Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Tourism Is Eating the World
In 1953, mountaineers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first confirmed summiting of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Recently, Everest has grown so popular that photos are surfacing showing huge linesof climbers waiting to surmount that same peak. On rarefied ground where once only Norgay and Hillary tread, now climbers are dying because of overcrowding.
A less dramatic version of this scene is being played out around the world -- for both good and ill. The number of international tourist arrivals has been increasing more or less exponentially since the mid-20th century, and totaled about 1.4 billion in 2018. Europe has seen the biggest share, but the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast:
This growth has been driven by a confluence of factors. Most obviously, disposable incomes have grown around the world, with China’s gains being especially impressive in recent years. People are living longer and having fewer children, giving them the time and freedom to travel more. Areas that were once off-limits, now are accessible as the world has generally become a more peaceful and open since the end of the Cold War.
Technology has also played a key role. Air travel is cheap and ubiquitous. Tickets, hotels, tours and local transportation can now be booked online. The internet has also given the masses information about the world's tourist destinations, from Japanese hot springs to California wine country to Iceland's glaciers. Recently, Google Maps has made it much easier to find one’s way around a strange country, translation apps have made foreign-language communication less daunting, Uber offers easy transportation in many international cities and Airbnb has expanded the range of available accommodations.
Tourism is big business for the countries that manage to attract hordes of visitors. Direct receipts from tourism totaled $1.6 trillion in 2017, or 2% of the entire world economy:
The World Travel and Tourism council estimates that the amount of economic activity attributable to the sector is much larger, reaching $8.8 trillion in 2018, and supporting as much as 10% of all jobs on the planet.
But tourism has a down side as well. As the Everest example shows, travel to the most popular destinations is subject to what economists call congestion externalities -- when you go to a famous place, your presence makes the experience just a little less convenient and comfortable for everyone else. Multiply that effect by the millions, and the world’s tourists are crowding each other out of a good time. I felt this myself when I recently went to Golden Gai, a bar district that used to be one of Tokyo’s hidden gems, and found that it was packed with Western and Chinese tourists.
For cities, the experience can be even more harrowing. Even as tourist dollars flow into the coffers of local businesses, mobs of travelers strain infrastructure that was never built to handle so many human bodies. If a city tries to accommodate the inflow by building large amounts of new infrastructure, those streets and trains will sit empty during the off season, or if the city loses its tourist appeal. Travelers can be accommodated with Airbnb, but this can push up rents for locals. Logistically, it’s simply inefficient for every location in the world to always be prepared to house, feed and transport many more people than actually live there.
Unfortunately, there will come a point where over-tourism makes travel both logistically inconvenient and much less enjoyable for everyone. The problem can be ameliorated by spreading tourists around to less crowded destinations, as Japan is trying to do. Some destinations, like Amsterdam, are cutting back on advertising and self-promotion. But eventually there will be no choice but to start charging tourists a fee.
A few places are already trying this. Venice will soon start charging people to come to the city for day trips. New Zealand has introduced a tourist tax. Various other European countries and cities have implemented or plan to implement taxes on hotels and other overnight accommodation. This is a simple application of congestion pricing, the textbook economics solution to the problem of overcrowding.
A less dramatic version of this scene is being played out around the world -- for both good and ill. The number of international tourist arrivals has been increasing more or less exponentially since the mid-20th century, and totaled about 1.4 billion in 2018. Europe has seen the biggest share, but the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast:
This growth has been driven by a confluence of factors. Most obviously, disposable incomes have grown around the world, with China’s gains being especially impressive in recent years. People are living longer and having fewer children, giving them the time and freedom to travel more. Areas that were once off-limits, now are accessible as the world has generally become a more peaceful and open since the end of the Cold War.Technology has also played a key role. Air travel is cheap and ubiquitous. Tickets, hotels, tours and local transportation can now be booked online. The internet has also given the masses information about the world's tourist destinations, from Japanese hot springs to California wine country to Iceland's glaciers. Recently, Google Maps has made it much easier to find one’s way around a strange country, translation apps have made foreign-language communication less daunting, Uber offers easy transportation in many international cities and Airbnb has expanded the range of available accommodations.
