Tuesday, September 3, 2019
The Geography of Risk
It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.
Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.
In July 2014, the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit arm of the federal government that helps fund and direct critical research in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences, reported the findings of a yearlong study of coastal risks. Damages from hurricanes and nor’easters have “increased substantially over the past century,” the researchers noted, “largely due to increases in population and development in hazardous coastal areas.” The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.
Critically, the report, Reducing Coastal Risk on the East and Gulf Coasts, observed that there is “no central leadership, unified vision,” or national strategy to reduce the costs associated with hurricanes. The preponderance of federal funding is paid out after storms, with scant attention to zoning or land-use issues, buyouts, or retreat from vulnerable floodplains. “Over the past century, most coastal management programs have emphasized coastal armoring, while doing little to decrease development in harm’s way,” the report concluded. (...)
In the last two decades, hurricanes and coastal storms have caused over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in damage at the coast — far more than earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires combined. That represents a nearly sixfold increase from the prior two decades (1980–1990), as well as most of the hurricane damage in the last century ($725 billion of $1.2 trillion), after adjusting for inflation and population. Alarmingly, the pace of destruction is accelerating, with seventeen of the twenty most expensive hurricanes occurring since 2000. In 2017, Harvey, Maria, and Irma alone accounted for over $300 billion in damage, the single-most expensive hurricane season ever.
Absent a dramatic but unlikely shift in weather patterns, or Americans abandoning the coasts, this sharp spike in hurricane damage is likely to continue, experts say. This is even as the federal government is spending tens of billions on building seawalls, widening beaches, elevating houses, and undertaking an array of other costly efforts to protect coastal property. (...)
It needs to be acknowledged that government spending is full of kinks, making it hard to know the exact price tag for some disasters. Historical data aren’t always available or reported consistently, with disaster recovery programs scattered across numerous federal agencies. Nevertheless, based on figures that FEMA and other agencies have published, it is safe to say that federal taxpayers have spent at least $500 billion since 1950 responding to hurricanes and coastal storms, including over $350 billion in the last decade alone, a phenomenon that some researchers have likened to a “stealth entitlement” that primarily benefits the wealthy.
In his revealing 1999 study of federal disaster spending, the University of Massachusetts geographer Rutherford H. Platt coined a nice phrase, “the federalization of disasters,” to capture the growing inclination of politicians and bureaucrats to declare every disaster a federal disaster, followed by a gusher of government funds to help pay for the recovery.
“The law since 1950 was always that federal assistance should be secondary to local assistance. It should be a residual level of protection, not the major level of protection,” Platt told me in an interview in 1998. “But clearly the politics have changed.”
But it wasn’t only the politics that shifted; it was the public’s attitudes as well. There was a growing expectation among coastal property owners, mayors, and governors that federal dollars would flow their way after hurricanes to help underwrite their recovery. In the 1970s, FEMA administrators pointed out the distorting effects of this shift in attitudes, noting that “first-dollar coverage” by the government (versus private insurance or homeowners paying for their own repairs) subsidized risky building in floodplains and encouraged owners of coastal property to forego private insurance. In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.
by Gilbert M. Gaul, Longreads | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray
Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.In July 2014, the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit arm of the federal government that helps fund and direct critical research in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences, reported the findings of a yearlong study of coastal risks. Damages from hurricanes and nor’easters have “increased substantially over the past century,” the researchers noted, “largely due to increases in population and development in hazardous coastal areas.” The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.
Critically, the report, Reducing Coastal Risk on the East and Gulf Coasts, observed that there is “no central leadership, unified vision,” or national strategy to reduce the costs associated with hurricanes. The preponderance of federal funding is paid out after storms, with scant attention to zoning or land-use issues, buyouts, or retreat from vulnerable floodplains. “Over the past century, most coastal management programs have emphasized coastal armoring, while doing little to decrease development in harm’s way,” the report concluded. (...)
In the last two decades, hurricanes and coastal storms have caused over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in damage at the coast — far more than earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires combined. That represents a nearly sixfold increase from the prior two decades (1980–1990), as well as most of the hurricane damage in the last century ($725 billion of $1.2 trillion), after adjusting for inflation and population. Alarmingly, the pace of destruction is accelerating, with seventeen of the twenty most expensive hurricanes occurring since 2000. In 2017, Harvey, Maria, and Irma alone accounted for over $300 billion in damage, the single-most expensive hurricane season ever.
Absent a dramatic but unlikely shift in weather patterns, or Americans abandoning the coasts, this sharp spike in hurricane damage is likely to continue, experts say. This is even as the federal government is spending tens of billions on building seawalls, widening beaches, elevating houses, and undertaking an array of other costly efforts to protect coastal property. (...)
It needs to be acknowledged that government spending is full of kinks, making it hard to know the exact price tag for some disasters. Historical data aren’t always available or reported consistently, with disaster recovery programs scattered across numerous federal agencies. Nevertheless, based on figures that FEMA and other agencies have published, it is safe to say that federal taxpayers have spent at least $500 billion since 1950 responding to hurricanes and coastal storms, including over $350 billion in the last decade alone, a phenomenon that some researchers have likened to a “stealth entitlement” that primarily benefits the wealthy.
In his revealing 1999 study of federal disaster spending, the University of Massachusetts geographer Rutherford H. Platt coined a nice phrase, “the federalization of disasters,” to capture the growing inclination of politicians and bureaucrats to declare every disaster a federal disaster, followed by a gusher of government funds to help pay for the recovery.
“The law since 1950 was always that federal assistance should be secondary to local assistance. It should be a residual level of protection, not the major level of protection,” Platt told me in an interview in 1998. “But clearly the politics have changed.”
But it wasn’t only the politics that shifted; it was the public’s attitudes as well. There was a growing expectation among coastal property owners, mayors, and governors that federal dollars would flow their way after hurricanes to help underwrite their recovery. In the 1970s, FEMA administrators pointed out the distorting effects of this shift in attitudes, noting that “first-dollar coverage” by the government (versus private insurance or homeowners paying for their own repairs) subsidized risky building in floodplains and encouraged owners of coastal property to forego private insurance. In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.
by Gilbert M. Gaul, Longreads | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray
Revolution on the Installment Plan
When then twenty-six year-old Elle Hunt was asked to keep a money diary for the Guardian last year, the purpose was to dispel the common belief that millennials are spendthrifts. They, too, the thinking goes, could enjoy the delights of home ownership and flush 401(k)s, if only they would stop wasting money on avocado toast and turmeric lattes.
For four weeks, London-based Hunt documented every pound spent, from her daily commute to a £181 cut-and-color to over a hundred pounds on bar tabs. She ate out for lunch almost every day, and she often went out of her way to get the better, and more expensive, coffee near her workplace. She was single, with no children or dependents, living with a roommate in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city with an acute housing crisis where over twenty-two thousand homes sit empty because they were bought for investment and not occupancy. She had savings, but with buying property beyond her reach, it was more of a rainy-day fund than a means for executing a life plan.
The diary went viral, and the condemnation was swift. A reader told Hunt she was “wasting her life,” another added that she was bringing “shame” upon her family. The audience was publicly aghast that she would spend one hundred quid on a Taylor Swift concert ticket; after all, there are so many bands and artists who need financial support. Others focused on her salary—somewhere around £40,000 for a media job—and called her a “poor little rich girl.” Many—many—used the opportunity to tell the world how frugal they are—“I read it whilst eating my homemade wrap for lunch”—the frugality somehow implying virtue. Even the financial expert brought in to comment in the original article dunked on her vices. When you’re spending so much on coffee while complaining about runaway housing prices in urban areas, he wrote, “you’re starting to lose a bit of the moral argument.”
Hunt’s was hardly the only money diary to go viral this way. There was the New York City intern whose rent is paid by her parents, an Instagram influencer earning $604,000 a year, a Toronto couple with almost $500,000 in debt, and a Scot on the dole. No matter the income level or the employment status, each expense was suspect. “[H]ere’s a tip to save money.dont buy coffee and sugar when you have less than a tenner” an anonymous account scolded the Scot. Several readers expressed horror that the steeply indebted couple still ate sushi. If a money diarist mentioned buying a top at H&M, a commenter found cause to mention sweatshops. If another line-itemed a stop at McDonald’s, someone was there to say veganism is the only ethical choice.
Not even sex diaries inspire as much moralizing as the money diary (nor are they even close to being as popular or viral-friendly). These days all romantic and sexual relations are understood to be about power, and they are discussed in the language of health: if you date a notably younger or older person, you’ve “got issues”; if you are in a committed relationship with a partner of the same age, economic and educational background, and salary, you’re “healthy.” Tales of promiscuity and lust inspire mild reactions like “get therapy.” Love is love, polyamory is trending, everyone is sex positive, and Midwestern churches are flying rainbow flags. All our indignation has found a new target in the genre of financial disclosure.
Prosperity is Personal
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the financial industry underwent deregulation, and as consumer protections from credit card companies, banks, and short-term lenders were stripped away, the idea of personal financial responsibility as a coping mechanism took hold. Everyone was trying to fleece you, banks added fees for speaking to a teller or using your debit card outside of the country or asking for a paper statement or putting money in your account or taking money out of your account or closing your account. And the high priests of personal finance materialized in clouds of smoke, offering a prosperity gospel of discipline and attentiveness, if only you paid them on the installment plan.
