[ed. Insane.]
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Filibuster: Weapon of Mass Obstruction
It’s obvious that McConnell’s commitment to the filibuster is instrumental. The filibuster on executive branch nominations of appointees and federal judges was sacred — he condemned the Democrats’ use of the “nuclear option” to get rid of it in 2013 — until President Trump needed Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and then it was bye-bye to the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees that McConnell’s predecessor as Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had left intact. If the reconciliation process didn’t exist, and Republicans needed 60 votes for upper-income tax cuts, there’s almost no doubt McConnell would have killed the legislative filibuster in 2017, for the sake of his party’s signature priority.
I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy. I’m interested in his history. To make his case for the indispensable importance of the legislative filibuster, McConnell has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate. He has to create a new narrative to serve his current interests.
The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.
Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.
In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power. Legislation that deserves a debate never reaches the floor; coalitions that could form never get off the ground.
In quoting Madison, McConnell frames the filibuster as part of our constitutional inheritance. It is not. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. The Senate, like the House of Representatives, was meant to run on majority rule.
Remember, the framers had direct experience with supermajority government. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had equal representation and it took a two-thirds vote of the states for Congress to exercise its enumerated powers. Without the consent of nine states (out of 13), Congress could not enter treaties, appropriate funds or borrow money. And the bar to amendment, unanimity, was even higher. The articles were such a disaster that, rather than try to amend them, a group of influential elites decided to scrap them altogether.
For a taste of this frustration, read Alexander Hamilton in Federalist no. 22, which contains a fierce condemnation of supermajority rule as it was under the articles:
To make the Senate slow-moving and deliberative, the framers would not raise barriers to action so much as they would insulate the body from short-term democratic accountability. That meant indirect election by state legislatures, staggered terms of six years and a small membership of two senators per state. And at ratification, that is where the Senate stood: a self-consciously aristocratic body meant to check the House of Representatives and oversee the executive branch, confirming its appointments and ratifying its foreign agreements. (...)
The filibuster as we understand it developed in the 20th century. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster as a war measure after Republicans successfully filibustered a bill to arm merchant ships. Democrats obliged and created a “cloture” rule to end debate with a two-thirds vote of the chamber. In 1975, the Senate reduced that threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 votes in a 100-member body.
Throughout this time, filibusters were uncommon. It was perfectly possible for the Senate to debate, deliberate and come to consensus without the supermajority requirement McConnell and the Republican caucus have imposed on virtually all legislation since 2009.
The point of comparison for the Senate as McConnell has shaped it is the middle of the 20th century, when a conservative coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats made the chamber a graveyard of liberal legislation and social reform. Consensus didn’t matter. Power did. And it wasn’t until liberals wrested power from this coalition — in the House as well as the Senate — that they could take the initiative and begin work on an otherwise popular agenda.
There is no question the Senate is supposed to be slow, even sluggish. But it’s not supposed to be an endless bottleneck. The framers wanted stability in government, not stagnation. What we have now, with the filibuster intact, is a Senate that can barely move.
by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy. I’m interested in his history. To make his case for the indispensable importance of the legislative filibuster, McConnell has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate. He has to create a new narrative to serve his current interests.
Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.
In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power. Legislation that deserves a debate never reaches the floor; coalitions that could form never get off the ground.
In quoting Madison, McConnell frames the filibuster as part of our constitutional inheritance. It is not. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. The Senate, like the House of Representatives, was meant to run on majority rule.
Remember, the framers had direct experience with supermajority government. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had equal representation and it took a two-thirds vote of the states for Congress to exercise its enumerated powers. Without the consent of nine states (out of 13), Congress could not enter treaties, appropriate funds or borrow money. And the bar to amendment, unanimity, was even higher. The articles were such a disaster that, rather than try to amend them, a group of influential elites decided to scrap them altogether.
For a taste of this frustration, read Alexander Hamilton in Federalist no. 22, which contains a fierce condemnation of supermajority rule as it was under the articles:
The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching toward it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.Hamilton is especially angry with the effect of the supermajority requirement on governance.
In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.Delegates to the constitutional convention considered and rejected supermajority requirements for navigation acts (concerning ships and shipping), regulation of interstate commerce and the raising of armies. Majorities would have the final say everywhere except for treaties, amendments and conviction in an impeachment trial.
To make the Senate slow-moving and deliberative, the framers would not raise barriers to action so much as they would insulate the body from short-term democratic accountability. That meant indirect election by state legislatures, staggered terms of six years and a small membership of two senators per state. And at ratification, that is where the Senate stood: a self-consciously aristocratic body meant to check the House of Representatives and oversee the executive branch, confirming its appointments and ratifying its foreign agreements. (...)
The filibuster as we understand it developed in the 20th century. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster as a war measure after Republicans successfully filibustered a bill to arm merchant ships. Democrats obliged and created a “cloture” rule to end debate with a two-thirds vote of the chamber. In 1975, the Senate reduced that threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 votes in a 100-member body.
Throughout this time, filibusters were uncommon. It was perfectly possible for the Senate to debate, deliberate and come to consensus without the supermajority requirement McConnell and the Republican caucus have imposed on virtually all legislation since 2009.
The point of comparison for the Senate as McConnell has shaped it is the middle of the 20th century, when a conservative coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats made the chamber a graveyard of liberal legislation and social reform. Consensus didn’t matter. Power did. And it wasn’t until liberals wrested power from this coalition — in the House as well as the Senate — that they could take the initiative and begin work on an otherwise popular agenda.
There is no question the Senate is supposed to be slow, even sluggish. But it’s not supposed to be an endless bottleneck. The framers wanted stability in government, not stagnation. What we have now, with the filibuster intact, is a Senate that can barely move.
Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Friday, January 29, 2021
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.
I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.
In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.
The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.
The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
We live in the digital century during the formative years of information civilization. Our time is comparable to the early era of industrialization, when owners had all the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations. The intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.
This past year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. (...)
The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos
To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.
In a leaked memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what engages you.
I’m homing in now on Facebook not because it’s the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it’s the largest social media company and its consequences reach farthest.
The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.
[ed. Remember, paywall advice.]
I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.
The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.
The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
We live in the digital century during the formative years of information civilization. Our time is comparable to the early era of industrialization, when owners had all the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations. The intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.
This past year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. (...)
The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos
To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.
In a leaked memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what engages you.
I’m homing in now on Facebook not because it’s the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it’s the largest social media company and its consequences reach farthest.
The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.
Miley Cyrus
[ed. Don't judge. The girl can sing and really seems be coming into her own these days (probably teach a Master class in marketing in her spare time).]
The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship
American culture does not have many words to describe different levels or types of friendship, but for our purposes, sociology does provide a useful concept: weak ties. The term was coined in 1973 by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, and it comprises acquaintances, people you see infrequently, and near strangers with whom you share some familiarity. They’re the people on the periphery of your life—the guy who’s always at the gym at the same time as you, the barista who starts making your usual order while you’re still at the back of the line, the co-worker from another department with whom you make small talk on the elevator. They’re also people you might have never directly met, but you share something important in common—you go to the same concerts, or live in the same neighborhood and frequent the same local businesses. You might not consider all of your weak ties friends, at least in the common use of the word, but they’re often people with whom you’re friendly. Most people are familiar with the idea of an inner circle; Granovetter posited that we also have an outer circle, vital to our social health in its own ways.
