My Ultimate Facebook Post

I still don’t have a dog.

Don’t have a mischievous cat either.

Haven’t changed my hairstyle.

I did not knit my own wedding gown or make my own ceramic wok.

I did not grow my own tomatoes, herbs, or strawberries. No amusingly large squash.

I did not plant pomegranates. And I never will.

Sorry, I have not perfected my pie crust.

And I did not make a cake with frosting sculpted into the shape of robots playing soccer on the moon for my son’s eighth birthday.

A happy winking emoji can be inserted to confuse people about your real attitude toward any post. Happy winking emoji = plausible deniability.

On Friday night, I did not drink pomegranate martinis with my besties at a hip bar downtown.

There are no adorable videos of my 4 kids piled on top of the couch eating S’mores, wearing pirate costumes.

I have not recently taken up a new sporting activity, and I have no photos of me in tennis outfits where I look youthful and vigorous and carefree.

No photos of me surfing in middle age, clad in a wetsuit, thumbs up, having a blast.

I have only the one kid, and I like to protect his privacy.

No videos of my dog chasing butterflies. Remember, no dog.

I have not painted my dining room pomegranate red.

I have not recently hiked to the top of Mount Denali.

All the world’s zip lines have so far evaded my grasp.

The state of the world scares and depresses me just as much as it does you, but it’s not a contest.

My home improvement projects are only marginally successful.

I have not eaten the BEST tacos or ice cream or homemade brown-butter sage ravioli at the latest trendy food truck.

I am hopelessly behind schedule on all the cool TV shows.

I am not quite sure who the Kardashians are.

The books I read are usually from academic presses.

I am re-reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, but I’m guessing you’d rather not know that.

Also, I just had a pomegranate smoothie, but it tasted like weevils, so I figure it’s best to leave that out.

No, I did not get a special honor from my employer or alma mater or neighborhood association.

Videos of cute animals do not move me to tears. Not even hedgehogs. Not even baby hedgehogs.

OMG. I don’t do church or anything resembling it.

I am not raising chickens.

Most of my political opinions mimic those of smarter, better-informed people, so what’s the point really?

Genealogy is boring.

I do not know where to find THE BEST deal on anything.

I am not reaping the benefits of antioxidants from pomegranates.

I have not made pomegranate mousse. (...)

I do not have a great new job or apartment or cool skirt.

It is hot, but it is July in the United States, so you already knew that.

I do not want to induce a flood of mansplaining.

Who cares if there are awesome new popsicle flavors?

I have not tried colored eyeshadows lately.

There is no emoji for sorrow.

There is a color of eyeshadow called Lilac Sorrow.

I dislike tattoos, and I already know that most of you will find this opinion unwelcome and elitist.

Does anyone know where to get the best organic pomegranates? I don’t care if you do.

I did go on vacation, but I was too busy enjoying it to post pictures, and since it is now more than 20 seconds since it happened, no one could possibly be interested in that.

I am not married and will not gloat about my anniversary.

Somehow, my loved ones know I love them even without my announcing it here.

I’d rather not humiliate myself by posting pictures of myself at age 14.

I’d rather not force you to say insincere things about me.

My daughter did not win the spelling bee. (I will not insert a crying-bee sticker here.) She was not the youngest diver ever to spelunk the Florida aquifer. She did not receive certification in underwater welding or go skydiving or get her pilot’s license. She is not currently conducting my state’s orchestra. Her novel was not published. She did not get into an Ivy league college. She looks like a baby in her baby pictures. Right now, she is probably eating potato chips and watching YouTube videos. Face it, I don’t even have a daughter.

For me, emojis activate existential despair. Even the ones for “Haha” and “Happy.”

Call me old-fashioned, but a social media post does not seem like a profound memorial to my dearly departed grandparents.

Okay, I finally got a dog, but you are so busy posting pictures of your own dog that I can’t see why you’d care about mine. He digs holes in the backyard and barks at fireworks, but he is, after all, a dog, so what’s there to report?

I have not benefited from a new diet or skincare product.

Pomegranate juice has not diminished my age spots or acne.

I have not achieved most of what I set out to do in my life.

I didn’t even go to my 20th high school reunion.

I do not think social media is very social.

I love you all, but I’m slowly dying of ennui.

There is no colored ribbon to show your support for people suffering from ennui. It is a silent killer.

Research shows that people who eat 12 or more pomegranates each week are the tiniest bit healthier than those who do not. But research also shows that they are more prone to ennui. And they are just too weird to be tolerated.

Death by ennui is slow and painful.

This is not a cry for help.

Every time I look at Facebook, my dog becomes agitated. I think he can hear high-pitched screams rising from the graveyard of posts.

I am not agitated. Do not tell me to lighten up, calm down, or smile. I may have to smother you in your sleep with a pillow full of emojis. Happy emojis.

Happy winking emoji.

by Brook J. Sadler, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via

Soccer Ball Security

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gift of a soccer ball to U.S. President Donald Trump last week set off a chorus of warnings -- some of them only half in jest -- that the World Cup souvenir could be bugged. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham even tweeted, “I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”

It turns out they weren’t entirely wrong. Markings on the ball indicate that it contained a chip with a tiny antenna that transmits to nearby phones.

But rather than a spy device, the chip is an advertised feature of the Adidas AG ball. Photographs from the news conference in Helsinki, where Putin handed the ball to Trump, show it bore a logo for a near-field communication tag. During manufacturing, the NFC chip is placed inside the ball under that logo, which resembles the icon for a WiFi signal, according to the Adidas website.

The chip allows fans to access player videos, competitions and other content by bringing their mobile devices close to the ball. The feature is included in the 2018 FIFA World Cup match ball that’s sold on the Adidas website for $165 (reduced to $83 in the past week).

Adidas declined to comment on whether the chip could be a vector of a Russian hack. There is no suggestion that such balls or their chips have any security vulnerabilities. The chip itself can’t be modified, according to the product description on the Adidas website. “It is not possible to delete or rewrite the encoded parameters,” it says.

While the logo on the ball advertised the presence of the chip, it couldn’t be determined from the photos whether the chip might have been removed, replaced with actual spy gear, or, even more remotely, whether the entire ball itself was fabricated for the event and only resembled the Adidas model in question.

“The security screening process that is done for all gifts was done for the soccer ball,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. “We are not going to comment further on security procedures.” The White House declined to say whether any modifications to the ball had been identified or where the ball would be kept going forward.

The chip is the same technology used in some contactless payments, including those with Apple Pay and Google Pay.

