Chris Austin
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Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie

One of the strengths of the Republican Party is its message discipline. When it finds an issue that works, it beats that issue to death, flogging it long after it stops working. Thus after the Civil War, the party waved the “bloody shirt” by attacking Democrats for opposing the war, which created a continuous run of Republican presidents between 1868 and 1912, punctuated only by a single Democrat, Grover Cleveland.

Another bloody shirt that Republicans have waved forever and plan to wave again this election cycle is “socialism.” I put the term in quotation marks because to hear Republicans tell it, virtually everything government does is socialism; it is utterly foreign to the United States, and it cannot be implemented without imposing tyranny on the American people, along with poverty and deprivation such as we see today in Venezuela, where socialism allegedly destroyed the country.

On July 17, Vice President Mike Pence gave a preview of the coming socialism-addled Republican strategy rather than the actual policies of Joe Biden. Said Pence (emphasis added):

Before us are two paths: one based on the dignity of every individual, and the other on the growing control of the state. Our road leads to greater freedom and opportunity. Their road leads to socialism and decline. (...)

The plan to run against some mythical threat of socialism has been underway for some time. As early as October 2018, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report attacking it, with a follow-up chapter in the 2019 Economic Report of the President. More recently, well-known right-wing crackpot Dinesh D’Souza published a screed on the subject, the gist of which is that all liberals, progressives, and Democrats are socialists, as were the Nazis. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has also published The Case Against Socialism, which one reviewer said “does not make a case against socialism, but it does make a convincing case against nepotism.” (Senator Paul is the son of former Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, for whom I worked in the 1970s.)

The essence of the Republican attack is to lie about the nature of socialism, grossly exaggerating its negative excesses while completely ignoring its positive effects. When they are forced to concede that some socialistic government programs–such as disease prevention or temporarily higher unemployment benefits–may be valuable, they will nevertheless insist that it must be resisted because it’s the first step on the slippery slope to totalitarianism. As Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican who represents the Confederate state of Arkansas, put it in a tweet: “Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the Gestapo.”

Republicans assert, endlessly, that the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek proved that the welfare state leads inevitably to socialism and tyranny in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek’s theory may have been plausible in the midst of World War II, all the evidence since then thoroughly contradicts it. There is no evidence whatsoever that welfare states morph into total state control of the economy and produce a concomitant loss of freedom and prosperity. There is not a single case of this happening anywhere. Nor is there anything in Hayek’s theory to explain why socialism collapsed in the Soviet Union or why privatization rolled it back in places like Britain. (Ironically, Hayek’s relatively expansive view of government’s legitimate functions make him a virtual socialist to some of today’s right-wingers.) (...)

Like Smith, the Founding Fathers understood that government has functions that go far beyond the night watchman state favored by those on the right today. Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense underpinned the ideology of the American Revolution, was a virtual socialist. His most radical work, Agrarian Justice, proposed the revolutionary idea of a wealth tax to fund payments to citizens reaching maturity, a precursor to today’s idea of a basic income.

James Madison, principal author of the Constitution, agreed that providing income to the indigent was a core government function. He wrote in an 1820 letter:

To provide employment for the poor and support for the indigent is among the primary, & at the same time not least difficult cares of the public authority. In very populous Countries the task is particularly arduous. In our favored Country where employment & food are much less subject to failures or deficiencies the interposition of the public guardianship is required in a far more limited degree. Some degree of interposition nevertheless, is at all times and everywhere called for. (...)

Since they’re unable to run against the actual expansion of the American welfare state, GOP propagandists retreat into fantasy. Always missing from the Republican critique is any clear definition of socialism. This is intentional. Republicans know that the term “socialism” is unpopular with many Americans—although a growing percentage embrace it. Republicans also know that numerous programs they view as socialistic are nevertheless very popular with voters. President Harry Truman often made this point in his speeches. He said in 1952:

Socialism is a scare word [Republicans] have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

Conversely, Republicans never call their many tax giveaways to favored industrialists like Elon Musk “socialism.” In her brilliant book, The Entrepreneurial State, the economist Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated that the entire tech sector rests on a foundation of government-funded research and development that is almost never acknowledged.

In truth, Republicans aren’t opposed to socialism per se but only socialism that benefits poor people and minorities. Socialism for farmers and industrialists is just fine as far as they are concerned.

by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Mr. Bartlett is a former Republican who served as a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush.]

Did the Boomers Ruin America? A Debate

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” (...)

I’ve been fascinated by the fight over the baby boomers. You maybe remember OK, boomer, this dismissal of boomer politics that got popular on the internet for a minute and drove boomers totally crazy. That came, of course, during Donald Trump’s presidency. And it reflected frustration in having our fourth boomer president.

And then it’s not like there was — well, there was a bit of a generational handover, actually. Joe Biden — he’s not a boomer. He’s born a few years before the boomers. But I don’t think that’s the kind of generational handover a lot of young people were looking for, which I think gets to the point of this generational frustration. There is a sense — and not just a sense, a reality — that America’s elder generations have kept a hammerlock on power. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: So I’ve been wanting to do a show on this. First, is it useful to talk about this at all? Generations are big and diverse. What’s the point in talking in categories of that size? But then also, what is the critique at its core? I mean, you don’t get a lot out of OK boomer. Whenever there’s this much anger, though, lasting for this much time and emerging in this many cultural forms, you got to assume there’s something real there, something worth trying to understand on its own terms.

But one thing about it is, it’s not just one critique of the boomers. There’s a left critique that’s more about economics and power, and then a right critique that, at least usually, is more about cultural libertinism and individualism and institutional decay. So I wanted to put these critiques together to see if they added up to something coherent. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of carping millennials. And I say that as an often carping millennial.

Jill Filipovic is a writer, commentator, a lawyer, and she’s the author of the book “OK, Boomer, Let’s Talk How My Generation Got Left Behind,” which is a very nice encapsulation of the economic case for millennial rage. Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of “Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” which is a pretty searing critique from the right. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here we go.

