Saturday, September 7, 2019
The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV
Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.
I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)
But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic. (...)
As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”
He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.
He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain. (...)
I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)
But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic. (...)
As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.
He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain. (...)
If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?
It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.
Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”
The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”
Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder. (...)
Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.
In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.
Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.
Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons. (...)
Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.
The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.
Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”
The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”
Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder. (...)
Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.
In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.
Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.
Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons. (...)
Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.
The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.
by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
Friday, September 6, 2019
Private Equity and Surprise Medical Billing
Surprise medical billing has become a critical issue facing Americans across the country because of purposeful corporate practices designed to increase profits. As hospitals have outsourced emergency rooms and other specialty care to reduce costs, private investors have bought up specialty physician practices, rolled them into powerful national corporations, and taken over hospital emergency services. The result: large out-of-network surprise bills. The hidden actors: Leading private equity firms looking for ‘outsized’ returns.
Surprise medical billing made headlines in 2019 as patients with health insurance found themselves liable for hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unforeseen medical bills. When patients with urgent medical problems go to an emergency room (ER) or are treated by specialty doctors at a hospital that is in their insurance network, they expect that the services they receive will be ‘in-network’ and covered by their insurance. But often a doctor not in their insurance network is under contract with the hospital and actually provides the care. When this happens, patients are stuck with unexpected and sometimes unreasonably high medical bills charged by these ‘out-of-network’ doctors. This typically occurs when the hospital has outsourced the ER or other specialized services to a professional staffing firm or a specialty doctors’ practice. This problem has exploded in recent years because hospitals are increasingly outsourcing these services to cut costs. And more and more patients are faced with surprise medical bills — adding substantially to the already impossible medical debt that working people face.
Hospital outsourcing of emergency, radiology, anesthesiology, and other departments has provided an opening for physician practices to operate these services as independent organizations. Initially, hospitals outsourced these services to small, local doctors’ groups. But over the past decade, private equity firms have become major players — buying out doctors’ practices and rolling them up into large corporate physician staffing firms that provide services to outsourced emergency rooms, anesthesiology and radiology departments, and other specialty units. By 2013, physician staffing firms owned by Blackstone Group and Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) – among the largest PE firms in the country – cornered 30 percent of this market. Since then, private equity ownership of these services has continued to grow. Private equity firms also own two of the three largest emergency ambulance and air transport services – another major source of surprise medical billing.
Private equity ownership matters because the business model of private equity firms is to use a lot of debt in a leveraged buyout of companies they acquire and then extract as much cash as possible out of them in order to pay down the debt and reward their investors with ‘outsized returns’ that exceed stock market gains. They can be thought of as for-profit corporations on steroids. Buying up specialty practices is financially attractive because there is a large and growing demand for outsourced doctors, and out-of-network doctors can command a substantial premium for their services. Emergency rooms and certain medical services provided in hospitals are not really part of a competitive ‘marketplace’ because patients in emergency medical situations rarely have a choice: they need immediate medical care and cannot ‘shop around’ for an in-network trauma doctor or radiologist. Thus, surprise bills are difficult to avoid if patients face a medical emergency and must go to the ER or if they are hospitalized and require access to specialty medical services.
How Widespread is Surprise Billing and Why Has It Grown?
Surprise medical billing is exacerbating the already serious problem of medical debt in this country, which is a leading cause of bankruptcy for American families. And surprise billing is growing rapidly. Forty percent of Americans surveyed by the Kaufman Family Foundation in April, 2019, reported receiving an unexpected medical bill; and 20 percent of those surveyed said it was due to out-of-network charges – or surprise billing. A study by health researchers at Stanford University, for example, examined fees charged to patients with private insurance who were treated by the emergency department of a hospital. They reviewed 13.6 million trips to the ER that occurred over the period 2010 to 2016. About a third (32.3 percent) of these trips in 2010 resulted in a surprise medical bill. But by 2016, that figure had increased to 42.8 percent. That is, more than 4 in 10 trips to the ER ended with patients getting a surprise medical bill. For in-patient stays, surprise billing rose from 26 percent to 42 percent, and the average costs per patient also jumped from $804 to $2,040. At this rate of increase, the estimated percent of hospital visits resulting in a surprise bill would be 48 percent in 2019 – or almost one half. The study also found that in 2016, 86% of ER visits and nearly 82% of hospital admissions incurred surprise ambulance service bills.