During the past year, it’s often felt like the pandemic has come for all but the closest of my close ties. There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel. Sometimes we respond to each other’s Instagram Stories.
None of the experts I spoke with had a good term for this kind of middle ground—the weaker points of Granovetter’s proposed inner circle and the strongest of the weak ties—except for the general one. “Friend is a very promiscuous word,” William Rawlins, a communications professor at Ohio University who studies friendship, told me. “Do we have a word for this array of friends that aren’t our close friends? I’m not sure we do, and I’m not sure we should.” (...)
Friends are sometimes delineated by the ways we met or the things we do together—work friends, old college buddies, beer-league-softball teammates—but they’re all friends, and Rawlins thinks that’s for the best. “Living well isn’t some cloistered retreat with just a few folks,” he told me. “The way worlds are created is by people sharing with and recognizing each other.” Many different kinds of relationships are important, he says, and man does not thrive on close friendships alone.
This realization, new to me, is also somewhat new in the general understanding of human behavior. Close relationships were long thought to be the essential component of humans’ social well-being, but Granovetter’s research led him to a conclusion that was at the time groundbreaking and is still, to many people, counterintuitive: Casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to well-being as family, romantic partners, and your closest friends. In his initial study, for example, he found that the majority of people who got new jobs through social connections did so through people on the periphery of their lives, not close relations.
Some of the most obvious consequences of our extended social pause could indeed play out in the professional realm. I started hearing these concerns months ago, while writing a story on how working from home affects people’s careers. According to the experts I spoke with, losing the incidental, repeated social interactions that physical workplaces foster can make it especially difficult for young people and new hires to establish themselves within the complex social hierarchy of a workplace. Losing them can make it harder to progress in work as a whole, access development opportunities, and be recognized for your contributions. (After all, no one can see you or what you’re doing.) These kinds of setbacks early in professional life can be especially devastating, because the losses tend to compound—fall behind right out of the gate, and you’re more likely to stay there.
The loss of these interactions can make the day-to-day realities of work more frustrating, too, and can fray previously pleasant relationships. In a recent study, Andrew Guydish, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, looked at the effects of what he calls conversational reciprocity—how much each participant in a conversation talks while one is directing the other to complete a task. He found that in these situations—which often crop up between managers and employees at work—pairs of people tended to use unstructured time, if it were available, to balance the interaction. When that happened, both people reported feeling happier and more satisfied afterward.
Now Guydish worries that reciprocity has been largely lost. “Zoom calls usually have a very defined goal, and with that goal comes defined expectations in terms of who’s going to talk,” he told me. “Other people sit by, and they don’t get their opportunity to give their two cents. That kind of just leaves everybody with this overwhelming sense of almost isolation, in a way.”
This loss of reciprocity has extended to nondigital life. For example, friendly chats between customers and delivery guys, bartenders, or other service workers are rarer in a world of contactless delivery and curbside pickup. In normal times, those brief encounters tend to be good for tips and Yelp reviews, and they give otherwise rote interactions a more pleasant, human texture for both parties. Strip out the humanity, and there’s nothing but the transaction left.
The psychological effects of losing all but our closest ties can be profound. Peripheral connections tether us to the world at large; without them, people sink into the compounding sameness of closed networks. Regular interaction with people outside our inner circle “just makes us feel more like part of a community, or part of something bigger,” Gillian Sandstrom, a social psychologist at the University of Essex, told me. People on the peripheries of our lives introduce us to new ideas, new information, new opportunities, and other new people. If variety is the spice of life, these relationships are the conduit for it.
During the past year, it’s often felt like the pandemic has come for all but the closest of my close ties. There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel. Sometimes we respond to each other’s Instagram Stories.
Friends are sometimes delineated by the ways we met or the things we do together—work friends, old college buddies, beer-league-softball teammates—but they’re all friends, and Rawlins thinks that’s for the best. “Living well isn’t some cloistered retreat with just a few folks,” he told me. “The way worlds are created is by people sharing with and recognizing each other.” Many different kinds of relationships are important, he says, and man does not thrive on close friendships alone.
This realization, new to me, is also somewhat new in the general understanding of human behavior. Close relationships were long thought to be the essential component of humans’ social well-being, but Granovetter’s research led him to a conclusion that was at the time groundbreaking and is still, to many people, counterintuitive: Casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to well-being as family, romantic partners, and your closest friends. In his initial study, for example, he found that the majority of people who got new jobs through social connections did so through people on the periphery of their lives, not close relations.
Some of the most obvious consequences of our extended social pause could indeed play out in the professional realm. I started hearing these concerns months ago, while writing a story on how working from home affects people’s careers. According to the experts I spoke with, losing the incidental, repeated social interactions that physical workplaces foster can make it especially difficult for young people and new hires to establish themselves within the complex social hierarchy of a workplace. Losing them can make it harder to progress in work as a whole, access development opportunities, and be recognized for your contributions. (After all, no one can see you or what you’re doing.) These kinds of setbacks early in professional life can be especially devastating, because the losses tend to compound—fall behind right out of the gate, and you’re more likely to stay there.
The loss of these interactions can make the day-to-day realities of work more frustrating, too, and can fray previously pleasant relationships. In a recent study, Andrew Guydish, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, looked at the effects of what he calls conversational reciprocity—how much each participant in a conversation talks while one is directing the other to complete a task. He found that in these situations—which often crop up between managers and employees at work—pairs of people tended to use unstructured time, if it were available, to balance the interaction. When that happened, both people reported feeling happier and more satisfied afterward.
Now Guydish worries that reciprocity has been largely lost. “Zoom calls usually have a very defined goal, and with that goal comes defined expectations in terms of who’s going to talk,” he told me. “Other people sit by, and they don’t get their opportunity to give their two cents. That kind of just leaves everybody with this overwhelming sense of almost isolation, in a way.”
This loss of reciprocity has extended to nondigital life. For example, friendly chats between customers and delivery guys, bartenders, or other service workers are rarer in a world of contactless delivery and curbside pickup. In normal times, those brief encounters tend to be good for tips and Yelp reviews, and they give otherwise rote interactions a more pleasant, human texture for both parties. Strip out the humanity, and there’s nothing but the transaction left.
The psychological effects of losing all but our closest ties can be profound. Peripheral connections tether us to the world at large; without them, people sink into the compounding sameness of closed networks. Regular interaction with people outside our inner circle “just makes us feel more like part of a community, or part of something bigger,” Gillian Sandstrom, a social psychologist at the University of Essex, told me. People on the peripheries of our lives introduce us to new ideas, new information, new opportunities, and other new people. If variety is the spice of life, these relationships are the conduit for it.
by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Valerie Chiang
Hawaii's Food System is Broken. Now is the Time to Fix It
Kalany Omengkar
Image: via:Hawaii’s Food System Is Broken. Now Is The Time To Fix It (Honolulu Civil Beat)
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Precedent and the Conservative Court
In the spring of 2019, the Supreme Court's new majority, which by then included two Trump appointees, overturned one of the Court's decades-old precedents. In Nevada v. Hall, decided in 1979, the Court had ruled one state could not claim sovereign immunity in another state's courts. The Court's 2019 majority, in an opinion authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, concluded that Hall had misread the historical record and that its rule had survived as an outlier.