So welcome, both of you, to the show. Helen, I want to begin with you. Why is generational analysis valuable? I mean, we’re dealing with pretty arbitrary time periods. Generations, they contain multitudes. So why are boomers or any other age cohort a useful descriptive category for understanding American society?

HELEN ANDREWS: The clue that first got me thinking that the boomers might be worth analyzing as a generation rather than through historical events that they happened to be around for was that the 1960s was a global phenomenon. A lot of people attribute ’60s protests in the United States to the various issues that they centered around, things like the anti-war movement. But you saw the same kinds of student protests in countries that didn’t have a draft or in countries where they had completely different records in World War II. And the parent-child dynamic was just totally alien to what it was in the United States.

So that got me thinking that the ’60s might have been a product just of the youth generation having such demographic heft, there being just so many more young people around. And that was the reason the ’60s protests took the form they did and were so universal across the civilized world. And then I started following the boomers through their political career. And you saw the same kinds of coincidences across the globe as they came into power in the 1990s. You saw neoliberal triangulators, who were trying to reconcile the left and capitalism, and the same types of leaders like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in different places.

So any phenomenon that is happening in countries that have very different histories and issues sets, but similar demographic bulges, I thought was an indication that generations were worth looking at as generations.

EZRA KLEIN: So I can buy that. So then, Jill, let’s say I’m a boomer who thinks my generation wasn’t really that bad. And I’m tired of everybody yelling at me. I mean, sure, every generation, we make a few mistakes. But ultimately, we boomers, we left the world better than we found it. And the problem is that millennials are just particularly self-pitying, and they just want to blame the fact that life is hard on everyone else. Convince me I’m wrong.

JILL FILIPOVIC: Well, that’s pretty much the same thing that people said about the boomers when they were young, right? There is a whole book written about them called “The Culture of Narcissism.” If you read Helen’s book, it certainly draws on a lot of the descriptions of boomers when they were young people. I think one thing that’s very poorly understood about the boomer generation — and perhaps this is me being slightly defensive of them — is that they’re an incredibly politically polarized generation.

So boomers, much more so than millennials, much more so than the silent generation, more so even than Gen Xers, are really split politically down the middle between liberals and conservatives. And I think what we’ve actually seen and what I hear, especially from liberal boomers, is the sense of, well, wait a minute. We were trying to make the world a better place. And then there were political forces who we didn’t vote for who may have been part of our cohort, who now you’re using to blame our entire generation.

There’s some fairness to that defensiveness. That said, I would say, liberal boomers kind of won the culture. Conservative and more moderate boomers won American politics. And so the generation wide legacy, yes, does have some positives. But overwhelmingly, we’re now living on a planet that’s flooding and burning. So I think it’s a little hard to say that boomers left it better than they found it.

EZRA KLEIN: On the flooding and burning point — and I guess I’ll send this one to Helen, but it’s really for both — one thing I thought about, reading both of your books, is how much the boomers are actually a stand-in for technological change, some of which they generate and some of which they didn’t. I mean, the planet is burning. But the driving of fossil fuels as the way you power economies, I mean, that predates the boomers. And then, obviously, it grows during their heyday.

But a lot of the things that I think they get tagged for come from scientific advances that they weren’t even the ones to necessarily create. I mean, a lot of the sexual politics changes come from the pill. A lot of — and this is a theme of your book, Helen — a lot of social changes come from television. I mean, how much are boomers, Helen, simply the generation that happened to be largest and then in power when a lot of the electricity revolutions innovations came into full flower?

HELEN ANDREWS: I don’t think you can blame technology for the way the world is today and the wreckage that the boomers left us. For example, when we talk about the world today being a lot tougher for millennials than it was for the boomers, one of the things we’re talking about is the loss of power on the part of the working class. Their wages are not growing the way that they used to in the days of the boomers. A one-income family can’t make it the way that they could in the time of the boomers.

Some of that is attributable to technology, but a lot of that is due to changes in what the boomers did to the left. That is, the boomers were the generation of the new left. And the reason they called themselves that is because they were rebelling against the old left. They deliberately wanted the left-wing party in the western democracies not to stand for working class people and unions, but rather to stand for identity politics type interests. The hinge moment in America for that is the reforms to the Democratic National Convention in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.

The way that delegates were chosen was then tilted toward or to favor identity politics. So the boomers made a choice to have their left-wing party champion identity politics, rather than working class people and unions. And so that’s the reason why the working class was then so vulnerable to these technological changes. The technological changes would have happened either way. But I think they would have had better defenders in the left-wing parties if the boomers hadn’t replaced the old left with their new left.

EZRA KLEIN: Is this what you think they did wrong? I mean, my understanding of your take on the boomers is that they unleashed a kind of cultural reckoning on America. And you do talk about the new left questions in the book, but you’re a Trump supporter. He’s not a huge fan of unions himself. Or is it your view that we should go back to a much stronger union and redistribution style politics? Is that the politics you want to see return?

HELEN ANDREWS: No, I would like to see the Republicans become the working class party of the future. Because I don’t think the Democratic Party as currently constituted is going to turn around and start championing their interests. And so I think there’s room for Republicans to be a little bit nicer to labor and to unions as a part of that realignment.

But realistically, Republicans protecting working class interests may have a different issue set than it did when the old left was championing unions in the 1940s and ’50s. It may look like having different positions on things like trade and immigration, which are actually areas where Trump and the working class were quite together.

EZRA KLEIN: Jill, give me your economic critique of the boomer legacy.

JILL FILIPOVIC: Yeah, so it’s interesting hearing what Helen says because it just strikes me as entirely ahistorical and the kind of polar opposite conclusion that I came to in researching my book. If you look at the political decisions that were made that really did gut the American middle class and working class, yes, Democrats are certainly not innocent parties here. But many of those decisions and many of those huge changes came about when boomers field the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and then again in 1984.

