Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Kiss What Is Left of Your Medical Data Privacy Goodbye
[ed. See, the trouble is the computer can collect a lot of information and regurgitate it in many different ways, and people are fascinated by that. Controlling and measuring everything. … We’re all ranked. And who’s it for? Now, if it’s for the academics, they’re relatively harmless. But then it’s going to ultimately be used, at some point, and it has kind of a smell of eugenics, that we want to purify this kind of motley race called human beings and if we can measure all the different attributes, we can then make normative the right path and the right way to be. I think that is the absence of diversity and the absence of freedom.]
~ Governor Jerry Brown
Matt Stoller warned back in 2012 that insurers would increasingly induce, then force, customers to agree to surveillance. But a Wall Street Journal story tonight describes how insurers and medical providers, meaning your doctor’s employers, are actively cooperating, so as among other things, to help Big Pharma peddle more drugs to you.
Stoller warned that over time, insurance companies would make it prohibitive and eventually impossible to refuse to agree to intensive monitoring:
And even though far too many people are perfectly happy to wear devices that monitor some health measures on an ongoing basis, at least they chose for the data to be collected and hopefully have some appreciation that promises about privacy too often aren’t what they appear to be.
But the Wall Street Journal describes what amounts to a full bore war on individual medical privacy, including linking medical histories to credit records. And the author puts a big smiley face on this effort by depicting it as breaking down silos. “Silos” is a dog-whistle word in Corporate America. Silos are bad! Sharing is good! From the article:
Some issues:
There’s an even more immediate possible use for this information, as Wall Street Journal reader Michael Heinzmann pointed out:
Matt Stoller warned back in 2012 that insurers would increasingly induce, then force, customers to agree to surveillance. But a Wall Street Journal story tonight describes how insurers and medical providers, meaning your doctor’s employers, are actively cooperating, so as among other things, to help Big Pharma peddle more drugs to you.
Stoller warned that over time, insurance companies would make it prohibitive and eventually impossible to refuse to agree to intensive monitoring:
Profit-driven surveillance does not start and stop with young adults. It is, in fact, becoming pervasive. The main theme of a recent IBM consulting document on the future of the insurance industry is how much more money an insurance company can make if it tracks and tags its customers. This is particularly true for auto insurance companies, some of whom like Allstate and Progressive are experimenting on new technologies. For instance, IBM suggests that “A “pay-as-you-live” product would trade some location and time-of-day privacy data for lower insurance bills overall.”
IBM is recommending these companies stick a sensor in your car, measure where you go and when, your speed, acceleration and deceleration, etc. The progression over time could be to withdraw traditional insurance products, so that you won’t be able to get an insurance product without sensors attached. As this presentation offers, “The aforementioned rising tide of technology also empowers insurance underwriters to bring their products closer to realtime interaction via sensor networks and enlightened privacy regulations.”…Now at least this progression has the appearance of being consensual. First you are paid for giving up your privacy, then over time, the positioning changes so that customers have to pay a premium for non-monitored products, and then as their usage falls (and you get a lot of adverse selection), the insurer can pretend to be justified in getting rid of the privacy products, having set them up to fail.
And even though far too many people are perfectly happy to wear devices that monitor some health measures on an ongoing basis, at least they chose for the data to be collected and hopefully have some appreciation that promises about privacy too often aren’t what they appear to be.
But the Wall Street Journal describes what amounts to a full bore war on individual medical privacy, including linking medical histories to credit records. And the author puts a big smiley face on this effort by depicting it as breaking down silos. “Silos” is a dog-whistle word in Corporate America. Silos are bad! Sharing is good! From the article:
Although technology exists to make AI a potent tool, there is a snag. Data relevant to answering specific questions often reside in various locations, from hospitals to diagnostic labs to pharmaceutical companies. These information silos are typical in the health-care field, leaving scientists and other medical professionals at a disadvantage to harness the full predictive power of AI.
Small businesses such as PatientMatters LLC and Prognos Health Inc. are overcoming the data-gathering obstacles to provide insights to medical customers including health plans. “For Prognos to do what we do, you need to have large data sets,” said Sundeep Bhan, co-founder and chief executive of Prognos, which helps insurers predict their members’ disease risks.Lovely. So now we have medical pre-crime, since these data-diggers are making it sound as if they are doing more than projecting out the typical trajectory of pre-existing conditions. Again from the article:
Prognos…has teamed up with diagnostic labs to accumulate diagnostic data on 200 million patients, which it marries with information from health plans to answer questions such as which members are likely to develop a specific condition.
Diagnostic labs, which hope their data will be used to solve medical problems, share the entrepreneur’s dreams of seeing medicine take a leap forward, Mr. Bhan said. “At the end of the day, in health care, that’s what we care about,” he added.If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you, as the story itself demonstrates: (...)
Some issues:
How much of this will wind up being a garbage-in, garbage out exercise? Most of this data is presumably from electronic health records. We’ve regularly published cross posts from Health Care Renewal on this topic, describing in depth what a train wreck they are. The short version is that EHRs were designed for billing purposes, not with medical care in mind. Two of many examples: Health Care Information Technology: A Danger to Physicians and to Your Health and How Electronic Health Records Degrade Care and Endanger Patients.
How much has Obamacare with its neoliberal shopping imperative, undermined this data gathering and mining? In theory, if you have opted to be in an HMO, all of your records ought to be under the same roof. But what if thanks to Obamacare, you switched HMOs, or went from an HMO to a PPO and then back, or even went without coverage? Your medical records are supposed to go from your old provider to the new ones, but how often does that happen well? I know of people who insist on getting copies of all of their blood and other major tests to carry with them to doctor visits, since they’ve found too often the doctor either doesn’t have all of the information or doesn’t have ready access to it.How much will this effort be used to further corporatize care and reduce doctor input? It is a safe bet this sort of data will be used to advance the corporatiation of medicine, which we first discussed in a 2013 post, citing Dr. David Edelberg at Whole Health Chicago (emphasis original):
• The health industry hopes that individual medical practices and small medical groups will ultimately disappear from the landscape by being financially absorbed into larger groups owned by hospital systems.…
Physicians are expected to spend a limited amount of time with each patient, and are encouraged to see as many patients as possible during a workday. The insurance companies, sometimes with the token cooperation of a few physician-employees, create vast books of patient-care guidelines to which they believe their physicians must be “accountable” (remember this word, it will crop up again). These guidelines might mean documented Pap smear and mammogram frequency, weight management and exercise, colonoscopies for patients over 50, and getting that evil LDL (bad cholesterol) below 99 by any means possible…
If the chart audit system discovers that a physician, for whatever reason, is an “outlier”–that she’s either not following the guidelines exactly or not getting the results anticipated for her patient population—she’ll be financially penalized. A quick example of what might occur: if your LDL is 115, you may be on the receiving end of a statin sales pitch from your doctor, not because bringing it down to 99 will improve your longevity, but because your refusal to do so will impact her financial bottom line….
