At Least Five Interesting Things For Your Weekend

[ed. As a followup to Ezra Klein's excellent interview with Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii (Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here's One), which echos many of these themes.]

1. Intel’s troubles and American short-termism

Intel stock took a huge nosedive today, losing over a quarter of its value. That’s only top of a big long-term decline since 2021. The company is worth less than a third of what it was at its peak in 2021:

The trigger for today’s decline was Intel’s announcement that it was going to going to cut 15% of its workforce and suspend dividend payments to shareholders. The longer-term drop is related to Intel’s falling revenue, which has plummeted since 2021:

Source: Bloomberg

The long-term story of Intel’s woes is by now well-known. The company grew fat and complacent from relying on its old line of business — supplying ever-better CPUs to server farms — and kept missing new markets and new business models as a result. TSMC’s foundry business proved more efficient than Intel at pushing the boundaries of chip manufacturing — using EUV lithography tools that Intel itself paid to invent, and then ended up not using. NVidia became the master of designing GPUs for AI, while a bunch of other companies like ARM and Samsung mastered low-power smartphone processors. Intel suffered from a classic case of Clay Christensen-style disruption.

On top of that, several short term factors are weighing on Intel. The post-pandemic chip shortage turned into a glut, slamming Intel’s sales and profits. U.S. export controls on China cut off Intel’s sales to Huawei.

Some commentators, seeing Intel’s woes, are rushing to declare this a failure of industrial policy. For example, here’s the WSJ editorial board:

In other bad industrial policy news, Bloomberg reported this week that Intel is planning to cut thousands of additional jobs. This would be the chip maker’s third large workforce reduction since Congress passed the $280 billion chips subsidy bill that CEO Patrick Gelsinger lobbied for. Intel has been awarded $8.5 billion in grants and up to $11 billion in loans to expand U.S. manufacturing production.

While chasing subsidies, Intel missed out on the AI boom, which has cost it dearly as competitors surge ahead. Now it’s playing catch-up. When government steers capital, companies sometimes get distracted and drive into a cul-de-sac.

At the New York Post, Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen declare that “Biden-Harris wasted $8.5 billion in taxpayer money to lose 15,000 jobs at Intel”.

Now, spending on Intel might indeed turn out to be a waste — someday. But it’s pretty ludicrous to say that Intel’s cost-cutting moves and stock price drops reflect the failure of CHIPS Act subsidies. The $8.5 billion in subsidies to Intel were announced in March 2024, in a non-binding preliminary memorandum. It is now August 2024, less than five months after that announcement. That means it’s very possible that zero dollars have actually been disbursed to Intel so far. Certainly, the majority of the subsidy money remains unspent.

It’s a little bit silly to criticize the results of a policy that hasn’t even been implemented yet.

Meanwhile, Intel’s turnaround plans — including a foundry business like TSMC’s and investments in AI chips — are still in the early stages. One reason profits have fallen at Intel is that it’s investing heavily. Bloomberg reports:

The company reports revenues divided between product groups and its manufacturing operations, with factories undergoing a massive upgrade and a build-out program that’s weighing heavily on profits…Revenue is improving at what [Intel] calls its Foundry unit, gaining 4% from a year earlier to $4.32 billion.

Furthermore, Intel’s suspension of a dividend signals that it’s planning to invest its earnings in its own business, rather than returning cash to shareholders. Paying dividends is what companies do when they don’t have ways to profitably reinvest the money; this is why growth stocks don’t tend to pay dividends. This is just Corporate Finance 101.

And Intel’s job cuts, painful as they are for the workers affected, are a cost-cutting move that will free up more cash to invest in the company’s recovery plan. Whether that plan will succeed isn’t clear yet, but if you were going to turn a company like Intel around, this is probably how you’d start.

Steve Glinert (a previous Noahpinion guest contributor) has a good thread where he acknowledges Intel’s missteps and challenges, but expresses frustration with the short-termism implicit in the current round of doomsaying:

The rush to declare Intel’s struggles a failure of industrial policy is emblematic of the crippling short-termist mindset that America has allowed to set over the past few decades. It’s the same brain worm that led the same people to declare Obama’s cleantech loan programs a failure because of Solyndra, when those same loan programs boosted Tesla to become the world leader in electric vehicles — with a market cap worth far more than every penny the U.S. government spent on the entire loan program.

Industrial policy takes time. If you think that just announcing some subsidies, without even writing the checks, should be enough to boost a company like Intel to world domination within five months, you’re living in a fantasy land of your own creation. I don’t know whether or not Intel will turn itself around, but if the doomsaying of the WSJ’s editorial board represents all the patience America can muster, we might as well resign ourselves to living in the Chinese Century.

2. What’s wrong with Canada’s economy?

Canada has turned in a disappointing economic performance over the last decade, coming in behind most other rich countries — even slow-growing ones like the UK and Japan:

Canada’s productivity levels were close to those of the U.S. in 1980, but have fallen far behind since then:

Source: RBC Economics

This poor performance is a bit of a mystery. Canada is located right next to the fast-growing U.S. It has avoided a financial crisis or other economic calamity. It has arguably the world’s best immigration policy, with a massive continuous influx of high-skilled immigrants. So what’s wrong?

RBC Economics has come out with the first plausible-sounding answer I’ve seen. In a recent article, they argue that Canada’s problem is a combination of low levels of investment and slow productivity growth, caused by regulatory red tape, a lack of R&D, and a pivot from manufacturing and technology to lower-productivity-growth industries like construction and services:

Some of the causes of Canada’s long-term slowdown in economic growth are well-known and clear. Let‘s start with an inefficient regulatory and administrative approval system at all levels of government, which has unintentionally increased internal barriers to trade and growth. Infrastructure chokepoints and red tape further make international trade more difficult than it should be. Those have contributed to lower Canadian business investment, and with that, an overweight of capital going to buildings and construction…

Canadian businesses invest substantially less than in the U.S.—about half as much per worker in aggregate…[P]art of the slowing in investment has been from a pullback in investment in the Canadian oil and gas sector…But, businesses have also invested a substantially smaller share of GDP in the manufacturing sector in Canada than in the U.S. over the last decade…

Businesses have long argued that an inefficient project approvals backdrop is making investing in Canada relatively expensive…

A patchwork of regulatory and administrative rules across different municipalities and provinces is complicated and unintentionally restricts trade within Canada…The International Monetary Fund has estimated that internal trade barriers (for example, regulatory differences across regions, paperwork requirements for businesses in multiple jurisdictions, and certification differences that limit labour mobility) cost the equivalent of a 20% average tariff between provinces…

[T]here remain significant bottlenecks where Canadian infrastructure significantly underperforms. The country’s turnaround times at ports are among the longest in the world…Canada also ranks poorly on “ease of exporting” in global rankings by the World Bank largely due to high document and paperwork costs…

Productivity in Canada lags in most industries versus the U.S., but the Canadian economy is also overweight in construction, where productivity growth has been slower. (...)

As for policy recommendations, there’s some easy libertarian stuff here — slash land-use regulation and red tape at ports, harmonize provincial regulation to enable internal trade, and cut corporate taxes. That’s the low-hanging fruit.

But that doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough to do the trick, because the sectoral shift from tech and manufacturing to construction and services will still be a problem. Canada needs to think about dipping its toes into the waters of industrial policy. Exactly what that could look like is a topic for a longer post.

3. If you want good cheap infrastructure, build up state capacity

America has a big problem building infrastructure. Our roads and trains cost much more per mile than other rich countries. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, including land-use regulation, NIMBYism, and broken government contracting processes. But one reason is simply that the U.S. lacks state capacity. We used to have a bunch of highly competent government bureaucrats who knew how to get roads and trains built; then, starting in the 1970s, we fired a bunch of those workers and let much of the in-house expertise decay into nothingness. In its place we hired a bunch of expensive outside consultants whose goal was maximizing their own payouts from the government, rather than providing high-quality infrastructure for the citizenry at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer.