So you had Reagan who came in, increased tax havens for corporations, refused to increase the federal minimum wage, which we’re still arguing about, which has certainly damaged working class earning power, gutted union power and union membership. When you look at the ways in which the American economic landscape has changed, comparing boomers to millennials, one of the biggest differences is that when boomers were young, they saw their future as invested in.

So, when boomers were young adults, the federal government was spending $3 in investments into the future, things like infrastructure, education, research for every dollar it spent on entitlements. Now that’s flipped. So the federal government is spending $3, and as soon as boomers all are retired, that number will have ticked up to closer to $5 for every dollar it spends on future investments. So as boomers have gone through the course of their lives, they’ve seen the government work for them. Millennials really haven’t. We’ve been the ones stuck footing the bill.

And when it comes to this gap between the middle class and the working class and the degree to which working class earnings have really seen the bottom fall out, which is what’s happened over the past several decades, that’s been a pretty direct result of a systemic dismantlement of the kind of L.B.J. Great Society policies, of F.D.R.’s social welfare policies, of strong protections for unions. I mean, a tax on union memberships and right to work laws are not Democratic inventions. Those were coming from Republicans, and often boomer Republicans.

So, from my view, it really is this shift to conservatism among baby boomers, and sort of Reagan conservatism in particular, that was then bolstered by this kind of ’90s Clinton era centrist Democratic Party that really saw it, I think, to compete on the cultural issues that Republicans made salient and did kind of cede ground on a lot of the most important economic issues that Americans needed to thrive.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times (Transcript - Ezra Klein Show Podcast) |  Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein Show

Chi Chi Rodriguez at the Masters - 70′s

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[ed. It's Masters week.]

Predicting the Future of Prediction Markets

Sometimes economists are just flat-out wrong. According to economic theory, annuities and reverse mortgages should be very popular for managing risk and liquidity — yet both products struggle for mainstream acceptance. Another favorite of economists is prediction markets: contracts with payoffs contingent on some real-world event. Their future is also highly uncertain.

In essence, prediction markets let people “bet” on some feature of the economy, thereby creating a new financial derivative. A prediction market in gross domestic product, or perhaps in local rates of unemployment, could be a useful means of hedging risk. If you are afraid that GDP will fall, you could “short” GDP in a prediction market and thus protect your overall economic position, because your bet would pay out if GDP came in lower than expected.

Prediction markets are also a useful means of discovering information about what is likely to happen next. If you want to know who is likely to win the Super Bowl, is there any better place to look than the published betting odds? By the same reasoning, various interest rate futures markets offer clues about what the Federal Reserve might be planning. The value of having more and better public information is another reason to encourage prediction markets.

The big puzzle is why prediction markets haven’t taken off, at least not since the earlier 19th-century history of “bucket shops.” Part of the reason is regulatory constraints, but prediction markets have not succeeded in some other parts of the world without such constraints. Intrade.com, now defunct, was based in Ireland and created active and successful markets in sporting events and presidential elections. But most of their prediction markets remained fairly illiquid, due to lack of customer interest. (...)

A skeptic might say that demand is limited because there are already so many good and highly informative markets in other assets. In 2009, for instance, was a market necessary to predict how well the iPhone was going to do? The share price of Apple might have served to perform a broadly similar function.

The question, then, is which prediction markets might prove most useful. Nobel Laureate economist Robert J. Shiller has promoted the idea of prediction markets in GDP, but most people face major risks at a more local, less aggregated level. One of the risks I face, for example, concerns the revenue of the university where I teach. This year enrollments rose slightly even though U.S. GDP fell sharply. So a GDP-based hedge probably is not very useful to me.

How about a prediction market in local real-estate prices, so that home buyers and real-estate magnates may hedge their purchases? Maybe, but then the question is whether enough professional traders would be attracted to such markets to keep them liquid. So-called binary options, particularly when the bet is on the price of a financial asset, often have remained unfairly priced or manipulated, and are viewed poorly by regulators.

For a prediction market to take off, it probably has to satisfy a few criteria: general enough to attract widespread interest; important enough to matter; and unusual enough not to be replicable by trading in existing assets. The outcomes also need to be sufficiently well-defined that contract settlement is not in dispute. (...)

For all the obstacles facing prediction markets, there is cause for optimism about their long-run viability. There are many more financial assets and contracts today than a few decades ago, and such markets can be expected to increase. The internet lowers trading and monitoring costs, and that should make prediction markets easier to create.

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Sébastien Thibault via Nature

[ed. See also: Tales from Prediction Markets (Misinformation Underload); and, The Power of Prediction Markets (Nature).]

The Therapy-App Fantasy

Talkspace is part of a growing field of services that promise mental-health care via smartphone. And unlike many of the problems tech start-ups have set out to solve, this one actually exists: It’s hard to find a therapist. Maybe you have insurance, so you look up a list of in-network providers, start cold-calling, and hope to reach someone with an opening. Maybe you ask for recommendations from friends and hope someone they know takes your insurance or has out-of-pocket rates you can afford. Maybe you don’t know anybody with a therapist and the prospect of getting one yourself seems risky or shameful. Maybe you don’t know anyone with a therapist because there aren’t any therapists around to see — approximately 33 percent of counties have no records of licensed psychologists.

Geographic distribution is just one of the ways the mental-health profession fails to match the people in need of care: Doing so would also require more therapists who speak Spanish, more therapists of color, more therapists with LGBTQ expertise. Even in a therapist-rich environment like New York City, intangibles intervene. How do you find someone to whom you feel comfortable saying things you may feel uncomfortable saying at all? People seeking therapy face all these challenges even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. According to a CDC report released last summer, 40 percent of American adults were dealing with mental-health or substance-abuse issues in late June, with younger adults, people of color, essential workers, and unpaid caregivers disproportionately hard-hit.