The 1990s saw the rise of Suze Orman, Vicki Robin, and Dave Ramsey, gurus who built self-help empires of books, TV and radio shows, financial planning and counseling, all with the same message: document and account for everything. Any excess or frivolity was waste. Why throw away $3.50 on a cup of coffee when you could shove it in a Roth IRA and retire a millionaire forty years later? Meanwhile, interest rates were stagnant, so if you wanted your savings to grow you’d have to funnel it into investments, where a bunch of finance bros could do whatever they wanted with it. We all remember what happened after that.
But for all their financial expertise, most of these wizards still recommend buying property amid a manifest housing crisis. They advocate for “smart” investments while Wall Street bilks small-scale investors. And you don’t see any of them testifying in front of Congress against the lax regulation of short-term lending operations. But if you find yourself in a spiral of debt because you needed some cash when your car broke down a week before the end of the month, they’ll say it’s your fault for agreeing to the terms laid out in a payday loan. That those are the only terms under which the economically disadvantaged can find credit is not up for consideration. If you were not outright lied to, it is your responsibility, they’ll explain, to live up to your obligations. If you call into one of their many syndicated radio shows asking for advice, they’ll grill you on personal expenses, not on how your insurance company left you in a pile of medical debt despite your coverage. (And really, if you signed an agreement with an insurance company, you’re probably to blame for not researching your options thoroughly.) In a recent episode on his YouTube channel, Ramsey rebuked a caller for living outside his means by supporting his orphaned niece and elderly mother. He urged him to reconsider that support. (...)
Even after the revelations of manipulation, corruption, and criminal activity on the part of mortgage brokers, banks, and investment firms, there was plenty of moral condemnation of individual homeowners for agreeing to terms they could not “honor.” There were mass evictions and a recession and a growing homelessness problem; at the same time there was mounting public suspicion that the real villains were borrowers who took out impossible loans. When U.S. News and World Report asked “Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” they listed “homeowners” first. (Media consultants were suspiciously missing from the list.) The crackerjack New York Times opinion pages wrote that assisting underwater homeowners “rewards irresponsibility.” And today this moral creep can still be found on investment websites that contend “homebuyers . . . were definitely not completely innocent.” At the same time, these arguments are being rehashed for the student debt crisis, often explicitly in the language of morality.
All the while, the cage has gotten smaller and better reinforced, and the human behavior within that cage has been subjected to a more exacting moral gaze. This has long been true for food stamp recipients who are monitored for “wasting” government “handouts” on soda and booze, or for single mothers on welfare who might be too slutty. But now that monitoring has spread to those asking not for assistance but merely sympathy. This moral-financial surveillance now extends to the humble domain of the freelance writer.
Penny for Her Thoughts
After the economic crash, after movements like Occupy brought anti-capitalist discourse into the mainstream, millennials got a bevy of electronic whazzits to help them with cage maintenance. Apps like Mint, Digit, SmartyPig, Stockpile, Tiller, GoodBudget, Personal Capital, Stash, and Acorns automated the budget and savings recommendations that Orman and her ilk had preached for twenty years. Podcasts and websites like Side Hustle, The Minimalists, Money Girl, Modernfrugality.com, NerdWallet.com, and TheBillfold.com promised to “demystify” personal finance and “remove the taboo” of talking about money. (...)
These interviews fit within a broader trend of documenting all productivity online, where writers hashtag their #amwriting word counts for the day, gym rats post their reps, and eating disorder vamps count their caloric intake and output. The motivation for such self-presentation lies somewhere between accountability, humblebragging, and outright fabrication. Nevertheless, the gratuitous logging of monetary goings-on for the internet’s gold-star approval, without taking into account that financial standing has more to do with a family’s generational wealth, recalls the behavior of mutants with good genes, an ascetic nature, and probably a lot of fire in their natal charts, who claim their weight and muscle mass is the result of paleo dieting and self-discipline. Research has shown for years that weight is not a simple equation of how many calories you consume and how many you burn, and that our food supply in America is vastly poisonous, but we still listen to these dolts telling us their thinness proves their moral worth.
by Jessa Crispin, The Baffler | Read more:
For four weeks, London-based Hunt documented every pound spent, from her daily commute to a £181 cut-and-color to over a hundred pounds on bar tabs. She ate out for lunch almost every day, and she often went out of her way to get the better, and more expensive, coffee near her workplace. She was single, with no children or dependents, living with a roommate in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city with an acute housing crisis where over twenty-two thousand homes sit empty because they were bought for investment and not occupancy. She had savings, but with buying property beyond her reach, it was more of a rainy-day fund than a means for executing a life plan.
The diary went viral, and the condemnation was swift. A reader told Hunt she was “wasting her life,” another added that she was bringing “shame” upon her family. The audience was publicly aghast that she would spend one hundred quid on a Taylor Swift concert ticket; after all, there are so many bands and artists who need financial support. Others focused on her salary—somewhere around £40,000 for a media job—and called her a “poor little rich girl.” Many—many—used the opportunity to tell the world how frugal they are—“I read it whilst eating my homemade wrap for lunch”—the frugality somehow implying virtue. Even the financial expert brought in to comment in the original article dunked on her vices. When you’re spending so much on coffee while complaining about runaway housing prices in urban areas, he wrote, “you’re starting to lose a bit of the moral argument.”Hunt’s was hardly the only money diary to go viral this way. There was the New York City intern whose rent is paid by her parents, an Instagram influencer earning $604,000 a year, a Toronto couple with almost $500,000 in debt, and a Scot on the dole. No matter the income level or the employment status, each expense was suspect. “[H]ere’s a tip to save money.dont buy coffee and sugar when you have less than a tenner” an anonymous account scolded the Scot. Several readers expressed horror that the steeply indebted couple still ate sushi. If a money diarist mentioned buying a top at H&M, a commenter found cause to mention sweatshops. If another line-itemed a stop at McDonald’s, someone was there to say veganism is the only ethical choice.
Not even sex diaries inspire as much moralizing as the money diary (nor are they even close to being as popular or viral-friendly). These days all romantic and sexual relations are understood to be about power, and they are discussed in the language of health: if you date a notably younger or older person, you’ve “got issues”; if you are in a committed relationship with a partner of the same age, economic and educational background, and salary, you’re “healthy.” Tales of promiscuity and lust inspire mild reactions like “get therapy.” Love is love, polyamory is trending, everyone is sex positive, and Midwestern churches are flying rainbow flags. All our indignation has found a new target in the genre of financial disclosure.
Prosperity is Personal
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the financial industry underwent deregulation, and as consumer protections from credit card companies, banks, and short-term lenders were stripped away, the idea of personal financial responsibility as a coping mechanism took hold. Everyone was trying to fleece you, banks added fees for speaking to a teller or using your debit card outside of the country or asking for a paper statement or putting money in your account or taking money out of your account or closing your account. And the high priests of personal finance materialized in clouds of smoke, offering a prosperity gospel of discipline and attentiveness, if only you paid them on the installment plan.
The 1990s saw the rise of Suze Orman, Vicki Robin, and Dave Ramsey, gurus who built self-help empires of books, TV and radio shows, financial planning and counseling, all with the same message: document and account for everything. Any excess or frivolity was waste. Why throw away $3.50 on a cup of coffee when you could shove it in a Roth IRA and retire a millionaire forty years later? Meanwhile, interest rates were stagnant, so if you wanted your savings to grow you’d have to funnel it into investments, where a bunch of finance bros could do whatever they wanted with it. We all remember what happened after that.
But for all their financial expertise, most of these wizards still recommend buying property amid a manifest housing crisis. They advocate for “smart” investments while Wall Street bilks small-scale investors. And you don’t see any of them testifying in front of Congress against the lax regulation of short-term lending operations. But if you find yourself in a spiral of debt because you needed some cash when your car broke down a week before the end of the month, they’ll say it’s your fault for agreeing to the terms laid out in a payday loan. That those are the only terms under which the economically disadvantaged can find credit is not up for consideration. If you were not outright lied to, it is your responsibility, they’ll explain, to live up to your obligations. If you call into one of their many syndicated radio shows asking for advice, they’ll grill you on personal expenses, not on how your insurance company left you in a pile of medical debt despite your coverage. (And really, if you signed an agreement with an insurance company, you’re probably to blame for not researching your options thoroughly.) In a recent episode on his YouTube channel, Ramsey rebuked a caller for living outside his means by supporting his orphaned niece and elderly mother. He urged him to reconsider that support. (...)
Even after the revelations of manipulation, corruption, and criminal activity on the part of mortgage brokers, banks, and investment firms, there was plenty of moral condemnation of individual homeowners for agreeing to terms they could not “honor.” There were mass evictions and a recession and a growing homelessness problem; at the same time there was mounting public suspicion that the real villains were borrowers who took out impossible loans. When U.S. News and World Report asked “Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” they listed “homeowners” first. (Media consultants were suspiciously missing from the list.) The crackerjack New York Times opinion pages wrote that assisting underwater homeowners “rewards irresponsibility.” And today this moral creep can still be found on investment websites that contend “homebuyers . . . were definitely not completely innocent.” At the same time, these arguments are being rehashed for the student debt crisis, often explicitly in the language of morality.
All the while, the cage has gotten smaller and better reinforced, and the human behavior within that cage has been subjected to a more exacting moral gaze. This has long been true for food stamp recipients who are monitored for “wasting” government “handouts” on soda and booze, or for single mothers on welfare who might be too slutty. But now that monitoring has spread to those asking not for assistance but merely sympathy. This moral-financial surveillance now extends to the humble domain of the freelance writer.
