mining 'Mafias' Killing Each Other to Build Cities

In the dark of the night of 20 December, two Kenyan truck drivers met a blazing death. The men were loading up their vehicles at around 2am on the bank of the Muooni river, about 60 miles south-east of Nairobi, when a mob of local youths descended on them. The attackers torched the lorries, burning the drivers “beyond recognition”, police told a local newspaper. A third truck driver was shot with arrows.

The grisly episode was the most dramatic outbreak in a wave of recent violence in Makueni County, an impoverished rural area that is home to just under 1 million people. In the last two years, at least nine people have been killed and dozens more injured, including police officers and government officials. The carnage has been sparked by an unlikely substance that is fast becoming one of the 21st century’s most important commodities: sand.

Though most people never give it a second thought, sand is a crucial ingredient in the construction of roads and buildings – the skeletons of modern cities. Concrete and asphalt are largely just sand and gravel glued together with cement.

In Kenya, as in most of the developing world, cities are growing at a frenzied pace. Nairobi’s population has increased tenfold since the country became independent in 1963, and is now fast approaching 4 million. The number of urban dwellers in the world has shot from fewer than 1 billion in 1950 to almost 4 billion today, and the UN predicts another 2.5 billion will join them in the next three decades. That’s the equivalent of adding eight New York Cities every year.

Creating buildings to house all the people and the roads to knit them together requires prodigious quantities of sand. Worldwide, more than 48bn tonnes of “aggregate” – the industry term for sand and gravel, which tend to be found together – are used for construction every year. That number is double what is was in 2004. It’s an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Pulling all of that sand out of the ground, however, takes a severe toll on the environment. Across the world, riverbeds, beaches and floodplains are being stripped bare by sand miners. In response, authorities are trying to regulate the manner and location of extraction. In turn, it has spawned a global boom in illegal sand mining. “As the price of sand goes up, the ‘mafias’ get more involved,” says Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher with the United Nations environment programme and author of a study on sand mining.

by Vince Beiser, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Sand mining: the global environmental crisis you’ve probably never heard of]

Jethro Tull

[ed. Sound familiar? You decide: Did Jethro Tull Influence The Eagles' 'Hotel California'? (turn up the sound a bit)].

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Why Eidos Is Ditching Italian Suits, Hitting the Skatepark, and Saving American Menswear

Eidos creative director Antonio Ciongoli is the most candid designer I’ve ever met. My first gig in the industry was as an intern for Eidos, and having assumed that fashion types tend towards innuendo, Antonio always surprised with his no-BS talk about what it was like to design in such a strange time for menswear. Guys were ditching suits en-masse (bad news for a brand started by Neapolitan tailoring house Isaia at the height of the suit-and-tie #menswear movement), fast fashion was killing department store sales, and social media was confusing the hell out of everybody. But by pivoting from tailoring to slouchy-sprezzy sportswear, Antonio has put Eidos on the (very) short list of exciting, successful New York-based menswear brands just a few years later. (This even though Antonio himself has all but abandoned the city for his home in New Jersey, telling me that “Every neighborhood has become the same.”) Given that the Fall-Winter 2017 collection, previewed exclusively here, is Antonio’s largest and most ambitious ever, I figured it was time to have another one of our frank discussions about the line, the business, and the industry.

The new collection is called “New York Blues.” Eidos has finally left Italy, huh? 

This time around I picked an inspiration that felt really right for where I want our brand to go. It’s just about good clothes, kind of funky fabrics, but we weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel at all. It was just about making cool stuff. I got a little bit caught up in my mind on how I felt that the collection—I thought a lot about how it should fit in with what else is happening in the market, and this season I didn’t think about that at all. I feel like everybody in New York with social media and everything has some level of fashion fatigue.

I would say that’s accurate to a certain extent.

I’m just tired of it, and season-after-season—I feel like I’m almost regressing back to high school and what I was into in high school. The skateboard thing crept in more this season than ever before. I’m out in New Jersey skating all the time and wearing Carharrts. That idea of utilitarian clothing was much more the focus this time around.

Is that why you guys skipped out on New York Fashion Week: Men’s this season? 