This has been one conclusion of the Transit Costs Project, a panel of experts that has devoted years to studying the problem of rail costs in the U.S. In a recent report on how America could actually build high-speed rail, they reiterate the importance of in-house expertise vs. outside consultants:

With a bank of rail experts in Washington and universities churning out grads with relevant skills, individual projects could reduce their reliance on consultants and do more work in-house. (This was also a recommendation of a previous Transit Costs Project study about local mass transit.) To take a related example, for the price of one consultant contract to study whether to put trash in garbage bins or not, you could hire 10 in-house experts for four years to create a culture of trash expertise at the heart of local government.

But this isn’t just speculative. BART, the Bay Area’s commuter rail service, has been replacing its rolling stock (that’s a fancy name for train cars), which it calls the Fleet of the Future project. It has been accomplishing this within a reasonable time frame — not as fast as Japan would, but much faster than we’ve come to expect from California infrastructure projects. And unlike most other California infrastructure projects, Fleet of the Future has come in way under budget!

In a recent update, BART explains the secrets of their success:

BART’s popular Fleet of the Future project has just completed one milestone, with the final car of the original contract now ready for service…In the six years since the first Fleet of the Future train first went into service, the new trains have gone from a surprising sight for riders to an everyday part of their trip….

The increased pace in production and delivery of the new fleet has been essential to the transition. Car manufacturer Alstom is now delivering 20 cars a month to BART, almost twice as many as the 11 cars a month stipulated in the original delivery schedule…

The quicker tempo of deliveries is one of the reasons the Fleet of the Future project is expected to come $394 million under budget. Another big cost saver was BART’s decision to have its own highly experienced staff do more of the engineering work in house. The project team, led by John Garnham, has included engineers who have successfully completed new rail car projects at other agencies. (emphasis mine)

State capacity, folks. It really works. America needs more and better bureaucrats for things like infrastructure, because the alternative is to throw huge amounts of taxpayer money at inefficient outside contractors. 

4. Why East Asian countries got rich

For well over half a century, economists have been having a wonky but very fascinating debate about how poor countries get rich. The question is how important capital investment is, relative to improvements in technology, education, regulatory policy, industrial structure, trade, urbanization, and other things that get summarized under the name of total factor productivity or multifactor productivity. The answer is important, because the more important capital investment is, the more poor countries can catch up simply by pouring more money into building factories, infrastructure, housing, and offices. Whereas the more important TFP is, the more countries need to focus on making difficult institutional and structural changes in order to keep growing.

Thirty years ago, Paul Krugman wrote an article called “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, in which he argued — based on the work of Alwyn Young — that most East Asian countries (with the exception of Japan) had grown fast not because of TFP, but because of high levels of capital investment. Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (1997) disagreed, arguing that TFP growth stimulates more capital investment, so that we should attribute more of the East Asian growth miracle to TFP than Krugman and Young do. (...)

So basically, China transitioned from TFP-based growth to investment-based growth after the Great Recession. That’s a highly simplified story, but that’s our best guess as to what happened.

The question now is whether China can transition back. The optimistic view — from China’s perspective, anyway — is that the real estate bust will shift resources back to manufacturing, and that Xi Jinping’s massive and unprecedented industrial policy will give a big boost to TFP growth. The pessimistic view is that the shift from TFP-growth growth to investment-based growth in 2008 reflects the inherent limitations of China’s state-driven model, and that it will fall short of countries like Japan and South Korea in terms of living standards. Basically, the question is whether Xi Jinping’s China is more like a newer, bigger South Korea, or more like a newer, bigger Soviet Union.

5. Hanania on race in the 2020s

Richard Hanania is a pundit whose work I generally do not like. His typical analysis relies heavily on racial and gender stereotypes, and he gets a lot of stuff wrong. But ever since a major expose thrust him into the limelight last year, Hanania’s takes have at least, occasionally been more measured and reasonable. And I must give credit where credit is due here, because I think that he had a very good take on the recent “White Women for Kamala” and “White Dudes for Harris” events.

Basically, Hanania argues that after a decade of singling White people out for collective castigation, the progressive movement is accepting White people as just another racial interest group worthy of inclusion in the coalition:

One thing right-wingers love is to complain that you can only have affinity groups for blacks and other minorities…Along comes the Kamala campaign and says it’s ok to be white. That is, as long as you’re a good person, which means supporting reproductive freedom, not being “weird,” and voting Democrat. We’re all in this together.

It seems “woke” on the surface, but it’s actually a sign that liberals are moving away from woke. In 2020, something like this wouldn’t have even been possible. Talk of “whites” in left-coded spaces only occurred in the context of flogging them for their sins. In 2024, you can be a white dude for Kamala and it’s totally cool. The symbol for “White Dudes for Harris” is a trucker hat, showing self-deprecating humor and membership in a movement that is not at all weird or neurotic about race.

White people receive the message that Democrats do not consider you the problem. You’re welcome into the coalition. There’s even a Zoom call you can join, and don’t worry, it won’t be just Robin DiAngelo telling you how much you suck. Kamala has made clear that she’s *only* considering white men for VP…

Republicans have been caught flat-footed. Conservatives want to portray these events as a kind of 2020 DEI struggle session, and they can find clips backing up that view, but people who have attended say that there was actually very little of that…

What else can conservatives say in response? I’ve seen a little bit of “why can’t we have a whites for Trump thing?” Well, who’s stopping you? It’s a free country. Organize “whites for Trump” and see what happens…There will be no “Whites for Trump” event because the campaign would never allow it, understanding it would be a PR nightmare. “Whites for Trump” would draw sewer dwellers, instead of the nice, seemingly normal people that came out for Harris…

We can now all see the hopelessness and stupidity of white nationalism, which wants to argue that the 220 million American whites who are at each other’s throats over social issues and values should unite under one umbrella because they share the same interests. The only way white identitarianism would have had any hope is if liberalism stayed in summer of Floyd mode indefinitely, where you push anti-white rhetoric so blatantly and aggressively that it causes a natural reaction.

Whites for Kamala completely defuses any hope of building a broad white identitarian coalition.

This sounds basically right to me. White people are not yet a numerical minority in America — and depending on how many Hispanic and multiracial Americans define themselves as White, they may never be. But events like “White women for Kamala” show that the progressive movement may simply decide to treat White progressives as just one more minority identity group in a rainbow coalition.

And I think Hanania is also right that if this happens, it will take a lot of the wind out of the sails of white nationalism and rightism in general. For most people, being part of a minority group in a rainbow coalition probably sounds like a better deal than fighting a grim race war to try to expel other groups en masse or break up the nation just to be a supermajority again.

But at the same time, I think there’s another vision that’s even better than the rainbow coalition. If national identity can be strengthened, and the salience of racial identities weakened, Americans wouldn’t have to define their place in American society by the circumstances of their birth. The proper counter to progressive identitarianism will never be White nationalism; it will always be American nationalism.

Update: I also like Hanania’s take on progressives re-embracing patriotism and the American flag. I don’t think it’s quite true yet, but I think it’s what should happen, and maybe by the end of this decade it will.

6. San Francisco nonprofits are both corrupt and ineffectual

In 2022, there was a big tech bust that deprived the city of San Francisco, and the state of California in general, of a lot of tax revenue. At that point, San Francisco began taking a harder look at the nonprofits to which it has famously outsourced many of its social services. Unsurprisingly, many cases of incompetence and outright corruption are being discovered. (...)

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; Slejven Djurakovic on Unsplash

He Who Shrank

Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!
That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.

"They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time."

I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:

"Only a half year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost complete rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race."

He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new peculiar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.

"And for these things they call me great! For these puny discoveries they heap honors on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were but accidental discoveries on my part -- to which I gave hardly a thought. Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten years, ever suspected that all my labors and experiments were pointed toward one end, and one end alone."

He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The Professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.

