Numb to Corruption: How the GOP Trained Its Base Not to Care

With great fanfare, the New York Times published a major feature on Tuesday headlined "Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him." This investigative report chronicled a truly breathtaking pattern of Donald Trump acting about as guilty and corrupt as a human being can: Firing anyone he fears might expose him, hiring loyalists and pressuring them to cover up for him, encouraging associates to commit perjury on his behalf, intimidating witnesses, lobbing false accusations, bullying congressmen into covering for him -- the list goes on.

Anyone who dropped into American politics after having been out of it for the past five years would be floored, wondering how on earth Trump and his associates aren't in jail already. But for most people who read the article, the takeaway is quite different: It's useful to have a thorough accounting of the horrors at the halfway point of this current hellish journey, but this journalistic behemoth will change nothing.

Anyone who wasn't already convinced that Trump is a corrupt criminal will be unmoved. We still have to wait to find out whether Trump has lost even the tiny fraction of voters necessary to kick him out of office in 2020. We've got two more years of this: Stories about Trump's corruption and criminality that should shock everyone but won't, Trump voters blithely dismissing the overwhelming evidence against him as "fake news" and people who see the truth standing by, helpless to change things.

The Times reporters grasp this reality, noting in the article that "many Americans have lost track of how unusual" Trump's behavior has been. Since much of his obstruction of justice occurs right out in the open, it may not seem as criminal and conspiratorial as it actually is.

No doubt, as the Times reporters argue, "the president’s brazen public behavior" has numbed the public to the seriousness of the situation, which is no doubt exactly what Trump is hoping for. But Trump's own behavior, and even the behavior of those Republicans who actively cover up for him, is only part of the story. In truth, Republicans have been priming their voters for decades to accept, defend and even adore a shameless criminal in the White House.

The key to Trump's defense with his base, I would argue, is not that he tries to convince them he's innocent, at least not in the traditional sense of "someone who didn't do the crimes he's suspected of." Instead, the strategy is to suggest that all politicians are corrupt, everyone is complicit and therefore all investigations are just bad-faith power grabs conducted for purely partisan reasons.

That strategy is working with Trump's base because that's exactly the message Republicans have been instilling in their voters for decades.

First, Republicans normalized the idea that all politicians are corrupt by electing a series of deeply corrupt politicians themselves. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all been warm-up acts to Trump. Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion: Every one of those presidents helped train their voters to defend political corruption if it was conducted for supposedly meritorious ends.

With Watergate -- a bush-league burglary gone wrong -- the training wheels hadn't come off. But by the time Bush administration lies had led us into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq, your average conservative had not only become adept at making excuses for political corruption, but had fully accepted that doing so is a normal and expected aspect of supporting the Republican Party. It's honestly not that big a leap from defending the corrupt Bush administration to defending the corrupt Trump administration.

Second, Republican politicians trained their base to think of investigations as bad-faith political power grabs by themselves using investigations primarily, if not solely, for this purpose. Ever since the Bill Clinton presidency, Republicans have invented a steady stream of Democratic "scandals" to gin up fake umbrage, from Whitewater and Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky to whatever the hell was supposed to be scandalous about "Benghazi."

(A note for the #MeToo era: Whatever you might think about Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, which was clearly inappropriate behavior, it's safe to say that Republican outrage over it was in bad faith.)

All these endless, pointless investigations and scandal-mongering over Democratic behavior that wasn't corrupt, much less criminal, has primarily served to indoctrinate the conservative masses into believing that "investigations" are never truly serious, but just a tool for partisans trying to score political points. They are now throughly primed to interpret the investigations into Trump's very real corruption as nothing more than Democrats seeking revenge for decades of mistreatment by Republican hacks.

That's why polls that measure whether Republican voters "believe" Trump is telling the truth are somewhat beside the point. The real problem is that they don't believe it matters whether Trump is a criminal, and even the proverbial "smoking gun" wouldn't shake them from that belief.

The polling data that's more useful is data showing the surge in Republican support for Russia and belief that Russia is an "ally" since Trump's election. Which is to say that the increasing evidence that Russian intelligence interfered with the American election, and attempted to bribe a candidate into ending sanctions levied on Russia for human rights violations, has only made Republicans love the Russians even more. That isn't the result of ignorance. It's evidence of a widespread belief that criminality is no problem if it helps their team win.

by Amanda Marcotte, Salon |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: The Red Menace is Real (Jacobin):

One of the luckiest breaks for the United States, and indeed the world, was that Trump never actually governed as the populist he pretended to be. (...)

Had Trump passed some version of universal health care, he would have probably secured a second term, increased the GOP’s domination of Congress, and left the Democrats wandering the political desert for a generation in the political realignment that followed.]

The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits

Will the Colorado run dry?

The beginnings of the mighty Colorado River on the west slope of Rocky Mountain National Park are humble. A large marsh creates a small trickle of a stream at La Poudre Pass, and thus begins the long, labyrinthine 1,450-mile journey of one of America’s great waterways.

Several miles later, in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Kawuneeche Valley, the Colorado River Trail allows hikers to walk along its course and, during low water, even jump across it. This valley is where the nascent river falls prey to its first diversion — 30 percent of its water is taken before it reaches the stream to irrigate distant fields.

The Never Summer Mountains tower over the the valley to the west. Cut across the face of these glacier-etched peaks is the Grand Ditch, an incision visible just above the timber line. The ditch collects water as the snow melts and, because it is higher in elevation than La Poudre Pass, funnels it 14 miles back across the Continental Divide, where it empties it into the headwaters of the Cache La Poudre River, which flows on to alfalfa and row crop farmers in eastern Colorado. Hand dug in the late 19th century with shovels and picks by Japanese crews, it was the first trans-basin diversion of the Colorado.

Many more trans-basin diversions of water from the west side of the divide to the east would follow. That’s because 80 percent of the water that falls as snow in the Rockies here drains to the west, while 80 percent of the population resides on the east side of the divide.

The Colorado River gathers momentum in western Colorado, sea-green and picking up a good deal of steam in its confluence with the Fraser, Eagle, and Gunnison rivers. As it leaves Colorado and flows through Utah, it joins forces with the Green River, a major tributary, which has its origins in the dwindling glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, the second largest glacier field in the lower 48 states.

The now sediment-laden Colorado (“too thick to drink, too thin to plow” was the adage about such rivers) gets reddish here, and earns its name – Colorado means “reddish.” It heads in a southwestern direction through the slick rock of Utah and northern Arizona, including its spectacular run through the nearly 280-mile-long Grand Canyon, and then on to Las Vegas where it makes a sharp turn south, first forming the border of Nevada and Arizona and then the border of California and Arizona until it reaches the Mexican border. There the Morelos Dam — half of it in Mexico and half in the United States — captures the last drops of the Colorado’s flow, and sends it off to Mexican farmers to irrigate alfalfa, cotton, and asparagus, and to supply Mexicali, Tecate, and other cities and towns with water.

While there are verdant farm fields south of the border here, it comes at a cost. The expansive Colorado River Delta — once a bird- and wildlife-rich oasis nourished by the river that Aldo Leopold described as a land of “a hundred green lagoons” — goes begging for water. And there is not a drop left to flow to the historic finish line at the Gulf of California, into which, long ago, the Colorado used to empty.

Nature, in fact, has been given short shrift all along the 1,450-mile-long Colorado. In order to support human life in the desert and near-desert through which it runs, the river is one of the most heavily engineered waterways in the world. Along its route, water is stored and siphoned, routed and piped, with a multi-billion dollar plumbing system — a “Cadillac Desert,” as Marc Reisner put it in the title of his landmark 1986 book. There are 15 large dams on the main stem of the river, and hundreds more on the tributaries.