Penny for Her Thoughts
After the economic crash, after movements like Occupy brought anti-capitalist discourse into the mainstream, millennials got a bevy of electronic whazzits to help them with cage maintenance. Apps like Mint, Digit, SmartyPig, Stockpile, Tiller, GoodBudget, Personal Capital, Stash, and Acorns automated the budget and savings recommendations that Orman and her ilk had preached for twenty years. Podcasts and websites like Side Hustle, The Minimalists, Money Girl, Modernfrugality.com, NerdWallet.com, and TheBillfold.com promised to “demystify” personal finance and “remove the taboo” of talking about money. (...)
These interviews fit within a broader trend of documenting all productivity online, where writers hashtag their #amwriting word counts for the day, gym rats post their reps, and eating disorder vamps count their caloric intake and output. The motivation for such self-presentation lies somewhere between accountability, humblebragging, and outright fabrication. Nevertheless, the gratuitous logging of monetary goings-on for the internet’s gold-star approval, without taking into account that financial standing has more to do with a family’s generational wealth, recalls the behavior of mutants with good genes, an ascetic nature, and probably a lot of fire in their natal charts, who claim their weight and muscle mass is the result of paleo dieting and self-discipline. Research has shown for years that weight is not a simple equation of how many calories you consume and how many you burn, and that our food supply in America is vastly poisonous, but we still listen to these dolts telling us their thinness proves their moral worth.
by Jessa Crispin, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Liana Finck
Sunday, September 1, 2019
Overview of JPEG XL
The JPEG XL Image Coding System (ISO/IEC 18181) has a richer feature set than existing codecs and can deliver images with similar quality at a third of the size of widely used alternatives. It is designed with responsive web design in mind, so that content renders well on a wide range of devices. The JPEG XL coding tools include variable-size DCT, nonlinear Haar transforms, multiresolution encoding, adaptive quantization, adaptive loop filters and context modeling.
JPEG XL includes several features that help transition from the legacy JPEG format. Existing JPEG files can be losslessly transcoded to JPEG XL, while significantly reducing their size. A lightweight lossless conversion process back to JPEG ensures compatibility with existing JPEG-only clients such as older generation phones and browsers. Thus it is easy to migrate to JPEG XL, because servers can store a single JPEG XL file to serve both JPEG and JPEG XL clients. JPEG XL decoders can perform enhancement that would improve image quality when dealing with the legacy JPEG format. JPEG XL encoders may also choose to add a small amount of additional information to further enhance the quality of decoded images, while remaining backward-compatible with existing legacy JPEG decoders.
JPEG XL is also designed to meet the needs of high-quality imaging and professional photography. A color-managed processing pipeline with full 32 bit per channel precision enables support for wide-color-gamut/high-dynamic-range images. JPEG XL reaches high compression efficiency at visually lossless quality (as defined in ISO/IEC 29170-2) using psychovisual modeling plugins.
JPEG XL is designed for efficient decoding even in software, with parallel and SIMD-friendly coding tools. JPEG XL compares favorably with contemporary coding solutions in terms of complexity.
JPEG XL further includes features such as animations, alpha channels, lossless and progressive coding to support a wide range of use cases including but not limited to photo galleries, e-commerce, social media, user interfaces and cloud storage. To enable novel applications, it also adds support for 360 degree images, image bursts, large panoramas/mosaics, and printing.
JPEG XL includes several features that help transition from the legacy JPEG format. Existing JPEG files can be losslessly transcoded to JPEG XL, while significantly reducing their size. A lightweight lossless conversion process back to JPEG ensures compatibility with existing JPEG-only clients such as older generation phones and browsers. Thus it is easy to migrate to JPEG XL, because servers can store a single JPEG XL file to serve both JPEG and JPEG XL clients. JPEG XL decoders can perform enhancement that would improve image quality when dealing with the legacy JPEG format. JPEG XL encoders may also choose to add a small amount of additional information to further enhance the quality of decoded images, while remaining backward-compatible with existing legacy JPEG decoders.JPEG XL is also designed to meet the needs of high-quality imaging and professional photography. A color-managed processing pipeline with full 32 bit per channel precision enables support for wide-color-gamut/high-dynamic-range images. JPEG XL reaches high compression efficiency at visually lossless quality (as defined in ISO/IEC 29170-2) using psychovisual modeling plugins.
JPEG XL is designed for efficient decoding even in software, with parallel and SIMD-friendly coding tools. JPEG XL compares favorably with contemporary coding solutions in terms of complexity.
JPEG XL further includes features such as animations, alpha channels, lossless and progressive coding to support a wide range of use cases including but not limited to photo galleries, e-commerce, social media, user interfaces and cloud storage. To enable novel applications, it also adds support for 360 degree images, image bursts, large panoramas/mosaics, and printing.
by JPEG | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Oh... ok. ?]
How to Lose Weight With Intermittent Fasting: Alternate Day Fasting Benefits
A type of intermittent fasting that calls for eating nothing one day, and then whatever a person wants the next, can be done safely for several months and comes with a number of health benefits, a study has found.
Alternate day fasting improved cardiovascular markers, reducing blood pressure and heart rate after four weeks, researchers reported in Cell Metabolism on Tuesday. People who followed the plan for six months also had lower levels of LDL “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides compared to those who ate normally.
Overall, they ate about 37% fewer calories, lost weight and had an “improved fat distribution,” reducing the fat in their trunk and abdomen by about 14% on average.
Researchers saw no adverse effects from alternate day fasting even after six months, concluding the strategy seems to be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with.
Humans can easily tolerate skipping food for an entire day, said Dr. Thomas Pieber, one of the study authors and chair of the department of internal medicine at the Medical University of Graz in Austria.
“The truth is that our organism is ready to fast for much longer,” Pieber told TODAY. “Ten thousand or 100,000 years ago, we didn’t have breakfast, lunch and dinner and some cake in-between with our coffee. (...)
Besides shedding weight and fat, the people who fasted had beneficial cardiovascular changes and showed reduced levels of an age-associated inflammatory marker, the study found.
At the same time, alternate day fasting didn’t cause a decline in bone mineral density or white blood cell count the way continuous calorie restriction has been shown to do in previous studies.
One reason fasting may be so beneficial for the human body is that it can activate autophagy, a mechanism that helps to regenerate cells, Pieber said. (...)
Tips for trying alternate day fasting:
by A. Pawlowski, Today | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've been doing this for years (IBS), and it's no big deal. Once your appetite shrinks you don't even think about it. In fact, it amazes me how much time, effort and expense people devote to shopping, preparing and eating three meals a day. I'm still the same weight I was in high school.]
Alternate day fasting improved cardiovascular markers, reducing blood pressure and heart rate after four weeks, researchers reported in Cell Metabolism on Tuesday. People who followed the plan for six months also had lower levels of LDL “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides compared to those who ate normally.
Overall, they ate about 37% fewer calories, lost weight and had an “improved fat distribution,” reducing the fat in their trunk and abdomen by about 14% on average.
Researchers saw no adverse effects from alternate day fasting even after six months, concluding the strategy seems to be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with.Humans can easily tolerate skipping food for an entire day, said Dr. Thomas Pieber, one of the study authors and chair of the department of internal medicine at the Medical University of Graz in Austria.
“The truth is that our organism is ready to fast for much longer,” Pieber told TODAY. “Ten thousand or 100,000 years ago, we didn’t have breakfast, lunch and dinner and some cake in-between with our coffee. (...)
Besides shedding weight and fat, the people who fasted had beneficial cardiovascular changes and showed reduced levels of an age-associated inflammatory marker, the study found.
At the same time, alternate day fasting didn’t cause a decline in bone mineral density or white blood cell count the way continuous calorie restriction has been shown to do in previous studies.
One reason fasting may be so beneficial for the human body is that it can activate autophagy, a mechanism that helps to regenerate cells, Pieber said. (...)
Tips for trying alternate day fasting:
- Always check with your doctor first. This eating regimen may not be right for people with type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, Baum said.
- Try skipping breakfast and lunch, but keeping dinner at first to ease into the regimen, and then expanding to a full 24-hour fast, Pieber recommended.
- Some people prefer a modified version of alternate day fasting where they stick to 500 calories one day, then still eat anything they want the next. In this version, go for at least 50 grams of protein on fasting days to help keep hunger at bay, Varady suggested. A good option may be a salad with beans or some chicken.
- Don’t drink any sweetened beverages on fasting days, even if they contain artificial sweetener, because the sweet taste can cause hunger, Pieber noted. Water is best, though black coffee or tea also works. But don’t overdo it: being hungry and caffeinated can be a terrible combination, Baum cautioned. Hot beverages can help curb hunger, Varady noted.
- Pieber, who fasts himself, doesn’t recommend exercising during the first week people try the plan. But it’s fine after that, he said. “After some weeks, you are even more energetic when you exercise on a fasting day versus the non-fasting day,” he said. But Baum urged caution: If you’re fasting and burning calories during a workout, you could feel weak. (...)
“There are decades of research showing that eating fewer calories is better for health and living longer,” Baum said. “You need to find something that works. Weight loss is not a one-size-fits-all prescription.”
by A. Pawlowski, Today | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've been doing this for years (IBS), and it's no big deal. Once your appetite shrinks you don't even think about it. In fact, it amazes me how much time, effort and expense people devote to shopping, preparing and eating three meals a day. I'm still the same weight I was in high school.]
