Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Millions of Animals Lost in Australia's Wildfires
Koala Mittens and Baby Bottles: Saving Australia’s Animals After Fires (NY Times)
Image: Christina Simons for The New York Times
[ed. Loss in the millions (if not billions), including up to 30% of Australia's koala's. See also: Bugpocolypse.]
Tom Petty on Songwriting
~ Tom Petty (Billboard)
The Superpowers of Super-Thin Materials
In materials science, 2-D is the new 3-D.
In recent years, internet-connected devices have colonized a range of new frontiers — wrists, refrigerators, doorbells, cars. But to some researchers, the spread of the “internet of things” has not gone nearly far enough.
“What if we were able to embed electronics in absolutely everything,” Tomás Palacios, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently. “What if we did energy harvesting from solar cells inside highways, and had strain sensors embedded in tunnels and bridges to monitor the concrete? What if we could look outside and get the weather forecast in the window? Or bring electronics to my jacket to monitor my health?”
In January of 2019, Dr. Palacios and his colleagues published a paper in Nature describing an invention that would bring that future a little closer: an antenna that can absorb the ever-thickening ambient soup of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular signals and efficiently turn it into usable electrical energy.
The key to the technology is a promising new material called molybdenum disulfide, or MoS₂, that can be deposited in a layer just three atoms thick. In the world of engineering, things can’t get much thinner.
And thin is useful. For instance, a layer of MoS₂ could wrap around a desk and turn it into a laptop charger, without any power cords.
As researchers like Dr. Palacios see it, two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat.
by Amos Zeeberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times
[ed. From 2D to holographics (see next post).]
In recent years, internet-connected devices have colonized a range of new frontiers — wrists, refrigerators, doorbells, cars. But to some researchers, the spread of the “internet of things” has not gone nearly far enough.
“What if we were able to embed electronics in absolutely everything,” Tomás Palacios, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently. “What if we did energy harvesting from solar cells inside highways, and had strain sensors embedded in tunnels and bridges to monitor the concrete? What if we could look outside and get the weather forecast in the window? Or bring electronics to my jacket to monitor my health?”In January of 2019, Dr. Palacios and his colleagues published a paper in Nature describing an invention that would bring that future a little closer: an antenna that can absorb the ever-thickening ambient soup of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular signals and efficiently turn it into usable electrical energy.
The key to the technology is a promising new material called molybdenum disulfide, or MoS₂, that can be deposited in a layer just three atoms thick. In the world of engineering, things can’t get much thinner.
And thin is useful. For instance, a layer of MoS₂ could wrap around a desk and turn it into a laptop charger, without any power cords.
As researchers like Dr. Palacios see it, two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat.
by Amos Zeeberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times
[ed. From 2D to holographics (see next post).]
Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms.
Opinion among the Dio faithful, nonetheless, was divided on the subject of his “Dio Returns” comeback tour, largely because Dio has been dead for almost 10 years. The Marina del Rey office suite was the site of a visual-effects company creating a Dio hologram. The hologram would tour with a living backing group consisting, in large part, of former Dio bandmates.
If you missed the tour, you might want to take a moment here and call up one of the fan-shot videos posted on YouTube — say, “Rainbow in the Dark,” Dio’s 1983 hit, filmed at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on June 3, during which the Dio hologram prowls a central portion of the stage, bobbing, weaving, twirling his microphone cord to the monster riffs and occasionally using his free hand to air-conduct his most operatic vocal flourishes. (“His” — would “its” be more apt? Neither word feels quite right.) At one point, the bassist, Bjorn Englen, takes several very deliberate steps to his left, allowing the hologram to dance in front of him and adding to the illusion of a three-dimensional conjuring.The hologram itself has an uneasy pallor, a brighter shade than the humans onstage but at the same time insubstantial, like a ghost struggling to fully materialize. One crucial decision that had faced the animators was choosing the right age for their creation. Dio in his MTV-era prime tempted them, of course, but then wouldn’t it be strange to watch him perform alongside band members who were roughed up by the ensuing years like the rest of us? Then again, Dio’s actual age in 2019, were he alive, would be 77, which is not ideal for a heavy-metal frontman. The creative team ultimately settled on a spry, middle-aged Dio, outfitting him in black leather pants, a studded leather wristband and a bell-sleeved white tunic embossed with a silver cross.
A start-up called Eyellusion produced “Dio Returns.” It’s one of a handful of companies looking to mold and ultimately monetize a new, hybrid category of entertainment — part concert, part technology-driven spectacle — centered, thus far, on the holographic afterlives of deceased musical stars. (...)