The era of tapping the Colorado River, though, is coming to a close. This muddy river is one of the most contentious in the country — and growing more so by the day. It serves some 40 million people, and far more of its water is promised to users than flows between its banks — even in the best water years. And millions more people are projected to be added to the population served by the Colorado by 2050.

The hard lesson being learned is that even with the Colorado’s elaborate plumbing system, nature cannot be defied. If the over-allocation of the river weren’t problem enough, its best flow years appear to be behind it. The Colorado River Basin has been locked in the grip of a nearly unrelenting drought since 2000, and the two great water savings accounts on the river — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — are at all-time lows. An officially announced crisis could be at hand in the coming months.

Meanwhile the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California, and Nevada — have, despite much debate, been unable to come up with a Drought Contingency Plan to keep water in Lake Mead below levels that would trigger a crisis and lead to mandatory cuts in water. And if the states do not agree on a plan by the end of this month, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman says she will step in and force hard decisions.

There are large, existential questions facing the 40 million people who depend on the river — there simply is not enough water for all who depend on it, and there will likely soon be even less.

by Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360 |  Read more:

Image: Ted Wood

[ed. First in a series.]

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity, according to which the objects exert a pull on each other. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space, which the objects distort. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.

“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” Feynman said. What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,” Feynman said. “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. In everyday reality, it’s strange to imagine that objects move by “choosing” the easiest path. (How does a falling rock know which trajectory to take before it gets going?) But, a century ago, when physicists began to make experimental observations about the strange behavior of elementary particles, only the least-action interpretation of motion proved conceptually compatible. A whole new mathematical language—quantum mechanics—had to be developed to describe particles’ probabilistic ability to play out all possibilities and take the easiest path most frequently. Of the various classical laws of motion—all workable, all useful—only the principle of least action also extends to the quantum world. (...)

Whether these researchers are on the right track or not, the web of explanations of reality exists. Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Take general relativity. Physicists know that Einstein’s theory is incomplete. Yet it is a spectacular artifice, with a spare, taut mathematical structure. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can’t take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure. What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it’s bound to be superseded?

It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.

by Natalie Wolchover, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Lennard Kok

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dos Cabezas, 1982
via:

Benihana and the Question of Cultural Appropriation

I love Benihana.

It isn’t the food that does it for me; not the USDA Choice steak and certainly not the chicken (though I’ll admit I’m a sucker for shrimp of any kind, for Benihana’s bad dipping sauces, for the mushrooms that are invariably over- and undercooked at the same time). It isn’t even the exuberant faux friendliness of the service, even if I get a little thrill of excitement whenever the entire floor staff gathers ‘round to sing happy birthday to a table twice, once in English and another in perfunctory if adequate Japanese.

Even though I’ll happily eat a plate of food cut into scat-sized bits or clap along with the staff and their birthday song, and will even, if the spirit calls to me—and it has, frequently—pipe up in Japanese when the time comes, what I love about Benihana is more intangible than the food served or the ambience or the reasonable-for-Manhattan drink prices and specials.

It isn’t even the outright wackiness—the flying shrimp tails or the onion volcano or the egg juggling or any of the other cooking acrobatics.

No, it’s the bare, brutal honesty of the whole experience. I don’t just mean the upselling is as clear as the bland onion soup served with your meal. It’s that every restaurant does what Benihana does but more sneakily and less efficiently; it’s that Benihana murdered the preciousness of the “chef’s table” and cooked it up along with shrimp long before the “chef’s table” ever existed; it’s that Benihana understands most people don’t go out just to eat, just to drink, just for the show; it’s that Benihana knows most people just want a good time, and it only exists to give it to them quickly—no matter how large your group, no matter how many yelling kids, no matter how many drinks you’ve had or ordered, you’re in and out in less time than it takes to see a movie. That is why I admire the man who came up with the concept that Benihana perfected and thereby spawned a legion of copycat “hibachi” Japanese steakhouses across the world.

Now, I don’t usually sit around and think about Benihana and why it’s good, although I often sit around and think about why other restaurants I go to are bad. Which is another way of saying I’ve never found Benihana offensive in the slightest, even though I can’t really say I enjoy the food. But this past summer, social media conspired against my studied complacency about examining the Benihana experience too closely. A reporter tweeted out a photo posted by Donald Trump Jr. on his Instagram: a snap of some fried rice shaped into “I <3 U” on a griddle, over which Trump had typed, incomprehensibly, “My culture is not your fried rice ‘I love you’ with a beating heart sign!!! [crying laughing emoji] #culturalappropriation.”

Oh, no! Politics! In food! In restaurants! And even worse I realized it was possible that all along, over the years—even as I laughed and clapped along as countless Benihana cooks scootched a stack of onions spouting steam across what might as well have been the same flattop, a flattop so long it could very well span my 35 years, and said, or yelled, or merely observed as they are obviously required to: “A choo-choo train”—I had been the unwitting accomplice in some form of awful appropriation of my culture, my culture as a half-Japanese person, yes, but more importantly, my culture as a Japanese-American. (...)

The transformation of the popular conception of Japanese culture in this country from the World War II era to the present is entirely unique. Japan was once an enemy so menacing that it warranted putting its emigrants in concentration camps; now it exists as a kind of benign oddity in the American mind. Today, the Japanese are widely known for their food, their cleanliness, their attention to detail, their customer service, and their comics and cartoons, which serve to reinforce the image of Japan as a pleasant, albeit weird, place populated with correspondingly weird and pleasant people—a caricature that is about two parts Marie Kondo, one part Jiro Ono, and one part Haruki Murakami.

This caricature is relentlessly reinforced by the country's admirers in the Western press. We are told the Japanese are just so positive or that we Americans would do well to emulate them, despite regular news reports about the society's deeply ingrained misogyny, exploitative work culture, and the rampant xenophobia that finds its expression in its suicidally exclusionary immigration policies, which is why it’s held up as an exemplar by ethno-nationalists the world over. And let’s not forget the jingoism evident in the pilgrimages and tributes sent by Japanese heads of state to a shrine dedicated to the few token war criminals prosecuted in the aftermath of World War II, which justifiably enrages Japan's neighbors.

All of which is to say, Japan is a complicated country with a troubled culture, but for most Americans, it is merely the source of products that they are willing to pay a premium to possess, not because they are technologically more advanced or qualitatively better, but because they have a certain aesthetic, whether it’s animated cartoons, middle-brow fiction, or scented oil dispensers guaranteed to spark joy for years to come.

Nowhere is this tendency to overvalue Japanese-ness more evident than in restaurant culture, which is why it would be silly for Benihana to ditch any references to its legitimately Japanese origin, even if it doesn’t need them. Japanese stuff sells, and it would be malpractice for any restaurateur not to take advantage of the fact that many Americans are more willing to spend money on “small plates” at an “izakaya” than on bar food at a restaurant and bar.

by Sho Spaeth, Serious Eats |  Read more:

Image: Vicky Wasik

Harry Nilsson

[ed. See also: A Whale's Afterlife (New Yorker).]

What Happened When I Bought a House With Solar Panels

On a rare rainy day early last year, my husband, Alex, and I toured what, with any luck, would become the most exciting and daunting purchase of our lives: a cream-colored bungalow-style fixer-upper, built in 1924, a few blocks from our rental in Santa Barbara, Calif. What the house lacked in curb appeal, it more than made up for in charm and utility: the original built-in cupboards in the dining room, the way the light streamed in from copious windows, the fenced backyard for our wirehaired mutt. Moldy linoleum in the bathroom would be easy to rip up. A shower head inexplicably hanging above the kitchen sink would be easy to rip out. The location was a big draw, as was, at least initially, the fact that the red pitched roof of the two-car garage was outfitted with 17 solar panels. We’d get to do our bit for the planet.

