StoryAI, a Bot That Autocompletes a Story For You

Behold StoryAI: Type in a few sentences, and the model autocompletes your story, writing a few hundred more words that, by its calculations, could plausibly follow.

It was created by the folks at BotSociety Inc, using the GPT-2 774M model created by OpenAI, which is eerily good. As an example, it was fed these three sentences as a seed ...

President Trump is buying Greenland in a surprise deal. The state of California is traded in return. The deal was well received by Republicans.

... and it generated this following story:

The Washington Post reports: 

"Trump said the country's unique geography and natural mineral resources would be 'an asset' to the state over its lifespans. He is expected to move swiftly to make good the investment in the $10.8 billion purchase of a national park that he and the president of Denmark, Jens Stoltenberg, announced last year.

"The sale of the state could help the U.S. in its fight against global warming, which is already heating up the planet. The government of Denmark says the purchase will pay for a 10-year expansion of a national park in the north of the island, which is one of the world's most biodiverse areas." 

This move doesn't come as a surprise to political analysts. A recent study by the World Wildlife Fund and the Smithsonian's National Center for Atmospheric Research revealed several Arctic nations have substantial oil reserves and natural gas reserves and they are in talks to trade them in for the Arctic. 

"Canada and Russia are the two most active, buying all but 2 percent of the Arctic's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, based on an analysis of data from 2008 to 2016," explains the Wall Street Journal. "As many as 11 countries also have interests in the Arctic. The U.S. and Britain, which both lost an ocean fleet to Islamic State militants in the last year, are both among them, as are China, Germany and India."

These story-generation models are getting sophisticated enough -- and easy enough for anyone to deploy -- that it isn't hard to imagine them being used in various forms of deception, from spam to fraudbots to political twitterbots and chatbots. They're probably already being used in those sectors.

I wondered what the model would generate if I fed it the opening two sentences of this very blog post, and, le voila:

I'd love to know their version: I was going to use GPT-2 when I published my paper, but it was in need of some improvement. I thought I'd try the GPT model, too. 

And the robot did not disappoint. The robot wrote down what was on the page. It was incredibly fast. Like very good. It did not need to go over the page twice, as it was already there so fast. I can't tell you how impressed I am. One might compare it to the kind of artificial intelligence the DeepMind AlphaGo machine has: fast, and smart, and able to match humans in a match. 

We should see more of this. The problem of the robot's writing in a non-linear format is not entirely solved yet, but it could be, and the work done for this paper could inform future work by companies like OpenAI, creating the kind of general-purpose AI that could be used right here in our everyday lives. 

And of course, we shouldn't think of deep learning for humans as a technology we would just casually take to the bank, use as an ATM. It's a tool, one that needs to be used carefully. A robot that is more or less a computer could benefit from careful control over its output data and how it is interpreted as being used. If you ask any machine-learning researcher whether they are "a fan of deep learning", you'll find a lot of skeptics. 

This is all possible because of a deep realization by the researchers I mentioned before — that our world works better when everyone, all the time, is able to read and understand text. What this all comes down to, however, is that everyone deserves a little bit of control over the way their own world works. That's why, for me, the best thing about this paper is not that it makes machine learning even deeper and more important. No, it's that it shows, just once again, that the tools we use to teach and take control of computers have been working for centuries. And that, ultimately, it works.

by Clive Thompson, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: CC-2.0-licensed photo of typewriter via Ak~i's Flickr stream
[ed. Now this is scary.]

Rumbling in the Whine Cellar

Peppered with complaints from farmers fed up with President Trump’s trade war, Sonny Perdue found his patience wearing thin. Mr. Perdue, the agriculture secretary and the guest of honor at the annual Farmfest gathering in southern Minnesota this month, tried to break the ice with a joke.

“What do you call two farmers in a basement?” Mr. Perdue asked near the end of a testy hourlong town-hall-style event. “A whine cellar.”

A cascade of boos ricocheted around the room.

American farmers have become collateral damage in a trade war that Mr. Trump began to help manufacturers and other companies that he believes have been hurt by China’s “unfair” trade practices.

More than a year into the trade dispute, sales of American soybeans, pork, wheat and other agricultural products to China have dried up as Beijing retaliates against Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. Lucrative contracts that farmers long relied on for a significant source of income have evaporated, with Chinese buyers looking to other nations like Brazil and Canada to get the commodities they need. Farm bankruptcy filings in the year through June were up 13 percent from 2018 and loan delinquency rates are on the rise, according to the American Farm Bureau. (...)

Losing the world’s most populous country as an export market has been a major blow to the agriculture industry. Total American agricultural exports to China were $24 billion in 2014 and fell to $9.1 billion last year, according to the American Farm Bureau. Exports of farm products to China fell by $1.3 billion in the first half of the year, the agriculture group said this month.

A report from the Agriculture Department this month found that Canadian wheat exports to China have “rocketed” this year, while exports from the United States have plunged.