For Justice Stephen Breyer, who was in the minority, this rationale was not enough. "[J]udges may be tempted to seize every opportunity to overrule cases they believe to have been wrongly decided," he wrote, "[b]ut the law can retain the necessary stability only if this Court resists that temptation." He ended on a foreboding note: "Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next." (...)
Indeed, by historical standards, the Roberts Court has been remarkably unwilling to overturn past decisions. The Warren and Burger Courts overturned an average of four Supreme Court precedents each term. Even when counting some of its more perplexing statements as overrulings — including declarations that "the court of history" had overruled the 1944 decision of Korematsu v. United States and that the 1896 ruling of Ward v. Race Horse had been "methodically repudiated" — the Roberts Court has overturned, on average, a little over one decision per term.
More recently, some signs have emerged of the Court's increasing readiness to overturn precedent. Since Justice Gorsuch joined the Court in 2017, the average is up to three overrulings per term. The appointment of Gorsuch, along with those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have and will continue to shift the intellectual makeup of the Court.
The recent overrulings have provided an opportunity for the justices to reason about the nature and authority of judicial precedent. To the nation's great benefit, several justices in the conservative majority have forthrightly described the conditions under which they would vote to overrule precedent. By publicly elaborating criteria for overruling past decisions, these justices have provided a way for the governed to hold them accountable to a neutral set of principles. They also offer some valuable clues as to which way the Court's new majority may be headed and the internal divisions that may characterize it. More important still, their discussions illuminate the role and the limits of judicial authority in our constitutional system.
The Precedent Debates
The Court's deference to its own precedents under the doctrine of stare decisis serves many important functions. It pushes the justices to learn from past example. It allows justices who disagree strongly about fundamental interpretive questions to find points of agreement. While the originalist and the living constitutionalist may disagree about the Constitution, precedent allows each to recognize that, as a factual matter, the Court has decided a given constitutional question before and then permits them to agree to let it stand. Perhaps most important, precedent is good for public faith in the Court as a court of law. If changes in the makeup of the Court caused a sea change in the law, the Court would increasingly resemble a legislature, weakening the case for its independence from electoral politics.
It is an old joke, though, that stare decisis is Latin for "stand by things decided when it suits our purposes." Every justice believes some opinions must be overruled some of the time — the question is which ones those are. For this reason, Justice Breyer's contention that stare decisis is essential because it constrains judges from deciding cases based on the vagaries of preference may be exactly wrong. A judge who believes a past decision was erroneous as law the day it was decided but likes the decision as policy would find that stare decisis enables him to reach his preferred result and uphold the past decision. The norm of adherence to precedent may therefore expand, not constrain, judicial discretion. What is needed to constrain judicial caprice, then, is not the call of mere stare decisis, but rather a clear, cross-cutting test for when precedent constrains a judge — and, equally significant, when it does not.
by Jeremy Rozansky, National Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
For Justice Stephen Breyer, who was in the minority, this rationale was not enough. "[J]udges may be tempted to seize every opportunity to overrule cases they believe to have been wrongly decided," he wrote, "[b]ut the law can retain the necessary stability only if this Court resists that temptation." He ended on a foreboding note: "Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next." (...)
More recently, some signs have emerged of the Court's increasing readiness to overturn precedent. Since Justice Gorsuch joined the Court in 2017, the average is up to three overrulings per term. The appointment of Gorsuch, along with those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have and will continue to shift the intellectual makeup of the Court.
The recent overrulings have provided an opportunity for the justices to reason about the nature and authority of judicial precedent. To the nation's great benefit, several justices in the conservative majority have forthrightly described the conditions under which they would vote to overrule precedent. By publicly elaborating criteria for overruling past decisions, these justices have provided a way for the governed to hold them accountable to a neutral set of principles. They also offer some valuable clues as to which way the Court's new majority may be headed and the internal divisions that may characterize it. More important still, their discussions illuminate the role and the limits of judicial authority in our constitutional system.
The Precedent Debates
The Court's deference to its own precedents under the doctrine of stare decisis serves many important functions. It pushes the justices to learn from past example. It allows justices who disagree strongly about fundamental interpretive questions to find points of agreement. While the originalist and the living constitutionalist may disagree about the Constitution, precedent allows each to recognize that, as a factual matter, the Court has decided a given constitutional question before and then permits them to agree to let it stand. Perhaps most important, precedent is good for public faith in the Court as a court of law. If changes in the makeup of the Court caused a sea change in the law, the Court would increasingly resemble a legislature, weakening the case for its independence from electoral politics.
It is an old joke, though, that stare decisis is Latin for "stand by things decided when it suits our purposes." Every justice believes some opinions must be overruled some of the time — the question is which ones those are. For this reason, Justice Breyer's contention that stare decisis is essential because it constrains judges from deciding cases based on the vagaries of preference may be exactly wrong. A judge who believes a past decision was erroneous as law the day it was decided but likes the decision as policy would find that stare decisis enables him to reach his preferred result and uphold the past decision. The norm of adherence to precedent may therefore expand, not constrain, judicial discretion. What is needed to constrain judicial caprice, then, is not the call of mere stare decisis, but rather a clear, cross-cutting test for when precedent constrains a judge — and, equally significant, when it does not.
by Jeremy Rozansky, National Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Telework's Tax Mess
Why it matters: Our tax laws aren't built for telecommuting, and this new way of working could have dire implications for city and state budgets.
The backdrop: By and large, Americans owe income taxes where they work, Rueben notes.
- "There’s gonna be a shakeout of what economic activity looks like and where it’s going to get done, and that’s going to require cities to rethink what their tax base looks like," says Kim Rueben of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
- Here's a good example: Professional baseball players owe tax money in the states where their away games take place.
- So if a New Hampshire resident is commuting to a Massachusetts-based company, that person will pay taxes to Massachusetts.
The pandemic upended that system. Now, that same New Hampshire resident is following stay-at-home orders and working from home every day. So does that worker owe Massachusetts any tax money?
- If the worker is only commuting four out of five days a week, they'll owe Massachusetts taxes on four-fifths of their income, says Rueben.
It's a huge question that has reached the Supreme Court.
- New Hampshire, which doesn't have an income tax, is suing Massachusetts for asking telecommuters to pay income taxes on work completed outside of Massachusetts.
The big picture: The pandemic has exposed our tax laws' inability to handle remote work at scale — which is sure to be a permanent side effect of this time period.
- But Massachusetts is saying that work would have been done within its state if not for the pandemic and is asking out-of-state commuters to pay taxes on the days they would have come to the office. (...)
- Even if people choose not to work from home 100% of the time, many will cut down the number of days in the office. That means they may move out of expensive cities and spend less time at local businesses.