According to the trade publication Pollstar, roughly half of the 20 top-grossing North American touring acts of 2019 were led by artists who were at least 60 years old, among them Cher, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney, Dead & Company and Billy Joel; the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Bob Seger took the top three slots. Using technology to blur the line between the quick and the dead tends to be a recipe for dystopian science fiction, but in this case, it could also mean a lucrative new income stream for a music industry in flux, at a time when beloved entertainers can no longer count on CD or download revenues to support their loved ones after they’ve died. “If you’re an estate in the age of streaming and algorithms, you’re thinking: Where is our revenue coming from?” Brian Baumley, who handles publicity for Eyellusion, told me. Some of those estates, Baumley bets, will arrive at a reasonable conclusion about the dead artists whose legacies they hope to extend: “We have to put them back on the road.”
Tupac Shakur became one of the earliest test subjects for the new technology 15 years after his murder, when his hologram made a surprise appearance at the 2012 Coachella festival. To actually project a person-size holographic image into three-dimensional space, à la Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” would require powerful, prohibitively expensive lasers that would also burn human flesh. The Tupac hologram was created with a combination of C.G.I., a body double and a 19th-century theatrical trick known as Pepper’s Ghost, some variation of which has been used for almost all the hologram musical performances of recent years.
As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.
The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. (...)
The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.
by Mark Binelli, NY Times | Read more:As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.
The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. (...)
The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.
Image: Base Holograms
Monday, January 6, 2020
Hardball Questions For the Next Debate
Mr. Biden: Your son Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during your vice-presidential term. The Ukrainian government was investigating Burisma for misdeeds, and Hunter was allegedly one of the targets of the investigation. President Trump alleges that you used your clout as VP to shut down the investigation into Hunter, which if true would constitute an impeachable abuse of power.
My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer?
Mr. Bloomberg: You’ve been criticized as puritanical and self-righteous for some of your more restrictive policies, like a ban on large sodas. You seem to lean into the accusation, stating in a 2014 interview that:
Despite spending $100 million in the first month of your presidential campaign, you are currently placed fifth – behind two socialists, a confused old man, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. In, let’s not forget, an increasingly shaky effort to prevent President Donald J. Trump from winning a second term.
So my question for you is: what makes you so sure you’re not in Hell already?
Mayor Buttigieg: You are a gay Navy veteran. Your last name is “Buttigieg”. You are mayor of “South Bend”. And you first achieved prominence on the national stage for a New York Times editorial about your travels in the Horn of Africa, which includes the country of “Djibouti”.
My question is: is your campaign just the setup for a gay porno? Do you really think viewers want this much backstory?
Senator Warren: Despite your many years of service to the nation, media attention has focused on your claim to be descended from Native Americans. You told your former employer Harvard that you were of Native descent. Republicans accused you of trying to unfairly exploit affirmative action, but an investigation showed you did not benefit from any affirmative action at the time, leaving it unclear why you would do this.
More recently, you took a genetic test to establish your Native background. The test showed you did have a Native ancestor 6-12 generations back, but supporters were left baffled as to why you would take it or expect anyone to care. Conservatives used to the test to reignite the scandal around your Harvard employment, and progressives condemned you for promoting a view of race based on biology rather than culture or self-identification. The general consensus, again, was that you got no benefit from the test and it was unclear why you would do this.
The development of one of the algorithms that uses genetic information to determine racial background was called the “Warren Project” after its lead geneticist Jim Warren. Warren founded FamilyTreeDNA, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that continues to be a leader in genetic testing for ancestry, with about $16 million in revenue each year. This is relevant because Jim Warren is your ex-husband and the father of your children, who presumably stand to inherit a significant part of the FamilyTreeDNA fortune.
So my question for you is: is your campaign is just a publicity stunt to raise interest in genetic testing?
My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer?
Mr. Bloomberg: You’ve been criticized as puritanical and self-righteous for some of your more restrictive policies, like a ban on large sodas. You seem to lean into the accusation, stating in a 2014 interview that:
I am telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.Let’s not focus on what this says about your humility, or about your religious beliefs. I want to focus on a different issue.
Despite spending $100 million in the first month of your presidential campaign, you are currently placed fifth – behind two socialists, a confused old man, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. In, let’s not forget, an increasingly shaky effort to prevent President Donald J. Trump from winning a second term.
So my question for you is: what makes you so sure you’re not in Hell already?
Mayor Buttigieg: You are a gay Navy veteran. Your last name is “Buttigieg”. You are mayor of “South Bend”. And you first achieved prominence on the national stage for a New York Times editorial about your travels in the Horn of Africa, which includes the country of “Djibouti”.
My question is: is your campaign just the setup for a gay porno? Do you really think viewers want this much backstory?
Senator Warren: Despite your many years of service to the nation, media attention has focused on your claim to be descended from Native Americans. You told your former employer Harvard that you were of Native descent. Republicans accused you of trying to unfairly exploit affirmative action, but an investigation showed you did not benefit from any affirmative action at the time, leaving it unclear why you would do this.
