The New Blogger Sucks

 

[ed. You know how whenever somebody says they're going to make something "better" and whatever it is has been working perfectly fine up to that point? You're probably going to get screwed. That's Blogger, the platform running this website (by Google). I expect to write more about how awful this new version is, but for the short term expect to see fewer posts until I can figure out how to work around the incomprehensible changes they've made (or I can migrate to another platform like WordPress). For background, see also: here, here, here, here, here and here. In the mean time, take this as an opportunity go back and visit some previous posts from the archive. There's some great stuff there.]

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87 (NY Times)

Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times

[ed. A giant in our time. See also: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 (NPR); and A 5-Decade-Long Friendship That Began With A Phone Call (NPR).]

Telemedicine Tales

A few months back, I described my Luddite biases about telemedicine. On the one hand, the idea of allowing established patients to consult with an MD outside an office visit is a big plus. Even before getting to Covid-19 concerns, it saves patient time and hopefully allows patients whose work or family demands makes it hard to free up time during normal office hours to get treated. On the other, the US being the world capital of rentierism, it isn’t hard to anticipate that telemedicine will often provide lower service levels with no corresponding price reductions.

Below, we feature a post by a clinician who confirms our concerns. He had advocated telemedicine in the pre-Covid era. He warns that telemedicine is creating cookie-cutter by design “doc in a box” practices, for instance restricting participating MDs in the tests they can run.

It had not occurred to me that the telemedicine services provided to MDs would be anything more than established MDs consulting with patients by phone, as they routinely did in Australia in the early 2000s, and/or getting a secure videoconference line. Earlier this year, in Alabama, my mother’s crusty MD reluctantly did her annual exam by phone. But my regular doctor in New York insisted on video (I needed an office visit for her to consider giving me a new scrip), claiming it was necessary to be “HIPPA compliant.” That made me wonder if she thought she was required to retain a recording. I didn’t find that acceptable (I also generally hate videoconferencing with the passion of a thousand suns) and flew to New York instead (yes, I am insanely protective of my medical privacy).1 This discussion of the tech of telemedicine makes me think I am less nuts than I did before.

This post doesn’t acknowledge another pet peeve: in Australia, telemedicine in the form of phone consults for established patients was well established. It was also understood to be a supplement to office visits, not a substitute for them, and priced accordingly.

Due to Covid-19, CMS mandated payment parity for telemedicine visits. This is unfortunate since for some, perhaps arguably many types of concerns, a telemedicine session simply cannot allow for as much diagnosis as a live visit. The doctor cannot listen to your lungs and heart, stick a light in your ear, see your skin color accurately, poke your belly if it needs poking, or examine body parts that are not behaving normally. And if the doctor provides a treatment, it would seem probable that at least for some patients, the placebo effect would be reduced.

In other words, a practice that ought to be a boon looks set to become a vehicle for crapification. And the US medical system is pretty crappy to begin with.

By Cetona. Originally published at Health Care Renewal

1. Introduction. This post might just as easily be entitled “tales from the crypt,” so far down the netherworld chute have American public health and medical workers been plunged. Nowadays whenever I speak to fellow physicians and tell them I’ve moved on from my own front line patient care, we exchange these utterances: they say “congratulations, I’m envious” and I say “my condolences.” But the topic for today is more focal: telemedicine in the Age of Coronavirus.

Telemedicine, or “telemed,” doesn’t quite fit neatly into my ongoing series on why my dander’s up. So for now let’s set it aside and come back another time. It turns out that telemed—remote diagnosis and treatment using telecoms—is, like so many other innovations in health care, a two-edged sword. Let’s look at it and see if we can come up with provisional answers to what, exactly, it means, beyond fear of face-to-face, to see its use soaring these days.

I’ve observed telemedicine now in a number of settings—lots of testimonials from colleagues, family, friends, and in just one instance myself as patient. Most of this is quite recent, for reasons we’ll get to. I’ve never practiced it, never had time on my schedule to Zoom into some patient’s bedroom. That’s just an artifact of the timing. But I used to teach about it. And now it’s arrived like gangbusters after languishing for decades in the ever-hopeful hearts of long standing organizations (here, here) devoted in part or in full to digital medicine.

The “why” for this onrush of telemedicine exposure is an easy one. In the Before Times, we had reimbursement problems that impeded it. All the other barriers, by, say 2010, were secondary. All our clocks now have a thick black line between BC and AD. Before Coronavirus versus After Donald.

