All My Exes Live In Pixels

Why some men save their former flames’ nudes long after a breakup

Tyler calls the folder on his laptop that contains nudes of his exes “Rogaine.” He changed it from “cocaine” after too many people asked him what he was keeping in there. Anwar called his “random stuff,” but he kept the nudes nested in the fourth of four untitled folders. That was before he deleted the folder sometime last year, when he got paranoid about potential hacking. Ryan’s old nudes are scattered throughout his email — you can find them by typing “.jpg” into the search bar — but he rarely looks at them, except when he’s newly single. Bill says he doesn’t know where his are, probably on camera memory cards and old hard drives. But now that I mention it, he’s gonna gather them into a single place.

Nudes from my exes are collected in a folder called “just drunk enough to send this.” I made it when I was studying abroad at a South African university with slow internet and a long-distance girlfriend. One day, she sent a video with the subject head “just drunk enough to send this.” I took my laptop to the library immediately and made small talk with a fellow American while the progress bar slowly filled up. The video featured my girlfriend wearing a tank top and camouflage booty shorts. “True Affection” by The Blow played in the background. The first line of that song is “I was out of your league,” which she almost definitely was. (I’ve only heard that song once in the years since she sent me the video. I would describe my reaction to it as Pavlovian.) (...)

And, though the specific practice is a modern phenomenon, we would be lying to ourselves if we said it wasn’t deeply rooted in history. Photographers like Albert Arthur Allen were producing boudoir photography as early as the 1920s, but nudes must have predated that. After all, the Tourist Multiple and the Simplex were consumer-focused cameras that debuted in 1913 and 1914, respectively. Another thing that debuted around that time was World War I. If you think that British, French and German women were sending their soldier husbands off to war empty-handed, then I have some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.

by Michael Hafford, MEL |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Chaka Khan & Rufus

"Tell Me Something Good" is a song by Rufus and Chaka Khan, written by Stevie Wonder and released in 1974. The single was a hit in the United States, peaking at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent one week at number one on the Cash Box Top 100. It was among the earliest hits to use the guitar talk box, by Tony Maiden. (Wikipedia)

[ed. See also: Ain't Nobody.]

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[ed. Reminds me of a short-lived poppy explosion along the Glenn Highway outside of Anchorage, in Alaska. A DOT road engineer/employee died and specified in his will that his remaining estate be used to plant poppy seeds along the entire central median stretching from Anchorage to Eklutna (over 30 miles). It was one of the most awesome things I've ever seen. Certainly more intense than what's pictured here. Sadly, I can't seem to find any Google history of who that person was or when it happened (two or three decades ago anyway). Whoever it was, thank you for the wonderful experience!]

Bike Madness

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[ed. Wow. A lot of thought (and probably trial and error) went into the design of this course.]

This Week, Billionaires Made a Strong Case for Abolishing Themselves

In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.

One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.

It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.

As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).

In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.

His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.

Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.

But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.

For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.

On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.

That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.

It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.

And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.

But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.

At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.

by Anand Giridharadas, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Teacher greets students, by having them choose which greeting is most comfortable for them.
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The FTX Saga - Simplified

A bank, in simple terms, is an entity where a customer can deposit their money (and get paid interest), or can borrow money (and pay interest to the bank). The way a bank makes money is that it charges more interest to the borrower than what it pays to the depositor. A bank is allowed to lend your money out without your explicit permission. Because of this, governments heavily regulate banks. They are limited as to who they can lend to and how much. They are audited frequently and have robust external oversight.