- So in addition to potential income tax revenue loss, cities may see diminished property and sales tax revenue, too, says Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs site Indeed.
Image: Annelise Capossela/Axios
The Face of the NYSE
Image: AFP
[ed. This guy. In nearly every photo of the NY Stock Exchange and across a wide range of financial articles, you can't escape him. It finally ocurred to me to do a Google search to see if I was hallucinating, and, out to curiosity, determine if he really is a trader and not just some character actor (he is a trader). But...]The irony is that even as human traders have been de-emphasised at exchanges due to the rise of electronic trading, the need for photos of them remains stronger than ever. Every markets article on a website needs some kind of image. But these days there are only 375 trading-firm employees on the floor of the exchange, according to a spokeswoman for NYSE, which is part of Intercontinental Exchange. In the 1990s, such employees numbered in the thousands.
That lack of activity on the floor has led some news organizations to believe that all the action shots of traders are misleading. In 2014, Jeremy Olshan, editor in chief of MarketWatch, a Wall Street Journal sister website, banned photos of the NYSE floor for that reason. “The Big Board,” he explained then, “is now little more than a Big Tent for a phony media circus of photo-ops and cable-news talking heads.” The ban remains in effect today.
Gamestop and the Revenge of the Retail Trader
Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, and AMC shares opened up 300%, extending a run that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent gains appear soft and weak.
Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking the infrastructure, access, and information that professionals enjoy. Hell, most professional fund managers that regular folks can invest in fail to beat the market. That’s one reason why index funds and other passive investments that merely track aggregate performance have grown so much in recent years; why pay more to have someone make you less money than simply making the same returns as the S&P 500?
Things have changed some in recent years. Robinhood blew up the trading fee economy, and now along with a host of similar companies — Public.com with its social focus, Freetrade in the UK, and so forth — has made retail investing far more accessible than it was before to more folks. And we’re all trapped inside. And a rude, jokey Reddit forum has gone from in-nerd joke to front-page news after its users started to push their weight around.
It’s an old saw that back in the dotcom boom traders would congregate in chat rooms to share tips, lie to each other, and try to pump their own equities higher. That all still happens. But what has changed is that the combination of mature social platforms and free trading has at once boosted access to the public markets while Reddit and other online congregation points have provided a simpler way for retail investors, the hoi polloi, to fuck around and make other people find out. (...)
This is what has happened with Gamestop, a company that until recently was unnotable, and stuck between a physical retail footprint, the pandemic, and its customers increasingly preferring digital game purchases. It was worth around $4 per share last summer. It started 2021 worth around $18. Now it’s $147.98 after rising 92.7% yesterday, and is up $69.02 this morning, or 46.6%.
How did that happen? No, the company did not get suddenly, radically stronger in short order. Instead, a coterie of Reddit users realized that Gamestop was shorted by more than 100%. That means that investors had bet more shares than existed in the company that it would lose value.
And mostly this would have been fine, a quirk of the market; other highly-shorted stocks can see a majority of their shares sold short, but to see a short-percentage of greater than 100% was eyebrow-raising.
Then came the wager: If big investors had bet more shares than Gamestop had in existence that it would lose value, what would happen if lots of individuals investors — retail interest, as they say — started buying the stock? That might drive its value up, forcing the hedge funds and other big capital pools to decide whether to hold onto their negative bet and take strong paper losses as Gamestop rallied, or cover their short, buying the stock at a higher price than they initially paid for it, losing money. Covering shorts would require buying the stock at high prices, perhaps boosting its value yet again.
It’s the wildest short-squeeze we can recall.
There’s always tension between short-sellers and investors who prefer to make positive wagers. Indeed, shorts are generally hated and the term perma-bear, slang for someone who is chronically worried about the price of assets to the point of distraction,1 is often levied at them.
But a boom in retail investing and social platforms allowing the congregation of disparate individual investors can do quite a lot, it turns out. So, users of the WallStreetBets sub-Reddit started buying Gamestop. And they kept doing so, pushing its price higher and higher.
The result was that big money got smacked in the shorts, literally. CNBC reports that short-sellers have lost more than $5 billion so far thanks to Gamestop’s rapid appreciation on the back of becoming an internet meme.
by Alex Wilhelm, Jonathan Shieber, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: Eric BVD - Stock.Adobe.com
Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking the infrastructure, access, and information that professionals enjoy. Hell, most professional fund managers that regular folks can invest in fail to beat the market. That’s one reason why index funds and other passive investments that merely track aggregate performance have grown so much in recent years; why pay more to have someone make you less money than simply making the same returns as the S&P 500?
It’s an old saw that back in the dotcom boom traders would congregate in chat rooms to share tips, lie to each other, and try to pump their own equities higher. That all still happens. But what has changed is that the combination of mature social platforms and free trading has at once boosted access to the public markets while Reddit and other online congregation points have provided a simpler way for retail investors, the hoi polloi, to fuck around and make other people find out. (...)
This is what has happened with Gamestop, a company that until recently was unnotable, and stuck between a physical retail footprint, the pandemic, and its customers increasingly preferring digital game purchases. It was worth around $4 per share last summer. It started 2021 worth around $18. Now it’s $147.98 after rising 92.7% yesterday, and is up $69.02 this morning, or 46.6%.
How did that happen? No, the company did not get suddenly, radically stronger in short order. Instead, a coterie of Reddit users realized that Gamestop was shorted by more than 100%. That means that investors had bet more shares than existed in the company that it would lose value.
And mostly this would have been fine, a quirk of the market; other highly-shorted stocks can see a majority of their shares sold short, but to see a short-percentage of greater than 100% was eyebrow-raising.
Then came the wager: If big investors had bet more shares than Gamestop had in existence that it would lose value, what would happen if lots of individuals investors — retail interest, as they say — started buying the stock? That might drive its value up, forcing the hedge funds and other big capital pools to decide whether to hold onto their negative bet and take strong paper losses as Gamestop rallied, or cover their short, buying the stock at a higher price than they initially paid for it, losing money. Covering shorts would require buying the stock at high prices, perhaps boosting its value yet again.
It’s the wildest short-squeeze we can recall.
There’s always tension between short-sellers and investors who prefer to make positive wagers. Indeed, shorts are generally hated and the term perma-bear, slang for someone who is chronically worried about the price of assets to the point of distraction,1 is often levied at them.
But a boom in retail investing and social platforms allowing the congregation of disparate individual investors can do quite a lot, it turns out. So, users of the WallStreetBets sub-Reddit started buying Gamestop. And they kept doing so, pushing its price higher and higher.
The result was that big money got smacked in the shorts, literally. CNBC reports that short-sellers have lost more than $5 billion so far thanks to Gamestop’s rapid appreciation on the back of becoming an internet meme.
by Alex Wilhelm, Jonathan Shieber, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: Eric BVD - Stock.Adobe.com
[ed. See also: GameStop Shares Surge Afresh as Short Sellers Start to Surrender (Yahoo); and (for more than you ever wanted to know): The GameStop Game Never Stops (Bloomberg).]