Tourism is big business for the countries that manage to attract hordes of visitors. Direct receipts from tourism totaled $1.6 trillion in 2017, or 2% of the entire world economy:
The World Travel and Tourism council estimates that the amount of economic activity attributable to the sector is much larger, reaching $8.8 trillion in 2018, and supporting as much as 10% of all jobs on the planet.
But tourism has a down side as well. As the Everest example shows, travel to the most popular destinations is subject to what economists call congestion externalities -- when you go to a famous place, your presence makes the experience just a little less convenient and comfortable for everyone else. Multiply that effect by the millions, and the world’s tourists are crowding each other out of a good time. I felt this myself when I recently went to Golden Gai, a bar district that used to be one of Tokyo’s hidden gems, and found that it was packed with Western and Chinese tourists.
For cities, the experience can be even more harrowing. Even as tourist dollars flow into the coffers of local businesses, mobs of travelers strain infrastructure that was never built to handle so many human bodies. If a city tries to accommodate the inflow by building large amounts of new infrastructure, those streets and trains will sit empty during the off season, or if the city loses its tourist appeal. Travelers can be accommodated with Airbnb, but this can push up rents for locals. Logistically, it’s simply inefficient for every location in the world to always be prepared to house, feed and transport many more people than actually live there.
Unfortunately, there will come a point where over-tourism makes travel both logistically inconvenient and much less enjoyable for everyone. The problem can be ameliorated by spreading tourists around to less crowded destinations, as Japan is trying to do. Some destinations, like Amsterdam, are cutting back on advertising and self-promotion. But eventually there will be no choice but to start charging tourists a fee.
A few places are already trying this. Venice will soon start charging people to come to the city for day trips. New Zealand has introduced a tourist tax. Various other European countries and cities have implemented or plan to implement taxes on hotels and other overnight accommodation. This is a simple application of congestion pricing, the textbook economics solution to the problem of overcrowding.
by Noah Smith, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Perversity! Futility! Jeopardy!
Suppose you were a person who didn't want to think too hard; and suppose you were a centrist pundit for one of the nation’s leading newspapers. But I repeat myself.
Your assignment at this point in the political cycle—still a year away from next summer’s nominating conventions—is to survey the field of candidates and find them all lacking. The reason? None of them are saying just what you think they should be saying. Your gut tells you that the ideal candidate is one who resembles that paragon of calm reason and moderation: the centrist pundit!
You will see, as early as it is, a distinct threat on the horizon. There are candidates competing to lead the Democratic Party who want to pull the party to the far left. You must sound the alarm. These candidates will commit to stances that will scare away moderate voters. As they pander to the activist wing of their party, they are hurting their chance to win the general election next November. Being a seasoned political observer, you are well aware that this often happens in Democratic primaries: candidates veer left to get the nomination, and then pivot to the center for the general. But you also know this: it’s not going to work. Too many responsible moderates, such as yourself, will worry the candidate is still harboring those leftist plans. You don’t want someone who is going to bankrupt the nation.
The column writes itself.
The Democratic debates in June (and the internecine debates among congressional Democrats) set off a chorus of such columns, all making the same point: we do not like what we’re hearing. On the New York Times op-ed pages alone there were: 1) a Bret Stephens complaint in which he channeled the impressions of “ordinary people” (i.e., white nativists) and concluded that the Dems were off to “a wretched start”; 2) a Maureen Dowd column in defense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, featuring former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel assailing the left flank of the Democratic Party with the challenge, “Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party?”; 3) Thomas Friedman confessing that he was “shocked” by some of the rhetoric he heard in the debates; and 4) David Brooks, under the title “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” warning that “the party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable.”