A brokerage, in simple terms, is an entity where a customer can deposit their money and buy investment assets, in hopes to grow their money over time. Typically, a customer can open two types of accounts in a brokerage:

• Cash account: This account can exclusively buy and sell assets

• Margin account: This account can not only buy and sell assets, it can borrow against those assets. For example, you can deposit $10,000 USD and buy Apple stock. You can then use that Apple stock as collateral and borrow against it. Typically you could borrow up to a certain amount. For a stock like Apple, you could borrow up to 70% of the value of the stock, so in our example, you could borrow up to $7,000 USD, which you could use to buy whatever you want. However, there is a caveat: if Apple stock falls 50%, you would be faced with a margin call: Your account balance is $5,000 USD in Apple stock, but you borrowed $7,000. When this happens the brokerage will call you and ask you to deposit $5,000 USD in collateral so your account is covered. If you don’t have the money, the brokerage has the right to sell your remaining Apple stock to cover your bad debt. However in our example, there is a shortfall of $2,000 USD ($5,000 from the sale of Apple stock - $7,000 loan you took). In that case the brokerage will try to get that $2,000 from you through legal means, but that would cost money and time and they might not be able to recover it. What would happen is that the brokerage would then realize a loss of $2,000 against their capital.

How does a brokerage make money? Typically, there are four ways:

1. Charging commissions on trading. You buy $10,000 worth of Apple stock? That trade costs you $10.
2. Charging a fee on your account. You have $10,000 in your account. The brokerage charges an 1% annual fee for holding your assets, but your trades are free. So if your account balance stays at $10,000 for a year, you would pay $100 for having your assets in there.
3. They charge for making a market in an asset. In simple terms, they sell the asset to you at a price slightly higher than the purchase price in the open market, or buy the asset from you at a lower price than the sale price in the open market. The best example of this model for making money are currency exchange houses.
4. Lending. They will lend cash and other assets to margin accounts, and charge an interest fee to the customer that borrows. Like I explained in our Apple example above, this adds considerable risk to the business model, so brokerages that engage in margin lending must have robust risk management processes to ensure that there are no shortfalls in the customers accounts. No brokerage wants to be constantly calling their customers asking for more money. Furthermore, a brokerage must have capital on hand to be able to lend to their customers and to be able to absorb shortfalls. A Brokerage (in most countries) is not allowed to lend customer funds out, unlike a bank. It must hold all customer deposits 1:1. This means that if you deposited $10,000 USD, it must always hold that $10,000 USD. If you deposited 10 Bitcoin it must hold that 10 Bitcoin at all times.

Enter FTX

FTX was a crypto exchange and brokerage, with a slick trading platform. FTX’s founder and CEO was Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). What separated FTX from the rest of the firms that offered similar services was how fast and efficient their platform was, how liquid their market making business was (This means, in simple terms, that FTX was one of the best places to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. It was fast and the prices they offered where some of the best), and their margin lending business. At FTX, you were allowed to deposit cash or cryptocurrencies, then borrow against them. Their systems were so advanced when it came to risk management that the sale of collateral when margin was breached was automatic, no need to call the customer asking for cash to cover.

 
Enter Alameda Research

Alameda was an investment firm founded by SBF prior to his founding of FTX. Alameda invested in cryptocurrencies and its strategies were considered wildly successful in the crypto space. As a fund it only managed investments of its employees and a few early backers. SBF was the CEO of Alameda before becoming the CEO of FTX. Alameda was a major client of FTX.

 
Enter FTT Token

FTT is a cryptocurrency created by FTX as a rewards system for its customers. You were rewarded FTT tokens for trading in FTX (Although you could also just buy the tokens in the open market). Having FTT in your FTX account allowed you to have discounts on trading fees, and FTX allowed you to borrow up to 95% of the value of your FTT tokens in your account. How did the FTT token maintain its value? FTX would use some of its trading profits to buy back FTT in the open market and destroy the tokens. This would theoretically mean that FTT would increase in value the more trading profits FTX generated. FTT token holders theoretically had a partial claim to the future profits of FTX, similar to a stock.

So, how does this all lead to the implosion of FTX?

It is assumed that, like many other crypto investment and trading firms, Alameda Research incurred significant losses in their portfolio during the crypto downturn of this year. Alameda traded and invested using loans, and at one point their losses became so big that their lenders asked for their money back, which Alameda did not have. For reasons still unknown to the crypto space, SBF made a decision to bail out Alameda. Now allegedly the hole was so big that SBF’s own money or even FTX’s own capital was not enough to cover these losses (It is assumed that the losses at Alameda could have been over $10 billion USD), so SBF decided to use FTX’s customer funds to bail out Alameda.