Similarly, another 2019 study found that patients who are admitted to a hospital from the ER are much more likely to receive an out-of-network charge — as many as 26% of admissions from the emergency room were found to include a surprise bill. The study also found that 38 percent of Americans are ‘very worried’ and another 29 percent are ‘somewhat worried’ about being able to afford surprise medical bills. People particularly vulnerable to these charges are those with coverage from large employers that are self-insured. And vulnerability also varied by region, with Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Kansas having higher rates of surprise billing; and Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Maine, and Mississippi having lower rates.
While large surprise medical bills are typically associated with doctors in the ER or in specialties such as radiology, anesthesiology, or critical care units such as neo-natal, burn, or trauma centers, other out-of-network physicians may also issue surprise bills. For example, those who assist a patient’s doctor in a procedure or hospitalists who check on patients during hospital stays can also charge separately for their services. The Stanford study found that the likelihood that a patient admitted to an in-network hospital would face a surprise medical bill because at least one out-of-network doctor cared for them increased from 26.3 percent 2010 to 42.0 percent in 2016. A particularly egregious instance occurred when an assistant surgeon sent a bill for $117,000 to a patient who had surgery for herniated discs in his neck. The patient’s own in-network surgeon sent a bill for $133,000, but accepted a fee of $6,200 negotiated with the insurance company. The out-of-network assistant surgeon is seeking full payment of his charges. This is a particularly egregious example, but surprise bills for a few thousand dollars are not uncommon.
The problem of surprise billing has grown substantially in recent years because hospitals have been under financial pressure to reduce overall costs and have turned to outsourcing expensive and critical services to third-party providers as a cost-reduction strategy. Outsourcing is not new, as hospitals began outsourcing non-medical ancillary services such as facilities management and food services in the 1980s, in response to a round of structural changes in government financing. By the 1990s, hospitals were experimenting with the use of independent ‘hospitalists’ to care for patients between rounds by the local admitting doctors who had a hospital affiliation. Hospitalists’ numbers increased over the next two decades as hospital staffing firms grew and provided a range of temporary or short-term professionals to fill shortages in nursing, technical, or clinical positions.
Recent outsourcing, however, has expanded to critical care areas – emergency rooms, radiology, anesthesiology, surgical care, and specialized units for burn, trauma, or neo-natal care. Now hospitals contract with specialty physician practices or professional physician staffing firms to provide these services – even if the patient receives treatment at a hospital or at an outpatient center that is in the patients’ insurance network. According to one study, surprise billing is concentrated in those hospitals that have outsourced their emergency rooms. A recent report found that almost 65 percent of U.S. hospitals now have emergency rooms that are staffed by outside companies. (...)
Private Equity’s Business Model: Its Role in Outsourcing and Consolidating Specialty Services
Private equity firms have played a critical role in consolidating physicians’ practices into large national staffing firms with substantial bargaining power vis-à-vis hospitals and insurance companies. They have also bought up other emergency providers, such as ambulance and medical transport services. They grow by buying up many small specialty practices and ‘rolling them up’ into umbrella organizations that serve healthcare systems across the United States. Mergers of large physician staffing firms to create national powerhouses have also occurred. As these companies grow in scale and scope and become the major providers of outsourced services, they have gained greater market power in their negotiations with both hospitals and insurance companies: hospitals with whom they contract to provide services and insurance companies who are responsible for paying the doctors’ bills.
Hospitals have consolidated in order to gain market share and negotiate higher insurance payments for procedures. Healthcare costs have been driven up further by the dynamics associated with payments for out-of-network services. As physicians’ practices merge or are bought out and rolled up by private equity firms, their ability to raise prices that patients or their insurance companies pay for these doctors’ services increases. The larger the share of the market these physician staffing firms control, the greater their ability to charge high out-of-network fees. The likelihood of surprise medical bills goes up, and this is especially true when Insurance companies find few doctors with these specialties in a given region with whom they can negotiate reasonable charges for their services.