More recently, you took a genetic test to establish your Native background. The test showed you did have a Native ancestor 6-12 generations back, but supporters were left baffled as to why you would take it or expect anyone to care. Conservatives used to the test to reignite the scandal around your Harvard employment, and progressives condemned you for promoting a view of race based on biology rather than culture or self-identification. The general consensus, again, was that you got no benefit from the test and it was unclear why you would do this.
The development of one of the algorithms that uses genetic information to determine racial background was called the “Warren Project” after its lead geneticist Jim Warren. Warren founded FamilyTreeDNA, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that continues to be a leader in genetic testing for ancestry, with about $16 million in revenue each year. This is relevant because Jim Warren is your ex-husband and the father of your children, who presumably stand to inherit a significant part of the FamilyTreeDNA fortune.
So my question for you is: is your campaign is just a publicity stunt to raise interest in genetic testing?
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Loitering Is Delightful
I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands
Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.
The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.
For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book that is not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, “Lord.”) (...)
Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.
NO SOLICITING
NO LOITERINGstacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.
Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.
For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book that is not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, “Lord.”) (...)
Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.
by Ross Gay, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Banksy
Sunday, January 5, 2020
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Russell Wilson
In a season filled with heart-pounding victories, Wilson had once again been his best when on the brink of defeat. His statistics in that Nov. 3 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: five touchdown passes, 378 yards, no interceptions and a cascade of elusive scrambles.
It was Seattle’s ninth game of the season, and his improvisation looked akin to watching Miles Davis in full flight while the opposing defense was playing basic keys. It was impossible not to wonder if this would be the season in which Wilson found the postseason redemption that has eluded him for five years.
It has been that long since Wilson threw the most infamous interception in Super Bowl history: a pass a yard from the goal line against the New England Patriots that denied the Seahawks a repeat as champions. “I am never going to let one play define my career, good or bad,” Wilson said in a recent interview with The New York Times, incanting the trademark mantra he has used since that throw. “I’m going to keep trusting the process, and continue to go for it.” (...)
As he prepares to lead his team in a wild-card playoff game Sunday in Philadelphia against the Eagles (9-7), how should Russell Wilson be regarded?
It seems fitting that he will chase the Super Bowl ghost with an injured team full of question marks. There are ways in which Wilson, in his eighth season in the N.F.L., is still a question mark, still an enigma to those outside his immediate sphere.
The Times followed Wilson and his team for the last nine weeks of the season and saw a riveting quarterback who had to be thrillingly perfect to win this season, and a preprogrammed, hard-to-fathom star who sometimes buckled when least expected.
Which Seahawks team will we see in the postseason? That depends on which Russell Wilson shows up. (...)
To fans in Seattle, Wilson sits firmly on the Mount Rushmore of sports icons. His No. 3 jersey is ubiquitous. His tendency to be friendly while also keeping the world at arm’s length fits in with a cultural vibe known locally as “Seattle nice.”
As stars such as Richard Sherman and Lynch left the team, and as Wilson spread his own narrative on social media, the city’s love affair with its favorite quarterback only intensified.
Social media is arguably the perfect platform for Wilson, allowing thin but glowing glimpses of his life through the mediating remove of technology. There he is, at the local children’s hospital on Facebook Live. On Instagram, getting his hair cornrowed, letting his goofball flag fly and cooing with his family for Christmas.
In April, after signing a record contract — $140 million for four years, with a $65 million signing bonus — he popped up on Twitter in the dead of night, barechested, cuddling next to his music superstar wife, Ciara.
“We got a deal, Seattle,” he said in a Barry White baritone far deeper than his usual voice, which some read as an assertion of his blackness.
“Russell understands how race works in America, that America sees what it wants to see in a black person, and him especially, being a black football player,” said Louis Moore, a professor at Grand Valley State in Michigan who focuses on race and sport, when asked about Wilson’s post. “The beauty of Russell Wilson is he is able to play with the stereotypes.”
However Wilson portrays himself, the online glimpses have given him a dash of personality that even longtime admirers find refreshing.
“It’s good for us to see he’s not some robot,” said a fan, Charlene Lewis, as she walked to Seattle’s downtown stadium.
by Kurt Streeter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
It was Seattle’s ninth game of the season, and his improvisation looked akin to watching Miles Davis in full flight while the opposing defense was playing basic keys. It was impossible not to wonder if this would be the season in which Wilson found the postseason redemption that has eluded him for five years.
It has been that long since Wilson threw the most infamous interception in Super Bowl history: a pass a yard from the goal line against the New England Patriots that denied the Seahawks a repeat as champions. “I am never going to let one play define my career, good or bad,” Wilson said in a recent interview with The New York Times, incanting the trademark mantra he has used since that throw. “I’m going to keep trusting the process, and continue to go for it.” (...)
