#there are people who follow me who do care about leverage and might have voted because of me

[suddenrundown]

see i do think its funny tho being so invested in a ship poll that you either a) would feel the need to swing the poll your way via bots or b) accuse other people of doing so, when more than likely its just that this piece of media you’ve never heard of has a lot of people that you’ve never seen who are just crazy passionate, you know?

#for everyone saying "what the hell is leverage???'' there are just as many people on the other side saying the same about your anime #i know i voted and then reblogged the poll twice and the second time i told people we were losing #there are people who follow me who do care about leverage and might have voted because of me #and i follow a lot of people who adore leverage and have quite a bit of reach as far as followers go #and even people who dont particularly care about leverage and follow any of us might still see the poll and be like #eh sure why not and vote ot3 just cuz ''well i follow them and they care so i'll cast a vote for their fave blorbos'' #its not that deep and certainly not the result of a conspiracy lol #this is such a silly thing to have Thoughts on but i do even tho its super unnecessary haha

[kuiperblog]

Reviewing four small Knizia card games

I love Reiner Knizia’s small, simple board game designs that are “easy to learn, hard to master.”  And I love the fact that many of the games he’s designed have Japanese editions which are made by companies that 1) care more about component quality than their western counterparts, and 2) are made for customers in tiny Tokyo apartments, where shelf space is at a premium.

They’re the perfect games to stuff into a backpack (or suitcase) and bring out to share with people who “enjoy playing games, but aren’t into the board game hobby.”  They’re something for the people who don’t want to play a 1+ hour long euro engine builder, but would like to be treated to something of a higher class than Uno or Monopoly.

Thus it came to be that when visiting my family for Christmas this (er, last) year, I took four Reiner Knizia card games with me. They were such a big hit that the family won’t let me take them back with me. (Okay, actually, leaving the games behind was my suggestion after they expressed interest in acquiring copies for themselves; given the economics of importing items from Japan, it makes more sense for me to just order replacement copies of the games for myself the next time I place an order from Amazon JP, which is something I now do fairly often since learning that they will let you pay in USD with a US credit card and ship directly to the US.)  The following list is assorted roughly in descending order of how much I liked them:

High Society (3-5 players, 15-30 minutes)

This was immediately my favorite, and a poll of the family revealed it to be a unanimous favorite (excluding the non-vote from my sister, who refused to pick a favorite). It also happens to be the one game in the pile that wasn’t a Japanese import. (There is a Japanese version; I just like the art from the 2018 US version published by Osprey better.)

I love this game. It’s an incredibly mean game consisting entirely of auctions to win cards that are worth points (and “reverse auctions” where you bid money to not receive the cards that are worth negative points), with the stipulation that whoever has the least money at the end of the game loses.

Furthermore, you are bidding with fixed denominations of money: you have a single card of each denomination of $1, $2, $4, $6, $8, $10, $12, $15, $20, or $25 (Actually, the “currency” in the game is francs, and you’re bidding thousands of francs, but denoting them with a dollar sign is easier.)  Critically, you can only increase your bid by adding a card to your previous bid; the auction house does not make change. What you very quickly realize is that lower denominations are a precious commodity: you’d much rather spend a single $10 card than a $4 + a $6.  If you spend all of your “low” cards early, you quickly lose the ability to incrementally increase bids.

This is an auction game that is mean, where you frequently use your money to bully other people at the table into paying more for cards that you had no intention of buying (but that they desperately need), or by baiting them into bidding wars that bait out their low cards, removing their ability to strategically bid later in the game. There are all sort of subtle asymmetries that crop up in ways that affect the bidding in interesting ways: for example, one of the negative cards (which triggers a reverse auction where you bid not to take it) causes you to lose one of your point cards. If you’re sitting across the table from someone whose only card is a 9 or a 10, they’ll be desperate to avoid that card, whereas you might be more willing to take it if you’re just going to be losing a 2-point card. That gives you leverage. Ditto for situations when you’re in the final turns of the game, sitting across from someone who has a handful of money but with a point total that is nowhere near winning -- or the reverse, when you’ve got a handful of money, and are staring at someone who is at risk of being sent to the poorhouse and has precious little money to spend when a negative point card comes up.

It’s incredibly simple and takes about 2 minutes to teach the rules, but it’s highly interactive, and extremely cutthroat. It’s the opposite of what you get from most modern “euro” board games (which are often made to feel like “multiplayer solitaire”), and everything you want from a Knizia game.

Kariba (2-4 players, 15 minutes)

(The above photo is of the Japanese version of the game, which has slightly different art from the latest US release; as you can surmise, there’s no language component.)

Kariba game with simple rules and simple artwork/theming that you could play with a child, but as with most Knizia games, it hides a certain amount of depth behind its simple decision-making. (It also has an optional “expert” mode, where you draft cards from a market rather than drawing blindly off the top of the deck, which is highly recommended once everyone at the table understands how to play.)