by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, Institute for New Economic Thinking | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Surprise medical billing made headlines in 2019 as patients with health insurance found themselves liable for hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unforeseen medical bills. When patients with urgent medical problems go to an emergency room (ER) or are treated by specialty doctors at a hospital that is in their insurance network, they expect that the services they receive will be ‘in-network’ and covered by their insurance. But often a doctor not in their insurance network is under contract with the hospital and actually provides the care. When this happens, patients are stuck with unexpected and sometimes unreasonably high medical bills charged by these ‘out-of-network’ doctors. This typically occurs when the hospital has outsourced the ER or other specialized services to a professional staffing firm or a specialty doctors’ practice. This problem has exploded in recent years because hospitals are increasingly outsourcing these services to cut costs. And more and more patients are faced with surprise medical bills — adding substantially to the already impossible medical debt that working people face.
Hospital outsourcing of emergency, radiology, anesthesiology, and other departments has provided an opening for physician practices to operate these services as independent organizations. Initially, hospitals outsourced these services to small, local doctors’ groups. But over the past decade, private equity firms have become major players — buying out doctors’ practices and rolling them up into large corporate physician staffing firms that provide services to outsourced emergency rooms, anesthesiology and radiology departments, and other specialty units. By 2013, physician staffing firms owned by Blackstone Group and Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) – among the largest PE firms in the country – cornered 30 percent of this market. Since then, private equity ownership of these services has continued to grow. Private equity firms also own two of the three largest emergency ambulance and air transport services – another major source of surprise medical billing.Private equity ownership matters because the business model of private equity firms is to use a lot of debt in a leveraged buyout of companies they acquire and then extract as much cash as possible out of them in order to pay down the debt and reward their investors with ‘outsized returns’ that exceed stock market gains. They can be thought of as for-profit corporations on steroids. Buying up specialty practices is financially attractive because there is a large and growing demand for outsourced doctors, and out-of-network doctors can command a substantial premium for their services. Emergency rooms and certain medical services provided in hospitals are not really part of a competitive ‘marketplace’ because patients in emergency medical situations rarely have a choice: they need immediate medical care and cannot ‘shop around’ for an in-network trauma doctor or radiologist. Thus, surprise bills are difficult to avoid if patients face a medical emergency and must go to the ER or if they are hospitalized and require access to specialty medical services.
How Widespread is Surprise Billing and Why Has It Grown?
Surprise medical billing is exacerbating the already serious problem of medical debt in this country, which is a leading cause of bankruptcy for American families. And surprise billing is growing rapidly. Forty percent of Americans surveyed by the Kaufman Family Foundation in April, 2019, reported receiving an unexpected medical bill; and 20 percent of those surveyed said it was due to out-of-network charges – or surprise billing. A study by health researchers at Stanford University, for example, examined fees charged to patients with private insurance who were treated by the emergency department of a hospital. They reviewed 13.6 million trips to the ER that occurred over the period 2010 to 2016. About a third (32.3 percent) of these trips in 2010 resulted in a surprise medical bill. But by 2016, that figure had increased to 42.8 percent. That is, more than 4 in 10 trips to the ER ended with patients getting a surprise medical bill. For in-patient stays, surprise billing rose from 26 percent to 42 percent, and the average costs per patient also jumped from $804 to $2,040. At this rate of increase, the estimated percent of hospital visits resulting in a surprise bill would be 48 percent in 2019 – or almost one half. The study also found that in 2016, 86% of ER visits and nearly 82% of hospital admissions incurred surprise ambulance service bills.
Similarly, another 2019 study found that patients who are admitted to a hospital from the ER are much more likely to receive an out-of-network charge — as many as 26% of admissions from the emergency room were found to include a surprise bill. The study also found that 38 percent of Americans are ‘very worried’ and another 29 percent are ‘somewhat worried’ about being able to afford surprise medical bills. People particularly vulnerable to these charges are those with coverage from large employers that are self-insured. And vulnerability also varied by region, with Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Kansas having higher rates of surprise billing; and Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Maine, and Mississippi having lower rates.
