Crystalline Nets Harvest Water From Desert Air, Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

When Omar Yaghi was growing up in Jordan, outside of Amman, his neighborhood received water for only about 5 hours once every 2 weeks. If Yaghi wasn’t up at dawn to turn on the spigots to store water, his family, their cow, and their garden had to go without. At a meeting last week here, in an-other area thirsting for freshwater, Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water.

“This is fantastic work that addresses a real problem,” says Jorge Andrés Rodríguez Navarro, a MOF chemist at the University of Granada in Spain. It’s also just one example of how MOFs may finally be entering their prime. Yaghi and his colleagues synthesized the first MOF in 1995, and chemists have created tens of thousands of the structures since. Each is made up of metal atoms that act like hubs in a Tinkertoy set, connected into a porous network by organic linkers designed to hold fast to the hubs and create openings to house molecular guests. By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2). “We can play games with modifying these and know exactly where every atom is,” says Amanda Morris, a MOF researcher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. But because many of the early MOFs were expensive to make and degraded quickly, they did not live up to initial excitement.

In recent years, Yaghi and other MOF-makers have figured out a broad set of design rules to make MOFs more robust. More highly charged metals, for example, create stronger bonds that stand up to heat. That has opened up functions such as housing catalysts, which typically work faster at high temperatures. Another stability boost came when researchers learned to tailor the architecture to shield less-stable bonds in a MOF from attack by trapped molecules.

As a result, commercial applications are starting to take off. One recent market report predicted that sales of MOFs for applications including storing and detecting gases will balloon to $410 million annually over the next 5 years, up from $70 million this year. “Ten years ago, MOFs showed promise for a lot of applications,” says Omar Farha, a MOF chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “Now, that promise has become a reality.”

One application is Yaghi’s, which he hopes will help provide drinking water for the estimated one-third of the world’s population living in water-stressed regions. Yaghi and his colleagues first developed a zirconium-based MOF in 2014 that could harvest and release water. But at $160 per kilogram, zirconium is too expensive for bulk use. So, last year, his team came up with an alternative called MOF-303, based on aluminum, which costs just $3 per kilogram. In the desert of Arizona, Yaghi and his team placed their MOF in a small, clear plastic container. They kept it open to the air at night, allowing the MOF to absorb water vapor. They then closed the container and exposed the MOF to sunlight, which drove liquid water from it—but the harvest was only about 0.2 liters per kilogram of MOF per day.

At last week’s meeting of the American Chemical Society and in the 27 August issue of ACS Central Science, Yaghi reported that his team has devised a new and far more productive water harvester. By exploiting MOF-303’s ability to fill and empty its pores in just minutes, the team can make the new device complete dozens of cycles daily. Supported by a solar panel to power a fan and heater, which speed the cycles, the device produces up to 1.3 liters of water per kilogram of MOF per day from desert air. Yaghi expects further improvements to boost that number to 8 to 10 liters per day. Last year, he formed a company called Water Harvesting that this fall plans to release a microwave-size device able to provide up to 8 liters per day. The company promises a scaled-up version next year that will produce 22,500 liters per day, enough to supply a small village. “We’re making water mobile,” Yaghi says. “It’s like taking a wired phone and making a wireless phone.”

by Robert F. Service, AAAS Science |  Read more:

Image: Mathieu Prevot

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Student Debt Is Transforming the American Family

In April, 2011, the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom was sitting in her office at New York University when one of her most promising students appeared at her door, crying. Kimberly had dreamed of life in New York City since she was eight years old. Growing up in a middle-class family just outside Philadelphia, she was regaled with stories about her mother’s short, glamorous-sounding stint waitressing in Times Square. Kimberly’s version of the big-city fantasy was also shaped by reruns of “Felicity,” a late-nineties drama set at a lightly fictionalized version of N.Y.U. Her dream school did not disappoint. Kimberly was an intrepid, committed student, studying the effects of globalization on urban space; she worked with street venders and saw their struggles to make ends meet. College opened up a new world to her. But her family had sacrificed to help finance her education, and she had taken out considerable loans. She had looked forward to putting her degree to good use, while chipping away at the debt behind it. But the job she was offered involved outsourcing labor to foreign contractors—exacerbating the inequalities she hoped a future career might help rectify.