And now, just in time for the next round of Democratic debates, Dowd has returned with a second defense of Pelosi’s “pragmatism,” while deriding progressives as “modern Puritans,” while also blaming Democrats for spending too much time “knifing one another.” Her stated motivation was anger that Left Twitter roasted her recent Washington soiree, which was attended by Pelosi. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel summarized the column as “the Democrats will lose if the left keeps making fun of my parties,” but it was even worse than that—Dowd was insisting that because Nancy Knows Best, any “puritan” push for impeachment reflected not just the nastiness of the left but its stupidity.
You could gather examples of this kind of standard punditry from the archives, feed them into a computer, and produce this year’s batches through artificial intelligence. You’d have to plug in new names, but not new ideas.
In the 1980s, the candidate who sparked pundit-panic was Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based civil rights leader ran in the Democratic primary in 1984, and again in 1988. That first race was especially instructive. Imagine: an angry black man running for president, and in a year when the overarching mission for Democrats should have been to deny Ronald Reagan a second term. Obviously, Jackson could not win against Reagan, so what was the point?
From the op-ed page of the New York Times, William Safire surveyed the field in June of 1983 and saw Jackson “marching out with the blacks,” as well as other emerging threats to the Democratic Party establishment’s preferred candidate, former vice-president Walter Mondale. Illinois congressman John Anderson, who had run as an independent in 1980, was considering another run (he decided against it). California senator Alan Cranston was campaigning for a freeze on nuclear weapons production. Cranston was winning the “greens,” according to Safire, “who make nominatable whomever they rally behind and make unelectable whomever they help nominate.” Safire saw a parallel in the landslide 1983 reelection of Margaret Thatcher in Britain: even if Reagan didn’t run for reelection in 1984, he surmised, “any Republican candidate would win, as Mrs. Thatcher did, on the dangerous kookiness of a far-left government.”
As it turned out, of course, Mondale won the nomination and ran as a conventional middle-of-the-road Democrat. He went on to win thirteen electoral votes (Minnesota and the District of Columbia) to Reagan’s 525. Good times. (...)
The foundational fallacy of most mainstream campaign punditry is that presidential elections are decided on some kind of left-right binary axis. It happens to be the belief of most of the operatives and funders of the Democratic Party establishment, as well. Their first principle is: if voters see policy proposals that seem to be coming from the American left, they will choose a conservative like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush as the safer alternative. It’s remarkable that so many veteran political columnists and political “pros” seem to think it works this way. But that they cling to this article of faith in the third year of the Trump presidency is not just curious—it’s perverse.
Even if it was mostly due to a series of freakish accidents that Trump found a narrow path to the presidency, does anyone believe his policy proposals ensured his success? That somehow American voters considered the details of the immigration issue, for example, and decided “yes, let’s build a wall and require Mexico to pay for it.” Or that perhaps he was correct in saying that Obamacare should be dismantled for some unspecified Republican approach to health care?
You could list any number of factors that are more decisive in a presidential election than what’s in a candidate’s policy papers. It’s unfortunate, but one of the most determinative factors is how well a candidate performs in front of large audiences, especially on television—that is, does the candidate have what are essentially acting skills: looking good, speaking with confident facial expressions, attracting viewers instead of turning them off? (In television infotainment and newscasts, there are attempts to measure this appeal by “Q Scores.”)
In a more general way, being able to move voters emotionally obviously has more relevance than where a candidate comes down on any particular policy proposal. Take the matter of what kind of health care system is best for the United States in the coming decade. Our centrist pundits are gnashing their teeth because several Democrats are willing to discuss the idea of universal health care. Any Medicare for All proposal is going to be too scary once voters realize it means “getting rid of private health insurance.” Supposedly the Republicans will have a field day by rallying people to the cause of corporate insurance. If you get a Democratic candidate who believes that and tries to deflect the charge with detailed explanation of how the system would gradually evolve— that if you like your employer-sponsored health insurance you can keep it, etc. etc.—you are on the losing side. But if you tap into what many people feel—that is, that big insurance companies are not your friend, and that the business model of most private insurance is to wriggle out of paying for health care and to saddle you with as much cost as possible . . . why not rescue people from the clutches of profit-driven insurance companies? These are businesses that, until it was disallowed, insisted they would not cover people with “pre-existing conditions.”
