Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Geisha Selfies Banned in Kyoto
Authorities in Kyoto have banned photography in parts of the city’s main geisha neighbourhood, amid a flurry of complaints about harassment and bad behaviour by foreign tourists in the quest for the perfect selfie.
The ban, introduced recently on private roads in the city’s Gion district, includes a fine of up to 10,000 yen (£70), as Kyoto and other sightseeing spots in Japan grapple with the downside of a boom in visitors that is expected to last long after next summer’s Tokyo Olympics.
“Tourism pollution” is a growing problem in Kyoto, where tourists flock to ancient shrines and temples and, in Gion, catch sight of the female entertainers – known locally as geiko – and maiko apprentices dressed in elaborate kimono on their way to evening appointments.In response to complaints by residents and businesses, the local ward has put up signs near narrow streets leading off Hanamikoji, a public main road, warning visitors not to take snapshots.
The neighbourhood is home to exclusive restaurants where geiko and maiko entertain customers on tatami-mat floors and over multiple course kaiseki dinners. (...)
Existing signs reminding visitors about etiquette appear to have had little effect on tourist behaviour. Residents say the explosion in the number of visitors to Kyoto has led to overcrowded buses, fully booked restaurants and a general din that spoils the city’s miyabi – the refined atmosphere that draws people to the city in the first place.
by Justin McCurry, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: xavierarnau/Getty Images
[ed. Industrial tourism - killing cultures and the environment daily! Here's the kicker: A record 31 million people visited Japan last year – up almost 9% from the previous year – helped by a weaker yen, an easing of visa requirements and the increasing availability of cheap flights. The government has set a target of 40 million overseas visitors by next year, rising to 60 million by 2030. See also: It's Time to Take Down the Mona Lisa (Guardian)]
Purged
How a failed economic theory still rules the digital music marketplace
Unless you spent a lot of time listening to early ’00s techno-utopian babble, the Theory of the Long Tail probably means nothing to you. Yet if you live in the US or Europe and you run a digital music label, you’re living it – or the fallout from it – almost every day.
In 2004, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson proposed The Long Tail, an economic theory blown up by futurist steroids. It theorized that with the introduction of the internet, blockbusters would matter less and everyone would sell “less of more.” The Long Tail prophesied “How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand,” according to the subtitle of Anderson’s later book, which if true would turn the field of economics on its head.
For a practical example of what this all means, compare a brick-and-mortar record store like the old Tower Records vs. an online retailer like Traxsource. Your local Tower Records had to limit its inventory to take into account a finite shelf space. Their stock might have consisted of a couple hundred records. And each record didn’t get equal shelf space: your hippie boomer parents were going to buy more copies of Beatles records than all your Belgian techno records, so the store would stock and give more attention to the former. This “artificial” scarcity of physical products taking up physical space and depriving it from other products had bent consumer behavior out of shape for basically all of history.
With the internet and the creation of intangible digital products, this was supposed to change. Traxsource and other digital retailers are limited not by shelf space but by the size of their server hard drive array. And buying more server space is cheaper than building a new store.
According to Anderson, sales would in the future would represent a classic “Pareto” or “power law” demand curve: 20% of sales would be by “star” artists selling millions of copies each in our record store analogy, while 80% would consist of many thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of artists selling relatively few copies of each of their albums as the store’s near-infinite inventory meant people could metaphorically “wander about” and choose from millions of options.
This was the “Long Tail” in a nutshell, represented on a chart stretching to the right into infinity: in the future, music retailers would sell “less” copies from “more” artists. Many more.
And then this elegant economic theory ran headlong into the tsunami of shitmusic.
The Marvel-ization of the Music Industry
Nothing turned out the way Anderson predicted.
As early as 2008 – five years after iTunes was founded and we began to get actual data of how this whole thing was working – keen observers began chopping the Long Tail down to size. Economist Will Page working with Andrew Bud and Gary Eggleton was able to obtain somewhat anonymized transactions from a “large digital music provider” rumored to be either Rhapsody or iTunes itself. They had so much data, in fact, that an ordinary Excel spreadsheet choked on it.
It was a gigantic sample of… nothing.
80% of the songs had no transaction data: they had sold no copies at all.
There wasn’t any volume in the “Long Tail” and nothing had really changed – except for the worst. The actual sales data showed an even greater concentration of sales in the “Fat Head.” Page later spoke about their findings:
“We found that only 20% of tracks in our sample were ‘active,’ that is to say they sold at least one copy, and hence, 80% of the tracks sold nothing at all. Moreover, approximately 80% of sales revenue came from around 3% of the active tracks. Factor in the dormant tail and you’re looking at an ’80/0.38% rule’ for all the inventory on the digital shelf.
“Finally, only 40 tracks sold more than 100,000 copies, accounting for 8% of the business. Think about that – back in the physical world, forty tracks could be just 4 albums, or the top slice of the best-selling ‘Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume 70’ which bundles up 43 ‘hits’ into one perennially popular customer offering!”
When the new owners of Rolling Stone recently announced they would challenge Billboard’s dominance of the pop charts, what was left unsaid is how pointless a “top 100” of ANYTHING has become. As far as big-time music industry relevance, a “top 100” could probably be cut down to a “top 8” or “top 11.” Sales are so heavily concentrated at the top that you’d expect artists to start their own campaign for industry income equality. (Which, in a way, we are.)
Paradoxically, though economists are now skeptical of the Theory of the Long Tail, people – including artists and management – still base their careers on it. It’s one of the guiding, unquestioned principles of doing business in the digital world. Axioms such as “getting on all platforms” and “going where the people are listening” are music industry fortune cookies, urging everyone to fall into place in an economic system that works for almost no one. Apple and Spotify boast of their huge inventories of tracks – millions upon millions that no human could listen to – but the lion’s share of listens and revenue still go to the head.
Unless you spent a lot of time listening to early ’00s techno-utopian babble, the Theory of the Long Tail probably means nothing to you. Yet if you live in the US or Europe and you run a digital music label, you’re living it – or the fallout from it – almost every day.
In 2004, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson proposed The Long Tail, an economic theory blown up by futurist steroids. It theorized that with the introduction of the internet, blockbusters would matter less and everyone would sell “less of more.” The Long Tail prophesied “How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand,” according to the subtitle of Anderson’s later book, which if true would turn the field of economics on its head.
For a practical example of what this all means, compare a brick-and-mortar record store like the old Tower Records vs. an online retailer like Traxsource. Your local Tower Records had to limit its inventory to take into account a finite shelf space. Their stock might have consisted of a couple hundred records. And each record didn’t get equal shelf space: your hippie boomer parents were going to buy more copies of Beatles records than all your Belgian techno records, so the store would stock and give more attention to the former. This “artificial” scarcity of physical products taking up physical space and depriving it from other products had bent consumer behavior out of shape for basically all of history.With the internet and the creation of intangible digital products, this was supposed to change. Traxsource and other digital retailers are limited not by shelf space but by the size of their server hard drive array. And buying more server space is cheaper than building a new store.
According to Anderson, sales would in the future would represent a classic “Pareto” or “power law” demand curve: 20% of sales would be by “star” artists selling millions of copies each in our record store analogy, while 80% would consist of many thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of artists selling relatively few copies of each of their albums as the store’s near-infinite inventory meant people could metaphorically “wander about” and choose from millions of options.
This was the “Long Tail” in a nutshell, represented on a chart stretching to the right into infinity: in the future, music retailers would sell “less” copies from “more” artists. Many more.