The rules are simple: all the animals want to visit the watering hole, and so every turn you play a card from your hand in one of the eight slots around the board. Animals are allowed to bring friends of the same species: you may play multiples of a matching card. And when three (or more) animals of the same species are present at the watering hole, they chase away the next-smallest animal: three rhinos (7) will chase away any number of leopards (6), allowing the player who played the rhino(s) to add the leopards to their scoring pile.  And if there are no leopards presents, the rhinos will instead scare away the ostriches (5), and if that slot is also empty they’ll chase away the giraffes (4)... The elephants (8) of course are big enough to chase anyone away.

The mice (1) are too small to chase away any of the other animals -- except for the fact that, as everyone knows, elephants are afraid of mice, so a group of mice can chase away any number of elephants -- but only elephants.

The game often begins in a sort of “cold war,” with everyone playing conservatively, trying to sculpt their hand without adding too much scoring materiel to the board, until more and more points have been deployed, and finally someone is forced to act -- which creates a bigger stack for someone else to either grow, or to take for themselves. It gives the game a wonderful sense of tempo: there’s a slow build-up, followed by a series of high-scoring turns where you try to cash in as much as possible while hoping that you won’t be the first player at the board to “fizzle out.”  And if you do fizzle out, then you get to play “defense,” creating small stacks to create buffers and “play defense” and limit the scoring opportunities for other players.

Circus Flohcati (2-5 players, 15-20 minutes)

Rethemed in Japan as  なつのたからもの (Treasures of Summer), featuring the many beautiful cards shown above which depict the various joys of summer, including fireworks, eating watermelon, visiting the beach, and so on.  (The English versions of Circus Flohcati are themed around a flea circus, and the various versions range from annoyingly cartoonish, to the debatably offputting illustrations of the 2016 English 2nd edition where all the members of the flea circus have human bodies and insect heads, like something out of a Cronenberg movie.)  Also, the Japanese cards have much better quality/texture.

Circus Flohcati is a game that is much more fun in practice than I would have expected from reading the rulebook before my first playthrough.  Technically speaking, there’s not much in the way of interaction, which is often how you get games with a “multiplayer solitaire” feel, where people feel at liberty to get up from the table and get a drink (or otherwise not pay attention to the game) when it’s not their turn. However, in practice, that rarely happens in Flohcati.  Part of it comes from the fact that you need to pay attention to what cards other people are picking up -- at the end of the game, you only score the highest card for each suit, and seeing someone else pick up a white 6 might clue you in as to how likely they might be willing to pass on a white 5.  There’s also 9 cards in the 89 card deck that allow for direct interaction, allowing you to do things like force another player to give you a card of their choosing or at random, so if you see someone take a card that you wanted, you should (and will) remember that fact for later.  (This is the only form of direct player interaction.)  Players also can get points for completing sets, so you want to be aware of what other people are taking.  (If you see someone else going after all the 3′s, maybe you don’t want to veer into their lane and compete with them for 3′s. Or maybe, if you’re seated to their right, you do want to compete with them and deny them the last one that they need to complete their set.)

But, more fundamentally, everyone pays attention during each other player’s turn because each turn feels exciting, because it’s a press-your-luck game: you can pick a face-up card from the table, but if you don’t like what you can see, you can flip over a new card -- with the stipulation that if you flip over a new card that matches a suit that’s already on the board, you “bust” and forfeit your turn.  There are 10 suits, so flipping over a new card when there’s 2 suits visible gives you a ~20% chance of busting (fairly safe), but the danger quickly increases...each card flip feels tense, and it’s fun to watch as other people at the table get greedy and either get rewarded or punished for their greed.

When reading the rulebook for the first time, the level of decision-making in this game didn’t strike me as something that would be all that interesting, but when playing, it strikes a good balance: the decisions are simple, but they’re fast and often quickly lead to other decisions as you ratchet up the risk and tension. As Knizia titles go, it’s not the deepest game, but every turn (including your opponents’) feels exciting and engaging.

Trendy (2-5 players, 20 minutes)

If you want to get your hands on a copy of this game, the 2021 Japanese version might actually be the easiest to find, as the only other versions are the original 2000 German release, and the 2004 version which was released in English.

The rules are simple: on your turn, you play out a numbered card face up. Once the table has collectively assembled a “complete set,” everyone who played cards as part of that set gets to score them, and all other cards that don’t match the trend get discarded. (A “complete set” requires a number of cards equal to the face value of the cards: three 3′s is a complete set, as is four 4′s, five 5′s, six 6′s, or seven 7′s.) Each card scores equal to its face value, so making higher numbers trend is harder, but more rewarding if you can pull it off.  Mixing things up are a few cards that count as two cards, and a few “out” cards that will discard all cards of a specific number from play.

Out of all of the games, it’s the one I feel the least compelled to go back and replay, as it lends itself to somewhat repetitive play patterns. And yet, as game designer, I kind of love this game for achieving what few games do, and that is perfectly communicating its theme through its gameplay.