Back in the BC, we can’t get it paid for. Now, in the almost-AD: HHS rushes out new emergency regs, enabling telemed. With the pandemic, the new regs arrived just when providers, deprived of adequate PPE and in some cases a big chunk of salary, really needed the option. Whether they actually approved of it or not, different story. Necessity is the mother. All the rest is dross.

The above remarks set the stage. We just need to remind ourselves in passing: there’s just not much scientific evidence for this technology’s safety or efficacy. Rather, like so much else in digital medicine, telemed is probably here to stay because of one or another regulatory or epidemiologic crisis. Contrariwise, it’s not an evidence-based imperative, at least not with respect to clinical results. For providers, of course, it may well mean survival, a different story.

So until we get more convincing science, here, for this blog’s intrepid readers, are some narrative bits and bites to chew on: telemedicine, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

by Yves Smith, Cetona, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. This tracks with my experience these days, not just with telemedicine, but with hospitals in general (and doc-in-a-box staff that appear to want as little interaction with patients as possible). I get the sense that I'm just a billable code, their main priority being moving patients through the system).]

Winged Foot Golf Course Flyover

[ed. The US Open starts today. Expect the usual carnage.]

via:

via: lost

In America’s Blood

Twenty years ago​,​ the National Rifle Association didn’t know what to do after a mass shooting. But it now has the protocol down: it’s had, after all, plenty of practice. First: keep quiet. Cancel events and interviews, stop updating Twitter and Facebook. If cornered, say: ‘This is a time to mourn, not to play politics.’ Or: ‘The anti-gun zealots are exploiting a tragedy to advance their anti-freedom agenda.’ Meanwhile, NRA fundraisers will be trying to reach all their five million members to let them know that this time it’s serious, the liberals are coming for their guns, and they need to dig deep and donate whatever can be spared to ‘freedom’s safest place’, the NRA. On their own, the members will have already started calling politicians to demand that they not back down on gun freedom: 60 per cent of Americans, when surveyed, are in favour of stricter gun control laws, but you wouldn’t know it from a congressman’s call log. On its website, the NRA advises members not to threaten the politicians they telephone, and to be careful about identifying themselves as members of the NRA, since ‘unfortunately, many anti-gun politicians are under the misguided impression that NRA members only say what NRA tells them to say.’

What the NRA no longer does after a mass shooting is grovel before Congress, as its flustered head did after Columbine in 1999, when – was that shame? – he testified that anyone who buys a gun should have to pass a background check (he took that back a few years later), and agreed that guns shouldn’t be allowed in schools (he took that back too). With reporters, silence and deflection tend to work well enough, but if a particular mass shooting seems to be getting more attention than usual, or if even Republican allies start suggesting that maybe they’re not completely unsympathetic to ‘some common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and how’s that working out for them? More than one hundred Americans are killed every day by cars – will you outlaw cars too? Will you force women to defend themselves against murderers and rapists with knives? And she’ll quote Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s leader, who likes to say that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ In 2012, after 26 people (twenty of them six and seven-year-olds) were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he suggested that every school in America should have ‘an extraordinary corps’ of armed citizens patrolling the halls. After all, Obama’s daughters were protected with guns: ‘Are the president’s kids more important than yours?’ an NRA ad asked. In 2018, after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, LaPierre said the solution was to arm teachers. News stations followed by holding debates on whether teachers should pack heat, with federal funds allocated to shooting lessons. Never mind gun control. The next month, the NRA broke a 15-year fundraising record.

LaPierre likes to say that shooting is in America’s blood: it’s what Americans have always done, with the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our soldiers during the Civil War, appalled me.’ He assumed that Americans would eventually be drawn into a European war in which they would be outmatched, particularly against the Prussians with their superior rear-loading rifles. (...)