And then this elegant economic theory ran headlong into the tsunami of shitmusic.
The Marvel-ization of the Music Industry
Nothing turned out the way Anderson predicted.
As early as 2008 – five years after iTunes was founded and we began to get actual data of how this whole thing was working – keen observers began chopping the Long Tail down to size. Economist Will Page working with Andrew Bud and Gary Eggleton was able to obtain somewhat anonymized transactions from a “large digital music provider” rumored to be either Rhapsody or iTunes itself. They had so much data, in fact, that an ordinary Excel spreadsheet choked on it.
It was a gigantic sample of… nothing.
80% of the songs had no transaction data: they had sold no copies at all.
There wasn’t any volume in the “Long Tail” and nothing had really changed – except for the worst. The actual sales data showed an even greater concentration of sales in the “Fat Head.” Page later spoke about their findings:
“We found that only 20% of tracks in our sample were ‘active,’ that is to say they sold at least one copy, and hence, 80% of the tracks sold nothing at all. Moreover, approximately 80% of sales revenue came from around 3% of the active tracks. Factor in the dormant tail and you’re looking at an ’80/0.38% rule’ for all the inventory on the digital shelf.
“Finally, only 40 tracks sold more than 100,000 copies, accounting for 8% of the business. Think about that – back in the physical world, forty tracks could be just 4 albums, or the top slice of the best-selling ‘Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume 70’ which bundles up 43 ‘hits’ into one perennially popular customer offering!”
When the new owners of Rolling Stone recently announced they would challenge Billboard’s dominance of the pop charts, what was left unsaid is how pointless a “top 100” of ANYTHING has become. As far as big-time music industry relevance, a “top 100” could probably be cut down to a “top 8” or “top 11.” Sales are so heavily concentrated at the top that you’d expect artists to start their own campaign for industry income equality. (Which, in a way, we are.)
Paradoxically, though economists are now skeptical of the Theory of the Long Tail, people – including artists and management – still base their careers on it. It’s one of the guiding, unquestioned principles of doing business in the digital world. Axioms such as “getting on all platforms” and “going where the people are listening” are music industry fortune cookies, urging everyone to fall into place in an economic system that works for almost no one. Apple and Spotify boast of their huge inventories of tracks – millions upon millions that no human could listen to – but the lion’s share of listens and revenue still go to the head.
by Terry Matthew, 5Mag.net | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, November 4, 2019
Falter: The Human Game
Is the human race approaching its demise? The question itself may sound hyperbolic — or like a throwback to the rapture and apocalypse. Yet there is reason to believe that such fears are no longer so overblown. The threat of climate change is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today. At the same time, emerging technologies of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are giving a small, technocratic elite the power to radically alter homo sapiens to the point where the species no longer resembles itself. Whether through ecological collapse or technological change, human beings are fast approaching a dangerous precipice.
The threats that we face today are not exaggerated. They are real, visible, and potentially imminent. They are also the subject of a recent book by Bill McKibben, entitled “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” McKibben is an environmentalist and author, as well as the founder of 350.org, a campaign group working to reduce carbon emissions. His book provides a sober, empirical analysis of the reasons why the human race may be reaching its final stages.Can you explain what you mean by the “human game”?
I was looking for a phrase to describe the totality of everything that we do as human beings. You could also term it as human civilization, or the human project. But “game” seems like a more appropriate term. Not because it’s trivial, but because, like any other game, it doesn’t really have a goal outside of itself. The only goal is to continue to play, and hopefully play well. Playing the human game well might be described as living with dignity and ensuring that others can live with dignity as well.
There are very serious threats now facing the human game. Basic questions of human survival and identity are being realistically called into question. It’s become clear that climate change is dramatically shrinking the size of the board on which the game is played. At the same time, some emerging technologies threaten the idea that human beings as a species will even be around to play in the future.
Could you briefly run down the implications of climate change for the future of human civilization, as we presently understand it?
Climate change is by far the biggest thing that humans have ever managed to do on this planet. It has altered the chemistry of the atmosphere in fundamental ways, raised the temperature of the planet over 1 degree Celsius, melted half the summer ice in the Arctic, and made the oceans 30 percent more acidic. We are seeing uncontrollable forest fires around the world, along with record levels of drought and flooding. In some places, average daily temperatures are already becoming too hot for human beings to even work during the daylight.
People are making plans to leave major cities and low-lying coastal areas, where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. Even in rich countries like the United States, critical infrastructure is being strained. We saw this recently with the shutdown of electrical power in much of California due to wildfire risk. This is what we’ve done at merely 1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is already becoming difficult to live in large parts of the planet. On our current trajectory, we are headed for 3 or 4 degrees of warming. At that level, we simply won’t have a civilization like we do now.
Since the major culprit in climate change remains the fossil fuel industry, what practical steps can be taken to get their activities under control? And given that they also share a planet with everyone else, what exactly is their plan for a future of climate dystopia?
We have already made efforts at divestment and halting the construction of pipelines, but the next crucial area is finance: focusing on the banks and asset managers that give them the money to do what they do. (...)
The other major threat that you identify is posed by technologies like genetic engineering. Can you explain the threat that they pose to human identity and purpose?
Just as we had long taken for granted the stability of the planet, we have likewise taken for granted the stability of the human species. There are technologies now emerging that call into question very fundamental assumption about what it means to be a human being. Take, for example, genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR. These are already now coming into effect, as we saw recently in China, where a pair of twins were reportedly born after having their genes modified in embryo. I don’t see any problem with using gene editing to help existing people with existing diseases. That is very different, however, from genetically engineering embryos with specialized modifications.
Let’s say for example that an expectant couple decides to engineer their new child to have a certain hormonal balance aimed at improving their mood. That child may reach adolescence one day and find themselves feeling very happy without any particular explanation why. Are they falling in love? Or is it just their genetic engineering specs kicking in? Human beings could soon be designed with a whole range of new specs that modifies their thoughts, feelings, and abilities. I think that such a prospect — not far-fetched at all today — will be a devastating attack on the most vital things about being human. It will call into question basic ideas of who we are and how we think about ourselves.
There is also the implication of accelerating technological change in genetic engineering technology. After modifying their first child, those same parents may come back five years later to the clinic to make changes to their second child. In the meantime, the technology has marched on, and you can now get a whole new series of upgrades and tweaks. What does that mean for the first child? It makes them the iPhone 6: obsolete. That’s a very new idea for human beings. One of the standard features of technology is obsolescence. A situation where you are rapidly making people themselves obsolete seems wrongheaded to me.
by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
'The Stakes Are Enormous'
The candidate who lost to Trump is making all the right moves as some fear a primary gone too far left. It’s a tantalising notion, but most observers counsel caution – and a dose of realism
A high-profile book tour. Countless TV interviews. Political combat with a Democratic primary candidate and Donald Trump. A year before the US presidential election, it looks like a campaign and it sounds like a campaign but it isn’t a campaign. At least, not as far anyone knows.Yet a recent surge of activity by Hillary Clinton, combined with reports and columns suggesting the Democrats have not found the right candidate, have made a 2016 rematch a fun, speculative and potentially intriguing topic of Washington conversation.
‘The stakes are enormous’: is Hillary Clinton set for a White House run? (The Guardian)
[ed. Ack... just kill me now. The fact that anyone's even speculating about this (mostly brain-dead media/Washington political hacks, but still) should be cause for alarm. It's the same political calculus that motivates Biden - if you win the primary, it's home free. Because, Blue... No Matter Who.]