…the subtext of “standardized” always includes the unspoken “spend less money on the patient.” Thus, a doctor might be financially penalized for recommending nutritional counseling to lower cholesterol (“counseling is expensive”) instead of writing a generic statin drug (cheap). Or recommending psychotherapy (“therapy is very expensive”) instead of generic Prozac (cheaper than M&M’s). Or referring patients for massage, acupuncture, or even chiropractic (“expensive, expensive, expensive!”) instead of pushing an over-the-counter antiinflammatory (free to the insurance company, as it’s OTC).And the connection to credit data is cringe-making. Just wait for the articles saying that a better credit score means better health, when if there is any causality, it almost certainly runs the other way.
There’s an even more immediate possible use for this information, as Wall Street Journal reader Michael Heinzmann pointed out:
With the GOP hell-bent on eliminating protections for patients with preexisting conditions from guaranteed access to health insurance – any leakage of personal/private healthcare data would have devastating effects upon millions of patients. Healthcare organizations have a very poor track record on protecting their customers’ data (and none have suffered any significant sanctions).
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
[ed. See also: 23andMe's Pharma Deals Have Been the Plan All Along (Wired) Quote via: .]
Monday, January 7, 2019
How to Hand Out Free Money
On a gray afternoon in Juneau, 36-year-old Kristen Hemlock sat on her bed picking at a cold McDonald’s chicken sandwich, waiting for the checks to arrive. Her four-year-old son, Eli, chubby and dimpled, lay on his stomach on a bottom bunk two feet away, distracting himself with YouTube cartoons. Six-year-old Mason wasn’t home from school yet, permitting a fleeting truce in the brothers’ perennial war over her phone. In a home the size of a dorm room, it was a more reliable source of entertainment than their toy trucks and guns. Broken drawers spilled out of a chipped wicker dresser, and fleece blankets, one patterned with the phrase “I love you to the moon and back,” blocked light from the lone window.
The boys’ father, 35-year-old Daniel Varner, sat at a tiny table in khaki overalls and work boots, jiggling his leg.
“It’s delivery mail, isn’t it?” he asked Hemlock.
“Yeah, so it might be tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah, it’s not coming. I was thinking post office box.”
“It could.” Hemlock emitted the nervous laugh she reserves for her saddest stories. “I’m hopeful.”
Most of the family’s 52 neighbors at St. Vincent de Paul Society’s transitional housing shelter, a faded blue building on the outskirts of town, were also waiting for money.
It was October 4, and pretty much everyone in Alaska was expecting it, with varying degrees of impatience—$1,600 for every man, woman, and child. For nearly four decades, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, designed to share revenue from the state’s oil wealth, has made flat annual payouts to anyone who has lived there for at least one calendar year, barring those with certain criminal convictions. While the program’s architects didn’t use the term, it’s the closest thing today to a universal basic income program that has durably existed anywhere in the world. (...)
Inadvertently, red-leaning and fiercely independent Alaska has become a global model for advocates of doling out “free money.” After visiting the state in July 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal basic-income booster, wrote in a Facebook post that the dividend provides “good lessons for the rest of our country.” The dividend has been a third rail in Alaskan politics for nearly four decades. But just as the hype around basic income is growing, the program is facing an existential threat. Plummeting oil revenue has left the resource-dependent state—the only one with no sales or personal income tax—with multibillion-dollar deficits. Even after dramatic spending cuts, savings reserves are dwindling. The local GOP establishment, with backing from wealthy corporate interests, has blocked virtually all attempts to generate new revenue through taxes. With money running out, elected officials have slashed annual checks in half, despite their popularity. In May, lawmakers voted for the first time to divert $1.7 billion away from dividends to pay directly for government spending. While imposing income taxes would affect the richest Alaskans most, smaller dividend checks, and the program’s uncertain future, are hitting low-income families hardest. (...)
The dividend’s origins are rooted less in idealism than in greed. In 1968, nearly a decade after Alaska joined the Union, the largest oil field in North America was discovered on its northern coast at Prudhoe Bay. Lease sales filled the young state’s coffers with $900 million, more than five times its annual budget. Within five years, the entire windfall was gone. Much of it paid for education and transportation projects, but some politicians and members of the public felt that spending had overinflated the bureaucracy. Jay Hammond, a trapper and fisherman elected governor in 1974, declared that the “nest egg” had been “scrambled.” He and other leaders decided the state ought to safeguard some oil revenue for future generations. In 1976, voters approved a constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund, a savings account that would be managed by a semi-independent, state-owned corporation and would take in at least a quarter of oil royalties and related income and invest it.
The fund’s principal could never be touched, barring a constitutional amendment, but Hammond strongly believed the earnings should go directly to residents. The self-styled “bush rat governor” had no interest in charity or wealth redistribution. Rather, influenced by consultants like Milton Friedman who advocated a federal basic income, he viewed recipients as shareholders that should benefit equally from ownership in “Alaska, Inc.” and could spend money more efficiently than the government. Hammond reasoned individual distributions would give the public a personal stake in keeping the fund safe—were politicians to fritter away or mismanage the savings, it would hit every resident right in the pocketbook. If oil was, in the words of OPEC’s founder, “the devil’s excrement,” breeding waste and corruption, Hammond argued a dividend would “at least halfway pin a “diaper'” on it.
As the young fund slowly built up principal, lawmakers debated how to spend the earnings. Most of them strongly opposed dividends, preferring to fund infrastructure or loans to small businesses. Many feared handouts would attract “freeloaders” to the state, or that people would stop working or waste money on frills and vices. But when oil prices soared after the Iranian revolution, there seemed to be enough revenue to go around. In 1980, legislators repealed individual income taxes and put the fund to use, enacting a dividend that would give every adult Alaskan $50 for each year they’d been a resident since statehood. The US Supreme Court ruled the seniority provision unconstitutional, so legislators replaced it with flat annual payouts, extending them to children and adding provisions that prevented recipients from losing federal public assistance because of any windfall. In 1982, Alaskans received their first checks of $1,000. It was the first time in contemporary history that a government had sent money to people just for living in its jurisdiction. (...)
Less than 150 miles from mainland Russia, the Iñupiaq village of Teller, population 228, sits at the base of a tiny sandspit on the edge of a bay bordering the Bering Sea. Unlike many Alaska Native villages, which are only accessible by plane or boat, Teller can be reached by a gravel road that winds through rust and ocher tundra meadows, interrupted by creeks and trampled by herds of reindeer and musk oxen. Beyond the beached skiffs and the sliced salmon draped over wooden racks, on Whale Street (if you hit Walrus Street or Sled Way, you’ve gone too far), a hand-painted sign marks the Teller Native Store, the only place in town selling groceries.
Inside on a Sunday afternoon, Albert Oquilluk lifted a freezer lid. Nothing but reindeer meat, at $14.49 a pound. “Usually, we just go out and get our own,” he said. Trailed by his six-year-old son, Urijah, he moved to a pair of refrigerators and peered at the racks. “No sausage, no bacon.” He threw a can of Spam in his shopping basket.