The administration has tried to mollify farmers by rolling out two financial aid packages totaling $28 billion. The White House has also dispatched Mr. Perdue, the 72-year-old former governor of Georgia who was raised on a farm and trained as a veterinarian, to places like Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin to calm the nerves of farmers.

But as the trade fight gets uglier, farmers are beginning to panic. Last week, Mr. Trump said he would increase tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to 30 percent and impose a 15 percent tax on another $300 billion worth later this year. China has already said it will no longer buy American agricultural products and announced on Friday that it would raise tariffs on $75 billion of exports from America. (...)

Mr. Perdue, who was once a Democrat, has also shown a penchant for pleasing conservatives. Last year, he pitched the idea of slashing federal food stamp assistance programs by partially replacing food allowance money for the poor with “harvest boxes” of pasta, cereal and canned goods selected by the government. That plan was eventually scrapped, but Mr. Perdue has continued his push to curtail food stamps this year, including last month when he proposed a rule that would cut three million people off from food stamps by changing the eligibility requirements.

Most recently, Mr. Perdue won plaudits from top White House officials for moving part of his agency out of town. After agency research clashed with the administration’s policy agenda, Mr. Perdue decided last year to relocate two of the department’s scientific divisions — the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — to the Kansas City region from Washington. Mr. Perdue claimed that the relocation was not retaliatory and was about moving researchers closer to their subjects.

According to the American Federation of Government Employees, only about 100 of the approximately 500 employees from the divisions have agreed to relocate.

When Mr. Perdue addressed employees in June about the move, several stood and turned their backs to him, according to people who were in the room. Democrats have been outraged by the relocation, calling it an attack on science. And the Agriculture Department’s inspector general said in a report released this month that moving the research units without congressional approval might be illegal.

In the West Wing, however, Mr. Perdue’s decision was seen as a stroke of brilliance.

At the South Carolina Republican Party’s Silver Elephant gala in early August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, hailed Mr. Perdue’s maneuver as a case study of how to “drain the swamp.”

by Alan Rappeport, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Melissa Golden for The New York Times

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Elton John

[ed. Kenny Lattimore does a nice cover version, too. See also: Holiday Inn (I'm not sure if it's Davy Johnstone or Rick Fortenberry on mandolin).

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Bullshit Jobs

"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is the latest fascinating and infuriating book from David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. If you’re not familiar with Graeber, he’s an anarchist who does anthropology, or an anthropologist who does anarchism (he strongly dislikes being called an “anarchist anthropologist,” along with another Nickname That Cannot Be Uttered). The dislike of this first moniker—we shall never utter the second—has always struck your authors as strange. The best way to describe Graeber’s anthropology is as anarchist anthropology. It’s different than other studies or ethnographies. His writing, to the extent that it has a uniform style, is made up of five thousand word anecdotes that somehow coalesce into an overarching theory. Much like anarchism, his anthropology is less grand theory and more “here are a bunch of cool things that seem to say something about the world.” There are flaws with this approach, of course, but it does make for an engaging and bottom-up type of writing.

Graeber’s own family and personal history is equally interesting. He comes from a long line of radicals—his grandfather was a late 19th century atheist and frontier musician, his father fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother was a garment worker-turned Broadway star whose story is very much worth reading. Graeber himself played a key role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where he was credited with popularizing the phrase “we are the 99%.” Bullshit Jobs is not remotely his first book: some of his other notable works include: “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy,” “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and “Direct Action: An Ethnography.”

“That’s all very well,” you may be thinking, “but isn’t this review about Bullshit Jobs,and didn’t it come out about a year ago, and isn’t that an unreasonably long time to wait to review it?” To this we will say two things, the first being that this is Current Affairs and we do not bow to the tyranny of clocks, and the second is that, if anything, Graeber’s book is even more relevant today than when it was first published, because the foul trends it examines have only grown stinkier since then.

The Five Types of Bullshit Jobs

The first chapters of the book finds Graeber in classic form, wielding anecdotes about German military contractors (apparently it takes three different subcontractors and around twenty man-hours of labor to move a computer from one office to another) and Spanish government workers (specifically, the hero Joaquín García, who skipped work for six years without anyone noticing) that are as hilarious as they are illustrative about the point Graeber is trying to make—bullshit jobs are plentiful, they are often created for the most asinine reasons, and doing them breaks our brains.

Bullshit jobs invoke an intense cognitive dissonance in large part because they shouldn’t be able to exist under capitalism (more on this later). For now, the important thing to remember is that bullshit jobs are, essentially, the “fat” that today’s sleek, ulta-efficient corporations are always seeking to trim—and yet it comprises an enormous, ever-burgeoning percentage of their workforce and budget. According to the theorists, this isn’t possible: companies with bloated advisory boards and expensively useless brand consultants should perish at the hands of their leaner rivals. But the thousands upon thousands of personal stories that Graeber’s book is based upon suggests otherwise.