In theory, such tags can be programmed to initiate an attack on a phone, at least one hacker has shown. In 2015, Forbes reported that an engineer used an NFC chip to send a nearby Android phone a request to open a link that -- if the user agreed to open it -- installed a malicious file that took over the phone.

by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: AP

via: uncredited

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Sorry to Bother You

When the history of this terrible moment in American life is written, I suspect the surreal and deeply radical indie film “Sorry to Bother You” will be a major cultural marker, like “Easy Rider” in 1969 or “Slacker” in 1990. Watching it — agog that it ever got made in the first place — felt like getting a little glimpse into the future, and not just because its dystopian satire is half a step away from our reality.

“Sorry to Bother You,” a sleeper hit, may be the most overtly anticapitalist feature film made in America. If you want to get a feel for the zeitgeist behind the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the wave of unionizing in digital media, the striking teachers in red states, and the general broad seething fury about inequality that’s particularly pronounced among people who came of age amid the Great Recession, it’s a good place to start. It’s the kind of art we can expect as more and more members of the creative class find themselves living precariously, forced to spend inordinate energy worrying about their basic material needs.

I say this even though the film’s writer and director, Boots Riley, avowed Communist and frontman for the Oakland hip-hop act The Coup, is, at 47, far from a millennial. And though “Sorry to Bother You” feels shockingly current, as Jonah Weiner wrote in The New York Times Magazine, Riley published the screenplay as a book in 2014. If it took a long time to gestate, though, it feels like it was born at precisely the right moment.

The film is impossible to really summarize, and I don’t want to give away its gobsmacking twists. It’s about an African-American man named Cassius Green — he goes by Cash — living with his girlfriend, an avant-garde artist, in the garage of his uncle’s house, which is facing foreclosure. Desperate for work, he becomes a telemarketer, where his uncanny ability to feign the voice of a confident white man makes him a star, lofting him into a rarefied realm of high-paid, grotesquely immoral salesmanship. The movie includes subplots about unionization, (literal) debt slavery, viral videos, brutal reality television and the cultural worship of sociopathic entrepreneurs. (As well as weird disturbing stuff I don’t want to give away.) I’ve never seen anything like it.

Last week it was the seventh highest grossing film in the country, on a list that is dominated by big-budget studio movies. The reviews have been rapturous; the young socialists feel seen. “Riley has made the indignity of wage labor a part of the public conversation, including among a multiracial demographic that has been excluded from media narratives about the progressive movement,” Briahna Gray wrote in The Intercept. (...)

At least for the duration of “Sorry to Bother You,” capitalism feels evil but also tawdry and preposterous, and labor solidarity seems sexy and exuberant. Sitting in the theater, I felt like I had a new apprehension of what it might be like to be young, idealistic, and at the mercy of nearly totalitarian economic forces.

Americans in their 20s and 30s, after all, are as a cohort poorer and more indebted than their predecessors, while being surrounded by comic-book villain displays of wealth. (Just this week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family owns 10 yachts, proposed to make it harder for students defrauded by for-profit colleges to seek loan forgiveness.) They are the most diverse generation of adults in history at a time of vicious right-wing backlash from older white people.

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:

Image:CreditImage: Annapurna Pictures

The Middle Precariat: The Downwardly Mobile Middle Class

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The children of America’s white-collar middle class viewed life from their green lawns and tidy urban flats as a field of opportunity. Blessed with quality schools, seaside vacations and sleepover camp, they just knew that the American dream was theirs for the taking if they hit the books, picked a thoughtful and fulfilling career, and just, well, showed up.

Until it wasn’t.

While they were playing Twister and imagining a bright future, someone apparently decided that they didn’t really matter. Clouds began to gather—a “dark shimmer of constantly shifting precariousness,” as journalist Alissa Quart describes in her timely new book “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.”

The things these kids considered their birthright—reputable colleges, secure careers, and attractive residences—were no longer waiting for them in adulthood.

Today, with their incomes flat or falling, these Americans scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon. Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work they can’t stand to support families they rarely see. Petrified of being pushed aside by robots, they rankle to see financial titans and tech gurus flaunting their obscene wealth at every turn.

Headlines gush of a humming economy, but it doesn’t feel like a party to them—and they’ve seen enough to know who will be holding the bag when the next bubble bursts.

The “Middle Precariats,” as Quart terms them, are suffering death by a thousand degradations. Their new reality: You will not do as well as your parents. Life is a struggle to keep up. Even if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is not your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich.

Much of Quart’s book highlights the mirror image of the downwardly mobile middle class Trump voters from economically strained regions like the Midwest who helped throw a monkey wrench into politics-as-usual. In her tour of American frustration, she talks to urbanites who lean liberal and didn’t expect to find themselves drowning in debt and disappointment. Like the falling-behind Trump voters, these people sense their status ripped away, their hopes dashed.

If climbing up the ladder of success is the great American story, slipping down it is the quintessential tragedy. It’s hard not to take it personally: the ranks of the Middle Precariat are filled with shame.

They are somebodies turning into nobodies.

And there signs that they are starting to revolt. If they do, they could make their own mark on the country’s political landscape.

The Broken Bourgeoisie

Quart’s book takes a sobering look at the newly unstable bourgeoisie, illustrating what happens when America’s off-the-rails inequality blasts over those who always believed they would end up winners.

There’s the Virginia accountant who forks over nearly 90% of her take home pay on care for her three kids; the Chicago adjunct professor with the disabled child who makes less than $24,000 a year; and the California business reporter who once focused on the financial hardships of others and now faces unemployment herself.

There are Uber-driving teachers and law school grads reviewing documents for $20 an hour—or less. Ivy Leaguers who live on food stamps.

Lacking unions, church communities and nearby close relatives to support them, the Middle Precariats are isolated and stranded. Their labor has sputtered into sporadic contingency: they make do with short-term contracts or shift work. (Despite the much-trumpeted low unemployment rate, the New York Times reports that jobs are often subpar, featuring little stability and security). Once upon a time, only the working poor took second jobs to stay afloat. Now the Middle Precariat has joined them.

Quart documents the desperate measures taken by people trying to keep up appearances, relying on 24/7 “extreme day care” to accommodate unpredictable schedules or cobbling together co-living arrangements to cut household costs. They strain to provide things like academic tutors and sports activities for their kids who must compete with the children of the wealthy. Deep down, they know that they probably can’t pass down the cultural and social class they once took for granted.

Quart cites a litany of grim statistics that measure the quality of their lives, like the fact that a middle-class existence is now 30% more expensive than it was twenty years ago, a period in which the price of health care and the cost of a four-year degree at a public college nearly doubled.

Squeezed is especially detailed on the plight of the female Middle Precariat, like those who have the effrontery to procreate or grow older. With the extra burdens of care work, pregnancy discrimination, inadequate family leave, and wage disparities, (not to mention sexual harassment, a subject not covered), women get double squeezed. For women of color, often lacking intergenerational wealth to ease the pain, make that a triple squeeze.