It would be pretty to think that America’s course is decided by rational voters who closely examine the policy choices in front of them. Who can believe that in the age of Trump? Here’s a counter-theory then: in most presidential elections, the vast majority of voters will choose the Democratic or Republican based on ideology or partisan loyalty. The remaining small sliver of “persuadable voters” are responding to something that is not necessarily a preference or rejection of conservative or liberal policies. Often it is just a vague sense of which candidate seems more plausible in offering hope for a better politics, or a better economy, or a better country, or a better deal for people like them.
by Dave Denison, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: PBS NewsHour/The Baffler
[ed. I just want a candidate who's sincere and authentic (vs. poll or media or advisor driven), who can articulate a path forward that feels like progress (instead of pandering to everyone).]
Your assignment at this point in the political cycle—still a year away from next summer’s nominating conventions—is to survey the field of candidates and find them all lacking. The reason? None of them are saying just what you think they should be saying. Your gut tells you that the ideal candidate is one who resembles that paragon of calm reason and moderation: the centrist pundit!
You will see, as early as it is, a distinct threat on the horizon. There are candidates competing to lead the Democratic Party who want to pull the party to the far left. You must sound the alarm. These candidates will commit to stances that will scare away moderate voters. As they pander to the activist wing of their party, they are hurting their chance to win the general election next November. Being a seasoned political observer, you are well aware that this often happens in Democratic primaries: candidates veer left to get the nomination, and then pivot to the center for the general. But you also know this: it’s not going to work. Too many responsible moderates, such as yourself, will worry the candidate is still harboring those leftist plans. You don’t want someone who is going to bankrupt the nation.The column writes itself.
The Democratic debates in June (and the internecine debates among congressional Democrats) set off a chorus of such columns, all making the same point: we do not like what we’re hearing. On the New York Times op-ed pages alone there were: 1) a Bret Stephens complaint in which he channeled the impressions of “ordinary people” (i.e., white nativists) and concluded that the Dems were off to “a wretched start”; 2) a Maureen Dowd column in defense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, featuring former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel assailing the left flank of the Democratic Party with the challenge, “Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party?”; 3) Thomas Friedman confessing that he was “shocked” by some of the rhetoric he heard in the debates; and 4) David Brooks, under the title “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” warning that “the party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable.”
And now, just in time for the next round of Democratic debates, Dowd has returned with a second defense of Pelosi’s “pragmatism,” while deriding progressives as “modern Puritans,” while also blaming Democrats for spending too much time “knifing one another.” Her stated motivation was anger that Left Twitter roasted her recent Washington soiree, which was attended by Pelosi. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel summarized the column as “the Democrats will lose if the left keeps making fun of my parties,” but it was even worse than that—Dowd was insisting that because Nancy Knows Best, any “puritan” push for impeachment reflected not just the nastiness of the left but its stupidity.
You could gather examples of this kind of standard punditry from the archives, feed them into a computer, and produce this year’s batches through artificial intelligence. You’d have to plug in new names, but not new ideas.
In the 1980s, the candidate who sparked pundit-panic was Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based civil rights leader ran in the Democratic primary in 1984, and again in 1988. That first race was especially instructive. Imagine: an angry black man running for president, and in a year when the overarching mission for Democrats should have been to deny Ronald Reagan a second term. Obviously, Jackson could not win against Reagan, so what was the point?
From the op-ed page of the New York Times, William Safire surveyed the field in June of 1983 and saw Jackson “marching out with the blacks,” as well as other emerging threats to the Democratic Party establishment’s preferred candidate, former vice-president Walter Mondale. Illinois congressman John Anderson, who had run as an independent in 1980, was considering another run (he decided against it). California senator Alan Cranston was campaigning for a freeze on nuclear weapons production. Cranston was winning the “greens,” according to Safire, “who make nominatable whomever they rally behind and make unelectable whomever they help nominate.” Safire saw a parallel in the landslide 1983 reelection of Margaret Thatcher in Britain: even if Reagan didn’t run for reelection in 1984, he surmised, “any Republican candidate would win, as Mrs. Thatcher did, on the dangerous kookiness of a far-left government.”