Public Pension Funds Criticized for Profiting From Private Equity’s “Surprise Billing” Abuse
We’ve described how private equity is behind the stunningly widespread abuse known as “surprise billing” or “balance billing”. This occurs when Americans with health insurance get hit with “out of network” charges for ambulances, emergency room services, or even with scheduled surgeries when they did what they could to make sure that only medical professionals in their networks were part of their operating room team.
This scam has become so widespread that a 2019 survey by the Kauffman Foundation found that 40% of American families had been hit with an unexpected medical bill, and half of those were for out of network charges. Other studies found that over one in four emergency room visits resulted in a surprise bill, as did over four in ten ambulance rides. No wonder there have been more and more efforts at the state and local level to prohibit or severely limit this practice.
Eileen Appelbaum, co-head of CEPR, has identified the hidden hand behind this abuse: private equity. In turn, consumer and patient advocates have wised up and are starting to pressure the public pension funds that profit from investing in the private equity funds that have been leading this abuse, KKR and Blackstone. This is the key section of a must-read post by Appelbaum:
We also pointed out how the sudden death of a promising and pretty comprehensive California bill to end surprise billing, where no one even deigned to explain what happened, had all the hallmarks of heavyweight donors putting the kibosh on it. The revelation of private equity as the big moving force behind surprise bills makes it all make sense.
This scam has become so widespread that a 2019 survey by the Kauffman Foundation found that 40% of American families had been hit with an unexpected medical bill, and half of those were for out of network charges. Other studies found that over one in four emergency room visits resulted in a surprise bill, as did over four in ten ambulance rides. No wonder there have been more and more efforts at the state and local level to prohibit or severely limit this practice.
Eileen Appelbaum, co-head of CEPR, has identified the hidden hand behind this abuse: private equity. In turn, consumer and patient advocates have wised up and are starting to pressure the public pension funds that profit from investing in the private equity funds that have been leading this abuse, KKR and Blackstone. This is the key section of a must-read post by Appelbaum:
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…
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.[vii]A recent report found that almost 65 percent of U.S. hospitals now have emergency rooms that are staffed by outside companies.[viii]…
Private equity firms have played a critical role in consolidating physicians’ practices into large national staffing firms with substantial bargaining power vis-Ã -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.
The design of the private equity business model is geared to driving up the costs of patient care. Private equity funds rely on the classic leveraged buyout model (LBO) in which they use substantial debt to buyout companies (in this case specialty physician practices as well as ambulance services) because debt multiplies returns if the investment is successful. They target companies that have a steady and high cash flow so they can manage the cash in order to service the debt and make high enough returns to pay their investors ‘outsized returns’ that exceed the stock market.[xi] Emergency medical practices are a perfect buyout target because demand is inelastic, that is, it does not decline when prices go up. Moreover, demand for these services is large – almost 50 percent of medical care comes from emergency room visits, according to a 2017 national study by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and demand has steadily increased.[xii] PE firms believe they face little or no downside market risk in these buyouts.Appelbaum has carefully documented the history of the two biggest players in this patient-muscling operation: Envision Healthcare, a rollup of emergency ambulance and specialty physicians’ practices now owned by KKR funds, and TeamHealth, a healthcare staffing company that provides hospitals with ER professoinals, anesthesiologists, hospitalists, and hospital specialists such as OB/GYN, orthopedics, general surgery, pediatric services as well as post-acute care, now owned by Blackstone funds. And she shows that private equity ownership has led to extortionate billing practices: (...)
We also pointed out how the sudden death of a promising and pretty comprehensive California bill to end surprise billing, where no one even deigned to explain what happened, had all the hallmarks of heavyweight donors putting the kibosh on it. The revelation of private equity as the big moving force behind surprise bills makes it all make sense.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
[ed. See also: Elizabeth Warren’s Plan Is a Massive Win for the Medicare for All Movement (The Intercept).]
[ed. See also: Elizabeth Warren’s Plan Is a Massive Win for the Medicare for All Movement (The Intercept).]
This Alaskan Beat the Odds at the Supreme Court - It Cost $1.5 Million
Moose hunter John Sturgeon serves as both inspiration and warning for anyone who has ever gotten worked up over a perceived injustice and vowed to fight it “all the way to the Supreme Court.”
An inspiration because Sturgeon took on the federal government and - not once but twice - beat the odds to get the high court to accept his case and rule in his favor.
Why a warning? Because Sturgeon's 12-year, only-in-Alaska battle to travel on a forbidden hovercraft through national parkland to his favorite hunting spot cost well north of $1.5 million.
“I had no idea how much it was going to cost, but you start down this slide and there’s no stopping it,” Sturgeon said. “Not many people could do what I did, because they don’t have the financial resources, which I don’t either. But I did have a cause that really ignited people.”
Sturgeon agreed to let The Washington Post examine the details of his costs and the donations to his cause to illuminate what it takes to bring a lawsuit before the Supreme Court.
Among his donors: the Alaska Wildlife and Conservation Fund, the National Rifle Association, the Alaska Conservative Trust, national and international hunting groups, hundreds of ordinary Alaskans and one very wealthy one.
Edward Rasmuson read about Sturgeon's case, called him up and found him sincere, and then offered to help pay the legal bill. "I maybe gave $250,000 to $300,000 to $400,000 - hell, I don't know," Rasmuson said in an interview. "But I'm fortunate. I'm wealthy, I can afford it."
The money covered things such as the $20,891.89 bill to print legal documents exactly as the Supreme Court requires. To reimburse the $11,063.25 in hotel costs for Sturgeon's lawyers to hone their strategy at three moot courts in Washington. To pay for 3,691 hours of legal work at the law firms that have represented him since 2011.
At the end of summer, Sturgeon's supporters boarded a stern-wheeler for a trip down the Chena River for one last fundraiser. It was billed as the "Thanks a Million Victory Cruise." There were drinks and dinner, tributes to Sturgeon and a silent auction offering uniquely Alaskan items such as a gold nugget and several fur pelts donated by Willy Keppel of the village of Quinhagak, nearly 600 miles away.
"Hope this helps," wrote Keppel, who said he was strapped for cash but wanted to contribute. "Thank you for taking the fight to the feds!"
Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy was onboard to call Sturgeon a “hero” (and to submit the winning bid for one of the pelts). To show how broad the support for Sturgeon is, also along were several prominent Alaskans who have signed a petition to remove Dunleavy from office.
Sturgeon's case resonated because it could bring a long-sought clarification of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), with which Congress set aside more than 100 million acres for preservation. Alaskans have argued that Congress did not intend for the land to be regulated like other federal parkland and preserves because the way of life is so different in the Last Frontier.
Sturgeon said he only knew that he didn’t think National Park rangers had the authority to tell him he could not use the hovercraft as he had for years.
"I called the state of Alaska and said, 'Aren't you supposed to manage the state's rivers?' and they said yes," Sturgeon recalled. "That's when I kinda decided I wanted to, maybe, you know, sue the federal government. But I didn't want a frivolous lawsuit."
He went to an Anchorage lawyer named Doug Pope and laid out the situation. Pope did some research and came back with good news and bad news.
"Not only do you have a case, but this could go all the way to the Supreme Court," Pope told Sturgeon.
The bad news: A legal fight like that could take six years or more, and maybe cost about $700,000.
