The Strange and Fascinating World of r/meth

R/meth has 144,000 followers now, far more than r/StopSpeeding, a subreddit with 28,000 members dedicated to helping people get off meth. In the pinned post, the mod thanks his fellow tweakers for the laughs, late nights, and camaraderie — and tells them they’re in good hands with the new moderator. (...)

I talked to one of them. He’s a 32-year-old-software engineer who calls himself WilliamWegman, after the artist who takes surreal photographs of his Weimaraners dressed up like people. He said when he found the subreddit he became “obsessed and in love,” but also “disgusted, concerned, and humored.”

“Sometimes I can’t look at it. Sometimes I can’t look away,” he told me. “There is this incredible lawlessness about it, and this almost indescribable atmosphere that I more often find worrisome.”

Wegman seems to take his newfound job as a moderator pretty seriously. He tries to be helpful. In one recent post, he replied to a user who complained about vomiting up “yellow stuff,” telling the guy the “yellow stuff” is bile and that he needs to put his phone down and eat. Nobody bothered responding. Unlike some other users, Wegman stresses quitting when possible. He recently wrote a long post titled “if your here because you're new to meth,” encouraging new users to stop before they become hopelessly addicted.

For Wegman, this is personal. A ten-year addict, he’s been sober for two years, but relapsed about two months ago and became a r/meth moderator soon after. During those two years, he told me, he went from making minimum wage sorting recycled electronics to making six figures as a software engineer. “I went to school, I worked nights and weekends and studied all day. I was a machine. Kicking ass at everything. I had never been completely sober before. This is who I actually was. I did not expect this. People who use drugs can’t imagine the kind of success they could have if they were absolutely sober.” He continued:

If you want to make sacrifices of all kinds so that you can maintain a somewhat normal life and use at the same time then do that, and I hope you get high as fuck.

The problem is most people do not have the will power, maturity, or support to use methamphetamine in a somewhat responsible way and wind up getting hurt.

At r/meth I see it like we are all running this marathon together. Drinking copious amounts of water, taking vitamins, staying awake until we hallucinate, having sex for 16 hours straight, taking a break to eat, have a cigarette and go right back to it.

So when I see someone laying on the side of the road saying their heart hurts I stop and say, 'Hey I think it's time to get some help.' I stay with them for a while and tell them everything I can think to encourage them to stop, then I turn around and keep running. I keep running because I can't stop running, most of us can't stop running.

So it is harm reduction, not sobriety, which seems to be r/meth’s official raison d’etre. That said, it's mostly just posts reminding people to drink water and use lube. “There is an absolutely titanic knowledge deficit about true harm reduction,” Wegman said. “So what is commonly known and passed around is always the same stuff. Magnesium, vitamins, electrolytes, food, water, sleeping every couple days, and how to ‘wash’ or remove some of the ‘cut’ from your meth with paint thinner.”

The harm reduction content accounts for a small percentage of posts on r/meth. As a whole, the subreddit is a community built around the shared experience of doing meth, and not much more or less than that. The back and forth in comment sections can get pretty long because, well, everybody’s on meth. But nobody pretends otherwise. There’s no pretense here, no personas. It might be one of the last places on the internet where people know exactly who they are, and are honest with themselves and everybody else about it. They post pictures and videos of themselves, shitpost, ask for advice, and commiserate over their shared experiences on the drug — encounters with the so-called “shadow people” being one of the most interesting. (...)

Unlike the mysterious shadow people, many r/meth users are more than willing to show people exactly who they are. Although depictions of intravenous use are banned, videos of users smoking meth aren’t, and such videos are ubiquitous. The people posting videos of themselves don’t bother concealing their faces, and they could look like anybody. Some of them are young, some old, every race, men and women. I asked Wegman whether or not he thought all these videos might trigger relapse in people trying to quit, or possibly encourage them to smoke more. He said that if people were looking up a drug they used to abuse online, it was only a matter of time before they relapsed again.

“If you’re trying to stay clean and you do anything related to the drug you’re abstaining from, you are starting to relapse. Period.”

As for the videos encouraging people to use more, Wegman was skeptical. He admitted that a lot of addicts are sexually aroused by seeing other people use, and that this might “excite someone to take a few more hits,” but nothing more than that. According to Wegman:

The thing that encourages you to do more meth is the meth itself. You take a hit, it feels so good immediately you want another and take it. The higher you get the more you want it until you are literally screaming inside your head “fucking give me more yes!!!” And you are not rationally deciding to take more, you're giving in to the insanely powerful urge the drug creates. You are aware of this and you find it absolutely captivating and you love letting the drug tell you what to do. Really what it is, is you lose control over your rational thoughts, of your conscience. You are still aware of your rational self and are aware you are parting ways with it. That your willpower is being unassigned to operate through the moral conscious, and is being put on standby so your high self can take over. Once this happens, and it happens every single time, the real fun begins. Meth highs are about losing control to what the meth wants you to do.

Some of the content is extremely concerning. Here, a user asks if he’s having an overdose. A year ago he was posting pictures of his cat and talking about video games and music. He’s 14. I asked Wegman if he thought that people were better or worse for r/meth existing at all. He said:

The bad are already bad and getting worse without reddit. The good are good and also getting worse without reddit, but the good’s stronger rationale and moral compass digs its claws in deeper into the slippery incline, so it's a slower descent into complete debauchery and self-destruction. Note the claws can be forced, with great willpower, deep enough into the slippery meth incline that the user is able to stay at one altitude, but the strain is very great, and the position awkward.

Methamphetamine is a complicated and cumbersome drug that requires a lot of time and effort to manage somewhat, or even to just stay alive. It is a high maintenance drug par excellence. Like owning a dragster or something. It needs maintenance (your body) after every race or it falls apart.

Then he gave me a list of pros and cons.

by River Page, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: r/meth

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The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of grown men, rapacious men, whose nature is to bust-out the weak men as cruelly and certainly as possible, over and over again.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is our story, the story of the United States here in the fin de siecle of The Long Now, where our entire country has been busted out and stripped for parts by grown men, rapacious men, different from Tony Soprano only in that they plunder legally within a system of courts and laws and regulatory agencies.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is a story of loss and sadness.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of what happens when Story ends, when the reality of the bust-out — crappy stores and crappy management and overwhelming debt — finally swamps the narratives of Stock Buybacks!TM and Turnaround!TM and Short Squeeze!TM.

And maybe a story of hope.

Hope how?

Hope that the reality of the American bust-out — crappy institutions and crappy leaders and overwhelming debt — will begin to swamp the narratives of Yay, Stock Market! and Yay, College! and Boo, MAGA! and Boo, Wokeism!.

Hope that the assignment of losses here at the end of an age will force us to call things by their proper names, to identify weakness as weakness and rapaciousness as rapaciousness and narrative as narrative. Hope that we will have the courage to reject them all. Hope that we will choose to be more clear-eyed and more full-hearted as we move forward with resolve to Make/Protect/Teach in the world beyond bust-out.

So here is the story of the weak and the rapacious and the narrative-driven. Here is the story of Bed Bath & Beyond. Not for shame or schadenfreude, but for hope.

***

There are at least three distinct phases of the Bed Bath & Beyond bust-out.

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by the original founders and management of the company. This is where most of the money was sucked out of the company, and by the time the original founders and management were deposed in May 2019, the company was already dead.

Bust Out 2 was orchestrated by the management team that replaced the Bust Out 1 team, together with an external investor, Ryan Cohen.