As it turned out, of course, Mondale won the nomination and ran as a conventional middle-of-the-road Democrat. He went on to win thirteen electoral votes (Minnesota and the District of Columbia) to Reagan’s 525. Good times. (...)
The foundational fallacy of most mainstream campaign punditry is that presidential elections are decided on some kind of left-right binary axis. It happens to be the belief of most of the operatives and funders of the Democratic Party establishment, as well. Their first principle is: if voters see policy proposals that seem to be coming from the American left, they will choose a conservative like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush as the safer alternative. It’s remarkable that so many veteran political columnists and political “pros” seem to think it works this way. But that they cling to this article of faith in the third year of the Trump presidency is not just curious—it’s perverse.
Even if it was mostly due to a series of freakish accidents that Trump found a narrow path to the presidency, does anyone believe his policy proposals ensured his success? That somehow American voters considered the details of the immigration issue, for example, and decided “yes, let’s build a wall and require Mexico to pay for it.” Or that perhaps he was correct in saying that Obamacare should be dismantled for some unspecified Republican approach to health care?
You could list any number of factors that are more decisive in a presidential election than what’s in a candidate’s policy papers. It’s unfortunate, but one of the most determinative factors is how well a candidate performs in front of large audiences, especially on television—that is, does the candidate have what are essentially acting skills: looking good, speaking with confident facial expressions, attracting viewers instead of turning them off? (In television infotainment and newscasts, there are attempts to measure this appeal by “Q Scores.”)
In a more general way, being able to move voters emotionally obviously has more relevance than where a candidate comes down on any particular policy proposal. Take the matter of what kind of health care system is best for the United States in the coming decade. Our centrist pundits are gnashing their teeth because several Democrats are willing to discuss the idea of universal health care. Any Medicare for All proposal is going to be too scary once voters realize it means “getting rid of private health insurance.” Supposedly the Republicans will have a field day by rallying people to the cause of corporate insurance. If you get a Democratic candidate who believes that and tries to deflect the charge with detailed explanation of how the system would gradually evolve— that if you like your employer-sponsored health insurance you can keep it, etc. etc.—you are on the losing side. But if you tap into what many people feel—that is, that big insurance companies are not your friend, and that the business model of most private insurance is to wriggle out of paying for health care and to saddle you with as much cost as possible . . . why not rescue people from the clutches of profit-driven insurance companies? These are businesses that, until it was disallowed, insisted they would not cover people with “pre-existing conditions.”
It would be pretty to think that America’s course is decided by rational voters who closely examine the policy choices in front of them. Who can believe that in the age of Trump? Here’s a counter-theory then: in most presidential elections, the vast majority of voters will choose the Democratic or Republican based on ideology or partisan loyalty. The remaining small sliver of “persuadable voters” are responding to something that is not necessarily a preference or rejection of conservative or liberal policies. Often it is just a vague sense of which candidate seems more plausible in offering hope for a better politics, or a better economy, or a better country, or a better deal for people like them.
Image: PBS NewsHour/The Baffler
[ed. I just want a candidate who's sincere and authentic (vs. poll or media or advisor driven), who can articulate a path forward that feels like progress (instead of pandering to everyone).]
Nutrition Science Is Broken
It's been a tortuous path for the humble egg. For much of our history, it was a staple of the American breakfast — as in, bacon and eggs. Then, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it began to be disparaged as a dangerous source of artery-clogging cholesterol, a probable culprit behind Americans’ exceptionally high rates of heart attack and stroke. Then, in the past few years, the chicken egg was redeemed and once again touted as an excellent source of protein, unique antioxidants like lutein and zeaxanthin, and many vitamins and minerals, including riboflavin and selenium, all in a fairly low-calorie package.
This March, a study published in JAMA put the egg back on the hot seat. It found that the amount of cholesterol in a bit less than two large eggs a day was associated with an increase in a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease and death by 17 percent and 18 percent, respectively. The risks grow with every additional half egg. It was a really large study, too — with nearly 30,000 participants — which suggests it should be fairly reliable.