The solar array was a modern addition to a property that otherwise hadn’t changed much since 1950, when the late owner, Michael “Jug” Jogoleff, moved into the home’s 948 square feet as a preschooler with his mother and aunt, transplants from Iowa. He never moved again. He grew tall and barrel-chested and remained a lifelong bachelor, becoming a neighborhood fixture who organized block parties. His décor reflected his obsession with all things electronic, in particular ham radio. “Radios and computers were packed into every available square inch of space he could find,” and “his roof bristled with every form of antenna,” Santa Barbara’s amateur radio club wrote after he died of cancer at the age of 70 in January 2017. “He was the consummate ‘ham’ and could build anything—and did! Amateur radio has lost one of the last of the ‘real hams.’”

Two days after walking through Jug’s ham shack, we made an offer. A week later, just before we entered escrow, we learned the solar array hadn’t belonged to Jug. It was, in the language of the industry, a third-party-owner, or TPO, system, belonging to Sunrun Inc., the largest provider of residential solar in the U.S. I started looking into the TPO model. It’s used less often than it once was, but it’s been important in making residential solar, once out of reach for most people, much more widespread. The reason is simple: Homeowners usually pay nothing upfront. A company like Sunrun puts solar panels on your roof, connects them to your home, and claims a tax benefit for owning the system. Going forward, you pay Sunrun to provide the bulk of your electricity needs instead of your utility.

I’d soon learn that the system was tied to the title of the house. It appeared that if we bought Jug’s place, we’d have to assume his lease arrangement with Sunrun. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this as a buyer, but it definitely piqued my curiosity as a journalist. I set out to examine the value proposition carefully.

A Sunrun customer service representative told me that in the year before he went solar, Jug’s monthly bill to Southern California Edison averaged $115. Under the terms of his deal, he paid $75 a month to Sunrun. The panels on his garage were expected to cover 85 percent of his energy needs. That left him reliant on SoCal Edison for the remaining 15 percent, at a cost of about $17 a month. All in, his energy bills came to about $92, a savings of about $23 a month.

I got ahold of a copy of Jug’s contract, and quickly saw how Sunrun could afford to extend such an offer. It lasted 20 years. The payments escalated annually by 2.9 percent—they’d be 72 percent higher by 2036. The tax credit was worth at least $5,000. (...)

I asked Sunrun if it would take back the system to put it on someone else’s house. It wouldn’t. The only way to get out from under the obligation, as far as we could tell, was to prepay the balance on the remaining 18-plus years’ worth of payments and buy the hardware outright. The price: $27,300.

By mid-February, we’d reached a standstill. We wouldn’t complete the deal if it meant taking on the obligation to Sunrun. The trust managing Jug’s assets for his heirs was refusing to buy out the system. Sunrun was blocking the sale via a document called a UCC filing, which showed the company had a financial claim on the property. (Sunrun disputes how consumer advocates characterize UCC filings: “effective liens.”) Our lender was refusing to fund our loan without a resolution.

I began to grieve, and then felt like a materialistic jerk for getting so attached to a wooden box. It wasn’t that simple, of course. By then, the house represented the place where Alex and I would—maybe with a child or two one day—build our future.

A few months later, regulators would vote to make California the first U.S. state to require solar panels on almost all new homes starting in 2020—meaning TPO solar will soon become a lot more common in California. (The shares of Sunrun and its competitors soared on the news.) That’s bound to further complicate the homebuying economy as at least some buyers—or the buyers after them—make the same calculations Alex and I did. (...)

Offering rooftop solar setups worth tens of thousands of dollars for no money down requires weaving an intricate financial web. The monthly payments in 20-year contracts provide Sunrun with future streams of cash flow, but acquiring customers, procuring hardware, and paying installers (and executives) require money today. Government incentives are key, especially the federal Investment Tax Credit, which allows owners to deduct 30 percent of the cost of a rooftop system from their federal taxes.

The structure of tax incentives in the U.S. also helps explain why it’s the only country where the TPO model has thrived. Homeowners elsewhere buy rooftop solar systems outright, and for much cheaper; Americans pay twice as much as their global peers. Australia and other countries offer substantial upfront subsidies or rebates—at one point, the Australian subsidies covered some 80 percent of the cost of a typical system. (They now cover about a third of the cost, which is falling.) In the U.S., by contrast, homeowners who buy systems outright can’t claim the credits until the next time they file their taxes, and then only if they owe the government at least as much as the value of the credit. (Currently the credit can be spread over multiple years.) That and other factors play to the strengths of Sunrun.

Sunrun finances its initial costs by taking on debt and raising capital from what are called tax equity investors. Only a few dozen companies have the appetite for tax credits and financial sophistication to be in this pool, including Google, JPMorgan Chase, and General Electric, says Joe Osha, an analyst who covers energy technology at JMP Securities LLC. They invest in Sunrun not to generate significant cash returns but to reap tax benefits: By assuming ownership of thousands of solar systems they can claim the credits and thus lower their tax bills from other economic activities. Hugh Bromley, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF, says Sunrun and its competitors offer solar, sure, but can be better understood as having created “one of the most sophisticated financial engineering industries of any sector of the U.S. economy.”

by Esmé E. Deprez, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Finding Home in a Parking Lot

Jamie used to wake up most nights with a flashlight in his face. From the backseat bed he’d winnowed into his SUV, he’d look up to see a police officer rapping on his window. Keep driving, they’d tell him. But Jamie didn’t have anywhere to drive. “I asked them repeatedly, ‘Isn’t there somewhere I can go where it’s not going to be a problem with you?’”

For Jamie, who turned 55 last month, the car was his only destination: It’s where he’s slept for most of the past two years, he says, save a 6-month stint he spent “in the bushes.” After the retail music store he’d worked at for eight years went out of business, he got evicted from his apartment in San Diego, and crashed with friends and family until their goodwill ran out. Then he got a new temporary job as a flooring installer, and the job came with a car. When the gig was over, his employer let him keep the vehicle. And then it became his sanctuary.

Jamie is one of thousands of America’s homeless who, instead of turning to shelters or the streets, live in their cars, vans, and RVs. In many cities where housing prices are high, their ranks, too, are growing. Los Angeles, which reported falling homelessness rates this year, still hosts one of the largest populations in the country: Of the 50,000 total homeless residents, the majority are unsheltered, and about a quarter (or 15,700) are based in their cars. In San Diego County, where Jamie still lives, a January 2018 homeless count found that 1,262 residents lived in vehicles there, although the number is likely higher, because it didn’t include people living in RVs. And in the King County area, where Seattle is located, the entire unsheltered population increased by 15 percent between 2017 and 2018. In that same year, the number of those in their cars leapt 46 percent, to reach 3,372.

Lifting people out of unsheltered homelessness is a challenge that each city is tackling differently—building more, and more affordable, housing; increasing the number of shelter beds; strengthening mental health treatment; softening eviction laws.

But a new cadre of “safe parking” programs are cropping up across the West Coast, too, aimed at carving out space and security for the people homeless services haven’t yet reached.

The first official Safe Parking program was launched in Santa Barbara in 2004, when a counseling center partnered with city officials and local faith leaders to open up parking lots each night for homeless families living out of their RVs, and to connect them to social services. Now, the Santa Barbara program runs 23 lots with 134 total spaces, and has expanded to accept other vehicles. Other California counties like Los Angeles and San Diego run their own versions of the program, and churches outside Seattle, like the Lake Washington Methodist Church in Kirkland, have implemented smaller, more local models. (...)

