Monday, August 12, 2019
Sapiosexuals
Name: Sapiosexuals.
Age: Mid 30s.
Appearance: not important.
Why not important? Because it’s all about what’s on the inside.
What’s on the inside? Brains, baby.
I don’t get it. Am I missing something? I’ll keep it simple for you: we sapiosexuals are sexually attracted to highly intelligent people, regardless of looks.
What do you mean “we”? There are lots of us. The French equality minister, Marlène Schiappa, confirmed that she is “sapiosexuelle” in an interview.
How did the subject come up? She was being asked about a novel she had written, in which the heroine finds the former French prime minister Alain Juppé unbelievably sexy.
This is nonsense, surely. No. The term was apparently coined in 1998, “sapiens” being the Latin word for “wise”.
I knew that. Sapiosexuals are sexually aroused by intellectual debate, deep thinking and long conversations about literature.
No they aren’t. Don’t knock it just because you’ve never experienced it.
Are you calling me stupid? Never mind … you have lovely eyes.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that this qualifies as a sexual orientation? Well, it’s as much an identity as autosexuality.
It sounds like a pretentious excuse for having an ugly boyfriend with no sense of humour. The term has attracted some criticism in the past from people who say it reinforces simplistic and outmoded definitions of intelligence, and that it discriminates against neurodiversity.
I’m pretty sure that’s more or less what I was saying. But the term has definitely caught on in recent years. About 0.5% of users on the dating website OkCupid identify as sapiosexual.
I suppose this emphasis on the mind over outward appearance is refreshing, but I’m still suspicious. Because you think the distinction says more about the person claiming it than the people they’re attracted to?
No, it’s just that, clever as I am, I would rather that someone loved me for my cheekbones. Don’t worry, I’m sure the right shallow idiot will come along one day.
Age: Mid 30s.
Appearance: not important.Why not important? Because it’s all about what’s on the inside.
What’s on the inside? Brains, baby.
I don’t get it. Am I missing something? I’ll keep it simple for you: we sapiosexuals are sexually attracted to highly intelligent people, regardless of looks.
What do you mean “we”? There are lots of us. The French equality minister, Marlène Schiappa, confirmed that she is “sapiosexuelle” in an interview.
How did the subject come up? She was being asked about a novel she had written, in which the heroine finds the former French prime minister Alain Juppé unbelievably sexy.
This is nonsense, surely. No. The term was apparently coined in 1998, “sapiens” being the Latin word for “wise”.
I knew that. Sapiosexuals are sexually aroused by intellectual debate, deep thinking and long conversations about literature.
No they aren’t. Don’t knock it just because you’ve never experienced it.
Are you calling me stupid? Never mind … you have lovely eyes.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that this qualifies as a sexual orientation? Well, it’s as much an identity as autosexuality.
It sounds like a pretentious excuse for having an ugly boyfriend with no sense of humour. The term has attracted some criticism in the past from people who say it reinforces simplistic and outmoded definitions of intelligence, and that it discriminates against neurodiversity.
I’m pretty sure that’s more or less what I was saying. But the term has definitely caught on in recent years. About 0.5% of users on the dating website OkCupid identify as sapiosexual.
I suppose this emphasis on the mind over outward appearance is refreshing, but I’m still suspicious. Because you think the distinction says more about the person claiming it than the people they’re attracted to?
No, it’s just that, clever as I am, I would rather that someone loved me for my cheekbones. Don’t worry, I’m sure the right shallow idiot will come along one day.
by The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Marlène Schiappa … a self-confessed sapiosexuelle. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Autosexuals (The Guardian).]
The Descent Into Cruelty
Is America becoming a crueler place? In the last two days, I’ve seen three disturbing news stories. First, Boston police “cleaned up” part of the city’s South End by hassling homeless people and destroying their possessions. This is not atypical police behavior, but the Boston PD achieved newsworthy levels of callousness after they apparently literally threw disabled people’s wheelchairs into a trash compactor. Here, read Boston magazine’s report:
“You could hear the metal crushing noise. It was really loud. They just tossed it in and crushed it,” says Cassie Hurd, a Boston homeless advocate who at the time had been observing the area. Hurd says about 15 BPD and state police cruisers, along with a DPW trash truck, rolled up to Mass. Ave. after dark and began telling the people congregating there to leave. Any unattended items were confiscated, she says, including at least three wheelchairs. “We spent a significant amount of time with someone who lost his wheelchair. He is not able to be mobile without it, and not having a home, nowhere to sit, nowhere to go, and was having pain. He couldn’t really balance or walk,” Hurd says. “He had left his wheelchair for a minute and his partner tried everything to keep the wheelchair. She pleaded with police and was sobbing and crying. They took it and threw it in the back of the truck and it was devastating to watch. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent them from throwing it out.” The man, who she identified as Jarrod, told her he had been injured in a hit-and-run car crash about a week earlier and had been prescribed the wheelchair by a doctor. His backpack had also been taken and trashed in the sweep, she says he told her.
Being a cop can turn you callous, we know that. But really, if you destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair as they beg you to stop, you’ve lost the very last shred of your humanity. There’s nothing left.
Next story: The government deported a schizophrenic man from Detroit, sending him to live on the streets of Baghdad. Jimmy Aldaoud had never lived in Iraq, and didn’t speak Arabic. In a desperate video he posted online from Iraq, Jimmy said:
“They wouldn’t listen to me… They wouldn’t let me call my family. Nothing. They just said: You’re going to Iraq and your best bet is to cooperate with us. That way we’re not going to chain you up; we’ll put you on a commercial flight. I begged them. I said, ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country. I’ve never been there.’ However, they forced me. I’m here now… I don’t understand the language. I’ve been sleeping in the street… I’m diabetic. I can’t get insulin shots. I’ve been throwing up, sleeping in the streets, trying to find something to eat. I’ve got nothing over here.”
Aldaoud died in Baghdad, alone and miserable, apparently from lack of access to insulin. “He was literally crying every day,” said his sister.
Third and finally, ICE conducted a series of immigration raids at Mississippi food-processing plants and arrested about 680 people, the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history. Children came home from school to find their parents gone. An ICE official replied to criticism of this: “We are a law enforcement agency, not a social services agency.” Here is 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging for her father’s release:
“Government please show some heart, let my parent be free with everybody else please… My dad didn’t do nothing. He’s not a criminal.”
I don’t know how anyone can do these things and live with themselves. But “rules are rules” arguments are very powerful. “I don’t make the law, I just enforce it.” Of course, everyone has a duty not to participate in the enforcement of certain laws. If they didn’t, then the “just following orders” defense to genocide would be valid, and there would be nothing wrong with participating in the building of a totalitarian nightmare-state. I think one big problem with cops and soldiers is that they launder their morality and fail to exercise the basic responsibility of asking whether what they are doing is humane.
But even that lets them off the hook too much. Take the wheelchairs. There is no law saying that cops have to destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair. That’s a matter of pure discretion. Even if you’re told to conduct “Operation Clean Sweep,” nobody is going to object to you allowing the disabled to roll away rather than, as depicted in a tragic photo from the scene, stagger away painfully. What could possibly cause police to act this way?
I don’t know, there’s just a kind of “authoritarian mentality” that many of them seem to develop, where they think “the law” means “barking orders at people and then punishing them mercilessly if they don’t comply to the letter.” Look at that poor guy who got murdered at the La Quinta in Arizona. The officer kept shouting instructions at him and confusing him, and then when he made an unexpected movement the officer filled him with bullets. The cop was acquitted at court, then given early retirement and a pension.