Zaloom felt that there was something representative about Kimberly’s story, as more students find themselves struggling with the consequences of college debt. She wanted to learn about the trajectory that had brought Kimberly to her office that day. She visited her at home and listened as her mother, June, talked about how she, too, had fantasized about a life in New York. But June’s family had needed her back home, in Pennsylvania, where she met Kimberly’s father. They eventually divorced, but they stayed in the same town, raising Kimberly together. June had wanted her daughter to have the experiences she had missed out on. When Kimberly was accepted at N.Y.U., her father urged her to attend a more affordable school in state. June implored him to change his mind, and he eventually agreed. The decision stretched their finances, but June told her daughter, “You’ve got to go.”

It’s easy to dismiss quandaries like Kimberly’s as the stuff of youth, when every question seems freighted with filmic significance. There’s a luxury to putting off practical concerns. But her story gave Zaloom insight into the evolving role of college debt in contemporary American life. Kimberly’s predicament was put in motion when she first set her sights on attending a college where, today, the annual tuition is more than fifty thousand dollars, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. That her parents risked their financial stability to nurture this dream seemed meaningful. Previous generations might have pushed a college-bound child to fend for herself; Kimberly’s parents prized notions of “potential” and “promise.” Shielding her from the consequences of debt was an expression of love, and of their own forward-looking class identity.

Since 2012, Zaloom has spent a lot of time with families like Kimberly’s. They all fall into America’s middle class—an amorphous category, defined more by sensibility or aspirational identity than by a strict income threshold. (Households with an annual income of anywhere from forty thousand dollars to a quarter of a million dollars view themselves as middle class.) In “Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost” (Princeton), Zaloom considers how the challenge of paying for college has become one of the organizing forces of middle-class family life. She and her team conducted interviews with a hundred and sixty families across the country, all of whom make too much to qualify for Pell Grants (reserved for households that earn below fifty thousand dollars) but too little to pay for tuition outright. These families are committed to providing their children with an “open future,” in which passions can be pursued. They have done all the things you’re supposed to, like investing and saving, and not racking up too much debt. Some parents are almost neurotically responsible, passing down a sense of penny-pinching thrift as though it were an heirloom; others prize idealism, encouraging their children to follow their dreams. What actually unites them, from a military family in Florida to a dual-Ph.D. household in Michigan, is that the children are part of a generation where debt—the financial and psychological state of being indebted—will shadow them for much of their adult lives.

A great deal has changed since Kimberly’s parents attended college. From the late nineteen-eighties to the present, college tuition has increased at a rate four times that of inflation, and eight times that of household income. It has been estimated that forty-five million people in the United States hold educational debt totalling roughly $1.5 trillion—more than what Americans owe on their credit cards and auto loans combined. Some fear that the student-debt “bubble” will be the next to burst. Wide-scale student-debt forgiveness no longer seems radical. Meanwhile, skeptics question the very purpose of college and its degree system. Maybe what pundits dismiss as the impulsive rage of young college students is actually an expression of powerlessness, as they anticipate a future defined by indebtedness.

Middle-class families might not seem like the most sympathetic characters when we’re discussing the college-finance conundrum. Poor students, working-class students, and students of color face more pronounced disadvantages, from the difficulty of navigating financial-aid applications and loan packages to the lack of a safety net. But part of Zaloom’s fascination with middle-class families is the larger cultural assumption that they ought to be able to afford higher education. A study conducted in the late nineteen-eighties by Elizabeth Warren, Teresa Sullivan, and Jay Westbrook illuminated the precarity of middle-class life. They found that the Americans filing for bankruptcy rarely lacked education or spent recklessly. Rather, they were often college-educated couples who were unable to recover from random crises along the way, like emergency medical bills.