"And at last I have attained the end," he almost whispered, holding the tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial light in the ceiling. "Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless experimenting, and now, here in my hand -- success!"

The Professor's manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the submerged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.

"Immense!" he exclaimed. "Immense! Why -- why it's so immense that --. But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself."

At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.

* * *

Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.

"Look!" he gestured toward the night sky. "The unknown! Does it not fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day traveling out there among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind. Within a month I could solve the puny difficulty that confronts them; could, but I won't. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste their lives away, what do I care about them?"

I wondered what he was driving at, but realized that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:

"And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: 'We can now realize as never before the truly staggering expanse of the universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have traveled a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.'

"Thus they would believe. Only I ould know how wrong they were, for I can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed. Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!"

"But, Professor," I interposed, "just think --"

"Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the universe, to determine what it is, the manner and purpose and the secret of its creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing, you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial, and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me."

Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.

"Wait!" he said. "Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations. And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had theretofore been only a theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others, each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just as our own is in reality.

"And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless numbers of these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.

"All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a whole, form -- what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great, ultramacrocosmic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of sand, or wisp of smoke, or -- good God! -- an eyelash of some creature living on that world!"

* * *

I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be -- yet what did I or anyone know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?

"It can't be!" I burst out. "It's incredible, it's -- monstrous!"

"Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an electron whirling about the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions forming --"

"For God's sake, stop!" I cried. "I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on -- forever! And besides," I added lamely, "what has all this to do with -- your discovery, the fluid you showed me?"

"Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the infinitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it must exist identically in the atoms below us?"

I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorizing. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:

"If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are everywhere. In every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute, and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!"

by Henry Hasse via Johnny Pez |  Read more:

Image: Leo Morey via

[ed. A favorite of Carl Sagan, highly regarded throughout sci-fi land, and now in the public domain. I haven't read it yet but just from initial outlines it reminds me of old college dorm room philosophy sessions : ) ]

Book Review: Two Arms and a Head

Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia.

In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.

He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.

 

The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.

In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.

Writing under the pseudonym Clayton Atreus, he lays out in excruciating detail how awful it is to be paralyzed, and how his new life is but a shadow of what it once was. He concludes that his life is no longer worth living, and proceeds to end it.

Along the way, he addresses the obstacles that society has put in his way of dying on his own terms—the biggest of which is the fact that physician-assisted suicide for his condition is illegal at the time.

But there are other factors. Smaller, more insidious roadblocks. Our society doesn't just condemn suicide; we do a great disservice to newly disabled patients in refusing to let them voice their misery and grief about being disabled. The book is a scathing indictment of how our society enables the lifelong disabled at the expense of the newly disabled and terminally ill.

Looking back from ~15 years in the future, when we have a patchwork of states and countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, Clayton's story stands as a cautionary tale for why it must become—and stay—legal.

Being Paralyzed Sucks

As a student of philosophy, Clayton is heavily influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Camus. He analyzes the experience of being paralyzed primarily through the lens of Existentialism. It’s hard to imagine a more apt philosophy for interpreting body horror.

Two Arms and a Head comes from one of those rare moments in history when an individual’s circumstances so perfectly intersect with their skills that they leave a mark on the world. What better cosmic tragedy than to have a strong, fit, arrogant philosophy buff suddenly find himself paralyzed? His memoir is an exploration of what it means to exist in a body that is no longer entirely his own.

The full ramifications of being paralyzed are rarely discussed in polite company. Rest assured, he omits no details:

Everything below my nipples is no longer me. Hence the title of this work, “Two Arms and a Head”. [...] I am two arms and a head, attached to two-thirds of a corpse. The only difference is that it’s a living, shitting, pissing, jerking, twitching corpse. [...] What was once my beloved body is now a thing. [...]

Two arms and a head. Period. Additionally, I will be using a sort of shorthand in this book when I refer to parts of “my” body. So when I say “my penis”, for instance, what I really mean is “the unfeeling, alien piece of flesh that used to be my penis, but is now just part of the living corpse I will push or drag around forever until I am dead.” [...]

As far as I feel about my body, who do you love more than anyone else in the world? Think of that person. Now picture being chained to their bloated corpse—forever.

No, Really, It's Way Worse Than You Think

I had limited exposure to paraplegics until I read this book. Growing up, I only knew them from pop culture—usually as side characters who would appear on Very Special Episodes of Saturday morning cartoons. Professor X. The glider kid from that one episode of Avatar. The main character from the other Avatar.

The tropes gave me a mental model of being paraplegic that boiled down to "you can't use your legs, so you have to drag yourself in and out of a wheelchair to use the toilet. But you're still an ordinary person sitting upright in a wheelchair."

Clayton wastes no time in dispelling this myth:

> I am devastatingly, cataclysmically physically disabled. [...]

> There is a tremendous difference between me and an able-bodied person sitting in a wheelchair. Tremendous.

Spinal cord injuries affect everything downstream of the injury—not just "the legs" but also the pelvis, bowels, genitals, and abdomen. Depending on where the injury occurs, that can include all the trunk muscles that keep someone sitting upright. (...)

To start off, that means that he has no use of the muscles that hold him upright.

Nothing keeps me sitting up—no hip flexors, erector spinae, hamstrings, or abdominal muscles. I am arms-and-a-head on a column of Jell-O.

He can't put both arms out in front of him, lest he fall over. He has to continuously prop himself up with one arm while doing anything at arm's length. After only 1.5 years of being paralyzed, this has already caused significant repetitive strain injuries in his elbows, shoulders, and ulnar nerves.

Clayton still has to deal with all the logistics of life, despite two-thirds of his body being a hunk of corpse-flesh. He dedicates huge swaths of the text to all the little time-wasting tasks he now has to do. How much of his life is ticking away with every delay, every piece of effort, every task that is trivial for an able-bodied person but monstrously difficult for him. Something as simple as getting out of a car is an entire production—let alone running errands, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking.

Since the lower two-thirds of his body no longer sends pain signals to his brain, he must proactively tend to all of its physical needs. Complications include pressure sores, infections, and a high chance of blood clots. Aside from suicide, the leading causes of death among paraplegics are all related to poor circulation.

In addition to the loss of conscious sensation and muscle control, problems with the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, orthostatic blood pressure, temperature regulation—are common. This is even more pronounced in cervical spine (neck) injuries. Some quadriplegics black out or the blood rushes to their head when being moved from lying down into reclining in a wheelchair. A spinal cord injury wreaks havoc on the body's functioning. (...)

The Decision to Die

I am absolutely and heartbreakingly in love with life. But this is not life. [...]

For those who like to say this one: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I reply that suicide in my case is a permanent solution to a permanent problem. [...] I have only one serious problem in life and it’s being paralyzed.

Clayton does not come to this decision lightly. He considers it exhaustively and systematically. When deciding whether to keep living, he starts from the premise that there is some amount of suffering past which life stops being worth it. He evaluates where that dividing line is by examining the sources of meaning in his life. (...)

Reading this book should prompt a moment of introspection. If you disagree with Clayton’s list above, then reflect on what does give your life meaning. No, seriously, make a list: family, friends, partners, children, hobbies, skills, etc. Write them down.

Cross out one entry at random. How would you feel if you lost that entry? Would you still have enough left over to carry on? Probably.

Now cross out a few more. Lose your partner. Lose your children. Lose your parents. Your siblings. Your best friend. Your favorite hobby. How do you feel? Still worth it?

Add in some physical negatives: chronic pain. Constant nausea every time you eat. Losing feeling and control of your bowels, your legs, your genitals, your diaphragm, your non-dominant hand, your dominant hand, both arms. What about loss of sight? Hearing? Speaking? Communicating at all? (...)

How much would you have to lose before your life stops being worth living?

That list—and the dividing line between "worth it" and "not"—is different for everyone. The decision to end one's life is deeply personal. Clayton happened to draw the line at a particular point. Others may agree or disagree, but Clayton’s judgment was his own.