Bust Out 3 is so outrageous – a self-proclaimed functionally bankrupt company selling self-proclaimed worthless equity to meme investors, degenerate gamblers all – that I just call it the lulz period.

Both Bust Out 2 and the lulz period were quite speedy looting operations, so I’ve zoomed in on the past 12 months to show the stock price moves more clearly. In particular, the exit spike for Ryan Cohen’s Bust Out 2 sale was so fast that his exit price of $22+ per share doesn’t even register on the long-term chart above!

In general, I think this is a common factor in all bust-out processes, whether of a company or a country, that the individual bust-out episodes become shorter, sharper and more ridiculous as there’s less and less juice to squeeze out of the orange. (...)

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by CEO Steve Temares and company founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg after the disastrous 2013 Christmas shopping season. (...)

In response, Temares and the board announced a Strategic Plan! TM to reinvigorate the company, complete with a $1.5 billion bond offering, the first debt in company history. What was at the core of this grand plan, you ask? Well of course there were words like “building a leading e-commerce presence” and “targeted acquisitions” and “commitment to excellence”, but the main plank of the 2014 strategic plan and the only thing management actually executed on was simply this: Stock Buybacks! TM. (...)

Over the 6-year period of Bust Out 1, the board and management of Bed Bath & Beyond spent $4.4 billion buying back their own stock on total free cash flow of $3.6 billion. As their stores deteriorated and their margins collapsed, this company spent ALL of their free cash flow and then $800 million MORE buying back stock.

Now that’s a bust-out!

How did this personally benefit Temares, Feinstein and Weisenberg? Well, I compiled the 100+ SEC filings from these gentlemen to find out.

Steve Temares is a real estate lawyer who was hired by the company as their general counsel in 1992 and worked his way up the ranks. He’s not a founder. He’s not an entrepreneur. He’s a real estate lawyer who went from general counsel to executive VP to COO to CEO in 2004. I do not think it was an accident that Bed Bath & Beyond also instituted their stock buyback plan when Temares was named CEO.

As CEO, Temares was granted a total of 5.2 million shares of stock over his tenure, either as options that he immediately sold on exercise or as stock grants at no cost. He never bought a single share of Bed Bath & Beyond on the open market, but was reloaded by the board of directors every few years.

As CEO, Temares sold 4.3 million shares of stock for $148.4 million. This is net of all option exercise costs. This is in addition to his cash salary, bonuses and benefits, which averaged more than $4 million per year during the Bust Out 1 period. This is solely in connection with his personal holdings and is separate from the dozens of transactions associated with the family trust he established to exercise and sell additional BBBY options. After being fired as CEO, Temares sold an additional 900,000 shares for an estimated $18 million. This is in addition to his cash severance package of $36 million. In sum, Steve Temares received well in excess of $200 million in cash from Bed Bath & Beyond shareholders, the majority of this during or after Bust Out 1.

As for co-founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg, after the stock buyback program was introduced they each sold more than 10 million shares for an estimated $300 million. Each. This is in addition to the CEO-level salaries, bonuses and benefits they received as Co-Chairmen of the Board (my fave benefit was $230,000 in car service allowances per year; I mean, how is that possible?). This is in addition to the millions spent to make all-cash acquisitions of retail operations started by their sons, most famously $86 million in cash to acquire buybuy Baby from Leonard Feinstein’s son, including the retirement of $19 million in debt owed to the Feinstein family.

Honestly I don’t get as worked up over founders taking huge amounts of money out of a company as I do over managers, and if Bed Bath & Beyond had remained a private company that the founders decided to suck dry and leave to their kids … more power to ’em. But that wasn’t what Feinstein and Eisenberg did. They took the company public, dominated the board with Steve Temares, and used stock buybacks to prop up the stock price and sell tens of millions of shares into the open market. Feinstein and Eisenberg were old school merchants! You’ll never convince me that they didn’t understand exactly what was happening with the accelerated operational decline of the company from 2014 forward and exactly what were the consequences of spending 122% of free cash flow on stock buybacks.

It’s no wonder that Temares, Feinstein and Eisenberg were all kicked out of the company in 2019, but by then the fatal damage was already done.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilontheory |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. More American capitalism TM at its finest.]

An Anthropologist of Filth

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32.

By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with significant experience: he had spent three years of his adolescence in a reformatory for armed robbery; been a boxer and a janitor; worked in an automobile factory and an ammunition plant; trained as a hair stylist and a beautician; been married for nearly seven years; and been industrious and canny enough to purchase a pretty three-room house for himself and his wife, Themetta, known as Toddy. He had one existence chalked up, and was headed out toward several more.

“Maybellene” is classic Chuck Berry: a boy driving a Ford V-8 is chasing a girl in a Cadillac DeVille, the two cars potent symbols for sexual jockeying and pursuit. A rhythm of negotiated feint, never crossing into anything too obvious or vulgar—bumper-to-bumper, side to side, until finally the man-machine gives up the ghost. “The Ford got hot and wouldn’t do no more.” But then he suddenly revives and catches Maybellene “at the top of the hill.” Crest, cusp, plateau. The world spread out before him, waiting to be embraced.

This revving, frisky 45 is a logbook containing the codes and call signs of the postwar dispensation. As RJ Smith puts it in his new biography, Chuck Berry: An American Life, the artist “invented images and they came alive in the world.” He would be adored and imitated by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. The world of teenage desire had found its poet laureate—and he was not young or white or innocent. (...)

Berry never claimed that he invented rock and roll, and was always quite happy to point out where he’d gotten his inspiration: from the great hinterland and invisible college of rhythm and blues. He happily fessed up to his influences, such as Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. There was a lot of guilt-free recycling involved—transplanting a riff or a lick, a line or a trope, into fresh new settings. (Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan was the source for the famous opening guitar riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) Even the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit “My Ding-A-Ling” was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew. He tinkered, customized, and retooled songs as if giving an old car a new coat of paint, adding horsepower, then taking them back out on the open road again.

What he did do, indisputably, was visualize a whole new postwar landscape, and provide a soundtrack for its leisure time: a hybrid somewhere between white pop and black R & B. Smith has a lovely phrase for this: “Scraps and rags and things given away for free were pulled together and made into a brand new flag.” Rhythm and blues had always referenced highways and trains (even that dark Faust of the Delta blues, Robert Johnson, name-checks Greyhound buses and Terraplane cars), but Berry was the first person to give it a pop art twist. “Up to the corner and ’round the bend / Right to the juke joint, you go in / Drop the coin right into the slot / You gotta hear something that’s really hot.” All the fetishes of the emerging teenage culture of ready consumption appear in the mind’s eye: car radios, bright milkshakes, sizzling burgers, blaring jukeboxes. Dating and driving and disposable income. There is far more clamor about travel and consumer goods in Berry’s music than there is about sex and/or love. Also notable: the number of songs that reference marriage. (If he were a book, he’d, improbably, be Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties.) He doesn’t really write what you would call love songs—beautiful souls, pining hearts—rather, his songs are about things pursued, purchased, possessed. Various makes of cars. A “hi-fi phono.” High-heeled shoes. Skyscrapers. A TWA flight. “A model on the cover of a magazine.” Berry understood that technology would change everything, would shape the very nature of desire. “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / ’Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.” Sharp and punchy and streamlined, his songs are like episodes of a TV series that had yet to be made by anyone.