John F. Kennedy’s assassination was harder for the NRA to explain away: the president’s motorcade was hardly lacking in good guys with guns, and Lee Harvey Oswald had ordered his cheap Carcano infantry rifle, surplus from the Italian military, from the back pages of the NRA’s monthly magazine, American Rifleman. In response, the NRA’s then head, Franklin Orth, came out in favour of limiting mail-order gun purchases and did little to prevent the Gun Control Act of 1968, which ‘banned the interstate retail sale of guns, prohibited all sales to juveniles, convicted felons and individuals adjudicated as being mentally unsound’. It was far more anaemic than the bill that Lyndon Johnson had hoped to pass, but it enraged a faction of NRA hardliners, who would succeed in overturning the law prohibiting interstate sales. One board member, Neal Knox, argued that Kennedy’s assassination might have been the work of gun control activists trying to bring about disarmament – a commie plot to make Americans easier to subdue. The NRA split between members who bought their guns for hunting and target practice – and who wanted to move the organisation’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where they would concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won. (...)

There​ are probably 400 million ‘civilian owned’ firearms in the US, and (although there is of course no registry) 43 per cent of Americans report that they live in a home with a gun, even if they don’t own one themselves. Those numbers are going up. Anxiety about the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests have done more for gun sales than the 9/11 attacks, and even more than the election of Barack Obama and the Sandy Hook shootings, when Americans thought that guns were about to become illegal and that they needed to stock up. Not all states require that all gun purchasers undergo background checks – loopholes abound – but whenever a person does buy a gun from a licensed dealer, the FBI dutifully performs one. The checks usually take a few minutes and are hardly intrusive, but at least they can be counted. Last year, they performed 28.4 million checks; by the end of August this year, they were already at 25.9 million. (Just wait until Christmas sales are taken into account.) In January and February, according to a Brookings study, Americans were buying between 80,000 and 100,000 guns a day. In March, after Trump declared a state of emergency, it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying failed, filed lawsuits – to have gun shops classified as ‘essential businesses’, to stop them having to close during lockdowns. What could be more ‘essential’, the NRA argued, than the ability to defend your life? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, pushed back, and eventually prevailed in the courts; other Democratic governors caved in. The Republicans had needed little persuading in the first place. (...)

Trump admits that he’s been bought – ‘a lot of the people who put me where I am are strong supporters of the Second Amendment’ – and says that the best way to prevent gun violence is to build mental institutions (since ‘mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun’). But financially, Trump’s victory was a disaster for the NRA: members became complacent with an ally in the White House, and dues dropped by $35 million. (‘We have an unusual business model,’ one board member told the New York Times. ‘The more successful we are, the less money we make.’) In the midterm elections, for the first time, the NRA was outspent by gun control advocacy groups, and they’ve had layoffs. All this has made them increasingly dependent on large donations from gun manufacturers, sometimes estimated to be at least 60 per cent of their income. It’s not just American money: a quarter of the guns in the US were made in Europe, and Austrians (Glock), Germans (SIG Sauer) and Italians (Beretta) have donated millions of dollars to the NRA in order to protect their biggest market. The interests of gun sellers and gun buyers often overlap, but not always. I used to wonder why the NRA seemed to value the right to carry a concealed gun over an openly carried one, until it was pointed out to me (in Tom Diaz’s excellent book The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It) that gun manufacturers often make more money from accessories – waistband holsters, ankle holsters, jackets with special pockets, vegan leather handbags with gun compartments – than from the guns themselves.

But above all, the NRA protects its own interests. Smyth’s book only touches on the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established for the first time that Americans have a right under the Second Amendment to keep guns for self-defence in their homes. Smyth mentions that the majority opinion partly relied on the work of a legal academic who’d been on the payroll of the NRA – a canny investment. But Adam Winkler’s more comprehensive (also more engaging) book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011), offers a persuasive account of the NRA’s efforts to prevent libertarian gun rights activists from pursuing Heller all the way to the Supreme Court – not because the NRA thought they’d lose, or that another case would be stronger, but because they feared that a stunning legal victory would depress membership dues. As a former NRA lobbyist told Winkler, ‘nothing keeps the fundraising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they’re a pro-gun David facing an invincible anti-gun Goliath.’ And the NRA needed the money – not only for its voter registration drives. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that NRA executives, principally LaPierre, have been diverting ‘charitable assets for their own benefit and interests’. The lawsuit she filed in August is a 168-page chronicle of lives well lived: private jets, yachts, safaris; $12,332.75 of NRA money for LaPierre’s niece to spend eight nights at a Four Seasons resort; $16,359 for hair and make-up artists for LaPierre’s wife. A senior assistant put her son’s wedding on expenses.

by Deborah Friedell, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Why Everything Is Sold Out

All summer, I tried to buy things, and mostly I failed. I signed up for two separate wait lists for out-of-stock black spandex bike shorts, which I needed for the Peloton I had bought, itself back-ordered for two months. I also added my email address to a wait list for curtain rods, remembering how the shifting fall sun broils the kitchen table that’s now my office. When word from Bed Bath & Beyond came weeks later to let me know they were back on sale, I was too slow on the draw—they sold out about as swiftly as hand sanitizer did in March. Over the weekend, I believed I had acquired replacements for my worn-out bed linens, but my email receipt contained a confession: The sheets would arrive, at best, around Halloween.