Decision in hand, next comes the hard part.

 
The Roadblocks

I did not want much from the world in dying. To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane. To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear. To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome. And to be comforted as I died. When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone.

For Clayton, killing himself is not a simple matter. At the time only one US state, Oregon, had any kind of “Death With Dignity” law on the books. However, this law only allowed assisted suicide for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, while Clayton’s condition was stable.

The slightest whisper of suicidal ideation would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward. He has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret.

Becoming paralyzed destroys him on two fronts—the disability itself, and the fact that he is completely, utterly, devastatingly alone with his feelings. He writes Two Arms and a Head because he needs to show the world how agonizing it is to face death alone and how important it is for physical-assisted suicide to become—and stay—legal.

How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody! But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone. But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves. [...]

Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me. What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out. [...]

Beware! There could be a horrible fate waiting for you and if you don’t all get together, look each other in the eye, recognize the insanity, and change the laws, you could wake up tomorrow as a head on a corpse with no way out for the next thirty years. (...)

The State of MAiD

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is currently legal in a patchwork of countries and US states.

The exact rules, restrictions, and methods vary. In most places that have legalized it, the patient’s condition must be considered terminal (i.e. death is expected within six months) to be eligible for MAiD. The procedure itself is typically either an IV injection administered by a nurse, or a prescription cocktail of benzodiazepines, digoxin, and opioids which patients drink themselves.

In Canada and the Netherlands, MAiD is also available to patients with a disability that does not present as immediately terminal. The Netherlands currently includes severe treatment-resistant mental illness as a qualifying condition, and Canada will follow suit in 2027.

So it sounds like Clayton got his wish, at least in Canada and parts of Europe. Now, when a Canadian ends up in a terrible accident, they have a choice in the matter of whether they want to spend the next few decades as a quadriplegic head-on-a-corpse. Phew.

However, it’s not all smooth sailing. It seems like every few months there’s another horror story in the press coming out of Canada or Europe. Two news stories came out in quick succession in late March/early April 2024—one from Canada, the other from the Netherlands. (...)

Not Dead Yet

Clayton had a particular amount of ire directed at one prominent anti-MAiD disability rights org: Not Dead Yet.

Not Dead Yet (NDY) was founded in 1996 by the same people who lobbied to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed a few years prior. As the name implies, they reject the notion that death could ever be an acceptable response to living with a disability.

When terminally ill patients get polled on why they are choosing MAiD, it turns out that avoiding pain isn’t the primary motivation. In Oregon, where MAiD is only available for the terminally ill, every patient fills out a questionnaire when they apply for the program. Tallying up all the surveys from 1998–2023, to top reasons are:

• “Losing autonomy” (90%)

• “Less able to engage in activities” (90%)

• “Loss of dignity” (70%)

• “Losing control of bodily functions” (44%)

• “Burden on family” (47%)

• “Inadequate pain control, or concern about it” (29%)

• “Financial implications of treatment” (7%)

The top five all relate to the disabling symptoms that come with dying. “Less able to engage in activities” sounds remarkably similar to Clayton’s reasoning of, “the things that gave my life meaning are no longer possible, therefore it’s time to die.”

This isn’t surprising when considering that palliative care is legal in all 50 states. If someone’s condition is judged to be terminal, as Oregon requires, they already get a bottomless supply of morphine. Pain is not really the problem anymore.

The problem is that a failing body is, well, failing. Patients become weak and frail. They struggle to walk and use the bathroom. They may become dependent on a feeding tube or a respirator. Somewhere along the way they might lose their minds to dementia. All of these are serious, debilitating symptoms that can suck the meaning out of life, so many patients choose to die before they get to that point.

Not Dead Yet condemns this status quo.

There’s a lot to unpack here. NDY is starting from the premise that the desire to end one’s life is always and necessarily the product of an irrational mind, Claytons of the world be damned. Medical professionals, given that they’ve sworn an oath to protect life, have an obligation to treat all suicidal ideation with “suicide prevention” care (i.e. involuntary commitment until the patient comes to their senses).

A society that has legalized MAiD still extends this preventive care to the able-bodied who want to die, but then turns around and gladly assists disabled patients in ending their lives. This is discrimination! Doctors are murdering the undesirables! (...)

Un-Assisted Suicide

The final argument that anti-MAiD proponents fall back on is that anyone can just commit suicide; why do they need help from doctors?

The glaringly obvious answer is: because patients cannot “just” commit suicide.

Clayton could not “just” ask for help putting his affairs in order. He could not “just” say goodbye to his loved ones. He could not “just” die peacefully without anyone trying to stop him. He could not “just” publish his memoir before his death—not if he wanted to avoid being committed.

Young people would prefer not to think about such things, but what everyone does not see is that those old people are you. You are them, it’s just a matter of time.

Until we defeat death in the glorious transhumanist future, it’s coming for all of us. Some of us may die suddenly in a tragic accident. Some may be diagnosed with a terminal illness that kills in a matter of months.

But most of us will die by very slow decay.

The counterfactual world—where the elderly are kept alive as shriveled husks for years, slowly withering away—is gruesome and ghastly.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. When you see someone suffering, someone you've loved all your life, and your only hope is that they die as soon as possible, you'll understand why this issue is so important. It doesn't appear much will change soon (until Boomers start going in greater numbers), but hopefully in another generation or two the barbaric idea of preventing people from leaving peacefully on their own terms will just be a shameful artifact of the past. You can read the complete version of Two Arms and a Head online here.]

Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here’s One.

Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party on all kinds of issues — trade, foreign policy, immigration. He has challenged, even upended, the old consensus by giving people a very different story about what was wrong in America, about why they were struggling.

To be clear, I think most of Trump’s policies and many of his stories are quite different, bad and often false. But to give some credit to the Republicans, they are having these big internal policy debates, and the people coming up behind Trump are having even more of them. The world has changed, their party has changed, their voting base has changed, and so they need to change.

On the Democratic side, you haven’t seen as much change. That would be normal for a party running an incumbent president. There wasn’t a presidential primary this year in which candidates hashed out their different visions in front of the voters. Biden has not been a strong messenger. Kamala Harris hasn’t had much time to build out an agenda of her own. The Democratic Party has been unified the past few years, but it has been unified against Trump, against MAGA. It’s not been — in its communications, in the way it runs elections — primarily about its policy vision.

Brian Schatz is the senior senator from Hawaii and one of the Democrats doing the most work on these issues. He’s been a very influential policy voice. Over the past few years, he’s had a bit of a political evolution trying to change the party on the issues that matter most to voters — particularly affordability.

Schatz joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here’s One. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii discusses policies that can make housing and college more affordable.

What’s it been like to be a Democratic senator over the past month or two?

There’s a saying in Hawaii that everything in Hawaii is political except politics, which is personal. And that’s what it felt like. It was obviously politically difficult. But more than anything, a lot of us really revere Joe Biden. To accomplish everything that we’ve accomplished together and then to say, “Hey, thank you very much. We don’t think you’re our standard-bearer anymore” — it’s just deeply, deeply painful.

But people have been underestimating Kamala Harris all along and underestimating the pent-up demand of the anti-Trump coalition, which basically was just sitting there latent. I actually thought the algorithm wasn’t going to permit us to feel hope anymore. And suddenly the internet was fun again, and fund-raising was going crazy, and people were making jokes. I always think the campaign that’s having fun is the one that’s likely to win. And we are definitely having fun now.

The level of anger about prices, about affordability, feels to me like something Democrats have not fully faced up to. It’s something that you’ve begun to talk a lot more about over the past couple of years. I’m curious about your evolution on this.

The fact is we passed the biggest climate action in human history, and basically nobody knows about it. And whether it’s the biggest climate action we’ve ever taken or the biggest investment in Native American communities that we’ve ever taken, it’s true to say those are the biggest actions ever taken. It’s also true to say that that’s not enough.