Therapists have long faced the question of how to provide their care to more people without diminishing its quality. In 1918, amid the catastrophe of the First World War, Sigmund Freud gave a lecture in which he proposed using free clinics for mass mental-health care — even as he acknowledged that doing so might require his fellow psychoanalysts to “alloy the pure gold” of their usual methods. “We’ve been in a crisis of access to mental-health care really since mental-health care professionalized,” said Hannah Zeavin, a professor at UC Berkeley whose forthcoming book, The Distance Cure, traces the history of remote therapy from Freud’s letters to crisis hotlines and up through today’s apps.

Accelerated by the pandemic, Zeavin’s subject has gone from an academic curiosity to a growth sector. Businesses in the “digital behavioral health” space raised $1.8 billion in venture-capital funding last year, compared to $609 million in 2019. In January, Talkspace announced plans to go public this year in a $1.4 billion SPAC deal. A presentation for investors managed to be simultaneously grim and upbeat in outlining the “enormous” market for its services: More than 70 million Americans suffer from mental illness, according to Talkspace, and the country has seen a 30 percent increase in the annual suicide rate since 2001. Talkspace says 60 percent of its users are in therapy for the first time. (...)

Much of what appears if you search “therapy” in the App Store does not provide the services of a human therapist. Some of it does not address mental health at all, in the strict sense: It is the digital equivalent of a scented candle, wafting off into coloring apps and relaxation games. Many services occupy an area somewhere in between professional care and smartphone self-soothing. Reflectly, for example, bills itself as “the World’s First Intelligent Journal” and promises to use the principles of positive psychology, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy to help users track their moods and “invest in” self-care. “Just like a therapist!! But free!!” reads one review. (Reflectly costs $9.99 a month.) Sayana, an AI chatbot, is personified as a pastel illustration with a dark bob and cutoff jeans; she also tracks the user’s mood and offers tips (“Observe your thoughts as they flow, just like the river”) to guide users on a journey through “the world of you.” “This is like your own little therapist and I love it!” reads one five-star review. Youper (mood tracking, chatbot, lessons) sells “Self-Guided Therapy”; Bloom (mood tracking, chatbot, lessons) is “the world’s first digital therapist.”

But chatbots and mood scores aren’t generally what people are imagining when they say, for example, that their ex needs therapy. “Therapy” here conjures an intervention to fix the personality and save the soul. Different people want different things from therapy. They want to break bad habits, work through trauma, vent about their boss, their boyfriend, their mom. They want to feel better (always easier said than done). They want someone to talk to, and they want some tools. When I resumed seeing my longtime therapist over video, I wanted her to tell me whether the problem was my brain or the pandemic — I needed someone I trusted to judge the situation. That is to say, I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I wanted the help of someone who knew better. And this — expert counsel in the palm of your hand — is what the high end of an emerging class of therapy apps claims to deliver.

“In 2021, mental health is finally cool,” declares a podcast ad for BetterHelp, one of the apps promising access to trained therapists that has promoted itself to consumers most aggressively. “But therapy doesn’t have to be just sitting around talking about feelings. Therapy can be whatever you want it to be.”

With a therapy app, more blatantly than in most health-care transactions, the patient is a customer, and the customer is always right. But this assumes patients know what they want and need and that getting it will make them feel better. These are not expectations most therapists would necessarily share — nor are they ones therapy apps are reliably prepared to fulfill.

A D.C.-area Talkspace user named Cait remembered getting off to a more auspicious start. “I was so excited because they give you all these therapists,” she said. “It was almost like a dating app.” Cait had signed up for the service after talking to a satisfied friend with a supportive Talkspace therapist who texted her all the time. Cait had recently started medication for depression; it helped, but she wanted to speak with someone regularly, and even with her insurance, she was worried about cost. She saw that Talkspace was offering a New Year’s deal at the beginning of 2021. If she used that and paid for six months up front, she could get half a year of therapy for $700. This seemed to her like quite a deal — far cheaper than paying out of pocket for conventional therapy but also far cheaper than what Talkspace might otherwise have been. While mood trackers and mindfulness apps can cost $10 or $15 a month, therapy apps like Talkspace, BetterHelp, Brightside, and Calmerry — ones that connect users to an actual licensed human therapist — cost hundreds of dollars. Without discounts (or subscribing for months at a time), a one-month Talkspace plan that includes weekly video sessions runs nearly $400. Particularly because the standard length of these visits is just 30 minutes, users are paying hourly rates that can approach those of in-person care.

Of course, many users aren’t paying out of pocket because, for many apps, users aren’t the customer at all. These apps, like Ginger and Lyra, focus on selling their services to employers or insurance companies.

by Molly Fischer, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Pablo Rochat

Kurt Otto-Wasow, Ile de la Cité, Paris 1950s
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Deconstructing That $69 Million NFT

“NFTs” have hit the mainstream news with the sale of an NFT based digital artwork for $69 million. I thought I’d write up an explainer. Specifically, I deconstruct that huge purchase and show what actually was exchanged, down to the raw code. (The answer: almost nothing).

The reason for this post is that every other description of NFTs describe what they pretend to be. In this blogpost, I drill down on what they actually are.

Note that this example is about “NFT artwork”, the thing that’s been in the news. There are other uses of NFTs, which work very differently than what’s shown here.

tl;dr

I have long bit of text explaining things. Here is the short form that allows you to drill down to the individual pieces.

• Beeple created a piece of art in a file
• He created a hash that uniquely, and unhackably, identified that file
• He created a metadata file that included the hash to the artwork
• He created a hash to the metadata file
• He uploaded both files (metadata and artwork) to the IPFS darknet decentralized file sharing service
• He created, or minted a token governed by the MakersTokenV2 smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain
• Christies created an auction for this token
• The auction was concluded with a payment of $69 million worth of Ether cryptocurrency. However, nobody has been able to find this payment on the Ethereum blockchain, the money was probably transferred through some private means.
• Beeple transferred the token to the winner, who transferred it again to this final Metakovan account

Each of the link above allows you to drill down to exactly what’s happening on the blockchain. The rest of this post discusses things in long form.