When I asked Steve Rowen, a managing partner at the retail-analytics firm Retail Systems Research, if these inventory problems were as widespread as my personal frustrations suggested, he had to stifle a laugh before answering me: “Absolutely.” Similar problems currently dog all kinds of retailers, and they have for months. At the beginning of the pandemic, when most people assumed that things would be back to normal in weeks or months, retailers and manufacturers “weren’t really in a hurry to shift gears and make a lot of expensive decisions,” Rowen said. “I don’t think anyone really had any indication as to how long this pandemic and its effects were going to be felt.” (...)

Since millions of Americans started spending a lot more time at home, many of them have been making very similar decisions about how to do so comfortably. According to Rowen, that has helped create supply issues in all sorts of categories: food, cleaning products, medication, exercise equipment, outdoor gear, furniture and home decor, renovation supplies, home electronics, office supplies, loungewear, and beyond. At the start of the year, no one could know that standing desks and kiddie pools would become hot commodities. But this far into the pandemic, shortages aren’t persisting only because of what’s suddenly trendy.

To understand why you still can’t find your preferred migraine medication or your usual brand of dog food, you have to start with where those products begin: manufacturing. Long before most Americans had a hint of the disaster to come, the inventory of many products began to thin behind the scenes. The United States imported more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of products from China in 2018, about 20 percent of the country’s total annual imports. When China went into lockdown in late January to stanch the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s enormous manufacturing sector screeched to a halt. That paralyzed the flow of all kinds of things into the United States—strollers, gym clothes, Nintendo Switch consoles, and crucial components for products assembled in other countries, such as textiles for clothing and parts for cellphones and computers. When those components disappeared, some assembly lines in countries such as Vietnam and South Korea went idle, compounding the crisis in the U.S.

Brands and retailers that relied on imports from China or elsewhere in Asia began considering suppliers in Latin America, Europe, or the U.S. to pick up the slack. But as those searches got under way, the coronavirus spread to more countries, shutting down many manufacturing facilities around the world, at least temporarily.

Then, having controlled the coronavirus, Chinese manufacturing rebounded. “As soon as China was up and running, and the United States’ manufacturing facilities weren’t, we started importing more goods from China than ever before,” Rowen said. But an elevated reliance on things produced half a world away comes with some risks. Goods make their way from Asia to the U.S. on massive cargo ships, and the shipping industry is barrelling toward a labor crisis: Hundreds of thousands of workers are currently stranded at sea because their home countries’ pandemic travel restrictions prevent them from coming ashore. Abandoning them on ships threatens to collapse global shipping by exhausting and abusing workers currently at sea while driving those waiting for work to other industries. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—which supplies the remaining 80 percent of imported goods sold in the U.S.—has yet to return to full manufacturing capacity.

No matter where a product is made, it has to be packaged before it can be shipped or stocked on a shelf, creating yet another obstacle. Plastic bottles and pouches, cardboard boxes, and aluminum cans all have to be manufactured too, and often with expensive machinery that can make only a very specific type of bag or bottle. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you make if you don’t have the right thing to put it in. The consumer supply of flour is still recovering, in part because mills spent months fighting over a finite supply of the small paper sacks it’s packaged in. There was always plenty of flour, but someone baking sourdough for the first time doesn’t want one of the giant bags that typically get sent to restaurants.

Once products are manufactured, packaged, and imported, they still have to be distributed to warehouses and stores, which has become its own bottleneck. The pandemic has made long-haul trucking more dangerous and difficult—in the spring, truckers lacked protective gear and sanitizing equipment, and many of the places where they’d normally get a night’s rest or a hot meal had closed due to lockdowns. Since then, demand for truckers’ services has surged along with demand for certain types of products, and some trucking companies have capitalized on it by switching on short notice to routes that pay better, adding even more chaos to the scramble to get sought-after products onto shelves. Even when items make it onto a truck, more slowdowns await: More trucks are arriving than warehouses and stores usually deal with, and they have only so many loading docks and so many hours in a day.

by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Australian Football League: What Is It?