Pope advised instead: "Spend the money on your grandkids. By the time this is done, are you even still going to be moose-hunting, John?"
Turns out he is - he filled the freezer just a couple of weeks ago - and his grandkids will be just fine.
The origins of Sturgeon’s case have been told now in two Supreme Court decisions. In the fall of 2007, he was trying to fix a steering cable on his hovercraft, which was beached on a gravel shoal of the Nation River, within the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Sturgeon for years had used his hovercraft to traverse the shallow rivers to his favorite hunting spot near the Canadian border. But on this day, he was approached by National Park rangers who informed him that the craft was banned in all federal park lands. Not only was he barred from using it to get to the hunting ground, he was told he could not use it to get home.
An inspiration because Sturgeon took on the federal government and - not once but twice - beat the odds to get the high court to accept his case and rule in his favor.
Why a warning? Because Sturgeon's 12-year, only-in-Alaska battle to travel on a forbidden hovercraft through national parkland to his favorite hunting spot cost well north of $1.5 million.
“I had no idea how much it was going to cost, but you start down this slide and there’s no stopping it,” Sturgeon said. “Not many people could do what I did, because they don’t have the financial resources, which I don’t either. But I did have a cause that really ignited people.”Sturgeon agreed to let The Washington Post examine the details of his costs and the donations to his cause to illuminate what it takes to bring a lawsuit before the Supreme Court.
Among his donors: the Alaska Wildlife and Conservation Fund, the National Rifle Association, the Alaska Conservative Trust, national and international hunting groups, hundreds of ordinary Alaskans and one very wealthy one.
Edward Rasmuson read about Sturgeon's case, called him up and found him sincere, and then offered to help pay the legal bill. "I maybe gave $250,000 to $300,000 to $400,000 - hell, I don't know," Rasmuson said in an interview. "But I'm fortunate. I'm wealthy, I can afford it."
The money covered things such as the $20,891.89 bill to print legal documents exactly as the Supreme Court requires. To reimburse the $11,063.25 in hotel costs for Sturgeon's lawyers to hone their strategy at three moot courts in Washington. To pay for 3,691 hours of legal work at the law firms that have represented him since 2011.
At the end of summer, Sturgeon's supporters boarded a stern-wheeler for a trip down the Chena River for one last fundraiser. It was billed as the "Thanks a Million Victory Cruise." There were drinks and dinner, tributes to Sturgeon and a silent auction offering uniquely Alaskan items such as a gold nugget and several fur pelts donated by Willy Keppel of the village of Quinhagak, nearly 600 miles away.
"Hope this helps," wrote Keppel, who said he was strapped for cash but wanted to contribute. "Thank you for taking the fight to the feds!"
Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy was onboard to call Sturgeon a “hero” (and to submit the winning bid for one of the pelts). To show how broad the support for Sturgeon is, also along were several prominent Alaskans who have signed a petition to remove Dunleavy from office.
Sturgeon's case resonated because it could bring a long-sought clarification of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), with which Congress set aside more than 100 million acres for preservation. Alaskans have argued that Congress did not intend for the land to be regulated like other federal parkland and preserves because the way of life is so different in the Last Frontier.
Sturgeon said he only knew that he didn’t think National Park rangers had the authority to tell him he could not use the hovercraft as he had for years.
"I called the state of Alaska and said, 'Aren't you supposed to manage the state's rivers?' and they said yes," Sturgeon recalled. "That's when I kinda decided I wanted to, maybe, you know, sue the federal government. But I didn't want a frivolous lawsuit."
He went to an Anchorage lawyer named Doug Pope and laid out the situation. Pope did some research and came back with good news and bad news.
"Not only do you have a case, but this could go all the way to the Supreme Court," Pope told Sturgeon.
The bad news: A legal fight like that could take six years or more, and maybe cost about $700,000.
Pope advised instead: "Spend the money on your grandkids. By the time this is done, are you even still going to be moose-hunting, John?"
Turns out he is - he filled the freezer just a couple of weeks ago - and his grandkids will be just fine.
The origins of Sturgeon’s case have been told now in two Supreme Court decisions. In the fall of 2007, he was trying to fix a steering cable on his hovercraft, which was beached on a gravel shoal of the Nation River, within the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Sturgeon for years had used his hovercraft to traverse the shallow rivers to his favorite hunting spot near the Canadian border. But on this day, he was approached by National Park rangers who informed him that the craft was banned in all federal park lands. Not only was he barred from using it to get to the hunting ground, he was told he could not use it to get home.
by Robert Barnes, WaPo via ADN | Read more:
Image: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Ok Boomer
In a viral audio clip on TikTok, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and polo shirt declares, “The millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome, they don’t ever want to grow up.”
Thousands of teens have responded through remixed reaction videos and art projects with a simple phrase: “ok boomer.”
“Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying cry for millions of fed up kids. Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people — and the issues that matter to them. (...)
The meme-to-merch cycle is nothing new, but unlike most novelty products, “ok boomer” merch is selling. Shannon O’Connor, 19, designed a T-shirt and hoodie with the phrase “ok boomer” written in the “thank you” style of a plastic shopping bag. She uploaded it to Bonfire, a site for selling custom apparel, with the tagline “Ok boomer have a terrible day.” After promoting the shirt on TikTok, she received more than $10,000 in orders. (...)
Ms. O’Connor is far from the only one cashing in. Hundreds of “ok boomer” products are for sale through on-demand shopping sites like Redbubble and Spreadshirt, where many young people are selling “ok boomer” phone cases, bedsheets, stickers, pins and more.
Nina Kasman, an 18-year-old college student selling “ok boomer" stickers, socks, shirts, leggings, posters, water bottles, notebooks and greeting cards, said that while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people. “Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.” (...)
Rising inequality, unaffordable college tuition, political polarization exacerbated by the internet, and the climate crisis all fuel anti-boomer sentiment.
And so Ms. Kasman and other teenagers selling merch say that monetizing the boomer backlash is their own little form of protest against a system they feel is rigged. “The reason we make the ‘ok boomer’ merch is because there’s not a lot that I can personally do to reduce the price of college, for example, which was much cheaper for older generations who then made it more expensive,” Ms. Kasman said. “There’s not much I can personally do to restore the environment, which was harmed due to corporate greed of older generations. There’s not much I can personally do to undo political corruption, or fix Congress so it’s not mostly old white men boomers who don’t represent the majority of generations.”
by Taylor Lorenz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Shannon O’Connor
Thousands of teens have responded through remixed reaction videos and art projects with a simple phrase: “ok boomer.”
“Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying cry for millions of fed up kids. Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people — and the issues that matter to them. (...)
The meme-to-merch cycle is nothing new, but unlike most novelty products, “ok boomer” merch is selling. Shannon O’Connor, 19, designed a T-shirt and hoodie with the phrase “ok boomer” written in the “thank you” style of a plastic shopping bag. She uploaded it to Bonfire, a site for selling custom apparel, with the tagline “Ok boomer have a terrible day.” After promoting the shirt on TikTok, she received more than $10,000 in orders. (...)Ms. O’Connor is far from the only one cashing in. Hundreds of “ok boomer” products are for sale through on-demand shopping sites like Redbubble and Spreadshirt, where many young people are selling “ok boomer” phone cases, bedsheets, stickers, pins and more.
Nina Kasman, an 18-year-old college student selling “ok boomer" stickers, socks, shirts, leggings, posters, water bottles, notebooks and greeting cards, said that while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people. “Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.” (...)