Why do I care?

Well, you don’t. It makes you feel stupid that you haven’t heard about it, when everyone is suddenly talking about it as if it’s been a thing for a long time. But the reality, they didn’t know what it was a month ago, either. Here is the Google Trends graph to prove this point — interest has only exploded in the last couple months:

The same applies to me. I’ve been aware of them (since the CryptoKitties craze from a couple years ago) but haven’t invested time reading source code until now. Much of this blogpost is written as notes as I discover for myself exactly what was purchased for $69 million, reading the actual transactions.

So what is it?

My definition: “Something new that can be traded on a blockchain that isn’t a fungible cryptocurrency”.

In this post, I’m going to explain in technical details. Before this, you might want to pause and see what everyone else is saying about it. You can look on Wikipedia to answer that question, or look at the following definition from CNN (the first result when I google it):

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are pieces of digital content linked to the blockchain, the digital database underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. Unlike NFTs, those assets are fungible, meaning they can be replaced or exchanged with another identical one of the same value, much like a dollar bill.

You can also get a list of common NFT systems here. While this list of NFT systems contains a lot of things related to artwork (as described in this blogpost), a lot aren’t. For example, CryptoKiddies is an online game, not artwork (though it too allows ties to pictures of the kitties).

What is fungible?

Let’s define the word fungible first. The word refers to goods you purchase that can be replaced by an identical good, like a pound of sugar, an ounce of gold, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil. When you buy one, you don’t care which one you get.

In contrast, an automobile is a non-fungible good — if you order a Tesla Model 3, you won’t be satisfied with just any car that comes out of the factory, but one that matches the color and trim that you ordered. Art work is a well known non-fungible asset — there’s only one Mona Lisa painting in the world, for example.

Dollar bills and coins are fungible tokens — they represent the value printed on the currency. You can pay your bar bill with any dollars.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, ZCash, and Ethereum are also “fungible tokens”. That’s where they get their value, from their fungibility.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is the idea of trading something unique (non-fungible, not the same as anything else) on the blockchain. You can trade them, but each is unique, like a painting, a trading card, a rare coin, and so on.

This is a token — it represents a thing. You aren’t trading an artwork itself on the blockchain, but a token that represents the artwork. I mention this because most descriptions about NFTs are that you are buying artwork — you aren’t. Instead, you are buying a token that points to the artwork.

The best real world example is a receipt for purchase. Let’s say you go to the Louvre and buy the Mona Lisa painting, and they give you a receipt attesting to the authenticity of the transaction. The receipt is not the artwork itself, but something that represents the artwork. It’s proof you legitimately purchased it — that you didn’t steal it. If you ever resell the painting, you’ll probably need something like this proving the provenance of the piece.

Show me an example!

So let’s look an at an example NFT, the technical details, to see how it works. We might as well use this massive $69 million purchase as our example. Some news reports describing the purchase are here: [1] [2] [3].

None of these stories say what actually happened. They say the “artwork was purchased”, but what does that actually mean? We are going to deconstruct that here. (The answer is: the artwork wasn’t actually purchased).

by Robert Graham, Security Boulevard |  Read more:

Image: Security Boulevard

[ed. FYI: the cryptographic hash for the Beeple painting is (apparently): 6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017]

Shameless

In an episode of the 11th season of Shameless, Ian Gallagher (played by Cameron Monaghan) experiences wage theft at his new “shitty ass minimum wage job hauling boxes around a warehouse.” He discovers that management has paid him for 39 hours when he worked for 45, deducting money for locker fees, safety vests, and bathroom breaks. “Welcome to the working man’s America,” a co-worker tells him. Two episodes later, Ian quits the job to run drug money instead.

Shameless, Showtime’s tragicomic study of the ever-expanding American lumpenproletariat, ends this year after over a decade of being the only series of its kind on television, an anti-Horatio Alger tale that lays bare the gaping maw where our social safety net should be. The Gallaghers, a dysfunctional South Side Chicago family, are different from other working-class TV families like the Bunkers from All in the Family, or the Connors from Roseanne. As show creator Paul Abbot told the New York Times, “it’s not blue collar, it’s no collar.”

The show’s characters are driven by their basic material needs—nobody has the luxury of becoming self-actualized. They rotate between manual labor and food service jobs, prisons and homeless shelters, supplementing minimum wage or government aid—both insufficient—with mooching, begging, theft, fraud, and several varieties of sex work. Shameless is uncouth, grotesque, and abject where other premium cable hits of the past 10 years have been slick, aspirational fantasias populated by the wealthy. The series is an indictment of a system in which both political parties have abandoned a desperate underclass. When it ends, we’ll lose a realistic reflection of the ways that a growing number of Americans get by.

Such reflections have always been hard to find in mainstream mass media. Early Hollywood’s system of self-censorship, known as the Motion Picture Production Code, forbade depictions of crime on film, unless the criminals were unsympathetic characters who suffered for their sins. Code rules also discouraged portrayals of illicit drugs and the “selling of a woman’s virtue.” While the code officially ended in 1968 and didn’t apply to television, its spirit haunted the small screen for decades, clashing with audience appetites for stories about drugs, prostitution, and other types of crime—the vicarious experience of watching characters violate social norms. The challenge for TV writers has been to give viewers what they want, while simultaneously reinforcing the traditional middle-class values that have undergirded the genre since the 1950s. How to do this? Make crime ubiquitous, but poverty invisible.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a study revealed that one-third of all prime-time TV shows revolved around crime. Curiously, it also found that TV writers gave the majority of criminal characters professional or managerial jobs, or else left unknown the matter of their work and socioeconomic status. The same holds true today. The fictional criminals we watch on shows like Billions or various “copaganda” programs are frequently white collar, or they’re rendered somehow class-less. The narratives focus much more on individual pathology than on material conditions. Television is also more likely to portray violent crime—e.g., rape and murder—over the more quotidian crimes of survival, like shoplifting, petty drug dealing, or offering the occasional hand job for cash, the small informal ways of making ends meet in an era of suppressed wages and skyrocketing rents. Few television programs have engaged, politically and ideologically, with issues of class and labor. Fewer still have explored how (and why) poor people are pushed into criminalized underground economies.