Rejecting Comcast
A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it.
"Finally, a broadband provider you can trust," the city-run broadband service's website says in a pointed message about the Comcast cable and CenturyLink DSL services that are the city's primary broadband networks.
Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. (...)
The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000.
Ballot question
In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.
The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn't participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.
In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.
Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year."
Net neutrality, competitive prices
Fort Collins Connexion promises to follow net neutrality principles, saying it will not "intentionally block, slow down, or charge money for specific websites and online content."
The municipal ISP's privacy pledge says that it does not "share, distribute, or sell a User's specific Internet usage history, call history, voicemail, or other electronic data generated from a User's Internet and phone Service to any external third party."
Connexion's website is advertising only two residential Internet packages, the $59.95 gigabit plan and a 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on Internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchased router.
Connexion offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month. When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85.
Connexion's prices are competitive. Looking at Comcast's website for offers in Fort Collins today, we found a $60 monthly price for download speeds of up to 400Mbps, and $70 a month for 1Gbps. But those Comcast prices are only good for two years and would automatically rise after the promotional period. Comcast charges early termination fees, and the company says that equipment fees, taxes, other fees, and "applicable charges" may be added to the advertised price. Comcast's modem/router gateway costs $13 a month.
Besides that, Comcast's cable upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds, and Comcast enforces a 1TB monthly data cap in Colorado and many other states. Comcast charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB used after a customer hits 1TB, or $50 extra per month for unlimited data.
Comcast potentially offers lower prices than Connexion for lower-speed plans, but even then it's hard to do better than the city-run option. We found an offer in Fort Collins of 60Mbps download speeds for $29.99 a month from Comcast, but the price rises to at least $59.95 after a year. Another offer for 15Mbps download speeds has the same $29.99 monthly price for the first year and rises to 51.95 afterward.
But again, these advertised prices don't include extra taxes and fees, data cap charges, and the mental cost of dealing with Comcast's customer service. Comcast may also charge installation fees of up to $90 depending on which package you buy.
[ed. Hallelujah.]
"Finally, a broadband provider you can trust," the city-run broadband service's website says in a pointed message about the Comcast cable and CenturyLink DSL services that are the city's primary broadband networks.
Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. (...)The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000.
Ballot question
In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.
The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn't participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.
In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.
Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year."
Net neutrality, competitive prices
Fort Collins Connexion promises to follow net neutrality principles, saying it will not "intentionally block, slow down, or charge money for specific websites and online content."
The municipal ISP's privacy pledge says that it does not "share, distribute, or sell a User's specific Internet usage history, call history, voicemail, or other electronic data generated from a User's Internet and phone Service to any external third party."
Connexion's website is advertising only two residential Internet packages, the $59.95 gigabit plan and a 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on Internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchased router.
Connexion offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month. When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85.
Connexion's prices are competitive. Looking at Comcast's website for offers in Fort Collins today, we found a $60 monthly price for download speeds of up to 400Mbps, and $70 a month for 1Gbps. But those Comcast prices are only good for two years and would automatically rise after the promotional period. Comcast charges early termination fees, and the company says that equipment fees, taxes, other fees, and "applicable charges" may be added to the advertised price. Comcast's modem/router gateway costs $13 a month.
Besides that, Comcast's cable upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds, and Comcast enforces a 1TB monthly data cap in Colorado and many other states. Comcast charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB used after a customer hits 1TB, or $50 extra per month for unlimited data.
Comcast potentially offers lower prices than Connexion for lower-speed plans, but even then it's hard to do better than the city-run option. We found an offer in Fort Collins of 60Mbps download speeds for $29.99 a month from Comcast, but the price rises to at least $59.95 after a year. Another offer for 15Mbps download speeds has the same $29.99 monthly price for the first year and rises to 51.95 afterward.
But again, these advertised prices don't include extra taxes and fees, data cap charges, and the mental cost of dealing with Comcast's customer service. Comcast may also charge installation fees of up to $90 depending on which package you buy.
by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Aurich Lawson[ed. Hallelujah.]
Welcome to Gem-O-Rama, California’s New Gold Rush
At the 77th Annual Gem-O-Rama last October, hundreds of professional and amateur rockhounds descended on the tiny community of Trona, Calif., for a weekend of treasure hunting. Gem dealers, geologists, retirees and school children dived into the mud and brine of Searles Lake to extract specimens of spellbinding molecular order: hanksite, pink halite, borax and other salt crystals.
Crystals, the now ubiquitous wellness accessories sitting on your desk or bedside table, all come from somewhere. Some come from this dry lake bed in the California desert. “A lot of people don’t pay attention to what’s going on under their feet,” said Alexandra Gama, president of the geology club at California State University, Sacramento. But for the weekend at Gem-O-Rama, what’s going on underfoot is the main event.
Since 1873, Searles Lake has been mined for borax and other minerals, which are sold by the ton for everything from fertilizer to cleaning products, glass manufacturing to gunpowder. The mining operation spawned a small company town, Trona, and with it, the Searles Lake Gem & Mineral Society. The Society has worked with the mining company, now called Searles Valley Minerals, Inc., to host Gem-O-Rama every year since 1941. (Before you grab your pickax, note that Gem-O-Rama 2019 was canceled because of severe damage caused by earthquakes this summer. The epicenters of the July 4 and 5 quakes were just west of Trona.)
Over the course of the festival, there are three field trips, eachheading to different locations and excavation challenges, during which attendees can pursue their quarry. For the “Mud Trip,” Searles Valley Minerals employees have turned over sections of earth 10- to 20-feet deep, revealing clusters of hanksite — a rare, greenish six-sided crystal — in the thick black goo. Later, at the “Blow Hole,” stones buried as far as 50 feet beneath the lake bed are pumped above ground in an impressive geyser. (...)
The rich sediment at Searles Lake has been millions of years in the making. Volcanic activity upstream produced mineral-laden rocks. Glaciers ground up the rocks, leaching their minerals and dissolving them in water. The runoff flowed down from the mountains and into the lake. As the earth warmed, the water largely evaporated, leaving layers of brine that the desert sun bakes into crystals.
Rocks and minerals are standard fourth-grade science curriculum in California, said Moira Talan, a teacher at Topanga Elementary Charter School in Los Angeles County. “Topanga,” Ms. Talan said, “is kind of a crystal place.” For more than 10 years, Ms. Talan has brought students to Gem-O-Rama, where they can become geologists for the weekend, collecting and identifying minerals.
by Josephine Sedgwick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Guido for The New York Times
Crystals, the now ubiquitous wellness accessories sitting on your desk or bedside table, all come from somewhere. Some come from this dry lake bed in the California desert. “A lot of people don’t pay attention to what’s going on under their feet,” said Alexandra Gama, president of the geology club at California State University, Sacramento. But for the weekend at Gem-O-Rama, what’s going on underfoot is the main event.
Since 1873, Searles Lake has been mined for borax and other minerals, which are sold by the ton for everything from fertilizer to cleaning products, glass manufacturing to gunpowder. The mining operation spawned a small company town, Trona, and with it, the Searles Lake Gem & Mineral Society. The Society has worked with the mining company, now called Searles Valley Minerals, Inc., to host Gem-O-Rama every year since 1941. (Before you grab your pickax, note that Gem-O-Rama 2019 was canceled because of severe damage caused by earthquakes this summer. The epicenters of the July 4 and 5 quakes were just west of Trona.)Over the course of the festival, there are three field trips, eachheading to different locations and excavation challenges, during which attendees can pursue their quarry. For the “Mud Trip,” Searles Valley Minerals employees have turned over sections of earth 10- to 20-feet deep, revealing clusters of hanksite — a rare, greenish six-sided crystal — in the thick black goo. Later, at the “Blow Hole,” stones buried as far as 50 feet beneath the lake bed are pumped above ground in an impressive geyser. (...)
The rich sediment at Searles Lake has been millions of years in the making. Volcanic activity upstream produced mineral-laden rocks. Glaciers ground up the rocks, leaching their minerals and dissolving them in water. The runoff flowed down from the mountains and into the lake. As the earth warmed, the water largely evaporated, leaving layers of brine that the desert sun bakes into crystals.
Rocks and minerals are standard fourth-grade science curriculum in California, said Moira Talan, a teacher at Topanga Elementary Charter School in Los Angeles County. “Topanga,” Ms. Talan said, “is kind of a crystal place.” For more than 10 years, Ms. Talan has brought students to Gem-O-Rama, where they can become geologists for the weekend, collecting and identifying minerals.
Image: Brian Guido for The New York Times
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Do We Really Want a Microsoft of Marijuana?
The legalization of marijuana as a medicine in 33 states, 11 of which allow its use as a recreational drug, has made weed a dynamic American industry, among the economy’s fastest-growing sources of new jobs. California alone, with $3.1 billion in projected marijuana sales for this year, has a legal market as large as that of any country on the planet.
Entrepreneurs grumble nonetheless. Not since Ronald Reagan ran for president have American newspapers been so full of anecdotes about heroic jobs-creating businessmen stymied by regulation.
Their gripe concerns banking. Marijuana may be legal in many states, but it remains illegal under federal law, which classifies it, implausibly, as a highly dangerous Schedule 1 narcotic. A bank that does business with weed growers or sellers therefore puts its assets at risk. Proprietors of marijuana businesses find it hard to start 401(k) retirement plans for workers and to get insurance. They can’t avail themselves of federal bankruptcy protection. And they need to conduct a lot of their business in cash.