Rising inequality, unaffordable college tuition, political polarization exacerbated by the internet, and the climate crisis all fuel anti-boomer sentiment.
And so Ms. Kasman and other teenagers selling merch say that monetizing the boomer backlash is their own little form of protest against a system they feel is rigged. “The reason we make the ‘ok boomer’ merch is because there’s not a lot that I can personally do to reduce the price of college, for example, which was much cheaper for older generations who then made it more expensive,” Ms. Kasman said. “There’s not much I can personally do to restore the environment, which was harmed due to corporate greed of older generations. There’s not much I can personally do to undo political corruption, or fix Congress so it’s not mostly old white men boomers who don’t represent the majority of generations.”
by Taylor Lorenz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Shannon O’Connor
The Happiness Ruse
Happiness is in many ways the marketing breakthrough of the past decade, with self-care and anti-stress products now rounding out the bestseller list on Amazon (think of ‘gravity blankets’, ‘de-stressing’ adult colouring books and fidget spinners), where they nestle alongside chart-topping tomes by ‘happiness bloggers’. All of this is made possible by a specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs.
This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness, in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else. Sadness and disappointment are rejected, even neutral or mundane life experiences get airbrushed out of the frame. It’s as though appearing unhappy implies some kind of Protestant moral fault: as if you didn’t work hard enough or believe sufficiently in yourself.
Happiness has, of course, not always been conceived of this way. The Epicurean outlook on happiness – which Thomas Jefferson was thinking of when he enjoined Americans to cherish ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence – is exceedingly simple and different. As Epicurus saw it, happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented. (...)
Not all happiness movements retain as close a relation to Epicurean ideas. Positive psychology, for instance, became voguish after Martin Seligman chose happiness as his core theme in 1998, after becoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Seligman proposed that happiness came from having and searching for positive emotions, a sense of community and existential meaning. He believed that humans tend to ‘learn’ unhappiness in choosing not to escape unpleasant situations even when we can. On this view, happiness is something we must constantly teach ourselves: it is something we work towards.
From here, it’s only a small leap to today’s widespread understanding of happiness as the pursuit and purchase of peak experience. Prescription antidepressants are consumed at record levels, self-help books crowd the shelves, and multiple therapies compete to shift us out of negative mindsets so that we might flourish. All of this is work, but of a particular variety, in which every moment is optimised in order to achieve peak happiness, no matter how fleeting, at the same time as unhappiness is actively pushed away.
But it’s a concept riddled with problems. ‘What is happiness?’ asks the fictional advertising executive Don Draper in Mad Men, in neo-Hobbesian mode, before answering: ‘It’s the moment before you need more happiness.’ These days, we pursue happiness rather than letting it come to us. We try to collect moments of happiness like shells at the beach, even as the waves wash them away. The pursuit is Sisyphean; it inevitably leads down a disappointing path.
There is no image of modern existential emptiness quite like the person travelling the world while constantly posting pictures of restaurants and landmarks on social media, and competitively performing happiness at the expense of making genuine connections with his peers. In trying to be happier – better – than others, this person risks alienating himself from them. It’s a zero-sum game. (...)
The fetish for pursuing happiness appears to be a peculiarly Anglo-American phenomenon, perhaps because there is such strong cultural pressure in both countries to downplay negative emotions. Compared with, say, the French, who are generally content to live outside of happiness – happiness being unsophisticated, not the marker of a life well lived – Brits and, most especially, Americans downplay negative emotions in favour of putting forth the happiest face possible. Americans are known for the fake smile and ‘I’m good, thanks!’ while Brits are renowned for avoiding conversational unpleasantness, and for maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of pain and disappointment. Denying and masking negative feelings, because they are socially and culturally unacceptable, is the norm. In the Anglo-American scheme of thinking, negative emotions are negatively reflective of us – as if we’ve made a fundamental mistake, lived without the gusto and positivity needed to achieve happiness.
But all of this happy pretending catches up. A person living in a Western culture is about four to 10 times more likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than a person in an Eastern culture, according to the psychologist Brock Bastian’s book, The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018). In China and Japan, Bastian writes, people tend to view positive and negative emotions as essential and equal; happiness, in the East, should not be actively pursued, just as sadness should not be actively avoided. Bastian sources this stance in religion, especially those Buddhist philosophies that seek to embrace the entirety of the human condition and to comprehend pain in terms of its underlying reasons.
The desire to twist our negative emotions into something upbeat is a way of thinking that leaves us open to the kind of ad-man manipulation in which Watson specialised. But it’s not a desire that entered our culture from a vacuum. There’s a significant economic incentive for businesses when people believe that happiness is something that we must work – and buy – toward. Happy workers tend to be about 12 per cent more productive. Google has a ‘chief happiness officer’. The ‘treat-yourself’ ethic is still a major sales driver, and nearly every beauty brand now bases its advertisements on ‘self-care’. Meanwhile, the APA revised its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) so that any bereaved person grieving longer than two months might be considered to have a mental illness requiring medical treatment – for example, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin.
If Wellbutrin sounds a bit like the happiness-inducing drug ‘soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), it’s probably because it – and all of this happiness conditioning – is a bit Huxleyan. With the rise of positive psychology in the midcentury, which piggybacks on Hobbes’s 17th-century ideas, Huxley foresaw how the Epicurean ideal of happiness was being – and would be – transformed. ‘The right to the pursuit of happiness,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.’
[ed. See also: Can You Overdose on Happiness? (Nautilus).]
This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness, in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else. Sadness and disappointment are rejected, even neutral or mundane life experiences get airbrushed out of the frame. It’s as though appearing unhappy implies some kind of Protestant moral fault: as if you didn’t work hard enough or believe sufficiently in yourself.
Happiness has, of course, not always been conceived of this way. The Epicurean outlook on happiness – which Thomas Jefferson was thinking of when he enjoined Americans to cherish ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence – is exceedingly simple and different. As Epicurus saw it, happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented. (...)Not all happiness movements retain as close a relation to Epicurean ideas. Positive psychology, for instance, became voguish after Martin Seligman chose happiness as his core theme in 1998, after becoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Seligman proposed that happiness came from having and searching for positive emotions, a sense of community and existential meaning. He believed that humans tend to ‘learn’ unhappiness in choosing not to escape unpleasant situations even when we can. On this view, happiness is something we must constantly teach ourselves: it is something we work towards.
From here, it’s only a small leap to today’s widespread understanding of happiness as the pursuit and purchase of peak experience. Prescription antidepressants are consumed at record levels, self-help books crowd the shelves, and multiple therapies compete to shift us out of negative mindsets so that we might flourish. All of this is work, but of a particular variety, in which every moment is optimised in order to achieve peak happiness, no matter how fleeting, at the same time as unhappiness is actively pushed away.
But it’s a concept riddled with problems. ‘What is happiness?’ asks the fictional advertising executive Don Draper in Mad Men, in neo-Hobbesian mode, before answering: ‘It’s the moment before you need more happiness.’ These days, we pursue happiness rather than letting it come to us. We try to collect moments of happiness like shells at the beach, even as the waves wash them away. The pursuit is Sisyphean; it inevitably leads down a disappointing path.
There is no image of modern existential emptiness quite like the person travelling the world while constantly posting pictures of restaurants and landmarks on social media, and competitively performing happiness at the expense of making genuine connections with his peers. In trying to be happier – better – than others, this person risks alienating himself from them. It’s a zero-sum game. (...)