While large surprise medical bills are typically associated with doctors in the ER or in specialties such as radiology, anesthesiology, or critical care units such as neo-natal, burn, or trauma centers, other out-of-network physicians may also issue surprise bills. For example, those who assist a patient’s doctor in a procedure or hospitalists who check on patients during hospital stays can also charge separately for their services. The Stanford study found that the likelihood that a patient admitted to an in-network hospital would face a surprise medical bill because at least one out-of-network doctor cared for them increased from 26.3 percent 2010 to 42.0 percent in 2016. A particularly egregious instance occurred when an assistant surgeon sent a bill for $117,000 to a patient who had surgery for herniated discs in his neck. The patient’s own in-network surgeon sent a bill for $133,000, but accepted a fee of $6,200 negotiated with the insurance company. The out-of-network assistant surgeon is seeking full payment of his charges. This is a particularly egregious example, but surprise bills for a few thousand dollars are not uncommon.
The problem of surprise billing has grown substantially in recent years because hospitals have been under financial pressure to reduce overall costs and have turned to outsourcing expensive and critical services to third-party providers as a cost-reduction strategy. Outsourcing is not new, as hospitals began outsourcing non-medical ancillary services such as facilities management and food services in the 1980s, in response to a round of structural changes in government financing. By the 1990s, hospitals were experimenting with the use of independent ‘hospitalists’ to care for patients between rounds by the local admitting doctors who had a hospital affiliation. Hospitalists’ numbers increased over the next two decades as hospital staffing firms grew and provided a range of temporary or short-term professionals to fill shortages in nursing, technical, or clinical positions.
Recent outsourcing, however, has expanded to critical care areas – emergency rooms, radiology, anesthesiology, surgical care, and specialized units for burn, trauma, or neo-natal care. Now hospitals contract with specialty physician practices or professional physician staffing firms to provide these services – even if the patient receives treatment at a hospital or at an outpatient center that is in the patients’ insurance network. According to one study, surprise billing is concentrated in those hospitals that have outsourced their emergency rooms. A recent report found that almost 65 percent of U.S. hospitals now have emergency rooms that are staffed by outside companies. (...)
Private Equity’s Business Model: Its Role in Outsourcing and Consolidating Specialty Services
Private equity firms have played a critical role in consolidating physicians’ practices into large national staffing firms with substantial bargaining power vis-à-vis hospitals and insurance companies. They have also bought up other emergency providers, such as ambulance and medical transport services. They grow by buying up many small specialty practices and ‘rolling them up’ into umbrella organizations that serve healthcare systems across the United States. Mergers of large physician staffing firms to create national powerhouses have also occurred. As these companies grow in scale and scope and become the major providers of outsourced services, they have gained greater market power in their negotiations with both hospitals and insurance companies: hospitals with whom they contract to provide services and insurance companies who are responsible for paying the doctors’ bills.
Hospitals have consolidated in order to gain market share and negotiate higher insurance payments for procedures. Healthcare costs have been driven up further by the dynamics associated with payments for out-of-network services. As physicians’ practices merge or are bought out and rolled up by private equity firms, their ability to raise prices that patients or their insurance companies pay for these doctors’ services increases. The larger the share of the market these physician staffing firms control, the greater their ability to charge high out-of-network fees. The likelihood of surprise medical bills goes up, and this is especially true when Insurance companies find few doctors with these specialties in a given region with whom they can negotiate reasonable charges for their services.
by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, Institute for New Economic Thinking | Read more:
Image: uncredited
There Has Been Just One Buyer Of Stocks Since The Financial Crisis
Now, in his latest Flow Show weekly report, BofA CIO Michael Hartnett confirms that the flows continued for one more week, as another $11.4 billion flowed into bonds, while $8.4 billion was redeemed from stocks (a clear sign investors are not worried about bond bubble for now, with chunky inflows to both IG ($7.9bn) & govt bond ($3.5bn) funds).
More importantly, when looking at the bigger picture and finding $213 billion in redemptions from equity funds stands in stark contrast to $337bn inflows to bond funds; Hartnett answered our pressing question: who is buying stocks here?
His answer: "the sole buyer of US stocks remain corporate buybacks, not institutions" as shown in the chart below. (...)
This is notable not only because it means that without the buyback bid (made possible by record cheap debt, which is used to fund corporate stock repurchases) stocks would be far, far lower, but because it is a carbon copy of what we observed almost exactly two years ago, suggesting that between the summers of 2017 and 2019 absolutely nothing has changed.