To fix this problem, Congress is considering the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would create a “safe harbor” against federal bank regulators in states where marijuana has been legalized. The bill has 206 co-sponsors and breezed through the House’s Financial Services Committee in March. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin backs it. So does Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. It appears to be a matter of bipartisan logic and common sense.
It is true that the available banking for marijuana business is unstable, most of it provided by state-chartered banks and credit unions that do not have the federal government as their primary regulator. It is also true that marijuana-related banking is expensive — $5,500 a month for a checking account at one bank in Massachusetts, according to The Boston Globe.
But reform could make matters worse. Big investment banks and corporations want a more streamlined banking regime in order to scale up marijuana operations. Many members of Congress have rallied behind the SAFE Banking Act not because their voters care about pot but because their donors care about money. The old hippie who grows a couple of plants in his backyard in Santa Cruz is not the guy who is paying the former House speaker John Boehner to lobby on behalf of the National Cannabis Roundtable.
Relatively well-capitalized pot businesses are already turning into big corporations. Last year Bank of America and Goldman Sachs reportedly advised Constellation Brands on a $4 billion investment in Canopy Growth, a “multifaceted cannabis company” headquartered in Ontario. (Marijuana is legal nationally in Canada.) On Tuesday the retired New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski revealed his new role as a spokesman for Abacus, a corporation that sells cannabis-derived health products.
Any businessman would want in on marijuana. It is a legal drug, and a legal drug is a gold mine. If it is addictive, it creates a compulsion to purchase. As we learned from the tobacco hearings of the 1990s, not all businessmen can resist exploiting their customers’ compulsions. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says marijuana “can” be addictive. But even if a drug is merely “habit forming,” as many doctors believe marijuana to be, it creates an unlevel playing field between seller and consumer. The more “efficient” the market, the more powerful this inequality.
Whether or not marijuana’s Schedule 1 classification makes sense medically, it serves a purpose politically. Often government intervention requires thwarting businessmen’s antisocial impulses, not just unleashing their productive ones. Politicians are reluctant to admit to being “anti-business.” So a lot of useful regulation gets carried out under pretexts.
Adding sophisticated banking to the pot business will do more than make it more “logical.” It will also turn an artisanal space into a corporate one. It will change what we mean by “legalized marijuana.” In referendum questions over the past decade, Americans have been making big decisions based on such thoughts as, “Should my 19-year-old daughter be put at risk of prison because she was caught with a joint at the freshman mixer?” Voters in many states have seen legalizing marijuana as the prudent choice. Corporations didn’t enter into it.
But corporations bring to the fore questions of size, power and accountability. Do we want multinational businesses using vast marketing budgets and gifted creative teams to teach our children that smoking a lot of pot is somehow sexy, or manly, or sophisticated? Do we want labs to come up with new flavors and varieties that turn pot-smoking into an adventure in connoisseurship and a way of demarcating oneself by class? Would we be content with a Microsoft of marijuana?
by Christopher Caldwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Alex Merto; Photographs from Getty Images and Dreamstime
Entrepreneurs grumble nonetheless. Not since Ronald Reagan ran for president have American newspapers been so full of anecdotes about heroic jobs-creating businessmen stymied by regulation.
Their gripe concerns banking. Marijuana may be legal in many states, but it remains illegal under federal law, which classifies it, implausibly, as a highly dangerous Schedule 1 narcotic. A bank that does business with weed growers or sellers therefore puts its assets at risk. Proprietors of marijuana businesses find it hard to start 401(k) retirement plans for workers and to get insurance. They can’t avail themselves of federal bankruptcy protection. And they need to conduct a lot of their business in cash.
To fix this problem, Congress is considering the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would create a “safe harbor” against federal bank regulators in states where marijuana has been legalized. The bill has 206 co-sponsors and breezed through the House’s Financial Services Committee in March. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin backs it. So does Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. It appears to be a matter of bipartisan logic and common sense.It is true that the available banking for marijuana business is unstable, most of it provided by state-chartered banks and credit unions that do not have the federal government as their primary regulator. It is also true that marijuana-related banking is expensive — $5,500 a month for a checking account at one bank in Massachusetts, according to The Boston Globe.
But reform could make matters worse. Big investment banks and corporations want a more streamlined banking regime in order to scale up marijuana operations. Many members of Congress have rallied behind the SAFE Banking Act not because their voters care about pot but because their donors care about money. The old hippie who grows a couple of plants in his backyard in Santa Cruz is not the guy who is paying the former House speaker John Boehner to lobby on behalf of the National Cannabis Roundtable.
Relatively well-capitalized pot businesses are already turning into big corporations. Last year Bank of America and Goldman Sachs reportedly advised Constellation Brands on a $4 billion investment in Canopy Growth, a “multifaceted cannabis company” headquartered in Ontario. (Marijuana is legal nationally in Canada.) On Tuesday the retired New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski revealed his new role as a spokesman for Abacus, a corporation that sells cannabis-derived health products.
Any businessman would want in on marijuana. It is a legal drug, and a legal drug is a gold mine. If it is addictive, it creates a compulsion to purchase. As we learned from the tobacco hearings of the 1990s, not all businessmen can resist exploiting their customers’ compulsions. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says marijuana “can” be addictive. But even if a drug is merely “habit forming,” as many doctors believe marijuana to be, it creates an unlevel playing field between seller and consumer. The more “efficient” the market, the more powerful this inequality.
Whether or not marijuana’s Schedule 1 classification makes sense medically, it serves a purpose politically. Often government intervention requires thwarting businessmen’s antisocial impulses, not just unleashing their productive ones. Politicians are reluctant to admit to being “anti-business.” So a lot of useful regulation gets carried out under pretexts.
Adding sophisticated banking to the pot business will do more than make it more “logical.” It will also turn an artisanal space into a corporate one. It will change what we mean by “legalized marijuana.” In referendum questions over the past decade, Americans have been making big decisions based on such thoughts as, “Should my 19-year-old daughter be put at risk of prison because she was caught with a joint at the freshman mixer?” Voters in many states have seen legalizing marijuana as the prudent choice. Corporations didn’t enter into it.
But corporations bring to the fore questions of size, power and accountability. Do we want multinational businesses using vast marketing budgets and gifted creative teams to teach our children that smoking a lot of pot is somehow sexy, or manly, or sophisticated? Do we want labs to come up with new flavors and varieties that turn pot-smoking into an adventure in connoisseurship and a way of demarcating oneself by class? Would we be content with a Microsoft of marijuana?
by Christopher Caldwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Alex Merto; Photographs from Getty Images and Dreamstime
In Defense of Hatred
The British National Health Service (NHS) was launched on July 5, 1948, after a colossal political struggle. It was an extraordinarily ambitious scheme: to provide free healthcare for the entire country, so that nobody would again have to pay a medical bill for basic services. Nearly 90 percent of British doctors had opposed the scheme, making arguments that are familiar today (doctors would be “slaves” and the government would embark down the road to totalitarian serfdom). The socialist Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, a left-wing firebrand who had been born into a Welsh coal mining family, had worked diligently to overcome opposition and make the NHS a reality. He negotiated deals with the medical establishment and successfully charmed his enemies, so that on the morning of the 5th, all of Britain would wake up to find themselves able to go to the doctor without having to pay.
It was one of the most remarkable political triumphs of the 20th century. But the night before the NHS was to begin operating, Bevan nearly ruined everything. On July 4th, he gave a speech to a conference of Labour Party activists in Manchester in which he unleashed his rage upon the Conservative Party. Describing his background among the poor of Wales, and the avoidable suffering he had witnessed growing up, Bevan thundered:
“That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now… I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.”
The speech was a political disaster. Bevan had tried to convince the country that the NHS was a unifying measure that all reasonable people could agree to. He had presented himself as a pragmatist, a compromiser. Now he was denouncing the party of Winston Churchill as “vermin” and admitting that he hated their guts. The newspaper headlines were predictable: “BEVAN: MY BURNING HATRED OF THE TORIES”; “THE MAN WHO HATES 8,092,858 PEOPLE.” The Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, expressed his disappointment in Bevan, and the speech was alleged to have cost the party millions of votes. (The Conservatives returned to power three years later, in 1951).
The “vermin” speech may or may not deserve credit for affecting Labour’s political fortunes. But it was certainly a political misstep for Bevan, especially on the very eve of the NHS’s creation. And for conservatives, the speech proves what they all believe to be true: The left may speak in the language of pragmatism sometimes, they may claim to support unifying goals and unobjectionable principles, but beneath it all they are hateful class warriors motivated not by love, but by a burning desire to destroy a bourgeoisie whom they envy and despise. Bevan “let the mask slip.” He told the truth and exposed the left for what it really was.
But the reality here is more interesting and complicated. I think many of us on the left probably sympathize with Bevan, because we grapple with the same opposing instincts that he did: We simultaneously believe in “universal” programs and love “all” of humankind and keep seeing particular portions of humankind inflict terrible pain on their fellow creatures. This does not mean that we are “hateful” people, but rather that one day we wake up overflowing with love, the next day with hate, and our love of justice makes us enraged at the practitioners of injustice.