So which is it? Is the egg good or bad? And, while we are on the subject, when so much of what we are told about diet, health, and weight loss is inconsistent and contradictory, can we believe any of it?
Quite frankly, probably not. Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method. As nutrition-research critics Edward Archer and Carl Lavie have put it, “’Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape.”
Other nutrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University, have been similarly scathing in their commentary. They point out that observational nutrition studies are essentially just surveys: Researchers ask a group of study participants — a cohort — what they eat and how often, then they track the cohort over time to see what, if any, health conditions the study participants develop.
The trouble with the approach is that no one really remembers what they ate. You might remember today’s breakfast in some detail. But, breakfast three days ago, in precise amounts? Even the unadventurous creature of habit would probably get it wrong. That tends to make these surveys inaccurate, especially when researchers try to drill down to specific foods.
Then, that initial inaccuracy is compounded when scientists use those guesses about eating habits to calculate the precise amounts of specific proteins and nutrients that a person consumed. The errors add up, and they can lead to seriously dubious conclusions.
A good example is the 2005 study that suggested that eating a cup of endive once a week might cut a woman’s risk of ovarian cancer by 76 percent. There was even a possible mechanism to explain the effect: Endive is high in kaempferol, a flavonoid that has shown anticarcinogenic properties in laboratory experiments. It was a big study, based on a cohort of more than 62,000 women. This study was published in the prestigious journal Cancer, and many in the media were convinced. Dr. Mehmet Oz even touted it on his television show.
But, as Maki Inoue-Choi, of the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues pointed out, the survey had asked about many other kaempferol-rich foods — including some that had higher levels of kaempferol than endive does — and not one of those other foods had the same apparent effect on ovarian cancer.
The new study linking eggs and cardiovascular disease deserves similar scrutiny. Statistically speaking, 30,000 participants makes for a very powerful study. And in fairness, the study’s defenders say that it did a good job accounting for factors that might have influenced the findings, such as overall fat consumption, smoking, and lifestyle.
But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study. Can we assume that the participants gave a reliable depiction of their diet at the outset, and then that they maintained that same diet for the years — in many cases, decades — that followed? Probably not. Who eats the same way for 10 years?
In light of these flaws, Dr. Anthony Pearson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in suburban St. Louis, had this advice: “Rather than drastically cutting egg consumption,” he wrote in a blog for MedPage Today, “I propose that there be a drastic cut in the production of weak observational nutrition studies and a moratorium on inflammatory media coverage of meaningless nutritional studies.” (...)
Unfortunately, it is impractical — and probably impossible — for most researchers to carry out those types of studies on a large scale. Crunching the data from a big observational study is a much easier way to get a publication and some media attention. So we get what we get.
In the meantime, what do the rest of us do with our diets?
Most experts recommend avoiding processed foods as much as possible and sticking with a Mediterranean-like diet because it makes intuitive sense. It is not too restrictive. It is heavy in fruits and vegetables. It has the right kinds of fats and some grains. It includes fish and generally lean proteins.
These experts contend that you should also be wary about foods that are said to have newly revealed healthy, or unhealthy, properties. In other words, don’t buy the notion of superfoods. The evidence is just not there.
by Timothy F. Kirn, Undark | Read more:
Image: kajakiki via Getty Images
This March, a study published in JAMA put the egg back on the hot seat. It found that the amount of cholesterol in a bit less than two large eggs a day was associated with an increase in a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease and death by 17 percent and 18 percent, respectively. The risks grow with every additional half egg. It was a really large study, too — with nearly 30,000 participants — which suggests it should be fairly reliable.
So which is it? Is the egg good or bad? And, while we are on the subject, when so much of what we are told about diet, health, and weight loss is inconsistent and contradictory, can we believe any of it?Quite frankly, probably not. Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method. As nutrition-research critics Edward Archer and Carl Lavie have put it, “’Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape.”