Meanwhile, as Credit Suisse notes, one of the major features of the US equity market since the low in 2009 is that the US corporate sector has bought over 20% of market cap, while institutions have sold 7% of market cap.
Why this rush by companies to buyback their own stock, and in the process artificially boost their Eearning per Share? There is a very simple reason: as Reuters explained some time ago, "Stock buybacks enrich the bosses even when business sags." And since bond investors are rushing over themselves to fund these buyback plans with "yielding" paper at a time when central banks have eliminated virtually all yield and risk, who is to fault them.
by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge | Read more:
Image: BofA Merrill Lynch Global Investment Strategy, Bloomberg, Fed Reserve Bank
Thursday, September 5, 2019
The American Medical System Is One Giant Workaround
The nurses were hiding drugs above a ceiling tile in the hospital — not because they were secreting away narcotics, but because the hospital pharmacy was slow, and they didn’t want patients to have to wait. I first heard about it from Karen Feinstein, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, who reported it at a board meeting several years ago. I wasn’t surprised: Hiding common medications is a workaround, an example of circumventing onerous rules to make sure patients get even basic care.
Workarounds are legion in the American health care system, to the extent that ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute) listed them fourth among its list of top 10 patient safety concerns for health care organizations in 2018. Workarounds, the group writes, are an adaptive response — or perhaps one should say maladaptive response — to “a real or perceived barrier or system flaw.”
Staff use workarounds because they save valuable time. According to Anita Tucker, a business professor at Boston University, system breakdowns, or what she calls “operational failures,” and the workarounds they stimulate, can “consume up to 10 percent of a nurse’s day.” Most hospital nurses are stretched to their limits during their 12-hour shifts. No nurse has 90 minutes to lose to a slow pharmacy or an inefficient hospital bureaucracy.
I saw the common sense that can underlie workarounds when my hospital floor instituted bar code scanning for medication administration. Using a hand-held scanner to register bar codes on medications and patients’ hospital bracelets sounds smart. But then some medications routinely came without bar codes, or had the wrong bar codes, and we nurses weren’t given an easy way to report those errors. Patients’ wrist bands could be difficult to scan and the process disturbed them, especially if they were asleep. The lists of medications on the computer screen were also surprisingly hard to read, which slowed everything down.
But the biggest problem was that the scanning software did not work with our electronic medical records — so all drugs had to be checked off in both systems. This is a huge problem when dealing with patients like those receiving bone-marrow transplants, who might get 20 drugs every morning — some of which are delivered through IVs and come with nonstandard doses. What was already a lengthy process suddenly took twice as long.
Some nurses responded to the arrival of the bar code system with workarounds, including refusing to use the scanner, or taping copies of patient bar codes to their med carts. I tried to adhere to the rules, but if I was especially busy or couldn’t get a medication to scan, I would chuck the whole process.
However, because bar code scanning has been shown to reduce errors in medication administration, the hospital officials wanted it to be done consistently. They produced a public list of all the nurses on the floor. Each nurse was labeled green, yellow or red, depending on the percentage of medications he or she administered using bar codes. Family members, doctors — anyone could see how a nurse was graded.
Over time the list worked, but the sting of it also endured. We were being punished for taking time for patients, even if it meant bending the rules. No one among the managerial class seemed to understand that nurses care a lot about patient safety. The unheard concern was that a green light for bar code scanning meant a patient could fall into the red zone for something else.
Workarounds in health care always involve trade-offs like this, and often they are trade-offs of values. Increasingly, the entire health care system is built on workarounds — many of which we don’t always recognize as such.
Consider the use of medical scribes, who complete doctors’ electronic paperwork in real time during patient visits. The American College of Medical Scribe Specialists reported that 20,000 scribes were working in 2014, and expects that number to climb to 100,000 in 2020.
I have heard doctors say they need a scribe to keep up with electronic medical records, the mounting demand of which is driving a burnout epidemic among physicians. Scribes allow doctors to talk with and examine patients without having a computer come between them, but at base they are a workaround for the well-known design flaws of electronic medical records.