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Chinese New Year
Image: Chinaculture.org
[ed. Chinese New Year 2021, Feb. 12 - Feb. 17]
What Fast Food Tells Us About the World
Can fast food explain the world? Put another way, can tracing the tentacles of the world’s biggest fast food companies inform our understanding of capitalism today?
The question is hardly a new one. In December 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously posited a “Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention,” which stated that no two countries hosting a McDonald’s had ever gone to war with each other. In those days, at the pinnacle of the contemporary global era, fast food was a near-perfect metaphor for the advance of capitalism around the world if only because it so clearly illustrated the essentially American nature of globalization. As Bill Clinton described the world to come during his inaugural January 1997 inaugural address—the starting pistol of the era, if there ever was one—“ports and airports, farms and factories will thrive with trade and innovation and ideas, and the world’s greatest democracy will lead a whole world of democracies.” Globalization was a phenomenon sustained by American-based, American-dominated rule-making groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Any nation that wished to be part of the emergent world order had to adopt not just its rules into its legal system, but incorporate the cultural values which undergirded them as well.
Today, globalization may be an inescapable human condition, but as both an economic and cultural phenomenon, it is less obviously the project of the United States or any other one country than at any time in the past 20 years. Flows of trade, finance, and cultural exchange continue to deepen, but rising uncertainty about who, if anyone, is guiding them has made following their course all the more complicated.
Yum! Brands (parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Huts) is a case in point. At the time of its spin-off from PepsiCo in 1997, 80 percent of the company’s profits came from the United States, with most of the remaining 20 percent coming from other wealthy nations like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Fifteen years later, those numbers had nearly reversed, with 70 percent of profits coming from overseas, and most of those from so-called “emerging markets.” Still-poor but fast-growing regions in Africa and Southeast Asia—the leading edge of globalization’s advance—now serve as hubs for both the sale of fast food and the production of its raw materials, while more affluent countries like China and India are treated as reliable mainstays and the United States is yesterday’s market. McDonald’s, and now even Burger King, Dairy Queen, and Dunkin’ (formerly Dunkin’ Donuts) are following a similar pattern.
For all these companies, the essential mission of selling meat cheaply and quickly, in roughly identical forms and in roughly identical settings, remains the same, but it’s one advanced by a network of local franchise partners and suppliers who have little to do with the United States. Even as patrons can recognize something essentially American in the biggest fast food chains, there is less reason than ever to call fast food the culinary front of American expansionism. Just as global capitalism is no longer an exclusively American project, fast food is no longer one, either.
Perhaps then we shouldn’t abandon the fast food metaphor of global capitalism, but revisit it. Even as a regional American phenomenon, fast food represented the last link in a chain connecting every stage of economic development, from agriculture to industry to services. As a global phenomenon, that chain connects soy fields in Brazil to poultry farms, slaughterhouses, and customers a world away. (...)
In 1987, as China emerged from a long period of isolation, KFC opened its then-largest outlet in the world in Beijing, one block from Tiananmen Square. McDonald’s followed in 1990 with a restaurant in Shenzhen before opening its own largest-in-the-world outlet in Beijing two years later. Even a few years after the Golden Arches arrived in the Chinese capital, anthropologist Yunxiang Yan observed, many Chinese considered a visit to McDonald’s a special occasion worth saving for in advance. Lower-income patrons often invited their families for the occasion and splurged on a cab to pick them up to create a more memorable experience. Tourists from distant provinces considered McDonald’s one of the essential stops on the capital circuit, and one which they were quick to boast of when they returned home. Often, Yan observed, these patrons would take their used clam shell containers and drink cups home with them as souvenirs.
To people who grew up in the United States or Europe, the idea that anyone (but adults, especially) could be so enamored with fast food might be surprising. The high cost of a fast food meal compared to the standard streetside food options in China partly explains the excitement. In the mid-1990s, a typical meal for a family of three cost one-sixth the average Chinese worker’s monthly wage, making it a luxury for most patrons. But as in Hong Kong, the experience of being in a fast food restaurant was always a bigger draw than the food itself, even for those who could afford to go multiple times per week. Chinese news during this time typically associated fast food’s success with its “atmosphere of equality and democracy,” Yan noted. Servers at McDonald’s and KFC were polite by training, and a patron ordered from the counter, facing a uniformed official as an equal. No matter who they were, patrons could expect to be treated with dignity and respect. Many went merely to experience “a moment of equality,” Yan wrote in Golden Arches East. (...)
That “moment of equality” came with a real sense of possibility—and power. In the way that a Chinese restaurant is many middle class Americans’ first encounter with a foreign culture, for Chinese people in the 1990s, a KFC or McDonald’s was a first brush not just with the United States, but with capitalism. At a time when the state provided every essential service, fast food offered Chinese people the rare chance to use their money to buy something useless but fun. And in that way, it gave people a chance to be a new kind of person—a consumer—and to be recognized as that before anything else. (...)
Global homogeneity is a feat that only a truly global company can pull off, and if only for that reason, it’s also one of the industry’s biggest selling points, particularly in developing countries where new consumers are unlikely to take such displays of international synchronicity for granted. For many of the industry’s newest loyalists in Addis Ababa, Dakar, and Astana, the idea of eating the same thing and in the same way as other people around the world is as exciting a culinary possibility as there is.
What is true for patrons is often more true for employees. In one 2005 study, sociologist Carolyn Hsu found KFC employees in the city of Harbin, China, who had given up better-paying jobs at state-run companies in the small cities of their upbringing to scrub countertops and mop floors at a fast food restaurant in the bigger city up the road. What Americans derisively called a “McJob” in the United States was, in this still under-developed corner of Asia, a chance to participate in the global economy for the first time.
“Working in a western restaurant allowed them to participate in the world of the center and cast off the taint of the periphery,” Hsu wrote. “As employees, they could participate in ‘scientific’ rationalized practices”—frying chicken in deep purpose-built machines according to exacting health standards—“meet foreigners, eavesdrop on da kuan (big shots) making deals, and taste the same food that people were eating in New York, Tokyo, and Paris.”
The question is hardly a new one. In December 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously posited a “Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention,” which stated that no two countries hosting a McDonald’s had ever gone to war with each other. In those days, at the pinnacle of the contemporary global era, fast food was a near-perfect metaphor for the advance of capitalism around the world if only because it so clearly illustrated the essentially American nature of globalization. As Bill Clinton described the world to come during his inaugural January 1997 inaugural address—the starting pistol of the era, if there ever was one—“ports and airports, farms and factories will thrive with trade and innovation and ideas, and the world’s greatest democracy will lead a whole world of democracies.” Globalization was a phenomenon sustained by American-based, American-dominated rule-making groups like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Any nation that wished to be part of the emergent world order had to adopt not just its rules into its legal system, but incorporate the cultural values which undergirded them as well.