That was certainly part of it. We are in a weird spot where if you look at what’s happening in New York at least from a fashion perspective—we don’t really fit in with what’s going on here. And the idea of showing our collection in Milan or Paris timing-wise is super hard and otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense. It comes around to the idea that we’re not a fashion brand. And I’m OK with that. These are clothes that are made to be worn a lot, forever, and not once for a street style photograph and then never again.

Is a “fashion brand” to you any line that’s too in-the-moment?

Yeah, and I just don’t see staying power in that. There are other brands that are doing things that I like that have a presence in New York that don’t do [NYFW: M] either. I think about Brendon [Babenzien] at Noah, and Brendon’s not doing a presentation. They’re just different goals, and it’s a huge investment of time and money to show, and when you’re so small I’d rather take that time and effort and put it towards making the product better. And then also creating content that will live longer than 10 minutes or whatever the presentation would be. 

by Samuel Hine, GQ |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ani DiFranco

The True Story of the “Ellen Selfie”

[ed. A little late, but, yeah we all know how things went down at the Oscars last night. Here's an account of another Oscars moment. What's interesting to me is how scripted these 'moments' actually are. That's entertainment (and business), I guess.]

With Oscar night approaching, I find myself thinking back to one of the high points of my time at Twitter: The Academy Awards of 2014, and the famous “Ellen Selfie.”

From time to time, people ask me how that selfie came to be. It’s a pretty good story of collaboration, partnership and professionalism. And these days, a story with a happy ending is worth telling.

by Fred Graver, Medium |  Read more:
Image: Bradley Cooper

How Toshiba Lost $6 Billion

Since its founding in 1873 as Japan’s first maker of telegraph equipment, Toshiba has survived a litany of challenges, from the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, to having its factories bombed into rubble during World War II, to the drubbing of the Zune music player it co-developed with Microsoft. Now the conglomerate may be undone by four nuclear power plants under construction in the American South. Blown deadlines and budgets at the reactors in Georgia and South Carolina overseen by Toshiba’s Westinghouse Electric subsidiary resulted in the resignation of Toshiba Chairman Shigenori Shiga on Feb. 14 and a 712.5 billion yen ($6.3 billion) writedown on its nuclear reactor business.

That charge to cover cost overruns at Westinghouse eclipses the $5.4 billion that Toshiba paid for the company in 2006. The financial fallout of the nuclear business’s collapse is far greater. To stay afloat, Toshiba says it may have to sell a majority stake in its last remaining crown jewel: its flash-memory business, which makes chips used in smartphones and solid-state disk drives. The company already sold off its consumer electronics and medical equipment businesses following an accounting scandal in 2015.

“Toshiba is being torn apart,” says Amir Anvarzadeh, head of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners in Singapore. “It’s going to survive, it’s not going to go bankrupt. But it’s the end of Toshiba as a company with any hopes to grow.”

Many investors apparently agree. The company, which had already lost $7 billion in market value over the past six weeks, saw its shares fall an additional 10 percent after the announcement of the writedown and Shiga’s departure. Another worry for the markets is that the huge Westinghouse charge will cause the company’s shareholder equity to drop to negative 150 billion yen for the current year ending in March, according to Toshiba forecasts.

Besides Toshiba investors, there’s another group of big losers: advocates of nuclear power, who had high hopes for Westinghouse, which in 2008 became the first U.S. company to win nuclear power plant construction permits since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. But the nuclear renaissance Toshiba bet on never materialized, in part because the company couldn’t build reactors along the timelines and within the budgets it had promised. It had anticipated that Westinghouse’s next-generation AP1000 modular reactor design would be easier and faster to execute—just the opposite of what happened. In a briefing after the writedown announcement, Toshiba President Satoshi Tsunakawa said the company may now pull out of nuclear plant construction altogether and only provide equipment and engineering services, which would make it extremely difficult for it to sell nuclear projects to customers. All options are on the table for the nuclear business, including a possible sale of Westinghouse, he said.