These days, paying for college poses another potential for crisis. The families in “Indebted” are thoughtful and restrained, like the generically respectable characters conjured during a Presidential debate. Zaloom follows them as they contemplate savings plans, apply for financial aid, and then strategize about how to cover the difference. Parents and children alike talk about how educational debt hangs over their futures, impinging on both daily choices and long-term ambitions. In the eighties, more than half of American twentysomethings were financially independent. In the past decade, nearly seventy per cent of young adults in their twenties have received money from their parents. The risk is collective, and the consequences are shared across generations. At times, “Indebted” reads like an ethnography of a dwindling way of life, an elegy for families who still abide by the fantasy that thrift and hard work will be enough to secure the American Dream.

If you are a so-called responsible parent, you might begin stashing away money for college as soon as your child is born. You may want to take advantage of a 529 education-savings plan, a government-administered investment tool that provides tax relief to people who set money aside for a child’s educational expenses. Some states even provide a 529 option to prepay college tuition at today’s rates. Zaloom writes of Patricia, a schoolteacher in Florida who managed to cover in-state fees for both of her children after five years of working and saving. Patricia resented the fact that preparing for her children’s future left her with so little time and energy to be with them in the present. Her daughter, Maya, was academically gifted and excelled in college. Then, when Patricia’s son, Zachary, was a high-school senior, her husband walked out on the family, leaving them four hundred thousand dollars in debt. Patricia spent her retirement savings to keep them afloat. Zachary had difficulty coping, and he had never shown a strong inclination toward college, but the money was already earmarked. Zaloom writes, “Her investment in his tuition was an expression of faith in him.” He struggled in college and never graduated. “If I’d had a crystal ball,” Patricia says, “I wouldn’t have gotten in the program for Zachary.” In Zaloom’s view, Patricia’s decisions all point to a core faith that college is fundamental to middle-class identity.

Throughout “Indebted,” parents and children lament the feeling of burdening one another. Parents fear that their financial decisions might limit their children’s potential, even when those children are still in diapers. It’s a fear, Zaloom argues, that loan companies often exploit. “You couldn’t not hear about it,” Patricia recalled of the commercials for Florida’s college-savings account.

The existence of 529 plans suggests that paying for college is just a matter of saving a bit of each monthly paycheck. And yet Patricia is an outlier. Only three per cent of Americans invest in a 529 account or the equivalent, and they have family assets that are, on average, twenty-five times those of the median household. Zaloom disputes the premise that “planning leads to financial stability.” Student debt didn’t become a problem because families refused to save. “In truth, it’s the other way around,” she writes. “Planning requires stability in a family’s fortunes, a stability in both family life and their finances that is uncommon for middle-class families today.”

As an anthropologist, Zaloom is particularly attuned to how institutions teach us to see ourselves. The Free Application for Student Aid (fafsa) form, required of all students seeking assistance, consists of a hundred or so questions detailing the financial history of the applicant’s family. Zaloom hears about the difficulty of collecting this information, especially when parents are estranged, or unwilling to help. And the form presumes a lot about how the “family unit” works. One informational graphic poses the question “Who’s my parent when I fill out the fafsa?”

Our failure to adhere to these official scripts becomes a sign of personal inadequacy. Zaloom argues that the financial-aid process encourages families to “maintain silence about the challenges they face in sending their children to college.” Sometimes, during her interviews, parents would ask Zaloom not to disclose the details of their finances to their children. (Elizabeth Warren has spoken about how she learned that her family was “poor” when she was filling out her financial-aid forms.) At times, the families sounded as though they were in denial. One mother wanted to shield her daughter from reckoning with the family’s tenuous financial health as they put her through college: “It’s not really part of a conversation that [my daughter] needs to be in.” That conversation can’t always be avoided, though. As Kimberly’s parents hashed out her prospects, there was, she recalled, “this weird moment of them feeling like my potential was going to be limited by their financial decisions and choices.”

by Hua Hsu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Till Lauer

Natalia Lafourcade

[ed. Recommended by Linda Ronstadt. See: Linda Ronstadt Has Found Another Voice (New Yorker).]