Enter Shameless, which debuted in 2011, adapted from a British series of the same name. When showrunner John Wells pitched network executives, he had to fight suggestions to set the series in the American South or in a trailer park, those well-worn tropes used to telegraph deprivation in pop culture. Instead, Shameless takes place in a multi-racial city whose denizens have been left behind by gentrification but who see survival—against all odds and by any means necessary—as a point of familial pride. The Gallagher offspring are neglected by their chaotic parents, a mother with bipolar disorder and a father with chronic alcoholism, and so must fend for themselves in a crowded ramshackle home. Nearly every move they make in hopes of bettering their lot is thwarted by a byzantine public welfare system and an indifferent neoliberal state. They have no bootstraps, no boots, and for one character who suffers a workplace accident followed by a DIY amputation, not even a full set of toes.

You couldn’t find a better illustration of the concept, theorized by Marx and Engels, of the lumpenproletariat, the prefix of which translates to “ragged” or “rabble.” In 19th century Europe, the lumpen were those with “questionable means of support and of dubious origin,” like beggars, gamblers, pickpockets, and prostitutes, who inhabited the streets or urban slums. This so-called “surplus population” lived on the “crumbs of society” in part because their drug and alcohol dependencies made them unsuitable for traditional labor. In contemporary America, members of the lumpen fall through the cracks of a system that happily starves people with disabilities and deprives the poor of mental health and drug treatment services, leaving them cycling in and out of formal employment and underfunded institutions. They’re depraved, as the Sondheim lyric goes, on account of they’re deprived.

by Sascha Cohen, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Big Chunks of Corporate Tax Cuts End Up in Executive's Pockets

"This new law will provide tax incentives for companies to expand and create jobs by investing in plants and equipment,” proclaimed President George W. Bush in 2002 as he signed the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act. “This measure will mean more job opportunities for workers in every part of our country.”

As Bush promised, the bill included significant corporate tax cuts. Further reductions in corporate taxes would follow with the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The rhetoric in each instance was the same: Purportedly, these tax cuts were not for the sake of enriching corporate management but for employing American workers — hence the word “jobs” in all three titles. These companies would take the extra money and invest it in the workforce, creating new and better opportunities for regular people.

That is not what happened. In reality, a new academic study finds, a significant fraction of recent corporate tax breaks simply went to increased pay for top corporate executives. The paper, currently undergoing peer review before publication, is the first comprehensive academic examination of its kind. Its author, Grinnell College assistant professor of economics Eric Ohrn, used a database of top-level compensation at publicly traded U.S. firms to analyze the tax cuts’ impact on executive pay.

If Ohrn is correct, the reductions in the corporate income tax over the past two decades will reward America’s corporate royalty with hundreds of billions of dollars between now and 2030. Ohrn attributes this extraordinary payday to executives’ successful use of “rent-seeking,” an economic concept that describes individual and corporate use of power to capture wealth without adding any new value themselves.

Ohrn examined the pay of 31,879 executives at 2,794 publicly traded companies from 1998 to 2012. His results showed that for every dollar in reduced corporate taxes from two types of tax cuts, compensation for the top five executives at the companies increased by 15 to 19 cents.

Though there is little data readily available on lower-ranking executive pay, higher pay at the top almost certainly pulls up executive compensation on the corporate rungs just underneath. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., points out that if the next 20 executives at each company in Ohrn’s study received in aggregate half the increased pay of the top five executives, it would mean that “between 22% and 37% of the money gained from a tax break went to 25 of the highest-paid people in the corporate hierarchy.”

The amount of money at stake is gigantic.

American business has for decades been conducting a war against corporate taxation. The rationale for cuts is always the same: Companies and their favored politicians claim that they have opportunities to make investments in new technologies and plants that would lead to better jobs and higher pay for workers. Unfortunately, thanks to overbearing corporate taxes, they simply can’t afford to do it.

Neither part of this story is true. There is no discernible connection between levels of corporate profits and investment. Moreover, even if there were, it would likely make little difference for average workers: Higher productivity led to higher median wages for regular people during the three decades after World War II, but that link was broken in the 1970s. Since then, productivity has continually increased but has barely shown up in the paychecks of regular people. Instead, the greater wealth has gone to those at the top of the pay scale, such as corporate executives.

But the fact that the case for corporate tax cuts makes no sense has not impeded its success. During the 1960s, the federal government took in an average of about 3.7 percent of the gross domestic product via corporate income taxes. By the late 1990s, it had fallen to 2.1 percent. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that it will average 1.3 percent from 2021-2030 — that is, 0.8 percentage points of GDP less than 20 years ago.

The decrease may not seem like much on its face, but the CBO projects that the total U.S. GDP over the next 10 years will be $273 trillion. If the corporate income tax were still at the 2.1 percent of GDP level of the late 1990s, it would bring in $5.73 trillion. At the current projected rate of 1.3 percent, it will be $3.55 trillion. Corporations will save $2.18 trillion. 

by Jon Schwarz, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

[ed. No surprise here. And, since Biden's infrastructure bill is supposed to be paid for with higher corporate taxes, we're already seeing expected pushback (obviously from Republicans, but also from at least one Dem). Here's Joe Manchin today:  "In a radio interview with West Virginia's MetroNews, Manchin said raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, as envisioned in the plan, is just too high, though he did say he could get behind a hike to 25 percent.