Now, how can SBF do this without raising any flags? Transferring billions of dollars in assets from FTX to Alameda would have raised all of the red flags, and it would have leaked to the crypto market fairly quickly. SBF knew that he had to keep this hidden from the majority of the FTX organization.

by Jorge I Velez, Learning Decision Theory and its Applications (Substack) | Read more:

-----

See also: What happened at Alameda Research (Milky Eggs):

If you want to read a poorly researched fluff piece about Sam Bankman-Fried, feel free to go to the New York Times (PDF). If you want to understand what happened at Alameda Research and how Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits, read this article. (...)

To be clear, we still don’t have a perfect understanding of what exactly happened at Alameda Research and FTX. However, at this point, I feel that we have enough information to get a grasp on the broad strokes. Through a combination of Twitter users’ investigations, forum anecdotes, and official news releases, the history of these two intertwined companies becomes progressively less hazy, slowly coalescing into something resembling a consistent narrative.

Of course, without witness testimonies and a full financial investigation, our claims only remain tentative at best. Any given piece of information may be flawed or even fabricated. However, if they are assembled together and put in context, they together lend credence to the following timeline:

• SBF, Trabucco, and Caroline were (probably) initially well-intentioned but not especially competent at running a trading firm
• Alameda Research made large amounts of book profits via leveraged longs and illiquid equity deals in the 2020-2021 bull market
• Although Alameda was likely initially profitable as a market maker, their edge eventually degraded and their systems became unprofitable
• Despite success with some discretionary positions, on net, Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money and liquid cash throughout 2021-2022 as a result of excessive discretionary spending, illiquid venture investments, uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting, and general deficiencies in overall organizational ability
• When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors
• This repayment spurred on increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually resulting in total insolvency

Details follow below. (Many thanks to all those who have contributed to this article, be it through private discussions or through public content that I’ve quoted or otherwise relied upon.) (Read more:)

Don’t Let Adderall Scarcity Trigger a Repeat of the Opioid Epidemic

U.S. pharmacies are critically low on Adderall and its generic equivalents, leaving more than 26 million patients scrambling and competing for the pills since late summer. The scarcity is going to last for many more months because of supply chain problems as well as federal restrictions on manufacturers and imports.

If we don’t act fast, this shortage could trigger two major public health crises.

Many people who have been taking this amphetamine-based stimulant – whether prescribed for attention deficit or narcolepsy or used illicitly as a performance or party drug – will lose access. This carries serious physical and mental health risks.

Amphetamine withdrawal symptoms, including depression, are not easily addressed with other kinds of drugs. So as countless individuals are confronting having to rapidly taper or stop, we’re facing a real possibility of a public health disaster on a scale not seen since the prescription opioid crisis that began a decade ago.

Instead of enduring withdrawal, other individuals cut off from Adderall are likely to turn to alternative stimulants like crystal meth, fueling a much broader crisis.

The early 2010s taught us that dependence and addiction don’t simply disappear when the pills do. At that time, catastrophic regulation failures contributed to widespread opioid dependence and addiction. The government response to the prescription opioid crisis focused on rapidly reducing supply: crackdowns on pill mills, tightened restrictions on prescribing and reformulation of products to make them harder to snort and inject. This approach backfired, pushing many users onto the illicit market.

As a chemical analog of prescription opioids, heroin was widely available and far cheaper than its pharmaceutical cousins. But its unpredictable quality and link with injection drug use made heroin a much more dangerous alternative; the recent rise in fentanyl contamination has further fueled the crisis. Overdose rates have continued to soar, spiking from 16,000 during the height of the prescription opioid crisis to more than 100,000 annually. The number of cases of blood-borne infections like HIV and hepatitis has spiked in tandem.

Today’s Adderall shortage is setting up a similar crisis. For those losing adequate access to prescription amphetamine, illicit alternatives – especially methamphetamine – are readily available. Just as with heroin, years of increasingly punitive policies, aggressive law enforcement, government fear-mongering and growing public panic failed to address the “meth problem.”(...)