Cars provide crucial mobility for those who commute to work, but the quarters are cramped: To be able to sleep inside the vehicles, people must bend their backs and knees uncomfortably. A carbon monoxide leak could prove deadly. And while vehicles may be relatively closed off from the elements, their roofs can drip in the rain, and mold can sprout on the windows. Karina O’Malley, Lake Washington Methodist Church’s Safe Parking Coordinator, says that in Washington’s rainy season, many people keep pets in the car to increase body heat, and line windshields with towels or fit tarps over the roofs to keep out wetness and chills. Bathroom access on the road is spread out and sparse; showers, almost non-existent. (“Beach showers [were] fine in the summertime, but when it gets to be wintertime…” Jamie trails off. “It’s not exactly North Dakota here, but it’s been getting down into the low 30s.”)

The hardest part, though, Jamie and homeless advocates say, is finding a space to park undisturbed for the night. “Obviously there’s fear of being broken into, especially while you’re asleep; of having things stolen out of your vehicle, your last safe space,” said Emily Uyeda Kantrim, L.A.’s Safe Parking program coordinator. “But the harassment and people continually having to move their vehicle usually comes from residential neighborhoods.” (...)

Although America has an estimated 2 billion parking spots for the country’s 250 million cars, the space is contested, and highly policed. “We can acknowledge that there are thousands of parking spaces in Los Angeles that go unused at night,” said Kantrim. Indeed, UCLA transportation scholar Donald Shoup estimates that “14 percent of incorporated land in Los Angeles County is devoted to parking” in his book, Parking and the City.

Some see Safe Parking programs as a better way to activate that unused space. Most lots open up at night to let people drive in, and then clear out during the days. Reserving land for a short period of time “in order to stabilize our most vulnerable population who are actually prevented from being in other safe spaces at night—that's reasonable,” Kantrim said.

It’s simple, says Teresa Smith, the CEO of Dreams for Change, which runs San Diego’s safe parking program: “We’re using parking lots to park cars.”

Of course, it’s not actually that simple. Each program operates, and is funded, differently. But they all start with the same premise, says Safe Parking L.A.’s Kantrim: “You have a parking lot. You identify people who need to use it. You have a security guard to check people in at night. You have some reasonable place for them to use the restroom—be it a porta-potty or an externally accessible bathroom. And that’s about it. There aren’t a lot of moving pieces.”

by Sarah Holder, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: (Applied Survey Research/All Home)

Courtney Barnett

Lindsey Carr, Status Soup
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Restoring an Antique Rusty Cleaver

[ed. Strangely mesmerizing (no narration).]

via:
[ed. Winter's getting old.]

How the Natural Resources Management Act Passed

Conservationists are celebrating the Tuesday passage by the Senate of the massive Natural Resources Management Act, one of the most significant and sweeping pieces of conservation legislation created in years. The bill designates some 1.3 million acres of wilderness, creates six new National Park Service units, and most importantly, permanently reauthorizes the venerable Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), ensuring conservation acquisition funds for generations to come.

“Given the contentious and partisan nature of politics in Washington, this is a huge moment,” says Adam Cramer, executive director of the Outdoor Alliance, a consortium of outdoor recreation advocacy organizations. “That the one thing all those senators can agree on is conservation makes this doubly sweet.” The bill passed by a vote of 92 to 8 and is moving on to the House of Representatives, which is expected to pass the legislation.

The 662-page bill is a conglomeration of some 100 pieces of legislation. Though it was largely championed by western lawmakers like senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Ron Wyden of Oregon, the bill does provide conservation benefits for every state through the LWCF, which helps federal agencies, states, and local communities purchase land for parks and access to open spaces. That’s why experts believe it has been the rare issue with bipartisan agreement during the Trump administration. As with all large congressional bills, however, the National Resources Management Act is an act of compromise that leaves some wary of its effects.

The legislation most conservationists are skeptical of is the Alaska Native Veterans Land Allotment Equity Act introduced by Murkowski and fellow Alaska senator Dan Sullivan. The legislation would allow Native Alaskan armed-services veterans who missed a historic 1971 homesteader land allotment to claim 160 acres of federal public lands. The problem, according to critics, is that it’s a wrong that was already righted in 1998 and currently there’s nothing to stop beneficiaries from selling their land to developers. That puts some 448,000 acres at risk.

“Alaska’s public lands often tend to be the political grease for land-conservation initiatives in the Lower 48, and that’s wrong,” Adam Kolton of the Alaska Wilderness League told the Outside contributing editor Christopher Solomon in an article for the Washington Post. “These are the last fully intact ecosystems in the United States. They shouldn’t just be trade-bait to pass broader public lands bills.”

by Frederick Reimers, Outside |  Read more:
Image: Marc Muench/Tandem

[ed. A time honored tradition - privatizing Alaska's public resources. See also: The New Fight Over Oil in Alaska’s Greatest Wilderness (ANWR). Quote:

The slow pluck began in fall 2017, when Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski tacked a rider onto the Republican tax-overhaul bill mandating that the federal government issue at least two leases for drilling in the coastal plain. This was a carefully planned tactic, since the tax bill couldn’t be filibustered. It gave a minority of drilling proponents their only chance at success against majority opposition. Even members of the GOP took issue with the move. In late November, a dozen House Republicans signed a letter objecting to the rider, citing the country’s overwhelming opposition to drilling in ANWR. (According to a 2017 Yale University poll, just 29 percent of registered voters supported oil exploration in the refuge.) Still, after an ebullient President Trump signed the tax bill, he bragged about it in a speech: “I didn’t think it was a big deal until one day a friend of mine who was in the oil business called. ‘Is it true that you have ANWR in the bill?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Who cares? What is that?’ ... ‘Reagan tried, every single president tried ... the Bushes, everybody.’ I said, you got to be kidding, I love it now.” ]

How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny

The digital utopian dream of our age looks something like the 2016 concept video created by a Google R&D lab for a never-released product called the Selfish Ledger. The video was obtained in May by The Verge, which described it as “an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering.” Borrowing from Richard Dawkins’s notion of the “selfish gene,” the Selfish Ledger would be a self-help product on steroids, combining Google’s cornucopia of personal data with artificial-intelligence tools whose sole aim was to help you meet your goals.

Want to lose weight? Google Maps might prioritize smoothie shops or salad places when you search for “fast food.” Want to reduce your carbon footprint? Google might help you find vacation options closer to home or prioritize locally grown foods in the groceries that Google Express delivers to your doorstep. When the program needs more information than Google’s data banks can provide, it might suggest you buy a sensor, such as an Internet-connected scale or Google’s new AI-powered wearable camera. Or, if the needed product is not on the market, it might even suggest a design and 3D-print it.

The program is “selfish” in that it stubbornly pursues the self-identified goal the user gives it. But, the video explains, further down the road “suggestions may be converted not by the user but by the ledger itself.” And beyond individual self-help, by surveilling users over space and time Google would develop a “species-level understanding of complex issues such as depression, health, and poverty.”

The idea, according to a lab spokesperson, was meant only as a “thought-experiment ... to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.” But the slope from Google’s original product — the seemingly value-neutral search engine — to the social engine of the Selfish Ledger is slipperier than one might think. The video’s vision of a smart Big Brother follows quite naturally from the company’s founding mission “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.” As Adam White recently wrote in these pages (“Google.gov,” Spring 2018), “Google has always understood its ultimate project not as one of rote descriptive recall but of informativeness in the fullest sense.”