The senator claimed he wasn't alone, either. "There's six or seven other Democrats who feel very strongly about this," he said. "We have to be competitive, and we're not going to throw caution to the wind."]

Jane Cornwell
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Biden’s Child Tax Credit as Universal Basic Income

For several decades, child advocates have tried to bring more public indignation to the scandal of extreme child poverty, and have pushed for the expansion of the Child Tax Credit. In recent years, some progressives have called for something that seemed even more utopian, a universal basic income.

Well, gentle reader, we just got both. And the brilliance is in the details.

The credit, which is really a family allowance run through the IRS, provides $3,000 a year for each child under 18, topped up to $3,600 for kids under six. So a family with three kids gets almost $10,000. As a point of reference, the average income of the bottom 20 percent of American households is about $14,000.

The new Child Tax Credit will cut the rate of child poverty in half, and will raise the total incomes of the bottom fifth of American families by 33 percent. I never expected to see something like this in my lifetime. (...)

If you compare the new tax credit with the Earned Income Tax Credit and the existing Child Tax Credit, there is one key difference beyond the expanded benefits. The existing tax credits leave out the poorest of the poor, because you have to have some taxable income in order to get them.

The new credit is for everyone, except the very richest. If you have some existing contact with the IRS, checks will come automatically. If you don’t, all you need to do in order to apply is to state your income, the Social Security numbers of you and your kids, and that’s it.

There is no hassle establishing income eligibility, because eligibility is automatic. There will be no abusive audits of the kind that the IRS has imposed on so many EITC recipients for technical mistakes.

Even better, the legislation authorizes the Treasury to send checks monthly. Under the current system, EITC and CTC recipients get their refunds at tax time.

People in poverty often borrow against their anticipated annual tax refund, paying usurious interest rates to tax preparation companies, for whom these refund loans are a major profit center. When the check comes, it’s experienced as coming from H&R Block rather than from Uncle Sam.

This new policy eliminates the middleman. The recipient gets either a check, a direct deposit, or a debit card from the Treasury, and gets 100 cents on the dollar with no rake-off by the tax preparer.

by Robert Kuttner, American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The Moment When Democrats Recovered Their Soul; and, McConnell: From Moscow Mitch to Beijing’s Bozo (American Prospect).]

Building a Lunar Ark

A "lunar ark" hidden inside the moon's lava tubes could preserve the sperm, eggs and seeds of millions of Earth's species, a group of scientists has proposed.

The ark, or gene bank, would be safely hidden in these hollowed-out tunnels and caves sculpted by lava more than 3 billion years ago and would be powered by solar panels above. It would hold the cryogenically preserved genetic material of all 6.7 million known species of plants, animals and fungi on Earth, which would require at least 250 rocket launches to transport to the moon, according to the researchers.

Scientists believe the endeavor could safeguard our planet's wildlife against both natural and human-caused apocalyptic scenarios, such as a supervolcano eruption or a nuclear war, and ensure the survival of their genes.

The scientists presented their lunar ark plans on Sunday (March 7) at the IEEE Aerospace Conference, which was held virtually this year due the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There's this strong interconnectedness between us and nature," lead author Jekan Thanga, head of the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at the University of Arizona, told Live Science. "We have a responsibility to be guardians of biodiversity and the means to preserve it."

Not all the technology needed for this ambitious project exists yet, but the researchers think that it could realistically be built within the next 30 years, Thanga said.

Existential threats

The main motivation behind the lunar ark is to create a secure off-world storage facility for biodiversity.

"I like to use the data analogy," Thanga said. "It's like copying your photos and documents from your computer onto a separate hard drive, so you have a backup if anything goes wrong."

Therefore, if an apocalyptic event destroyed the natural world or wiped out most of humanity, there would be a chance to "hit a reset button," Thanga said.

In their presentation, the researchers listed the following as potential existential threats to biodiversity on Earth: Supervolcanic eruption, global nuclear war, asteroid impact, pandemic, climate change acceleration, global solar storm and global drought.

"The environment and human civilization are both very fragile," Thanga said. "There are many of these really tragic circumstances that could happen."

Creating genetic back-ups to preserve biodiversity is not a new concept. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located within the Arctic Circle in Norway, holds the genetic samples of plant species from around the world and has already been used to reintroduce certain plants back into the wild. However, that vault is still at risk of being destroyed by rising sea levels or an asteroid strike.

Only by storing the genetic information somewhere else in the solar system can we ensure it survives any existential threats to Earth, the researchers said.

Lava tubes

The moon was the obvious choice for an off-world ark for one main reason: It is only a four-day journey from Earth, which means transporting the samples is much easier than taking them to Mars. Building an ark in orbit around Earth is also not secure enough due to the instability of orbit, Thanga said.

However, another benefit of building an ark on the moon is that it can be safely hidden away in lava tubes. These hollowed-out caverns and tunnels under the surface were formed during the moon's fiery infancy, and they have remained untouched ever since. Lava tubes would protect the ark from meteor strikes and DNA-damaging radiation. The lava tubes have also been suggested as excellent places to build lunar cities for a human civilization on the moon as well, as previously reported by Live Science.

by Harry Baker, Live Science |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

[ed. The post following this one mentions this (the first time I've heard of it). Seems like a great idea (along with DNA sequencing of all stored items).] 

If UFOs Are Alien Beings, Are They Just Doing Mood Affiliation?

Robin Hanson has a long and very interesting blog post on that question. The point is not to argue that the UFOS are alien beings of some kind, but rather if they were which kinds of theories might help us understand them? Here is just part of Robin’s much longer take:

If the main block to believing in UFOs as aliens is a lack of a plausible enough social theory of aliens, then it seems a shame that almost no one who studies UFOs is a social science theorist. So as such a person, why don’t I step in and try to help? If we can find a more plausible social theory, we could become more willing to believe that UFOs are aliens…

Stylized fact #2: Aliens are rare and self-limited, and yet are here now.