From these anecdotes, Graeber constructs a catalogue of the various forms and flavors of bullshit jobs. As he describes them:

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important….

Goons [are] people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them….

Duct tapers are employees whose jobs only exist because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist….

Box tickers [are] employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing….

Taskmasters fall into two categories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others…. [Type 2 contains those] whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for other to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.”

As Graeber explains the intricacies of each category of bullshit job, you may find yourself thinking, “Wow, there are a lot of jobs that sound like flunkies—bodyguards, personal shoppers, ‘special assistants to the chairman.’ And there’s a lot of jobs that sound like goons: P.R. gurus, SEO marketers, and—with apologies to most of the Current Affairs editorial board—lawyers. And the duct tapers: Couldn’t that describe pretty much everyone in I.T.? Box tickers sound like every H.R. manager, diversity consultant, and sustainability advisor you’ve ever met, and ‘taskmaster’ could be a synonym for ‘project manager’ and its related mutations. Oh god, are all jobs bullshit jobs?”

by Oren Nimni & Nick Slater, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Best Honky-Tonks in Texas

There was a time, not so long ago—after World War II but before Willie moved to Austin—that most Texans would have shared a common, if working, definition of “honky-tonk.” But nowadays, many seem to have the wrong idea about what qualifies (and there are some, typically of the recently arrived variety, for whom the word might as well be Swahili). Part of what makes the term so tricky to nail down is the fact that there are certain ineffable qualities that a true honky-tonk must possess. Some historic venues lose it over time, and some brand-new joints have it from day one. So before we go any further, let’s set some guidelines.

A honky-tonk is not a dance hall. Many of our most beloved dance halls were built by German and Czech settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century. They are often beautiful structures, originally constructed to host social clubs and other family-friendly affairs. Honky-tonks, by contrast, tend to have roots as shallow as tumbleweeds’. Few can trace their history back more than a few decades, and only a handful of stalwarts have been around for more than fifty years. In fact, a honky-tonk is seldom erected at all. It tends to spring to life when an empty filling station or abandoned store is repurposed. As such, the honky-tonk does not boast the elegant architectural qualities of a dance hall. The ceilings are low, the walls cinder block and windowless, the lighting is neon, and the dance floor, when not sticky tile or concrete, is likely made of wood salvaged from an old high school gym. Nor is a honky-tonk the focal point of civic life. It is most often found on the outskirts of town, where it serves the periphery of society. And a honky-tonk is certainly no place to take small children.

A honky-tonk is not a restaurant. The fare is typically limited to the kind you’d find at a Little League concession stand: Frito pie, nachos, nuts, and various fried or pickled items. A few places serve fine burgers from their grease-laden flattops. And you might come across passable steak (chicken-fried or grilled) on certain nights. But if you ever see blue cheese on the menu, friend, you’re not in a honky-tonk. (On the other hand, if you smell blue cheese near the men’s room, you might be.)

A honky-tonk is not a country-themed nightclub. Such country discos are widespread among the state’s big cities and were founded on the honky-tonk’s core principles—namely, booze, country music, dancing, and hooking up—but the parallels pretty much end there. For one thing, these cavernous warehouses operate almost exclusively at night and on the weekends. This runs contrary to the operating hours of a honky-tonk, which should welcome customers at least five days a week and open before folks get off work. Whereas each honky-tonk offers some sense of the owner’s personality (if only in the array of taxidermy displayed), the nightclub is a more impersonal experience.

While groups like Texas Dance Hall Preservation have taken laudable steps to save our state’s handsome dance halls, the dingy, rough-hewn honky-tonk hasn’t inspired the same kind of conservation efforts. As a result, the honky-tonk is now endangered. But those that remain continue to serve an important role in their communities: they are the place where a person can unspool a troubled mind, pursue or nurture romance, drown their sorrows, or shake their limbs to a country song.

This spring, I traveled some three thousand miles in search of the state’s best honky-tonks. As expected, most were hole-in-the-wall joints with little to admire aesthetically. Many had yet to meet smoking bans, and a couple featured the inevitable hothead fuming over some perceived slight at the pool table. But the vast majority are mostly welcoming places—so long as you don’t get too out of line or come in proselytizing for veganism. I reckon that parts of this list might not sit well with some readers and others will be baffled by what’s left off. I’m happy to have the debate, so long as it’s over Lone Stars—in a honky-tonk, of course.

Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar

Established: 1968
Basics: Cash only. Smoking permitted. $5 cover charge on Saturdays and holiday weekends.
Drink: Lone Star (longneck). Sells setups. Wine: Barefoot.
Food: Bags of chips, popcorn for $1—salty and a bit stale (in other words, good).
Sign: “Cowboys—No shirt, no service. Cowgirls—No shirt, free beer.”
Pro Tip: Don’t wear your rough-out suede boots. The sawdust will stick to them.