Is it accurate to say America is becoming crueler? Most of American history has been pretty cruel. Immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the homeless—they have never been well-treated here. I can’t tell whether the place is getting worse, or I’m just noticing things that have been happening continuously from the beginning. There aredifferences—as I say, the immigration raid is bigger than any we’ve seen. Certainly, Donald Trump has a gratuitously cruel personality, from encouraging rally attendees to beat up protesters to telling cops they should stop protecting suspects’ heads from whacking into the doorframe as they are shoved into the back of police cars. If the president, to any degree, sets the “moral tone” for the country, and changes the bounds of what is socially permissible, then I wouldn’t be surprised if America was getting nastier on average.
I hesitate to say that “we” are becoming crueler, though. Despite scenes of wheelchairs being smashed by garbage trucks and little girls crying about their dads being taken away, there is tremendous resistance and resilience. In some quarters I feel a kind of warmth and solidarity I’ve never seen before in my life. Public opinion has actually turned more pro-immigrant over time, not less, and Donald Trump does not represent the conscience of the country.
Still, it doesn’t take a majority to create a nightmare. I worry that this is just the beginning. Already around me I see some supposed “leftists” defending strict immigration enforcement, which means rounding up families in the night and tearing parents away from kids. Setting aside the encouraging compassion and outrage I feel at DSA events, it’s still true that the vast majority of people look upon their government doing horrific things, shrug, and go about their day. It honestly makes me think: What would happen if they started exterminating people? If nobody had to see it, if people just disappeared in the night, and the ones taken were homeless or “illegal,” what would happen to stop it? Jimmy Aldaoud was exterminated. He’s dead now, because the government deliberately sent a diabetic schizophrenic to one of the world’s most dangerous cities. I’m not seeing people marching for Jimmy. I’m in a coffee shop right now, and people are drinking macchiatos and talking about their lives.
“You could hear the metal crushing noise. It was really loud. They just tossed it in and crushed it,” says Cassie Hurd, a Boston homeless advocate who at the time had been observing the area. Hurd says about 15 BPD and state police cruisers, along with a DPW trash truck, rolled up to Mass. Ave. after dark and began telling the people congregating there to leave. Any unattended items were confiscated, she says, including at least three wheelchairs. “We spent a significant amount of time with someone who lost his wheelchair. He is not able to be mobile without it, and not having a home, nowhere to sit, nowhere to go, and was having pain. He couldn’t really balance or walk,” Hurd says. “He had left his wheelchair for a minute and his partner tried everything to keep the wheelchair. She pleaded with police and was sobbing and crying. They took it and threw it in the back of the truck and it was devastating to watch. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent them from throwing it out.” The man, who she identified as Jarrod, told her he had been injured in a hit-and-run car crash about a week earlier and had been prescribed the wheelchair by a doctor. His backpack had also been taken and trashed in the sweep, she says he told her.
Being a cop can turn you callous, we know that. But really, if you destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair as they beg you to stop, you’ve lost the very last shred of your humanity. There’s nothing left.Next story: The government deported a schizophrenic man from Detroit, sending him to live on the streets of Baghdad. Jimmy Aldaoud had never lived in Iraq, and didn’t speak Arabic. In a desperate video he posted online from Iraq, Jimmy said:
“They wouldn’t listen to me… They wouldn’t let me call my family. Nothing. They just said: You’re going to Iraq and your best bet is to cooperate with us. That way we’re not going to chain you up; we’ll put you on a commercial flight. I begged them. I said, ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country. I’ve never been there.’ However, they forced me. I’m here now… I don’t understand the language. I’ve been sleeping in the street… I’m diabetic. I can’t get insulin shots. I’ve been throwing up, sleeping in the streets, trying to find something to eat. I’ve got nothing over here.”
Aldaoud died in Baghdad, alone and miserable, apparently from lack of access to insulin. “He was literally crying every day,” said his sister.
Third and finally, ICE conducted a series of immigration raids at Mississippi food-processing plants and arrested about 680 people, the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history. Children came home from school to find their parents gone. An ICE official replied to criticism of this: “We are a law enforcement agency, not a social services agency.” Here is 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging for her father’s release:
“Government please show some heart, let my parent be free with everybody else please… My dad didn’t do nothing. He’s not a criminal.”
I don’t know how anyone can do these things and live with themselves. But “rules are rules” arguments are very powerful. “I don’t make the law, I just enforce it.” Of course, everyone has a duty not to participate in the enforcement of certain laws. If they didn’t, then the “just following orders” defense to genocide would be valid, and there would be nothing wrong with participating in the building of a totalitarian nightmare-state. I think one big problem with cops and soldiers is that they launder their morality and fail to exercise the basic responsibility of asking whether what they are doing is humane.
But even that lets them off the hook too much. Take the wheelchairs. There is no law saying that cops have to destroy a homeless person’s wheelchair. That’s a matter of pure discretion. Even if you’re told to conduct “Operation Clean Sweep,” nobody is going to object to you allowing the disabled to roll away rather than, as depicted in a tragic photo from the scene, stagger away painfully. What could possibly cause police to act this way?
I don’t know, there’s just a kind of “authoritarian mentality” that many of them seem to develop, where they think “the law” means “barking orders at people and then punishing them mercilessly if they don’t comply to the letter.” Look at that poor guy who got murdered at the La Quinta in Arizona. The officer kept shouting instructions at him and confusing him, and then when he made an unexpected movement the officer filled him with bullets. The cop was acquitted at court, then given early retirement and a pension.
Is it accurate to say America is becoming crueler? Most of American history has been pretty cruel. Immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the homeless—they have never been well-treated here. I can’t tell whether the place is getting worse, or I’m just noticing things that have been happening continuously from the beginning. There aredifferences—as I say, the immigration raid is bigger than any we’ve seen. Certainly, Donald Trump has a gratuitously cruel personality, from encouraging rally attendees to beat up protesters to telling cops they should stop protecting suspects’ heads from whacking into the doorframe as they are shoved into the back of police cars. If the president, to any degree, sets the “moral tone” for the country, and changes the bounds of what is socially permissible, then I wouldn’t be surprised if America was getting nastier on average.
I hesitate to say that “we” are becoming crueler, though. Despite scenes of wheelchairs being smashed by garbage trucks and little girls crying about their dads being taken away, there is tremendous resistance and resilience. In some quarters I feel a kind of warmth and solidarity I’ve never seen before in my life. Public opinion has actually turned more pro-immigrant over time, not less, and Donald Trump does not represent the conscience of the country.
Still, it doesn’t take a majority to create a nightmare. I worry that this is just the beginning. Already around me I see some supposed “leftists” defending strict immigration enforcement, which means rounding up families in the night and tearing parents away from kids. Setting aside the encouraging compassion and outrage I feel at DSA events, it’s still true that the vast majority of people look upon their government doing horrific things, shrug, and go about their day. It honestly makes me think: What would happen if they started exterminating people? If nobody had to see it, if people just disappeared in the night, and the ones taken were homeless or “illegal,” what would happen to stop it? Jimmy Aldaoud was exterminated. He’s dead now, because the government deliberately sent a diabetic schizophrenic to one of the world’s most dangerous cities. I’m not seeing people marching for Jimmy. I’m in a coffee shop right now, and people are drinking macchiatos and talking about their lives.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. I feel some pity (not much) for anyone who still supports Trump, and the whole un-American apparatus that surrounds and encourages him (Republican Senate included). For the rest of their lives they'll have to live with the knowledge that they're the ones who would Go Nazi (Dorothy Thompson, Harper's). Not a nice thing to live with. See also: New Trump rule targets poor and could cut legal immigration in half (Reuters).]