Enter the Adderall shortage.

A massive influx of people forced to switch from a pharmaceutical amphetamine to street methamphetamine would be nothing short of a nightmare. But there is still time to prevent a stimulant remake of the tragic scenario we have seen play out with opioids.

The F.D.A. has powerful tools at its disposal to ease the Adderall shortage. This includes attracting and fast-tracking approval for international manufacturers and helping rapidly develop domestic production.

Maintaining a reliable, safe supply of amphetamine medications is crucial to avoid a major public health crisis. Bigger thinking is also vital to prevent other similar crises from occurring in the future.

The current Adderall shortage is a symptom of deep structural dysfunction in our institutions, policies and systems responsible for drugs. As with opioids, stewardship of prescription stimulants in American healthcare is poor, often vacillating between excess and deficit. We need far more nuanced, patient-centered approaches to medication access that are not bogged down in drug panics and concerns about law enforcement.

Meanwhile, our streets are flooded with illicitly manufactured alternatives of unpredictable content and dosage, despite cavalier investments in criminal justice efforts to stem their supply. Instead, cost-effective lasting solutions like housing, social services, and wrap-around supports are necessary to make our society healthier and safer.

Bold actions are urgently needed to prevent history from repeating itself.

by Leo Beletsky, LA Times | Read more:

Image: JB Reed/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[ed. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. When Purdue Pharma's aggressive opioid marketing campaign eventually revealed abuses, everyone -  government (Congress, CDC, FDA, DEA), doctors, hospitals, politicians, media, insurance companies - everyone, fell all over themselves to "get tough" on opioids. Supplies and prescriptions for pain medications were cut off almost immediately and long-term patients thrown under the bus. Guess what happened next? Widespread suffering, diverted drug seeking, increased and accelerating mortalities, spiking suicides, new drugs (fentanyl) filling the vacuum, and newly emboldened cartels making tons of money. Now Adderall is in short supply, but this time the affected population includes financiers, bankers, students, professors, billionaires, businessmen, media hacks, technology bros, Hollywood, and just about everyone else that needs a little bump to perform at an elevated level of performance. In other words, everybody. So I don't imagine this supply crisis will last long (or experience the same kind of pharmaceutical malpractice we've seen with opioids). See also: How L.A. Got Hooked on Adderall (LA Magazine); Amid the Adderall Shortage, People With A.D.H.D. Face Withdrawal and Despair (NY Times); also, Cat Marnell's memoir How to Murder Your Life.]

Ensemble ZENE

[ed. Other worldly.]

11 Years

Elizabeth Holmes Sentenced to Over 11 Years in Prison (The Cut)

Image: Ethan Pines/The Forbes Collection via

[ed. Sociopathology, meet accountability.]

Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster

The Ticketmaster site crashed on Tuesday after about a bazillion of the gazillion Taylor Swift fans tried to buy tickets to her new Eras Tour.

Ticketmaster has been a thorn in the side of entertainers and fans alike for years, with service fees often adding 25 percent or even more to the original ticket price. For example, a recent ticket to the Jane’s Addiction/Smashing Pumpkins concert that cost $196 ended up being $231.

Fans trying to get tickets to an in-demand concert found some unlikely allies: politicians pushing an antitrust agenda. Self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted a “reminder” that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.”

The Context

Ticketmaster is nearing its 50-year mark, maintaining dominance through massive changes in the music revenue business. The ticket giant purchased Live Nation, the events promoter and venue operator, in 2010 and owns exclusive rights to first sales of a good number of concerts.

The deal was not a big company buying a competitor, but instead the predominant ticketing company for the live events industry (Ticketmaster) and a concert promotion company (Live Nation).

Ticketmaster’s influence over concerts and the rising costs of event tickets haven’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver called Ticketmaster “one of the most hated companies on earth.” (...)

Economic Lens

Ticketmaster has been criticized and investigated — but still rules the world of ticket sales in the entertainment industry

The antitrust concern with Ticketmaster is about its 2010 merger with Live Nation. The merger immediately drew hackles from critics for potentially giving Ticketmaster an unfair advantage in the entertainment ticket industry.