“There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here,” says Gregory Jaczko, former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). “This could take down Toshiba, and it certainly means the end of new nuclear construction in the U.S.”

by Jason Clenfield,Yuji Nakamura, Takashi Amano,

Pavel Alpeyev, and Stephen Stapczynski, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: 731; Photos: AP Images (1); Getty images (1)

David Byrne

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Jean-Claude Terrier
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Our Mysteriously Shrinking Kenai King Salmon

I attended a book signing at a Ninilchik book club meeting in early January of this year and met a bubbly lady by the name of Shirley, who, it turned out, is the stepdaughter of Les Anderson. You may remember that Anderson, fishing with friend Bud Lofstedt, caught the largest king salmon ever taken on rod and reel in North America.

The great fish was caught in the Kenai River on May 17, 1985. The behemoth weighed a whopping 97 pounds 4 ounces after laying in the bottom of Les' boat and then later his pickup truck for several hours. Reports indicate that the fish was beached around 7 a.m. but not weighed until 2 p.m. Many believe the fish would have topped 100 pounds had it been weighed immediately. We'll never know.

As Shirley and I bantered back and forth, she shared with me that she still has cans of Les' big king tucked away on the shelves of her pantry.

"Really!" I reacted with amazement.

She had my attention. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading several scientific papers written by fisheries scientists who used protein electrophoresis and mitochondrial DNA to separate the first run of Kenai River kings from second-run fish — or perhaps more accurately, tributary spawners from mainstem spawners.

My mind immediately began to race, thinking back on the last 32 years of Cook Inlet salmon fisheries management on the Kenai and Kasilof rivers. I wondered what that DNA in those cans might reveal if we could analyze it. With today's technology and the king salmon DNA baseline data now available for many streams in the Kenai watershed, we could tell a lot about that fish if we just had a small tissue sample.

Turns out, once the flesh has been cooked, it renders it useless for DNA analysis. In addition, Les had the fish mounted, and all the tissue, head, entrails, and fins were disposed of long ago.

Still, it piqued my interest and got me thinking about the years since Les caught his great fish and how we moved from the king salmon abundance and size on the Kenai in 1985 to the low abundance and smaller kings seen in the 21st century.

That Les caught such a huge fish in mid-May was unusual and surprising by most people's standards. Les and Lofstedt were simply moving a boat from point A to Point B on the river. It was so early in the season that almost no one was fishing the river yet. Typically, the Kenai Peninsula is still pretty darn cold in May. Both the Kenai and Kasilof rivers are usually low and turbid at that time and have a reputation for eating up the props and lower units of outboard motors of even experienced fishermen who know the river.

Back then, fishing on the river usually didn't get going until Memorial Day weekend and fishing usually wasn't good until the first week in June.

Les and Lofstedt decided they might as well drift a Spin-N-Glo with eggs on their way down the river to their destination. Somewhere between two well-known spots, Pillars and Honeymoon Cove, Les hooked the big male. The duo fought the fish for more than an hour up and down the river and seemingly everything went wrong that could. They tangled their lines. Les fell in the bottom of the boat. The net was too small.

But humble Les Anderson hung on to that king. Finally, with Lofstedt's help, they beached the boat on an exposed gravel bar and dragged the huge fish to shore. Neither angler had any idea what they had just done. They continued to fish that morning and not until hours later — with the urging of friends — did they decide to weigh the king. The rest is history.

The big king is intriguing and the circumstances surrounding its capture begs many questions. As far as we know, a fish of comparable size had not been caught by anyone anywhere in North America for at least 36 years. According to biologists, Anderson's king was a "six-ocean" fish — a fish that spent one year in freshwater and six years at sea before returning to spawn. Six-ocean fish are rare and make up a very small percentage of the run. Most of the really large kings that return to the Kenai River are four- and five-ocean kings.

And what was that fish doing in the river so early? In mid-May, Kenai River guides were still tying leaders, working on their outboards and readying for the upcoming season. Fisheries data at the time told us that early-run kings were significantly smaller fish, on average, than late-run kings. Conventional wisdom at the time said that almost all big kings exceeding 60 pounds enter the river later in July and spawn in the main stem.