After plucking the low-hanging fruit of web search, Google’s engineers began creating predictive search technologies like “autocomplete” and search results tailored to individual users based on their search histories. But what we are searching for — what we desire — is often shaped by what we are exposed to and what we believe others desire. And so predicting what is useful, however value-neutral this may sound, can shade into deciding what is useful, both to individual users and to groups, and thereby shaping what kinds of people we become, for both better and worse.

The moral nature of usefulness becomes even clearer when we consider that our own desires are often in conflict. Someone may say he wants to have a decent sleep schedule, and yet his desire to watch another YouTube video about “deep state” conspiracy theories may get the better of him. Which of these two conflicting desires is the truer one? What is useful in this case, and what is good for him? Is he searching for conspiracy theories to find the facts of the matter, or to get the informational equivalent of a hit of cocaine? Which is more useful? What we wish for ourselves is often not what we do; the problem, it seemed to Walker Percy, is that modern man above all wants to know who he is and should be.

YouTube’s recommendation feature has helped to radicalize users through feedback loops — not only, again, by helping clickbait conspiracy videos go viral, but also by enticing users to view more videos like the ones they’ve already looked at, thus encouraging the user merely intrigued by extremist ideas to become a true diehard. Yet this result is not a curious fluke of the preference-maximizing vision, but its inevitable fruition. As long as our desires are unsettled and malleable — as long as we are human — the engineering choices of Google and the rest must be as much acts of persuasion as of prediction.

California Streamin’

The digital mindset of precisely measuring, analyzing, and ever more efficiently fulfilling our individual desires is of course not unique to Google. It pervades all of the Big Tech companies whose products give them access to massive amounts of user data, including also Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and to some extent Apple. Each company was founded on a variation of the premise that providing more people with more information and better tools, and helping them connect with each other, would help them lead better, freer, richer lives.

This vision is best understood as a descendant of the California counterculture, another way of extending decentralized, bottom-up power to the people. The story is told in Fred Turner’s 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner writes that Stewart Brand, erstwhile editor of the counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, “suggested that computers might become a new LSD, a new small technology that could be used to open minds and reform society.” Indeed, Steve Jobs came up with the name “Apple Computing” from living in an acid-infused commune at an Oregon apple orchard.

Not coincidentally, the tech giants are now investing heavily in using artificial intelligence to provide customized user experiences — not the information that is most useful to people in general, but to individual users.* The AI assistant is the culmination of utopian aspiration and shareholder value, a kind of techno-savvy guardian angel that perfectly and mysteriously knows how to meet your requests and sort your infinitely scrollable feed of search results, products, and friend updates, just for you. In the process, these companies run headfirst into the impossibility of separating the supposedly value-neutral criterion of usefulness from the moral aims of personal and social transformation.

For at the foundation of the digital revolution there was a hidden tension. First through personal computing and then through the Internet, the revolutionaries offered, as Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog put it, “access to tools.” A precious few users today grasp and take advantage of the full promise of networked computers to build ever more useful applications and tools. Instead, the vast majority spend their time and resources on only a few functions on a few platforms, consuming entertainment, searching for information, connecting with friends, and buying products or services.

And while in theory there are more “choices” and “flexibility” available than ever, in practice these are winner-take-all platforms, with the default choices and settings dominating user behavior. Google can return tens of millions of results for a search, but most users won’t leave the first page. Essentially random suggestions to users can become self-fulfilling prophesies, as Wired reported of the obscure 1988 climbing memoir Touching the Void, which by 2004 had become a hit due to Amazon’s recommendation algorithm.

Moreover, because algorithms are subject to strategic manipulation and because they are attempting to provide results unique to you, the choices shaping these powerful defaults are necessarily hidden away by platforms demanding you simply trust them. Ever since its founding, Google has had to keep its search algorithm’s specific preferences secret and constantly re-adjust them to foil enterprising marketers trying to boost their profits at the expense of what users actually want. Every other Big Tech company has followed suit. As results have become more personalized, it becomes increasingly difficult to specify why, exactly, your newsfeed might differ from a friend’s; the complex math behind it creates a black box that is “optimized” for some indiscernible set of metrics. Tech companies demand you simply trust the choices they make about how they manipulate results.

Much of the politics of Silicon Valley is explained by this Promethean exchange: gifts of enlightenment and ease in exchange for some measure of awe, gratitude, and deference to the technocratic elite that manufactures them. Algorithmic utopianism is at once optimistic about human motives and desires and paternalistic about humans’ cognitive ability to achieve their stated preferences in a maximally rational way. Humans, in other words, are mostly good and well-intentioned but dumb and ignorant. We rely on poor intuitions and bad heuristics, but we can overcome them through tech-supplied information and cognitive adjustment. Silicon Valley wants to debug humanity, one default choice at a time. (...)

Big Tech companies have thus married a fundamentally expansionary approach to information-gathering to a woeful naïveté about the likely uses of that technology. Motivated by left-liberal utopian beliefs about human progress, they are building technologies that are easily, naturally put to authoritarian and dystopian ends. While the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world claim to be shocked by the “abuse” of their platforms, the softly progressive ambitions of Silicon Valley and the more expansive visions of would-be dictators exist on the same spectrum of invasiveness and manipulation. There’s a sense in which the authoritarians have a better idea of what this technology is for.

Wasn’t it rosy to assume that the main uses of the most comprehensive, pervasive, automated surveillance and behavioral-modification technology in human history would be reducing people’s carbon footprints and helping them make better-informed choices in city council races? It ought to have been obvious that the new panopticon would be as liable to cut with the grain as against it, to become in the wrong hands a tool not for ameliorating but exploiting man’s natural capacity for error. Of the two sides, cheer for Dr. Jekyll, but bet on Mr. Hyde.

by Jon Askonas, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Bizarre Spending Habits of Nicolas Cage

At one point in time, Nicolas Coppola, better known as Nicolas Cage (he changed his last name so as not to seem to be trying to cash in on his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola’s, name), was among the highest paid actors in the world, earning some $40 million in a year at the apex of his success. In 2009, Cage’s financial situation changed abruptly and he was forced to file for bankruptcy. So what happened?

The documented story of Cage’s financial turmoil began in 2001 when he hired one Samuel J. Levin to serve as his financial advisor. Cage would later blame Levin for sending him “down a path toward financial ruin”- a claim Levin vehemently denies, insisting that Cage bankrupted himself and that the actor was already in severe financial straights when Levin was hired. In fact, according to Levin, when Cage hired him in 2001, Cage already owed significant money to the IRS and had squandered most of his fortune up to that point on the usual trappings of the ultra-wealthy like cars, jewellery and artwork.

Now, if Cage had just spent his money on cars and fancy houses, there wouldn’t be much of a story here since plenty of wealthy of people have gone bankrupt buying stuff like that (humans gonna’ human)- not terribly interesting. But Cage’s path to bankruptcy despite massive annual earnings took a decidedly more eccentric route, more akin to legendary individuals such as Edward Hughes (The Golden Ball) and Evander Berry Wall (The King of the Dudes). You see, in addition to relatively normal excesses like Rolls Royce’s, a private jet, and a few yachts, Cage also bought some more, shall we say, unusual items.

For starters, in a spending spree that actually would ultimately be somewhat profitable, Cage spent an obscene amount of money on comic books and comic memorabilia. A lifelong fan of the medium, Cage at one point had a collection of comics worth several million dollars, including most notably a near-mint copy of Action Comics #1. This was a possession Cage was apparently extremely fond of owing to being a huge Superman fan, further evidenced by the fact that he named his son Kal-El. (Really)

Unfortunately for Cage, in 2000 his LA mansion was robbed and this particular comic, along with a few other of the more valuable ones in his collection, was stolen. Cage was devastated by the theft and spent years searching for it, only for it to be found and recovered by the police thanks to one of the auctioneers on the reality TV show, Storage Wars– because nothing about Cage’s life can be dull apparently.