PhotoRealism

Camera sales are continuing to fall off a cliff. The latest data from the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) shows them in a swoon befitting a Bollywood roadside Romeo. All four big camera brands — Sony, Fuji, Canon, and Nikon — are reposting rapid declines. And it is not just the point and shoot cameras whose sales are collapsing. We also see sales of higher-end DSLR cameras stall. And — wait for it — even mirrorless cameras, which were supposed to be a panacea for all that ails the camera business, are heading south.

Of course, by aggressively introducing newer and newer cameras with marginal improvements, companies like Fuji and Sony are finding that they might have created a headache. There is now a substantial aftermarket for casual photographers looking to save money on the companies’ generation-old products. Even those who can afford to buy the big 60-100 megapixel cameras are pausing. After all, doing so also involves buying a beefier computer. (Hello Mac Pro, cheese grater edition!)

I have seen this movie play out before — but in a different market.

Server Side Up

Servers and workstations were once were a very robust business that supported many companies. Some, like Sun Microsystems, made their own silicon, operating system, applications, and hardware. They printed money — so much, in fact, that they were once regarded as one of the four horsemen of the Internet. And then came the attack of commodity workstations crafted out of Microsoft Operating Systems and Intel Chips.

Then Linux arrived and started eating the server market from below. Sun responded by making the bigger and more muscular servers sought by big banks, three-letter agencies and some large corporations. For a while, this strategy blunted the attack, but eventually the company had to capitulate. They made Linux machines. They made devices based on Intel chips. They got into pizza servers. But none of it prevented them from becoming a footnote in the history of Silicon Valley.

In 2000, at the peak of Internet mania, and when WinTel and Linux started to become players in the server business, the total market was just over $65 billion. In 2018, worldwide server sales were over $90 billion. A majority of the buyers were companies that were focused on building out their own data centers and big clouds. In short, the overall demand grew and companies that didn’t adapt to this commodity-based reality were gone. Sun and Silicon Graphics were the most famous, but the list of names is long. Sun’s corporate tagline was, “the network is the computer.” I guess the executives didn’t get the memo.

Blurry Picture

Let me bring the parallels between servers and cameras into focus for you. Sony and its brethren have taken a page from the Sun playbook. They keep pushing cameras that have features, like higher megapixels, that most people don’t use or don’t care about. And the executives don’t seem to get a key fact about the market reality: what we do with with cameras and photos has changed.

In my pocket, I have a smartphone with a camera that just keeps getting smarter and more capable. It plays an essentially identical role to the one occupied by commodity servers in that industry’s saga. Because hundreds of millions of phones are sold every year, it is possible for companies like Apple, Google, Samsung and Huawei to pour billions into researching and improve their phone cameras, not to mention the software and algorithms. Thanks to this cocktail of better chips, better processing, better sensor and ever-improving algorithms, the future belongs to computational photography.

Photography industry purists recoil at the notion that their idea of future is wrong. When I suggest that the lifecycle of a photo will start and end with a digital screen, many dismiss it as unartistic. Though, I will say that I recently saw a 30-inch print of one of my photos, and to my amazement, it looked very artistic, indeed. But that is a rarity. Frankly, I was blown away that someone would pay me money to put one of my photos on their wall. The truth is, these naysayers are right — most of us aren’t creating art.

What we are doing is creating selfies, documenting moments with family, and snapping photos of food and latte art. We aren’t even trying to build a scrapbook of those images. It is all a stream — less for remembrance than for real-time sharing. In other words, we have changed our relationship with photography and photographs. It used to be that, photos served as a portal to our past. Now, we are moving so fast as we try to keep up in the age of infinitesimal attention spans. A minute, might as well be a month ago.