From an early age, Berry loved to tinker: junior handyman, hipster bricoleur. “Taking things apart explained the way the world worked far better than a sermon,” Smith writes. Berry comes to see everything, including learning the guitar, as a matter of mathematics. Radios, guitars; he wants to see the nuts and bolts behind the magical sound. Central to his development were what he called the “magic boxes,” the family piano and the Victrola record player. There was nothing he liked to do more than take something apart and put it back together again—which is just what he did with his music. He took the reigning spirit of R & B—raucous, gritty, nasty, alternately melancholy and murderous—and toned down its saturnine aspects while buffing up and emphasizing its Saturday-night shine.

If his scientific bent was one thing that marked him out, the other crucial difference between Berry and his musical contemporaries is that he wrote his own songs. Most performers at the time relied for their material on managers, publishing companies, pals of pals, or pals of heavy guys in fedoras. Berry wanted to rely on no one but himself. Even if you’re not a big Chuck Berry fan, there’s no arguing with his back catalogue. To list just the best-known songs from his impeccable run between 1955 and 1964 is to survey an unparalleled achievement: “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “School Day,” “Rock And Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Let It Rock,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Promised Land.” (...)

Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee sang as if they had something trapped inside of them that was so combustible it could only escape as a staggered hiss of stutters, moans, and squeals. When Berry sings, he enunciates crisply, as if he is still reciting poetry in his mother’s parlor. He never smears or elides his words, everything is clear and precise, milk teeth in the mouth of a cartoon character, pebbles in a stream. As an exercise, try reading out the lyrics of “Promised Land” yourself—even slowly, never mind at Berry’s kind of clip. The song communicates a feeling of travel as a breathless rush—and yet every name vibrates, every word rings like a bell. He’s a vaudeville comic who makes sure the whole audience, right to the back of the hall, registers every last hint, wink, and syllable.

Watch TV clips of Berry from his pomp (my favorite is a black-and-white one from Belgian TV, circa 1965, in which a sharp-suited Berry seems to be playing with a full-on jazz combo), and you realize that he was more of a natural all-round entertainer than most of his contemporaries. He managed to transfer the spirit of the traveling tent show into the compressed television age. He had an innate sense of what was required—something cool in both the jazz and the McLuhanite sense. He acts out his songs, using his exceptionally mobile face and beanpole body and cheese straw limbs. There is something almost unreal about him, like a zoot-suited roué out of a Tex Avery production. The country cousin and the city slicker in one and the same body. A walking contradiction. (...)

There was a paradox in the way the blues was framed by its early white enthusiasts: in order to be considered “authentic,” bluesmen had to remain bowed down, angry, bereft, defeated by the miseries of black life under American capitalism. Its practitioners, however, saw playing music precisely as a way out of that cul-de-sac. They wanted all the available spoils: shiny weekend suits, not tattered dungarees. Berry’s “poor boy” is no longer cooling his heels down on the farm, he’s being served food and drinks by an air hostess. There was no blues or church in Berry. His music may have been dashboard light to the crossroads darkness of the blues, but this wasn’t a sanctified light. It was more like a neon sign on a night out. It’s impossible to imagine him ever singing anything like Howlin’ Wolf’s “When I Laid Down I Was Troubled.”

Berry’s peers had a sense of sin and damnation in common, to the degree that their music might be taken for a form of speaking in tongues. Songs such as “Lucille” and “Great Balls of Fire” are metabolic eruptions; Berry’s music lacked any comparable sense of imminent demise. What it did convey was his own feeling of “ridin’ along in my automobile”: the roll and sway of a big car on an open road on a sunny day. One hand—or maybe just a pinkie—on the wheel. Not creeping along in a traffic jam to work, but driving for the sheer pleasure of it, without a destination, taking in the scenery. This is a man at ease.

Did anyone else write songs that were quite so visual? “They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale / The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” Elvis might sing about being down at the end of lonely street, but Berry would give you directions to the hotel parking lot, the bellhop’s name, and the color of the lobby carpet. His songs might almost be the memory-jog notes of someone scouting locations or pitching a sharp new road movie. They seem less like the cinema of the late Fifties and early Sixties than like advertisements or MTV-era music videos. Deft cuts from scene to scene. Traveling shots and bright flashbulb edits. “Promised Land” traverses the continent in two minutes and twenty-four seconds, via Greyhound bus, train, and plane. Berry’s motto is not “I’m a soul man,” but “I am a camera.”

It was his cousin Harry who introduced him, as a teenager, to the joys of photography (and much more besides: chemistry, rockets, astronomy, hypnotism). Harry “provided a conduit of science and rational thought to Chuck, plus also plenty of dirty pictures.” At this point we hear an ominous organ note on the soundtrack: “Over the years, Berry would amass a vast collection of cameras, video monitors, darkroom technology, and assorted recording devices.” Even after the success of “Maybellene,” his personal business cards read CHARLES BERRY, PHOTOGRAPHER. In tandem, Berry developed what might be termed an interest in, shall we say, the wilder shores of love. You get the impression that music was never really the place where he lost, found, or explored himself and his deepest desires. That place existed in the center of a Venn diagram whose twin cheeks were sex and tech.

This was consonant with his long-term taste for DIY, and just a different form of tinkering, of seeing things from all angles. An anthropologist of filth, Berry was fascinated by bodily waste, fore and aft. Boundary fetish: a moment between inside and outside. Berry owned and maintained several properties in the Hollywood Hills, and by the late Eighties visitors to one house in particular might find more than they bargained for in terms of interior design:

In the living room was an exotic table. A plate of glass was spread atop a bronzed naked woman who was lying on her back, her left arm and her knees holding up the table top. Her bare breasts pointed to the ceiling. A switch when toggled sent a hot, golden oil flowing down the statue’s legs.

Remember: this was a rental property. The troubadour mythos of rock and roll posits sex as a wild adventure; Berry is far more niche. He does not invite any kind of Dionysian cult. Despite their manifold flaws—the dead wives, drug insanity, and batty religious conversions—men like Elvis and Jerry Lee retain their patina of glamour, their plinth and their worshippers. In comparison, Berry is generally viewed as beyond the pale, his predilections distinctly un-wild, un-chic, un-romantic. Berry’s appetites were widely seen as excessive—or at least, excessive in the wrong way; he sculpted his own lurid, loopy world of fantasy, but it proved way too “real” for public taste.

by Ian Penman, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Chuck Berry on the road to Mobile, Alabama, October 1964.© Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12

Chelsea Gustafsson, Mr. Shark, 2020
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Sven Kroner, Ostern, Easter 21, 2021
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The Best Metal Detector

The dream of finding buried treasure is compelling, but the reality of metal detecting is that you mostly find trash—and you spend a lot of time doing it.

This may be the sort of repetitive, mainly solitary activity you intrinsically enjoy … or it may bore you to tears.

It’s best to figure that out before dropping a not-insignificant chunk of change on a metal detector of your own. So before you buy one, try to find a local club or store that will help you go on a trial hunt or two with an experienced detectorist. If the bug catches you, you’ll know it. And at that point, we’d say the Nokta Makro Simplex+ is the absolute best metal detector for a newcomer to the sport. (...)

I am a novice detectorist myself. And this guide reflects the expertise of about a dozen sources, including company reps from Garrett, Nokta, First Texas (maker of the Bounty Hunter), specialist retailers like Kellyco and metaldetector.com, as well as input from a whole bunch of dedicated hobbyists.