What to do at a Japanese Funeral
Attending a Japanese funeral can be stressful, even shocking, if you don't know what to do. The more you know beforehand the better, as you'll be able to comfort and support mutual friends and their families as is wont to do.
Varying in size and ceremony, it's safe to say that most Japanese funerals are performed in accordance with Buddhist beliefs, although many also include Shinto rites. Here are a few tips to help see you through the experience.
WHAT TO WEAR:
For men: a black suit, white shirt, and black necktie. For women: a non-revealing black dress (should fall below the knees) or suit is standard.
WHAT TO BRING:
The "koden", or condolence gift is standard. This monetary gift is put in a special envelope (see picture above, right), that can be purchased at larger stationary stores. The amount of the gift, which is used to help pay for the funeral, is usually between ¥5,000 and ¥30,000, depending on your relation to the deceased. If you are unsure how much to give, ask other colleagues - NOT the family of deceased.
It is customary to offer odd-number amounts (e.g. five ¥1000 notes = ¥5000; seven, nine ¥1000 notes, one ¥10,000). Take care not to leave amounts of four, "shi", which means "death" in Japanese.
WHAT TO SAY:
There are two standard phrases used during funeral ceremonies.
このたびはまことにご愁傷さまです。
"Konotabiwa, makotoni goshushosama desu." (I'm deeply sorry about your loss.)
御悔やみもしあげます。
"Okuyami moshiagemasu." (I offer my condolences)
A Japanese funeral usually includes a wake. The guests are seated, with the next of kin closest to the front. A Buddhist priest will read a sutra, and then the deceased family's members will each in turn offer incense to an incense urn in front of the deceased. The wake ends once the priest has completed the sutra. Each departing guest is given a thank you gift valued between 1/4 and 1/2 the value of the condolence money they contributed.
After the wake service has ended, visitors will continue to arrive to pay their respects, and it is considered appropriate for friends, other than very close friends, to only attend either the wake service (or visit on the night of the wake service) or the funeral, while the family stays up with the deceased in the same room or location for the night.
Varying in size and ceremony, it's safe to say that most Japanese funerals are performed in accordance with Buddhist beliefs, although many also include Shinto rites. Here are a few tips to help see you through the experience.
WHAT TO WEAR:
For men: a black suit, white shirt, and black necktie. For women: a non-revealing black dress (should fall below the knees) or suit is standard.WHAT TO BRING:
The "koden", or condolence gift is standard. This monetary gift is put in a special envelope (see picture above, right), that can be purchased at larger stationary stores. The amount of the gift, which is used to help pay for the funeral, is usually between ¥5,000 and ¥30,000, depending on your relation to the deceased. If you are unsure how much to give, ask other colleagues - NOT the family of deceased.
It is customary to offer odd-number amounts (e.g. five ¥1000 notes = ¥5000; seven, nine ¥1000 notes, one ¥10,000). Take care not to leave amounts of four, "shi", which means "death" in Japanese.
WHAT TO SAY:
There are two standard phrases used during funeral ceremonies.
このたびはまことにご愁傷さまです。
"Konotabiwa, makotoni goshushosama desu." (I'm deeply sorry about your loss.)
御悔やみもしあげます。
"Okuyami moshiagemasu." (I offer my condolences)
A Japanese funeral usually includes a wake. The guests are seated, with the next of kin closest to the front. A Buddhist priest will read a sutra, and then the deceased family's members will each in turn offer incense to an incense urn in front of the deceased. The wake ends once the priest has completed the sutra. Each departing guest is given a thank you gift valued between 1/4 and 1/2 the value of the condolence money they contributed.
After the wake service has ended, visitors will continue to arrive to pay their respects, and it is considered appropriate for friends, other than very close friends, to only attend either the wake service (or visit on the night of the wake service) or the funeral, while the family stays up with the deceased in the same room or location for the night.
by Deep Japan | Read more:
Image: Koden, uncredited
[ed. In Hawaii this ritual was more prevalent when I was younger than it is today. Still, the tradition of Koden remains (a good thing). One of my earliest and strongest memories is sitting alone in a small, dark room late at night a few feet from my dead uncle, with incense and candles burning while the adults went outside to smoke. I'd never been near a dead body before and it left a lasting impression.]
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Rotten Apple
Last week, iFixit reported on Apple’s latest salvo against the right to repair:
I want to focus on one practical problem here: the dearth of Apple stores to conduct these repairs. This is a problem outside major US cities, as I understand there are big chunks of the US that lack Apple stores. This means people who live in these areas must now either schlep to an Apple store – or ship their iPhone – when they need a simple battery change (unless they are prepared to ignore bogus error messages). Uh huh.
The problem extends outside the US, too, as some astute commentators on the iFixit post have noted:
So I continued on my itinerary, and travelled to Kolkata. At that time, there were no official Mac stores in India, and the basic repair was going to take weeks – and leave me without the use of my computer. I coped by rigging up an external keyboard. But in other situations where I’ve needed to have my MacBook attended to whilst in India, I’ve relied on third-party repair services.
Sayonara MacBook Pro
Apple seems to be doubling down on its hostile policy toward third-party or DIY repair. As Vice reports:
Other Right to Repair Developments
I don’t want to close with my musings on Apple, so instead will note in passing some recent positive developments on the right to repair front.
First, the Federal Trade Commission last month conducted a workshop, Nixing the Fix: A Workshop on Repair Restrictions. I wanted to write up this event at the time, but didn’t, as I was travelling and had some computer issues that made it impossible to listen to a livestream of the event and to check in with the subsequent conference call arranged by right to repair advocates.
The issue is clearly on the FTC’s agenda- and the skeptic in me worries that opponents may exploit this interest either to thwart a right to repair – or to co-opt the issue and enshrine a “right” that hurts rather than helps consumers. So far, right to repair initiatives have arisen at the state level; this is the first time the federal government has taken up this issue, according to Wired:
by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Rotten apple via
[ed. It's not just computers. See also: Hackers, farmers, and doctors unite! Support for Right to Repair laws slowly grows (Ars Technica).]
By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in iPhones, and only they can install them.
If you replace the battery in the newest iPhones, a message indicating you need to service your battery appears in Settings > Battery, next to Battery Health. The “Service” message is normally an indication that the battery is degraded and needs to be replaced. The message still shows up when you put in a brand new battery, however. Here’s the bigger problem: our lab tests confirmed that even when you swap in a genuine Apple battery, the phone will still display the “Service” message.
It’s not a bug; it’s a feature Apple wants. Unless an Apple Genius or an Apple Authorized Service Provider authenticates a battery to the phone, that phone will never show its battery health and always report a vague, ominous problem.There are many concerns the Apple policy raises – some of which I have discussed before (see Design Genius Jony Ive Leaves Apple, Leaving Behind Crapified Products That Cannot Be Repaired).
I want to focus on one practical problem here: the dearth of Apple stores to conduct these repairs. This is a problem outside major US cities, as I understand there are big chunks of the US that lack Apple stores. This means people who live in these areas must now either schlep to an Apple store – or ship their iPhone – when they need a simple battery change (unless they are prepared to ignore bogus error messages). Uh huh.
The problem extends outside the US, too, as some astute commentators on the iFixit post have noted:
You don’t understand problem broadly enough. There are only few Apple Stores in the world. Apple is officially selling iPhones in European countries where they don’t have official service points. Support is only available as mail-in where even battery change can take from 1 to 4 weeks. You cannot even have loan phone from Apple.
Niko Salonen – 4 days ago (...)And the phenomenon isn’t confined to Europe, but also affects Asia – as I once discovered when the keyboard on my MacBook Pro stopped working. I happened to be passing through Sri Lanka – which, IIRC, had an official Mac repair facility. Alas, repairing my device required a replacement part, which had to be ordered and shipped from Singapore, and I didn’t want to linger in Colombo to await its arrival.