[ed. My buddy was telling me about this and it sounded crazy. It is.]

Kolea: Relieve The Pandemic Blues By Counting Pacific Plovers

It is comforting to know that at least one beautiful and much anticipated event has not been cancelled because of the virus: the annual arrival of the Pacific golden plovers, known here as kolea.

And this year there is something new: residents are invited to join Hawaii’s first all-volunteer, statewide kolea count.

Since walking is one of the few activities many people do these days, counting kolea is an opportunity to add variety and purpose to daily strolls.

Marine life writer Susan Scott says, “The count is something positive during the COVID era. It gets you out of the house. You can do it by yourself and it offers a chance to build your awareness of these remarkable birds.”

The kolea — one of the longest nonstop migratory species in the world — normally begin arriving in the islands in July-August after their 3,000-mile nonstop, four-day flight from the tundra in western Alaska.

They are here now, hopping around in parks, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, any place there’s a grassy expanse, even on backyard lawns.

Each bird faithfully returns to the same place each year, fighting off other birds that dare to enter its territory.

The kolea reside in Hawaii for eight months each year before flying back to Alaska in late April-early May for their breeding and chick-raising season.

Hawaii Audubon Society is sponsoring the kolea count, hoping to collect data over the next 10 years on how many kolea arrive here annually, where they hang out and how long they stay. (...)

Interested counters can sign up for either a big count or a little count.

Residents interested in the little count will be responsible for recording the one or two kolea in their home gardens, church lawns and small parks.

People who register to do the big count will be tallying birds in large areas including cemeteries, large parks, athletic fields and school and college campuses and golf courses. (...)

Counters of both the little and big areas are asked to answer just four questions: How many kolea are in the area? When do the kolea in that area arrive? When do they leave for Alaska? How many remain in Hawaii through the summer?

Scott says many people interested in doing little counts are already checking in with information about what they call “their kolea,” the plovers who have been coming to their yards year after year.

Many households have given the kolea on their lawns names and taken to feeding them everything from mealworms they purchase at pet stores to small portions of scrambled eggs.

Scott says the protein and fat in chicken eggs is an acceptable snack for the plovers, which spend their days in Hawaii fattening up on worms and insects for the rigors of their return flight to Alaska.

While they are here, they almost double their weight from 4 to 7 ounces for their flights north. (...)

Kolea are a native species that has been in the Hawaiian Islands for more than 100,000 years according to fossil records.

Scott says they are remarkable in their readiness to adapt to modern day living, many not being afraid of cars or noise and loving such innovations as mini golf courses where they find it easier to catch insects crawling across the AstroTurf.

by Denby Fawcett, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Susan Scott
[ed. This is great. We used to have a pair that returned to our front yard for years.]

George Benson (feat. Earl Klugh)

I Appreciate Your Concern, But Our Enormous Wedding Was Socially Distanced

After I posted photos from Jared and my beautiful wedding weekend on Instagram, many of you expressed concern. You saw photos of 300 guests gathering and celebrating during a pandemic and commented things like, “Where are the masks?” and “Haven’t you heard of COVID-19?” and “What is wrong with you?” But I assure you, we took every precaution to ensure the safety of our guests and that we didn’t have to move our wedding date.

The fact is, the handful of our gorgeous photos that I shared don’t tell the whole story. For example, most of the wedding was outdoors, except for the ceremony and reception. Everyone wore masks during the entire event, except for the dinner, speeches, and dancing. And everyone was socially distanced, except for the transportation to and from the event, the event itself, and the after-party. Jared and I took the health and safety of our guests very seriously, and it was our first priority in planning our wedding and not moving it.

I know it might seem crazy to have a party right now, but honestly, the guest list was just family and friends, and co-workers, and random acquaintances we invited to fill the room, and we all know that that’s totally fine. Technically, all of our guests are in a quarantine pod with us, so there’s no need to worry. Some of you asked, “But what about the catering staff?” I appreciate your concern, but they were super clean about everything. Our wedding was probably no more dangerous than two people going out to eat. Just multiply that by a few hundred, and don’t even think about asking me to move my wedding date. (...)