This guide owes much of its authority to the generosity of Alan and Sandy Sadwin, who took me under their wing and into their world to help me understand the technology, techniques, and ethics of metal detecting. Both are passionate detectorists and longtime members of the Atlantic Treasure Club, Long Island’s oldest metal-detecting club (of which Alan is a former president). They spent hours of their time sharing their knowledge and helping me begin to get a grasp on the hobby as a whole as well as on the specific machines we selected for testing. Many other members of the club also welcomed me when I attended a monthly meeting in February 2020, and they similarly shared their advice and opinions.

Who should get this

For every story like the one about the guy who found an Anglo-Saxon hoard important enough to rewrite history, there are thousands of folks who spend years finding nothing but bottle caps. The actual process of treasure hunting is, quite frankly, time-consuming, monotonous, and rarely rewarded with truly special or valuable finds. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun. And who knows—you just might find some gold in them thar hills. But before you lay out the cash it takes to get started, you’ll want to know whether treasure hunting is right for you.

That’s why our first bit of “buying advice” isn’t about buying anything—not yet, anyway. Contact a local club or store, and ask if you can attend a meeting or be put in touch with a committed detectorist who might take you out for a trial hunt. Many clubs also hold occasional public events to encourage the curious to give detecting a try. If you’re friendly, patient, open about your interest, and willing to learn, you'll likely find someone to give you some hands-on guidance. And be honest with yourself: If the bug doesn’t grab you after a trial hunt or two, metal detecting may not be your thing. If it does grab you, you can look forward to many adventures, including specialized detecting trips—there are specialist tour operators in the US and UK who secure the rights to search farms and other private land. On the night I joined a meeting, one couple at the Atlantic Treasure Club had just returned from England, where they’d found a medieval gold coin and a silver one from the British Roman era.

It’s probably more accurate to describe detecting as a sport rather than a hobby, in that mastering it means mastering the equipment, techniques, and rules. There’s a fairly steep learning curve to the machines themselves, which are complex and fallible electronic devices. It takes time to understand how they work, where and why they can fail, and how to coax the best performance out of them. And though the techniques aren’t terribly complex, you do have to get them right to make your detector work well.

But there’s another way metal detecting is like a sport. The great writer John McPhee once wanted a synonym for the word sport and found this definition in an early-20th-century edition of Webster’s Dictionary: “a diversion of the field.” Metal detecting is certainly that.

There’s also a general mindset we witnessed when talking to happy detectorists: that they were in it as much for the act of searching as they were for finding something amazing. Alan and Sandy usually search Long Island’s Jones Beach, where not much of great monetary value ever shows up. (Though Alan did once reunite a high schooler with her lost class ring, a discovery that also busted her to her mom—she’d been strictly forbidden from going to the beach.) But instead, they regularly see porpoises, dolphins, and sharks in the waves, as well as the endangered piping plover nesting in the dunes. I loved watching sandpipers darting in and out as they followed the surf, showing intrigued youngsters what I was up to, and simply escaping my apartment’s walls. I once apologized to Alan for taking up so much of his time, and he said, “Don’t. You’re my excuse to get out there and have fun.” No matter what you find—or whether you find anything, period—enjoying the outdoors is an intrinsic pleasure of metal detecting, and not one to discount.

by Tim Heffernan, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image: Sarah Kobos

How to Raise $89 Million in Small Donations, and Make It Disappear

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.

The phone rings. The caller knows your name, and opens with a dad joke.

“Carla? Finally, it’s good to hear a kind voice. That last call was tougher on me than my mother-in-law’s meatloaf. (chuckles) I’m only kidding.”

He is asking for donations, for a group that helps the police.

“This is Frank Wallace calling for the American Police Officers Alliance. Very quickly, we’re mailing out the envelopes to help fight for our officers who protect our nation’s citizens, just like yourself. Once you receive your card in the mail, you can send back whatever you think is fair this time. That’s all.”

This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice.

And like “Frank Wallace,” the American Police Officers Alliance is not what it seems.

In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting.

In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system.

Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.

But just 1 percent of the money they raised was used to help candidates via donations, ads or targeted get-out-the-vote messages, according to an analysis by The Times of the groups’ public filings.

About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls.

It is not clear why the groups plowed so much of what they raised back into more fund-raising calls; compared with other political nonprofits, their fund-raising expenditures were extraordinarily high.

But one other set of expenditures was especially notable: The groups also paid $2.8 million, or 3 percent of the money raised, to three Republican political consultants from Wisconsin who were the hidden force behind all five nonprofits, according to people who worked for the groups and who in some cases were kept in the dark by the consultants about the finances of the operations.

Those three consultants helped organize the nonprofits, the people said, then billed them — through shell companies that obscured the connection.

The campaign-finance system is built to police who puts money into politics, legal experts say. These groups embodied a flaw: The system is poorly prepared to stop those who raise money and channel it somewhere other than candidates and causes.

By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, their spending records were posted not on the F.E.C.’s easily searchable site, but on a byzantine I.R.S. page written in bureaucratic jargon.

To understand what these groups did with their $89 million, The Times analyzed 15,851 pages of their financial reports, including 135,843 separate expenditures, searched corporate records in 10 states, and interviewed the nonprofits’ leaders and vendors.

Four of the five nonprofits remain active. In statements, they said they had not sought to avoid oversight, enrich insiders or deceive donors.

Instead, the groups said, they simply believed in helping politicians indirectly — not by giving them money or buying them ads or mentioning their names, but by obliquely raising issues that could shift voters their way.

To that end, the groups said, even fund-raising calls from “Frank Wallace” were part of their mission. Since they mentioned policing — a topic voters might care about — the calls were not a means to an end in the work of influencing elections. They were the work itself. (...)

“I do this to help people without a voice organize, raise money and design a platform,” Mr. Connors said in a statement. He confirmed his company’s ownership of Voter Mobilization LLC. “Yes I am paid for what I do (everybody is) but my real compensation is the satisfaction of Americans getting involved in the system,” he said. (...)

The organizations’ calls were recorded by Nomorobo, a company that collects robocalls so it can help customers block them. The company’s founder, Aaron Foss, said it had recorded tens of thousands of calls from just these four groups — putting them among the most prolific and longest-running robocallers his network has ever tracked.

The calls captured by Nomorobo were made using a powerful new technology, a “soundboard,” according to a spokesman for the groups’ largest vendor for fund-raising calls, New Jersey-based Residential Programs, Inc.

A soundboard is a computer program, preloaded with snippets of recorded dialogue, down to uh-huhs, thank-yous and mother-in-law jokes. By clicking buttons, an operator anywhere in the world can “speak” to donors in colloquial English without saying a word.

“One, it keeps everybody on script. Two, you don’t hear the foreign accent. And three, you don’t hear the call center noise,” Mr. Foss said.

“If you say, ‘Are you a robot?’,” Mr. Foss said, “there’s a button that says, ‘No.’”

The calls worked. The groups have reported bringing in more than 18,000 donations. More than 92 percent were for amounts smaller than $200.

“They say this will help with fallen officers, and this will help in a political way with getting new uniforms for the firemen. But in a political way, not a direct way,” said Louise McConkey, 72, a retiree in Puyallup, Wash., who has made 35 donations to the five groups.

But Ms. McConkey said that her donations, totaling $3,650, left her with less to give to other causes she believes in, like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She said she was surprised to learn how little money went to directly supporting candidates.