So I do think Kamala puts us in a better position to just talk about the future. And it’s very, very challenging, I think, for Donald Trump and JD Vance to talk about the future at all.

Let me show you how they’re talking about this particular part of, if not the future, the past.

[Audio clip of JD Vance] Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation, the baby boomers, could afford to buy a home when they first entered the work force. “But I don’t know,” this person observed, “if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.” The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington. I can tell you exactly how it happened. Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages. And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete with people who shouldn’t even be here for precious housing. Joe Biden’s inflation crisis, my friends, is really an affordability crisis. And many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them.

What do you think of that diagnosis?

I think there are parts of it that are pretty effective, right? He basically touches on what people are experiencing, and then he goes straight to racism and xenophobia and a bunch of right-wing tropes. But I think your point is well made by that clip, which is to say, we don’t really talk about the affordability crisis. Not all of us, right? And we don’t talk about struggling families.

I don’t think it’s that hard for us to live where people are, which is: You are actually struggling to make ends meet. That is not imaginary. We are not going to talk you out of it. But I think all they do is scapegoat. And what we need to do is talk about solutions going forward.

There’s some reason that not enough homes have been built, and that’s been particularly bad in places Democrats have power. It’s bad in Hawaii, where you’re from. It’s very bad in San Francisco, where Kamala Harris had the beginning of her political career. So what is your diagnosis? What has happened in housing?

We have created the scarcity on purpose. We have elevated something called community engagement, but it’s not actually objectively community engagement. It’s the ability for a few people who already have homes to hijack the whole process above the needs of the many. We’re actually making it nearly impossible for people to build anything.

And I think the premise here is that we can have nice things. We can have enough of the things that we want. If you operate under the assumption that there will only be 100 homes built, it is not unreasonable to say, “Well, listen, I want 35 of the 100 homes to be capital-A affordable.” That’s a totally reasonable, progressive approach. But the truth is, if you require that, it’s likely that zero homes will be built and nobody gets any housing.

When you’re out making this argument, how do people in Hawaii respond?

My district, when I was in the State Legislature, was Makiki, Manoa, sort of by Punahou School, by the University of Hawaii — a very nice, beautiful suburb. And those are some of the folks that are most worried about what a deregulatory environment would look like, in terms of their neighborhood.

So after the Hawaii Legislature passed some aggressive housing reforms this session — and I’m strongly behind it — I was at Safeway, and I was running into people who contributed to my first campaign with 15 bucks, people with whom I went to high school, and they were not happy.

I don’t think it’s unforgivable, but this is an uncomfortable conversation among friends. And that’s one of the things that I think the progressive movement has to grapple with, that there are a lot of communities that are 70-30 or 80-20 Biden and are pro-immigrant and pro-L.G.B.T.Q. and certainly pro-choice and pro-climate action. And on housing, they’re [expletive]. And I don’t think that can stand.

I think there’s a real tension on this inside progressivism, because it pits two values against each other. There’s a real feeling that in post-New Deal liberalism, the government ran over marginalized communities and the people didn’t have any democratic input. And then on the other hand, there’s this other dimension that I always call the firefighter test: Can firefighters who work and risk their lives to keep a city from burning down live in the city that they keep from burning down? How do those come into conflict, and how do they get unwound?

I think the constituency for proceduralism is small but vocal. And it’s not that there should be zero public input. When it comes to housing in the state of Hawaii, we have extraordinary protections for natural and cultural resources, as we should.

One of the last standing bowling alleys in the primary urban center of Honolulu, called Stadium Bowl-O-Drome — it was the old stadium, not an ecologically significant site, still subject to all the same environmental review that some of our most precious places in the state of Hawaii were subject to. And I think most regular people are able to kind of go, “If you’re going to throw up a 10-story building with apartments, then you maybe don’t need the same sort of environmental, cultural analysis that you would if you’re a building in coastal Maui.”

And when I make that argument, everybody nods. Now, who doesn’t nod? The people who live adjacent to the Stadium Bowl-O-Drome. So I agree that there’s this tension sort of superficially. But I actually think you can kind of puncture it by talking to regular people and then finding out that the proceduralists are, like, 11 people who just consistently show up.

But the procedure is so profound here. I find a lot of people in your place are starting to wonder, “Are these environmental bills doing as much to stop clean energy as they are to stop fossil fuels? Are they doing more to stop clean energy than they are to stop fossil fuels?” What’s been your intellectual evolution on liberal proceduralism?

It’s been rapid, and it’s been sort of almost radical. We did pass the biggest climate action ever, but as you know, we need transmission and distribution, and that is going to be stopped by local communities and state governments and oppositional mayors and other NIMBYs. And what’s really clear is that right-wing groups and fossil-funded groups are now funding the so-called left-wing proceduralists to stop good stuff from happening.

We are going to have to make it easier to meet our clean energy goals. All of these environmental safeguards were about stopping bad stuff, and now the new progressive movement is not just about stopping bad stuff; it’s about building good stuff. We’re going to have to be the party of construction. We’re going to have to be the party of financing things. We’re going to have to be the party of breaking ground.

A couple of years ago, in some bills you passed, there was a ton of money for rural broadband. Let me read you a story from The Washington Times: “Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.”

The Washington Times ends up blaming this on various requirements for obtaining the funds, climate change mandates, preferences for union workers, that sort of thing. I don’t know if that is why, but I do often find this problem where something big gets passed and then you check in on it a couple years later and actually people aren’t benefiting from it. These big priorities are exciting to people when they pass and then not that exciting when they’re being slowly implemented. What’s going on there?

Well, I think you pointed out one of the failures that we have, both governance-wise and politically. I don’t think we just, like, administer harder, implement better.

I think about the state historic preservation division of the state of Hawaii. The federal law says that you may consider something historic if it meets these criteria in the state of Hawaii. The assumption is everything more than 50 years old is historic. Now, the problem is we just have old houses. And so now they’re all potentially for state historic preservation division review. And so for four years, everyone was like, “We’ve got to get more bodies over there so they can process more applications.” And I sort of raised my hand and said there should just be fewer things on these people’s pile.

We have to clear the thicket here, and we have to be unapologetic about clearing the thicket. And by the way, this is really good for results, but it also is quite attractive to moderate swingy voters who just want government to kick ass and accomplish things. And they’re really looking for an effective mayor of the country.

The Covid relief plan, there were lots of really good things in it. But the thing that resonated with people was the checks. And I was kind of anti-U.B.I. and anti-direct-cash-assistance because I did think it was, like, the Silicon Valley way to wave a wand at the disintermediation of employment that they were causing. But I saw it impact people.

And I’ve got to say, boy, fast really works. It works on policy. It works for people. And the politics works. I think we should have the kind of impatience that regular people have, which is like, “What the hell? I thought you did this thing. Where’s my stuff?” And I don’t think we have that impatience. I think we have this sense that we enact, and then we take credit. (...)

Across the domains we’re talking about — housing, clean energy, I could name a bunch more — how do you deal with the fact that there are these national and actually global issues but the power is fractured down to the state level, to the local level, across a variety of condominium boards? It’s fractal, almost.

Well, the way I look at this is, I guess, two things. First, I do whatever I can on federal policy. But second, I do think we have to actually change the politics of this while we’re working on the policy.

I think the most important thing we can do is create a movement of young progressives articulating that in our collective progressive future, we’re all going to live together and in a Hawaii clean energy future — which probably polls at, I would say, 85 percent in the state of Hawaii — you think you’re not going to see a windmill? You think you’re not going to see a solar farm? You think we’re not going to do any geothermal? We’re a small place with 1.5 million-odd people. And if we are going to house the people we care about and if we are going to address the climate crisis, we’re going to see it. It can’t all be someplace else. And I think one of the most important things I can do is just say that as much as I can, as unapologetically as I can.