People talk about printing photos, but very few people actually do. Most of our images are sitting in cloud accounts that sync with our smartphone cameras. Occasionally, someone buys an Aura Frame (or something like it) because they want to view these photos in actual frames. I am a big Aura fan, and I use the frame to see the photos of people I love, like my parents, my immediate family, my goddaughters, and a few friends. But mostly, our pictures — even the best ones — function as glorified postcards on Instagram, Facebook, or some other messaging app. No one on WhatsApp cares if you made a photo in 50 megapixels or 12 megapixels Just as, in the cloud, no one gives two hoots if your server is Sun, Dell or HP.

by Om Malik, Om |  Read more:

Image: Camera and Imaging Products Association

The American Rodeo

The rodeo takes place in a dingy coliseum, one with rickety bleachers and a puny bandstand, all of which encircle a wide, mud-studded paddock. For the second time in as many hours, the PA is blaring “Old Town Road” by Lil’ Nas X, and on either end of the pasture are steel barricades and a labyrinth of animal pens, from whose darkened interiors we plainly hear fractious snorts and odd, eldritch harrumphing. Every now and then what emerges through the metal latticework of the pens are the desperate, heart-melting expressions of various confined barn animals—lambs and ponies, calves and stallions.

Soon an announcement comes crackling over the PA: “All Mutton Busters, please line up behind the Bucket Shoots. All mutton busters to the Bucket Shoots, please.” Do urban readers know anything about mutton-busting? Before coming to the rodeo, I didn’t. In fact, the very onomatopoetics of “mutton-busting” conjured, for me anyway, various carnal acts with barn animals. But Mutton-busting is far more innocent, a time-honored rite of passage for certain rural youngsters. Here’s how it works: a clique of adult-ranch hands corral a lamb into a small metal stall called a “bucket shoot.” A helmeted child is then passed through said bucket shoot, where a waiting handler situates her on the animal’s unsaddled back. Once the contestant is firmly barnacled to the lamb’s hide, the gate gets whipped open, and the ram proceeds to hightail it across the pasture, bleating madly and hurtling like a banshee. The object of the game is to see for how long the mutton-buster can hold on. As to the possible gratification the rider might receive from this bumpy peregrination, your guess here is as good as mine.

Moseying back and forth in front of the bucket shoots is tonight’s rodeo’s impresario, a deeply tanned man in his late forties who wears a pink polo and a sun-blanched cowboy hat. Right now, he’s heckling and cajoling the audience, speaking with the unctuous, concentrated poetry of a late-career car salesmen. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, before we get started, I want ya’ll to go on ahead and give our mutton-busters a nice, warm round of applause. After all, it takes a lot of courage to cross the cold metal of those bucket shoots. Because while you might think these sheep are just some docile little creatures, let me go on ahead and disabuse you of that notion. Because these ain’t your fuzzy, little, cute, cuddly-type animals that you want to take into bed with you. They ain’t the lambs that Mary had. So come on now and without any further ado, let’s go on ahead and get started.”

And yet, this turns out to be a head fake, because there’s even more pomp and pageantry. This includes not only an ovation for our veterans, but also bagpipe renditions of the National Anthem and “Amazing Grace.” Then the impresario asks to “go on ahead” and bow our heads. In my thirty-four years, I’ve heard my fair share of invocations, but I must confess this is the first time I’ve heard a Western-themed supplication. The prayer is laced with countrified motifs—cacti and tumbleweeds, desolate pastures and frontier heartache—and by the time the impresario rises to his heart-rustling conclusion, several men in the audience are wiping away a tear. “And when we embark on that final ride to the great pasture in the sky, where the grass is lush and green and stirrup-high, and the water flows deep and cool, we pray that our final judgment will be: ‘Come on in, cowboy, cowgirl, your entry ticket has been paid in full.” The resultant applause is so thunderous that the horses are bucking in their stables. (...)