Frankly, I see where Bevan was coming from with that vermin speech. He had spent his early years watching miners spend their entire days in an 18-inch high tunnel beneath the ground, getting paid barely enough to subsist on, and having no medical care to speak of. As Minister of Health, he had had to spend years fighting against extremely well-off people who had the audacity to suggest that giving these working people the basic necessities of life amounted to forced labor for the professional class. Is it not human, is it not indeed quite rational, to hate a party that “condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation”? Isn’t that kind of hatred the mark of a functioning moral compass?
Today, a lot of people seem to think “hatred” is what’s wrong with our politics. Republican senator Ben Sasse has written a book called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal. (Sasse: “When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.”) On the left, Matt Taibbi has a new book called Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. (“[D]omestically, we sold conflict. We began in the early nineties to systematically pry families apart, set group against group, and more and more make news consumption a… stimulation of the vitriolic reflex, a consumer version of the ‘Two Minutes Hate.’”) The Southern Poverty Law Center is known for tracking “hate” groups—a category in which the center includes both white supremacists and black nationalists—on the theory that there can be nothing worse than hate.
In a recent book called Against Hate, German journalist Carolin Emcke links hatred and “populism,” worrying about the rise of a hate-fueled politics in Europe that demonizes foreigners and religious minorities. Notably, Emcke does not just talk about right-wing bigotry, or attacks on the powerless by the powerful, but about “hatred” as an emotion, which she sees as blind, uncivilized, and dangerous. Haters, she says, are supremely confident people incapable of the nuance and humility that is the basis for sophisticated thought. Here are a few paragraphs from her introduction that capture her position:
Sometimes I wonder how they do it: how they hate the way they do. How they can be so sure of themselves. Because the haters have to be at least that: sure. Otherwise they would not talk the way they do, hurt the way they do, kill the way they do. Otherwise they could not insult others, humiliate others, attack others the way they do… You cannot hate and be unsure about hating at the same time… Hating requires absolute certainty. [..]
Hate is fuzzy. It is difficult to hate with precision. Precision would bring delicate nuance, attentive looking and listening; precision would bring that discernment that perceives individual persons.. ..[But once] individuals have been blotted out as individuals, then all that is left are indistinct groups to serve as targets of hatred; then they can hate to their hearts’ content, and defame and disparage, rave and rage: the Jews, the women, the unbelievers, the Blacks, the lesbians, the refugees, the Muslims, or perhaps the United States, the politicians, the West, the police, the media, the intellectuals… Hatred is aimed upwards or downwards but always along a vertical axis: against those ‘at the top’ or the ‘lowest of the low.’ It is always categorically ‘other’ who is oppressing or threatening the hater’s ‘self.’ …
I, In any case, do not think uninhibited shouting, slandering and insulting represents an advancement of civilization. I do not consider it a sign of progress that every inner baseness may be turned outwards just because exhibiting resentments is now supposed to have some public or even political relevance… I do not want to see the new, unbridled appetite for hatred becoming normal.
In Emcke’s formulation, then, hating “the media” or “politicians” is the same as hating Muslims or women. Whether or not your hatred is aimed “up” at a rich elite or “down” at the poor and dispossessed, the problem here is that people are expressing “resentments” and are “slandering and insulting” entire groups instead of seeing people in their full humanity.
I see the same problem with Emcke’s analysis that I do with those who condemn “populism of the right and left”: It collapses attacks on the powerful and attacks on the weak into one category, “attacks,” making Bernie Sanders’ attitude toward David Koch the same as the El Paso shooter’s attitude toward working class Hispanics. Emcke talks about those who “insult,” “hurt,” and “kill” as if those actions belong in the same category.
I am not sure I have a problem with hatred in and of itself. I certainly don’t think all hatred belongs in the same category, and the idea of lumping Aneurin Bevan’s hatred of preventable suffering in with the hatred of refugees and Muslims. The disdain for “hatred” and “divisive rhetoric” lacks an awareness of differences in who has power and who doesn’t, who actually has their lives threatened by being hated.
Is hatred ever healthy? Does it “strangle our charitable impulses” and make us stupid? I certainly try not to spend my life consumed by hatred, but I also think we should be infuriated by injustice, and I have always had respect for William Lloyd Garrison’s defense of “extremist” language in the anti-slavery movement:
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
I don’t know how you can look at certain features of the world and not feel very strong negative emotions toward those who are turning away from—or even directly causing—other people’s pain. My colleague Brianna Rennix has written about how her time working as an attorney at an immigraton jail has made her unable to think about the issue without a burning sense of rage coursing through her body:
I used to not think of myself as an angry person—and stupidly, I used to believe this was a virtue of some kind, that I was sanguine enough to give other people the benefit of the doubt. Well, that was fine, back when all I had to be annoyed about was some workplace drama, or an unrequited crush, or someone not doing the dishes. I had no fucking clue. In our immigration system, you sometimes run across people who are so petty, who are so ready to put their egos above the real lives of other human beings, that they feel like some kind of comic-book parody of a villain. At Dilley, too, you often get to hear the stories of how the detainees were treated just before getting here, while they were still at the border, far from observant legal eyes—made to sit in their wet clothes for three days in ice-cold temperatures, given frozen masses of rotted food to eat, forced to use an open toilet in a room packed with people while their children’s bottoms blistered in unchanged diapers, kicked and screamed at all night to keep them awake. These are things monsters do. This is what our country does to the poor and helpless, in a time of prosperity and peace. I think of how the little children I see every day are going to grow up, those who end up allowed to stay in the United States, with this their first welcome as refugees.
I am so angry that I am rapidly losing the ability to communicate with people and their facile opinions: “Well, but what’s the solution?” and “Well, but we can’t just let everyone in.” In the past I would have thought these people were moderates, probably. Now I think they are the accomplices of extreme evil. I don’t know what to do with all the rage in my body. And this is how I feel merely as an advocate and onlooker. If my family and friends were being tortured in this way, how would I live? Would my heart simply explode? How are there so many people in our country carrying this feeling in their body every day?
Is Brianna being “divisive”? Is she being “unsubtle”? Is she failing to “see the other side”? Possibly. But I also think she is having a more morally defensible reaction than those, like Emcke and Sasse, who think the problem is “anger in politics.” Sometimes anger is not only acceptable, but it is compelled. (...)
Aneurin Bevan should not have said that he hated the Tory Party, because it was a huge political miscalculation at a critical time for the NHS. Ultimately, the NHS proved an overwhelming popular success in spite of his speech, and despite decades of budget shortfalls and privatization pushes, British people today still affirm the underlying principle Bevan articulated, that “no society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” (Let us reflect on the implications of this for the contemporary United States.)
It was one of the most remarkable political triumphs of the 20th century. But the night before the NHS was to begin operating, Bevan nearly ruined everything. On July 4th, he gave a speech to a conference of Labour Party activists in Manchester in which he unleashed his rage upon the Conservative Party. Describing his background among the poor of Wales, and the avoidable suffering he had witnessed growing up, Bevan thundered:
“That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now… I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.”The speech was a political disaster. Bevan had tried to convince the country that the NHS was a unifying measure that all reasonable people could agree to. He had presented himself as a pragmatist, a compromiser. Now he was denouncing the party of Winston Churchill as “vermin” and admitting that he hated their guts. The newspaper headlines were predictable: “BEVAN: MY BURNING HATRED OF THE TORIES”; “THE MAN WHO HATES 8,092,858 PEOPLE.” The Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, expressed his disappointment in Bevan, and the speech was alleged to have cost the party millions of votes. (The Conservatives returned to power three years later, in 1951).
The “vermin” speech may or may not deserve credit for affecting Labour’s political fortunes. But it was certainly a political misstep for Bevan, especially on the very eve of the NHS’s creation. And for conservatives, the speech proves what they all believe to be true: The left may speak in the language of pragmatism sometimes, they may claim to support unifying goals and unobjectionable principles, but beneath it all they are hateful class warriors motivated not by love, but by a burning desire to destroy a bourgeoisie whom they envy and despise. Bevan “let the mask slip.” He told the truth and exposed the left for what it really was.
But the reality here is more interesting and complicated. I think many of us on the left probably sympathize with Bevan, because we grapple with the same opposing instincts that he did: We simultaneously believe in “universal” programs and love “all” of humankind and keep seeing particular portions of humankind inflict terrible pain on their fellow creatures. This does not mean that we are “hateful” people, but rather that one day we wake up overflowing with love, the next day with hate, and our love of justice makes us enraged at the practitioners of injustice.
Frankly, I see where Bevan was coming from with that vermin speech. He had spent his early years watching miners spend their entire days in an 18-inch high tunnel beneath the ground, getting paid barely enough to subsist on, and having no medical care to speak of. As Minister of Health, he had had to spend years fighting against extremely well-off people who had the audacity to suggest that giving these working people the basic necessities of life amounted to forced labor for the professional class. Is it not human, is it not indeed quite rational, to hate a party that “condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation”? Isn’t that kind of hatred the mark of a functioning moral compass?
Today, a lot of people seem to think “hatred” is what’s wrong with our politics. Republican senator Ben Sasse has written a book called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal. (Sasse: “When one half of the nation demonizes the other half, tendrils of resentment reach out and strangle whatever charitable impulses remain in us.”) On the left, Matt Taibbi has a new book called Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. (“[D]omestically, we sold conflict. We began in the early nineties to systematically pry families apart, set group against group, and more and more make news consumption a… stimulation of the vitriolic reflex, a consumer version of the ‘Two Minutes Hate.’”) The Southern Poverty Law Center is known for tracking “hate” groups—a category in which the center includes both white supremacists and black nationalists—on the theory that there can be nothing worse than hate.