The fetish for pursuing happiness appears to be a peculiarly Anglo-American phenomenon, perhaps because there is such strong cultural pressure in both countries to downplay negative emotions. Compared with, say, the French, who are generally content to live outside of happiness – happiness being unsophisticated, not the marker of a life well lived – Brits and, most especially, Americans downplay negative emotions in favour of putting forth the happiest face possible. Americans are known for the fake smile and ‘I’m good, thanks!’ while Brits are renowned for avoiding conversational unpleasantness, and for maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of pain and disappointment. Denying and masking negative feelings, because they are socially and culturally unacceptable, is the norm. In the Anglo-American scheme of thinking, negative emotions are negatively reflective of us – as if we’ve made a fundamental mistake, lived without the gusto and positivity needed to achieve happiness.
But all of this happy pretending catches up. A person living in a Western culture is about four to 10 times more likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than a person in an Eastern culture, according to the psychologist Brock Bastian’s book, The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018). In China and Japan, Bastian writes, people tend to view positive and negative emotions as essential and equal; happiness, in the East, should not be actively pursued, just as sadness should not be actively avoided. Bastian sources this stance in religion, especially those Buddhist philosophies that seek to embrace the entirety of the human condition and to comprehend pain in terms of its underlying reasons.
The desire to twist our negative emotions into something upbeat is a way of thinking that leaves us open to the kind of ad-man manipulation in which Watson specialised. But it’s not a desire that entered our culture from a vacuum. There’s a significant economic incentive for businesses when people believe that happiness is something that we must work – and buy – toward. Happy workers tend to be about 12 per cent more productive. Google has a ‘chief happiness officer’. The ‘treat-yourself’ ethic is still a major sales driver, and nearly every beauty brand now bases its advertisements on ‘self-care’. Meanwhile, the APA revised its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) so that any bereaved person grieving longer than two months might be considered to have a mental illness requiring medical treatment – for example, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin.
If Wellbutrin sounds a bit like the happiness-inducing drug ‘soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), it’s probably because it – and all of this happiness conditioning – is a bit Huxleyan. With the rise of positive psychology in the midcentury, which piggybacks on Hobbes’s 17th-century ideas, Huxley foresaw how the Epicurean ideal of happiness was being – and would be – transformed. ‘The right to the pursuit of happiness,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.’
by Cody Delistraty, Aeon | Read more:
Image: David Pollack/Corbis/Getty[ed. See also: Can You Overdose on Happiness? (Nautilus).]
Saturday, November 2, 2019
Iceland Livestreams 10-Year-Old McDonald's Cheeseburger
When McDonald's closed all its restaurants in Iceland in 2009, one man decided to buy his last hamburger and fries.
"I had heard that McDonald's never decompose so I just wanted to see if it was true or not," Hjortur Smarason told AFP.
This week, it's 10 years since the seemingly indestructible meal was purchased, and it barely looks a day older.
Curious observers can watch a live stream of the burger and fries from its current location in a glass cabinet in Snotra House, a hostel in southern Iceland.
"The old guy is still there, feeling quite well. It still looks quite good actually," the hostel's owner Siggi Sigurdur told BBC News.
"It's a fun thing, of course, but it makes you think about what you are eating. There is no mould, it's only the paper wrapping that looks old." (...)
Pictures posted on social media sparked discussion of other robust foods that have resisted the ravages of time.
"The health teacher in our high school did this, but just left them on a shelf," commented one Twitter user.
"He would point out how even after years they didn't grow mould because apparently there weren't even enough nutrients in it for microbes."
by Georgina Rannard, BBC | Read more:
Image: BBC
"I had heard that McDonald's never decompose so I just wanted to see if it was true or not," Hjortur Smarason told AFP.
This week, it's 10 years since the seemingly indestructible meal was purchased, and it barely looks a day older.
Curious observers can watch a live stream of the burger and fries from its current location in a glass cabinet in Snotra House, a hostel in southern Iceland."The old guy is still there, feeling quite well. It still looks quite good actually," the hostel's owner Siggi Sigurdur told BBC News.
"It's a fun thing, of course, but it makes you think about what you are eating. There is no mould, it's only the paper wrapping that looks old." (...)
Pictures posted on social media sparked discussion of other robust foods that have resisted the ravages of time.
"The health teacher in our high school did this, but just left them on a shelf," commented one Twitter user.
"He would point out how even after years they didn't grow mould because apparently there weren't even enough nutrients in it for microbes."
by Georgina Rannard, BBC | Read more:
Image: BBC
Friday, November 1, 2019
Jane Fonda is White, Wealthy and Privileged – and Using That Power For Good
As a way to step up her commitment to the global fight against climate inaction, Jane Fonda has decided to start getting arrested – on what seems to be weekly basis.
It’s a curious sentiment for her to feel like she should be doing more, considering her activist history eclipses pretty much the entirety of Hollywood’s, but it’s a genuinely heart-warming notion from our pinko grandmother. (Those pics of her picketing with Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein? You really love to see it.) In recent photos, she is seen dressed immaculately in a Chanel coat, smiling while police take her away, raising her closed fists as high as she can, given the restraints binding them together.
The reaction, interestingly, has been mixed. Young people (ie those who haven’t grown up with an especially firm knowledge of now-aged Hollywood divas– I can’t relate) have taken to Twitter to critique the action. It’s performative, they write from the safety of their Brooklyn apartments – it’s problematic, it’s an irresponsible show of privilege as an older rich white woman … as if her privilege, and manoeuvring of it, isn’t the point.
It’s quite the ouroboros – a tweet calling someone else performative can end up being performative in itself, but it’s par for the course with online discourse these days. It’s also a peculiar misreading of the optics behind Jane’s actions. At her age, garnering media attention and using the tools of recognisability is an effective way of connecting to her much older audience. It’s one that isn’t particularly known for positive contributions to environmental sustainability conversations, and one that might be uninterested in hearing from younger activists on the topic. It’s a shame that’s the case, but integrating older figures into our battles is nothing more than a smart tactical move. It’s time to start getting intergenerational instead of fixating solely on a single voice.
Imagine being 81 years old and facing ostracisation and constant threats by multiple US governments and a powerful contingent of rightwingers, only for young leftwing people to call your activism superficial, and you might have some kind of understanding of how bad faith these criticisms sound. There are, of course, hundreds of celebrities who have tapped into the zeitgeist and the metrics of “wokeness” to appeal to new markets without doing anything significant to, say, change that market, or enact any kind of significant difference or shift in consciousness, so the suspicion is perhaps understandable. It’s nonetheless important for us to parse why legitimate actions are scorned, so that we may be more critical of the powerful, and less susceptible to the ever growing manipulations of modern day PR.
by Jonno Revanche, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images
It’s a curious sentiment for her to feel like she should be doing more, considering her activist history eclipses pretty much the entirety of Hollywood’s, but it’s a genuinely heart-warming notion from our pinko grandmother. (Those pics of her picketing with Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein? You really love to see it.) In recent photos, she is seen dressed immaculately in a Chanel coat, smiling while police take her away, raising her closed fists as high as she can, given the restraints binding them together.