Other nutrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University, have been similarly scathing in their commentary. They point out that observational nutrition studies are essentially just surveys: Researchers ask a group of study participants — a cohort — what they eat and how often, then they track the cohort over time to see what, if any, health conditions the study participants develop.
The trouble with the approach is that no one really remembers what they ate. You might remember today’s breakfast in some detail. But, breakfast three days ago, in precise amounts? Even the unadventurous creature of habit would probably get it wrong. That tends to make these surveys inaccurate, especially when researchers try to drill down to specific foods.
Then, that initial inaccuracy is compounded when scientists use those guesses about eating habits to calculate the precise amounts of specific proteins and nutrients that a person consumed. The errors add up, and they can lead to seriously dubious conclusions.
A good example is the 2005 study that suggested that eating a cup of endive once a week might cut a woman’s risk of ovarian cancer by 76 percent. There was even a possible mechanism to explain the effect: Endive is high in kaempferol, a flavonoid that has shown anticarcinogenic properties in laboratory experiments. It was a big study, based on a cohort of more than 62,000 women. This study was published in the prestigious journal Cancer, and many in the media were convinced. Dr. Mehmet Oz even touted it on his television show.
But, as Maki Inoue-Choi, of the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues pointed out, the survey had asked about many other kaempferol-rich foods — including some that had higher levels of kaempferol than endive does — and not one of those other foods had the same apparent effect on ovarian cancer.
The new study linking eggs and cardiovascular disease deserves similar scrutiny. Statistically speaking, 30,000 participants makes for a very powerful study. And in fairness, the study’s defenders say that it did a good job accounting for factors that might have influenced the findings, such as overall fat consumption, smoking, and lifestyle.
But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study. Can we assume that the participants gave a reliable depiction of their diet at the outset, and then that they maintained that same diet for the years — in many cases, decades — that followed? Probably not. Who eats the same way for 10 years?
In light of these flaws, Dr. Anthony Pearson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in suburban St. Louis, had this advice: “Rather than drastically cutting egg consumption,” he wrote in a blog for MedPage Today, “I propose that there be a drastic cut in the production of weak observational nutrition studies and a moratorium on inflammatory media coverage of meaningless nutritional studies.” (...)
Unfortunately, it is impractical — and probably impossible — for most researchers to carry out those types of studies on a large scale. Crunching the data from a big observational study is a much easier way to get a publication and some media attention. So we get what we get.
In the meantime, what do the rest of us do with our diets?
Most experts recommend avoiding processed foods as much as possible and sticking with a Mediterranean-like diet because it makes intuitive sense. It is not too restrictive. It is heavy in fruits and vegetables. It has the right kinds of fats and some grains. It includes fish and generally lean proteins.
These experts contend that you should also be wary about foods that are said to have newly revealed healthy, or unhealthy, properties. In other words, don’t buy the notion of superfoods. The evidence is just not there.
by Timothy F. Kirn, Undark | Read more:
Image: kajakiki via Getty Images
Rolling Coal
Freedom as sociopathy.
A pickup truck "rolling coal" cruised by a downtown sidewalk crowded with tourists Saturday night here in the Cesspool of Sin. Rolling coal, says Wikipedia, "is the practice of modifying a diesel engine to increase the amount of fuel entering the engine in order to emit large amounts of black or grey sooty exhaust fumes into the air." Vice described it in 2014 as a way to "piss off cops, Prius drivers, and anyone else who happens to get in the way of their big-ass trucks."
It's an in-your-face weapon in the culture wars. Like flying big Confederate and Trump flags from your truck, only no one sees it coming until you flip the switch. (...)
Why bring it up in 2019? Because that grinning, "fuck your feelings" sociopathy behind rolling coal and Trump rally tee shirts has morphed into threatening passersby with a hail of bullets. A flip of the safety switch to "Fire" and watch people scatter. If they are not scattering already.
20-year-old Dmitriy Andreychenko filmed himself strolling into a Springfield, Mo. Walmart Thursday carrying an AR-style rifle, a handgun, and wearing a tactical vest with over 100 rounds of ammunition. It was just days after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio left 31 dead. His wife and his sister warned him it was a bad idea.