As he prepares to lead his team in a wild-card playoff game Sunday in Philadelphia against the Eagles (9-7), how should Russell Wilson be regarded?It seems fitting that he will chase the Super Bowl ghost with an injured team full of question marks. There are ways in which Wilson, in his eighth season in the N.F.L., is still a question mark, still an enigma to those outside his immediate sphere.
The Times followed Wilson and his team for the last nine weeks of the season and saw a riveting quarterback who had to be thrillingly perfect to win this season, and a preprogrammed, hard-to-fathom star who sometimes buckled when least expected.
Which Seahawks team will we see in the postseason? That depends on which Russell Wilson shows up. (...)
To fans in Seattle, Wilson sits firmly on the Mount Rushmore of sports icons. His No. 3 jersey is ubiquitous. His tendency to be friendly while also keeping the world at arm’s length fits in with a cultural vibe known locally as “Seattle nice.”
As stars such as Richard Sherman and Lynch left the team, and as Wilson spread his own narrative on social media, the city’s love affair with its favorite quarterback only intensified.
Social media is arguably the perfect platform for Wilson, allowing thin but glowing glimpses of his life through the mediating remove of technology. There he is, at the local children’s hospital on Facebook Live. On Instagram, getting his hair cornrowed, letting his goofball flag fly and cooing with his family for Christmas.
In April, after signing a record contract — $140 million for four years, with a $65 million signing bonus — he popped up on Twitter in the dead of night, barechested, cuddling next to his music superstar wife, Ciara.
“We got a deal, Seattle,” he said in a Barry White baritone far deeper than his usual voice, which some read as an assertion of his blackness.
“Russell understands how race works in America, that America sees what it wants to see in a black person, and him especially, being a black football player,” said Louis Moore, a professor at Grand Valley State in Michigan who focuses on race and sport, when asked about Wilson’s post. “The beauty of Russell Wilson is he is able to play with the stereotypes.”
However Wilson portrays himself, the online glimpses have given him a dash of personality that even longtime admirers find refreshing.
“It’s good for us to see he’s not some robot,” said a fan, Charlene Lewis, as she walked to Seattle’s downtown stadium.
by Kurt Streeter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Shinkansen Train
The Shinkansen Bullet Train has a streamlined forefront and structural adaptations to significantly reduce noise resulting from aerodynamics in high-speed trains.
Key Differentiators
The more streamlined Shinkansen train not only travels more quietly, it now travels 10% faster and uses 15% less electricity.
Biomimicry Story
Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer with JR West and a birdwatcher, used his knowledge of the splashless water entry of kingfishers and silent flight of owls to decrease the sound generated by the trains. Kingfishers move quickly from air, a low-resistance (low drag) medium, to water, a high-resistance (high drag) medium. The kingfisher’s beak provides an almost ideal shape for such an impact. The beak is streamlined, steadily increasing in diameter from its tip to its head. This reduces the impact as the kingfisher essentially wedges its way into the water, allowing the water to flow past the beak rather than being pushed in front of it. Because the train faced the same challenge, moving from low drag open air to high drag air in the tunnel, Nakatsu designed the forefront of the Shinkansen train based on the beak of the kingfisher. Engineers were able to reduce the pantograph’s noise by adding structures to the main part of the pantograph to create many small vortices. This is similar to the way an owl’s primary feathers have serrations that create small vortices instead of one large one. Read more about the bioinspiration behind the Shinkansen Train in Zygote Quarterly:
by Japan Railways Group | Read more:
Key Differentiators
The more streamlined Shinkansen train not only travels more quietly, it now travels 10% faster and uses 15% less electricity.Biomimicry Story
Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer with JR West and a birdwatcher, used his knowledge of the splashless water entry of kingfishers and silent flight of owls to decrease the sound generated by the trains. Kingfishers move quickly from air, a low-resistance (low drag) medium, to water, a high-resistance (high drag) medium. The kingfisher’s beak provides an almost ideal shape for such an impact. The beak is streamlined, steadily increasing in diameter from its tip to its head. This reduces the impact as the kingfisher essentially wedges its way into the water, allowing the water to flow past the beak rather than being pushed in front of it. Because the train faced the same challenge, moving from low drag open air to high drag air in the tunnel, Nakatsu designed the forefront of the Shinkansen train based on the beak of the kingfisher. Engineers were able to reduce the pantograph’s noise by adding structures to the main part of the pantograph to create many small vortices. This is similar to the way an owl’s primary feathers have serrations that create small vortices instead of one large one. Read more about the bioinspiration behind the Shinkansen Train in Zygote Quarterly:
by Japan Railways Group | Read more:
Image: Sam Doshi
[ed. Interesting in itself, but click on the link for a super cool interactive presentation (Case Study Auspicious Forms).]
Friday, January 3, 2020
Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide
Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide (NY Times)
Image: A man drags away plastic garbage bins from a property engulfed in flames in Lake Conjola in New South WalesMatthew Abbott for The New York Times
[ed. See also: This is not a Natural Disaster. It is Man Made (BNE).]