The reaction, interestingly, has been mixed. Young people (ie those who haven’t grown up with an especially firm knowledge of now-aged Hollywood divas– I can’t relate) have taken to Twitter to critique the action. It’s performative, they write from the safety of their Brooklyn apartments – it’s problematic, it’s an irresponsible show of privilege as an older rich white woman … as if her privilege, and manoeuvring of it, isn’t the point.It’s quite the ouroboros – a tweet calling someone else performative can end up being performative in itself, but it’s par for the course with online discourse these days. It’s also a peculiar misreading of the optics behind Jane’s actions. At her age, garnering media attention and using the tools of recognisability is an effective way of connecting to her much older audience. It’s one that isn’t particularly known for positive contributions to environmental sustainability conversations, and one that might be uninterested in hearing from younger activists on the topic. It’s a shame that’s the case, but integrating older figures into our battles is nothing more than a smart tactical move. It’s time to start getting intergenerational instead of fixating solely on a single voice.
Imagine being 81 years old and facing ostracisation and constant threats by multiple US governments and a powerful contingent of rightwingers, only for young leftwing people to call your activism superficial, and you might have some kind of understanding of how bad faith these criticisms sound. There are, of course, hundreds of celebrities who have tapped into the zeitgeist and the metrics of “wokeness” to appeal to new markets without doing anything significant to, say, change that market, or enact any kind of significant difference or shift in consciousness, so the suspicion is perhaps understandable. It’s nonetheless important for us to parse why legitimate actions are scorned, so that we may be more critical of the powerful, and less susceptible to the ever growing manipulations of modern day PR.
by Jonno Revanche, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images
Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture
A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.
Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”
Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”
She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.
That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.
Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.
“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”
The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)
He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.
Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.” (...)
It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”
Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.
Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.
“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”
Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”
In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”
“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”
by Sanam Yar and Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Anthony Freda
[ed. See also: Call-out culture: how to get it right (and wrong) (The Guardian).]
Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”
Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”
She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.
Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.
“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”
The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)
He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.
Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.” (...)
It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”
Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.
Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.
“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”
Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”
In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”
“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”
by Sanam Yar and Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Anthony Freda
[ed. See also: Call-out culture: how to get it right (and wrong) (The Guardian).]
Comments Close For SNAP Benefits
Friday is the last day for the public to comment on a proposed rule change by the Trump administration that would eliminate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, or food stamps, for more than 3 million people.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also recently admitted that the plan would mean that almost a million children would no longer automatically qualify for free school lunches.
In a new analysis released two weeks ago, the USDA says that almost half of those children would likely get free lunches, but only if they reapply to the school lunch program. The agency estimates that another half would likely qualify for reduced-price meals, instead of free ones, and that about 40,000 children would lose free lunches altogether because their family incomes exceed eligibility limits.
Opposition to the proposal has been strong, with almost 170,000 comments from the public so far, most of them negative.
"There is no excuse that in our first world country we have children who are malnourished," Eric Failing, executive director of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, wrote in a typical comment. "Yet this proposed rule, rather than helping to address these issues, will make them far worse."
Failing says an estimated 200,000 Pennsylvanians would lose food stamps if the proposed rule goes into effect.
The Trump administration says that it's trying to close a loophole in current law, which gives states the flexibility to waive certain asset and income limits for individuals who are receiving both SNAP and other welfare benefits. Most states take advantage of these waivers, in part because it makes it easier to administer safety-net programs, which often have different eligibility requirements.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said when announcing the proposed rule change this summer that food stamps should be a "temporary safety net" for low-income families. He said the administration wants to move people off of government aid and into the workforce so they can become more self reliant.
Perdue also noted that the change – which involves something called "broad-based categorical eligibility" — would save an estimated $2.5 billion a year from the SNAP program. Currently, the federal government spends about $4 billion every month to provide food stamps to more than 36 million people.
The SNAP eligibility proposal is one of several the administration has made over the past year to cut assistance for low-income families. Among other things, the administration has proposed imposing tougher work requirements on able-bodied childless adults who receive SNAP benefits. It also wants to change the way a family's utility costs are calculated in determining the size of their monthly food stamp benefit. The latter change alone would save the government an estimated $4.5 billion over five years.
None of these proposals has gone into effect yet, and all have been fiercely opposed by a broad coalition of anti-poverty advocates, social service providers and state and local government officials.
by Pam Fessler, NPR | Read more:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also recently admitted that the plan would mean that almost a million children would no longer automatically qualify for free school lunches.
In a new analysis released two weeks ago, the USDA says that almost half of those children would likely get free lunches, but only if they reapply to the school lunch program. The agency estimates that another half would likely qualify for reduced-price meals, instead of free ones, and that about 40,000 children would lose free lunches altogether because their family incomes exceed eligibility limits.
Opposition to the proposal has been strong, with almost 170,000 comments from the public so far, most of them negative."There is no excuse that in our first world country we have children who are malnourished," Eric Failing, executive director of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, wrote in a typical comment. "Yet this proposed rule, rather than helping to address these issues, will make them far worse."
Failing says an estimated 200,000 Pennsylvanians would lose food stamps if the proposed rule goes into effect.
The Trump administration says that it's trying to close a loophole in current law, which gives states the flexibility to waive certain asset and income limits for individuals who are receiving both SNAP and other welfare benefits. Most states take advantage of these waivers, in part because it makes it easier to administer safety-net programs, which often have different eligibility requirements.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said when announcing the proposed rule change this summer that food stamps should be a "temporary safety net" for low-income families. He said the administration wants to move people off of government aid and into the workforce so they can become more self reliant.
Perdue also noted that the change – which involves something called "broad-based categorical eligibility" — would save an estimated $2.5 billion a year from the SNAP program. Currently, the federal government spends about $4 billion every month to provide food stamps to more than 36 million people.
The SNAP eligibility proposal is one of several the administration has made over the past year to cut assistance for low-income families. Among other things, the administration has proposed imposing tougher work requirements on able-bodied childless adults who receive SNAP benefits. It also wants to change the way a family's utility costs are calculated in determining the size of their monthly food stamp benefit. The latter change alone would save the government an estimated $4.5 billion over five years.
None of these proposals has gone into effect yet, and all have been fiercely opposed by a broad coalition of anti-poverty advocates, social service providers and state and local government officials.
by Pam Fessler, NPR | Read more:
Image: Julio Cortez/AP
[ed. Wonder what their grandchildren will think of them.]
[ed. Wonder what their grandchildren will think of them.]
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Joe Jackson
Pretty soon now, you know I'm gonna make a comeback
And like the birds and the bees in the trees it's a sure-fire smash
I'll speak, to the masses through the media
And if you got anything to say to me you can say it with cash
'Cause I've got the trash
And you got the cash
So baby we should get along fine
So give me all your money
'Cause I know you think I'm funny, yeah
Can't you hear me laughing
Can't you see me smile
I'm the man
Lyrics:
What’s Wrong With the New Figurative Painting?
To be clear, what bothered me was not the spectacle of bad work, of which there’s always plenty around. Instead, the problem had to do with good work that still didn’t seem as good as it could have been, art that engaged my interest but left me unsatisfied. “What’s wrong,” I kept asking myself. “What’s the problem?” My silent answer was, repeatedly, “This work is academic.” Or rather, “There’s something academic in this work.”
What’s Wrong With the New Figurative Painting? (The Nation)
Image: Doron Langberg, Daniel Reading (2019)
Peter Luger Used to Sizzle. Now It Sputters.
I can count on Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn to produce certain sensations at every meal.