The manager had an employee pull the fire alarm to clear the store. A former member of the military held Andreychenko at gunpoint until police arrived.
But Missouri is an open-carry state, he told police. It was just a “social experiment” to see if his Second Amendment rights were still intact. He didn't see a reason why "people would freak out." Police charged Andreychenko with making a terrorist threat. A Battlefield City officer and another driver went to the emergency room with "severe injuries" after a collision as police rushed to the scene.
Dahlia Lithwick ponders the mentality it takes to practice belligerence as a form of free expression:
A pickup truck "rolling coal" cruised by a downtown sidewalk crowded with tourists Saturday night here in the Cesspool of Sin. Rolling coal, says Wikipedia, "is the practice of modifying a diesel engine to increase the amount of fuel entering the engine in order to emit large amounts of black or grey sooty exhaust fumes into the air." Vice described it in 2014 as a way to "piss off cops, Prius drivers, and anyone else who happens to get in the way of their big-ass trucks."
It's an in-your-face weapon in the culture wars. Like flying big Confederate and Trump flags from your truck, only no one sees it coming until you flip the switch. (...)Why bring it up in 2019? Because that grinning, "fuck your feelings" sociopathy behind rolling coal and Trump rally tee shirts has morphed into threatening passersby with a hail of bullets. A flip of the safety switch to "Fire" and watch people scatter. If they are not scattering already.
20-year-old Dmitriy Andreychenko filmed himself strolling into a Springfield, Mo. Walmart Thursday carrying an AR-style rifle, a handgun, and wearing a tactical vest with over 100 rounds of ammunition. It was just days after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio left 31 dead. His wife and his sister warned him it was a bad idea.
The manager had an employee pull the fire alarm to clear the store. A former member of the military held Andreychenko at gunpoint until police arrived.
But Missouri is an open-carry state, he told police. It was just a “social experiment” to see if his Second Amendment rights were still intact. He didn't see a reason why "people would freak out." Police charged Andreychenko with making a terrorist threat. A Battlefield City officer and another driver went to the emergency room with "severe injuries" after a collision as police rushed to the scene.
Dahlia Lithwick ponders the mentality it takes to practice belligerence as a form of free expression:
[ed. Andreychenko didn’t die last week. Instead, officers took the man into custody “without incident.” That’s a tremendous surfeit of good fortune for a man who was apprehended both by an armed bystander and the police. By its very definition, white privilege is the ability to film yourself conducting a “social experiment” with military-grade weapons at the same chain where a mass shooting just happened, without being shot dead in your tracks. Trayvon Martin wasn’t even granted the luxury of being allowed to conduct a “social experiment” with a bag of Skittles.]
I am mindful of privilege today more than most days because it is the second anniversary of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and we all know how that ended. I am mindful of what privilege buys you in America: the right to not get shot when you’re armed to the teeth, and the right to not have to explain beyond the fact that you were just “experimenting” with constitutional freedoms. The privilege of violent white men is the privilege of an almost-perfect failure of empathy, imagination, or regard. It buys you the right to ignore your wife and sister, to ignore current events and history and murder statistics, to ignore the fact that reasonable people should reasonably fear being shot in a bloody massacre. It allows you to stagger blindly through the world and not get killed, while you practice the fine art of looking like you can and will shoot hundreds of others, without even wondering why people are fleeing the building with their children clutched tight.
White men with guns, quickly becoming the most lethal cohort of Americans, don’t just benefit, every day, from the presumption of innocence, and eternal boyhood. They benefit twice over—first from that, and then from the presumption that their perfect self-absorption and solipsism are themselves enduringly worthy of constitutional protection.That is Lithwick's polite way of saying some Americans' idea of freedom is the right to behave like an asshole. Now they have elected one to the White House who tells them every day to go to town. "Perceived grievance, either political or personal" motivates these shooters. Trump, who has built his life around grievance and revenge, validates theirs.
by Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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]
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