So I continued on my itinerary, and travelled to Kolkata. At that time, there were no official Mac stores in India, and the basic repair was going to take weeks – and leave me without the use of my computer. I coped by rigging up an external keyboard. But in other situations where I’ve needed to have my MacBook attended to whilst in India, I’ve relied on third-party repair services.
Sayonara MacBook Pro
Apple seems to be doubling down on its hostile policy toward third-party or DIY repair. As Vice reports:
…this move by Apple is the latest in a long string of actions that have made it more difficult for independent repair companies to work on its products. For example, the latest line of MacBook Pros has a software kill switch that has the ability to essentially end third-party repair.Now, I’m not sure that Apple has thus far triggered that kill switch. But they can do so at any time. I’m mulling replacing my MacBook Pro. The crapification of Apple laptops – including the elimination of the MagSafe and the problematic butterfly keyboard – means that I cannot see my way to paying up to replace my MacBook with another MacBook. Knowing Apple has incorporated such a software kill switch combined with the company’s latest action on iPhone battery replacements adds up to a dealbreaker for me, especially as I spend much of my time far away from places that have a local Apple store.
Other Right to Repair Developments
I don’t want to close with my musings on Apple, so instead will note in passing some recent positive developments on the right to repair front.
First, the Federal Trade Commission last month conducted a workshop, Nixing the Fix: A Workshop on Repair Restrictions. I wanted to write up this event at the time, but didn’t, as I was travelling and had some computer issues that made it impossible to listen to a livestream of the event and to check in with the subsequent conference call arranged by right to repair advocates.
The issue is clearly on the FTC’s agenda- and the skeptic in me worries that opponents may exploit this interest either to thwart a right to repair – or to co-opt the issue and enshrine a “right” that hurts rather than helps consumers. So far, right to repair initiatives have arisen at the state level; this is the first time the federal government has taken up this issue, according to Wired:
At the heart of the issue lies the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, passed by Congress in 1975. The act was written in response to “widespread consumer dissatisfaction with both the content and performance of warranty obligations,” according to Fordham Law Review.
In short, it’s the law that governs consumer product warranties, and it prevents manufacturers — from automakers to tablet makers — from denying warranty coverage on a conditional basis. Manufacturers can’t void the warranty on a product just because the consumer went and repaired it themself, swapped parts, or had it fixed by a third party.Just because the law prevents manufacturers from voiding a warranty on the grounds that a consumer used a third party to make a repair doesn’t prevent manufacturers from attempting to do just that. According to Wired:
But some manufacturers still use language suggesting that your warranty will be voided. Last April the FTC sent warning letters to six major companies: Asus, Hyundai, HTC, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. (Vice first obtained the list of manufacturers by filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act.) In some cases, as with Microsoft’s Xbox One warranty, the language is just iffy enough to butt up against the law. Others are more explicit, like HTC, which applies stickers stating, “The limited warranty shall not apply if the warranty seal (void label) has been removed.”
Then, in October of last year, the nonprofit US Public Interest Research Group published a report that said 45 out of 50 companies surveyed still void warranty coverage in the case of independent repair. These companies, all members of the Association of Home Appliances Manufacturers, include Breville, Dyson, Haier, Hisense, LG Electronics, Philips Electronics, and Samsung Electronics America….Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have championed a right to repair for farm equipment, and the NYT editorial board is also on-board. So, depending on how 2020 plays out, a right to repair may pop up on the federal agenda – although at present, activity remains concentrated at the state level, where about 20 states have introduced relevant legislation.
Image: Rotten apple via
[ed. It's not just computers. See also: Hackers, farmers, and doctors unite! Support for Right to Repair laws slowly grows (Ars Technica).]
What Is Geoengineering—And Why Should You Care?
It’s becoming clear that we won’t cut carbon emissions soon enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. But there may be ways to cool the planet more quickly and buy us a little more time to shift away from fossil fuels.
They’re known collectively as geoengineering, and though it was once a scientific taboo, a growing number of researchers are running computer simulations and proposing small-scale outdoor experiments. Even some legislators have begun discussing what role these technologies could play (see “The growing case for geoengineering”).
But what is geoengineering exactly?
Traditionally, geoengineering has encompassed two very different things: sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere will trap less heat, and reflecting more sunlight away from the planet so less heat is absorbed in the first place.
The first of these, known as “carbon removal” or “negative emissions technologies,” is something that scholars now largely agree we’ll need to do in order to avoid dangerous levels of warming (see “One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky”). Most no longer call it “geoengineering”—to avoid associating it with the second, more contentious branch, known as solar geoengineering.
This is a blanket term that includes ideas like setting up sun shields in space or dispersing microscopic particles in the air in various ways to make coastal clouds more reflective, dissipate heat-trapping cirrus clouds, or scatter sunlight in the stratosphere.
The word geoengineering suggests a planetary-scale technology. But some researchers have looked at the possibility of conducting it in localized ways as well, exploring various methods that might protect coral reefs, coastal redwoods, and ice sheets.
Where did the idea come from?
It’s not a particularly new idea. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned it might be necessary to increase the reflectivity of the Earth to offset rising greenhouse-gas emissions. The committee went so far as to suggest sprinkling reflective particles across the oceans. (It’s revealing that in this, the first ever presidential report on the threat of climate change, the idea of cutting emissions didn’t seem worth mentioning, as author Jeff Goodell notes in How to Cool the Planet.)
But the best-known form of solar geoengineering involves spraying particles into the stratosphere, sometimes known as “stratospheric injection” or “stratospheric aerosol scattering.” (Sorry, we don’t come up with the names.) That’s in part because nature has already demonstrated it’s possible.
Most famously, the massive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the summer of 1991 spewed some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky. By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particles in the stratosphere helped push global temperatures down about 0.5 °C over the next two years.
And while we don’t have precise data, huge volcanic eruptions in the distant past had similar effects. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was famously followed by the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, a gloomy period that may have helped inspire the creation of two of literature’s most enduring horror creatures, vampires and Frankenstein’s monster.
Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko is generally credited as the first to suggest we could counteract climate change by mimicking this volcanic phenomenon. He raised the possibility of burning sulfur in the stratosphere in a 1974 book.
In the following decades, the concept occasionally popped up in research papers and at scientific conferences, but it didn’t gain much attention until the late summer of 2006, when Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, called for geoengineering research in an article in Climatic Change. That was particularly significant because Crutzen had won his Nobel for research on the dangers of the growing ozone hole, and one of the known effects of sulfur dioxide is ozone depletion.
In other words, he thought climate change was such a threat that it was worth exploring a remedy he knew could pose other serious dangers.
So could geoengineering be the solution to climate change, relieving us of the hassle of cutting back on fossil fuels?
No—although the idea that it does is surely why some energy executives and Republican legislators have taken an interest. But even if it works (on which more below), it’s at best a temporary stay of execution.
It does little to address other climate dangers, notably including ocean acidification, or the considerable environmental damage from extracting and burning finite fossil fuels. And greater levels of geoengineering may increase other disruptions in the climate system, so we can’t just keep doing more and more of it to offset ever rising emissions.
How is geoengineering being researched?
In the years since Crutzen’s paper, more researchers have studied geoengineering, mainly using computer simulations or small lab experiments to explore whether it would really work, how it might be done, what sorts of particles could be used, and what environmental side effects it might produce.
The computer modeling consistently shows it would reduce global temperatures, sea-level rise, and certain other climate impacts. But some studies have found that high doses of certain particles might also damage the protective ozone layer, alter global precipitation patterns, and reduce crop growth in certain areas.