[ed. See also: This is not a Natural Disaster. It is Man Made (BNE).]
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
Having worked my way through almost all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, I’ve come to recognize a phenomenon I call The Stephenson Guarantee: You don’t know what any Stephenson book will be like before you crack it open, but you can be assured it won’t be like anything else. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is no exception. This isn’t my favorite Stephenson novel, but it certainly occupies an important place in his corpus. It’s also damned impressive for a near-future vision from 1995; although the advanced nanotech that drives the story is largely unrealized twenty years later, the book contains many other imaginative innovations that have since come to pass, either in part or full. And nanotech may be just around the corner, if technologists are to be believed.
It was a queer and exciting feeling to read The Diamond Age––a story about Nell, a young girl who accidentally comes to possess a nanotech book (The Primer) with the ability to sense its environment and incorporate the girl’s experiences into its instructive narratives––on a Kindle. My Kindle is certainly no Primer, but it’s also something more (and also less) than a paper book. Primer-like technologies are probably a couple decades or more away, so it seems plausible that future readers might look back on the quaint little Kindle and sigh: “It was clunky all right, but maybe we wouldn’t have got where we are without it.” Perhaps, I kept thinking as I prodded the touchscreen to turn pages and pull up definitions of unfamiliar words, perhaps we are on our way.
Trying to summarize the plot of The Diamond Age (or any Stephenson novel for that matter) is daunting, because the author generally eschews traditional narrative arcs, favoring instead a smorgasbord of oddly strung together concepts and moments of insight. This style, while contributing greatly to Stephenson’s mystique, is rarely rewarding in the way we expect. The relative dearth of traditional character development and clear resolutions of conflict, coupled with the deluge of tech-talk all Stephenson readers come to expect, can make The Diamond Age seem like a tough read. And it is. But it’s also worth the effort.
This book helped me realize something important about how I interpret Stephenson’s work, which is that his worlds almost always exceed his stories and characters. Stephenson designs linguistic webs that explore (and exploit) human nature, socio-cultural dynamics, geography, environmental and economic pressures, offbeat humor, historical trends, and sheer whimsy. The Diamond Age takes many forms: a fairy tale, a Dickensian rags-to-riches narrative, a treatise on the benefits and risks of nanotech, a crash course in Turing machines, an inquiry into the capabilities of the collective unconscious, a Confucian morality play, and a touching look at parent-child relationships. Although many of the characters in this book are interesting, fun, and even endearing, Stephenson’s runaway enthusiasm for ideas left little room for them to grow on me in the fashion I expect from “great” literature. But, of course, this is not “great” literature. It’s something else entirely.
It’s often difficult to locate unambiguous moral lessons in Stephenson novels, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prod morality in a meaningful way. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson ruminates on the persistence of tribalism in human psychology and community. Beyond the predicament of living in a future world where nation-states have given way to “phyles” (self-chosen tribes), characters struggle with the timeless tension between the desire to do right by those closest to them (friends and family), and the desire to do what’s right for humanity in general. In a wonderful passage, the headmistress of a neo-Victorian prep school points out that even the best and brightest fail to dent the world if they ignore the collective efforts of fellow humans:
It was a queer and exciting feeling to read The Diamond Age––a story about Nell, a young girl who accidentally comes to possess a nanotech book (The Primer) with the ability to sense its environment and incorporate the girl’s experiences into its instructive narratives––on a Kindle. My Kindle is certainly no Primer, but it’s also something more (and also less) than a paper book. Primer-like technologies are probably a couple decades or more away, so it seems plausible that future readers might look back on the quaint little Kindle and sigh: “It was clunky all right, but maybe we wouldn’t have got where we are without it.” Perhaps, I kept thinking as I prodded the touchscreen to turn pages and pull up definitions of unfamiliar words, perhaps we are on our way.
Trying to summarize the plot of The Diamond Age (or any Stephenson novel for that matter) is daunting, because the author generally eschews traditional narrative arcs, favoring instead a smorgasbord of oddly strung together concepts and moments of insight. This style, while contributing greatly to Stephenson’s mystique, is rarely rewarding in the way we expect. The relative dearth of traditional character development and clear resolutions of conflict, coupled with the deluge of tech-talk all Stephenson readers come to expect, can make The Diamond Age seem like a tough read. And it is. But it’s also worth the effort.This book helped me realize something important about how I interpret Stephenson’s work, which is that his worlds almost always exceed his stories and characters. Stephenson designs linguistic webs that explore (and exploit) human nature, socio-cultural dynamics, geography, environmental and economic pressures, offbeat humor, historical trends, and sheer whimsy. The Diamond Age takes many forms: a fairy tale, a Dickensian rags-to-riches narrative, a treatise on the benefits and risks of nanotech, a crash course in Turing machines, an inquiry into the capabilities of the collective unconscious, a Confucian morality play, and a touching look at parent-child relationships. Although many of the characters in this book are interesting, fun, and even endearing, Stephenson’s runaway enthusiasm for ideas left little room for them to grow on me in the fashion I expect from “great” literature. But, of course, this is not “great” literature. It’s something else entirely.