In a recent book called Against Hate, German journalist Carolin Emcke links hatred and “populism,” worrying about the rise of a hate-fueled politics in Europe that demonizes foreigners and religious minorities. Notably, Emcke does not just talk about right-wing bigotry, or attacks on the powerless by the powerful, but about “hatred” as an emotion, which she sees as blind, uncivilized, and dangerous. Haters, she says, are supremely confident people incapable of the nuance and humility that is the basis for sophisticated thought. Here are a few paragraphs from her introduction that capture her position:
Sometimes I wonder how they do it: how they hate the way they do. How they can be so sure of themselves. Because the haters have to be at least that: sure. Otherwise they would not talk the way they do, hurt the way they do, kill the way they do. Otherwise they could not insult others, humiliate others, attack others the way they do… You cannot hate and be unsure about hating at the same time… Hating requires absolute certainty. [..]
Hate is fuzzy. It is difficult to hate with precision. Precision would bring delicate nuance, attentive looking and listening; precision would bring that discernment that perceives individual persons.. ..[But once] individuals have been blotted out as individuals, then all that is left are indistinct groups to serve as targets of hatred; then they can hate to their hearts’ content, and defame and disparage, rave and rage: the Jews, the women, the unbelievers, the Blacks, the lesbians, the refugees, the Muslims, or perhaps the United States, the politicians, the West, the police, the media, the intellectuals… Hatred is aimed upwards or downwards but always along a vertical axis: against those ‘at the top’ or the ‘lowest of the low.’ It is always categorically ‘other’ who is oppressing or threatening the hater’s ‘self.’ …
I, In any case, do not think uninhibited shouting, slandering and insulting represents an advancement of civilization. I do not consider it a sign of progress that every inner baseness may be turned outwards just because exhibiting resentments is now supposed to have some public or even political relevance… I do not want to see the new, unbridled appetite for hatred becoming normal.
In Emcke’s formulation, then, hating “the media” or “politicians” is the same as hating Muslims or women. Whether or not your hatred is aimed “up” at a rich elite or “down” at the poor and dispossessed, the problem here is that people are expressing “resentments” and are “slandering and insulting” entire groups instead of seeing people in their full humanity.
I see the same problem with Emcke’s analysis that I do with those who condemn “populism of the right and left”: It collapses attacks on the powerful and attacks on the weak into one category, “attacks,” making Bernie Sanders’ attitude toward David Koch the same as the El Paso shooter’s attitude toward working class Hispanics. Emcke talks about those who “insult,” “hurt,” and “kill” as if those actions belong in the same category.
I am not sure I have a problem with hatred in and of itself. I certainly don’t think all hatred belongs in the same category, and the idea of lumping Aneurin Bevan’s hatred of preventable suffering in with the hatred of refugees and Muslims. The disdain for “hatred” and “divisive rhetoric” lacks an awareness of differences in who has power and who doesn’t, who actually has their lives threatened by being hated.
Is hatred ever healthy? Does it “strangle our charitable impulses” and make us stupid? I certainly try not to spend my life consumed by hatred, but I also think we should be infuriated by injustice, and I have always had respect for William Lloyd Garrison’s defense of “extremist” language in the anti-slavery movement:
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
I don’t know how you can look at certain features of the world and not feel very strong negative emotions toward those who are turning away from—or even directly causing—other people’s pain. My colleague Brianna Rennix has written about how her time working as an attorney at an immigraton jail has made her unable to think about the issue without a burning sense of rage coursing through her body:
I used to not think of myself as an angry person—and stupidly, I used to believe this was a virtue of some kind, that I was sanguine enough to give other people the benefit of the doubt. Well, that was fine, back when all I had to be annoyed about was some workplace drama, or an unrequited crush, or someone not doing the dishes. I had no fucking clue. In our immigration system, you sometimes run across people who are so petty, who are so ready to put their egos above the real lives of other human beings, that they feel like some kind of comic-book parody of a villain. At Dilley, too, you often get to hear the stories of how the detainees were treated just before getting here, while they were still at the border, far from observant legal eyes—made to sit in their wet clothes for three days in ice-cold temperatures, given frozen masses of rotted food to eat, forced to use an open toilet in a room packed with people while their children’s bottoms blistered in unchanged diapers, kicked and screamed at all night to keep them awake. These are things monsters do. This is what our country does to the poor and helpless, in a time of prosperity and peace. I think of how the little children I see every day are going to grow up, those who end up allowed to stay in the United States, with this their first welcome as refugees.
I am so angry that I am rapidly losing the ability to communicate with people and their facile opinions: “Well, but what’s the solution?” and “Well, but we can’t just let everyone in.” In the past I would have thought these people were moderates, probably. Now I think they are the accomplices of extreme evil. I don’t know what to do with all the rage in my body. And this is how I feel merely as an advocate and onlooker. If my family and friends were being tortured in this way, how would I live? Would my heart simply explode? How are there so many people in our country carrying this feeling in their body every day?
Is Brianna being “divisive”? Is she being “unsubtle”? Is she failing to “see the other side”? Possibly. But I also think she is having a more morally defensible reaction than those, like Emcke and Sasse, who think the problem is “anger in politics.” Sometimes anger is not only acceptable, but it is compelled. (...)
Aneurin Bevan should not have said that he hated the Tory Party, because it was a huge political miscalculation at a critical time for the NHS. Ultimately, the NHS proved an overwhelming popular success in spite of his speech, and despite decades of budget shortfalls and privatization pushes, British people today still affirm the underlying principle Bevan articulated, that “no society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” (Let us reflect on the implications of this for the contemporary United States.)
Friday, August 30, 2019
Fired!
Given Westerhout’s sensitive role as a confidante to the president, the few details the White House shared about her abrupt firing had Washington’s political-media class in a quiet frenzy on Thursday night and Friday.
via: Politico
[ed. Quiet frenzy... says all you need to know about this country's political class (and media).]
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Is My Millennial Co-Worker a Narcissist, or Am I a Jealous Jerk?
Millennials’ Revolt
If you are interested in taking classes and attending conferences, why not take your company up on its ability to pay for them? If you’re not in a position to attend because of your family commitments, that’s O.K. too, but it doesn’t mean your colleague needs to stop attending. If opportunities aren’t being doled out unequally and you aren’t being forced to take on extra work to cover for their absence, whether they are an average performer or a superstar really doesn’t concern you. The fact that you are not responsible for this person’s work outcomes and that you are considering complaining to their supervisor — who is responsible for said work outcomes, and surely knows where their employee is on a given day — suggests it is not in fact about “adding value” but pure resentment.
This is the economic system’s fault, too. You’ve been set up to resent millennials just as much as we’ve been set up to resent you. The good news is that you can still break the cycle.
If you are genuinely curious about learning more from your co-worker’s experiences, try asking! Deliberately hoarding information would be a weird strategy; it seems far more likely that they don’t realize anyone would be interested. Might a friendly message asking if they’d be willing to have lunch and talk about some of the most interesting parts of the most recent conference benefit you both more than lingering resentment?
My co-worker seems to work more for their (I don’t want to specify gender) personal brand than for the company. This team member posts their whereabouts on Slack: They’re at a conference, at class (coursework tangential to their job), working from home! They keep us up to date on the minutiae of their travel (leaving at 11 a.m.! on a train without Wi-Fi until 7 p.m.!). They meet their goals, but I’m not privy to what their results look like — are they treading water or exceeding their goals?
I could be glad this younger co-worker is out and about so much, but the department doesn’t benefit in any way. (We’re in marketing.) When this co-worker reports on conferences, they don’t say how what they learned will help us.
Another co-worker and I try to sort out if we’re jealous. (We have family obligations and perhaps we’re a bit stodgy?) But I think if someone is getting smarter on the company dollar, they should share with their team. Instead, we’re on the outside, watching our co-worker flit from thing to thing, polishing their own brand.
Am I not thinking the new-think? Or is this person a workplace narcissist? Why does it bother us so much? What language can I use with co-worker’s supervisor and the department head that doesn’t make it seem like a personality issue, but about adding value to the organization? Or is it just that co-worker’s personality and mine are far apart and I should look for my own classes and conferences and polish my own brand?
What’s the balance between what’s good for the individual vs. good for the team?
— K.C.I’ve previously outed myself as a millennial in this column, and I suppose I should further disclose that I recently (and quite publicly) quit my job and got a new one thanks in part to my largely positive reputation in an industry known for absurd levels of upheaval. So! I am impressed by your colleague’s savvy brand-building, which I strongly suspect has less to do with narcissism than with their experiences making a career in a post-financial crisis world. I have never had a job that didn’t feel tenuous, which means I have never had the freedom to not obsess over my personal brand and whether I’m doing enough to burnish it through work, social media, skill-building and networking. Ofcourse we would rather quit Twitter and stop going to conferences and professional mixers and take all our vacation days and develop real hobbies and deeper human connections, but the entire economic system has shown us over and over that we cannot, because we will end up broke disappointments to everyone we know. (Malcolm Harris’s excellent book “Kids These Days,” which details how millennials were shaped by economic trauma, is a worthwhile read on this subject.)