Most autumns, Oquilluk would have had stores of dried salmon at home, or he’d be out shooting ducks and geese. This year, he’d been lucky enough to land a temporary job as a heavy-equipment operator helping build a new dumping ground for the sewage that villagers collect in “honey buckets.” (Most homes don’t have plumbing or running water.) Normally, his only steady pay was a $125 monthly stipend for sitting on the tribal council, with some money on the side from plowing snow or driving people to clinic appointments. Oquilluk’s wife, Carolyn, works for the local government, but some years the family ends up on food stamps. The construction wages were a welcome boon, but he’d been working 10 hours a day, six days a week, since June. That left no time for fishing and hunting, which most villagers still do to supplement their diets.
Oquilluk is 48 with a round face and salt-and-pepper hair. He tossed a quart of ultra-pasteurized milk into the basket, then Krusteaz pancake mix, Sailor Boy Pilot Bread Crackers, Sun-Maid FruitBits, grape Kool-Aid, and 27 Otter Pops. Canned sweet potatoes, pickles, and pickled beets went in, too. There were no fresh fruits and vegetables—those had to be hauled or shipped from Nome, a small city about two hours away, or foraged in the form of wild berries or “beach greens.” Urijah sneaked some Goldfish crackers into the basket, and his father threw in a tin of beef jerky. The total for 11 items and the mess of Otter Pops came to $81.22.
The family’s dividends had arrived two days earlier and were paying for the groceries. All together, Oquilluk, his wife, and their four kids had gotten $9,600 after the cuts. Even given their flush year, that sum made up about 15 percent of their income. In leaner times, they needed the dividend to survive. Rural Alaska is expensive, with gas for their truck and boat costing more than $700 a month. Groceries top $1,000. This year, the money helped them buy things beyond the basics. Oquilluk and his wife had already spent about $2,000 on Amazon. They bought raw honey, kids’ clothing, boots, a boot dryer, a burger press, tongs, bowls, a come-along for hauling boats or marooned four-wheelers, a jigsaw for carving a traditional crescent-shaped knife called an ulu, a bucket seat cushion, a smartphone attachment for their spotting scope, and eight pounds of lard. They were thinking of splurging to send one of their daughters to attend tribal conferences in Anchorage.
Most importantly, they paid off some of the $5,000 plus late fees remaining on their loan for an 18-foot skiff and motor, which Oquilluk had bought so he could fish. “We’re almost three years overdue on payments. When they started cutting our PFDs, that’s when we couldn’t make a payment.”
The Oquilluks are better off than many of their neighbors in Teller, where almost 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line and income per capita is less than half the national median income. For some, the dividend is the only cash they get all year besides public assistance. Dividend checks play an amplified role in rural Alaska, with its isolation, lack of jobs, high living costs, and less reliable public services. Researchers at the University of Alaska-Anchorage estimate that eliminating dividends would increase the number of Alaska Natives living below the poverty line by about a third and boost poverty among elderly Native people in rural areas by 72 percent. Thanks to his job and the dividend, Oquilluk said, “we’re making ends meet.”
In some ways, the role the dividend plays in rural Alaska is similar to what advocates say a universal basic income could do: fill the gaps when there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Alaska’s dividend is not high enough to represent what advocates call a full basic income, defined as being enough to survive on and escape poverty, either on its own or combined with social services. But given that its payments are regular, unconditional, and doled out to virtually everyone, the Permanent Fund Dividend is the closest thing to an institutionalized universal basic income in the world today. For proponents of expanding the idea, the lessons are clear: Universal direct cash distributions work. And they become wildly popular once enacted, with beneficiaries even in an individualistic, conservative state finding ways to justify a government entitlement elsewhere embraced by radicals and leftists.
The boys’ father, 35-year-old Daniel Varner, sat at a tiny table in khaki overalls and work boots, jiggling his leg.
“It’s delivery mail, isn’t it?” he asked Hemlock.“Yeah, so it might be tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah, it’s not coming. I was thinking post office box.”
“It could.” Hemlock emitted the nervous laugh she reserves for her saddest stories. “I’m hopeful.”
Most of the family’s 52 neighbors at St. Vincent de Paul Society’s transitional housing shelter, a faded blue building on the outskirts of town, were also waiting for money.
It was October 4, and pretty much everyone in Alaska was expecting it, with varying degrees of impatience—$1,600 for every man, woman, and child. For nearly four decades, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program, designed to share revenue from the state’s oil wealth, has made flat annual payouts to anyone who has lived there for at least one calendar year, barring those with certain criminal convictions. While the program’s architects didn’t use the term, it’s the closest thing today to a universal basic income program that has durably existed anywhere in the world. (...)
Inadvertently, red-leaning and fiercely independent Alaska has become a global model for advocates of doling out “free money.” After visiting the state in July 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal basic-income booster, wrote in a Facebook post that the dividend provides “good lessons for the rest of our country.” The dividend has been a third rail in Alaskan politics for nearly four decades. But just as the hype around basic income is growing, the program is facing an existential threat. Plummeting oil revenue has left the resource-dependent state—the only one with no sales or personal income tax—with multibillion-dollar deficits. Even after dramatic spending cuts, savings reserves are dwindling. The local GOP establishment, with backing from wealthy corporate interests, has blocked virtually all attempts to generate new revenue through taxes. With money running out, elected officials have slashed annual checks in half, despite their popularity. In May, lawmakers voted for the first time to divert $1.7 billion away from dividends to pay directly for government spending. While imposing income taxes would affect the richest Alaskans most, smaller dividend checks, and the program’s uncertain future, are hitting low-income families hardest. (...)
The dividend’s origins are rooted less in idealism than in greed. In 1968, nearly a decade after Alaska joined the Union, the largest oil field in North America was discovered on its northern coast at Prudhoe Bay. Lease sales filled the young state’s coffers with $900 million, more than five times its annual budget. Within five years, the entire windfall was gone. Much of it paid for education and transportation projects, but some politicians and members of the public felt that spending had overinflated the bureaucracy. Jay Hammond, a trapper and fisherman elected governor in 1974, declared that the “nest egg” had been “scrambled.” He and other leaders decided the state ought to safeguard some oil revenue for future generations. In 1976, voters approved a constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund, a savings account that would be managed by a semi-independent, state-owned corporation and would take in at least a quarter of oil royalties and related income and invest it.
The fund’s principal could never be touched, barring a constitutional amendment, but Hammond strongly believed the earnings should go directly to residents. The self-styled “bush rat governor” had no interest in charity or wealth redistribution. Rather, influenced by consultants like Milton Friedman who advocated a federal basic income, he viewed recipients as shareholders that should benefit equally from ownership in “Alaska, Inc.” and could spend money more efficiently than the government. Hammond reasoned individual distributions would give the public a personal stake in keeping the fund safe—were politicians to fritter away or mismanage the savings, it would hit every resident right in the pocketbook. If oil was, in the words of OPEC’s founder, “the devil’s excrement,” breeding waste and corruption, Hammond argued a dividend would “at least halfway pin a “diaper'” on it.