Others researchers have found that these risks can be reduced, if not eliminated, by using particles other than sulfur dioxide and by limiting the extent of geoengineering.
But no one would suggest we’ve arrived at the final answer on most of these questions. Researchers in the field believe we need to do a lot more modeling work to explore these issues in greater detail. And it’s also clear that simulations can only tell us so much, which is why some are proposing small outdoor experiments.
by James Temple, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: USGS Archives
[ed. It's looking like there's no other hope. See also: the law of Unintented Consequences.]
They’re known collectively as geoengineering, and though it was once a scientific taboo, a growing number of researchers are running computer simulations and proposing small-scale outdoor experiments. Even some legislators have begun discussing what role these technologies could play (see “The growing case for geoengineering”).
But what is geoengineering exactly?
Traditionally, geoengineering has encompassed two very different things: sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere will trap less heat, and reflecting more sunlight away from the planet so less heat is absorbed in the first place.
The first of these, known as “carbon removal” or “negative emissions technologies,” is something that scholars now largely agree we’ll need to do in order to avoid dangerous levels of warming (see “One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky”). Most no longer call it “geoengineering”—to avoid associating it with the second, more contentious branch, known as solar geoengineering.This is a blanket term that includes ideas like setting up sun shields in space or dispersing microscopic particles in the air in various ways to make coastal clouds more reflective, dissipate heat-trapping cirrus clouds, or scatter sunlight in the stratosphere.
The word geoengineering suggests a planetary-scale technology. But some researchers have looked at the possibility of conducting it in localized ways as well, exploring various methods that might protect coral reefs, coastal redwoods, and ice sheets.
Where did the idea come from?
It’s not a particularly new idea. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned it might be necessary to increase the reflectivity of the Earth to offset rising greenhouse-gas emissions. The committee went so far as to suggest sprinkling reflective particles across the oceans. (It’s revealing that in this, the first ever presidential report on the threat of climate change, the idea of cutting emissions didn’t seem worth mentioning, as author Jeff Goodell notes in How to Cool the Planet.)
But the best-known form of solar geoengineering involves spraying particles into the stratosphere, sometimes known as “stratospheric injection” or “stratospheric aerosol scattering.” (Sorry, we don’t come up with the names.) That’s in part because nature has already demonstrated it’s possible.
Most famously, the massive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the summer of 1991 spewed some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky. By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particles in the stratosphere helped push global temperatures down about 0.5 °C over the next two years.
And while we don’t have precise data, huge volcanic eruptions in the distant past had similar effects. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was famously followed by the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, a gloomy period that may have helped inspire the creation of two of literature’s most enduring horror creatures, vampires and Frankenstein’s monster.
Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko is generally credited as the first to suggest we could counteract climate change by mimicking this volcanic phenomenon. He raised the possibility of burning sulfur in the stratosphere in a 1974 book.
In the following decades, the concept occasionally popped up in research papers and at scientific conferences, but it didn’t gain much attention until the late summer of 2006, when Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, called for geoengineering research in an article in Climatic Change. That was particularly significant because Crutzen had won his Nobel for research on the dangers of the growing ozone hole, and one of the known effects of sulfur dioxide is ozone depletion.
In other words, he thought climate change was such a threat that it was worth exploring a remedy he knew could pose other serious dangers.
So could geoengineering be the solution to climate change, relieving us of the hassle of cutting back on fossil fuels?
No—although the idea that it does is surely why some energy executives and Republican legislators have taken an interest. But even if it works (on which more below), it’s at best a temporary stay of execution.
It does little to address other climate dangers, notably including ocean acidification, or the considerable environmental damage from extracting and burning finite fossil fuels. And greater levels of geoengineering may increase other disruptions in the climate system, so we can’t just keep doing more and more of it to offset ever rising emissions.
How is geoengineering being researched?
In the years since Crutzen’s paper, more researchers have studied geoengineering, mainly using computer simulations or small lab experiments to explore whether it would really work, how it might be done, what sorts of particles could be used, and what environmental side effects it might produce.
The computer modeling consistently shows it would reduce global temperatures, sea-level rise, and certain other climate impacts. But some studies have found that high doses of certain particles might also damage the protective ozone layer, alter global precipitation patterns, and reduce crop growth in certain areas.
Others researchers have found that these risks can be reduced, if not eliminated, by using particles other than sulfur dioxide and by limiting the extent of geoengineering.
But no one would suggest we’ve arrived at the final answer on most of these questions. Researchers in the field believe we need to do a lot more modeling work to explore these issues in greater detail. And it’s also clear that simulations can only tell us so much, which is why some are proposing small outdoor experiments.
by James Temple, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: USGS Archives
[ed. It's looking like there's no other hope. See also: the law of Unintented Consequences.]
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Case Study Houses
Case Study House No. 22
The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Killingsworth, and Ralph Rapson to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.
The program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses were built by 1948 and attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all 36 designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles, and one was built in San Rafael, Northern California and one in Phoenix, Arizona. Of the unbuilt houses #19 was to have been built in Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while #27 was to have been built on the east coast, in Smoke Rise, New Jersey.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed See also: The Bailey House, or Case Study House #21 (Wikipedia)]
Word Salad
Six weeks after the second largest bank failure in US history and about a week before the government would take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Kamala Harris was asked how the country would be different if she were POTUS for 8 years. This was her answer.
[ed. Originally via: Walter Bragman (Twitter), but I can't figure out how to copy/share Twitter videos, so here's the YouTube version. Harris' answer starts at 0:55]
The Choices Facing Community Colleges
America is in the middle of another news emergency, about crises that are genuinely important. But meanwhile, other aspects of public and private life grind on, and because they will matter so much in the long run, they deserve more attention than the permanent emergency-news culture usually allows for. Like many other entries in this series, today’s is an intentionally off-news item about some of these developments that will help determine the news of the future.
At the moment I have in mind two institutions that are rarely in the news but deserve to be featured in American discussions of prospects for a better economic and civic future.
One is, of course, America’s network of libraries, as Deb Fallows has discussed over the years. She wrote about them in the print magazine, in our book Our Towns, and in recent posts like this from Brownsville, Texas, and this from New York.
The other is the constellation of 1,000-plus public community colleges across the country. Three years ago in the magazine I made the case that a reliable sign of civic progress was whether a city took its community college seriously:
At the moment I have in mind two institutions that are rarely in the news but deserve to be featured in American discussions of prospects for a better economic and civic future.One is, of course, America’s network of libraries, as Deb Fallows has discussed over the years. She wrote about them in the print magazine, in our book Our Towns, and in recent posts like this from Brownsville, Texas, and this from New York.
The other is the constellation of 1,000-plus public community colleges across the country. Three years ago in the magazine I made the case that a reliable sign of civic progress was whether a city took its community college seriously:
Not every city can have a research university. Any ambitious one can have a community college.
Just about every world-historical trend is pushing the United States (and other countries) toward a less equal, more polarized existence: labor-replacing technology, globalized trade, self-segregated residential-housing patterns, the American practice of unequal district-based funding for public schools.
Community colleges are the main exception, potentially offering a connection to high-wage technical jobs for people who might otherwise be left with no job or one at minimum wage …In travels since then, Deb and I’ve seen more examples of community colleges acting as anchors for a city or region—for instance, with the “Communiversity” that has made such a difference in eastern Mississippi, or the innovative Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, Virginia. (This IALR in Danville is neither a normal research university nor a community college but approximates some functions of each, and works with nearby two- and four-year institutions.) And I’d argue that while every branch of American education is always “important,” from preschool and K–12 to the most intense research universities, community colleges really are the crucial institutions of this economic and political moment. That is because:
- They’re local- or state-based, and thus far freer to experiment, adapt, and innovate than most federally run institutions are at this moment of paralyzed national politics.