Was this fish a fluke or was his presence predictable? Was he a part of a heretofore unknown subpopulation that spawned in the Kenai's turquoise waters undetected by fisheries biologists? Had we been missing something all along about different stocks of Kenai River kings and their diverse run timing and spawning locations?

Radio telemetry studies have shown that some king salmon, after being released in the Kenai River with radio tags, continued their upstream migrations as far as 20 miles before abruptly turning back downstream and re-entering Cook Inlet — only to reascend the river days or weeks later.

Was this fish in the river to stay? Was it an early-run fish defying conventional wisdom regarding size? Was this a mainstem spawner or a tributary spawner headed for the Funny River or perhaps Benjamin Creek at the headwaters of the Killey River?

One thing is certain, even the monk Gregor Mendel (often called the father of genetics after his early work on pea plant cross-breeding) would agree that the genes this fish carried were unique and rare by today's standards.

When 60- to 80-pounders were common

History has documented king salmon well in excess of 100 pounds that were harvested commercially in the Columbia River in the early 1900s before the Grand Coulee Dam was built. The Columbia River kings were called "June hogs," a summer-running fish that spawned in its headwaters. Between overfishing that selected for larger fish and the installation of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia that prevented fish passage, the "June hogs" were extirpated by 1939 and their genetic templates lost forever. Today hatcheries do their best to replace and maintain those very fish by stocking millions of young salmon at a lofty price to taxpayers, but the native-fish genetic diversity, that was selected for over hundreds of years, was lost. Today's summer-run king salmon on the Columbia average 20 pounds.

Other North America rivers, besides the Columbia and the Kenai, that have produced some very large king salmon in the past, include the Umpqua, the Skeena, the Sacramento River, and of course our own Kasilof River. No other river, however, has consistently produced the number of extremely big fish that the Kenai once did.

Les Anderson's king is the largest king salmon known to exist since 1949, when a 126-pound chinook was captured in a commercial fish trap in saltwater near Petersburg in Southeast. That fish's stream of origin is unknown.

In the 1980s and '90s, Kenai River kings in the 60- to 80-pound range were almost a daily occurrence in July and, looking beyond Les' catch, 1985, in particular, was a memorable year for big fish. That year at least one other king broke 90 pounds and a handful of fish more than 80 pounds were taken. One of my clients, Jack Arthur from Chattanooga, Tennessee, landed an 85-pound king in July while fishing in the Deep Creek marine fishery near Ninilchik. That fish was undoubtedly a Kenai- or Kasilof-bound fish as well. What made 1985 such a good year for kings?

Was it a mild winter when that brood year was in the gravel? Was it good freshwater rearing and survival in the Kenai freshwater environment during the chinook's first year of life? Was it better-than-normal ocean survival and productivity that allowed them to grow so well as they reared in the Gulf of Alaska? Was there something about the handling of the commercial fishery that year that allowed so many kings into the river? Or were they just so numerous they overwhelmed all the net fisheries in the Inlet?

We don't know for sure. Maybe it was the perfect storm of all of these things. But one thing is certain: We have not seen the kings so big and in such numbers in the last decade.

by Mike Chihuly, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Ronnie Chappell / ADN

[ed. I went to trooper academy with Mike. Good guy, and passionate about the resource.]

Stevie Wonder

Rooftoppers: The Lure of Tall Buildings

When teenager Harry Gallagher clambered on to the roof of Canary Wharf’s highest building his exploits went viral. Gallagher, 19, aka Nightscape, is a rooftopper, someone who gains access to buildings and restricted spaces to take photographs of themselves, often hanging in precarious poses. To the uninitiated, it might appear to be a new phenomenon, but rooftopping’s genesis lies in the long-established urban explorer movement, known as urbex.

An early exponent was Jeff Chapman, or Ninjalicious, the late Toronto-based explorer who in the early noughties infiltrated buildings and underground systems, recording his adventures in his zine, Infiltration. Chapman tended to shun the limelight, but now rooftoppers are aiming ever higher in their quest for personal glory and reward.