“I’m pretty upset,” she said. “I think they owe people the money back.”

by David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Marquette Tribune
[ed. Republican "consultants" scamming their own donor base. Is anyone surprised? American capitalism at its finest, exploiting loopholes for profit.]

Circuit Diagram

via:

Katherina Olschbaur, The Rebel Angels, 2020.

via:

Guilt-Based Revenue Enhancement

POS Tip Demands Are Driving Inflation Higher

I have a new thesis I have been noodling around with: All of those Square credit card processing machines you use to pay for coffee or sandwiches or small retail purchases are driving inflation higher. Demands for worker tips in non-tipping industries are having a meaningful impact on prices and CPI.

Has the Bureau of Labor Statistics fully unpacked how to deal with this “innovation”? I am unsure how hip the FOMC or BLS is to this issue. But this much is clear: This tech-psych guilt trip has consumers spending more on services than they ordinarily would or should.

Note: This is not a new phenomenon; it was referenced way back in 2013 as a source of guilt-based revenue enhancement. In 2013, Fast Company noted that Square’s merchant partners generated more than $70 million in cumulative tips in a quarter; this represented a 133% year-over-year increase. Some merchants back in 2013 noted that Square’s tipping UI increased tips company-wide between 40% to 45%.

And that was a decade ago, before Square was as ubiquitous as it is today and during a deflationary decade. It slipped by more or less unnoticed. Today’s Pandemic-era inflation makes the Guilt-Tip demand a much more significant element when considering total price increases.

If you leave a few singles in a jar by the register, you assume the recipients are the staff who work there. We have no idea where the Square POS tips go. Recall Doordash and other weasels pocketing driver tips during the pandemic (we should make sure that’s not happening here). All POS tip demands should be mandated to show a disclosure as to where the money goes — and both Square and the retailer should be on hook if it does not go where advertised.

Before we go further, let’s discuss tipping: I worked as a waiter in college, and (like every other ex-waiter) now always leave at least 20%, typically in cash. During the lockdown, we wildly over-tipped on takeout and deliveries. I keep Fivers in my pocket for even modestly decent service (e.g., assembling a brunch’s worth of appetizing and bagels to go). Waitstaff, bartenders, cab drivers should be well comped for their efforts. Historically, they were often unpaid; the post-Civil War history of tipping is not pretty.

But that is not what this is about: Instead, it’s what has happened through companies using software UI as an opaque way to shift labor costs – and profits – to the consumer. I am not naïve; we all understand consumers of goods pay for labor, rent, costs of goods and profit. The issue here is obviously not that but rather, a sleazy way to trick people into paying more for goods and services than the actual price of those items.

I had been kicking the idea around, when a specific reveal brought it all suddenly into sharp focus:

Self-checkout machines now ask for tips in latest squeeze on customers

I read this as evidence the entire set-up is gaming consumer psychology to extract more dollars from every transaction. Or, you could just call it a fraud.

by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I have zero qualms about ignoring these things and, from my experience, the only ones who notice (if anyone) are the managers.]

Fake Consensualism

BETA-MEALRs

Dear friend, have you considered banning health care?

Several studies agree that sick people are often treated against their preferences and sometimes against their explicit requests. 51% of patients who request Do Not Resuscitate orders never get them. Among those who get them, 75% of their doctors don’t know about it. And among doctors who do know about it, 65% don’t feel a need to follow them if it conflicts with their own opinions.

So it should come as little surprise that 22% of people who sign forms saying they don’t want to be hospitalized get hospitalized and 31% of people who sign forms saying they don’t want CPR get CPR.

Or that patients who prefer to limit life-prolonging treatment get an amount of life-prolonging treatment that is statistically indistinguishable from everyone else.

Or that even though 80% of Americans say they want to avoid hospitalizations and intensive care as they are dying, in fact about 50% of Americans die in hospital and intensive care.

But in fact, the situation is far more dire than this. These studies only count people who have legally, explicitly spelled out a desire not to receive health care. What of people who sign off on all the dotted lines, but only under emotional blackmail that can hardly be called consensual?

The cancer patient who gets told she is “brave” and “a fighter” if and only if she accepts all the interventions modern medicine has to offer, but otherwise gets given “pep talks” on how she can’t “give up” on her family and friends.

The heart disease patient whose family constantly implies that if he really cares about them he’d “push on” as long as he could.

The elderly Muslim who consents to a massive and hopeless surgery only because she doesn’t want her community to remember her as a sinner who rejected God’s gift of life and who is burning in Hell for all eternity.

So although health care produces more than its share of obvious and legally binding consent violations, we have every reason to think this is only the tip of the iceberg, that countless millions of people who don’t want health care are pressured and bullied into accepting it and undergoing unnecessary suffering against their deepest wishes.

And the obvious solution, dear friend, is to ban health care. If there is no health care, no one can be coerced into receiving health care against their wishes. We tried having a health care system that operated on the principle of informed consent, it failed terribly, and now we must pass laws imprisoning anyone who provides any form of medication, surgery, or any other treatment attempting to alleviate disease or prolong life. While doctors, nurses, et cetera may be well-meaning, the real (and indeed realized) risk of nonconsensual treatment is far too dire to allow this so-called “humane” practice to continue.

Now you may think to yourself: this seems like it would be politically unpalatable. If the Republicans obstructed President Obama at every turn merely because he wanted to slightly modify the health system, what would they think of a law that would dismantle the health system entirely, and indeed threaten large fines and jail time to anyone trying to assume its functions?

This would indeed be a significant complication if not for the fact that the Republican Party must in any case very soon be eliminated forever. (...)

Yes, we want to ban health care, but we’re about so much more than that! We also oppose gay marriage, and straight marriage to boot. We are against prostitution but also all other forms of employment and all other sex (but especially BDSM). Also religion, vasectomies, all social gatherings, gender roles and breaking out of gender roles, gift-giving, telephones…(...)

II.

Even though most people dislike libertarians, their basic insight – that you can get a lot of the way to morality by saying things that people consent to are okay and things people don’t consent to are bad – holds a pretty eminent place in moral discourse, especially on the Left. This is with good reason. In a country where no one really agrees on what exactly morality is, consent is a useful semi-neutral principle that allows everyone to go off and do their own thing.

I’ve written a bit before about fake consequentialism, where people who have nonconsequentialist reasons for what they believe make up consequentialist ones so they can appeal to the general populace. I don’t think anyone has ever been convinced gay marriage is wrong because of sincere concern about the fate of children adopted by gay couples, but that argument keeps getting trotted out again and again because it’s one of the few anti-gay-marriage arguments that sounds remotely consequentialist. Or people who dislike porn claiming it will encourage viewers to rape people, even though as far as anyone can tell exactly the opposite is true.

And where there is fake consequentialism, not far behind you will find fake consensualism. Suppose there’s something you don’t like, but every time you argue against it, people say “Well, it’s all consensual and it doesn’t harm anyone except the people who have agreed to it, so mind your own business.” You can come back with “Yes, but how can we be sure the people involved in it really consented? Deep down? I bet they didn’t!” Or even “I bet this would lead to something nonconsensual happening somewhere else down the line!” Consensual BDSM? Just going to glorify abuse and lead to more nonconsensual abusing, right?