If I told you how many children willingly subjected themselves to this spectacle, you’d think I was inventing things. But the Mutton Busting continues for the better portion of an hour, and by my count, some thirteen children brave the bucket shoots in front of their friends and family this evening. Sitting here in the grandstands, I try to imagine what this experience must feel like to them, how the violence of unwanted animal-riding might rest upon their nerve-endings. And yet it’s only when Eli Wakeman crosses into the bucket shoots that things begin to seem criminally negligent. Wakeman is 4 (!), and even before the gate opens, he’s already turned on the waterworks. It’s at this point in the festivities that I finally notice the coterie of EMTs resting their elbows on the fence along the paddock, where they’re clearly just waiting for tonight’s inevitable injuries to call them into action. These will come later, during the “Barebacking” contest, when four adult ranch-hands attempt to “break” a cohort of psychotic stallions. As the horses shudder and buck, each cowboy will look like nothing so much as a mannequin falling down an escalator. One man gets a concussion. Another man shatters his collarbone. A third lands hard on his sacrum, except when I see him toodling around the fair after the rodeo, he is for some reason icing his forearm). It turns out my own spine is stiffening here in the un-ergonomic bleachers, and in light of the carnage on the paddock, I’m doing my best to hide from the other spectators little winces and the occasional mewling exhalation.

After little Eli Wakeman’s mercifully short adventure, I’m wondering why these fair goers are so keen to condone violence against their children. After all, this is a sport that ensures that a hard fall and some tears is the best a participant can hope for. At one point, the impresario jokes, “You know, folks, I think we better change the name ‘Mutton Busting’ to OCA. That stands for ‘Organized Child Abuse.’ [Responding to scattered groans] Oh, come on, I’m just teasing.” And yet, you can see the parents take great pride their children’s participation. Sometimes I watch the families watching the muttons who are getting busted, and they all have that hopeful, misty-eyed look of proud parents cheering on competitive offspring. It reminds me of a close friend of mine who was explaining to me how his four-year-old daughter had just announced her decision to become a vegetarian. “What’s weird, man, is that we didn’t even coax her in any way. One day, she just shows up at the breakfast island, and says, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to eat animals anymore—not today or any other day.’” But for all the father’s claims about the child’s intrinsic motivation, I couldn’t help but remember that she’s a product of her environment. After all, this is a child who attends Montessori art classes and whose parents take her to the public library for something called “Drag Queen Story Time.” It’s interesting to think that she’s being raised only forty minutes away from a rodeo where children her age are strapping on helmets and getting dragged by lambs across pastures. A tacit debate is taking place about child-rearing and the merits of overprotection. What attributes of citizenship—what quotients of courage and forbearance—might run in the veins of these children, in the veins of the adults they’ll become? It reminds me of what Hannah Arendt once said about the difference between nation-states and republics. A nation-state is formed by neighbors who, sharing no ideological tenets, bind themselves together in defense of common resources. A republic, meanwhile, is something different. What unites the citizens of a republic is a willful act of imagination. And yet how can we share an act of imagination when our basic mental frameworks are so wildly divergent?

by Barrett Swanson, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

A Photo Trip to Washington State, Dedicated to My Parents (The Atlantic)

Image: Justin Reznick

Tyler Shields, Gator Birkin
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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

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:

Image: Liana Finck

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.

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:

• 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.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Aurich Lawson
[ed. Hallelujah.]

Yuval Robichek, Surf's up
via:

Pamela Littky, Sarasota, FL
via:

via:

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

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

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.)

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:
Image: via

Fired!

Madeleine Westerhout, who left her White House job suddenly on Thursday as President Trump’s personal assistant, was fired after bragging to reporters that she had a better relationship with Trump than his own daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany Trump, and that the president did not like being in pictures with Tiffany because he perceived her as overweight.

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).]