Upon hearing the news that the comic had been found, Cage issued a statement that read, in part: “It is divine providence that the comic was found, and I am hopeful that the heirloom will be returned to my family.” (There was some doubt at this point because an insurance company had paid out on the stolen comic when it was stolen, and so Cage had to work out a deal to return said funds to the company to get the extremely valuable comic back.)

After the comic was returned to Cage, in order to pay off debts, the actor immediately sold the “heirloom” in an auction for a whopping $2,161,000 – a record breaking amount for a comic book at the time, and about 10 times what he originally paid for it. (More recently, on August 24, 2014, a copy of Action Comics #1 re-set the record selling for $3,207,852.)

Not content with owning some of the world’s rarest comic books, Cage also bought himself a veritable zoo’s worth of pets including a shark, a crocodile and a number of purebred dogs waited on paw and foot by hired handlers. Cage also owned a pet octopus he apparently bought for $150,000 and a pair of albino cobras called Moby and Sheba worth a cool quarter of a million dollars.

According to Cage, he studied the octopus’s movements to improve his own acting… a claim that most speculate was just Cage saying that in an attempt to write off the octopus and associated expenses on his taxes. But if you pay close attention… maybe not?

As for his pet cobras, Moby and Sheba, Cage claimed to need them for protection (again, perhaps so that he could attempt to write off their purchase for tax reasons).

In an apparent bid to be a baller even in the afterlife, Cage also bought himself a massive, nine foot tall pyramid-shaped tombstone…

By far Cage’s costliest purchases though were the numerous properties he bought and then spent millions of dollars remodeling and having giant parties in. These include a dozen estates variously described as being “palatial” in nature (including two actual castles in Europe), two private islands in the Bahamas, and the famed LaLaurie mansion in New Orleans (see our article: The Twisted Tale of Delphine LaLaurie and Her House of Horrors).

To be fair on these ones along with his many, many car purchases (including over 50 rare cars, such as a Lamborghini once owned by the Sha of Iran and a 1955 Jaguar D-Type he inexplicably decided to keep in his billiards room despite guests claiming that it was a complete mystery how he got the car in there), Cage had some success in the early going buying these, enjoying them for a time, and then re-selling them for significant profit. The profits stopped, however, when his acting career turned obscenely lucrative and he then mostly ceased doing the critical re-selling part, as well as started bidding for many such items at well over their projected market value to ensure he got them.

Along with fancy furniture and creature comforts like giant toy robots (really), Cage bought countless impossibly awesome knickknacks for his many homes including dozens of skulls belonging to long-dead prehistoric creatures, as well as things like shrunken Pygmy heads.

For a short period, the crowning jewel in Cage’s skull collection was a $300,000 T-Rex skull he supposedly outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for. It would later emerge though that the skull had been stolen, prompting Cage to hand it over to authorities to be given back to the original owner.

Cage also owned a prehistoric bear skull that he accidentally destroyed while playing pool with Sean Bean. According to Bean, a distraught Cage took the pieces of the skull and buried them in a nearby field early the next morning…

When he wasn’t walking around his house enjoying his collection of comic books and dinosaur skulls, Cage would throw massive “Gatsby-scale” parties at his various residences for his friends in Hollywood. Hugh Hefner would call Cage’s parties the “stuff of legend” and, remember, Hefner was a man who woke up every morning for five straight decades in a massive mansion full of scantily clad models. (...)

He didn’t bankrupt himself all on excess, however. A lesser known thing Cage spent vast sums of money on during this period was donating money to charities as freely as he spent it. As a result, Cage has been ranked by Forbes as one of the most generous actors in the world. Not just helping out his favorite causes by promoting them in fund raisers, as so many celebrities do without making much in the way of donations themselves (which, to be fair, is still very helpful to said charities), Cage has quietly donated many millions of dollars to dozens of charities over the years. For instance, in 2005 he gave $1 million to the Red Cross and, in 2006, $2 million to Amnesty International.

All good things must come to an end, however, and in 2009- a year in which Forbes claims Cage earned $40 million, Cage found himself in a major cash crunch with the IRS slapping him with a $6.2 million unpaid tax bill. At the same time, the stock market dip and housing market crash saw his vast property and other investment holdings hit the tank. Soon enough, creditors came a calling in droves. It didn’t help that he had leveraged the former equity in many of the houses to then turn around and buy more estates in a massive debt infused investment plan…

by Karl Smallwood, Today I Found Out |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Sorry... fell down the rabbit hole this morning.]

via:
[ed. Re: a new movie coming out (Yesterday). The premise: "What if only one person in the world knew about the Beatles?" Official trailer here. See also: Exploring the Confounding Implications of ‘Yesterday’ (The Ringer). ]

Early Adopter

2005

Craigslist> SF bay area> san francisco> community> missed connections: September 27: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores Park (Mission District).

We passed each other yesterday while I was walking my dog Baxter in Dolores Park. You (brunette curls, green eyes, wry smile) stopped to pet the dog (terrier, Jack Russell, brown and white) and then commented on my old Atari logo t-shirt because you were wearing an Atari Teenage Riot band t-shirt ("I guess that means I'm the more aggressive one" you said). But then you kept going before I (tall, dark, momentarily speechless) could really talk to you. I've never used CL missed connections before--it always seemed like a long shot--but my friend said that even if you didn't see it, maybe someone who knows you would, and I'm going to be kicking myself for a long time if I don't try something, so...hope we can connect!

To: w5cjq-6599435498@comm.craigslist.org
From: her@gmail.com
Subject: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores Park

Dear Old Skool Atari Boy--Glad you posted despite not being familiar with this so very newfangled technology. One of my friends did indeed see it and put 2 and 2 together. Hopefully you also know how to use these cool new things called cellphones. Grab a drink at the Make-Out Room tomorrow night? Here's my number, text me...

2007

Her: "Not bad for an old man."
Him: "Learned a few things in my time. You’re not so bad yourself. I mean, for someone so clearly lacking experience and refinement in the art of--Ow!"
Her: "Don't tease."
Him: "You did! If you can make fun of me for being older--"
Her: "No tickling!"
Him: "Besides, it's not that big a difference in the grand scheme, is it? My folks were ten years apart..."
Her: "Ten years is a lot longer than it used to be. In the 70s or the Bronze Age or whenever it was your parents met. Things move faster, change faster."
Him: "Point. Certainly, your entitled millennial flakiness is worlds different from..."
Her: "...the sullen sarcasm of your Generation X."
Him: "I was more on the cusp between X and Y.... Do we still talk about Y anymore?"
Her: "Yeah, no. Oops, just a sec."
Him: "Who's texting at this hour?"
Her: "Not texting. 'Tweeting'. New micro-blogging thing. Been playing with it since I got back from Austin, it was all over South By Southwest. You should try."
Him: "But you just made me join Facebook."
Her: "They're totally different. Different audience, different medium."
Him: "Eh. Maybe in a few years. After we're sure it's not gonna turn into another digital ghost town like Friendster-MySpace-Orkut-whatever."
Her: "Oh, my dear old man. You will try it now. Or, well, tomorrow. Otherwise you won't be able to 'follow' my 'tweets'! Don't you want to 'follow' me?"
Him: "Of course. If you insist. I will follow your tweets. I will follow you anywhere."
Her: "Say it again."
Him: "I. Will. Follow. You. Anywhere."