There is the insistent smell of broiled dry-aged steak that hits me the minute I open the door and sometimes sooner, while I’m still outside on the South Williamsburg sidewalk, producing a raised pulse, a quickening of the senses and a restlessness familiar to anyone who has seen a tiger that has just heard the approach of the lunch bucket.
There is the hiss of butter and melted tallow as they slide down the hot platter, past the sliced porterhouse or rib steak and their charred bones, to make a pool at one end. The server will spoon some of this sizzling fat over the meat he has just plated, generally with some line like “Here are your vitamins.”
There is the thunk of a bowl filled with schlag landing on a bare wood table when dessert is served, and soon after, the softer tap-tap-tap of waxy chocolate coins in gold foil dropped one at a time on top of the check.
And after I’ve paid, there is the unshakable sense that I’ve been scammed.
The last sensation was not part of the Peter Luger experience when I started eating there, in the 1990s. I was acutely aware of the cost back then because I would settle the tab by counting out $20 bills; cash was the only way to pay unless you had a Peter Luger credit card. At the end of the night my wallet would be empty. Because a Peter Luger steak made me feel alive in a way that few other things did, I considered this a fair trade, although I could afford it only once a year or so.
I don’t remember when the doubts began, but they grew over time.
Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed. A host with a clipboard looks for the name, or writes it down and quotes a waiting time. There is almost always a wait, with or without a reservation, and there is almost always a long line of supplicants against the wall. A kind word or reassuring smile from somebody on staff would help the time pass. The smile never comes. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger. (...)
The servers, who once were charmingly brusque, now give the strong impression that these endless demands for food and drink are all that’s standing between them and a hard-earned nap. Signals that a customer has a question or request don’t get picked up as quickly; the canned jokes about spinach and schlag don’t flow as freely.
Some things are the same as ever. The shrimp cocktail has always tasted like cold latex dipped in ketchup and horseradish. The steak sauce has always tasted like the same ketchup and horseradish fortified by corn syrup.
Although the fries are reasonably crisp, their insides are mealy and bland in a way that fresh-cut potatoes almost certainly would not be. The sole — yes, I’m the person who ordered the sole at Peter Luger — was strangely similar: The bread crumbs on top were gold and crunchy, but the fish underneath was dry and almost powdery.
Was the Caesar salad always so drippy, the croutons always straight out of a bag, the grated cheese always so white and rubbery? I know there was a time the German fried potatoes were brown and crunchy, because I eagerly ate them each time I went. Now they are mushy, dingy, gray and sometimes cold. I look forward to them the way I look forward to finding a new, irregularly shaped mole.
Lunch one afternoon vividly demonstrated the kitchen’s inconsistency: I ordered a burger, medium-rare, at the bar. So had the two people sitting to my right, it turned out. One of them got what we’d all asked for, a midnight-dark crust giving way to an evenly rosy interior so full of juices it looked like it was ready to cry. The other one got a patty that was almost completely brown inside. I got a weird hybrid, a burger whose interior shaded from nearly perfect on one side to gray and hard on the other. (...)
Luger is not the city’s oldest, but it’s the one in which age, tradition, superb beef, blistering heat, an instinctive avoidance of anything fancy and an immensely attractive self-assurance came together to produce something that felt less like a restaurant than an affirmation of life, or at least life as it is lived in New York City. This sounds ridiculously grand. Years ago I thought it was true, though, and so did other people.
The restaurant will always have its loyalists. They will laugh away the prices, the $16.95 sliced tomatoes that taste like 1979, the $229.80 porterhouse for four. They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.
[ed. I've never been to NY City, heard of Luger's, or particularly care. I just like reading a good Pete Wells takedown (although, all his restaurant reviews are generally interesting). See also: How a Food Critic Plots His Pans (NY Times).]
There is the insistent smell of broiled dry-aged steak that hits me the minute I open the door and sometimes sooner, while I’m still outside on the South Williamsburg sidewalk, producing a raised pulse, a quickening of the senses and a restlessness familiar to anyone who has seen a tiger that has just heard the approach of the lunch bucket.
There is the hiss of butter and melted tallow as they slide down the hot platter, past the sliced porterhouse or rib steak and their charred bones, to make a pool at one end. The server will spoon some of this sizzling fat over the meat he has just plated, generally with some line like “Here are your vitamins.”
There is the thunk of a bowl filled with schlag landing on a bare wood table when dessert is served, and soon after, the softer tap-tap-tap of waxy chocolate coins in gold foil dropped one at a time on top of the check.
And after I’ve paid, there is the unshakable sense that I’ve been scammed.The last sensation was not part of the Peter Luger experience when I started eating there, in the 1990s. I was acutely aware of the cost back then because I would settle the tab by counting out $20 bills; cash was the only way to pay unless you had a Peter Luger credit card. At the end of the night my wallet would be empty. Because a Peter Luger steak made me feel alive in a way that few other things did, I considered this a fair trade, although I could afford it only once a year or so.
I don’t remember when the doubts began, but they grew over time.
Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed. A host with a clipboard looks for the name, or writes it down and quotes a waiting time. There is almost always a wait, with or without a reservation, and there is almost always a long line of supplicants against the wall. A kind word or reassuring smile from somebody on staff would help the time pass. The smile never comes. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger. (...)
The servers, who once were charmingly brusque, now give the strong impression that these endless demands for food and drink are all that’s standing between them and a hard-earned nap. Signals that a customer has a question or request don’t get picked up as quickly; the canned jokes about spinach and schlag don’t flow as freely.
Some things are the same as ever. The shrimp cocktail has always tasted like cold latex dipped in ketchup and horseradish. The steak sauce has always tasted like the same ketchup and horseradish fortified by corn syrup.
Although the fries are reasonably crisp, their insides are mealy and bland in a way that fresh-cut potatoes almost certainly would not be. The sole — yes, I’m the person who ordered the sole at Peter Luger — was strangely similar: The bread crumbs on top were gold and crunchy, but the fish underneath was dry and almost powdery.
Was the Caesar salad always so drippy, the croutons always straight out of a bag, the grated cheese always so white and rubbery? I know there was a time the German fried potatoes were brown and crunchy, because I eagerly ate them each time I went. Now they are mushy, dingy, gray and sometimes cold. I look forward to them the way I look forward to finding a new, irregularly shaped mole.
Lunch one afternoon vividly demonstrated the kitchen’s inconsistency: I ordered a burger, medium-rare, at the bar. So had the two people sitting to my right, it turned out. One of them got what we’d all asked for, a midnight-dark crust giving way to an evenly rosy interior so full of juices it looked like it was ready to cry. The other one got a patty that was almost completely brown inside. I got a weird hybrid, a burger whose interior shaded from nearly perfect on one side to gray and hard on the other. (...)
Luger is not the city’s oldest, but it’s the one in which age, tradition, superb beef, blistering heat, an instinctive avoidance of anything fancy and an immensely attractive self-assurance came together to produce something that felt less like a restaurant than an affirmation of life, or at least life as it is lived in New York City. This sounds ridiculously grand. Years ago I thought it was true, though, and so did other people.
The restaurant will always have its loyalists. They will laugh away the prices, the $16.95 sliced tomatoes that taste like 1979, the $229.80 porterhouse for four. They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Ellen Silverman for The New York Times[ed. I've never been to NY City, heard of Luger's, or particularly care. I just like reading a good Pete Wells takedown (although, all his restaurant reviews are generally interesting). See also: How a Food Critic Plots His Pans (NY Times).]
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