Indirection – We can think of a number of plausible motives for rare limited aliens to make an exception to visit us. First, they may fear us as rivals, and so want to track us and stand ready to defend against us. Second, if their limitation policies are intentional, then they’d anticipate our possibly violating them, and so want to stand ready nearby to enforce their limitation policies on us.

In either of these two cases, aliens might want to show us their power, and even make explicit threats, to deter us from causing problems. And there’s the question of why they don’t just destroy us, instead of waiting around. Third, independent alien origins could be a rare valuable datapoint about far-more-capable aliens who they may fear eventually meeting. In this case they’d probably want to stay hidden longer.

My best bet is this. The vehicles would be “unmanned” drone probes, if only because the stresses of long trips through space would keep the actual alien beings close to home. So the relevant social science question is what kind of highly generalized software instructions you would give such drones. “Seek out major power sources, including nuclear, and seek out rapid flying objects, and then send information back home” would be one such set of instructions roughly compatible with the stylized facts on the ground (or in the air). Of course the information sent back to alien worlds will not be arriving for a very, very long time, so long that the concrete motives of the aliens may not be the major consideration. Collecting the information about other planets across some very long time frame might simply seem worthwhile, relative to the cheap cost of the drone probes. It reminds me a bit of that “put the DNA of all the species on the moon” project we have started, or those seed banks up in the Arctic. Why exactly did we do it? Why not I say!? And yet most humans do not even know those projects are going on.

A further generalized software instruction would be “if approached or confronted, run away fast.” Indeed that is what those flying vehicles seem to do.

The drone probes do not destroy us, because of Star Trek-like reasons: highly destructive species already have blown themselves up, leaving the relatively peaceful ones to send drones around. The drones probably are everywhere, in the galactic sense that is. Yet given the constraints imposed by the speed of light, it is difficult to do much with them that is very useful to the decision-makers that send (sent?) them out. So the relevant theory is one of how advanced civilizations allocate their surplus when there is a lot of discretion and not much in the way of within-lifetime costs and benefits to determine a very particular set of plans and goals. Not even for the grandkids.

In this hypothesis, of course, you have to be short immortality. And short usable wormholes.

By the way, don’t those photos of the drone probes make them look a bit like cheap crap? No tail fins, no “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” music signature, no 3-D holograms, just a superfast vehicle. Like something a second-rate alien non-profit picked up at the local Walmart and sent off into space en masse with solar-powered self-replication. Which is consistent with the view of them being a discretionary resource allocation stemming from projects with fairly fuzzy goals.

A problematic question for any theory is whether competing drone navies have come to visit us, and if so are they fighting over the spoils? Colluding? Hiding from each other? Or what? If aliens are afoot, why should it be only one group of them? That would seem strange, as in most things there are multitudes, at least speaking in Bayesian terms. Aren’t there at least both Klingon probes and Romulan probes, maybe Federation probes too.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: U.S. Department of Defense/Navy Times via:

[ed. Similar to Cixin Liu's perspective (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest) that alien probes could be out searching for energy or life-sustaining resources (as backups?), and if there's the possibility of competition from other advanced or hostile alien civilizations it might be better to just keep quiet about your discoveries and intentions. See also (in addition to the link above): Robin Hanson's Explaining Stylized UFO Facts; and Meta-Comments On UFO Talk (Overcoming Bias).]

Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.” (...)

Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”

Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”

The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as “the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.

by Jane Mayer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Axios on HBO / ZUMA / Alamy

[ed. What a shame.]

The Blaze

[ed. See also: The Blaze live at Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, France for Cercle.]

Max Kuiper, Blackened Views# 11
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Masao Yamamoto, Bonsai
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How To Set Up Your First Pedalboard

Making sure that you have everything you need to set up a solid, functional and low-noise pedalboard is important before you start wiring things together. That’s why we’ve created this insightful guide, giving you a step-by-step set of instructions, loads of tips and all the requirements.

How To Build A Pedalboard: Step-By-Step

Later in the article, we go into far more detail about the points below. However, if you want to cut to the chase then follow these concise steps to form your pedalboard!

1. Choose a versatile set of pedals – Tuner, overdrive, distortion, wah, delay and reverb pedals are great effects to begin with.
2. Find the right-sized board – Make sure that you find a pedalboard that has enough space to accommodate the effects that you have.
3. Purchase a pedal power supply – Keep your pedals powered quietly with a high-quality isolated pedal PSU. It’ll make a difference, trust us!
4. Order and connect your pedals – Route and position your pedals in a logical way, to ensure that you’re getting the most out of them.
5. Mount your stompboxes to your pedalboard – After you’ve established your layout, apply velcro to your pedalboard/stompboxes and mount them. Job done!

When Should I Start Buying Guitar Pedals?

Welcome to the world of stompboxes and pedalboards! We assume that you’ve reached a point where you feel limited by the tones offered by your amp, and that you’re keen to expand your sonic horizons.

It is when you come to that realisation that you should start investing in guitar pedals. Coming in all shapes and sizes, the amount of pedal options is vast. From the wave of overdrives out there to more niche effects like ring modulators, the sheer level of choice might seem slightly overwhelming at first.

However, setting up your first pedalboard should not be a daunting prospect! In this next section, we’ve identified essential pedals that you should choose before putting together your very own board.

Which Guitar Pedals Should I Start With?

While unique and experimental effects can be cool (especially if you’re a hipster), to most players they may seem a little bit far-fetched. That’s why we’ve picked out some super-popular pedalboard staples; the usual suspects if you will. You’ll see the following pedals gracing the boards of anyone from pub giggers all the way to seasoned pros.

But before we look at all of the key stompboxes you should have, you may already be thinking ‘which guitar pedal should be my first?’. Well, that’s an easy one – a tuner pedal!

by Elliot Stent, Anderton's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Brian Calvin, Duet (with Chorus), 2018
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