As the young fund slowly built up principal, lawmakers debated how to spend the earnings. Most of them strongly opposed dividends, preferring to fund infrastructure or loans to small businesses. Many feared handouts would attract “freeloaders” to the state, or that people would stop working or waste money on frills and vices. But when oil prices soared after the Iranian revolution, there seemed to be enough revenue to go around. In 1980, legislators repealed individual income taxes and put the fund to use, enacting a dividend that would give every adult Alaskan $50 for each year they’d been a resident since statehood. The US Supreme Court ruled the seniority provision unconstitutional, so legislators replaced it with flat annual payouts, extending them to children and adding provisions that prevented recipients from losing federal public assistance because of any windfall. In 1982, Alaskans received their first checks of $1,000. It was the first time in contemporary history that a government had sent money to people just for living in its jurisdiction. (...)
Less than 150 miles from mainland Russia, the Iñupiaq village of Teller, population 228, sits at the base of a tiny sandspit on the edge of a bay bordering the Bering Sea. Unlike many Alaska Native villages, which are only accessible by plane or boat, Teller can be reached by a gravel road that winds through rust and ocher tundra meadows, interrupted by creeks and trampled by herds of reindeer and musk oxen. Beyond the beached skiffs and the sliced salmon draped over wooden racks, on Whale Street (if you hit Walrus Street or Sled Way, you’ve gone too far), a hand-painted sign marks the Teller Native Store, the only place in town selling groceries.
Inside on a Sunday afternoon, Albert Oquilluk lifted a freezer lid. Nothing but reindeer meat, at $14.49 a pound. “Usually, we just go out and get our own,” he said. Trailed by his six-year-old son, Urijah, he moved to a pair of refrigerators and peered at the racks. “No sausage, no bacon.” He threw a can of Spam in his shopping basket.
Most autumns, Oquilluk would have had stores of dried salmon at home, or he’d be out shooting ducks and geese. This year, he’d been lucky enough to land a temporary job as a heavy-equipment operator helping build a new dumping ground for the sewage that villagers collect in “honey buckets.” (Most homes don’t have plumbing or running water.) Normally, his only steady pay was a $125 monthly stipend for sitting on the tribal council, with some money on the side from plowing snow or driving people to clinic appointments. Oquilluk’s wife, Carolyn, works for the local government, but some years the family ends up on food stamps. The construction wages were a welcome boon, but he’d been working 10 hours a day, six days a week, since June. That left no time for fishing and hunting, which most villagers still do to supplement their diets.
Oquilluk is 48 with a round face and salt-and-pepper hair. He tossed a quart of ultra-pasteurized milk into the basket, then Krusteaz pancake mix, Sailor Boy Pilot Bread Crackers, Sun-Maid FruitBits, grape Kool-Aid, and 27 Otter Pops. Canned sweet potatoes, pickles, and pickled beets went in, too. There were no fresh fruits and vegetables—those had to be hauled or shipped from Nome, a small city about two hours away, or foraged in the form of wild berries or “beach greens.” Urijah sneaked some Goldfish crackers into the basket, and his father threw in a tin of beef jerky. The total for 11 items and the mess of Otter Pops came to $81.22.
The family’s dividends had arrived two days earlier and were paying for the groceries. All together, Oquilluk, his wife, and their four kids had gotten $9,600 after the cuts. Even given their flush year, that sum made up about 15 percent of their income. In leaner times, they needed the dividend to survive. Rural Alaska is expensive, with gas for their truck and boat costing more than $700 a month. Groceries top $1,000. This year, the money helped them buy things beyond the basics. Oquilluk and his wife had already spent about $2,000 on Amazon. They bought raw honey, kids’ clothing, boots, a boot dryer, a burger press, tongs, bowls, a come-along for hauling boats or marooned four-wheelers, a jigsaw for carving a traditional crescent-shaped knife called an ulu, a bucket seat cushion, a smartphone attachment for their spotting scope, and eight pounds of lard. They were thinking of splurging to send one of their daughters to attend tribal conferences in Anchorage.
Most importantly, they paid off some of the $5,000 plus late fees remaining on their loan for an 18-foot skiff and motor, which Oquilluk had bought so he could fish. “We’re almost three years overdue on payments. When they started cutting our PFDs, that’s when we couldn’t make a payment.”
The Oquilluks are better off than many of their neighbors in Teller, where almost 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line and income per capita is less than half the national median income. For some, the dividend is the only cash they get all year besides public assistance. Dividend checks play an amplified role in rural Alaska, with its isolation, lack of jobs, high living costs, and less reliable public services. Researchers at the University of Alaska-Anchorage estimate that eliminating dividends would increase the number of Alaska Natives living below the poverty line by about a third and boost poverty among elderly Native people in rural areas by 72 percent. Thanks to his job and the dividend, Oquilluk said, “we’re making ends meet.”
In some ways, the role the dividend plays in rural Alaska is similar to what advocates say a universal basic income could do: fill the gaps when there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Alaska’s dividend is not high enough to represent what advocates call a full basic income, defined as being enough to survive on and escape poverty, either on its own or combined with social services. But given that its payments are regular, unconditional, and doled out to virtually everyone, the Permanent Fund Dividend is the closest thing to an institutionalized universal basic income in the world today. For proponents of expanding the idea, the lessons are clear: Universal direct cash distributions work. And they become wildly popular once enacted, with beneficiaries even in an individualistic, conservative state finding ways to justify a government entitlement elsewhere embraced by radicals and leftists.
by Katia Savchuk, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. I was initially against the PFD and thought about framing my first check instead of cashing it back in 1982. That idea didn't last long (like, before I could even buy a picture frame). I do think the PFD has had a big effect on the state's diversity bringing in lots of Samoans, Filipinos and other cultures with extended close-knit families. What was really crazy though was the near simultaneous abolishment of a state income tax.]
[ed. I was initially against the PFD and thought about framing my first check instead of cashing it back in 1982. That idea didn't last long (like, before I could even buy a picture frame). I do think the PFD has had a big effect on the state's diversity bringing in lots of Samoans, Filipinos and other cultures with extended close-knit families. What was really crazy though was the near simultaneous abolishment of a state income tax.]
Jerry Brown’s Midnight in America
Nearly a half-century on the national stage surely entitles a leader to some valedictory words, and if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician one could easily imagine what those words might be:
Though the sun is setting on my time of public service, it will always be rising for this great state et cetera, et cetera, and though we face daunting challenges let me assure you that I have never been more optimistic about the endless promise of blah, blah, blah.
But if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician he would never have been on the national stage for a half-century. He would have been shooed off it several decades ago, to a chorus of mockery about his supposedly eccentric style and mournful commentary about faded promise and what might have been.
Instead, at age 80, Brown is leaving the governorship of the nation’s largest state in a few hours, at noon on Monday. If this departure seems a bit reluctant—he pauses slightly, before demurring when I ask him if he wishes he could keep his job—it is emphatically on his own terms. A leader who at times has been treated as a figure of ridicule has vindicated his place as one of the most serious people in American life across two generations.
During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.