It went through only after the Justice Department under President Barack Obama completed a lengthy antitrust investigation that required the merged company to comply with some conditions to do the deal. That included signing an agreement that barred them from “retaliating against any venue that chooses to use another company’s ticketing services or promotional services.”

But problems persisted almost a decade later, according to the Justice Department. And Live Nation agreed to extend its original agreement not to force venues to use Ticketmaster through 2025.

Earlier this year, Ticketmaster and Live Nation were sued by a class of ticket-buyers for allegedly violating antitrust rules by maintaining an “illegal business arrangement under which Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S., threatens to withhold shows from major venues if they do not select Ticketmaster as their primary ticketing service provider,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote in a January article. (...)

Even if a fan is able to grab a Taylor Swift presale ticket, they’ll still have to pay processing and service fees — which can quickly add up to make a ticket that is seemingly affordable on its face much more expensive when it’s time to pay for it.

Critics say even with Justice Department oversight, the company is still functioning as a monopoly.

How does Ticketmaster/Live Nation stay on its throne? “Because Live Nation manages more than 500 major music artists, the company can demand that venues interested in hosting performances with those artists exclusively use Ticketmaster as their ticketing service, thus eliminating any potential competition,” the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project wrote in a report. The group has advocated for the Justice Department to undo the merger.

by Matthew Zeitlin, Cameron Hood, and Suzette Lohmeyer, Grid |  Read more:

Image: Noam Galai/ Getty Images
[ed. If she didn't predict this she's getting bad advice. If she did, and has decided to take on TM, then good luck and godspeed. But who knows? Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster Disaster Keeps Getting Worse (The Cut); and, Taylor Swift says her team was assured ticket demands would be met for her Eras tour (NPR).]

Mikhail Zarovny

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America Has an Earthquake Early-Warning System Now — On Your Phone

Your phone can now warn you before an earthquake arrives.

Yes, before.

“Be-be-boop! Be-be-boop! Earthquake,” rang an app on my iPhone at 11:42 a.m. on Oct. 25. “Drop, cover, hold on, shaking expected.”

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake had just struck about 50 miles away in California’s Silicon Valley. I leaped out of my chair and grabbed a wall. A few seconds later, the ground began to rumble.

This feat of science and personal technology is the best example I’ve seen of how smartphones can help protect tens of millions of us from significant danger. I’ll show you how to get it.

Known as ShakeAlert, America’s earthquake early-warning system was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and partners to give you typically up to 20 seconds of advance warning before significant shaking arrives, or even a minute in extreme circumstances. If you’re close to the epicenter, you might not get much notice — but it could still be enough to protect yourself.

After nearly two decades of development, ShakeAlert is now operating in California, Oregon and Washington state, where it’s considered 83 percent complete. The USGS is considering expanding the system to Alaska next.

ShakeAlert got one of its largest tests with that October earthquake, when it took less than 10 seconds for the system to send about 2.1 million warnings to Californians like me. Thankfully, there were no reports of major injuries. For me, the little bit of early notice helped me prepare mentally for what was about to come.

The experience also left me wondering: How can a push alert reach my phone faster than shaking does? “That’s a multistage process, and really I find it just fascinating that we can do it all,” says Dave Croker, a member of the ShakeAlert operations team at the USGS.

I met up with Croker at a USGS field station a few miles from California’s notorious San Andreas Fault, where he showed me how the system fits together — starting with your cellphone.

How to get earthquake alerts on your phone

Smartphones have a capability that Croker says is a game changer for earthquake safety: They always know your location. (...)

If you have an Android phone, you’re good to go. Google added ShakeAlert to its operating system in 2020 after the California portion first came online. The warnings pop up automatically on your phone’s lock screen, so long as you have location services and emergency notifications enabled. These alerts are tuned to arrive for earthquakes that are both at least magnitude 4.5 and are also expected to produce noticeable shaking at your location. (If severe shaking is expected, Android will send a special take-action alert.)