To enter this honky-tonk heaven, you must go down. Down a wooden staircase behind a red metal door on the main street of Bandera, down into the cool darkness beneath the town’s general store. A local woman will greet you at the bottom of the stairs. You’ll give her $5 and she’ll hand you a ticket to this neon kingdom. Your eyes will need a moment to adjust to the dim light, at which point you’ll take in your surroundings: The ceiling is low and made of red pressed tin. There’s a small stage to your right, and the bar beckons at the far end of the room. The air smells of popcorn, beer, and tobacco. The dance floor is blanketed with sawdust.

Arkey Juenke, the owner, was a young songwriter and guitar picker when a record producer took to calling him Blue, because of his tendency to write and sing sad songs. The name stuck. Arkey opened the Silver Dollar in 1968, and ever since Arkey Blue and the Blue Cowboys have been playing tear-in-your-beer tunes every Saturday night. In the afternoon, a regularly scheduled jam session draws a crowd of dancers. After they finish and before Arkey’s eight o’clock set begins, many of the dancers go home, eat dinner, take a nap, throw on fresh duds, and return just as the Blue Cowboys take the stage.

On the Saturday evening I was there, a good chunk of the crowd was made up of old-school cowboy types in Wranglers and straw hats, but one brave soul ventured downstairs wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. Many of the men’s faces were ruddy from the sun or from drink and lined by wrinkles as deep as cotton furrows. The women dripped with turquoise and sterling silver, and wore blouses emblazoned with Old Glory to mark the Memorial Day weekend. Those who didn’t already know one another made fast friends at the long tables covered in red-and-white-checkered cloths.

Promptly at eight, Arkey and his quintet launched into their set of honky-tonk classics. They burned through “Ramblin’ Fever,” and the steel guitar wailed on “There Stands the Glass.” As the night waltzed on, one of the dancers took a break and slid into the booth across from me. She introduced herself: Denise Lartin, 62 years old, originally from Queens, and now a proud Bandera resident. I asked how she had ended up here. “I got addicted to two-stepping,” she told me in the thickest New York accent I’ve heard outside of the movies. She had googled “cowboys” and discovered Bandera, which touts itself as the Cowboy Capital of the World. “I had gone to Utah and Arizona before coming here,” she said, “but there weren’t no cowboy bars. Not like here. You can go dancing every night of the week.”

Shortly before midnight, Arkey and his Blue Cowboys began to wrap their set. Denise and her boyfriend decided to head down Main Street to a country bar. Before they ascended the stairs, I asked Denise if she planned to stick around Bandera. “Oh, I’m here forever,” she said. “Texas, there’s nothing like it.”

by Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Leann Mueller

Let’s Not Repeat the Mistakes of the War on Terror

Americans often respond to tragedy by turning to ill-considered, dangerous ideas. But the suddenly popular idea of launching a domestic version of the war on terror — proposed in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton — is one of the worst ever.

The most ominous call for a new war on terror has come in an opinion article by John Allen and Brett McGurk in the Washington Post. Allen is a former Marine general and, in 2014, was named by President Barack Obama as a special envoy dealing with the Islamic State. In 2015, McGurk succeeded Allen in that role and continued under Donald Trump until last December. Their August 6 article had a headline designed to frighten: “We worked to defeat the Islamic State. White nationalist terrorism is an equal threat.”

The two former officials wrote that “we worked with all departments and agencies of the U.S. government to develop a comprehensive and multi-faceted campaign to defeat Islamic State terrorists on the battlefield, but also, and crucially, through counter-finance, counter-messaging and information sharing across the United States and globally… these efforts have stopped attacks and saved lives.”

This time, they want the war on terror to be at home, focused on white supremacist extremists. That would be the wrong answer to the problem of rising violence by white supremacists. It is a serious issue that will require serious thought and action. But simplistic answers like launching a domestic war on terror would certainly lead to unintended consequences that would cascade for decades, and might be worse than those that stemmed from the original global war on terror.

With their comparison of ISIS to white supremacists, Allen and McGurk strongly suggest that the government should bring the tools and tactics used against ISIS back home. Cleverly, they never quite say precisely what part of the war on ISIS should be used inside the United States — such specifics might lead to criticism and controversy. They simply raise the notion of turning America into an anti-terror war zone. That kind of vague rhetoric is exactly how the original war on terror got sold to the American people.

After the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the United States, stunned and angry, decided that it was a good idea to launch a global war on terror. Expansive new powers were granted to the government to fight this worldwide war, while old rules and regulations that were supposedly anachronistic and in the way of the fight against terrorism were eliminated — or illegally skirted. Eighteen years later, the results are in.

The global war on terror has been a catastrophe.