- They’re more and more the institutions that feel responsible for matching people who need opportunities with the fastest-growing opportunities of this era. (For instance, in much of the country there have been more openings than candidates for relatively high-wage “skilled trade” jobs: from welding and construction, to engine and robotics maintenance, to many aspects of the ever-expanding health-care industry. Many community colleges emphasize preparing graduates for jobs that are in demand right now, with skills that will also apply for whatever jobs emerge a decade from now.)
- Because they’re often dispersed across a state, with branches in smaller cities and rural areas, many of them have taken a lead in devising regionwide and rurally focused development plans. Most everyone knows that America outside the big cities faces its own set of challenges, from attracting new residents to creating new economic strongholds to dealing with physical and mental-health problems. The people working hardest toward solutions, at least among those I’ve met, are disproportionately at community colleges. (...)
What Deb and I learned when talking with community-college leaders in Traverse City was about the choices that they are facing—as are other members of the loose confederation of educators who are doing so much to shape the economic and civic future of the country. Based on what we heard, I think this is the list of next big choices:
- In this era of increasing nationwide interest in “placemaking,” are community colleges positioned to take the lead as stewards of a community’s development? Or do they need to follow other local institutions? (Here is an example of a four-year university that has taken the local lead. We’ve seen examples elsewhere of community colleges playing that role—for instance, in central Oregon. )
- How does a successful college set the balance between training people in hopes that they’ll stay in the area and training them for success, wherever they might end up? Should the prospect of graduates moving away affect an institution’s investment in them?
- How does a successful college think about the balance between training for specific skills, and general adaptability? How does it balance between the jobs of today, and those of a decade or two from now? (The Communiversity, in Mississippi, is wrestling with just these questions, plus the one about graduates who might move away.)
- What’s the proper way to work with private companies in the area? Is it all positive? What are the pitfalls and guidelines?
- When does it make sense to take a regional, or even statewide, approach, as opposed to programs aimed at each college’s local area?
- When does it make sense to seek out collaborations with research universities or four-year colleges?
- How should the “culture” of community colleges evolve to reflect their newly central role in American opportunity? Is there an even bigger place for ceremonies, “pomp and circumstance,” and other ways to add external signs of prestige to this experience?
by James Fallows, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: James Fallows
Friday, August 9, 2019
Peter Keane
[ed. I saw Peter years and years ago when he was the opening act for, I believe, Greg Brown. This is still one of my favorite albums. See also: You Haunt My Dreams and Tylersville Road (Peter Keane).]
Aaron Brent Harker, Honey Bear
via:
[ed. See also: Timber Corporations Can Keep Killing Bears, Judge Rules (Courthouse News). For scratching trees. In Washington state.]
Burning Down the House
David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth expands on his 2017 article of the same name in New York, where he’s deputy editor. It quickly became that magazine’s most viewed article ever. Some accused Wallace-Wells of sensationalism for focusing on the most extreme possibilities of what may come if we keep spewing carbon compounds skyward (as suggested by his title and his ominous opening line, the answer “is, I promise, worse than you think”). Whatever the article’s lurid appeal, I felt at the time of its publication that its detractors were mainly evading the message by maligning the messenger. (...)
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes. (...)
Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:
He allows that through carbon-capture or geoengineering “or other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best, he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone commercialization scale.
Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking. Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation is dire indeed.
The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But Wallace-Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective: getting our attention is. (...)
So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing, of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still worth trying. (...)
In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible, it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad—this news is. Tiny phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.
McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.
by Alan Weisman, NYRB | Read more:
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes. (...)Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:
The entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power.This is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane winds, or drops as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: growth is how we measure economic health, and growth must be literally fueled. Other than nuclear energy, which has its own problems, no form of energy is so concentrated, and none so cheap or portable, as carbon. By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth of buried organic matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing overhead. Now we’re finally paying attention, because hell is starting to rain down. (...)
He allows that through carbon-capture or geoengineering “or other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best, he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone commercialization scale.
Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking. Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation is dire indeed.
The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But Wallace-Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective: getting our attention is. (...)
So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing, of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still worth trying. (...)
In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible, it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad—this news is. Tiny phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.
McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.
Image: Richard Misrach: Untitled, 2007
Thursday, August 8, 2019
How Digital Advertising Works
Advertising campaigns used to be planned and managed by media buyers—usually 22-year-old, newly graduated communications majors. If that media buyer needed to help a car manufacturer reach men looking to buy a car, she might place an ad in Car and Driver, or in the automotive section of the newspaper. Advertising used to be something you could place, count, then see in the front cover spread of a magazine.
But this is not digital advertising today. Digital advertising is automated, data-driven, and opaque in its mechanics. That 22-year-old communications major has had to make way for data scientists, mathematicians, and computer programmers who, behind the scenes, use statistics, calculus, and linear algebra to optimize advertising campaigns, by micro-targeting users and constantly tweaking algorithms.
Does that car manufacturer still want to reach men looking to buy a car? A data scientist may tell them the optimal target is a 39-year-old man, carrying on an extramarital affair, who’s on the brink of divorce. They can model this hypothesis (and prove it works), and advertising companies like Google and Facebook can put that into execution, finding ways to home in and target those types of people online.
When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way, where highly complex auction markets make their money by competing on who can better track users and invade their privacy more thoroughly.
The targeting begins the moment you as a reader visit any website. Typically, your IP address, your location, and the URL of the page you are on are swiped from your browser without your explicit knowledge, and shared with advertising companies that run these ad auctions. The goal, of course, is to build as specific a portrait about you as possible—by linking your device with your identity—and cookies are a common tool for doing so.
A “cookie” is a small text file that a site can install on your computer when you visit. The text file fingerprints your device with a unique identifier, or “cookie ID” (such as 12345qwert). If the website knows your real identity (for example, if you log on to the site with your real name), the company can link it to your cookie (here, 12345qwert) and begin to gain an advantage in determining which ads to load onto your page.
For example, if you’re on the hypothetical URL newspaper.com/how-to-fight-melanoma, this probably means you’re reading an article about melanoma. Companies might use that information to make a prediction about whether you or someone you love may have cancer. And they most certainly use that info to determine which ads to load onto your page.
The prices that any company is able to fetch for its ads depend on two crucial factors: the ability to identify who is loading the page, and the ability to then connect the user’s identity with more information about the user.
Imagine a person visits espn.com to read an article about the upcoming Super Bowl. Assume first he doesn’t log on to the site, and blocks his browser cookies, so maybe the website he is visiting can’t know who he really is. An advertiser can nonetheless bid on the opportunity to display an ad to this anonymous reader. Maybe the slot goes to a beer brand that wants to generally reach people who like football. Perhaps the going price is a $2 CPM (cost per thousand) and the ad gets sold at this price (meaning, this is the clearing auction price).
But you’re not usually anonymous when you’re online, even when you think you are. Again, advertising companies might know your identity because you log in, or because you are using a browser that allows tracking. Now it’s not simply an anonymous person loading a page about the Super Bowl, it’s “Michael Greenberg,” of Wichita, Kansas.
Now, companies can combine Michael’s identity with other commercially available datasets in real time. For example, they might stitch Michael’s identity with the fact that he makes $1 million-plus per year, which means that they can match Michael with an ad for a private jet service instead of a Bud Lite. The private jet ad might sell at a $200 CPM as opposed to the $2 CPM beer ad targeted to an anonymous user.