It’s often difficult to locate unambiguous moral lessons in Stephenson novels, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prod morality in a meaningful way. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson ruminates on the persistence of tribalism in human psychology and community. Beyond the predicament of living in a future world where nation-states have given way to “phyles” (self-chosen tribes), characters struggle with the timeless tension between the desire to do right by those closest to them (friends and family), and the desire to do what’s right for humanity in general. In a wonderful passage, the headmistress of a neo-Victorian prep school points out that even the best and brightest fail to dent the world if they ignore the collective efforts of fellow humans:
It’s a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost––swallowed up in the ocean––unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. (loc. 5325)In his or her own way, each character in The Diamond Age discovers that while individual concerns can sometimes mesh nicely with group priorities, such synchrony cannot be counted on. We must, therefore, make difficult choices, sometimes with consequences that we neither endorse nor fully understand. This is not a novel insight about the character of the moral universe, but simply a creative reminder of the ineluctable frustrations that complicate human conduct.
by Miles Raymer, Words & Dirt | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Drone Strike Kills Top Iranian General in Baghdad
Iran Promises Retaliation After U.S. Kills General (NY Times)
Image: Iraq Security Media Cell, via Twitter
[ed. Without a doubt, the stupidist, most reckless thing Trump has ever done, and that's saying a lot. See also: Donald Trump’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani will come back to haunt him (The Guardian).]
Even though it is true that this killing amounts to an act of war, many regarded the severity of economic sanctions as an act of war too. So what is the point…to show the US as powerful even though it has yet to break Iran? To provoke Iran into doing something stupid?
It certainly did serve to poke a stick in the eye of Iraq, which was already gearing up to toss US troops out. The flagrant disregard for Iraq’s sovereignity is only going to accelerate that process as well as push a lot of fence-sitters in Iraq towards Iran. How smart was that?
Much of the understandable jitteriness results from the idea that Iran will strike back and precipitate a hot war. Iran has managed to survive by being among other things exceptionally disciplined and strategic. It’s unlikely to do anything without sounding out Russia and China, who are likely to be similarly measured and not show their hands. (via:)
Things We Hope Will Die in 2020
The Wing: A women-only coworking space branded as a feminist wonderland, The Wing calls itself “a diverse community open to all.” How inclusive! Memberships start at $185 per month. —Abigail Weinberg
Malcolm Gladwell’s career: Let’s thinslice: Malcolm Gladwell needs to stop writing. Gladwell’s theories are wrong (stop and frisk) or obvious (1,000 10,000 hours) or dumb (talking to strangers is the problem with everything). He made his bones at a time when glib, crypto-conservative contrarianism was the reigning media ethos. Today, the shtick has been worn so smooth as to be transparent. Flip through his latest book and you’ll find an easy-pass treatment of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and a determinedly apolitical reading of the death of Sandra Bland—two cases of institutional pathologies that Gladwell turns into parables about a quirk in human nature. Powerful people thus get excused for their mistakes, under the guise of Gladwell’s interrogating some orthodoxy or another. You don’t need to be a bestselling author of pop-science airport books to come up with a word for this stuff: bullshit. —Jacob Rosenberg
The careers of all business pop-psychology writers, while we’re at it
Podcasts
Complaining about “cancel culture”
Cars
Saturday Night Live political sketches
The “Overton window”
Caring about the Conways
Daylight savings time
“Neoliberal”
Slack: Hating on Slack isn’t an original idea, but let me add my name to the chorus of voices asking office decision-makers everywhere (including where I work) to spare us and get rid of it once and for all. If your office doesn’t use Slack, consider yourself lucky. It’s as if the annoying co-worker who never shuts up suddenly had a direct portal into your computer and you can’t turn it off. Suddenly you’re part of dozens of separate conversations, some of which you need to see, but most of which you don’t. You can try to leave but you’ll inevitably be added back in against your will, and there’s always at least one colleague who abuses the dreaded “@here” to summon everybody at once. It can be performative in the worst ways, including being used by managers to dress down subordinates in front of large groups of coworkers—see, for instance, the Away scandal—and serves as an involuntary venue for mediocre takes and tweet workshopping. It’s an information security nightmare, full of loose conversation and casual shit-talking that would be awkward (at best) when reviewed in a deposition or in some hacker’s Pastebin dump, and you have to trust your workplace admins to not look through it (the name is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, after all). Let’s go back to email. —AJ Vicens
Fad diets
Newsletters
Craft cocktails
The CIA’s Instagram account
The New England Patriots (...)