After 9/11, the CIA engaged in torture, and the National Security Agency secretly spied on millions of U.S. citizens without court approval. In 2003, the U.S. invasion of Iraq shattered the country and led to a generation of political and social chaos. U.S. troops have gone back to re-fight the same war in Iraq over and over, and now American children born at about the time of 9/11 may be deployed to the same fields in Iraq and Afghanistan where their parents fought. The bottom line: A total of between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the U.S. post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, according to a 2018 study by the Costs of War Project at the Watson Center for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Now it seems like everybody wants to do that again.

Just as Allen and McGurk’s article was published, similar language was coming from a joint statement issued by a group of six former senior directors for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from both parties: Nicholas Rasmussen, Joshua Geltzer, Jen Easterly, Luke Hartig, Chris Costa and Javed Ali. “We call on our government to make addressing this form of terrorism as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11,” they stated. “This also means providing a significant infusion of resources to support federal, state and local programs aimed at preventing extremism and targeted violence of any kind.”

This is terrible advice. At a time when the American system of government is already being sorely tested by a demagogue and would-be autocrat in the White House, it would be disastrous to grant more power to the Justice Department and the nation’s security services.

The underlying assumption common among these new arguments is that the global war on terror was a great success, and so should be copied and brought home. Allen and McGurk, for instance, take great credit in their op-ed for having defeated ISIS. It was a grand coalition of “nearly 80 partners” that they brought together and led in a march to victory. The truth is much more squalid.

ISIS was a product of the American enterprise in the Middle East. The United States didn’t originally go to Iraq to fight ISIS. It grew out of the chaos and violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and so the rise of ISIS was an unintended consequence of the global war on terror. To now argue that the global war on terror stopped ISIS is to ignore the fact that the global war on terror is also responsible for its rise in the first place.

What’s more, the ground forces that finally pushed ISIS from the major cities of Iraq and toppled its so-called caliphate were led in part by Iranian-backed Shia militias. They slaughtered Sunni Iraqis on their way to defeating ISIS. The United States turned a blind eye to the fact that American air power was in an unspoken alliance with Shia death squads committing atrocities as they rampaged across northern Iraq.

Some national security pundits arguing for a domestic war on terror have anticipated such criticism. “Addressing domestic terrorism does NOT mean blindly recreating what the US has done to fight int’l terrorism,” tweeted Geltzer, one of the signatories to the joint statement by former counterterrorism officials. “It means learning the RIGHT lessons & adapting them to this context.”

In other words, let’s take the good parts of the global war on terror and not the bad parts. Sorry, but there were no good parts. The global war on terror will go down in history as one of the most shameful periods in American history.

by James Risen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Elise Swain/The Intercept, Getty Images

For Whom The (Fake) Bell Tolls

I’m an attorney in Virginia, and I just left a court house where a small town is investigating a large issue of public corruption. I can’t give many details to protect the anonymity of my client and the privacy of others, but it was truly astonishing how many people were at the court that day to answer questions about what had happened in that town.

It was a sad state of affairs. But as I walked out of the courthouse. I looked across and I could hear church bells ringing. Then a police car pulled into an intersection with its lights on, and the officer started directing traffic. A line of cars started to flow from a church. I stopped a while to stand in respect, because though I live near DC, I’m from a small town, and I know that’s just what you do.

But then the church bells stopped in a jarring way. Apparently, they weren’t church bells. It was a recording of church bells being broadcast over speakers from a church steeple. That really got to me, and I’ve thought about it as I continued to walk away.

It was fake. That’s why it got to me. It had the appearance of gravitas and honor and old-ness, but it was a cheap recording that probably worked well in the beginning and was probably quite cost effective. But now it has aged, and the cheap underbelly of what we see on the outside showed itself. It wasn’t pretty.

Then eventually, the music started again. Church bell recording, as the cars continued to pass. But it wasn’t a hymn like it had been before. It was “The Star Spangled Banner” — “The Star Spangled Banner,” played on recorded church bell chimes was being used to mark a funeral. Why?

Because this is rural America, and it is crumbling. It is crumbling for multiple reasons, and I’m sure only one of them is things like the massive public corruption issue playing out in the courthouse. I’m sure another reason is the thinness of institutions that is hard to recognize when they’re going well, but the recording of the church bells cutting off in a jarred series of static and clicks was quite an epiphany (apocalypse?) illustrating that problem.

The fact that the church-bell tune that popped up right afterwards was “The Star Spangled Banner” just completed the sad metaphor. Why is that an appropriate song? “Be still my Soul.” “Be Thou My Vision.” “Amazing Grace.” There are endless better choices. Why “The Star Spangled Banner”?

Maybe because that “Americanism” is the only religion still standing in places like that. And it has a thinness to it that the fake church-bells only exaggerate when you know that they aren’t real and are just a recording.

by Rod Dreher, American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ira Carter
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Elina Sarlin, Reflection 2016
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Hard Seltzer is This Summer’s Biggest Scam

It’s the summer of 2019, and you are drowning in hard seltzer. Those White Claw variety packs are everywhere you look, from the park to the barbecue to the grocery store checkout aisle, where the customers in front of you and behind you are loading up on 100-calorie cans of gluten-free, ruby grapefruit-flavored fizz. You’re probably, inexplicably, drinking hard seltzer all of a sudden, even though 10 months ago you didn’t know such a thing existed, and you’re still not quite sure it’s actually seltzer, and you don’t know how this can got into your hand.