“The exact same ad, on the same website, at the same time, could be worth vastly different amounts to two different buyers depending on how much they know about the consumer being targeted,” explains Ari Paparo, now founder and CEO of advertising company Beeswax and a former Google exec. “User data is everything.”
Advertisers gain an even better advantage when they’re able to track what users do as they move from site to site, app to app, site to app, and vice versa, which is exactly how Facebook and Google operate (and exactly the type of information traditional publishers don’t have).
If a company that sells online ads can know what their readers are reading on other sites, then they can target the users based on that information when the user returns to their own site. For example, say Michael visits CNBC’s website in the mornings and reads about the markets, but visits The New York Times in the evenings and only reads the book review section. CNBC knows Michael is someone who follows the markets, and might monetize his view at a $30 CPM. The Times knows that Michael is someone who likes to read books so might only monetize Michael at a $10 CPM. If the Times can somehow find out that Michael is reading CNBC in the mornings, then when Michael visits the Times book section in the evening, the Times can target him as someone who follows the markets and monetize him at $30, too.
Would CNBC want to share with the Times what Michael reads on cnbc.com? Of course not. The two are competitors on the advertising side of the market. If CNBC is selling its audience of financial readers at a cost of $30, and the Times can copy CNBC’s readers and their reading patterns, then the Times could theoretically undercut CNBC and sell ads targeted to CNBC financial readers for, say, $20 instead of $30.
But publishers like the Times and CNBC have no choice but to share this information with Facebook and Google. How, might you ask, does Facebook currently get this data from news publishers that are also advertising competitors? Well, Facebook has a number of derivative products that flow from the social network, including “Like” buttons and log-in tools. Facebook licenses Like buttons to publishers so that their readers can “like” and then “share” news stories across the Facebook social network. But Facebook now conditions these licenses on the ability to track publishers’ readers, whether the readers click the Like buttons or not, and Facebook can now use publishers’ reader data to sell its own ads.
Google, which now tracks users on over 70 percent of the top one million sites, also uses its ability to track users across the internet to extract an advantage in advertising markets. Google tracks users via its analytics and ad-serving products, which Google consolidated and rebranded last summer as the Google Marketing Platform. Google was actually the first of the two companies to consolidate products under a rubric of privacy.
The implication of all this is that the money that Google and Facebook can make selling advertising goes well beyond what other ad sellers can demand in the market. The Big Tech duopoly can track billions of users across millions of sites and mobile apps, creating longitudinal profiles on users. News publishers simply cannot compete with that kind of an informational advantage.
But there is another thing going on in these markets that explains the duopoly in the advertising market. When most people think about Google and Facebook, they think the companies make so much money by selling ads on their own properties—Google search, Gmail, the Facebook social network, Instagram, and so on. This is partly true. Google and Facebook also run auctions through which publishers now sell their own advertising.
Unlike in finance, there are several auction markets where digital ads trade. Anyone can create one. But Google and Facebook make sure their own advertising inventory (YouTube, Facebook) can only be bought through their own, proprietary auctions. Google made almost $20 billion last year from selling other companies’ ads. This is why Google today is the largest seller of advertising, globally, period.
by Dina Srinivasan, American Prospect | Read more:
But this is not digital advertising today. Digital advertising is automated, data-driven, and opaque in its mechanics. That 22-year-old communications major has had to make way for data scientists, mathematicians, and computer programmers who, behind the scenes, use statistics, calculus, and linear algebra to optimize advertising campaigns, by micro-targeting users and constantly tweaking algorithms.
Does that car manufacturer still want to reach men looking to buy a car? A data scientist may tell them the optimal target is a 39-year-old man, carrying on an extramarital affair, who’s on the brink of divorce. They can model this hypothesis (and prove it works), and advertising companies like Google and Facebook can put that into execution, finding ways to home in and target those types of people online.When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way, where highly complex auction markets make their money by competing on who can better track users and invade their privacy more thoroughly.
The targeting begins the moment you as a reader visit any website. Typically, your IP address, your location, and the URL of the page you are on are swiped from your browser without your explicit knowledge, and shared with advertising companies that run these ad auctions. The goal, of course, is to build as specific a portrait about you as possible—by linking your device with your identity—and cookies are a common tool for doing so.
A “cookie” is a small text file that a site can install on your computer when you visit. The text file fingerprints your device with a unique identifier, or “cookie ID” (such as 12345qwert). If the website knows your real identity (for example, if you log on to the site with your real name), the company can link it to your cookie (here, 12345qwert) and begin to gain an advantage in determining which ads to load onto your page.
For example, if you’re on the hypothetical URL newspaper.com/how-to-fight-melanoma, this probably means you’re reading an article about melanoma. Companies might use that information to make a prediction about whether you or someone you love may have cancer. And they most certainly use that info to determine which ads to load onto your page.
The prices that any company is able to fetch for its ads depend on two crucial factors: the ability to identify who is loading the page, and the ability to then connect the user’s identity with more information about the user.
Imagine a person visits espn.com to read an article about the upcoming Super Bowl. Assume first he doesn’t log on to the site, and blocks his browser cookies, so maybe the website he is visiting can’t know who he really is. An advertiser can nonetheless bid on the opportunity to display an ad to this anonymous reader. Maybe the slot goes to a beer brand that wants to generally reach people who like football. Perhaps the going price is a $2 CPM (cost per thousand) and the ad gets sold at this price (meaning, this is the clearing auction price).
But you’re not usually anonymous when you’re online, even when you think you are. Again, advertising companies might know your identity because you log in, or because you are using a browser that allows tracking. Now it’s not simply an anonymous person loading a page about the Super Bowl, it’s “Michael Greenberg,” of Wichita, Kansas.
Now, companies can combine Michael’s identity with other commercially available datasets in real time. For example, they might stitch Michael’s identity with the fact that he makes $1 million-plus per year, which means that they can match Michael with an ad for a private jet service instead of a Bud Lite. The private jet ad might sell at a $200 CPM as opposed to the $2 CPM beer ad targeted to an anonymous user.
“The exact same ad, on the same website, at the same time, could be worth vastly different amounts to two different buyers depending on how much they know about the consumer being targeted,” explains Ari Paparo, now founder and CEO of advertising company Beeswax and a former Google exec. “User data is everything.”
Advertisers gain an even better advantage when they’re able to track what users do as they move from site to site, app to app, site to app, and vice versa, which is exactly how Facebook and Google operate (and exactly the type of information traditional publishers don’t have).
If a company that sells online ads can know what their readers are reading on other sites, then they can target the users based on that information when the user returns to their own site. For example, say Michael visits CNBC’s website in the mornings and reads about the markets, but visits The New York Times in the evenings and only reads the book review section. CNBC knows Michael is someone who follows the markets, and might monetize his view at a $30 CPM. The Times knows that Michael is someone who likes to read books so might only monetize Michael at a $10 CPM. If the Times can somehow find out that Michael is reading CNBC in the mornings, then when Michael visits the Times book section in the evening, the Times can target him as someone who follows the markets and monetize him at $30, too.
Would CNBC want to share with the Times what Michael reads on cnbc.com? Of course not. The two are competitors on the advertising side of the market. If CNBC is selling its audience of financial readers at a cost of $30, and the Times can copy CNBC’s readers and their reading patterns, then the Times could theoretically undercut CNBC and sell ads targeted to CNBC financial readers for, say, $20 instead of $30.
But publishers like the Times and CNBC have no choice but to share this information with Facebook and Google. How, might you ask, does Facebook currently get this data from news publishers that are also advertising competitors? Well, Facebook has a number of derivative products that flow from the social network, including “Like” buttons and log-in tools. Facebook licenses Like buttons to publishers so that their readers can “like” and then “share” news stories across the Facebook social network. But Facebook now conditions these licenses on the ability to track publishers’ readers, whether the readers click the Like buttons or not, and Facebook can now use publishers’ reader data to sell its own ads.