How does he see the world in 2019? “Dangerous—and we’re lucky to be alive,” Brown said, his voice rising. “Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be in a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear.”
And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”
Brown has been reading lately about World War I and sees contemporary parallels between the inability of that generation’s elites to comprehend or control the forces thrusting civilization toward disaster: “I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking.”
Brown may be the most brooding of any major figure in American life, as arresting in its own way as President Donald Trump and his jeremiads about “American carnage.” He regards Trump as a dangerous fraud but also “a symptom” of “widespread estrangement” of people from institutions and leaders they no longer trust—a phenomenon he has observed and often agreed with for decades. He wasn’t surprised that Trump stood out from the “pabulum and predictability” that conventional candidates were offering in 2016.
The message is not “Morning in America,” to borrow the phrase of Brown’s immediate predecessor. Ronald Reagan, of course, after winning the governorship in 1974, went on to a job that Brown very much wanted.
Early in his career Brown was widely seen as an interesting figure but too young to be president. Then for a time he was seen as interesting but too weird. Now he is undeniably still an interesting figure—and, in key respects, at last powerfully in synch with the politics of the moment—but too old.
After years as a second-tier issue, climate change is finally moving to a central place in the Democratic debate; Brown has been a prominent voice on energy and environmental matters since the 1970s. Mistrust of big money and corrupt elites is now shaping the politics of both major parties; Brown has been offering a similar critique and promoting citizen empowerment for decades. At the same time, his emphasis on fiscal discipline has sometimes put him at odds with California liberals.
A couple hours before our interview, at an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, Brown said it was a mistake to run for president three times—“one too many times,” he lamented, of his bids in 1976, 1980 and 1992—and acknowledged a nugget of political wisdom he first learned from another governor, his father Pat Brown: “Everything is timing.” (...)
Brown belongs with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy as figures who shaped American politics in recent decades more than anyone who did not actually achieve the Oval Office.
It is a rare politician who could generate enthusiasm for offices so much lower than ones he has already held. Why was Brown not too proud for that? “Well, because I’m practical,” he told me. “My skills lie in the political domain. So, outside of office I have less to accomplish and less to do. … I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political and that’s why I pursued it.”
When he returned as governor eight years ago, Brown resolved that he would not be confined narrowly to state issues, and instead would use the office as a platform for existential issues affecting the planet, like climate change and the nuclear peril. He speaks often with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, for instance, and once burrowed away reviewing a book by Perry arguing that the nuclear catastrophe remains much more probable than people realize.
But Brown says he is not expecting these efforts to loom large in history. My colleagues have noted that Brown is allergic to the word “legacy,” a point he proved in the interview. “Who can remember the legacy?” he said, bristling at my question. “Presidents have legacies in ways that governors don’t. They don’t write the history of governors.”
What follows are excerpts of POLITICO’s conversation with outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Though the sun is setting on my time of public service, it will always be rising for this great state et cetera, et cetera, and though we face daunting challenges let me assure you that I have never been more optimistic about the endless promise of blah, blah, blah.
But if Jerry Brown were a conventional politician he would never have been on the national stage for a half-century. He would have been shooed off it several decades ago, to a chorus of mockery about his supposedly eccentric style and mournful commentary about faded promise and what might have been.
Instead, at age 80, Brown is leaving the governorship of the nation’s largest state in a few hours, at noon on Monday. If this departure seems a bit reluctant—he pauses slightly, before demurring when I ask him if he wishes he could keep his job—it is emphatically on his own terms. A leader who at times has been treated as a figure of ridicule has vindicated his place as one of the most serious people in American life across two generations.During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.
How does he see the world in 2019? “Dangerous—and we’re lucky to be alive,” Brown said, his voice rising. “Humankind has created—certainly since the invention of the atomic bomb, but also biological breakthroughs, cyber capacities—humankind has the capacity of vast, vast destruction, even the elimination of human beings themselves, all over the planet. That could be in a matter of days, certainly with the nuclear.”
And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”
Brown has been reading lately about World War I and sees contemporary parallels between the inability of that generation’s elites to comprehend or control the forces thrusting civilization toward disaster: “I find the metaphor most congenial to describing this problem is sleepwalking.”
Brown may be the most brooding of any major figure in American life, as arresting in its own way as President Donald Trump and his jeremiads about “American carnage.” He regards Trump as a dangerous fraud but also “a symptom” of “widespread estrangement” of people from institutions and leaders they no longer trust—a phenomenon he has observed and often agreed with for decades. He wasn’t surprised that Trump stood out from the “pabulum and predictability” that conventional candidates were offering in 2016.
The message is not “Morning in America,” to borrow the phrase of Brown’s immediate predecessor. Ronald Reagan, of course, after winning the governorship in 1974, went on to a job that Brown very much wanted.
Early in his career Brown was widely seen as an interesting figure but too young to be president. Then for a time he was seen as interesting but too weird. Now he is undeniably still an interesting figure—and, in key respects, at last powerfully in synch with the politics of the moment—but too old.
After years as a second-tier issue, climate change is finally moving to a central place in the Democratic debate; Brown has been a prominent voice on energy and environmental matters since the 1970s. Mistrust of big money and corrupt elites is now shaping the politics of both major parties; Brown has been offering a similar critique and promoting citizen empowerment for decades. At the same time, his emphasis on fiscal discipline has sometimes put him at odds with California liberals.
A couple hours before our interview, at an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club, Brown said it was a mistake to run for president three times—“one too many times,” he lamented, of his bids in 1976, 1980 and 1992—and acknowledged a nugget of political wisdom he first learned from another governor, his father Pat Brown: “Everything is timing.” (...)
Brown belongs with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy as figures who shaped American politics in recent decades more than anyone who did not actually achieve the Oval Office.
It is a rare politician who could generate enthusiasm for offices so much lower than ones he has already held. Why was Brown not too proud for that? “Well, because I’m practical,” he told me. “My skills lie in the political domain. So, outside of office I have less to accomplish and less to do. … I never saw my father work on a car. I never saw him pick up a hammer. I never saw him pick up a broom. But I did hear him talk. I did see him go to meetings. And so I learned the skills of the political and that’s why I pursued it.”
When he returned as governor eight years ago, Brown resolved that he would not be confined narrowly to state issues, and instead would use the office as a platform for existential issues affecting the planet, like climate change and the nuclear peril. He speaks often with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, for instance, and once burrowed away reviewing a book by Perry arguing that the nuclear catastrophe remains much more probable than people realize.
But Brown says he is not expecting these efforts to loom large in history. My colleagues have noted that Brown is allergic to the word “legacy,” a point he proved in the interview. “Who can remember the legacy?” he said, bristling at my question. “Presidents have legacies in ways that governors don’t. They don’t write the history of governors.”
What follows are excerpts of POLITICO’s conversation with outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown. The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
by John F. Harris, Politico | Read more:
Image: Stephen Lam/Getty
Must Writers Be Moral? Their Contracts May Require It
When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you’re likely to think that they’re on the same side — the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot DÃaz and Sherman Alexie?
One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”
That’s reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.
This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.
Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print. (...)
Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”
It’s not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, “I think it would have a very significant chilling effect.”
Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she wouldn’t sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Ms. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future Is History,” about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.
Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Ms. Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an out-of-control “moral panic” bent on policing sexual behavior by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Gessen said about the contract, “because I have in the past been vilified on social media.” Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added, “I know what it’s like to lose institutional support when you most need it.” (...)
Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.
Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile. (...)
The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot DÃaz and Sherman Alexie?
One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”That’s reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.
This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.
Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print. (...)
Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”
It’s not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, “I think it would have a very significant chilling effect.”
Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she wouldn’t sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Ms. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future Is History,” about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.
Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Ms. Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an out-of-control “moral panic” bent on policing sexual behavior by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Gessen said about the contract, “because I have in the past been vilified on social media.” Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added, “I know what it’s like to lose institutional support when you most need it.” (...)
Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.
Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile. (...)
The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.
Northwest Angle
Petition calls for U.S. to give Northwest Angle to Canada (CBC)
[ed. See also: Northwest Angle (Atlas Obscura)]
Sunday, January 6, 2019
What’s the Purpose of a Moose’s Long Nose?
A scientist from Ohio once pondered why moose have such long noses.
Why, one might ask, does a scientist from Ohio care? It can tell them about evolution, says Lawrence Witmer, a biologist and professor of anatomy at Ohio University. As part of a study of unusual noses on dinosaurs and modern animals, Witmer and his colleagues examined the enigmatic nose of the moose.
Because moose disappeared from Ohio long ago, Witmer looked farther north for help, and he found it in Newfoundland, Canada's easternmost province. There, workers for the Department of Natural Resources shipped him four frozen heads of road-killed moose.
With moose heads intact in his Athens, Ohio, lab, Witmer dissected the noses for a closer look, finding enough compelling information to write a paper published in the Journal of Zoology.
Before Witmer's study, scientists had speculated on why the moose might have evolved such a long nose while other members of the deer family have relatively short noses.
One argument was that a long nose could help a moose shed heat from its huge body after running long distances to avoid predators. Witmer and his co-workers found this adaptation unlikely because few blood vessels exist near the outside surface of a moose's nose.
Another reason a moose might have a big nose is to better sniff out predators or potential mates. Witmer found that idea had merit, and his attention soon turned to a moose's nostrils.
Just like a person's ears, a moose's large nostrils point in opposite directions. The wide spacing of moose nostrils might permit a moose to better locate smells, as our ears help us locate the direction of a sound and its distance.
Witmer couldn't rule out that moose use their unique nostrils for directional smelling, but all the complicated tissues that make up a moose's nostrils suggested moose use them for something more — a set of valves that close automatically underwater.
"Animals like horses, dogs and cats can't close their nostrils," Witmer said. "Closing your nostrils is a common aquatic adaptation, but you don't see it in other members of the deer family.”
When a moose dips its head under water, the difference between the water pressure and the air pressure causes the nostrils to close, Witmer said.
This adaptation, perhaps the main reason a moose's nose is so long, allows a moose to feed underwater without flooding its nose, an unpleasant sensation even for two-legged, short-nosed mammals like us.
Why, one might ask, does a scientist from Ohio care? It can tell them about evolution, says Lawrence Witmer, a biologist and professor of anatomy at Ohio University. As part of a study of unusual noses on dinosaurs and modern animals, Witmer and his colleagues examined the enigmatic nose of the moose.
Because moose disappeared from Ohio long ago, Witmer looked farther north for help, and he found it in Newfoundland, Canada's easternmost province. There, workers for the Department of Natural Resources shipped him four frozen heads of road-killed moose.
With moose heads intact in his Athens, Ohio, lab, Witmer dissected the noses for a closer look, finding enough compelling information to write a paper published in the Journal of Zoology.Before Witmer's study, scientists had speculated on why the moose might have evolved such a long nose while other members of the deer family have relatively short noses.
One argument was that a long nose could help a moose shed heat from its huge body after running long distances to avoid predators. Witmer and his co-workers found this adaptation unlikely because few blood vessels exist near the outside surface of a moose's nose.
Another reason a moose might have a big nose is to better sniff out predators or potential mates. Witmer found that idea had merit, and his attention soon turned to a moose's nostrils.
Just like a person's ears, a moose's large nostrils point in opposite directions. The wide spacing of moose nostrils might permit a moose to better locate smells, as our ears help us locate the direction of a sound and its distance.
Witmer couldn't rule out that moose use their unique nostrils for directional smelling, but all the complicated tissues that make up a moose's nostrils suggested moose use them for something more — a set of valves that close automatically underwater.
"Animals like horses, dogs and cats can't close their nostrils," Witmer said. "Closing your nostrils is a common aquatic adaptation, but you don't see it in other members of the deer family.”
When a moose dips its head under water, the difference between the water pressure and the air pressure causes the nostrils to close, Witmer said.
This adaptation, perhaps the main reason a moose's nose is so long, allows a moose to feed underwater without flooding its nose, an unpleasant sensation even for two-legged, short-nosed mammals like us.
by Ned Rozell, ADN | Read more:
Image: Ned Rozell
[ed. I thought it might be so they could nose around in deep snow.]
[ed. I thought it might be so they could nose around in deep snow.]
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Wagyu: Online Beef Sales Take Off
Plant-based cuisine was one of the biggest food trends of 2018. At the same time, beef sales were massive. Nielsen has reported that beef saw the biggest change in U.S. sales in the past few years, with almost 11 percent more pounds sold in 2018 than in 2015. Beef consumption is expected to continue to rise, to 58.8 pounds per person in 2019, 2.8 percent higher than last year, according to forecasts from the Cattle Site.
While 55 percent of Americans still buy their meat at full-service markets, a growing segment is shifting to the internet to find more specialized products. Online meat purchases have jumped from 4 percent in 2015 to 19 percent in 2018. There are three main reasons: Customers are looking for a product that’s higher-quality, sustainable, and traceable.
So while traditional retailers such as Kroger, Albertsons, and even Whole Foods have done little to innovate—course-correcting a brick-and-mortar chain is slow business—consumers are now a click away from the finest-grade beef and the most esoteric cuts, with that pinnacle of fat-marbled decadence, wagyu, leading the charge. Google searches for “wagyu beef” have more than tripled in the past four years.
“It was just a couple years ago that we would constantly get the ‘What is wagyu?’ question from consumers and cattlemen. Those days seem to be behind us,” says George Owen, executive director of the American Wagyu Association.
A quick wagyu primer: Although many people think it’s strictly a Japanese export, American wagyu dates back to the 1970s, when animals brought over from Japan were crossed with domestic breeds such as Angus and Holstein. Today’s American wagyu is predominantly crossbred with some, but not many, full-blood wagyu. Many believe that full-blood, Japanese-heritage wagyu has higher marbling and a richer flavor than its American counterpart. (Kobe beef is also from wagyu cattle but can only come from specific breeds from Japan’s Hyogo prefecture. Beware the words “Kobe-style.”)