A lot of you also had issues with the bubbles we handed out to our guests to blow at us when we exited the ceremony. I totally understand your worries since COVID is spread through air particles, but what you didn’t realize is that we asked people not to come if they were feeling sick, so everyone there was really healthy. We would never want to put our guests at risk, or have to find another date for our venue.

Another photo that seemed to upset a lot of you was of Jared and me blowing out the candles and stuffing each other’s mouths with wedding cake. You left comments like, “Gross” and “Are you crazy?” and “Who even has candles on a wedding cake?” But Jared and I were both tested the day before the wedding, so it really isn’t a big deal. We look forward to getting our results any day now, and to not having to plan a 2021 wedding with everyone else.

by Liz Galvao, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: McSweeny's

Abolish the Senate

Abolish the Senate (The Baffler)

Image: Brandon Celi

[ed. How about just ending the filibuster and electoral college as a start.]

West Coast Has Worst Air Quality on Earth

The West Coast has the worst air quality on Earth right now, as nearly 100 active wildfires — including three of California's four biggest ever recorded — spew smoke.

Particulate matter from the smoke has made the air unhealthy to breathe all along the coast, as this map from air-quality monitoring company PurpleAir shows.

The numbers in the colored circles indicate the air quality index (AQI) detected by various monitoring sensors across the country. AQI is a metric measuring the level of pollutants in the air and how hazardous those levels are to human health, as determined by guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.

A higher AQI indicates more pollutants in the air and a greater health hazard. The EPA considers any AQI above 150 to be unhealthy for all people. Anything above 300 is considered a "health warning of emergency conditions."

The EPA does not make recommendations for AQI levels above 500, since they're "beyond index."

But PurpleAir's monitors around Salem, Oregon, reported AQIs as high as 758 on Friday morning.

by Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Yahoo News/Insider | Read more:
Image: PurpleAir

George Snyder - digital collage
via:

Two Feet

Golf Courses Emerge as a Fix for L.A.’s Affordable Housing Crisis

Golf Courses Emerge as a Fix for L.A.’s Affordable Housing Crisis (City Lab/Bloomberg)

Image: Bryan Chan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

[ed. No.]

Guitars Are Back, Baby!

Not so long ago, things didn’t look so great for the guitar, that global symbol of youthful freedom and rebellion for 70 years running.

With hip-hop and Beyoncé-style spectacle pop supposedly owning the hearts and wallets of millennials and Generation Z — and so many 20th-century guitar deities either dead (Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain) or soloing into their 70s (Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page) — electric guitar sales had skidded by about one-third in the decade since 2007, according to Music Trades, a research organization that tracks industry data.

Gibson guitars, whose celebrated Les Paul line had helped put the Led in Zeppelin, was sliding toward bankruptcy.

All of this was enough for The Washington Post to declare the “slow, secret death of the six-string electric” in 2017. That same year, even Mr. Clapton himself, known simply as “God” to devotees more than half a century ago, sounded ready to spread the ashes. “Maybe,” he mused at a 2017 news conference for the documentary “Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars,” “the guitar is over.”

Hold the obituaries.

A half-year into a pandemic that has threatened to sink entire industries, people are turning to the guitar as a quarantine companion and psychological salve, spurring a surge in sales for some of the most storied companies (Fender, Gibson, Martin, Taylor) that has shocked even industry veterans.

“I would never have predicted that we would be looking at having a record year,” said Andy Mooney, the chief executive of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, the Los Angeles-based guitar giant that has equipped Rock & Roll Hall of Famers since Buddy Holly strapped on a 1954 sunburst Fender Stratocaster back in the tail-fin 1950s.

“We’ve broken so many records,” Mr. Mooney said. “It will be the biggest year of sales volume in Fender history, record days of double-digit growth, e-commerce sales and beginner gear sales. I never would have thought we would be where we are today if you asked me back in March.”

It’s not just graying baby boomer men looking to live out one last Peter Frampton fantasy. Young adults and teenagers, many of them female, are helping to power this guitar revival, manufacturers and retailers said, putting their own generational stamp on the instrument that rocked their parents’ generation while also discovering the powers of six-string therapy.

Playing Away the Blues

It all started with a collective breaking point, according to Jensen Trani, a guitar instructor in Los Angeles whose thousands of instructional videos on YouTube, he estimated, have attracted some 75 million views over the past 14 years.