As a nurse, when I first learned about scribes, I was outraged. On the job, nurses hear repeatedly how health care companies can’t afford to have more nurses or aides to work with patients on hospital floors — and yet, money is available to pay people to manage medical records. Doctors who use scribes tend to see their productivity and work satisfaction increase, but the trade-off is still there: Scribes demonstrate the extent to which paperwork has become more important than patients in American health care.
The Affordable Care Act, which I support because it has made health care available to millions of previously uninsured Americans, is also an enormous workaround. The act expanded Medicaid, protected patients with pre-existing conditions and offered subsidies to make private insurance more affordable. Obamacare, though, was never intended to make sure that all Americans had affordable care; it works around our failure to provide health care to all our citizens. In its own way, the Affordable Care Act is as jury-rigged as using ceiling tiles to stash medications.
by Theresa Brown, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Runstudio/The Image Bank, via Getty Images
Workarounds are legion in the American health care system, to the extent that ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute) listed them fourth among its list of top 10 patient safety concerns for health care organizations in 2018. Workarounds, the group writes, are an adaptive response — or perhaps one should say maladaptive response — to “a real or perceived barrier or system flaw.”
Staff use workarounds because they save valuable time. According to Anita Tucker, a business professor at Boston University, system breakdowns, or what she calls “operational failures,” and the workarounds they stimulate, can “consume up to 10 percent of a nurse’s day.” Most hospital nurses are stretched to their limits during their 12-hour shifts. No nurse has 90 minutes to lose to a slow pharmacy or an inefficient hospital bureaucracy.I saw the common sense that can underlie workarounds when my hospital floor instituted bar code scanning for medication administration. Using a hand-held scanner to register bar codes on medications and patients’ hospital bracelets sounds smart. But then some medications routinely came without bar codes, or had the wrong bar codes, and we nurses weren’t given an easy way to report those errors. Patients’ wrist bands could be difficult to scan and the process disturbed them, especially if they were asleep. The lists of medications on the computer screen were also surprisingly hard to read, which slowed everything down.
But the biggest problem was that the scanning software did not work with our electronic medical records — so all drugs had to be checked off in both systems. This is a huge problem when dealing with patients like those receiving bone-marrow transplants, who might get 20 drugs every morning — some of which are delivered through IVs and come with nonstandard doses. What was already a lengthy process suddenly took twice as long.
Some nurses responded to the arrival of the bar code system with workarounds, including refusing to use the scanner, or taping copies of patient bar codes to their med carts. I tried to adhere to the rules, but if I was especially busy or couldn’t get a medication to scan, I would chuck the whole process.
However, because bar code scanning has been shown to reduce errors in medication administration, the hospital officials wanted it to be done consistently. They produced a public list of all the nurses on the floor. Each nurse was labeled green, yellow or red, depending on the percentage of medications he or she administered using bar codes. Family members, doctors — anyone could see how a nurse was graded.
Over time the list worked, but the sting of it also endured. We were being punished for taking time for patients, even if it meant bending the rules. No one among the managerial class seemed to understand that nurses care a lot about patient safety. The unheard concern was that a green light for bar code scanning meant a patient could fall into the red zone for something else.
Workarounds in health care always involve trade-offs like this, and often they are trade-offs of values. Increasingly, the entire health care system is built on workarounds — many of which we don’t always recognize as such.
Consider the use of medical scribes, who complete doctors’ electronic paperwork in real time during patient visits. The American College of Medical Scribe Specialists reported that 20,000 scribes were working in 2014, and expects that number to climb to 100,000 in 2020.
I have heard doctors say they need a scribe to keep up with electronic medical records, the mounting demand of which is driving a burnout epidemic among physicians. Scribes allow doctors to talk with and examine patients without having a computer come between them, but at base they are a workaround for the well-known design flaws of electronic medical records.
As a nurse, when I first learned about scribes, I was outraged. On the job, nurses hear repeatedly how health care companies can’t afford to have more nurses or aides to work with patients on hospital floors — and yet, money is available to pay people to manage medical records. Doctors who use scribes tend to see their productivity and work satisfaction increase, but the trade-off is still there: Scribes demonstrate the extent to which paperwork has become more important than patients in American health care.