One of the things that I think is encouraging is that I’ve gotten pushback but it hasn’t been that ferocious. Because I do think, in a lot of people’s heart of hearts, they go, “Huh. He’s probably right.”

On the left, people talk a lot about affordability, and what they think about is subsidy. But affordability is a mixture of how much people have to pay for something and then how much of the thing there is. The supply side feels to me like something where the policy muscle of the Democratic Party is not what one might wish.

One hundred percent. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s just habits of the mind and habits of the political ecology of Washington and every other place.

But I think the truth is there are shortages for various reasons. Sometimes the government creates a shortage. Sometimes a corporation is creating the shortage. My own judgment here is that we need to tell people that they can have nice things. And we need to operate under the assumption that — whether it’s housing or clean energy, in particular, or the affordability of prescription drugs — we need to look people in the eye and say, “All of these scarcities are created either by corporations or by governments.”

And sometimes the solution is deregulatory. Sometimes the solution is more aggressive regulation. Sometimes the problem is a not big-enough subsidy. Sometimes the problem is that we’re subsidizing the wrong thing. But the premise here is that we do get to have enough of the things that we say we want and that the government should be working on that.

by Ezra Klein with Sen. Brian Schatz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

[ed. What's the matter with this guy... sounds too sensible for a politician. See also:
The Democrats' new sunny vibes (Noahpinion).]

Where's the Love?

Show of hands: Who’s fed up with human resources?

Maybe you’re irked by the endless flow of memos and forms, many of which need to be filled out, pronto. Maybe you’re irritated by new initiatives that regularly emerge from H.R., which never seems to run out of new initiatives, not all of them necessary or especially wise, in your opinion. Or you’ve got some problem with management and you don’t trust that H.R. representatives will actually help. They sure are friendly, but they get paid by the suits. In a crunch, it’s pretty clear whose side they are on.

The H.R. department bugs a lot of employees and managers, and it seems to have more detractors than ever since the pandemic began. That’s when H.R. began to administer rules about remote work and pay transparency, programs to improve diversity, equity and inclusion and everything else that has rattled and changed the workplace in the last four years.

But if the H.R. department is bothering you, here’s a fact you might find perversely consoling: You are not as aggravated or bummed out as the people who work in H.R.

That was obvious at Unleash, an annual three-day conference and expo held this year at Caesars Forum, an immense convention hall near the Las Vegas Strip. In May, the event brought together some 4,000 H.R. professionals from across the country. It was billed as a place where “global H.R. leaders come to do business and discover inspirational stories.”

“For years, we have been fighting fires with cans of gasoline,” he said. “And now, here we are, after literally giving everything we could, and it’s like: ‘Oh, thanks for everything, but’” — and here’s the G-rated version, get lost — “‘Don’t make too much work for me. I’m not going to dot those I’s and cross those T’s. I’m the business, and you’re H.R.’”

Part of the frustration is that office behavior post-Covid has become notably less civil, which means that H.R. is being called in far more often to referee disputes. Everyone at Unleash had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch. Stop cutting your toenails on your desk.  (...)

H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls.

That said, don’t expect apologies. The consensus at Unleash was that most of these new ideas are designed with the goal of a more equitable workplace; like greater diversity, for instance, or standardized workplace reviews.

So get used to the memos.

Also, while you’re whining, get used to human capital management software programs. A recent Business Insider story, titled “Everyone Hates Workday,” asked why half of the Fortune 500 uses this particular piece of software — which handles benefits and recruiting and facilitates pay equity analysis — despite creating “mountains of busywork for everyone.”

It’s not the software’s fault, H.R. veterans say. It’s the fault of your company, which hasn’t configured it wisely or trained you adequately. Workday is here to stay, and one Unleash attendee had this bit of advice for its legions of haters: “Buckle up, buttercup.” (...)

In quieter settings, attendees lamented the low pay, the churn and the increasing workload. One discussed a work-induced mental breakdown. There was a lot of fretting about artificial intelligence, which seems poised to take jobs on the recruitment side of their business. (A number of vendors at the expo were selling software designed for that very purpose.)

Many H.R. executives have left the field in recent years, or they are looking for better offers. In 2022, LinkedIn found that H.R. had the highest turnover rate of any job it tracked.

“Everybody hates us,” said Hebba Youssef, the chief people officer at Workweek who has a podcast and a newsletter for H.R. professionals called “I Hate it Here.” Recent posts have included “Why Does Working in H.R. Feel So Lonely?” and “Everybody Hates Their Jobs Right?”

“Everything feels like a fool’s errand,” said Kyle Lagunas, a former H.R. executive at General Motors who now works at Aptitude Research, an H.R. advisory company based in Boston. He had just finished a highly animated presentation about H.R. tech in front of an audience of about 50 people. Now he sat in the designated media room and ranted a bit about the maddening challenges of running H.R. during and after the tumult of the pandemic.

Ms. Youssef especially bemoaned the mistrust employees feel toward H.R. It’s dispiriting, she said, because most people go into the field to be helpful.

“People in H.R. tend to be very compassionate, very empathetic,” she said. “But a lot of employees look at us as inherently evil.”

Let’s ‘Humanize’ the Company...

“It was initially known as ‘welfare work’ because it was employers demonstrating an interest in the welfare of workers,” said Gary Hoover, executive director of the American Business History Center in Tyler, Texas. After World War II, when the model of lifetime employment became the norm, the job was to ensure that workers stuck around.

“That starts to fade in the 1980-1981 recession,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Companies were facing an existential threat from Japan, which was building better cars, better steel. Executives started laying off people and, in downsizing mode, you don’t care too much about keeping employees happy.”

By then, “personnel department” had been rebranded as “human resources.”

“The idea was to stop thinking of employees as people that needed to be taken care of,” said Professor Cappelli. “People became resources, assets like any other, like machinery. The priority wasn’t to help people. It was to help the business.”

The question of the H.R. department’s priorities and purpose has festered ever since. When the #MeToo reckoning began, many wondered why H.R. hadn’t forestalled many of the worst misdeeds with timely, forceful interventions. Critics contend that the department’s first mission has long been the quiet and smooth operation of a company, and before the epidemic of sexual harassment became a national scandal, that often meant quashing conflicts.

More recently, H.R. has been in charge of dealing with the fallout of epochal events. When offices closed down because of Covid, H.R. administered remote work rules, which kept evolving as back-to-work dates were repeatedly pushed into the future. Tens of millions of U.S. workers quit their jobs starting in 2021 in what became known as the Great Resignation. H.R. found replacements. When diversity, equity and inclusion programs were mandated by upper management in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, which brought renewed efforts to address racial disparities, H.R. had yet another mission.

Some of these missions have since changed, yet again. (...)

Other jobs in the H.R. portfolio have not changed so much as multiplied. There are now so many workplace grievances that companies are calling in outside counsel to investigate more and more internal complaints, producing a robust source of billable hours at law firms.

One of those firms is Ogletree Deakins, which has offices in 32 states. After the start of the pandemic, so many corporate clients hired the firm to conduct internal investigations that in 2021 it created a dedicated practice group. Since then, the group has doubled its head count to 50 lawyers, from 25.

Many are looking into complaints by low-level H.R. employees against ones at higher levels.

Yes, the H.R. department wants help investigating itself.

by David Segal, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
[ed. Back in the day we had the Personnel Department,  which mostly just processed employment applications. Responsibility for interviewing and vetting applicants, dealing with behavioral and performance issues, managing work assignments, etc. were a managers role. That's what managers are supposed to do, right? Apparently not. From the comments section:

***

"I worked in HR for nearly 40 years. The problem with HR is they have no power. They say they are there for the employee, but if a problem has to do with management, they are useless. This applies to any area of HR where they think, at least initially, that they are there to solve problems by relaying useful information, which is necessary for improvements both to management and to employees. That's a myth. Management is not interested in making improvements that impact employees. The only thing that might get their attention is if an employee's issue could get them sued with the outcome most likely going to be in the employee's favor. They pay lip service to whatever mission statement about "one for all and all for one" someone in HR wrote up for them to sign off on. Employees don't expect much from management, but they do, at least at first, expect something better from HR, and they don't get it."