Google, which now tracks users on over 70 percent of the top one million sites, also uses its ability to track users across the internet to extract an advantage in advertising markets. Google tracks users via its analytics and ad-serving products, which Google consolidated and rebranded last summer as the Google Marketing Platform. Google was actually the first of the two companies to consolidate products under a rubric of privacy.
The implication of all this is that the money that Google and Facebook can make selling advertising goes well beyond what other ad sellers can demand in the market. The Big Tech duopoly can track billions of users across millions of sites and mobile apps, creating longitudinal profiles on users. News publishers simply cannot compete with that kind of an informational advantage.
But there is another thing going on in these markets that explains the duopoly in the advertising market. When most people think about Google and Facebook, they think the companies make so much money by selling ads on their own properties—Google search, Gmail, the Facebook social network, Instagram, and so on. This is partly true. Google and Facebook also run auctions through which publishers now sell their own advertising.
Unlike in finance, there are several auction markets where digital ads trade. Anyone can create one. But Google and Facebook make sure their own advertising inventory (YouTube, Facebook) can only be bought through their own, proprietary auctions. Google made almost $20 billion last year from selling other companies’ ads. This is why Google today is the largest seller of advertising, globally, period.
Image: Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Tough Laws, Cultural Differences Give Hawaii A Low Rate Of Gun Violence
In response to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that killed 31 people, Americans across the country are calling for stricter gun laws and turning their attention to states like Hawaii that appear less troubled by gun violence.
It does happen in Hawaii — just last week, a Honolulu police officer and a male suspect were shot near Pokai Bay. The last known mass shooting — known as the Xerox shootings — took place in 1999, leaving seven people dead.
But fewer people have died in Hawaii from gun violence in recent years than in any other state except Rhode Island.
In 2017, Hawaii had both the lowest number of gun deaths — 39 — and the lowest rate — 2.5 per 100,000 people, data from the federal Centers for Disease Control shows. Rhode Island beat Hawaii in 2016 and 2015.
That’s in comparison to the 3,513 gun deaths in Texas in 2017, or a rate of 12.4 per 100,000, the highest in the nation that year.
Hawaii’s strict gun laws have led some groups to sue.
“You can see how there’s this correlation,” said Laura Cutilletta, managing director of the Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy organization. Her organization’s analysis shows that stronger laws lead to lower gun death rates.
The center ranks Hawaii as having the seventh best gun laws out of the 50 states and a grade of A- on its scorecard, which the organization has been putting out since 2010. More than half of the states have an F.
“Hawaii is a strong state,” she said. Among other things, Hawaii requires gun dealers to get licenses and owners to register most firearms. The state regulates ammunition and restricts open carry, which prompted a federal lawsuit by local gun owners.
The Debate Over ‘Red Flag Laws’
Hawaii also put in place this year what’s known as a “red flag law,” or “extreme risk protection order,” which enables family members, medical professionals or others to prevent people from accessing guns when they appear to pose a threat.
Sixteen other states, including California, Connecticut and Florida, and Washington D.C., have passed similar laws.
State Sen. Karl Rhoads, who sponsored the Hawaii bill, said it’s meant to address the issue of people who buy their guns legally, but go through “some sort of breakdown.”
“It’s not foolproof,” Rhoads said, but it does stack the odds against a potential mass shooter.
But Harvey Gerwig, president of the Hawaii Rifle Association, said he finds these extreme risk protection orders problematic. His organization tried to defeat the bill.
“I understand with what’s been going on with all the crazy people shooting people that there’s a piqued interest in red flag laws,” he said. “But the fact is that most of these laws get abused.”
The law’s mechanism is very similar to how offenders in domestic violence incidents are barred by protective orders from accessing firearms.
A petitioner can file for a one-year protective order preventing someone from having a firearm. A hearing must be scheduled within 14 days. But in certain extreme cases, a petitioner can file for an order without notice to the respondent.
“We’re not against stopping somebody that is in fact dangerous to others,” Gerwig said. “The problem is that this law does not give any due process.” (...)
Gerwig said Hawaii’s cultural difference — the “Aloha spirit” — should be considered in accounting for the state’s low rate of gun deaths.
“Do we have a gun crime every now and then?” he said. “Yes we do. But we don’t have the level of violent crime that we’re seeing in large cities.”
Rhoads, the state senator who supports the extreme risk protection law, agreed that Hawaii benefits from a cultural difference.
“We don’t grab for a gun if we’re mad at somebody,” he said.
by Yoohyun Jung, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Chris Eger/Guns.com via
It does happen in Hawaii — just last week, a Honolulu police officer and a male suspect were shot near Pokai Bay. The last known mass shooting — known as the Xerox shootings — took place in 1999, leaving seven people dead.
But fewer people have died in Hawaii from gun violence in recent years than in any other state except Rhode Island.
In 2017, Hawaii had both the lowest number of gun deaths — 39 — and the lowest rate — 2.5 per 100,000 people, data from the federal Centers for Disease Control shows. Rhode Island beat Hawaii in 2016 and 2015. That’s in comparison to the 3,513 gun deaths in Texas in 2017, or a rate of 12.4 per 100,000, the highest in the nation that year.
Hawaii’s strict gun laws have led some groups to sue.
“You can see how there’s this correlation,” said Laura Cutilletta, managing director of the Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy organization. Her organization’s analysis shows that stronger laws lead to lower gun death rates.
The center ranks Hawaii as having the seventh best gun laws out of the 50 states and a grade of A- on its scorecard, which the organization has been putting out since 2010. More than half of the states have an F.
“Hawaii is a strong state,” she said. Among other things, Hawaii requires gun dealers to get licenses and owners to register most firearms. The state regulates ammunition and restricts open carry, which prompted a federal lawsuit by local gun owners.
The Debate Over ‘Red Flag Laws’
Hawaii also put in place this year what’s known as a “red flag law,” or “extreme risk protection order,” which enables family members, medical professionals or others to prevent people from accessing guns when they appear to pose a threat.
Sixteen other states, including California, Connecticut and Florida, and Washington D.C., have passed similar laws.
State Sen. Karl Rhoads, who sponsored the Hawaii bill, said it’s meant to address the issue of people who buy their guns legally, but go through “some sort of breakdown.”
“It’s not foolproof,” Rhoads said, but it does stack the odds against a potential mass shooter.
But Harvey Gerwig, president of the Hawaii Rifle Association, said he finds these extreme risk protection orders problematic. His organization tried to defeat the bill.
“I understand with what’s been going on with all the crazy people shooting people that there’s a piqued interest in red flag laws,” he said. “But the fact is that most of these laws get abused.”
The law’s mechanism is very similar to how offenders in domestic violence incidents are barred by protective orders from accessing firearms.
A petitioner can file for a one-year protective order preventing someone from having a firearm. A hearing must be scheduled within 14 days. But in certain extreme cases, a petitioner can file for an order without notice to the respondent.
“We’re not against stopping somebody that is in fact dangerous to others,” Gerwig said. “The problem is that this law does not give any due process.” (...)
Gerwig said Hawaii’s cultural difference — the “Aloha spirit” — should be considered in accounting for the state’s low rate of gun deaths.
“Do we have a gun crime every now and then?” he said. “Yes we do. But we don’t have the level of violent crime that we’re seeing in large cities.”
Rhoads, the state senator who supports the extreme risk protection law, agreed that Hawaii benefits from a cultural difference.
“We don’t grab for a gun if we’re mad at somebody,” he said.
by Yoohyun Jung, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Chris Eger/Guns.com via
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