If you use an iPhone, there’s a bit more work involved. You’ll need to download and run a free app such as MyShake, made by the University of California at Berkeley, or QuakeAlertUSA, made by Early Warning Labs. Unfortunately, you’ll have to repeatedly give the app permission to know your location at all times. (Apple, which has been heavily touting other iPhone safety features, said it didn’t have anything to share about integrating earthquake alerts into iOS.)

Regardless of what kind of phone you use, ShakeAlert can still find its way to you if an earthquake of magnitude 5 or higher hits. For areas also likely to surpass a high shaking threshold, wireless carriers are equipped to automatically send warnings to every phone using a similar emergency system to Amber Alerts. You just need to have government alerts activated in your phone’s settings.

by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post
[ed. See also: How to never miss an emergency alert from shootings to wildfires (WP).]

Ruminating on Life Transitions as Fall Shifts to Winter

In Southcentral Alaska this year, there wasn’t much of a transition from what we Alaskans call fall — that fleeting, fiery period — to what now feels like winter. One day the rain stopped, the next snow dumped.

Or, that’s how it felt.

Still, I find myself feeling like I’m playing catch-up with the season. I feel like I’m in an intermediary space, and am thinking about what it feels like to be here. If there wasn’t enough autumn for me, I’m now creating one in my mind.

My husband teases me for the way I talk to people I meet for the first time. He tells me I am an interrogator, bent on learning life stories. “Maybe they don’t want to tell you everything about what makes them them,” he says.

I don’t pry for its own sake. I’m not trying to unearth anything someone doesn’t want to tell me. But I am interested in people. I’m interested in new — to me — perspectives. And I value spaces that enable the sharing of those perspectives.

Maybe that’s why I’m a podcast junkie. That’s probably why I love long hikes or backpacks with people — there is enough open air and time to fully share stories. And that’s also probably why I am, as my husband lovingly points out, nosy.

Related, I like situations that stir up feelings. Or, I think I do. Sometimes I don’t love the feelings that get prodded loose. But I’ll take that over stasis.

Transitional periods create opportunities for that kind of stirring; eventually, that kind of story formation and sharing. Something gets changed or is in the process of changing. A thing that once was starts to transform into something new. That process of changing mixes things up, turns them over and shakes them out where I can see them.

Before they become what they are going to be — a story that gets told, for instance — the elements of change are just kind of free radicals out there, figuring out what they are before settling back into a new pattern.

For me, while in one of these periods, I’m what you might call a “brooder” — I get into the mulling; I think to the point of overthinking. I focus on the turning over of each of the pieces that are now more visible than before. I start to dream vividly. I go for long walks.

Eventually, all of this leads to action. But before that can happen, I need a good long while to sit with what’s coming up and sort it out for myself.

Here’s the thing about a transition period though: It can be hard to see as a whole when I’m in it. My lived experience is that a transition period is made up of moments, just like every other moment in my life. Here I am, just like always. I can rationally tell myself all I want that I’m in some kind of in-between, liminal space but when I’m actually in it, it’s just me living.

This year, I find myself brooding over a few different things and a few different definitions of transition.

One, as I already mentioned, is late fall. What does it mean to move from summer to autumn to winter in Alaska? It’s bittersweet. Most of the time there’s a semi-secret, riotous, earnest relief about not having to go at 110% all of the time, like I do when it’s 24-hour daylight.

Then, there’s the fear of impending winter. What will it be like with so little light? What will I feel? How hard will what I call “the weirds” — some version of depression — sink in, and how will I cope with it?

Fall has its own bright, fleeting moment of berry-picking in blazing tundra, but then it fades quickly and becomes an almost purely transitional zone of cold weather and barren trees but no snow.

Those are the days that can be the hardest. While I know objectively that winter will set in, my day-to-day experience still takes forever. It’s dark, but not yet the kind of dark that’s illuminated by white snow on the ground. I’m just about ready to welcome full winter, but it’s not here yet. It’s cold but not fully frozen.

by Ali Harvey, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Loren Holmes / ADN

US Regulators to Vote on Largest Dam Demolition in History

The largest dam demolition and river restoration plan in the world could be close to reality Thursday as U.S. regulators vote on a plan to remove four aging hydro-electric structures, reopening hundreds of miles of California river habitat to imperiled salmon.