The arbiter of our country’s meat quality has long been the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The government agency’s top rating is USDA prime, which comes from young beef cattle (traditionally grain-fed) with abundant marbling. But you won’t find much at your local supermarket. Instead, most markets offer a meat counter stocked with basics (with occasional nods to organic, grass-fed, or antibiotic-free) and a freezer stocked with commodity cuts such as ground beef and rump roast. (...)
Carrying niche products such as wagyu is a difficult stance for markets to take, says Darren Seifer, executive director at market researcher NPD Group. “Space is limited, and everything needs to fly off the shelves,” he says. “Online is more about what your distribution can handle.”
Online meat sales aren’t new. Omaha Steaks has been selling direct for a hundred years, but experts describe the company’s main products as more commodity than craft. Now its butchers are attempting to get with the program. In late 2018 they added four wagyu cuts, including a burger, rib-eye, New York strip, and filet mignon. So far “sales are exceeding expectations,” says Todd Simon, senior vice president and fifth-generation owner of Omaha Steaks.
Other sites have more fully embraced wagyu. “That [top-end] category formerly occupied by prime is now wagyu,” says Kurt Dammeier, chief executive officer of Seattle-based Mishima Reserve (as well as Beecher’s Handmade Cheese). He sells wagyu online from Japanese-heritage, full-blood Kuroge Washu bulls crossed with Angus cows from the western U.S. Costco, the rare exception among mass retailers, sells a 12-pound Japanese-imported wagyu for $1,280 online.
Another standout in direct-to-consumer meat is Crowd Cow, which started in 2015 and has already grown to reach annual sales well north of $10 million. Today it has more than 100 farms; steak arrives with the farmer’s name attached. Online you can learn how the animal was cared for and fed. At the apex of its assortment is “olive wagyu,” which comes from a ranch in Japan where the animals—only 2,200—are fed a special diet of Inawara rice straw, Italian ryegrass, and toasted and sweetened local olive pulp. The A5 olive wagyu tenderloin sells for about $400 per pound. The first time Crowd Cow listed it on its website, it sold out in 22 minutes. It’s one of the reasons Crowd Cow’s wagyu sales have grown fivefold since the company was launched.
“I think Crowd Cow is very clever,” says Andrew Gunther, executive director of A Greener World, a nonprofit focused on bringing more transparency to meat production. “If you’re selling on the internet, it’s about branding and marketing to your demographic,” he says. “They’ve done all the homework for the millennial.”
by Larissa Zimberoff, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Crowd Cow
While 55 percent of Americans still buy their meat at full-service markets, a growing segment is shifting to the internet to find more specialized products. Online meat purchases have jumped from 4 percent in 2015 to 19 percent in 2018. There are three main reasons: Customers are looking for a product that’s higher-quality, sustainable, and traceable.
So while traditional retailers such as Kroger, Albertsons, and even Whole Foods have done little to innovate—course-correcting a brick-and-mortar chain is slow business—consumers are now a click away from the finest-grade beef and the most esoteric cuts, with that pinnacle of fat-marbled decadence, wagyu, leading the charge. Google searches for “wagyu beef” have more than tripled in the past four years. “It was just a couple years ago that we would constantly get the ‘What is wagyu?’ question from consumers and cattlemen. Those days seem to be behind us,” says George Owen, executive director of the American Wagyu Association.
A quick wagyu primer: Although many people think it’s strictly a Japanese export, American wagyu dates back to the 1970s, when animals brought over from Japan were crossed with domestic breeds such as Angus and Holstein. Today’s American wagyu is predominantly crossbred with some, but not many, full-blood wagyu. Many believe that full-blood, Japanese-heritage wagyu has higher marbling and a richer flavor than its American counterpart. (Kobe beef is also from wagyu cattle but can only come from specific breeds from Japan’s Hyogo prefecture. Beware the words “Kobe-style.”)
The arbiter of our country’s meat quality has long been the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The government agency’s top rating is USDA prime, which comes from young beef cattle (traditionally grain-fed) with abundant marbling. But you won’t find much at your local supermarket. Instead, most markets offer a meat counter stocked with basics (with occasional nods to organic, grass-fed, or antibiotic-free) and a freezer stocked with commodity cuts such as ground beef and rump roast. (...)
Carrying niche products such as wagyu is a difficult stance for markets to take, says Darren Seifer, executive director at market researcher NPD Group. “Space is limited, and everything needs to fly off the shelves,” he says. “Online is more about what your distribution can handle.”
Online meat sales aren’t new. Omaha Steaks has been selling direct for a hundred years, but experts describe the company’s main products as more commodity than craft. Now its butchers are attempting to get with the program. In late 2018 they added four wagyu cuts, including a burger, rib-eye, New York strip, and filet mignon. So far “sales are exceeding expectations,” says Todd Simon, senior vice president and fifth-generation owner of Omaha Steaks.
Other sites have more fully embraced wagyu. “That [top-end] category formerly occupied by prime is now wagyu,” says Kurt Dammeier, chief executive officer of Seattle-based Mishima Reserve (as well as Beecher’s Handmade Cheese). He sells wagyu online from Japanese-heritage, full-blood Kuroge Washu bulls crossed with Angus cows from the western U.S. Costco, the rare exception among mass retailers, sells a 12-pound Japanese-imported wagyu for $1,280 online.
Another standout in direct-to-consumer meat is Crowd Cow, which started in 2015 and has already grown to reach annual sales well north of $10 million. Today it has more than 100 farms; steak arrives with the farmer’s name attached. Online you can learn how the animal was cared for and fed. At the apex of its assortment is “olive wagyu,” which comes from a ranch in Japan where the animals—only 2,200—are fed a special diet of Inawara rice straw, Italian ryegrass, and toasted and sweetened local olive pulp. The A5 olive wagyu tenderloin sells for about $400 per pound. The first time Crowd Cow listed it on its website, it sold out in 22 minutes. It’s one of the reasons Crowd Cow’s wagyu sales have grown fivefold since the company was launched.
“I think Crowd Cow is very clever,” says Andrew Gunther, executive director of A Greener World, a nonprofit focused on bringing more transparency to meat production. “If you’re selling on the internet, it’s about branding and marketing to your demographic,” he says. “They’ve done all the homework for the millennial.”
by Larissa Zimberoff, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Crowd Cow
World War II Enigma Cipher Machine Up for Auction
World War II Enigma cipher machine up for auction (Boing Boing)
[ed. For a fascinating (and entertaining) historical fiction account of Enigma's development and use in WWII read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.]
Childhood's End
All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.
The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?
Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.
Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.
Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.
Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well.
The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?
Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.
Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.
Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well.
by George Dyson, Edge | Read more:
Why (Some) Humans Are Born to Have a Beer Belly
It’s that time of the year when a middle-aged person’s fancy turns to treadmills and diets. Scientific literature on excess weight and health is expanding along with global waistlines, and yet, it’s hard to find a solid, coherent scientific explanation for why some people get fat and others don’t, and why some overweight people get Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and others don’t.