The Affordable Care Act, which I support because it has made health care available to millions of previously uninsured Americans, is also an enormous workaround. The act expanded Medicaid, protected patients with pre-existing conditions and offered subsidies to make private insurance more affordable. Obamacare, though, was never intended to make sure that all Americans had affordable care; it works around our failure to provide health care to all our citizens. In its own way, the Affordable Care Act is as jury-rigged as using ceiling tiles to stash medications.
by Theresa Brown, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Runstudio/The Image Bank, via Getty Images
[ed. This is one where you really should read the comments section.]
Google’s New Feature Will Help You Find Something To Watch
Google Search can now help you find your next binge. The company this morning announced a new feature which will make personalized recommendations of what to watch, including both TV shows and movies, and point you to services where the content is available.
The feature is an expansion of Google’s existing efforts in pointing web searchers to informative content about TV shows and films.
Already, a Google search for a TV show or movie title will include a “Knowledge Panel” box a the the top of the search results where you can read the overview, see the ratings and reviews, check out the cast, and as of spring 2017 find services where the show or movie can be streamed or purchased.
The new recommendations feature will instead appear to searchers who don’t have a particular title in mind, but are rather typing in queries like “what to watch” or “good shows to watch,” for example. From here, you can tap a Start button in the “Top picks for you” carousel to rate your favorite TV shows and movies in order to help Google better understand your tastes.
You can also select which subscriptions you have access to, in order to customize your recommendations further. This includes subscriptions services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO and HBO NOW, Prime Video, Showtime, and Showtime Anytime, CBS All Access, and Starz.
You can also indicate if you have a cable TV or satellite subscription. And it will list shows and movies available for rent, purchase or free streaming from online marketplaces like iTunes, Prime Video, Google Play Movies & TV, and Vudu, plus network apps like ABC, Freeform, Lifetime, CBS, Comedy Central, A&E, and History.
To get started, you’ll use a Tinder-like swiping mechanism to rate titles. Right swipes indicate a “like” and left swipes indicate a “dislike.” You can also “skip” titles you don’t know or have an opinion on.
After giving Google some starter data about your interests, future searches for things to watch will offer recommendations tailored to you.
The company notes that you can even get specific with your requests, by asking for things like “horror movies from the 80’s” or “adventure documentaries about climbing.” (This will help, too, when you can’t remember a movie’s title but do know what it’s about.)
Google’s search results will return a list of suggestions and when you pick one you want to watch, the service will — as before — let you know where it’s available.
The feature is an expansion of Google’s existing efforts in pointing web searchers to informative content about TV shows and films.
Already, a Google search for a TV show or movie title will include a “Knowledge Panel” box a the the top of the search results where you can read the overview, see the ratings and reviews, check out the cast, and as of spring 2017 find services where the show or movie can be streamed or purchased.The new recommendations feature will instead appear to searchers who don’t have a particular title in mind, but are rather typing in queries like “what to watch” or “good shows to watch,” for example. From here, you can tap a Start button in the “Top picks for you” carousel to rate your favorite TV shows and movies in order to help Google better understand your tastes.
You can also select which subscriptions you have access to, in order to customize your recommendations further. This includes subscriptions services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO and HBO NOW, Prime Video, Showtime, and Showtime Anytime, CBS All Access, and Starz.
You can also indicate if you have a cable TV or satellite subscription. And it will list shows and movies available for rent, purchase or free streaming from online marketplaces like iTunes, Prime Video, Google Play Movies & TV, and Vudu, plus network apps like ABC, Freeform, Lifetime, CBS, Comedy Central, A&E, and History.
To get started, you’ll use a Tinder-like swiping mechanism to rate titles. Right swipes indicate a “like” and left swipes indicate a “dislike.” You can also “skip” titles you don’t know or have an opinion on.
After giving Google some starter data about your interests, future searches for things to watch will offer recommendations tailored to you.
The company notes that you can even get specific with your requests, by asking for things like “horror movies from the 80’s” or “adventure documentaries about climbing.” (This will help, too, when you can’t remember a movie’s title but do know what it’s about.)
Google’s search results will return a list of suggestions and when you pick one you want to watch, the service will — as before — let you know where it’s available.
by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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.”
“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
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
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.”
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
PhotoRealism
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
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
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.]
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