The Middle Precariat in middle age is not a pretty sight: without union protection or a reliable safety net they endure lost jobs, dwindled savings, and shattered identities. In one of the saddest chapters, Quart describes how the pluckiest try reinvent themselves in their 40s or 50s, enrolling in professional courses and certification programs that promise another shot at security, only to find that they’ve been scammed by greedy college marketers and deceptive self-help mavens who leave them more desperate than before.

Quart notes that even those making decent salaries in the United States now see themselves barred from the club of power and wealth. They may have illiquid assets like houses and retirement accounts, but they still see themselves as financially struggling. Earning $100,000 sounds marvelous until you’ve forked over half to housing and 30% to childcare. Each day is one bit of bad luck away from disaster.

“The spectacular success of the 0.1 percent, a tiny portion of society, shows just how stranded, stagnant, and impotent the current social system has made the middle class—even the 10 percent who are upper-middle class,” Quart writes.

Quart knows that the problems of those who seem relatively privileged compared many may not garner immediate sympathy. But she rightly notes that their stresses are a barometer for the concentration of extreme wealth in some American cities and the widening chasm between the very wealthy and everybody else.

The Dual Economy

The donor-fed establishment of both political parties could or would not see this coming, but some prescient economists have been sounding the alarm.

In his 2016 book The Vanishing Middle Class, MIT economist Peter Temin detailed how the U.S. has been breaking up into a “dual economy”over the last several decades, moving toward a model that is structured economically and politically more like a developing nation—a far cry from the post-war period when the American middle class thrived.

In dual economies, the rich and the rest part ways as the once-solid middle class begins to disappear. People are divided into separate worlds in the kinds of jobs they hold, the schools their kids attend, their health care, transportation, housing, and social networks—you name it. The tickets out of the bottom sector, like a diploma from a first-rate university, grow scarce. The people of the two realms become strangers.

French economist Thomas Picketty provided a stark formula for what happens capitalism is left unregulated in his 2015 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It goes like this: when the rate of return on the investments of the wealthy exceeds the rate of growth in the overall economy, the rich get exponentially richer while everyone becomes poorer. In more sensible times, like the decades following WWII, that rule was mitigated by an American government that forced the rich pay their share of taxes, curbed the worst predations of businesses, and saw to it that roads, bridges, public transit, and schools were built and maintained.

But that’s all a fading memory. Under the influence of political money, politicians no longer seek a unified economy and society where the middle class can flourish. As Quart observes, the U.S. is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world, featuring the largest wealth inequality gap of the two hundred countries in the Global Wealth Report of 2015.

Who is to Blame?

Over and over, the people Quart interviews tend to blame themselves for their situation—if only they’d chosen a different career, lived in another city, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out this way. Sometimes they point the finger at robots and automation, though they arguably have much more to fear from the wealthy humans who own the robots.

But some are waking up to the fact it is the wealthy and their purchased politicians who have systematically and deliberately stripped them of power. Deprivations like paltry employee rights, inadequate childcare, ridiculously expensive health care, and non-existent retirement security didn’t just happen. Abstract words like deregulation and globalization become concrete: somebody actually did this to you by promoting policies that leave you high and dry.

As Quart indicates, understanding this is the first step to a change of consciousness, and her book is part of this shift.

Out of this consciousness, many individuals and organizations are working furiously and sometimes ingeniously to alter the negative trajectory of the Middle Precariat. Quart outlines proposals and developments like small-scale debt consolidation, student debt forgiveness, adequately subsidized day care, and non-traditional unions that could help.

America also has a track record of broad, fundamental solutions that have already proven to work. Universal basic income may sound attractive, but we already have a program that could improve the lot of the middle class if expanded: Social Security.

Right now, a worker stops having to pay Social Security tax on any earnings beyond $128,400—a number that is unreasonably low because the rich wish to keep it so. Just by raising that cap, we could the lower the retirement age so that Americans in their 60s would not have greet customers at Walmart. More opportunities would open up to younger workers.

The Middle Precariat could be forgiven for suspecting that the overlords of Silicon Valley may have something other than altruism in mind when they tout universal basic income. Epic tax evaders, they stand to benefit from pushing the responsibility for their low-paid workers and the inadequate safety net and public services that they helped create onto ordinary taxpayers.

Beyond basic income lies a basic fact: the American wealthy do not pay their share in taxes. In fact, American workers pay twice as much in taxes as wealthy investors. That’s why infrastructure crumbles, schools deteriorate, and sane health care and childcare are not available.

Most Americans realize that inequality has to be challenged through the tax code: a 2017 Gallup pollshows that the majority think that the wealthy and corporations don’t pay enough. Politicians, of course, ignore this to please their donors.

And so the Middle Precariat, like the Trump voters, is getting fed up with them.

by Lynn Parramore, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
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[ed. See also: Reimagining the Middle Class]

Liberalism and Empire

Paul Krugman had a column a few weeks ago called “Fall of the American Empire” about Donald Trump’s repudiation of “the values that actually made America great.” It is worth analyzing, because it is amusing and illustrative. Krugman believes that Trump is threatening to destroy America’s great “empire” and that this is bad, because our country’s “empire” is good and noble. Trump, Krugman suggests, is an aberrant departure from the lofty values and ideals that have guided our foreign policy for most of the past century. In fact, let’s have a look at a chunk of Krugman’s column so he can put things in his own words (please retain your guffaws until the end):

[W]e emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself — for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles. Of course, we often fell short of those ideals. But the ideals were real, and mattered. Many nations have pursued racist policies; but when the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote his 1944 book about our “Negro problem,” he called it “An American Dilemma,” because he viewed us as a nation whose civilization had a “flavor of enlightenment” and whose citizens were aware at some level that our treatment of blacks was at odds with our principles… But what does American goodness — all too often honored in the breach, but still real — have to do with American power, let alone world trade? The answer is that for 70 years, American goodness and American greatness went hand in hand. Our ideals, and the fact that other countries knew we held those ideals, made us a different kind of great power, one that inspired trust. Think about it. By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty. But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values. The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force.

I have said before that Trump exceptionalism will kill every one of your brain cells. By this I mean that there is a strong liberal tendency to see Donald Trump as totally different from any president who came before him, and to end up defending the indefensible records of prior administrations in an attempt to prove just how radically Trump departs from precedent. Krugman’s column is a perfect example of this tendency. Because he wants to show that Trump has destroyed an America that was “actually great,” he has to rewrite the entire history of post-World War II American foreign policy. He has to dismiss unspeakable crimes as minor blips, and avoid mentioning countless instances of intervention that show American policy to have been anything but idealistic and principled.

Krugman says that the United States largely refrained from pursuing selfish interests, instead helping create democracies around the world because of our commitment to our values. While there were regrettable exceptions such as our “not at all pretty” actions in Iran (a bit of an understatement to describe engineering a coup and installing a dictator), we are largely a country where “goodness” and “greatness” go hand in hand, and who only interfered in “some” developing countries, mostly with “soft power.” (It’s soft! Like giving them a cuddle. Except they’re being cuddled with crippling economic sanctions.)