If you are interested in taking classes and attending conferences, why not take your company up on its ability to pay for them? If you’re not in a position to attend because of your family commitments, that’s O.K. too, but it doesn’t mean your colleague needs to stop attending. If opportunities aren’t being doled out unequally and you aren’t being forced to take on extra work to cover for their absence, whether they are an average performer or a superstar really doesn’t concern you. The fact that you are not responsible for this person’s work outcomes and that you are considering complaining to their supervisor — who is responsible for said work outcomes, and surely knows where their employee is on a given day — suggests it is not in fact about “adding value” but pure resentment.
This is the economic system’s fault, too. You’ve been set up to resent millennials just as much as we’ve been set up to resent you. The good news is that you can still break the cycle.
If you are genuinely curious about learning more from your co-worker’s experiences, try asking! Deliberately hoarding information would be a weird strategy; it seems far more likely that they don’t realize anyone would be interested. Might a friendly message asking if they’d be willing to have lunch and talk about some of the most interesting parts of the most recent conference benefit you both more than lingering resentment?
by Megan Greenwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Margeaux Walter for The New York Times
[ed. I don't necessarily agree with this response, but if you're interested read the comments and decide for yourself.]
Stone Tools Suggest the First Americans Came From Japan
Evidence from the Cooper's Ferry archaeological site in Western Idaho shows that people lived in the Columbia River Basin around 16,000 years ago. That's well before a corridor between ice sheets opened up, clearing an inland route south from the Bering land bridge. That suggests that people migrated south along the Pacific coast. Stone tools from the site suggest a possible connection between these first Americans and Northeast Asian hunter-gatherers from the same period.
Route closed due to ice
A piece of charcoal unearthed in the lowest layer of sediment that contains artifacts is between 15,945 and 15,335 years old, according to radiocarbon dating. More charcoal, from the remains of an ancient hearth pit, dated to between 14,075 and 15,195 years old. A few other pieces of bone and charcoal returned radiocarbon dates in the 14,000- to 15,500-year-old range. In higher, more recent layers, archaeologists found bone and charcoal as recent as 8,000 years old, with a range of dates in between.
This makes clear that people had been using the Cooper's Ferry site for a very long time, but it's hard to say whether they stuck around or just kept coming back. "Because we did not excavate the entire site, it is difficult to know if people occupied the site continuously starting at 16,000 years ago," Oregon State University archaeologist Loren Davis told Ars. "I expect that this site was used on a seasonal basis, perhaps as a base camp for hunting, gathering, and fishing activities." (...)
Davis and his colleagues used a statistical model to calculate how old the very oldest layers of artifacts at the site should be. "The Bayesian model makes predictions about the age of the lower portion of [the excavated layers] based on the chronological trend of known radiocarbon ages in the upper and middle third," Davis explained. According to the model, the very oldest artifacts at Nipéhe are probably between 16,560 and 15,280 years old.
That's about 2,000 to 1,500 years before the great continent-spanning ice sheets of the Pleistocene began to break up. That break-up opened an ice-free corridor southward from the Bering land bridge between the towering sides of the Cordilleran and Laurentian ice sheets. According to computer simulations, that corridor was closed and buried under several kilometers of ice until at least 14,800 years ago, and possibly even later. And that has some important implications for when, and how, people first set foot in the Americas.
The coastal route
If the ice-free corridor wasn't open, the only way to get south of the ice sheets would have been to skirt along the Pacific coast on foot or by boat, moving among locations where the edges of the 4km (2.5 miles) thick glaciers didn't quite reach the Pacific Ocean. Much of Ice Age coastline is now underwater, largely thanks to the melting of those huge glaciers. But there have been a few recent archaeological finds that support the idea that the first humans in the Americans moved south along the coast much earlier than previously thought. (...)
A Japanese connection?
Buried in the Ice Age layers at Nipéhe, Davis and his colleagues found animal bones and discarded stone tools, including bifaces (two-sided handaxes; think of them as prehistoric multi-tools), blades, sharp stone flakes, and fragments of two projectile points. The tool collection didn't look a thing like the fluted projectile points that have become the archaeological calling card of the Clovis culture.
To make a Clovis-style projectile point, the flint-knapper has to chip off a flake from one or both faces at a point right at the base of the object. That creates a small groove (also called a flute), which makes it easier to fit the point onto the shaft of a spear or arrow. But at Nipéhe (and at a few other pre-Clovis sites in the Americas), people took the opposite approach: they shaped the base of the point into a stem to attach to the spear or arrow shaft. Some of the younger stone tools from Nipéhe are about the same age as the Clovis culture, but they're clearly a separate technology.
Stemmed projectile points aren't a recent technology, even by archaeological standards; people figured out that stems made points easier to haft by around 50,000 years ago in Africa, Asia, and the Levant. But there are different ways to shape a chunk of flint into a stemmed point, and the ones at Nipéhe look strikingly similar to stemmed points from Northeast Asia. Similarities are especially strong with items from the Japanese island of Hokkaido, which have turned up at sites dating between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago. (As an interesting side note, stemmed projectile points from a 13,500-year-old site in Kamchatka, in east Russia, were made with a distinctly different style.) (...)
Other aspects of the stone tools at Nipéhe also resemble the ones being made and used on Hokkaido at around the same time and slightly earlier. Davis and his colleagues claim that similarity is no coincidence. They suggest that the similar stone tool technology is evidence of a cultural link between the earliest Americans—who arrived on the Pacific coast and migrated southward before moving inland south of the ice sheets—and people in Northeastern Asia.
The dates line up well; many of the Hokkaido sites with stemmed points are older than Nipéhe, while others are around the same age.
Route closed due to ice
A piece of charcoal unearthed in the lowest layer of sediment that contains artifacts is between 15,945 and 15,335 years old, according to radiocarbon dating. More charcoal, from the remains of an ancient hearth pit, dated to between 14,075 and 15,195 years old. A few other pieces of bone and charcoal returned radiocarbon dates in the 14,000- to 15,500-year-old range. In higher, more recent layers, archaeologists found bone and charcoal as recent as 8,000 years old, with a range of dates in between.This makes clear that people had been using the Cooper's Ferry site for a very long time, but it's hard to say whether they stuck around or just kept coming back. "Because we did not excavate the entire site, it is difficult to know if people occupied the site continuously starting at 16,000 years ago," Oregon State University archaeologist Loren Davis told Ars. "I expect that this site was used on a seasonal basis, perhaps as a base camp for hunting, gathering, and fishing activities." (...)
Davis and his colleagues used a statistical model to calculate how old the very oldest layers of artifacts at the site should be. "The Bayesian model makes predictions about the age of the lower portion of [the excavated layers] based on the chronological trend of known radiocarbon ages in the upper and middle third," Davis explained. According to the model, the very oldest artifacts at Nipéhe are probably between 16,560 and 15,280 years old.
That's about 2,000 to 1,500 years before the great continent-spanning ice sheets of the Pleistocene began to break up. That break-up opened an ice-free corridor southward from the Bering land bridge between the towering sides of the Cordilleran and Laurentian ice sheets. According to computer simulations, that corridor was closed and buried under several kilometers of ice until at least 14,800 years ago, and possibly even later. And that has some important implications for when, and how, people first set foot in the Americas.
The coastal route
If the ice-free corridor wasn't open, the only way to get south of the ice sheets would have been to skirt along the Pacific coast on foot or by boat, moving among locations where the edges of the 4km (2.5 miles) thick glaciers didn't quite reach the Pacific Ocean. Much of Ice Age coastline is now underwater, largely thanks to the melting of those huge glaciers. But there have been a few recent archaeological finds that support the idea that the first humans in the Americans moved south along the coast much earlier than previously thought. (...)
A Japanese connection?
Buried in the Ice Age layers at Nipéhe, Davis and his colleagues found animal bones and discarded stone tools, including bifaces (two-sided handaxes; think of them as prehistoric multi-tools), blades, sharp stone flakes, and fragments of two projectile points. The tool collection didn't look a thing like the fluted projectile points that have become the archaeological calling card of the Clovis culture.
To make a Clovis-style projectile point, the flint-knapper has to chip off a flake from one or both faces at a point right at the base of the object. That creates a small groove (also called a flute), which makes it easier to fit the point onto the shaft of a spear or arrow. But at Nipéhe (and at a few other pre-Clovis sites in the Americas), people took the opposite approach: they shaped the base of the point into a stem to attach to the spear or arrow shaft. Some of the younger stone tools from Nipéhe are about the same age as the Clovis culture, but they're clearly a separate technology.
Stemmed projectile points aren't a recent technology, even by archaeological standards; people figured out that stems made points easier to haft by around 50,000 years ago in Africa, Asia, and the Levant. But there are different ways to shape a chunk of flint into a stemmed point, and the ones at Nipéhe look strikingly similar to stemmed points from Northeast Asia. Similarities are especially strong with items from the Japanese island of Hokkaido, which have turned up at sites dating between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago. (As an interesting side note, stemmed projectile points from a 13,500-year-old site in Kamchatka, in east Russia, were made with a distinctly different style.) (...)
Other aspects of the stone tools at Nipéhe also resemble the ones being made and used on Hokkaido at around the same time and slightly earlier. Davis and his colleagues claim that similarity is no coincidence. They suggest that the similar stone tool technology is evidence of a cultural link between the earliest Americans—who arrived on the Pacific coast and migrated southward before moving inland south of the ice sheets—and people in Northeastern Asia.
The dates line up well; many of the Hokkaido sites with stemmed points are older than Nipéhe, while others are around the same age.
by Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Loren Davis
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