The vote by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone facing a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years.

Approval of the application to surrender the dams' operating license is the bedrock of the most ambitious salmon restoration plan in history, and if approved the parties overseeing the project will accept license transfer and could begin dam removal as early as this summer. More than 300 miles (483 kilometers) of salmon habitat in the Klamath River and its tributaries would benefit, said Amy Souers Kober, spokeswoman for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration.

“This is an incredibly important milestone,” she said. “This project really carries important lessons for rivers and the conservation movement, and the most important lesson is the leadership of the tribes. It’s because of the tribes that these dams will come out and the river be will restored.”

The vote comes at a critical moment when human-caused climate change is hammering the Western United States with prolonged drought, said Tom Kiernan, president of American Rivers. He said allowing California's second-largest river to flow naturally, and its flood plains and wetlands to function normally, would mitigate those impacts.

“Instead of having reservoirs where a significant amount of that water evaporates, it’s better to have that river flow and allow the flood plains and wetlands filter the water and bring it down to groundwater where it doesn’t evaporate.”

The Klamath Basin watershed covers more than 14,500 square miles (37,500 square kilometers) and the Klamath itself was once the third-largest salmon producing river on the West Coast. But the dams, constructed between 1918 and 1962, essentially cut the river in half and prevent salmon from reaching spawning grounds upstream. Consequently, salmon runs have been dwindling for years. (...)

But plans to remove the dams have been controversial.

A group of homeowners who live around Copco Lake, one of the large reservoirs, have fought the dam removal plans for years and say the values of their lakefront homes have plummeted. A coalition formed to oppose the demolition plan argues that the money set aside to cover the demolition isn't adequate, and that cost overruns and liability concerns would fall on the shoulders of taxpayers.

They also question whether removing the dams will work to restore salmon because of changes in the Pacific Ocean that are also affecting the fish, said Richard Marshall, head of the Siskiyou County Water Users Association.

“The whole question is, will this add to the increased production of salmon? It has everything to do with what’s going on in the ocean (and) we think this will turn out to be a futile effort,” he said. "Nobody’s ever tried to take care of the problem by taking care of the existing situation without just removing the dams."

Rate payers in the rural counties around the dams are also angered by the project, which is funded by $200 million from PacifiCorp and $250 million from a voter-approved water bond in California.

U.S. regulators raised flags about the potential for cost overruns and liability issues in 2020, nearly killing the proposal, but Oregon, California and PacifiCorp, which operates the hydroelectric dams and is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, teamed up to add another $50 million in contingency funds.

The utility would face steep costs to add fish ladders and other environmental mitigations to the outdated dams in order to renew their hydroelectric license and in recent years has diversified their energy portfolio enough to absorb the loss of the dams, the company has said.

by Gillian Flaccus, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File
[ed. This should have happened years ago. There are way too many unnecessary and derelict dams scattered throughout the country (read Cadillac Desert to understand why). Quite a stretch to conflate dam removal with climate change, but opposition arguments are equally as feeble and predictable. Even the license holder/operator wants the dams removed.]

Annie Lennox

[ed. A treasure.]

Florida Man Makes Announcement

The key problem of the Republican party is that Trump does not care about “his” party. He does not even really care about being president again. Trump must run to stay out of jail. That is why all the media speculation about whether he has announced too early is silly. The former president is facing an onslaught of legal cases, on a broad variety of issues – mishandling of classified documents, insurrection, and tax fraud – for which he needs a lot of money and political coverage. As a mere citizen, even as a former president, he holds much less leverage than as a primary candidate, who may not be able to win the presidency for the Republican party but is probably still strong enough to lose it for them.

by Cas Mudde, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP
[ed. So much packed into one paragraph - what it says about politics, government, our legal system, and media. Title from Murdoch's recent issue of the NY Post.]

The Submarine

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.

Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site "eBay"?

Symbiosis

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.

by Paul Graham, PaulGraham.com |  Read more:

Image: Bukvoed (Creative Commons via:)

[ed. This is a classic, fairly old essay (2005) that's likely still true (if not more so). For more recent works, see: How to Lose Time and Money; and, Is There Such a Thing As Good Taste?] 

Bluey: Smoochy Kiss

[ed. And fluffies. My grandaughter loves Bluey.]

What in the World Happened to the Supreme Court?

Back in may, after waves of protesters converged on the Supreme Court in response to the leak of the draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, a black fence appeared around the Court’s perimeter. Eight feet tall and deemed “unscalable” by the authorities, it offered an eerie echo of how the Court’s neighbor on Capitol Hill had looked behind barricades erected after the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

What happened at the Capitol on that January day was an attempted coup. What happened at the Supreme Court in June 2022 was a power grab of a different sort, driving the law far to the right in service of an agenda that most Americans don’t share.

June 2022 caught many Americans by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. The majority votes that erased the right to abortion, that put a constitutional stranglehold on states’ and cities’ efforts to keep guns off the streets, that further tightened religion’s grip on civil society, and that cast an ominous shadow over the policy-making apparatus of the modern federal government were the products of a project that goes back decades, one that unfolded in the full view of anyone who bothered to watch.

The decisions that term were the culmination of the single-minded pursuit of a goal that united cultural conservatives, deregulatory free marketeers, anti-abortion zealots, affirmative-action opponents, and all the other disparate elements of the political right in one common aspiration: the capture of the Supreme Court. That aim made perfect sense. Although in theory many of the objectives sought by this coalition of convenience should have been achievable through politics, popular will stood in the way. Efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade by amending the Constitution had failed spectacularly; public support for the right to abortion had, in fact, increased immediately following the Court’s 1973 ruling (and has increased even more now, following Roe’s overturning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). There was little that conservatives could do to make their agenda more appealing at the ballot box. That meant getting the Court was not simply the obvious choice; it was the only choice.

This was a goal that animated the conservative movement, first in defeat and then in triumph. Triumph arrived four months into the Trump administration, when the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court vacancy that by previously unquestioned norms had been President Barack Obama’s to fill. A phrase began to make its way around Washington in that early Trump period, shared among mainstream Republicans who were growing anxious about the chaos emanating from the White House. “But we got Gorsuch,” they said to one another, sometimes shortening the phrase to a kind of code: “But Gorsuch.” It served as a reminder that although the new president was making them nervous, Senator Mitch McConnell’s strategy had kept the real prize in safe hands.

Bringing the country to June 2022 took more than Gorsuch, of course. It required Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement by Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the eve of the 2020 election—another norm-shattering McConnell feat. But although getting Gorsuch wasn’t the end, neither was it the beginning. (...)

At least one justice has openly expressed her concern. In a notable series of pointed remarks since mid-summer, Justice Elena Kagan has sounded an alarm. “If over time the Court loses all connection with the public and the public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy,” she said at a conference of federal judges in Montana. Kagan, a dissenter in Dobbs, did not explicitly mention the decision, but the reference was unmistakable. Scholars agree, warning that the gulf Dobbs opened between the public and the Court, and the majority’s blatant disregard of public sentiment, presents a serious threat to the Court’s legitimacy. “Indeed, the Dobbs decision may be the most legitimacy-threatening decision since the 1930s,” James L. Gibson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and a prominent scholar of the Court’s relationship to the public, wrote in an unpublished paper he posted on an academic website. (...)

The justices took up the case that became Dobbs because a majority was determined to change the law of abortion for the whole country, come what may. The Court has great power, but it seems to have lost any sense of its great responsibility.

What happens if the country decides that the Court is deploying its power irresponsibly, even illegitimately? There is no modern template for such a scenario. That’s why the crisis for the Court is also a crisis for political science about the Court, a fact that would be of merely professional concern were it not so illuminating of the full dimension of what has occurred.

by Linda Greenhouse, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

[ed. See also: The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’ (The Atlantic).]