Perhaps the best place for Krugman to begin correcting his misimpression is the excellent Wikipedia article “United States Involvement in Regime Change.” He might learn quite a bit about how his country has pursued its noble democratic ideals over the past century or so, in “some” countries including Vietnam, Guatemala, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Congo, Grenada, Honduras, Chile, Brazil, and Cuba. The United States tried to replace foreign governments 72 times during the course of the Cold War alone. The history of the CIA in the 20th and 21st century is a history of assassination and torture, and a cursory look at the history of the agency shows that our interventions in other countries were bloody, secretive, and definitely not “benign.” Patrice Lumumba was the democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo. The CIA plotted his death, and collaborated with his eventual killers. Salvador Allende was the democratically-elected president of Chile. The United States fomented a coup against him, one that eventually led to thousands of Chileans being tortured and killed. Jacobo Árbenz was the democratically-elected president of Guatemala. The United States deposed him and installed a dictator. The United States supported the mass killing of leftists in Indonesia, death squads in Nicaragua, and continues to support the horrific human rights abuses committed by Saudi Arabia. (Barack Obama offered the country $115 billion dollars in weapons, which are used to massacre Yemenis attending wedding ceremonies.) I could spend all afternoon listing horrendous things that our “benevolent” empire has done, the dictators we have supported in the name of “democracy,” and our long history of interfering in foreign elections to subvert the democratic will of other countries’ people. But instead I’ll recommend Krugman pick up a copy of Understanding Power.

United States foreign policy has consistently been motivated by the “United States’ national interest,” not a concern for “democracy.” If we valued democracy, we wouldn’t meddle in elections in order to try to put leaders we like in power. But we have done this constantly. Very, very few U.S. policies are primarily motivated by a sympathetic concern for the welfare of other people, though they are usually framed this way. The Vietnam War, portrayed as an attempt to preserve “democracy,” was anything but. The U.S. didn’t give a fig about the will of the people of Vietnam, and many policymakers were motivated by little more than a desperate desire to avoid being “humiliated” or “losing a war.”

Here, then, Paul Krugman, part of the progressive wing of mainstream U.S. discourse, is openly arguing that the United States should have an “empire,” that its proper place is as the benevolent monarch of the world, elected by nobody but in charge of all. It doesn’t matter whether anybody wants this, it’s our right because we’re so “good.” Of course, the only way to portray ourselves as good involves sweeping almost the entire historical record under the rug. But we do say the word “democracy” a lot. (...)

It’s not surprising to see Paul Krugman defending American empire, although it’s a little remarkable to see him literally using the word “empire” as a positive. One of the central differences between liberalism and leftism is that liberals believe American dominance over the world is a good idea, but just needs to be run by decent people, while leftists believe that it’s impossible to talk of democracy while also imposing your will on others. Richard Seymour’s excellent book The Liberal Defense of Murder shows how liberals throughout recent history have used rhetoric about humanitarianism and democracy to justify nationalistic wars of aggression.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Paul Krugman, uncredited

[ed. I think NJR is consistently the best analyst/commentator we have going these days. See also: Why Public Libraries are Amazing and Just Stop Worrying and Embrace the Left.]

osaka Japan2018
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No Free Parking

In the list of things that have annoyed Las Vegas visitors, paying for parking is at the top, or close to it. Which might be why one of the biggest names on the Las Vegas Strip is backing off charging customers for parking—kind of.

What’s interesting—and maybe gives an insight into consumer behavior broader than parking—is precisely what visitors to Las Vegas get angry at. Changing payouts on blackjacks from 3:2 to 6:5, which shifts the house edge to about 2 percent? Outrage, threats to never return again.

Yet few people protest keno, which has a house edge of 20 to 35 percent. Those who know just avoid the game.

Likewise, few people loudly complain that the Wynn Buffet charges $20.99 for breakfast, when Palace Station charges $7.99, because presumably Wynn offers $13 more of a breakfast buffet experience than Palace Station. And there’s the location. If you’re vacationing or attending a convention at Wynn, the ten minute drive to Palace Station, coupled with the ten to 15 minutes on each side to park and walk to the restaurant, might be worth that extra $13, even if the hash browns aren’t. Taking a taxi or rideshare adds at least $10 to the equation, plus the time to hail and find a ride.

Convention catering is notoriously steeply-priced. At The Mirage, for example, a single Brazilian coconut shrimp will set the average meeting planner back $9.50, plus a 19 percent gratuity, four percent service charge, and 8.25 percent tax rate. That’s not for a plate of shrimp—that’s for a single shrimp. The minimum order of 50 pieces runs more than $636. While that price certainly scares a few groups away, someone must be paying for $1,100 veggie trays (which serve 75 people, tip, service, and tax included), since they haven’t lowered the price.

But Wynn’s buffet has always been pricy, and convention catering isn’t a bargain anywhere, much less Las Vegas. Keno has been a sucker game since it was invented. Blackjack, though, was almost universally a 3:2 game until a few years ago. And parking, on the Las Vegas Strip at least, was always free-until it wasn’t. People don’t mind paying too much for something that always has been expensive, but paying—even a nominal amount—for something they’ve long had for free can be a deal breaker.

Doomsday for acres of free parking at Las Vegas Strip casinos was in 2016, when MGM Resorts International began charging to park at 11 of its Las Vegas Strip properties (self-parking at Circus Circus remained, and remains, complimentary). Caesars Entertainment soon began charging at most of its properties, as did the Cosmopolitan and Wynn Las Vegas.

To say that visitors were outraged is putting it lightly. Prices in Las Vegas, especially on the Strip, are as high as they’ve ever been, and adding another charge on top of resort fees and deteriorating game odds was, many felt, a bridge too far. Making matters worse, parking rates have increased substantially since 2016.

Before ownership of Las Vegas Strip casinos was concentrated in a few companies’ hands, innovations like charging for what was once free were seldom attempted, since it would be easy for customers to avoid one property that did something they didn’t like. It’s a bit harder to do that when ten casinos roll out the same policy overnight. In this case, paid parking snowballed once MGM began it; since its neighbors did not want to see visitors parking in their garages to patronize MGM properties, although it’s doubtful that they were upset at the extra “free” money coming in. So, within a matter of months, paying for parking on the Strip became a reality.

Has paid parking hurt business on the Strip? According to MGM’s 2017 4th quarter report, both slot handle and occupancy fell slightly in 2017, the company’s first full year with pay parking. Revenues in other areas increased, but these are signs of that overall demand is not growing robustly. Overall, visitation to Las Vegas as a whole fell 1.6 percent, and total room occupancy slipped as well. While many operators have reported increases in total income, it certainly seems that paid parking is not inspiring more people to visit Las Vegas.