Hard seltzer is “the drink of the summer,” according to the Washington Postand every other media outlet. White Claw, the brand which if we’re splitting hairs is the actual drink of the summer, has transcended its existence as a mass-produced canned beverage and transformed into a series of viral memes. The comedian Trevor Wallace had a particularly successful run satirizing the prototypical “White Claw guy” on social media — so successful that when he tried to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “AIN’T NO LAWS WHEN YOU’RE DRINKING CLAWS,” he got a cease and desist from the company’s legal team. (“We are incredibly grateful for all the support,” says Sanjiv Gajiwala, White Claw’s vice president of marketing. “Unfortunately we do have a trademark. There are laws.”)

When Four Loko announced that it would also be getting into the hard seltzer game, we started to get a sense of what this category will look like when taken to its illogical extreme. “Hard seltzer ran so we could fly,” read the tweet that introduced Four Loko Seltzer Sour (flavor: “with a hint of blue razz”), identified on its label as “the hardest seltzer in the universe,” at a lofty 14% alcohol by volume. (The other hard seltzers, by comparison, are between 4% and 5% abv, though Natural Light and Pabst have announced plans for future releases that will clock in, respectively, at 6% and 8%.)

By the beginning of this summer, hard seltzer sales were up 193% year over year, said a Nielsen report. Beer sales, by contrast, declined by 1.6% last year. White Claw, which comprises 9% of the total flavored alcoholic beverage category (and about 60% of the hard seltzer category specifically, the company says), was up 289% by volume in 2018 over the previous year, according to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis; Truly, a close second with 6% of the category, was up 278%. The Bay Area loves White Claw even more than the rest of the country, it seems: Sales in San Francisco and Oakland are up 791% over last year, even outpacing the 524% growth in California as a whole.

No wonder, then, that nearly every beverage behemoth has launched an entry: White Claw is part of Mark Anthony Brands, which also makes Mike’s Hard Lemonade; Truly is from Boston Beer Co., which you know as Sam Adams; Bon & Viv belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev; Henry’s is MillerCoors’; Crook & Marker is from the makers of antioxidant water Bai; Corona is behind Refresca. Smirnoff makes the unimaginatively titled Smirnoff Spiked Sparkling Seltzer. While beer sales fall, these companies aren’t going to get caught without a hard seltzer brand to ride that wave.

The forebear of today’s hard seltzer boom, of course, is Zima, MillerCoors’ clear, carbonated malt beverage that would definitely have been a viral meme if viral memes had existed in the 1990s. (Zima was discontinued in the U.S. in 2008 but MillerCoors revived it in 2018, announcing in a press release that it was bringing back “Z2K” for a limited release.) But Zima was typecast as a girly drink, with all the virility of a white wine cooler.

The bonkers achievement of the current hard seltzer mania, unlike Zima, is its ability to appeal to men as well as women — an achievement made possible, Amy McCarthy noted in Eater, by the contemporary conception of the “evolved bro” who enjoys “crossfit alongside paleo and keto diets.” This bro, McCarthy writes, has updated patriarchal values with “face masks, potentially disordered eating and an open and honest affection for spiked seltzer.” (...)

But here’s the thing. It’s a lie. Hard seltzer is not seltzer. Seltzer is carbonated water. “Hard seltzer” is a flavored malt beverage — essentially the same as a Lime-A-Rita or a Colt 45 or a Smirnoff Ice. These products derive their alcohol from fermented malted grains and are then carbonated, flavored and sweetened.

by Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle|  Read more:

Image: Russell Yip / The Chronicle
[ed. Ack.]

First Kidney Failure, Then A $540,842 Bill For Dialysis

For months, Sovereign Valentine had been feeling progressively run-down. The 50-year-old personal trainer, who goes by “Sov,” tried changing his workout and diet to no avail.

Finally, one Sunday, he drove himself to the hospital in the small town of Plains, Mont., where his wife, Jessica, happened to be the physician on call. “I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was just toxic.”

It turned out he was in kidney failure and needed dialysis immediately.

“I was in shock, but I was so weak that I couldn’t even worry,” he said. “I just turned it over to God.”

He was admitted to a nearby hospital that was equipped to stabilize his condition and to get his first dialysis session. A social worker there arranged for him to follow up with outpatient dialysis, three times a week. She told them Sov had two options, both about 70 miles from his home. They chose a Fresenius Kidney Care clinic in Missoula.