---

"I'm long retired and I've yet to meet or have heard of HR person worth a lick of salt to the employees they're theoretically there to help. In the firm I worked in most of my career, it was worse, a couple managers were corporate psychopaths and they played HR for suckers as much as they did the staff they were managing. Indeed, one routinely told us to tell them what they wanted to hear, then ignore it, here's what I want..... I even have an issue with the profession's title... I know practitioners are caring people, but my gosh, HR is a term that took over and replaced "personnel officer" .... that was at least more honest about the core of the job. As a wise person who was an expert in labor arbitration once told me — humans are NOT RESOURCES, gold, silver, oil, etc. are resources. Human are people with human needs, desires, emotions and all that, even HR people we're now told, no surprise. Resources on the other hand have always been natural stuff we dig up, grow, process, chew up and promptly discard whatever's left, moving on without skipping a step to the next batch. Maybe the HR people need to begin with a news philosophy. But I won't be holding my breath. Corporate bosses will always be king, no matter how unwise...."

Erik Witsoe, untitled
via:

John Mayall (1933–2024)

[ed. See also: John Mayall - G0dfather of British Blues - Documentary (YT).]

The Domination Tour

Five years ago, Britney Spears was rehearsing for her tenth concert series in 20 years when she suggested a tweak to one of the choreographer’s proposed dance moves. “It was as if I planted a huge bomb somewhere,” she said later under oath. Her tour managers, choreographers, and dancers disappeared into a room for 45 minutes. “I feel like they’re going to come back and be mean to me or punish me or something,” she remembered telling her assistant at the time.

Days later, Spears’s psychiatrist switched out her medication for a lithium prescription, advising that she wasn’t cooperating and was refusing to take her medication. The “Domination” residency, which had been announced to great fanfare months earlier, was quickly canceled, and Spears was once again involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility by handlers who—according to a paralegal who spoke to the podcast Britney’s Gram—theorized that the media buzz would boost ticket sales when she returned to the stage.

But the pandemic intervened, and Spears, for once freed from a punishing work schedule that entailed seven-day workweeks for all but one or two family vacations per year, began praying and researching her legal options, triggering the unlikely chain of events that ultimately led to the public unraveling of her jaw-dropping conservatorship. According to her public testimony and other reports, for 13 years the pop star had been quite literally trafficked by a shadowy clique of entertainment industry fixers and professional parasites who wiretapped her bedroom, medicated her, outfitted her with an IUD against her will, and monitored every morsel of food (no dessert) and keystroke, using a sophisticated surveillance apparatus one of the operation’s nine-year employees described as typical “counterterrorism.”

A half dozen streaming documentaries and Lord knows how many true-crime podcasts would ultimately chronicle the courtroom drama through which Spears emancipated herself from her indentured servitude. And yet three years after Spears detailed how she was imprisoned in her own home by a battalion of leeches who institutionalized her (at her own expense) in retaliation for attempting to tweak her own choreography, the pop music industry remains more thankless and constricting than ever.

Just as summer was beginning, both Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys were forced to cancel tours in which they had invested considerable sums of their own cash, due to lukewarm demand for tickets that had been priced too aggressively. The prolific hit machine Bebe Rexha unleashed a torrent of social media posts about how “hopeless” she felt working in an industry she claimed had repeatedly conspired to “undermine” her. And Spotify, as if on cue, announced it was tweaking its “mechanical royalties” compensation formula; songwriters could expect to receive $150 million less in 2025 than they had in 2024. The Guardian convinced 12 musical acts, including two with recent album releases that had charted in the top ten, to share their balance sheets from their most recent concert tours. Just one had turned a profit, of only about $7,000 for 29 performances.

These problems are more connected than they might seem, because power and resources in the music industry are so unbelievably concentrated. Since the demise of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, pop music in America has increasingly become a single-payer system, in which virtually every working musician relies for the majority of his or her earnings on a concert promotions cabal, anchored by Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its former CEO, the diminutive mogul Irving Azoff. Collectively, they own or control nearly 500 of the nation’s most important concert venues, sell more than 80 percent of the nation’s concert tickets, and perversely also solely or jointly manage the careers, brands, and business affairs of hundreds of artists, from U2 and Dua Lipa to Drake and The Weeknd.

Readers of the Prospect are well aware that the Biden Justice Department brought a case against Live Nation in May, seeking to unwind the 2009 Azoff-brokered deal that merged it with Ticketmaster. The lawsuit has much to say about Azoff, arguing that his new venue management company Oak View Group operates as a “pimp” for Live Nation. But the action was inspired in part by the intergalactic backlash after ticket-buying algorithms infested a supposedly fan-only presale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in November 2022 and drove prices up a thousand percent and more.

As flashpoints in protracted struggles against tyranny go, the Eras-trophe left something to be desired. Media coverage tended to focus on the plight of spoiled 13-year-old daughters of affluent white women—many of whom ultimately solved the problem by purchasing more accessibly priced tickets in Dublin or Vienna and mentally reclassifying the expense as an educational enterprise—which in turn enabled Live Nation and its legions of surrogates to spend the ensuing year and a half proposing legislation to crack down on ticket-hoarding bots. A far more illustrative media event for the purpose of illustrating the dangers of unchecked concert monopolies was probably the 2021 mass casualty event at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert, which numerous settled lawsuits alleged was the predictable result of combining Scott’s feral live persona with Live Nation’s relentless cost-cutting and outsourcing.

But to truly grasp the terrifying insidiousness of the concert cartel’s control over the music industry and the artists who are its lifeblood—and why even a successful antitrust case may not change much of anything—one must peruse the work of the leading scholar of the #FreeBritney movement, namely a Northern Virginia anti-monopoly activist named Melanie Carlson, whose deeply researched Substack explores the corporate and para-political relationships behind celebrity drama.

A licensed clinical social worker who is currently working on a doctoral dissertation about the institutional failures of domestic violence shelters, Carlson was originally drawn to #FreeBritney out of a combination of pandemic boredom and domestic abuse expertise. But upon diving into the court documents, she quickly realized that there was nothing “domestic” about Britney’s house arrest.

For starters, it was abundantly clear from business records, court filings, and Britney’s public appearances that a Nashville-based bookkeeper-turned-talent management specialist named Louise Taylor—dubbed #Loucifer by the movement—had played the most conspicuous role in orchestrating the conservatorship. But Loucifer herself was just one in a long list of seemingly interchangeable music managers turned mini-moguls (Scooter Braun, Sal Slaiby) who appeared to trade the same blue-chip clients every few years. And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Taylor named Irving Azoff and current Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino as her biggest mentors. (...)

The conservatorship was further codified by Caesars, the gaming conglomerate that hosted Spears’s “Piece of Me” residency in its Planet Hollywood casino and reportedly included a clause in its contract with the singer allowing it to cancel the residency if the conservatorship ended. (...)

Today, Live Nation manages the careers of some 2,000 artists through a dizzying collection of subsidiary management firms co-founded by such legendary managers as Guy Oseary, Scooter Braun, Jack Rovner, and the aforementioned Larry Rudolph, who discovered Spears when she was just 13 years old.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Spears had plenty of revenue streams other than concert tours to tap into. (She is, for example, estimated to have sold $1.5 billion in licensed perfume alone during the period of her conservatorship, and she made a reported $15 million a season as a reality show judge.) But by the mid-2000s, the music industry was in a state of existential despair. Recorded music sales had plunged two-thirds from the peak they hit in 1999, the year “Baby One More Time” sold most of the 25 million copies it moved. Britney’s critically lauded Blackout album, which had been released early in 2007 after getting leaked to the blogger Perez Hilton, sold just 2.5 million copies. “After her divorce, all her rehab expenses and her constant nights on the town at pricey L.A. restaurants,” opined one Fox News gossip columnist in April 2007, “Spears had better get back to work. And just an album won’t cut it. She’s got to figure out a way to tour. It’s the only way left to make money in what was once known as the music business.”