Which may be why Wynn Resorts, which started charging for self- and valet-parking in August 2017, recently announced it is retreating—somewhat—from parking fees.

Guests will still have to pass through gates at the parking garage and take a ticket. If they spend $50 or more, though, they are eligible for one day’s free parking. This isn’t going back to the good old days of easy come, easy go sliding in and out of garages at will, but it’s more of a retreat than any casino has offered on resort fees, which are more entrenched than ever and continue to escalate.

Why the change? Wynn Resorts spokesperson Deanna Petit-Irestone explains.

“Our guests choose to stay with us because of the attention we give to perfecting every detail of their experience,” she says, “and we came to believe that charging additional parking fees is counter to the personalized service we provide. This new policy directly reflects the way we know our guests want and deserve to be treated. The approachable spend amount ($50) is designed to ensure that parking remains plentiful for resort guests, while reducing parking overflow from neighboring businesses. Adding further value to the new policy is the ability to divide one total spend among several vehicles. For instance, if four visitors in four separate vehicles spend $200 at a restaurant, all four vehicles will be validated.”

The change in policy to allow validation is a sign that perhaps paid parking has not been the boon that some forecast it to be. As with resort fees and other upcharges, those who argue against it internally face an uphill battle, because proponents can point to actual dollars earned, while the other side can only hypothesize that parking charges are a drag on overall revenues. Of course, checking out online comments makes it clear that most customers despise paying for parking, but that’s not the kind of evidence that goes far in executive meetings.

Wynn’s reversal is the first sign that paid parking is not going away, but that it might be modified. Both Wynn and Encore are among the most expensive properties on the Strip, and if validating parking has a positive impact on visitation and spending, their competitors would strongly consider following suit. Allowing validation might make less money directly from parking, but if waiving a $12 parking fee is the tipping point that brings a customer in to spend $100 or more on a meal or, perish the thought, gamble, it’s hard to see how casinos would be missing out by doing so.

by David G. Schwartz, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Confessions of An Unredeemed Fan

Amy Winehouse’s last big concert was in Belgrade, a month before she died. This was June of 2011. Billed as the beginning of her comeback tour, the gig turned into one of her most infamous train wrecks: when she came on stage, she was drunk beyond the point of making sense, beyond the point of standing — tripping and crouching, sitting down to take off her shoes, leaning into her bass guitarist and holding his hand. The crowd started heckling her early and didn’t let up. “Sing!” they shouted. “Sing! Sing!”

Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.

The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”

She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.

The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.

At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.

There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.

Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart. (...)

The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.

After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”

A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”

Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”

The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.

Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.

Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public.

by Leslie Jamison, Longreads | Read more:

Image: Shirlaine Forrest / Getty

Were We Destined to Live in Facebook’s World?

More than 2 billion people have come to accept that Facebook is, more or less, what a social network is. Its highly particular and historically contingent bundle of features and applications has become the yardstick by which all other networks (outside China) are measured.

But was this Facebook inevitable, or have the company and its users simply fallen into this particular configuration? For example, Facebook began as a simple desktop website in which people could connect to friends in a small number of universities through MySpace-like profiles. But then came the News Feed in 2006, which collected and ranked the different things your friends were doing (like posting new pictures or breaking up). People hated it, even according to the engineers who worked on it. “A lot of folks wanted us to shut News Feed down. And most other companies would have done precisely that, especially if 10% of their users threatened to boycott the product,” recalled Ruchi Sanghvi, an engineer on the original team, in 2016. They didn’t, though, because as Sanghvi explained, to their minds it “was actually working.” “Amidst all the chaos, all the outrage, we noticed something unusual,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Even though everyone claimed they hated it, engagement had doubled.”

The “feed” format spread far and wide. And Facebook learned an important thing: It didn’t have to listen to what users said, when it could watch what they did. That’s guided decision after decision as the company morphed into the global powerhouse that it is.

But what if Facebook had shut down News Feed? Would Facebook have learned that its data might not reflect how users actually felt about a service they feel compelled to use? What if that decision flips the direction of both the social network and its internal processes?

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of a new book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Vaidhyanathan has been a strenuous critic of the technology industry, and the book is best described by his own pithy summary: “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.” He’s spent the past several years reading and thinking with scholarly depth about not just how Facebook works, but why it was built the way that it was.

I asked him to explore the question of Facebook’s rise, both in its actual features as well as the historical circumstances that shaped the social network. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.

Alexis Madrigal: Thinking about how Facebook is welded together, did we need to have a social network that did or aspired to do everything?

Siva Vaidhyanathan: One of the reasons why there is nothing like it and there’s been nothing like it and there might never be anything like it is that Mark Zuckerberg never held back in his vision of what this could be. He never thought that he was going to build something that would be the next killer version of HotOrNot, a cute little experiment. He never thought, I’m gonna build a dating app. Because he had a much grander theory of human interaction, misinformed by the shallowest reading of network theory and sociology, that he thought: Well, let’s not stop at building the best dating app, let’s change the world. Let’s give people a way to manage their social relations in a rich way.

At some point, he decided that there is a universal principle here, and that is the principle of engagement. What we should really be paying attention to, what he will make sure we pay attention to, are the things that generate engagement. That was one of the core mistakes. You could measure engagement and you can’t measure things like depth of thought or kindness.

Madrigal: Do you see any other app out there that serves as a counterexample to how Facebook works?

Vaidhyanathan: Instagram is the best argument against Facebook in a bizarre way. At some point, Zuckerberg decided Instagram was worth acquiring because he realized the power of the image and social connection. Instagram was either a threat to future growth or an opportunity for future features to be folded in. But to this day, it remains a saner, cleaner experience and one that has had minimal political effect on the world. And it’s a great place to see puppies.

Madrigal: As we think about the institutional history of Facebook, what else could have happened?

Vaidhyanathan: 2011 was one inflection point. In spring of 2011, there’s this instant myth out there that Twitter and Facebook were instrumental in the overthrow of dictatorships and the establishment of democracies. Even though by 2013, it was pretty clear that they were just new dictatorships, the myth remained.

That insulated Facebook from self-criticism. It was easy to go to work at Facebook—whether you were Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg or someone working at the lower level of the Facebook Messenger project—and convince yourself you were improving the world.

If we’d been able to deflate that myth, we might have seen Facebook behave more modestly internally. But 2011 was an affirmation that the global vision of bringing people together was going to yield good things for humanity. (...)

Madrigal: For me, the biggest inflection point was when Facebook moved into the media realm in 2013, which we wrote about contemporaneously. They were becoming your “personalized newspaper,” the best-ever personalized newspaper. They never say that anymore, but they used to say it all the time. They also used to say they wanted to “rewire” different things, political systems, etc. And for me that is the moment when suddenly, they rewire the whole information sphere through Facebook. And that just didn’t have to happen, even for Facebook to become a huge powerful globe spanning company.