Yum! Brands (parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Huts) is a case in point. At the time of its spin-off from PepsiCo in 1997, 80 percent of the company’s profits came from the United States, with most of the remaining 20 percent coming from other wealthy nations like Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Fifteen years later, those numbers had nearly reversed, with 70 percent of profits coming from overseas, and most of those from so-called “emerging markets.” Still-poor but fast-growing regions in Africa and Southeast Asia—the leading edge of globalization’s advance—now serve as hubs for both the sale of fast food and the production of its raw materials, while more affluent countries like China and India are treated as reliable mainstays and the United States is yesterday’s market. McDonald’s, and now even Burger King, Dairy Queen, and Dunkin’ (formerly Dunkin’ Donuts) are following a similar pattern.
For all these companies, the essential mission of selling meat cheaply and quickly, in roughly identical forms and in roughly identical settings, remains the same, but it’s one advanced by a network of local franchise partners and suppliers who have little to do with the United States. Even as patrons can recognize something essentially American in the biggest fast food chains, there is less reason than ever to call fast food the culinary front of American expansionism. Just as global capitalism is no longer an exclusively American project, fast food is no longer one, either.
Perhaps then we shouldn’t abandon the fast food metaphor of global capitalism, but revisit it. Even as a regional American phenomenon, fast food represented the last link in a chain connecting every stage of economic development, from agriculture to industry to services. As a global phenomenon, that chain connects soy fields in Brazil to poultry farms, slaughterhouses, and customers a world away. (...)
In 1987, as China emerged from a long period of isolation, KFC opened its then-largest outlet in the world in Beijing, one block from Tiananmen Square. McDonald’s followed in 1990 with a restaurant in Shenzhen before opening its own largest-in-the-world outlet in Beijing two years later. Even a few years after the Golden Arches arrived in the Chinese capital, anthropologist Yunxiang Yan observed, many Chinese considered a visit to McDonald’s a special occasion worth saving for in advance. Lower-income patrons often invited their families for the occasion and splurged on a cab to pick them up to create a more memorable experience. Tourists from distant provinces considered McDonald’s one of the essential stops on the capital circuit, and one which they were quick to boast of when they returned home. Often, Yan observed, these patrons would take their used clam shell containers and drink cups home with them as souvenirs.
To people who grew up in the United States or Europe, the idea that anyone (but adults, especially) could be so enamored with fast food might be surprising. The high cost of a fast food meal compared to the standard streetside food options in China partly explains the excitement. In the mid-1990s, a typical meal for a family of three cost one-sixth the average Chinese worker’s monthly wage, making it a luxury for most patrons. But as in Hong Kong, the experience of being in a fast food restaurant was always a bigger draw than the food itself, even for those who could afford to go multiple times per week. Chinese news during this time typically associated fast food’s success with its “atmosphere of equality and democracy,” Yan noted. Servers at McDonald’s and KFC were polite by training, and a patron ordered from the counter, facing a uniformed official as an equal. No matter who they were, patrons could expect to be treated with dignity and respect. Many went merely to experience “a moment of equality,” Yan wrote in Golden Arches East. (...)
That “moment of equality” came with a real sense of possibility—and power. In the way that a Chinese restaurant is many middle class Americans’ first encounter with a foreign culture, for Chinese people in the 1990s, a KFC or McDonald’s was a first brush not just with the United States, but with capitalism. At a time when the state provided every essential service, fast food offered Chinese people the rare chance to use their money to buy something useless but fun. And in that way, it gave people a chance to be a new kind of person—a consumer—and to be recognized as that before anything else. (...)
Global homogeneity is a feat that only a truly global company can pull off, and if only for that reason, it’s also one of the industry’s biggest selling points, particularly in developing countries where new consumers are unlikely to take such displays of international synchronicity for granted. For many of the industry’s newest loyalists in Addis Ababa, Dakar, and Astana, the idea of eating the same thing and in the same way as other people around the world is as exciting a culinary possibility as there is.
What is true for patrons is often more true for employees. In one 2005 study, sociologist Carolyn Hsu found KFC employees in the city of Harbin, China, who had given up better-paying jobs at state-run companies in the small cities of their upbringing to scrub countertops and mop floors at a fast food restaurant in the bigger city up the road. What Americans derisively called a “McJob” in the United States was, in this still under-developed corner of Asia, a chance to participate in the global economy for the first time.
“Working in a western restaurant allowed them to participate in the world of the center and cast off the taint of the periphery,” Hsu wrote. “As employees, they could participate in ‘scientific’ rationalized practices”—frying chicken in deep purpose-built machines according to exacting health standards—“meet foreigners, eavesdrop on da kuan (big shots) making deals, and taste the same food that people were eating in New York, Tokyo, and Paris.”
by Alex Park, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Second-Generation COVID Vaccines Are Coming
Six months ago, as the northern hemisphere was still battling the coronavirus pandemic’s first wave, all eyes turned to the COVID-19 vaccines in late-stage clinical trials. Now, a year after the pandemic first erupted, three COVID vaccines have been given emergency authorization by either the U.S. or U.K., as well as other countries. Two of the vaccines, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna, respectively, both employ a novel genetic technology known as mRNA. And the third is a more conventional vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca that uses a chimpanzee virus to deliver DNA for a component of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. (Russia, China and India have rolled out their own vaccines, but with the exception of a few countries, they have not been widely authorized elsewhere.)
But impressive as they are, these vaccines alone will likely not be sufficient to end the pandemic, experts say. Luckily, there are hundreds of other COVID vaccines under development—including many with new mechanisms of action—that could prove to be effective and cheaper and easier to distribute.
“I believe that this virus is going to change and that the vaccines we have approved right now are just not going to be as effective as we think they are,” says Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London. SARS-CoV-2 has already evolved several new variants—including the ones first identified in the U.K. and South Africa, which are more transmissible (though not—for now, at least—more deadly).
Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic, agrees it is far too early to think we have this virus beat. He points out that no vaccine for a coronavirus has ever been deployed in a public vaccination program. And mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s—touted by many as the future of vaccinology—have never previously been brought to market. “We don’t know what we don’t know. We have no idea what surprises we might find in a virus that we’ve only been aware of for a year,” says Poland, who co-authored an extensive review of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the Lancet last October. “And the history of vaccinology—in which I’ve been involved for four decades—is amply littered with things we thought we knew.”
What happens if somebody is vaccinated but contracts COVID anyway? Would they suffer an even worse case of illness, a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement? Or in a less dramatic scenario, what if the vaccines prevent immunized individuals from falling ill but do not prevent them from infecting others? The latter could actually worsen the pandemic if vaccinated individuals think they are safe and become asymptomatic carriers. Moreover, people worldwide display a wide range of natural immunity to the virus, so there may be a similar diversity in vaccine responses. “There are lots of booby traps that could lie in wait,” Poland says.
Furthermore, the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer have logistical issues that prevent them from being easily deployed globally. Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be stored at –70 degrees Celsius—colder than Antarctica’s average temperatures—in freezers that cost many thousands of dollars. Moderna’s can be stored at –15 degrees C, but because of freezer requirements, it still has little chance of reaching rural corners of India or Africa or poor, densely packed neighborhoods in South America. As long as vaccines are fragile, expensive and difficult to distribute, the pandemic will continue.