A few days after the treatments began, an insurance case manager called the Valentines warning them that since Fresenius was out-of-network, they could be required to pay whatever the insurer didn’t cover. The manager added that there were no in-network dialysis clinics in Montana, according to Jessica’s handwritten notes from the conversation. (The insurance company disputes this, saying that its case manager told Jessica there were no in-network dialysis clinics in Missoula.)

Jessica repeatedly asked both the dialysis clinic staff and the insurer how much they could expect to be charged, but couldn’t get an answer.

Then the bills came.

Patient: Sovereign Valentine, 50, a personal trainer in Plains, Mont. He is insured by Allegiance, through his wife’s work as a doctor in a rural hospital.

Total Bill: $540,841.90 for 14 weeks of dialysis care at an out-of-network Fresenius clinic. Valentine’s insurer paid $16,241.73. The clinic billed Valentine for the unpaid balance of $524,600.17.

Service Provider: Fresenius Medical Care, one of two companies (along with rival DaVita) that control about 70% of the U.S. dialysis market.

Medical Treatment: Hemodialysis at an outpatient Fresenius clinic, three days a week for 14 weeks.

What Gives: As the dominant providers of dialysis care in the U.S., Fresenius and DaVita together form what health economists call a “duopoly.” They can demand extraordinary prices for the lifesaving treatment they dispense — especially when they are not in a patient’s network. A 1973 law allows all patients with end-stage renal disease like Sov to join Medicare, even if they’re younger than 65 — but only after a 90-day waiting period. During that time, patients are extremely vulnerable, medically and financially.

Fresenius billed the Valentines $524,600.17 — an amount that is more than the typical cost of a kidney transplant. It’s also nearly twice Jessica’s medical school debt. Fresenius charged the Valentines $13,867.74 per dialysis session, or about 59 times the $235 Medicare pays for a dialysis session.

When Jessica opened the first bill, she cried. “It was far worse than what I had imagined would be the worst-case scenario,” she said. (...)

Dialysis companies are quite profitable. Fresenius reported more than $2 billion in profits in 2018, with the vast majority of its revenue coming from North America. The discrepancy in payments between Medicare and commercial payers gives dialysis centers an incentive to treat as many privately insured patients as possible and to charge as much as they can before dialysis patients enroll in Medicare. It may also give dialysis centers an incentive to charge the few out-of-network patients they see outlandish prices.

“The dialysis companies may think they can get closer to what they want from the health plans by staying out-of-network and charging these prices that are totally untethered to their actual costs,” said Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. “They have the health plans over a barrel.”

by Jenny Gold, Kaiser Health News |  Read more:

Image: Tommy Martino for KHN
[ed. See also: Dialysis Industry Spends Big To Protect Profits and Taking Dialysis Providers to Task: Nowhere But In The USA (KHN)]

The Great Seattle Pot Heist

Regina Liszanckie was about to head to work when she got the text from the owners of the business next door to hers: The razor-wire-topped chain-link gate and front door to her building were swinging open, and a single jar of marijuana lay on the ground beside the gate. She had been robbed.

Four months earlier, in September 2017, Liszanckie’s business, Plantworks, had joined the thousand-plus other “producer-processors” licensed to supply Washington’s burgeoning trade in recreational marijuana. She and her partner set out to grow high-end “craft” weed in 2,500 square feet of an anonymous industrial strip in Seattle’s North End. On the night of the break-in in January 2018, Plantworks had a full crop—26 pounds of high-quality dried, cured flower, worth about $52,000—ready to deliver to local cannabis shops.

The thieves, recounts Liszanckie, bypassed the live plants and headed straight for the ready-to-sell stock, cleaning it out. It was devastating.

Liszanckie asked around and discovered she was just one in a rash of growers in and around Seattle who’ve suffered similar break-ins, six of whom consented to be interviewed for this article. Their accounts followed a pattern: The burglars came in the wee hours and speedily cut the electricity to the security cameras and alarms. Sometimes they smashed through walls to get in, avoiding the alarms on the doors. Because even the legal grow operations tend to be unsigned and inconspicuously located in small warehouses and industrial strips, the noise went unnoticed. And the burglars chose their targets well: Bypassing large grow operations with highly secure, purpose-built facilities, they hit smaller, more vulnerable growers producing high-end, easy-to-move weed.

The robbers also showed an uncanny sense of timing, striking just as the growers had amassed inventories of cut, cured, ready-to-sell product worth thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The growers began posting news of the heists on Instagram, swapping conjectures as to how the burglars knew where and when to strike. Two hypotheses emerged. The first: that an employee at a retail pot shop was either involved in the break-ins or telling the burglars whom to hit.

But as the burglaries continued, the growers came to suspect that the criminals had found another way of getting the information they needed to target vulnerable businesses offering big payoffs: The government was giving it to them.