30-under-30 lists: This might have something to do with my recently turning 30, but I can tell you from experience: 30 is no different from 29 or 31. Why do we treat youth as its own virtue? I wish I could unlearn the word “Wunderkind.” —Rebecca Leber
Ratios
“I have a daughter, so I…”: Perhaps the best thing to happen over the past decade was the #MeToo movement, but of course, as with any step forward, there came bad allies and clout chasers. After the first wave of women who stood up and said, “Me, too,” there came a tide of men who said, “I have a daughter, so I… .” Fellas, maybe try thinking of women as whole human beings on their own merit, rather than in relation to yourselves. Your mothers and daughters and nieces and coworkers deserve more, dammit. —Becca Andrews
The idea of a monolithic “left”
“Adulting”: This is a word that never needed to be a word. Grow up already and just handle your shit. —Becca Andrews
Gender reveals
Gratuitous semiannual “I love women” threads in which men praise women in media: Chris Cillizza once unhelpfully tweeted “Women > Men. Everyone knows this.” Most men are only slightly more subtle, tweeting performative threads of women they admire on occasion, only to ignore the same women’s work and gravitate toward elevating and praising men’s work the rest of the year. —Rebecca Leber
Lists
Rankings
“Doggos”
“Puppers”
Hero worship of billionaires
Brands on Twitter
The “absolutely no one: / me:” meme
Creepy attacks on Greta Thunberg
Respect
Saying “regardless of your politics”
Devil’s advocacy
Zoom
Brexit
Uber/Lyft: They’re clogging streets, polluting, and killing public transit by offering unsustainably low investor-subsidized prices while mistreating drivers just long enough to replace them with robots. —Aaron Wiener
Goop and other pseudo-wellness bullshit: Stop saying juice cleanses and a $50 rose quartz face roller will make me feel better. —Laura Thompson
Detox elixirs
BS CBD promo
Fake butts
Image: Mother Jones/Getty
[ed. Something that should live (but sadly lacking these days): barbed and subversive satire.]
A Theory or Two of These Grim Times
Maybe it’s a function of who I follow on Twitter, but I didn’t see much in the way of “ring in the new year” chipperness. Seeing Australia go up in flames might have something to do with that, but even those who seemed awfully domestically focused also seemed subdued. I also noticed comparatively few “Year in review” or “Best of 2019/the past ten years” but that could just as well be due to the gutting of news rooms. Nevertheless, I thought I might be so bold as to offer a theory.
It’s not hard to see plenty of reasons why all save a select few (which includes the deluded and End of Days fans) have reason to be downbeat. Climate change. Mass species dieoff. Poisoning of the planet, particularly with plastics (that overlaps with dieoff but also creates day to day health and diet worries). Student debt. Short job tenures combined with mainly McJobs on offer. Often unaffordable and crapified health care. Having kids who ought to be able to go to college but need to be talked out of it since the debt load would be punitive. Fear over one’s likely inability to retire with the real risk of not being able to work. And that’s before getting to personal tragedies, like suffering a foreclosure or bankruptcy, or death, disability or drug addiction in the family. Shocks like that are even harder to take when so many things seem precarious.
To add to that long list, there’s more anxiety. Bizarrely fearful parenting even though the overwhelming majority of kids are safer than their free-range parents were at a similar age….and the riskiest thing kids do today on a regular basis is ride in a car. Anger and frustration over seemingly more and more Kafka-eque bureaucracies wreaking havoc. Surprisingly widespread diet fesithism. Anger about Trump. I’m sure readers could add to these lists.
None of these are news, but what seems to deepen the general gloom is a lack of confidence that anything will get better, a sense both of sorely limited personal power and lack of trust in those nominally in charge to do the right thing. And that is made more intense by concerns about pending collapse. When the very richest people in the world are acting like preppers, there’s reason to be worried.
I am personally upset at being part of the problem. I now live in a freestanding house, which means energy inefficient. I use a car to get about. Public transportation here is pretty much non-existent, and please don’t advise walking or biking. Both are physically impossible.
I also despair at my inability to do anything other than take pathetically trivial steps to reduce how much plastic I wind up using. Even with being a Yankee and using things until they are about to or do fall apart, I do wind up buying some things. Even socks are in plastic! And forget about buying food in the US. Eggs? Yogurt? Berries? You’d be surprised at how few egg vendors use cardboard cartons. It’s even gotten hard to to buy loose lettuce down here (although oddly loose kale is a different story). Admittedly not everything is this way….but way too much is.
So why are we so stuck on a bad trajectory? Simple explanations are always simplistic, but I hazard is that humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility, and the tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. Let me turn the mike over to that great philosopher, Jamie Lannister:
Traditionally, religion as well as settled systems of obligation (like feudalism) provided something of a framework for working to serve broader social/community interests as well as personal/family ones.