“Urban exploring is beginning to splinter into different practices,” said Theo Kindynis, a criminologist at Roehampton University. “What was traditionally thought of as urban exploration, fetishists exploring abandoned mental asylums, that sort of thing, is mutating. You’ve now got subway explorers and you’ve got rooftoppers like Nightscape doing the foot-dangling thing. As a result, you’ve got new attitudes and etiquettes evolving. The old ‘take-nothing-but-photos-leave-nothing-but-footprints’ adage is increasingly irrelevant.”

Gallagher has previously targeted Robin Hood airport in Doncaster, the roof of West Ham’s new stadium, and the London Olympic park’s Orbit structure. His exploits are posted on his YouTube channel and promoted through Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. His latest “hack”, released online last week, will have helped send his reputation soaring. Gallagher and a friend can be seen climbing on to the roof of One Canada Square and scaling its pyramid.

At the start of the video, already viewed 450,000 times and liked by 45,000 people on YouTube, the pair describe the challenge as “almost impossible” and express astonishment that they were able to pull it off. But Kindynis is not convinced. “These guys are notorious within the scene for poaching other people’s spots. I highly doubt they were the first people to get on to the roof of One Canada Square. They were probably told how to do it by someone else. Within the urbex community, these things tend to be kept hush-hush, but now it’s on YouTube and they will have changed their security measures so nobody else will be able to enjoy that rooftop.

“Within certain elements of the community, these guys are not liked. They are seen as a problem. Cranes and construction sites and rooftops are getting locked down because these guys are prostituting it to social media.”

The high-profile stunts of Gallagher and his cohorts seem a world away from urbex’s original ethos and its political overtones. In an article for Domus magazine in 2011, Dr Bradley Garrett, an urban explorer and a geographer at Southampton University, suggested that urbex practitioners were reviving the practice of “usufruct” – “which basically means that someone has the right to use and enjoy the property of another, provided it is not changed or damaged in any way”.

But Kindynis suggests the selfie generation are not in it for the philosophy.

“For the people doing it, it’s all about the image, getting the cool, exclusive YouTubable footage. It’s about building their personal brand, all about the image, all about the spectacle.”

by Jamie Doward and Alice Gibbs, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image:@night.scape

Another Day at the Office

In an industry whose top executives don’t make small change, Steve Schwarzman once again took home the most money among private equity titans for the year.

The Blackstone Group LP co-founder received $378 million in dividends on his stock ownership in 2016, according to calculations based on the firm’s annual report filed Friday with U.S. regulators. Including his cut of deal profits, salary and other compensation, Schwarzman took home $425 million, down from $734.2 million the previous year.

Private equity executives are some of the wealthiest financiers, drawing most of their income from dividends on their ownership in the companies. The founders of the largest private equity firms -- Blackstone, Apollo Global Management LLC, Carlyle Group LP, KKR & Co., Oaktree Capital Group LLC, Fortress Investment Group LLC, Ares Management LP and TPG -- are all billionaires, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

KKR co-founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts took home $116.1 million and $119.4 million, respectively, in 2016, according to the firm’s report filed Friday. That’s less than the previous year, when Kravis got $165.9 million and Roberts received $172.9 million.

In 2016 each cousin earned a $300,000 salary and about $63 million in carried interest, or his share of investment gains. Each took home more than $52 million in dividends.

by Melissa Mittelman, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

[ed. I don't care what Blackstone does. Is any single person worth over $1 billion in two years? I guess this is what's called Making America Great Again (which was when, exactly?). It used to be that we had strong unions that fought for decent wages, basic pension security and a dynamic middle class. Taxes were commensurate with earnings and promoted growth and infrastructure expansion. Government actually held financial institutions, health care and insurance providers accountable for predatory practices. How far back do you have to go to imagine a Great America again, and what would great look like? More trickle-down economics from benevolent billionaires? Throwing immigrants out so there's less competition and diversity? Making everyone shut up about whatever personal deviances they have, let alone give them legal standing? Bringing back industries and communities that technology and global competition have made irrelevant? I don't know. It's like wishing for Back to the Future... unless Biff takes over of course, and then... See also: How the Carried-Interest Loophole Makes the Super-Rich Super-Richer.]

Viet Huynh, Carpe Diem
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