Vaidhyanathan: It didn’t have to happen. The power of an ideology that says social engineering is possible and therefore, we should do it—that’s pretty irresistible to a bunch of idealistic, half-educated young people. If you’re someone who looks around the world and says, “There are some big problems but almost all of them can be solved with one thing”—and that thing is better and deeper personal connections so that we can overcome differences. And we have these tools that we can design that can do that for people. Then, at that point, once you’ve accepted all that, it makes it really hard for you to question anything.

These ideological blinders ... were so pervasive in hacker culture in the 1990s. Coming out of the Cold War, there was this amazing moment, once we freed up the channels of communication and people could learn about the world and other people around them. That was the great potential for human flourishing. And there weren’t a lot of people who directly objected to that optimism. If some communication is good, then more must be better. (...)

Madrigal: Do you see any plausible scenario where Facebook declines in importance?

Vaidhyanathan: I think the only possibility of Facebook becoming less meaningful and important in people’s lives would occur among elites in North America and Western Europe. People who read The Atlantic or read long academic books about Facebook might reduce their usage. But I see nothing but growth and more dependence on Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram in the rest of the world. Every day in so many ways, the United States matters less in the world. That’s not just Trump’s fault. It’s been a long-term process.

Look, if at some point, Facebook is allowed to compete with WeChat in China, then we’ve got a totally different game and what Americans think of Facebook will matter very little.

Madrigal: How do you mean?

Vaidhyanathan: Here is the nightmare scenario for Facebook that could bring them down. And it’s a worse situation than we have now. [Dominant Chinese social network] WeChat goes global. It bursts out of the confines of [China] and its diaspora and there is a functional version in 20, 50, 100 languages. Facebook could be in big trouble because WeChat does everything. WeChat is the operating system of a billion users. If you’re in China, you must use WeChat, almost everybody does. If you’re in China and you use WeChat, you are checking out library books, making doctor’s appointments, buying fast food. WeChat does what Facebook does and what Twitter does and what Instagram does and what your banking app does. Each of us has like, 60 apps on our phones and we use like, 7 of them. In China, you really only need the one.

What will then happen is that Facebook will double down on becoming the operating system of our lives. It will bolster the ways that its various functions work together. Instagram would be folded into Facebook and WhatsApp will be folded into Messenger. You can see Messenger looking more like WeChat all the time. If Facebook gets into China, it’ll introduce Messenger first.

Facebook breaks down and gives authoritarian states information about us and WeChat romps around the world, giving that information to the government of China. So, in that perverse way, serious competition for Facebook is a far worse scenario than we have now.

by Alexis Madrigal and Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Christian Hartmann/Reuters
[ed. See also: EFF has published a detailed guide to regulating Facebook without destroying the internet (original link: here)]

Alaska at a Crossroads

Alaska at a Crossroads
via: (CNN)
[ed. I usually hate media interactives but this one is pretty good - an Alaska that most tourists never see.]

Gary Larson, The Far Side

via:

Man Bites Prawn

The first cold night of fall, I went to the Living Fish Center, a small, superbly named Koreatown restaurant in whose window a brilliant neon trout burns in permanent midleap. Inside, a school of scarlet fish stare dumbly out from their dim tank, and a bubbling glass raceway teeming with prawns runs just below the ceiling. I am always happy to see swimming prawns.

From its name I had always inferred Living Fish Center was a . . . vivarium, a Korean analogue to Maine lobster pounds or posh Chinatown seafood palaces, but inside, the restaurant seemed more like a roadhouse, really, a basic Korean cafe, sparsely populated with students and elderly Korean couples and knots of workers still in their technicians' overalls. A chef stood mute guard over what looked like a refrigerated counter borrowed from an ice cream parlor, and cards on each table advertised fantastically expensive dinners in blocky Hangool script.

A waitress handed me a plastic glass half-filled with tepid tea that tasted mostly of detergent, and slid a small dish of oily toasted-rice gruel onto the menu-imprinted place mat. "Eat this first," she said, shrugging. "Perhaps you will like it."

It wasn't particularly good. The rubbery squid sauteed in spicy-sweet bean sauce, the clumsy fish chowder churning in its black iron pot, and the sugared, fried seaweed were hardly better. On the Korean sashimi platter, the slabs of tuna were still frozen, the whitefish dull, and the salmon had the funny, off-orange color of marshmallow peanuts. (You wrap Korean sashimi in lettuce leaves with fermented bean paste, sliced serrano chiles and cloves of raw garlic, so the actual taste of the fish may be fairly irrelevant - I suspect shark chum would taste good with raw garlic and big bottles of cold Hite beer.) The slices of raw sea cucumber on the platter were fine, gooey and briny and fresh, but you can eat only so much of that stuff before your system goes into overload. (One friend insists that raw sea cucumber is exactly like sperm, though a bit crunchier.)

More dishes arrived, part of the typical Korean generosity, including a whole fried fish, a foil tray packed with sauteed onions and diced shellfish, and half of a fresh sea urchin, spines still describing circles in the air, packed with its mild, briny roe. (Fresh sea urchin bears the same relation to the stinky stuff you get at sushi bars that fresh bluefin tuna does to a can of Star Kist.)

It is never easy to intuit an Asian cafe's specialty on a first visit, and Seoul-food menus, where non-Koreans tend to be steered toward bland stews and grilled meat dishes, are often the most unfathomable of all. (A New York Times reporter, famous for her knowledge of Asian cooking, recently wrote about a Manhattan soontofu restaurant apparently without realizing that the restaurant served soontofu at all.)

It wasn't until we looked at the prawns leaping about the tank, and the chef behind the bar, and what seemed to be on the plates of half the customers, that we figured out what the restaurant's specialty might be. I said a couple of words to the waitress, and the chef came out from behind his counter and climbed up to the raceway containing the prawns.

He dipped a hand into the tank, rippling the still, clear water until some of the prawns sprang up to nip at his fingers. He plucked the liveliest specimens from the water and brought them back to his station, where he quickly removed most of their shells. A few seconds later, the prawns were served on a mound of crushed ice, heads intact and very much alive.

It was among the most unsettling experiences I have ever had in a restaurant, preparing to bite into a living creature as it glared back at me, antennae whipping in wild circles, legs churning, body contorting as if to power the spinnerets that had been so rudely ripped from its torso, less at that moment a foodstuff than a creature that clearly did not want to be eaten.

I have consumed thousands of animals in my lifetime: seen lambs butchered, snipped the faces off innumerable soft-shell crabs, killed and gutted my share of fish. I had, I thought, come to terms with the element of predation inherent in eating meat - and I am thankful to the beasts that have nourished me. But this was the first time I had ever come up against one of the most basic of nature's postulates: You live; your prey dies. In order to eat, you must first rip into living flesh . . . not by proxy, not from a distance, not with a gun or knife, but intimately, with your teeth.