In hindsight, the conservatorship appears to have turned Spears, who at that point was far more interested in hanging out with her children than performing night after night, into a touring machine. And it worked: Spears brought in nearly $400 million in ticket revenue between 2009 and 2017, all while the battalion of lawyers, business managers, financial advisers, and medical professionals on her payroll continued to insist she was unable to care for herself.

It was while recording Blackout that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”

The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.

#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.

But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.

For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations. (...)

Last year, Britney Spears published a best-selling memoir, The Woman in Me, about her life in the gilded gulag of her conservatorship. The details were somehow even more dystopian and heartbreaking than all the documentaries and magazine narratives had conveyed. Spears vividly described the process of repeatedly making peace with the arrangement so she could spend time with her sons, only to have the tiny pleasures she was still allowed—french fries and desserts, over-the-counter energy supplements, vacations with her children—taken away for tiny perceived infractions. And she wrote with disarming wistfulness about 2007, the year of the head shaving and serial meltdowns before she turned into a “robot doll,” when she was still allowed to sleep in and drink shots with Paris Hilton when she wanted.

She describes rediscovering her love for performing over the course of a three-year “Piece of Me” residency in Las Vegas, only to be driven insane by her handlers’ refusal to let her make even minor tweaks to the performance. She sang the same 22 songs in the same order 248 times. “It was so lazy it was actually odd,” Spears wrote. “I worried what my fans would think of me. But as always the answer was no. Because if I actually took control of my show, it could awaken people to the fact that I might not need my dad as a conservator. I feel like he secretly liked me feeling ‘less than.’ It gave him power.”

Spears’s specific predicament was so exotic that it’s easy to forget her imprisonment was just a more intense version of the control that middlemen like Lou Taylor and Live Nation exert over all of their “product offerings,” no matter how famous and uniquely beloved. (...)

At this point, they all know the sordid backstory of the original Las Vegas residency, wherein Elvis Presley’s personal Loucifer, his longtime manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, leashed the King to the exhausting seven-year, 837-performance contract at the International Hotel that would arguably cause his early death, all to sustain the Colonel’s own vicious gambling addiction. (The International would send a roulette wheel to Colonel Parker’s room so he could gamble away.)

When Britney’s “Piece of Me” residency debuted shortly after her 32nd birthday in 2013, it was immediately hailed as a transformative event in the annals of the “Las Vegas musical landscape,” historically the realm of past-their-prime easy-listening talents. Britney’s engineered Sin City enslavement may seem in the modern day far more cynical than the King’s, because she was a young mom of two little boys. But Elvis had a one-year-old at home when his Vegas residency began, and he was just two years older than Britney at 34. The history of the music industry has been one of artist exploitation, even as the names of the exploiters have changed.

by Maureen Tkazic, The American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: James Nielsen/AP

[ed. I don't pay much attention to celebrities so didn't realize how venal her conservatorship actually was, and the whole industry appears similarly infected. What a surprise. See also: The New Pornographers (Tik Tok):]

***

"The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification. They travel around the world, mostly in first or business class, discussing their enjoyment of champagne and caviar and perfectly cooked fish and sumptuous desserts. They review hotels and lie out on beautiful beaches overlooking crystalline waters. They adventure and ride camels and visit rainforests. The world, for these TikTokkers, is an abundant oyster, from which they pluck pearls of audience engagement.

There is a young woman, Nara Smith, who is a model and influencer married to a model and influencer named Lucky Blue Smith. They are zygotes, relatively speaking, and already have four children (one from Lucky’s previous marriage). Though they rarely say it, they are Mormon (and there are a lot of similar influencers on TikTok). I am chagrined to know this, and yet. … Most days, Nara makes videos, speaking in that ubiquitous monotone people on the platform use, as she makes the most ludicrous things from scratch. She makes her own marshmallows and Turkish pizza and granola and mozzarella cheese. She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking. She is selling an enviable lifestyle — one where she is unencumbered by how the dishes are washed or who is tending to the children while she makes her videos, one where the particulars of her financial situation are inscrutable as she surrounds herself with the trappings of conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me started on Ballerina Farm, but it’s a whole thing.

Families with 10 or more children, often evangelical, who own innumerable coordinated outfits, and think quite highly of themselves even though they are never doing much of anything on camera. Parents sharing a day in the life, sometimes with medically complex children. Throuples sharing a day in the life. Pet owners sharing a day in the life. People getting ready to go out for a night on the town or to a birthday party or work. Couples sharing, in precise detail, what they’re wearing from underwear to the scent of the day. Makeup artists offering tutorials or showing off their skills. People sharing what they eat every day or doing meal prep for the week. Aestheticians and dermatologists cleaning pores and pulling viscera from body cavities. Hairdressers and barbers performing their services on a range of people from weekly clients to people who haven’t washed their hair in months or years and need a little care and tenderness to undo the damage. Doctors and nurses offering medical advice, or dancing or sharing what a shift is like or making fun of annoying patients, which, I’ll admit, doesn’t always inspire a lot of confidence in the medical establishment. (...)

There are so many “viral” dances. So many. These dances are usually created by Black creators and end up as memes that Kansas grandmothers and everyone else try to mimic to great or not so great effect. And there are the many, many niche communities. So many. Women who pack lunch for their husbands and detail everything, including the silverware and napkins. The quantity of food these men take to work is staggering, in case you were wondering. Housewives with a yen for organization and clear plastic storage goods. As in, you can watch videos of people bringing groceries home, emptying their refrigerators, cleaning them, and refilling their refrigerators, with everything neatly organized. People will remove things from one container only to place them in another, with a neatly printed label. It’s hypnotic but also deeply distressing when you start to think about the environmental impact.

TikTok is creative and sprawling and often strange and anarchic, which mirrors the internet more broadly. There are few rules; the platform takes all comers. Chaos is inevitable. You can find absolutely anything; it’s incredible to witness how many different ways there are to be, how creative (or uncreative) people are, how we crave attention, hoping that if we make the perfect video, we might be catapulted to some version of fame. It is also … haunting, how so many of us yearn to be seen, to be understood."

High Tech/Low Tech

Kim Yeji

Yusuf Dikeç,

[ed. One looks like they stepped out of The Matrix, the other a Turkish KGB officer. See also:]

Kim Yeji: The Paris Olympics’ coolest athlete and a South Korean superstar (The Athletic)

Viral Olympic shooters Yusuf Dikec and Kim Ye-ji unfazed by internet storm (Al Jazeera)

***

"Aside from his medal win, fans were quick to notice Dikeç’s attire during the event, which consisted of a white T-shirt and black pants. While shooting, the Olympian also adopted a very laid-back stance, with one hand in his pocket and another hand holding up his pistol as he stared directly at the target.

On his head, he was only wearing his pair of glasses, rather than using specific lenses that are worn by other athletes when shooting. He also wasn’t wearing ear protectors during the event, which competitors often use to block out the loud noises.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, many fans were impressed by Dikeç’s casual stance and relaxed demeanor when winning a silver medal. They also applauded Dikeç’s competitor, South Korean Olympic shooter Kim Yeji, who fans have called a “movie character” for her all-black attire and stance during the event.

“I think I’m gonna have to take a closer look at the Olympic Pistol competition. First we got South Korean Kim Yeji, who’s a total bada**,” one wrote. “Then comes Turkish competitor Yusuf Dikeç, who casually goes out and wins the silver with one hand in his pocket!” (Independent)

via:

David Byrne, Stop Making Sense
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Falling Stars Observed from the Balloon, illustration by Albert Tissandier for the second edition of James Glaisher's Travels in the Air, 1871

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