I used to automatically steelman BETA-MEALRs (ed. Ban Everything That Anyone Might Experience And Later Regret) into proper utilitarian arguments. “Well, euthanasia produces a gain of utility, by allowing people who want to die to do so. But it also produces a loss in utility, because it might unfortunately result in some people who didn’t want to die doing so. Who could possibly ever know which of these would be greater? So I guess all we can do is play it safe, right?”

But at some point, I started wondering how likely it was – even in cases where we genuinely have good reasons to worry about mistakes or pressure – that allowing people to choose whatever they preferred would result in fewer people getting what they want than banning all choices except one.

I mean, okay. You say we have to ban euthanasia, because if it’s not banned, some people who don’t want to die might have to. Okay. I come back and say “But if we ban euthanasia, some people who don’t want to live might have to. Except wait, no, not some people. All people. And not might have to. Definitely will have to. Required by law.” You say “Get the hell out of my office.” (...)

III.

According to Philip Tetlock’s dichotomy, a sacred value is a value in Far Mode, one that has big flashing signs saying “MORALITY!” around it. A secular value is one that is nice but not morally important, like saving money or increasing productivity.

A taboo tradeoff is when someone asks you to trade a secular value off against a sacred value, and tends to get people morally up in arms.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

[ed. Seems widely applicable - from 'culture war' eruptions to abortion. See also: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided (Less Wrong).]

Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird?

Bret Devereaux writes here about the oddities of the academic job market.

His piece is comprehensive, and you should read it, but short version: professors are split into tenure-track (30%, good pay and benefits) and adjunct (50%, bad pay and benefits). Another 20% are “teaching-track”, somewhere in between.

Everyone wants a tenure-track job. But colleges hiring new tenure-track faculty prefer newly-minted PhDs to even veteran teaching-trackers or adjuncts. And even if they do hire a veteran teaching-tracker or adjunct, it’s practically never one of their own. If a teaching-tracker or adjunct makes a breakthrough, they apply for a tenure-track job somewhere else. Devereaux describes this as “a hiring system where experience manifestly hurts applicants” and displays this graph:

Number of professors hired for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD.

He focuses on the moral question: is this good (no), and how can it be stopped (activism). I appreciate his commentary but I found myself wondering about the economic question: why did the system end up like this?

Remember, “greed” isn’t an answer. Greed can explain why management pays some people low salaries, but not why it pays other people high salaries. What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest? Also, given that some people will get good salaries, why shouldn’t it be the more experienced people?

Maybe this is all so obvious to Devereaux that he didn’t feel it needed explaining, but it’s not obvious to me. And I can’t find any existing discussion, so I’ll make a guess to start the conversation, and people who know more can tell me if I’m wrong.

Colleges want two things from their professors. First, they need them to teach classes. Second, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s reputation, and look prestigious.

Colleges want to pretend to students that the same people are doing both these jobs, because students like the idea of being taught by prestigious thought leaders. But they don’t want to actually have the same people do both jobs, because the most valuable use of prestigious thought leaders’ time is doing research or promoting their ideas. Every hour Einstein spends in the classroom is an hour he’s not spending in the lab making discoveries that will rain down honors upon himself and his institution. And there’s no guarantee Einstein is even a good teacher.

Solution: hire for two different positions, but give them the same job title to make things maximally confusing for students. Have them occasionally do each others’ jobs, so students get even more confused. You very conspicuously hire Einstein, and hold out the carrot of being taught by Einstein. But Einstein actually only teaches one 400-level seminar a year, and every other class is taught by the cheapest person able to teach at all.

The cheapest person able to teach at all is very cheap. The status draw of academia ensures qualified people will keep barrelling into it even if the expected pay and conditions are poor. So there will be a glut of qualified instructors, and colleges can hire them for peanuts.

But Einstein is expensive. In teaching, colleges just want to meet a bar of “able to do this at all”. But in research, colleges want to beat other colleges to hire the most prestigious people. That means if you’re the top PhD in your field, colleges will enter a bidding war to get you. And once someone has you, so on to the second-best PhD, etc. So here demand exceeds supply, and salaries stay high.

This could explain the tenure/adjunct distinction. Adjuncts are selling their ability to teach, tenured professors are selling their prestige, and colleges have decided they only need a certain amount of prestige before they stop caring and fill the other teaching positions with warm bodies. But they obscure all of this with similar job titles to trick students into thinking they’ll get taught by prestigious people.

But then why do they only hire inexperienced people? Why only people from outside their own institution? Here I’m even more confused, but a few guesses:

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. The above referenced Deveraux article here: Collections: Academic Ranks Explained Or What On Earth Is an Adjunct? (ACUP). See also: the Comments section for more interesting/personal perspectives:]

***

"I'm an academic and I can point out a few factual clarifications:

1. There's R1 (e.g., Ivy+, Stanford, MIT, ...) and not-R1 (typically liberal arts) institutions. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions are hired to do research and the teaching is incidental. It's flipped at not-R1 institutions. I _believe_ tenure-track professors teaching at R1 institutions is mostly a historical accident that got cemented into every part of the tenure/promotion/grant process so it's basically impossible to change at this point.

2. There's also STEM/not-STEM. As a concrete example, the top-4 CS programs don't hire adjuncts in the way you think about them (e.g., Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University). This dynamic is very different in non-STEM.

3. In STEM, the University puts in substantial resources to grow tenure-track faculty (startup packages go from $500k and way up).

4. Poaching does happen a decent amount. You just don't really hear about it much because tenured professors have it very nice and there's no need to complain about the processing."

The Tyranny of ‘the Best’

Let me tell you about my friend Dan Symons. There is a kind of person who finds the idea of seeking out “the best” incredibly enticing, on an almost spiritual level. The kind of person who genuinely enjoys perusing articles like “the nine best hair dryers of 2023,” who is overcome with clammy dread at the idea of drinking in a bar with only a four-star rating on Google, who, in order to plan a weekend getaway, requires a prolonged and extensive operation that involves several spreadsheets. You know the type. Maybe you even are the type.

Dan is that kind of person. He is also from California (perhaps not a coincidence that this is the home of both the eternal quest for self-optimization and the internet ecosystem that underpins the explosion in ratings culture), works in tech and has a keen appreciation for the finer things in life. He is known throughout our friend group for his fastidiously curated lists of restaurants, bars and even specific menu items; his near refusal to venture into establishments that are anything less than excellent; and his hours spent trawling reviews for everything from mini-fridges to trail shoes. When I questioned him on a rumor that I heard recently, that he had been freezing packets of “the best butter” to bring back from France, he confirmed it was true.

Dan may be an extreme case, but a dampened version of his instinct permeates our culture. If it didn’t, the raft of articles solemnly decreeing this year’s superlative vacuum cleaners simply would not exist.I had been wondering about where this culture of ratings and rankings came from and how it came to take over our lives; how even the least exciting consumer choices are framed in terms of elusive state-of-the-art options; and, conversely, how necessarily subjective things (novels, colleges, where to live) are increasingly presented as consumer choices for which there is an objective “best.”

I thought Dan could shed some light on what the pursuit of “the best” really means. But when I asked him, what I learned was that the motivation behind his “quest for the best” wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t about snobbery, or even, really, self-optimization.

“I think the really important thing to me — which is probably not a healthy thing — is I want to make sure the people I’m with have the best time possible,” Dan told me. “And this comes down to not just going to the restaurant, but even ordering as well. Like, ‘Are you sure you want to get that dish? Based on the other things we’re getting, is that the right thing to get?’ It extends through the whole meal.” To me it actually sounds, instead, as if Dan is trying to guarantee something closer to happiness. But can happiness really be found in a packet of butter? (...)