Neoliberalism has weakened community ties while religion has come to play a much less powerful role in organizing society than it once did. Western society, even down to marketing, fosters individualism, yet individuals have little power. And people who are struggling to survive or substantially occupied with earning an income and doing their best with their spouse and kids in a society that keeps them leisure and even sleep deprived barely have the slack to think about the looming problems bearing down on all of us, let alone do much about them.
It’s not hard to see plenty of reasons why all save a select few (which includes the deluded and End of Days fans) have reason to be downbeat. Climate change. Mass species dieoff. Poisoning of the planet, particularly with plastics (that overlaps with dieoff but also creates day to day health and diet worries). Student debt. Short job tenures combined with mainly McJobs on offer. Often unaffordable and crapified health care. Having kids who ought to be able to go to college but need to be talked out of it since the debt load would be punitive. Fear over one’s likely inability to retire with the real risk of not being able to work. And that’s before getting to personal tragedies, like suffering a foreclosure or bankruptcy, or death, disability or drug addiction in the family. Shocks like that are even harder to take when so many things seem precarious.
To add to that long list, there’s more anxiety. Bizarrely fearful parenting even though the overwhelming majority of kids are safer than their free-range parents were at a similar age….and the riskiest thing kids do today on a regular basis is ride in a car. Anger and frustration over seemingly more and more Kafka-eque bureaucracies wreaking havoc. Surprisingly widespread diet fesithism. Anger about Trump. I’m sure readers could add to these lists.
None of these are news, but what seems to deepen the general gloom is a lack of confidence that anything will get better, a sense both of sorely limited personal power and lack of trust in those nominally in charge to do the right thing. And that is made more intense by concerns about pending collapse. When the very richest people in the world are acting like preppers, there’s reason to be worried.
I am personally upset at being part of the problem. I now live in a freestanding house, which means energy inefficient. I use a car to get about. Public transportation here is pretty much non-existent, and please don’t advise walking or biking. Both are physically impossible.
I also despair at my inability to do anything other than take pathetically trivial steps to reduce how much plastic I wind up using. Even with being a Yankee and using things until they are about to or do fall apart, I do wind up buying some things. Even socks are in plastic! And forget about buying food in the US. Eggs? Yogurt? Berries? You’d be surprised at how few egg vendors use cardboard cartons. It’s even gotten hard to to buy loose lettuce down here (although oddly loose kale is a different story). Admittedly not everything is this way….but way too much is.
So why are we so stuck on a bad trajectory? Simple explanations are always simplistic, but I hazard is that humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility, and the tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. Let me turn the mike over to that great philosopher, Jamie Lannister:
So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.More specifically, one’s most pressing duties are to immediate family. Neoliberalism has somewhat weakened that; even Japan now sees young people regularly neglecting their parents, something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. But people. But in many societies, those ties are extremely strong, to the degree that some countries are run on a tribal/clientelist basis.
Traditionally, religion as well as settled systems of obligation (like feudalism) provided something of a framework for working to serve broader social/community interests as well as personal/family ones.
Neoliberalism has weakened community ties while religion has come to play a much less powerful role in organizing society than it once did. Western society, even down to marketing, fosters individualism, yet individuals have little power. And people who are struggling to survive or substantially occupied with earning an income and doing their best with their spouse and kids in a society that keeps them leisure and even sleep deprived barely have the slack to think about the looming problems bearing down on all of us, let alone do much about them.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
A Restaurant With No Leftovers
A recent report from ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on food waste reduction, found that restaurants in the United States generate about 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, or $25.1 billion in costs. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that food waste and packaging account for nearly 45 percent of the materials sent to landfills in the United States.
The reason zero-waste “is not a mainstream concept, that you don’t see it in gastronomy or hospitality in mainstream ways, is because we’re just waking up to it,” said the chef Douglas McMaster, who runs the waste-free London restaurant Silo and advised the owners of Rhodora. “We’re just seeing the reality of wasting as much as we do.”
by Matthew Sedacca, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Winnie Au
[ed. Sorry, zero points for 'wokeness' at this point. Go away.]
Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected
In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level in fourteen years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.
The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war.
"'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020. (...)
The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.
"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.
Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.
Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.
[ed. Bribery masquerading as socialism masquerading as capitalism. See also: Trump's tariffs are backfiring on the U.S., Fed finds (Yahoo News); and Trump, Granting Lobbyist Demands, Quietly Handed Billions More in Tax Breaks to Huge Corporations (Common Dreams); and finally, Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election? (Mother Jones)]
The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war."'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020. (...)
The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.
"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.
Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.
Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.
by Dan Charles, NPR | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images[ed. Bribery masquerading as socialism masquerading as capitalism. See also: Trump's tariffs are backfiring on the U.S., Fed finds (Yahoo News); and Trump, Granting Lobbyist Demands, Quietly Handed Billions More in Tax Breaks to Huge Corporations (Common Dreams); and finally, Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election? (Mother Jones)]
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