But by far the most important issue, Altmann says, is “durability”: how long people remain immune after vaccination. If a vaccine confers immunity for only a few months rather than many years, little progress will have been made in six months. By then we could be faced with more virulent forms of the disease swirling around the globe.
The good news, however, is that “second generation” vaccines are being developed by researchers, many of whom are working with novel techniques. “We have an embarrassment of riches,” Altmann says. “One thing that certainly hasn’t been appreciated by most people is that, on the back burner, the field of vaccinology has been steaming ahead over the past 15 years, developing a range of incredibly snazzy strategies.”
There are nearly 240 novel vaccine candidates in development, waiting in the wings for their moment. Here are a few that show the most potential.
by Zoe Cormier, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Russell Cheyne Getty Images
But impressive as they are, these vaccines alone will likely not be sufficient to end the pandemic, experts say. Luckily, there are hundreds of other COVID vaccines under development—including many with new mechanisms of action—that could prove to be effective and cheaper and easier to distribute.
Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic, agrees it is far too early to think we have this virus beat. He points out that no vaccine for a coronavirus has ever been deployed in a public vaccination program. And mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s—touted by many as the future of vaccinology—have never previously been brought to market. “We don’t know what we don’t know. We have no idea what surprises we might find in a virus that we’ve only been aware of for a year,” says Poland, who co-authored an extensive review of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the Lancet last October. “And the history of vaccinology—in which I’ve been involved for four decades—is amply littered with things we thought we knew.”
What happens if somebody is vaccinated but contracts COVID anyway? Would they suffer an even worse case of illness, a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement? Or in a less dramatic scenario, what if the vaccines prevent immunized individuals from falling ill but do not prevent them from infecting others? The latter could actually worsen the pandemic if vaccinated individuals think they are safe and become asymptomatic carriers. Moreover, people worldwide display a wide range of natural immunity to the virus, so there may be a similar diversity in vaccine responses. “There are lots of booby traps that could lie in wait,” Poland says.
Furthermore, the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer have logistical issues that prevent them from being easily deployed globally. Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be stored at –70 degrees Celsius—colder than Antarctica’s average temperatures—in freezers that cost many thousands of dollars. Moderna’s can be stored at –15 degrees C, but because of freezer requirements, it still has little chance of reaching rural corners of India or Africa or poor, densely packed neighborhoods in South America. As long as vaccines are fragile, expensive and difficult to distribute, the pandemic will continue.
But by far the most important issue, Altmann says, is “durability”: how long people remain immune after vaccination. If a vaccine confers immunity for only a few months rather than many years, little progress will have been made in six months. By then we could be faced with more virulent forms of the disease swirling around the globe.
The good news, however, is that “second generation” vaccines are being developed by researchers, many of whom are working with novel techniques. “We have an embarrassment of riches,” Altmann says. “One thing that certainly hasn’t been appreciated by most people is that, on the back burner, the field of vaccinology has been steaming ahead over the past 15 years, developing a range of incredibly snazzy strategies.”
There are nearly 240 novel vaccine candidates in development, waiting in the wings for their moment. Here are a few that show the most potential.
by Zoe Cormier, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Russell Cheyne Getty Images
Sanders: Will Use Budget Reconciliation to Pass $1.9T COVID Bill if GOP Balks
Senator Bernie Sanders said Sunday that Democrats will use budget reconciliation, a process requiring only a simple majority in the Senate, to pass President Biden‘s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package if Republicans refuse to get on board.
“We are going to use reconciliation, that is 50 votes in the Senate plus the vice president, to pass legislation desperately needed by working families in this country right now,” Sanders told CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union.
The Vermont independent, who is the incoming Budget Committee chairman, noted that Republicans used budget reconciliation to bypass the typical 60-vote threshold when approving the Trump administration’s tax reform bill as well as during a failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“You did it, we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna do it to protect ordinary people, not just the rich and the powerful,” he said.
Asked about his criticism of Republicans for using the same tactic to lower the vote threshold on major pieces of legislation, Sanders acknowledged his previous opposition but emphasized the urgency of providing pandemic relief to Americans, saying they cannot wait “weeks and weeks and months and months to go forward.”
“Yes, I did criticize them for that. And if they want to criticize me for helping to feed children who are hungry or senior citizens in this country who are isolated and alone and don’t have enough food, they can criticize me,” Sanders said.
Sanders also addressed the internet sensation that is his inauguration outfit, saying that he has turned the viral meme into a charitable opportunity and expects to raise more than $1 million for Meals on Wheels Vermont, a charity that serves the state’s elderly and homebound.
by Mairead McArdle, Yahoo News | Read more:
“We are going to use reconciliation, that is 50 votes in the Senate plus the vice president, to pass legislation desperately needed by working families in this country right now,” Sanders told CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union.
“You did it, we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna do it to protect ordinary people, not just the rich and the powerful,” he said.
Asked about his criticism of Republicans for using the same tactic to lower the vote threshold on major pieces of legislation, Sanders acknowledged his previous opposition but emphasized the urgency of providing pandemic relief to Americans, saying they cannot wait “weeks and weeks and months and months to go forward.”
“Yes, I did criticize them for that. And if they want to criticize me for helping to feed children who are hungry or senior citizens in this country who are isolated and alone and don’t have enough food, they can criticize me,” Sanders said.
Sanders also addressed the internet sensation that is his inauguration outfit, saying that he has turned the viral meme into a charitable opportunity and expects to raise more than $1 million for Meals on Wheels Vermont, a charity that serves the state’s elderly and homebound.
by Mairead McArdle, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Whatever you think of Bernie's politics, there's a reason he's so popular. First, he's a true, unapologetic populist. And second, most importantly: action talks, and bullshit walks. I don't know why more politicians don't get this. Voters are starved for authenticity.]
Monday, January 25, 2021
Positive Grid Spark
[ed. I just got my Positive Grid Spark amp today and am totally... amped. Check out additional videos: here and here (for more detailed YouTube test reviews). Amazing technology in such a small package (and reasonably priced at $260 on Amazon). Additional (written) reviews here (Guitar World) and here (Wired). See you in a few weeks. haha...]
How Democrats Planned for Doomsday
The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.
They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.
And they would demand stern punishment for Mr. Trump and his party: Republicans at every level of government who incited the mob “must be removed or resign,” read one version of the group’s intended message, contained in Ms. Shenker-Osorio’s presentation and reviewed by The New York Times.
The meeting was no lucky feat of emergency organizing, nor was the highly disciplined and united front that emerged from it.
Instead, it was a climactic event in a long season of planning and coordination by progressives, aimed largely at a challenge with no American precedent: defending the outcome of a free election from a president bent on overturning it.
By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left was ready: prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research.
At each juncture, the activist wing of the Democratic coalition deployed its resources deliberately, channeling its energy toward countering Mr. Trump’s attempts at sabotage. Joseph R. Biden Jr., an avowed centrist who has often boasted of beating his more liberal primary opponents, was a beneficiary of their work.
Just as important, progressive groups reckoned with their own vulnerabilities: The impulses toward fiery rhetoric and divisive demands — which generated polarizing slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” — were supplanted by a more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.
Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period.
Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all.
Interviews with nearly two dozen leaders involved in the effort, and a review of several hundred pages of planning documents, polling presentations and legal memorandums, revealed an uncommon — and previously unreported — degree of collaboration among progressive groups that often struggle to work so closely together because of competition over political turf, funding and conflicting ideological priorities.
For the organizers of the effort, it represents both a good-news story — Mr. Trump was thwarted — and an ominous sign that such exhaustive efforts were required to protect election results that were not all that close.
For the most part, the organized left anticipated Mr. Trump’s postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show. (...)
“It was a success, but doing something that should never have had to be done,” Mr. Podhorzer said.
[ed. Congratulations progressives for finally figuring out how to effectively coordinate messaging and deploy strategic activism (something Republicans are very good at). See also: Trump's coup didn't fail just from incompetence — credit the progressive activists who stopped him (Salon)]
They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.
They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.
And they would demand stern punishment for Mr. Trump and his party: Republicans at every level of government who incited the mob “must be removed or resign,” read one version of the group’s intended message, contained in Ms. Shenker-Osorio’s presentation and reviewed by The New York Times.
The meeting was no lucky feat of emergency organizing, nor was the highly disciplined and united front that emerged from it.
Instead, it was a climactic event in a long season of planning and coordination by progressives, aimed largely at a challenge with no American precedent: defending the outcome of a free election from a president bent on overturning it.
By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left was ready: prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research.
At each juncture, the activist wing of the Democratic coalition deployed its resources deliberately, channeling its energy toward countering Mr. Trump’s attempts at sabotage. Joseph R. Biden Jr., an avowed centrist who has often boasted of beating his more liberal primary opponents, was a beneficiary of their work.
Just as important, progressive groups reckoned with their own vulnerabilities: The impulses toward fiery rhetoric and divisive demands — which generated polarizing slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” — were supplanted by a more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.
Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period.
Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all.
Interviews with nearly two dozen leaders involved in the effort, and a review of several hundred pages of planning documents, polling presentations and legal memorandums, revealed an uncommon — and previously unreported — degree of collaboration among progressive groups that often struggle to work so closely together because of competition over political turf, funding and conflicting ideological priorities.
For the organizers of the effort, it represents both a good-news story — Mr. Trump was thwarted — and an ominous sign that such exhaustive efforts were required to protect election results that were not all that close.
For the most part, the organized left anticipated Mr. Trump’s postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show. (...)
“It was a success, but doing something that should never have had to be done,” Mr. Podhorzer said.
by Alexander Burns, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times[ed. Congratulations progressives for finally figuring out how to effectively coordinate messaging and deploy strategic activism (something Republicans are very good at). See also: Trump's coup didn't fail just from incompetence — credit the progressive activists who stopped him (Salon)]
Sony WH-1000XM4 Review: Bose-Beating Noise Cancelling Headphones
Sony’s top of the line noise-cancelling headphones have long had a winning formula and the latest edition has a much-requested addition – multiple device connectivity – to make them the best of class.
The WH-1000XM4 have an RRP of £350 and on initial inspection little has changed for the fourth edition of the 1000X line, with its understated design. The high-quality plastic body is well made and lightweight at 254g but doesn’t feel as premium as some metal or carbon fibre competitors that weigh more than 300g.
They are some of the lightest-feeling headphones you can buy, matching the longstanding comfort kings, the Bose QC35 II. The ear cups are well padded with a gentle, even pressure on the side of your head while a soft leatherette headband sits on your dome. It’s easy to forget you are wearing them apart from when the headband slips forward when you tilt your head to look down.
The XM4 are a regular set of Bluetooth 5.0 headphones, making them compatible with most Bluetooth-sporting phones, tablets, computers and other devices. They support the universal SBC and AAC audio formats used by most devices. But they also support Sony’s high-resolution LDAC Bluetooth audio format that is compatible with many Android devices for some of the highest-quality wireless audio. (...)
The XM4 have some of the best active noise-cancelling technology available, with a level of control that goes beyond most, effectively reducing most droning and low-frequency sound as well as some speech and other more sudden noise, matching the best from Bose.
Using the app you can personalise the noise-cancelling to take into account hair, glasses and other things that effect the seal of the ear cups, while a pressure optimiser that can determine whether you are on the ground or in the air helps when flying versus just the commute.
These are some of the best-sounding Bluetooth headphones you can buy, producing the sort of audio that has you discovering new nuances in well-worn tracks, putting them in the same league as the B&W PX7 and Apple’s AirPods Max.
They are not neutral, with a default sound that is more mid-bass heavy than some competitors, but they produce well-controlled, deep and full bass, warm mids and sparkling high notes. Unlike many rivals, they have a full equaliser in the app to customise the sound to your liking, as well as music enhancement systems such as Sony’s DSEE Extreme upscale audio to revive tones lost because of compression at the expense of battery life.
They do an excellent job of bringing the best out of most music genres, from pounding bass lines in high-energy electronica and a raw energy in grunge to sumptuous tones for jazz and soul and a wide sound profile for grand orchestral scores. Preservation of detail even in super complex tracks is top notch, while they also sound great for movie soundtracks, with vocals preserved over the top of powerful bass.
by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The WH-1000XM4 have an RRP of £350 and on initial inspection little has changed for the fourth edition of the 1000X line, with its understated design. The high-quality plastic body is well made and lightweight at 254g but doesn’t feel as premium as some metal or carbon fibre competitors that weigh more than 300g.
The XM4 are a regular set of Bluetooth 5.0 headphones, making them compatible with most Bluetooth-sporting phones, tablets, computers and other devices. They support the universal SBC and AAC audio formats used by most devices. But they also support Sony’s high-resolution LDAC Bluetooth audio format that is compatible with many Android devices for some of the highest-quality wireless audio. (...)
The XM4 have some of the best active noise-cancelling technology available, with a level of control that goes beyond most, effectively reducing most droning and low-frequency sound as well as some speech and other more sudden noise, matching the best from Bose.
Using the app you can personalise the noise-cancelling to take into account hair, glasses and other things that effect the seal of the ear cups, while a pressure optimiser that can determine whether you are on the ground or in the air helps when flying versus just the commute.
These are some of the best-sounding Bluetooth headphones you can buy, producing the sort of audio that has you discovering new nuances in well-worn tracks, putting them in the same league as the B&W PX7 and Apple’s AirPods Max.
They are not neutral, with a default sound that is more mid-bass heavy than some competitors, but they produce well-controlled, deep and full bass, warm mids and sparkling high notes. Unlike many rivals, they have a full equaliser in the app to customise the sound to your liking, as well as music enhancement systems such as Sony’s DSEE Extreme upscale audio to revive tones lost because of compression at the expense of battery life.
They do an excellent job of bringing the best out of most music genres, from pounding bass lines in high-energy electronica and a raw energy in grunge to sumptuous tones for jazz and soul and a wide sound profile for grand orchestral scores. Preservation of detail even in super complex tracks is top notch, while they also sound great for movie soundtracks, with vocals preserved over the top of powerful bass.
Image: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Saturday, January 23, 2021
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