I thought about the Hindu cabby who had driven me back into town from a Singapore seafood restaurant years ago, lecturing me the entire way on the spirituality inherent in a single prawn, and I thought about my vegan friends who refuse to eat anything that once had a face.

I bit into the animal, devouring all of its sweetness in one mouthful, and I felt the rush of life pass from its body into mine, the sudden relaxation of its feelers, the blankness I swear I could see overtaking its eyes. It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don't want to do it again.

by Jonathan Gold, LA Weekly |  Read more:

Image: Rocky Point Prawns
[ed. See also: A Look Back at the Gold Standard and What Will Los Angeles Do Without Jonathan Gold?]

Administration Announces Multibillion Stimulus For Farmers

Facing the brunt of President Trump's trade war with China, which threatens some $34 billion of US products and agriculture with duties, the White House has announced a $12 billion "short-term" stimulus plan to help US farmers hurt by China's "illegal" retaliatory tariffs.

The package, as expected, will consist of direct payments, food purchases and trade development - under a program already authorized under the Commodity Credit Corp act, which means Congressional approval is not required. Further details on the program will come by Labor Day, according to USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue and top officials.

Earlier in the day, Trump told a Veteran's group: "This country is doing better than it's ever done before, economically...It's all working out. Just remember: what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

As we reported earlier, China's retaliation against Trump's tariffs was a lefy on 545 categories of US products, ranging from soybeans, pork, chicken and seafood to sport-utility vehicles and electric vehicles, and as a result of plunging commodity prices, one group emerged as especially hard hit by the administration's tariffs: farmers.

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst appeared on CBS' "Face The Nation" warning that: "farmer ranchers are “always the first to be retaliated against” in these types of “trade negotiations," adding that farmers have been put in “very vulnerable position.”

Meanwhile, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig said that "there are real issues in our trade relationship with China that need to be addressed, but Iowa agriculture cannot continue to bear the brunt of the retaliation from our trading partners."

In short, America's farmers were getting ever more angry with Trump's policies.

"Soybeans are the top agriculture export for the United States, and China is the top market for purchasing those exports, The math is simple. You tax soybean exports at 25 percent, and you have serious damage to U.S. farmers."

Cheese producers were also hard hit, forced to discount their products to keep customers, with many putting orders put on hold and resulting in the biggest cheese inventory in US history.

"We have seen large drops in our dairy product sales prices at all levels," said Catherine de Ronde, economist for the Agri-Mark Inc. dairy cooperative. "It will create a significant backup of dairy products."

Not everyone is happy with Trump's emergency aid.

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) slammed the plan in a Tuesday press release, which reads:

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today released the following statement regarding reports that the Trump administration is considering offering $12 billion in farm aid to ease the impact of tariffs recently implemented by the administration. 

"I am glad that the administration finally seems to understand that the Trump-Pence tariffs are hurting the American people," said Corker.

"These tariffs are a massive tax increase on American consumers and businesses, and instead of offering welfare to farmers to solve a problem they themselves created, the administration should reverse course and end this incoherent policy. We will continue to push for a binding vote here in Congress to reassert our constitutional role on national security-designated tariffs."

And responding to earlier reports of Trump's $12 billion stimulus plan, Senator Bob Sasse (R-NE) said that the Trump administration was "going to make it 1929 again."

The Nebraska senator said that Trump's trade war is "cutting the legs out from under farmers," and that the White House will now "spend $12 billion on gold crutches."

"America’s farmers don’t want to be paid to lose – they want to win by feeding the world," Sasse said in a statement. "This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again."

As we noted earlier, under the White House plan, the money will be disbursed in at least three ways, coming through direct assistance, a food purchase and distribution program, and a trade promotion program.

The plan, which has been in the works for months, seeks to ensure U.S. farmers and ranchers — a key constituency for President Donald Trump and Republicans — don’t bear the brunt of an escalating trade fight with China, the European Union and other major economies.

by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge |  Read more:

Image: via

Wasabi: Japanese Flavor

When we discuss Japanese food, wasabi (Japanese horseradish) has been an indispensable foodstuff since olden times. Even in Europe and the United States, it is now common for wasabi to be used in dishes amid the booming popularity of “washoku” (Japanese cuisine). Shedding light on wasabi that has become a worldwide foodstuff as a condiment originating in Japan, we take a closer look at the influences it has given to food culture and its attractiveness.

Part 1: Seeking ‘Japan's No.1’

Selected wasabi (Japanese horseradish) are assembled in Tokyo's Tsukiji market from throughout the country. In its vegetable and fruit sales floor, wasabi that line the storefront of long-established intermediate wholesaler Kushiya are especially conspicuous. They are priced at more than 20,000 yen (about $170) per kilogram, which is higher than tuna sold in the adjacent seafood sales floor.

This wasabi attracts customers not only in high-class sushi restaurants in central Tokyo but also overseas.

“If you know the flavors of ‘maguro’ (tuna) and ‘hirame’ (bastard halibut) served with this wasabi, you cannot eat them without it,” said Masahiro Sugimoto, president of Kushiya.

What wasabi elicits such high praise from the professional maven? We visited its producer, Keiichi Tashiro, 43, a farmer in Gotemba, Shizuoka Prefecture.

Exposing it to spring water

Tashiro's wasabi fields are dotted along a river that flows between the mountains. The area has an abundance of spring water, whose temperature ranges between 10 and 13 degrees throughout most of the year. His wasabi fields take in this spring water. The fields are slightly inclined so that the water spreads equally to the entire fields. However, each field differs in size and shape. He slightly changes the field depending on such factors as the amounts of sunlight and the tilt of the land.

There are various cultivation methods, and Tashiro is adopting a method called “ishiue” (stone on). It is called that because a stone is placed on a seedling when wasabi is grown.

“Another method is ‘chon-ue,’ whose word origin is said to be ‘chokon to ueru’ (planting it slightly). In addition, there is a cultivation method of protecting a seedling from outside elements by covering it with pipes,” he said.

In the ishiue method, wasabi is laid on its side, so it grows horizontally. As a result, almost all the parts of wasabi are exposed to spring water and become bright green.

Even a cultivation career of 20 years

Following in the footsteps of his father, Kaoru Tashiro, 78, Keiichi began to cultivate wasabi. His career has spanned about 20 years. However, he fails even now.

In 2016, wasabi grew to only about the size of the tip of a thumb in one field. He is raising a variety called “Mazuma,” which takes about a year and a half to one year and 10 months for the wasabi to grow from seedlings to a size large enough for shipping. The period from planting the seedling to harvesting is lengthy, unlike many other agricultural products.