After Washington’s residents became the first in the nation (together with Colorado’s) to vote to legalize recreational marijuana sales and possession in 2012, the state liquor board, newly renamed the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board (WLCB) adopted exhaustive rules and regulations to govern the new trade. These require that cannabis producers and processors provide much more detailed information about their activities to the state each month than other businesses are obliged to provide—things like exactly how many plants they grow and harvest by batch and strain, how much inventory they hold and how much they sell, when, to whom, for how much. Whenever they transport product, they must file cargo manifests with detailed vehicle information. “We plant a seed, we report it,” Liszanckie says. “You take a cutting, you report it. How long you dry. What the final weight was. How soon did it go out door? What did you sell, who did you sell it to, for how much? What did they mark it up to? Easily 25 percent of our time is given over to tracking.”

The state and state-licensed data firms then post much of this information online, where it is available to the public.

In other words, Liszanckie and other growers fear that this system, put in place to ensure transparency and accountability in the newly legalized industry, may also leave a data trail that leads thieves straight to their doors, right when the pickings are fattest.

“If you are a crook, it’s a veritable laundry list of targets,” says Andrew Marris, a partner in the Seattle cannabis grower Fire Bros., which lost what it says was $200,000 worth of weed to burglars last summer.

by Eric Scigliano, Politico | Read more:
Image: Owen Freeman

Do Women’s Clothes Seem Weird Lately? Because I’m Into It

The consensus among my friends, as well as a lot of the women I follow on the internet, is that clothes suck lately. This summer, if you were to pop into any of the fast fashion outlets where trends both live and die, you’d find a strange mix of styles, indeed: ’90s-era crop tops and babydoll dresses, wacky prints, poofy sleeves, ruching and draping, and big, boxy shapes that don’t appear to align with the build of any actual human body. One could sum up fashion right now as “sexy baby” or “cursed prairie” or, as my friend and editor Rachel put it, a bizarre blend of both “modest and horny.”

I hear everybody’s qualms about this moment in style — and I respect them! — but I have to go against the grain here and speak my truth: I am loving it.

I’ve been a fan of fashion’s weird journey for years now. I love a good sack dress, even though I am one of the millions of people who hover somewhere between straight and plus sizes and they are not technically “flattering” on my body type. If I were to follow fashion magazine convention, I should always wear something that draws attention to my waist, where I'm smallest, and draws attention away from where I’m biggest: ass, hips, thighs. I shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes or, really, any sort of loud pattern at all but, rather, dark, neutral tones for their slimming effects. Anything architectural, bulky, or frilled is certainly a no-no — those additions will just make me take up more space, not less.

But where’s the fun in that?

I appreciate the value of simple, timeless clothing and can understand that if you’re a less risk-taking dresser, shopping must be pretty stressful these days. Maybe I’m just a hopeless trend monster, but I don’t know, man — I’m having the time of my life. I love these loud patterns! I love the bold color, the fascinating shapes, the funky additions to an otherwise unremarkable top or skirt that give it some flair. I love that fashion right now isn’t about what’s technically the most “flattering,” because those rules are designed with the thinnest, whitest, and most conventionally beautiful among us in mind.

The game is already rigged; even if we follow every rule, we still can’t really win. So why not just go wild and lean into the wackiness of it all? If I’m never actually going to attain the unattainable ideal of the sexy-but-not-too-sexy woman, then I might as well have a good time when I’m getting dressed in the morning.

by Shannon Keating, BuzzFeed |  Read more:

Image: Abbey Lossing for BuzzFeed News

The Shadow World
via:

 

[ed. The local grocery store was packed today with young people, all stocking up for a 4-day EDM festival at The Gorge. I told the checkout guy something like that would probably kill me... 4 days. Of EDM.]

The Big Splat

When the Earth Had Two Moons (Nautilus)
Image: M. Jutzi (U. Bern), E. Asphaug (ASU, UCSC)

It’s Official: Parts of California Are Too Wildfire-Prone to Insure

California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state.

Last winter when we wrote about home insurance rates possibly going up in the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about people in forested areas losing their homeowners’ insurance was based on anecdotes, not data. But now, the data is in and it’s really happening: Insurance companies aren’t renewing policies areas climate scientists say are likely to burn in giant wildfires in coming years.

Insurance companies dropped more than 340,000 homeowners from wildfire areas in just four years. Between 2015 and 2018, the 10 California counties with the most homes in flammable forests saw a 177 percent increase in homeowners turning to an expensive state-backed insurance program because they could not find private insurance.

In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.

“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement. “This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”

A similar dynamic is likely unfolding across many other Western states, according to reporting from the New York Times.

by Nathanael Johnson, Grist | Read more:
Image: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
[ed. Might want to re-think buying that coastal or riverfront property, too.]

St. Vincent

St. Vincent (Annie Clark)
via: here and here (from the ifuckinglovestvincent Tumblr blog).
[ed. Talent to burn. See also: Los Ageless. St. Vincent's Life in 6+ Riffs, and Being a Guitar God (YouTube)]