2010

Him: I'm scared
Her: I know :-(
Him: Hon im freaking out
Her: :-( I'm so sorry I couldn't fly out in time where are u now?
Him: in his hospital room with family we're about to do it
Her: You're actually texting right now? Even I wouldn't do that ;-)
Him: Learned it by watching you! ;-) Whatever. fuck smartphone etiquette. This is what I need now need to be talking to you right now
Her: I'm so so sorry. I love u so much
Him: I'm scared. I'm really scared. I don't know how to do this any of this first mom now dad how am I supposed to do this alone? I am freaking out
Her: Calm down. Breathe. You're not alone. You're with me. I'm here. I'm always here
Her: I'm always here
Her: u still there?
Him: I'm here. I need to tell you something honey
Him: This is important
Her: What?
Her: What is it?
Him: You home yet? Need something. Bag in glovebox in my car
Her: What is it you really need it now?
Him: Please just get it
Him: Hon?
Him: Hon??
Her: HFS you're doing this NOW?????
Him: What?
Him: ????
Him: Remember what we said about tone and txt messaging hon can't hear tone of voice u mad at me? Pls don't be mad at me!
Her: nonono its beautiful love i love u i love u but youre really doing this over text?
Him: Like I said I learned it by watching you :-P
Her: Don't tease! Is this real??
Him: Yes I'm doing this over text I'm doing this now because I'm sure i love you i need you i waited so long because of THIS but fuck THIS he wouldn't want me to waste time and I want to tell him we're doing this before he's gone even if he wont hear me i know what i want i don't want to do any of it without you never ever good bad whatever I dont care I just want u with me ok??
Her: yes
Him: yes yes???
Her: yes love yes I do I do I will marry you but isn't this weird with your dad?
Him: No no is perfect he loved you he'd be soooo happy he'd want us to be happy
Him: Shit shit aunt joon is giving me stinkeye have to go will talk later
Him: I LOVE YOU!!!
Her: <3 <3 <3

2012

Him: There you are! Was looking on AIM.
Her: Like I told you, no more AIM for me, just Gchat. About time you migrated too ;) How's the conference?
Him: Fine. Miss you. Video chat?
Her: You mean video chat...or video chat?
Him: Um. The italicized version. It is date night, after all.
Her: Indeed it is. I just need to finish this one email but then I can sign off.
Him: Meet you back on AIM in a few minutes?
Her: Skype. Really, tho, time to retire the AIM.
Him: So we're replacing one tool with two?
Her: [image attached]
Him: Heh. What's that?
Her: Grumpy cat. It's something we kids call a meme. On this thing we kids call the Interweb. That I'm using to make fun of you for being an old-ass grump. We're replacing one lame tool with two better ones. And Skype's encrypted. Particularly important when you’re on crappy unsecured hotel WiFi and we're...italicizing.
Him: Point. BTW, reservation deposit's due tomorrow if want to lock dates. You sure? Totally cool with the small destination thing if you are, just want to make sure you're sure sure sure
Her: I'm sure sure sure. Everyone else can just see it on Facebook and be jealous and then party with us when we get back.
Him: Alright then, operation exotic beach wedding is finally a go!!!
Her: :-D! OK, I'm ready. See you on Skype.

2013

Him: "Hello, my beautiful wife. What's up?"
Her: "Howdy, my weirdly formal but still adorable hubby. Where are you?"
Him: "Hotel bar, client dinner with Jameel in a few."
Her: "Oh, forgot it's earlier there. How few?"
Him: "Like, 10 minutes."
Her: "OK, plenty of time. Want you to do me a favor. Go download Snapchat from the app store and set up an account so I can send you something."
Him: "Another photo app?
Her: "Follow my lead, babe. Won't regret it."
Him: "Gimme a minute...downloading. How's your day?"
Her: "Another long lonely day banging on code in my pajamas. Miss you."
Him: "You too. Okay, downloaded...and...username's my name, no spaces or anything."
Her: "Creative."
Him: "Screw you."
Her: "If only you were here. But this'll have to do. Sending pic now...Merry Christmas!"
Him: "Whoa. Wow. Cute Santa hat. Is that the lingerie I got you for Valentine's? Wait! Where'd it go?"
Her: "That's the point. Disappears after a few seconds. That way I can feel comfortable sending more...intimate pictures."
Him: "Ahhhhhh. Got it. Like it. But what--oh hey Jameel! No, not too early, just--Hon, gotta go, but I'll call as soon as I'm back in the room."
Her: "I'm certain you will. Wish you were here."
Him: "Me too."

2016

Her: How are you not on Instagram by now?"
Him: "Oh for fuck's sake--"

2021

Him: "Please take those off? You look like a glasshole."
Her: "This is so much better than Google Glass was ever going to be. These guys aren't afraid of facial recognition. So many more possibilities."
Him: "Hope you don't fall into a manhole or something..."
Her: "Think I'll manage, thanks."
Him: "I just wish you'd talk to me."
Her: "I am talking to you. I just want to play with my new toy too. Let me have my fun. Besides, trust me, you'll be ignoring me and playing augmented reality games on your own pair within the year. I'll take them off when we get to dinner, promise."
Him: "Where is this car, anyway?"
Her: "Spex, when's the Uber arriving? Four minutes."
Him: "So you'll be doing a lot of that from now on?"
Her: "You should talk, Mister 'Siri, remind me tomorrow morning to remember that I have to remind myself at 10 o'clock on Tuesday to remind me that....' Anyway. You'll follow my lead as always and have one by Christmas, I'm sure."
Him: "I'm sure."
Her: "Oh.... See that couple PDAing on the bench? The Spex say I'm only one degree away from him, he works with Margot. The woman is two degrees away and...huh...isn't his wife."
Him: "Stop being nosy. And stop using those things to ignore me."
Her: "Fine, I'll ignore you without them."
Him: "Look--"
Her: "No, you look. You don't get to imply that I'm emotionally cheating on you and then get pissy that my feelings are hurt."
Him: "Wasn't implying anything, just asking who this work guy is who keeps talking to you and liking all your shit on Instagram and Facebook and--"
Her: "You said flirting, not talking."
Him: "Because you are."
Her: "I'm allowed to have friends. I'm even allowed to flirt, dammit. You put so much weight on things that are just...ephemeral bullshit, not important. I'm not sitting on a park bench making out with someone who isn't you. It's not real, it's just...like, a game."
Him: "You used to play those games with me."
Her: "You used to be around more instead of disappearing and leaving me alone for weeks at a time! ...Fuck. Fuck. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I yelled. But really, you can't trust me after a decade of marriage?"
Him: "Well, a bright little girl I know once told me a whole lot can change in ten years, especially these days."
Her: "Fuck you. I'm going home."
Him: "No. I'll go home. Go enjoy the city with your new robot eyes. Maybe stream it with your new friend."
Her: "Jesus, did you really just say that?"
Him: "I don't mean...I just...we need to cool off. I need to cool off. We can't go to dinner like this."
Her: "You think? Jesus. I honestly don't understand what you're turning into right now."
Him: "That makes two of us."