There is a way of talking about the psychedelic, hysterical effect of the information glut produced by the internet that tends to exaggerate the nefariousness of certain elements — like repeatedly being shown advertisements for things you’ve already bought — while minimizing how chaotic and messy it all feels. You could, for example, say that these lists are a product of “ratings derangement syndrome” and then say something like “In a world where our tech overlords manipulate their distraction vortex to shovel us into the slobbering maw of capitalism, ratings offer the illusion of taking back a semblance of control.”

Maybe. But to me, anyway, the experience of shopping for a hair dryer online feels less like being a pawn in a Matrix-esque mind-control operation and more like being trapped inside a box of plastic toys that have all been wound up so they constantly chatter and clatter against one another. The reality is I just want to spend as little time as possible in that box, while also hopefully buying something that won’t break the second time I use it. Best-of lists and rankings can seem like a simple solution to this problem.

There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me. (...)

I’d venture that not many people (possibly not any people) are able to tell the difference between the top toilet cleaner and the second best — or even the fifth or sixth. This suggests that the appeal of the best is not really about a simple difference in the quality of the product, but more about a feeling: of reassurance, maybe; of having won, having got the right thing.

Dan’s proclivities would place him squarely as “a maximizer,” a category of consumer invented by Barry Schwartz, an emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” which examines the detrimental side of endless consumer options. Dr. Schwartz defines people who are happy to settle for something that will probably be pretty good (a restaurant with above average, but not excellent, ratings; the third song they come to on a playlist; the midpriced toaster on the first page of Amazon) as “satisficers” and those who search exhaustively for the best version as “maximizers.” (Many people who are generally satisficers will have certain things that bring out their inner maximizer. In other words, we all have an inner Dan Symons.) (...)

The people I know who broadly seem most content with their lives have adopted the satisficer’s mind-set. When my hairdresser (a man of infinite wisdom) suggested I get a heat protection spray and I asked which one, he imparted some advice in this vein: “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “Just don’t spend £3, but don’t spend £25 either.” (The latter is the price of the brand the salon sells.) “Nobody really needs that. Spend around £7. That should be all right. Yes, always stick to the midrange. I should be a salesman!” He laughed. “Although not for the one we actually sell.”

Dr. Schwartz goes further: He has found that those who are on the higher end of the maximizing scale not only have a harder time making decisions but also are less satisfied with the decisions they do make. They’re also more likely to be borderline clinically depressed, he told me. “So it’s really not doing anyone a favor,” he said.

But the sensible attitude — as obvious as it may sound — can be hard to put into practice. Or maybe it’s easier to put into practice with hair spray than it is with, say, a “perfect vacation” or the “optimal time to retire.”

by Rachel Connolly, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tracy Ma

via:

via:

[ed. See also: YouTube is bringing 30-second unskippable ads to its TV apps (Engadget).]

Bad Manors

The street I grew up on in Moore County, North Carolina, is unrecognizable now. What was once a mix of modest, low-slung ranch-style houses interspersed with pockets of turkey oak scrub has been invaded by gargantuan homes with equally oversized trucks parked in the driveway. They tower over their older neighbors at a tragicomical scale difficult to convey, each identically crafted for maximum cheapness and interchangeability. Behold the McMansion in all its readymade, disposable grandeur.

Unlike the McMansions that predominated prior to the financial crisis—over-inflated, fake-stuccoed colonials festooned with some tacky approximation of European finery—the new iterations are whitewashed and modern, their windows undifferentiated voids. The compound hip roofs of the aughts have been replaced with peaky clusters of clumsy gables, a nod to the faux-folksy “modern farmhouse” trend ushered in ten years ago by HGTV. Moore County, meanwhile, is a prototypical American sprawl scenario: boundless, monotonous growth laying waste to what was once a network of stolid retirement communities orbiting the quiet resort town of Pinehurst. Who the hell are all these new interlopers? When I ask, my mother simply says, “They’re military.” Indeed, Moore County has become a de facto upscale exurb for high-level military personnel and civil servants working in nearby Fort Bragg. But it isn’t only happening in North Carolina: like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the McMansion has replicated, reduplicated, and overtaken the country overnight.

But what is a McMansion, exactly? Well, you know it when you see it. Take a look at any remotely desirable area on Zillow, sort by “new construction,” and you’ll see an endless array of them: bloated, dreary, amenity-choked domiciles. (...)

Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.

McShitshow

McMansions began proliferating even before the term first appeared in the 1980s. (Meant to lampoon the graceless strivers of the nouveau riche, the portmanteau has no known direct origin.) But, it wasn’t until 2008 that the McMansion firmly imprinted itself on the national consciousness. Recall the endless newsreels of oversized, foreclosed houses that implied that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused not by the predatory lending institutions who foisted junk mortgages on inexperienced homebuyers but by the greedy poors who wanted more house than they could afford, all in order to imitate their idols on MTV Cribs. The McMansion did not cause the financial crisis; its role was negligible at best. But it became indelibly associated with debauched, prerecession excess—and, in the wake of the collapse, seemed as though it might become an anachronism, a memorial to a bygone housing bubble.

Nevertheless, once the economy began to recover, the McMansion quietly returned, albeit in more respectable costumes: a Disneyfied version of the Craftsman style, the Tudor, and today’s neutered modernism or its farmhouse equivalent. (...)

Reviewing the many case studies I’ve undertaken at McMansion Hell over the last seven years, it becomes clear that the McMansion, for all its garish variation, follows a consistent floorplan. A central foyer opens up on either side to a formal dining and sitting room, both rarely used outside of tense Thanksgiving dinners. Two-story McMansions feature a large, often curved, staircase that leads up to a mezzanine off of which the private rooms (bedrooms, offices) are located. On the first floor, the foyer empties into a large space for entertaining—a cavernous great room and an open kitchen, invariably with an outsized island, often with a breakfast nook. Off a secondary hallway is a master suite, purposefully distanced from all the other bedrooms; it is usually flanked by a sitting room and a decadent little bathroom. As square footage expands, so, too, do the amenities: a wet bar, a bonus or rumpus room in the basement, a gym, a den exclusively for watching television, a (decorative) library. These are merely tacked onto the existing core plan as the house metastasizes outward, upward, or both. The social structure of the nuclear heterosexual family permeates the plan. Rooms are excessively gendered, both for children and adults. Man caves and she sheds abound. (...)

McPocalypse Now

The real question now is, Who is still building, buying, and living in these houses? It is stubbornly difficult to nail down. According to Realtor.com, millennials are moving to the suburbs, where mortgages are often cheaper than urban rents. Boomers are downsizing for accessibility reasons, often competing with millennials for the same entry-level houses. Gen X—making up 22 percent of homebuyers—are now the ones “looking for larger, trade-up homes.” An American Home Shield survey indicates that the largest homes are being built in the West, in Utah and Colorado, with other concentrations forming in emerging tech hubs like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. In essence, the only certainty is that when Americans get richer—through generational wealth transfer or through industry—they tend to seek out McMansions. When boomers die and bequeath their wealth to their children, those children will probably also build a bunch of McMansions.