Here in the U.S., beliefs about fat follow a science-y sounding quasi-religious narrative: Our prehistoric ancestors had to scramble for food, and therefore evolved voracious appetites that we’ve inherited like original sin. Only self-control can save us, and the association between fat and disease goes without question; it is seen as punishment for the sins of gluttony and sloth.
This narrative acknowledges evolution, but it’s not real evolutionary biology. This week, however, a real evolutionary biologist published a sweeping picture of human fat and health in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While traditional medical research tends to make very narrow hypotheses and test them with specific data, evolutionary biology often works as an observational science, seeking patterns that tie together and explain lots of diverse observations and measurements. Think Charles Darwin, or the big bang theory in cosmology.
The biologist, Mary Jane West-Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Costa Rica, has focused her work on understanding biological variation. Sometimes individuals with the same genes can show dramatic differences; a queen bee and her workers share the same genes but very different fates. A butterfly born at one time of year may live many times longer than those born in other seasons. Some fish can even change sex in response to changes in the environment.
She proposes that the same biological principle can explain why humans come in quite different shapes. Some people put on so-called visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, while others put on so-called subcutaneous fat on the limbs, hips and elsewhere. This makes a big difference in health because recent studies show it’s the visceral fat that’s associated with Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Because she’s interested in the functions of things, she looked into visceral fat — also known as the omentum, a part of the immune system. It wraps around the vital organs and protects them from infection. But what’s protective early in life can have a downside later. Our natural immune response often involves inflammation, and that has been associated with Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease. The omentum, she said, is the Rosetta stone of pathogenic obesity.
Why then do some people get an expanding omentum and others get "curves" or whatever the latest fashion calls attractively placed subcutaneous fat? She cites other biologists pointing to sexual selection as the driving force in the human tendency to put fat deposits in places where they serve as ornaments.
Her analysis of the data suggests that where your fat goes depends on how well fed you were as a fetus. It’s those who are most undernourished in utero — approximated by low birth weight — who are most likely to accumulate visceral fat in the abdomen. Underweight, badly nourished babies are more vulnerable to infection and benefit from the short-term strategy of laying down protective visceral fat. The pattern is set by epigenetics — chemical changes surrounding the DNA that determine which genes become activated in which tissues.
Here in the U.S., beliefs about fat follow a science-y sounding quasi-religious narrative: Our prehistoric ancestors had to scramble for food, and therefore evolved voracious appetites that we’ve inherited like original sin. Only self-control can save us, and the association between fat and disease goes without question; it is seen as punishment for the sins of gluttony and sloth.
This narrative acknowledges evolution, but it’s not real evolutionary biology. This week, however, a real evolutionary biologist published a sweeping picture of human fat and health in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.While traditional medical research tends to make very narrow hypotheses and test them with specific data, evolutionary biology often works as an observational science, seeking patterns that tie together and explain lots of diverse observations and measurements. Think Charles Darwin, or the big bang theory in cosmology.
The biologist, Mary Jane West-Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Costa Rica, has focused her work on understanding biological variation. Sometimes individuals with the same genes can show dramatic differences; a queen bee and her workers share the same genes but very different fates. A butterfly born at one time of year may live many times longer than those born in other seasons. Some fish can even change sex in response to changes in the environment.
She proposes that the same biological principle can explain why humans come in quite different shapes. Some people put on so-called visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, while others put on so-called subcutaneous fat on the limbs, hips and elsewhere. This makes a big difference in health because recent studies show it’s the visceral fat that’s associated with Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Because she’s interested in the functions of things, she looked into visceral fat — also known as the omentum, a part of the immune system. It wraps around the vital organs and protects them from infection. But what’s protective early in life can have a downside later. Our natural immune response often involves inflammation, and that has been associated with Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease. The omentum, she said, is the Rosetta stone of pathogenic obesity.
Why then do some people get an expanding omentum and others get "curves" or whatever the latest fashion calls attractively placed subcutaneous fat? She cites other biologists pointing to sexual selection as the driving force in the human tendency to put fat deposits in places where they serve as ornaments.
Her analysis of the data suggests that where your fat goes depends on how well fed you were as a fetus. It’s those who are most undernourished in utero — approximated by low birth weight — who are most likely to accumulate visceral fat in the abdomen. Underweight, badly nourished babies are more vulnerable to infection and benefit from the short-term strategy of laying down protective visceral fat. The pattern is set by epigenetics — chemical changes surrounding the DNA that determine which genes become activated in which tissues.
by Faye Flam, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Sean Gallup/Getty
We Need to Keep Laughing
We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.
We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.
We need to restrain a toddler in chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.
But also, we need to laugh.
There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a cabinet meeting?
Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Mr. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.
People, this is our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Mr. Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone. A Scot called Mr. Trump a “tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing … gibbon.”
Or take it from the Finns. When the president suggested that wildfires could be prevented by raking our forests, as he imagined the Finns did, these people showed that their reputation for humorlessness is wrong. Among the best pictures tweeted out by the Finns was that of a woman taking a vacuum to the forest floor.
Mr. Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It’s the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Mr. Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Mr. Trump.
The mockery gets to him because deep down, he knows he’s a fraud. “The Art of the Deal” was the invention of its ghostwriter. “The Apprentice” was complete fiction. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, recently told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king.” (...)
Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, “Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?” Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.’”
Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless ’em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.
So it’s encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall — please, it’s the source of our government shutdown. It’s not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It’s nothing, at this point. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” as Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.
Nancy Pelosi, the new — and this time around, well-fortified — speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. “He’s now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.” Not bad. Keep it up.
We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.We need to restrain a toddler in chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.
But also, we need to laugh.
There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a cabinet meeting?
Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Mr. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.
People, this is our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Mr. Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone. A Scot called Mr. Trump a “tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing … gibbon.”
Or take it from the Finns. When the president suggested that wildfires could be prevented by raking our forests, as he imagined the Finns did, these people showed that their reputation for humorlessness is wrong. Among the best pictures tweeted out by the Finns was that of a woman taking a vacuum to the forest floor.
Mr. Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It’s the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Mr. Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Mr. Trump.
The mockery gets to him because deep down, he knows he’s a fraud. “The Art of the Deal” was the invention of its ghostwriter. “The Apprentice” was complete fiction. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, recently told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king.” (...)
Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, “Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?” Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.’”
Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless ’em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.
So it’s encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall — please, it’s the source of our government shutdown. It’s not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It’s nothing, at this point. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” as Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.
Nancy Pelosi, the new — and this time around, well-fortified — speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. “He’s now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.” Not bad. Keep it up.
by Timothy Egan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Will Heath/NBC
[ed. See also: Pelosi Says She Will Skip Trump and Negotiate Directly with Putin (New Yorker)]
[ed. See also: Pelosi Says She Will Skip Trump and Negotiate Directly with Putin (New Yorker)]
Friday, January 4, 2019
The AOC Dance
[ed. She really bugs them (along with Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren). Do visit the Twitter site: AOC Dances to Every Song, it's great. (I like the Earth, Wind and Fire version myself). See also: That Viral Video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Is a Meta-Meme (Wired).]
Thursday, January 3, 2019
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