2025

Him: Can't believe we're doing this on chat. At least talk on phone?
Her: Fine. I'll call.
Him: "Hello."
Her: "So."
Him: "So you're really doing this? You really don't want me to come home? We've been married for over--"
Her: "You're the movie guy so you can have Netflix if I can keep Spotify. Been teaching it my preferences for fifteen years..."
Him: "For fuck's sake, we never should've mixed up accounts.... Fine. Then Amazon and Hulu stay mine too."
Her: "Fine. What about the house Apple ID?"
Him: "What about it? It's technically my account."
Her: "But it's been on my card the whole time--I paid for all the content in there."
Him: "Suck it up."
Her: "What?"
Him: "Cost of doing business. Or, in your case, fucking someone other than your husband."
Her: "After you screwed around with how many??"
Him: "Honey, it wasn't real! It was XRoulette! Totally anonymous! Totally virtual! Totally not real!"
Her: "Real people. Just because you don't know who or where doesn't mean they weren't real. Especially the one you bookmarked so you could keep going back to her again and again and again--"
Him: "What happened to 'it's not real, it's just ephemeral, it's just a game, why are you so mad?' Remember that line of bullshit? Because I sure as hell--"
Her: "Shit. I'm being advised to end this conversation."
Him: "What?"
Her: "My legal expert system is listening."
Him: "So this is real. You really don't want me to come home. You really want the divorce."
Her: "What? You're the one that left! You just said--what do you want? I'm just trying to--"

Pardon me, sir. This is your wife's legal advisor. For further communication, please have your software agent contact this software agent. Thank you and good night.

by Kevin Bankston, Motherboard |  Read more:
Image: Zoe van Djik

via:
[ed. Add your own punchline.]

A Speech on Socialism at Andover

On Monday I gave a talk about socialism at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, MA. Because Andover is one of the oldest and most expensive private schools in the United States, I thought it would be worth beginning with the subject of educational inequality. Below is the speech I prepared, though when I delivered it I ended up improvising a bit and going a bit more “off the cuff.” The students were delightful and asked thoughtful and challenging questions. I’d like to thank Derek Curtis for arranging the whole thing, he was extremely kind and helped me lug my bag across campus.

We’re going to talk about socialism and capitalism and whether those words are meaningful and how we should use them and I’m going to make the case that socialism is good and capitalism is bad and that you should be a socialist and use your life to try to make the world more socialistic. I am going to try to avoid just having a terminological discussion about what abstract terms mean, and instead talk about the principles that I think should guide us as we consider political and economic questions. (...)

The school you have here is amazing, it’s what a school should be. Your teachers are well-paid, your library is well-stocked, your grounds are well-maintained, you have every conceivable resource at your disposal. If you want to bring someone to come and give a talk, you can pay for them to come. But I think we all know that there is some kind of serious social injustice when some people go to schools where the gym has been condemned, and some go to schools that offer 30 different sports. Whatever we might think about how people earn success, when you’re young you don’t really earn much of anything. The kids in the Detroit School system are there because of the accident of their birth, and you are here because of the accident of your birth. That’s not to say that you don’t work hard, or that you aren’t smart—I am certain that you do and you are. But we all know that there is no element of justice in whether a 10 year old is hungry and homeless, because children really have very little control over their lives. The statistics on youth homelessness are really staggering—in the United States, it’s 4.2 million young people who are going to spend at least some part of each year not knowing where they’re going to stay. And while we often discuss the United States, when we start looking at the whole world things become just unfathomably unfair.

I’m beginning here, with a basic example of an unjustified inequality, because I think it’s important to see what I might call “the socialistic instinct” starts. Jack London, of Call of the Wild fame, was a socialist, and he explains in his essay “How I Became A Socialist” that it was not because he had read Karl Marx and accepted the dialectical materialist conception of history. It was because he went out into the world, and he realized that not everyone was like himself, and that the things he told himself about why some people deserved more than others simply broke down once he actually got to know people. (...)

Jack London’s socialism was formed by getting out of his bubble and actually trying to understand lives that were different from his own. And for me, that is where the socialistic instinct begins, not with economic theory but with a sense of solidarity, feeling a deep understanding, love of, and sympathy with your fellow human beings in very different circumstances, and wanting nothing for yourself that you do not also want for them. Terry Eagleton has a quote: “A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.” That really is the core of it. A socialist is, first and foremost, not just perturbed by injustice, but horrified by it, really truly sickened by it in a way that means they can’t stop thinking about it. It gives you the feeling that “we can’t do anything about that” or “that’s just the way of the world” is not acceptable.

I think both Jack London’s experiences, and my own observations here and at Harvard where I am a social policy student, testify to something important about inequality: The severity of the problem is never obvious when you are on top, because it is very hard to get concerned about things that you do not see before your eyes. Now, I have had days when I have looked around and felt like Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that we are all far too negative and need to wake up and smell the roses. Look at our excellent bistros, our growing GDP, our iPhones, the diminishment in extreme poverty, our global peace. And all of those things do exist. But then I remember how many people are in prison, how many people spend their days making the iPhones and growing the food and cleaning the bistro floors. It’s so easy not to notice the lives of others, because those lives are kept conveniently out of view—the prisons are far away in the countryside, the cleaning staff come in at night, the kitchen staff are confined to the kitchen. One of the most disturbing things about inequality is that two completely different situations can exist in the same place: paradise and hell on a single patch of ground. In New Orleans, where I live, you can see what that was like in the antebellum years: beautiful, peaceful Southern manor houses that also housed the unimaginable suffering of slaves.

The world has, in many ways, improved, in ways that are impossible to deny. It has improved in part through the efforts of activists who gave their lives. People have the eight-hour workday and the weekend because courageous working-class movements refused to tolerate exploitation. We have to be grateful for all the bounties that other people’s hard work has given us. But in many ways, the world has gotten more unjust even as it has gotten better, because there is a greater gap than ever between human potential and the reality many people face. So, for example, life expectancy has long trended upward for the United States overall, but it’s actually gone down for the poorest people, so that while the rich are living longer than ever there is a greater gap than ever before between people’s life expectancies. That gap means that even if on average you’re doing better, you might still have a more unfair world than before. (...)

With that moral starting point, then, of a revulsion at the disparities between the many and the few, let’s try to elaborate socialism a bit more. The word “socialism,” just like the word capitalism (and in fact the word democracy, justice, republic, etc.) has a highly contested meaning and I don’t think there’s any full agreement among people who call themselves socialists. Some people think socialists are those who support government control of industry, and capitalists are those who support private control of industry. That definition can’t work, because there are many socialists who don’t believe in the government at all, the anarchist socialists like Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin who believed that private power and government power were both tools used by the oppressors against the oppressed. What unites socialists in one big tent is a hatred of the concentration of wealth, and a belief that ordinary laborers deserve a fair share of the social product. The old slogan is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” and that does get at the nub of it. Whether we’re talking about a government redistributing wealth, or whether we’re talking about the internal workings of a company, people should be taken care of according to their needs and give according to their ability.

This is why socialists have historically pushed for government programs to take care of the sick, but why socialists also believe in unions, which aim to balance the power of employees against employers. Because it’s not just inequalities of wealth that we object to, but inequalities of power. We talk a lot about workplaces, because workplaces are extremely undemocratic places and employees often have very little power and very few rights. Your boss can fire you for things you say and do outside of work, and in the United States you have no remedy. Because you need a job in order to live, this can limit your realistic range of options in dealing with an abusive or exploitative boss. (...)

It’s this dynamic that has caused the political scientist Elizabeth Anderson to call corporations a kind of “dictatorship,” because in their internal structure they are completely top-down. Anderson has argued that companies constitute a kind of “private government,” one that has a lot of control over people’s lives but that they often don’t have any say in the management of. We can see the way this impacts people like the Amazon warehouse workers, who don’t get any say as to how many boxes it’s reasonable to pack in an hour, or how many miles they can walk comfortably. That’s one reason that Elizabeth Warren has proposed a plan for something called “co-determination,” which they have in Germany, where workers would be guaranteed a certain number of seats on corporate boards in order to ensure that their interests were represented and not always sacrificed for the sake of maximizing profit.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Socialism as a Set of Principles and Innovation Under Socialism (Current Affairs).]