Why? Some of the correlating factors are cultural, others architectural or material. For starters, you get more house for your money in the suburbs than in the city, where the price of land is astronomical. Buyers with children, but without the means to send them to private school, want to live in good school districts, which necessitates moving to wealthier neighborhoods on account of the American public school system’s entrenched racism and inequality. Architecturally speaking, the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size. It’s hard to be efficient when forcing four thousand-plus square feet under one roof. Tailor-made architectural creations remain out of reach (or undesirable) for many people. The McMansion is a structurally stable, if visually clunky, formula. Contrary to almost four decades of urbanistic thought highlighting the need for walkability, density, and transit-oriented development, companies like Pulte Homes continue to construct McMansion neighborhoods near highway off-ramps and high-traffic arterial roads. They do this because people buy these houses and drive to work, and because building single-family homes doesn’t require suffering through rezoning battles or complying with extensive building code requirements, to name just two pesky bureaucratic hurdles of the plethora associated with multifamily residential development. Perplexingly, despite the ascent of interest rates that might otherwise deter buyers from procuring a mortgage, building McMansions remains immensely profitable. PulteGroup—which constructs housing under several subsidiaries, including Pulte Homes—made over $13 billion in 2021, and while that revenue encompasses a range of property types, McMansions are certainly among them. These are simple, crude realities.

The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation. It is a one-stop shop of wealth signifiers: modernist décor (rich people like modernism now), marble countertops (banks have marble), towering foyers (banks also have foyers), massive scale (everything I see is splendor). Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.

It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.

by Kate Wagner, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © José Quintanar

Pat Benetar

Source: YouTube

Heaven Has a Bathrobe-Clad Receptionist Named Denise

If you ask anyone on TikTok what happens when you die, there's a decent chance they'll put it this way: You appear in a waiting room. You're wearing a bathrobe. And you're greeted not by St. Peter or Mother Mary, but by a gum-snapping, keyboard-clacking New Yorker named Denise.

As heaven's receptionist, Denise will hand you a welcome packet and ask what you want your ghost outfit to be. She'll fill you in on heaven's amenities (there's a free margarita bar), and she'll likely leave you with a little bit of gossip, lowering her voice to gripe about Paul Revere's latest email (all caps, subject line: URGENT) or that time in the nail salon when Jackie Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe ("like two cats on a hot tin roof").

But for all her office-gal kvetching, Denise is a people person. When someone shows up in the waiting room with fear or confusion — having died too young or too soon — it's Denise who's there to scoop them up in a hug and show them all of heaven's silver linings.

And for the TikTokers watching along, she has become a tool for thinking through the afterlife — and for grieving those who've already made their way there.

The real Denise is a 26-year-old pageant queen

Though arguably just as poignant as The Good Place or Field of Dreams, the world of heaven's reception is a low-fi, short-form experience. And like most TikTok series, it's the imaginings of one person alone: Taryn Delanie Smith.

The 26-year-old, better known as @taryntino21, considers herself first and foremost a content creator — she has gained 1.2 million TikTok followers in two years of posting. But she's an offline celebrity in her own right as well, having been crowned 2022's Miss New York and runner-up in the Miss America competition.

But before Smith had any sort of platform, she herself was a receptionist, working long hours to pay her way through a master's degree in international communication. It's that experience that she pulls from to inform Denise's character.

"I got promoted to the call center eventually, which was definitely not the promotion I thought it'd be," Smith said in an interview with NPR.

Even heaven's receptionist has to go through the same mundane daily dramas as any earthly office worker.

There's the slew of entitled folks who think they deserve the Angel Premium Plus package but are short on the cost: 7,899 good deeds. But then there's the creepy resident with red eyes who keeps abusing a downstairs pass to terrorize a suburban family.

"Why can't we just let women do it all?"

It's these types of creative, world-building details that keep Smith's audience so hooked. But like all great ideas, Denise's character was born in the least grandiose of ways — as a stray thought in the shower.

"I was standing there thinking, 'If I die in a chicken suit, then I have to wear the chicken suit forever.' Can you imagine a ghost coming to you in a chicken suit?" Smith said. "And I just couldn't stop giggling."

She hopped out of the shower and into a robe and towel, found the first stock image of heaven that came up on Google and made what she thought would be the stupidest video on the internet.

Today, the heaven's receptionist videos have been viewed over 37 million times on Smith's TikTok page, and at least 22 million times on other platforms. Smith gets recognized on the street as Denise more often than she does as Miss New York.

by Emily Olson, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Screenshot by NPR/TikTok @taryntino21

[ed. I wish I could embed her TikTok videos here, but alas...nope. Anyway, click on the NPR link for some examples, or her TikTok page (The Heaven Receptionist). Funny. For something completely different (but still TikTok-y), see also: Lemon8 Is for the (Hot, Rich) Girlies (PW):]

"Our timelines are populated with raw posts from unextraordinary people with a few diamonds mixed into the rough.

Lemon8 is different. It’s all diamond, no rough. Even the upper crust of TikTok finds it intimidating:"

Skin-Colonizing Bacteria Create Topical Cancer Therapy in Mice

While studying a type of bacteria that lives on the healthy skin of every human being, researchers from Stanford Medicine and a colleague may have stumbled on a powerful new way to fight cancer.

After genetically engineering the bacteria, called Staphylococcus epidermidis, to produce a tumor antigen (a protein unique to the tumor that’s capable of stimulating the immune system), they applied the live bacteria onto the fur of mice with cancer. The resulting immune response was strong enough to kill even an aggressive type of metastatic skin cancer, without causing inflammation.

“It seemed almost like magic,” said Michael Fischbach, PhD, an associate professor of bioengineering. “These mice had very aggressive tumors growing on their flank, and we gave them a gentle treatment where we simply took a swab of bacteria and rubbed it on the fur of their heads.”

Their research was published online April 13 in Science. Fischbach is the senior author, and Yiyin Erin Chen, MD, PhD, a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Medicine, now an assistant professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the lead author.

Skin colonizers

Millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses live on the surface of healthy skin. These friendly colonists play a crucial role in maintaining the skin barrier and preventing infection, but there are many unknowns about how the skin microbiota interacts with the host immune system. For instance, unique among colonizing bacteria, staph epidermidis triggers the production of potent immune cells called CD8 T cells — the “killer” cells responsible for battling severe infections or cancer.

The researchers showed that by inserting a tumor antigen into staph epidermidis, they could trick the mouse’s immune system into producing CD8 T cells targeting the chosen antigen. These cells traveled throughout the mice and rapidly proliferated when they encountered a matching tumor, drastically slowing tumor growth or extinguishing the tumors altogether.

“Watching those tumors disappear — especially at a site distant from where we applied the bacteria — was shocking,” Fischbach said. “It took us a while to believe it was happening.”

The mystery of the T cells that do nothing

Fischbach and his team didn’t start out trying to fight cancer. They wanted to answer a much more basic question: Why would a host organism waste energy making T cells designed to attack helpful colonizing bacteria? Especially as these T cells are “antigen-specific,” meaning each T cell has a homing receptor that matches a single fragment of the bacterium that activated it.

Even stranger, the CD8 T cells induced by naturally occurring staph epidermidis don’t cause inflammation; in fact, they appear to do nothing at all. Most scientists thought colonist-induced T cells must be fundamentally different from regular T cells, Fischbach said, because instead of traveling throughout the body to hunt for their target, they seemed to stay right below the skin surface, somehow programmed to keep the peace between bacteria and host.

by Hadley Leggett, Stanford Medicine |  Read more:

Image: Arif Biswas/Shutterstock.com