“There was this point with my students where I could tell that numbing out on Netflix and Instagram and Facebook was just not working anymore,” Mr. Trani, 38, said. “People could no longer go to their usual coping mechanisms. They were saying, ‘How do I want to spend my day?’”

For many, apparently, the answer was “strumming.” (...)

Nearly 20 percent of the newcomers were under 24, and 70 percent were under 45, the company reported. Female users accounted for 45 percent of the new wave, compared with 30 percent before the pandemic.

In a narrow sense, the surge made sense. Prospective players who had never quite found the time to take up an instrument suddenly had little excuse not to. As James Curleigh, the chief executive of Gibson Brands, put it: “In a world of digital acceleration, time is always your enemy. All of a sudden time became your friend.”

But there was more to it, Mr. Trani said. Many newcomers to the instrument seemed to be looking for an oasis of calm in a turbulent world. “There is,” he said, “this sense of learning how to sit with yourself.” (...)

Guitars are hardly the only consumer item to experience a quarantine bounce, of course. Sales have spiked for many items since lockdowns began — bicycles, baking yeast, board games, yoga mats, beans and even Everclear, the 190-proof spirit.

But a guitar is not a bag of lentils. A new guitar usually requires an investment of several hundred dollars, if not several thousand, and new players and virtuosos alike often live with their trusty ax for years, bonding with it as a statement of personal taste and style.

It’s what economists would call a “discretionary” purchase, the sort of nonessential consumer item that is usually the last thing one might buy when the economy is plunging and unemployment is skyrocketing. Throw in monthslong factory closures for manufacturers and a virtual disappearance of brick-and-mortar retailers, and the situation seemed nearly apocalyptic.

“I figured that this is one of those business-falls-off a-cliff situations,” said Chris Martin, the chief executive of C.F. Martin & Co., the 187-year-old manufacturer of acoustic guitars that has supplied contemporary stars like John Mayer and Ed Sheeran, as well as legends like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and some guy named Elvis, over decades. “We’ll pick up the pieces and put the company back together whenever.”

But after a “terrible” March, with revenues 40 percent below normal, business roared back.

“It’s crazy,” said Mr. Martin, the sixth-generation Martin to run the company. “It’s unbelievable the demand there is right now for acoustic guitars. I’ve been through guitar booms before, but this one caught me completely by surprise.”

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Fender

Why Goodreads is Bad for Books

On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world’s largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they’re losing their mind. After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them. Sometimes even checking what they’ve already read will be next to impossible. Across a huge range of reading habits and preferences, this the one thing that unites millions of Goodreads users: that Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable.

There should be nothing in the world more benign than Goodreads, a website and app that 90 million people around the world use to find new books, track their reading, and attempt to meet people with similar tastes. For almost 15 years, it has been the dominant platform for readers to rate books and find recommendations. But many of the internet’s most dedicated readers now wish they could share their enthusiasm for books elsewhere. What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster.

Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler say they initially launched the platform in 2007 to get recommendations from their literary friends. But it was something many others wanted, too: by 2013, the site had swelled to 15 million users. That year Goodreads it was bought by Amazon, an acquisition Wired magazine called “quaint”, given Amazon’s roots in bookselling before it became the store that sold everything. Even then, many Goodreads users already felt stung by the tech giant which had, a year earlier, changed the terms of its huge books dataset (which Goodreads used to identify titles). Goodreads had been forced to move to a different data source, called Ingram; the move caused users to lose large amounts of their reading records.

Most stuck with it, however – not because of the platform itself, but because of its community. Writing in the Atlantic in 2012, Sarah Fay called Goodreads “Facebook with books”, and argued that “if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own”. While newspapers mourned the decline of reading and literature, Goodreads showed that a large and growing number of people still had a real passion for books and bookshops. Thirteen years after the first Kindle was sold, printed books have more than ten times the market share of ebooks, but talking about books happens much more online. But now, for many, the utopia Goodreads was founded to create has become closer to purgatory.

Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.” (...)

With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.

In an alternate universe, we could be living with a meticulous tool for finding books we would love to read, from a much wider diversity of authors. Instead we have a book tracker that, for many people, barely works.

All this makes Goodreads an obvious target for a competitor. However, it has huge advantages over any new contenders; its megalithic books library and its tens of millions of readers give it a very comfortable position. But the discontent is quietly reaching breaking point.

by Sarah Manavis, The New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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