Because of that, it is painful when wasabi have not grown large enough to be shipped at the time of harvesting.

“I don't know the clear reason for the failure. If my father cultivates it, he does not experience such a failure,” said Keiichi Tashiro.

What his father has that he does not have is intuition resulting from experience, which is important for growing wasabi.

According to Tashiro, three factors are indispensable for wasabi cultivation: abundant spring water, avoiding strong sunlight and soil with good permeability. Seeing the degrees in the growth of wasabi, he changes the amount of water when irrigating them, mixes soil to improve its permeability and covers the plant with black plastic sheets depending on the strength of the sunlight. These works have major influences on the growth of wasabi. And even if he continues to do the same work, wasabi does not necessarily grow as idealistically as hoped.

Conquering complete destruction

In September 2010, Tashiro's wasabi fields were completely destroyed by a flood caused by a typhoon. Reminders of those days remain around the area.

“It can't be helped because wasabi cultivation is influenced by nature,” said Kaoru Tashiro.

The Tashiros were forced to start to create wasabi fields from scratch. It took nearly six years to return the fields to their original state though Kaoru also made efforts to do so.

“As long as there are people who are waiting for my wasabi, I cannot stop cultivating it,” Tashiro said with a smile.

Best wasabi are ‘handsome’

Masahiro Sugimoto, president of long-established intermediate wholesaler Kushiya in the Tsukiji market, has continued to purchase the Tashiro's wasabi for more than 20 years since the days of the father, Kaoru.

Sugimoto has tasted the wasabi of almost all the major production areas, such as Izu (Shizuoka Prefecture), Nagano, Akita, Iwate and Okutama (Tokyo).

Among these, Sugimoto “fell in love” with Tashiro's wasabi.

“His wasabi is especially delicious and its appearance is also good.”

Sugimoto doesn't fall in love with wasabi unless it scores nearly complete points in all five categories of hue, aroma, adhesiveness, hot flavor and sweetness.

“Delicious wasabi becomes a fresh green color when it is grated. Its pungent aroma is also distinctive. It also has adhesiveness and has a strong, hot flavor. There is also a delicate sweetness that comes after a while. The biggest difference between Tashiro's wasabi and other wasabi is sweetness,” Sugimoto said.

Even among Tashiro's wasabi, there is a difference in prices shown by Sugimoto. The cheap ones are priced between 6,000 yen and 8,000 yen per kilogram while the best ones are priced at more than 20,000 yen. According to Sugimoto, the best wasabi are different in appearance, and he calls them “handsome.”

The characteristics of the appearances are as follows: They are straight in shape and have few convex or concave portions on their surfaces. The color of their stems is purple. The bumps, which are traces of leaves that fell, are the same. The distances between spiral lines that can be found if seen up close are also equal.

“Handsome wasabi are extremely delicious. If they are not so, I cannot show prices that are four times higher than those of conventional ones,” Sugimoto said.

Wasabi he has purchased from Tashiro are mostly sold out within a week. A chef has even traveled from New York to buy the wasabi from Sugimoto.

The Kushiya president believes that wasabi plays a role in enriching Japanese food culture.

“Wasabi is not a main ingredient in sushi or sashimi (slices of raw fish). In addition, it is free of charge when offered in restaurants, though it is more expensive than most of the main items when purchased. Despite that, there are chefs who recognize its value and buy it. That is because there are customers who seek it out,” he said.

He added, “There were times when customers said, ‘Give me tears’ when they ask for wasabi in sushi restaurants (because wasabi is so pungent that they often shed tears when they eat it). If they say so, chefs would be able to understand that. Such a play on words was born, which promoted communication. I think that wasabi also has such a power.”

by Tsukiji, Asahi |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Why I’d Never Do a TED Talk

Picture this. A darkened auditorium, an attentive, cult-like audience staring ahead expectantly, hardly daring to breathe; a huge screen on which there is an image no one can decipher. And then, the person everyone has been waiting for strides confidently on to the spotlit stage, wearing a headset and carrying a PowerPoint remote, dressed immaculately and sporting a brand-new haircut. You can hear a pin drop as the presenter begins, “You think the world is round, but I am going to tell you to begin to believe it is actually square.”

Predictable, false and embarrassing; how I hate TED talks. And it’s not even because they’re named after a man. What I can’t abide is the way presenters pace around the stage, I hate the gravity with which they deliver their message, and being patronised by a smug, overconfident “thought leader” is pretty intolerable.

I have friends who have done TED talks, and have respectfully watched their efforts. But one minute in, I start to look away, cringing. Why are they so popular? Why do tickets for spectators sell for thousands of dollars? How come some folk clamber to get on the TED circuit, despite not being paid a penny for the privilege?

TED makes some pretty big claims: according to its website, its aim is to “foster the spread of great ideas, [by providing] a platform for thinkers, visionaries and teachers … Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea.” It’s difficult to know how it will change the world when style appears to be given a hundred times more thought than content. I imagine speakers rehearsing before the audition, checking hand gestures in the mirror in front of a bemused cat. Why do they all seem to perform identical gesticulations?

Those invited to be potential TED talkers are required to attend several auditions, and, if they are one of the chosen few, a number of rehearsals before they are deemed ready. I know one speaker who flew from London to New York just to audition to do TED, paying his own flight for the sheer privilege of performing a live advertorial and hopefully flogging a few books. The talks are so rehearsed that even the well-placed pauses and casual hair flicks look hideously false. TED-bots strut around the stage, posing, delivering well-crafted smiles and frowns. It’s like amateur dramatics for would-be intellectuals.

Many of the speakers state the blatantly obvious on a loop, sounding as though they have discovered the theory of relativity all over again. The pretentious gestures, rehearsed pauses and speech traits single them out from other public speakers. They appear to have learned the art of making the simplest ideas appear complex.

Let’s have a look at some of the topics tackled in these talks, only lightly paraphrased by me: “Why charity shops should replace posh designer shops”, “Why go fast when slow is better?” “Embracing openness and being yourself” (10,000 versions), “Schools kill creativity”, “Kids should teach themselves”, “How letting yourself be vulnerable, by someone about as vulnerable as Donald Trump, is the way to go”, “We have been tying our shoes wrong – here’s how to tie them right”, and my all-time favourite, “We are depressed because things are shit, therefore if things weren’t shit we wouldn’t be depressed, or need to take medication”.

I often give talks to both small and large audiences, and always feel nervous beforehand. This used to bother me, after decades of public speaking, but I then realised that being nervous is respectful of those who are there to hear me. Why would anyone wish to listen to some overconfident, over-rehearsed guru? Why would I want to subject them to a performance?

by Julie Bindel, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: PR
[ed. I avoid TED talks too (but could never articulate exactly why they all seem so grating). This is it. Didn't know about the extensive audition and rehearsal process.]