In Trendy, you are often left in a quandary like this one: the table has just been cleared, and the player to your right has just played a 7. You also have a 7 -- so maybe you want to hop on that trend so that when the 7′s score, you won’t be left out. On the other hand, the person who played the first 7 probably has multiple 7′s in hand. If you play your own 7, you’ll be scoring 7 points for yourself, but you might be helping that opponent score 14 or even 21 points! Better to go under them with a low card like a 3 or a 4 -- you’ll score fewer points, but you’ll punish the player who played a 7.

So you play the 3. And then you watch in horror as the next two players also play 7′s, followed by the original player, playing a fourth 7. Now, 7′s are very close to trending -- will you stubbornly try to undercut them with a 3 and try to make 3′s trend first?  Or will you accept the inevitable, hop on the bandwagon, and add your 7 to the pile so you can at least walk away with 7 points (knowing that your opponents will probably be walking away with more)? But what if the table doesn’t collectively have seven 7′s -- what if your opponents don’t have that final 7, and by hopping on the trend, you’re actually helping them score cards that might have otherwise been dead in their hand?

That, in a nutshell, is Trendy -- like the name (and artwork/theme suggests), it is a game about watching as trends catch on, and being left in the tension of getting peer pressured into hopping on a trend out of fear of getting left behind, versus the decision to break from the crowd and try to start a new trend that catches on faster. And, of course, with each person who hops on the bandwagon, the trend only grows stronger and harder to buck. You don’t want to be left out, but the later you join a trend, the less cred you get for being part of the “in” group. The person who starts the trend often collects bigger rewards than all of the followers, so it’s better to be the king of the 3′s than the fourth person to jump on the 6 train. And because higher numbers are worth more points, the more unlikely a trend is, the more you get rewarded for starting it. The gameplay is such a perfect encapsulation of the game’s theme that I’m kind of left in awe.

And yet, there’s only so many times you can watch those stories play out before you start to get a “been there, done that” feel. Having played over a dozen hands of this game, I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent playing Trendy, and I’m happy to recommend of for the reasons above, but I’m not sure it’s a game that I’m sad to see leave my collection. (On the other hand, my sister loves this game and will probably be introducing many more people to it.) It’s a great game to introduce to new people who can play it for 15-60 minutes, then get to say goodbye to the game before they have a chance to grow tired of it -- and in a way, isn’t that exactly what you want out of a “gateway” game?

#reiner knizia #board games #game design

[arecomicsevengood]

“Follow Your Own Star”

Lately I’ve found it hard to shake the feeling that everything of value is being destroyed, but we are being given simulacra in exchange, while we wait, to soften the blow. The relationship between the U.S. economy and what actually has value is basically nil, obviously, and COVID has only highlighted that, but beyond that, being in isolation has brought to light how much of what I consider “real” because it exists outside the bounds of money is nonetheless vulnerable. We’ve been given podcasts to fill our working hours with parasocial relationships where once we may’ve had genuine camaraderie with our coworkers. We’re given desultory political candidates to vote for in the absence of those who would govern in accordance with our actual beliefs. It feels like an elaborate art heist is taking place, where the masterpieces are exchanged for forgeries, and the endgame of those seeking to enrich themselves is to set a bonfire of all that’s made us human, all we’ve invested our true selves into. All this can occur only because our relationships have been made increasingly transactional already. I wondered at the start of quarantine how many couples, with the ability to see one another in the flesh compromised, had switched to having “sex” over Skype, how many intimate relationships were compromised by distance into resembling cam shows. Partly this curiosity was a way of comforting myself, as I came to the understanding that I would not be entering into anything approaching a real romantic relationship for the foreseeable future.

In the context of all of this, reading a book that feels reminiscent of the work of another artist feels like a minor thing, but it slips easily enough into the larger pattern. After reading Roaming Foliage by Patrick Kyle, I thought “Huh, this is very much a CF/Brian Chippendale thing.” Then, after reading Eight-Lane Runaways by Henry McCausland, I thought, “Oh, this is even more like a CF thing.” Both are, I think, appropriate for kids, which Powr Mastrs isn’t, but I also never read Powr Mastrs and felt like the thing that made it good was its BDSM pornography elements. People have been biting CF’s style for years — enough for him to address it with a little note in the third Powr Mastrs book, instructing them to “follow your own star.” Simon Hanselmann admits the similarities between the character design for Owl and a character in CF’s story in Kramers Ergot 5, Hanselmann’s subsequent popularity seems to suggest a moment where something becomes less of a direct influence and more just something that exists generally in the world. It’s art: Inspiration, influence, and appropriation are all part of the game. Reading Hanselmann, I’ve wondered what his work would’ve been like before exposure to his most obvious influences; reading these, I wondered instead if they would still have been made had Powr Mastrs 4 ever come out, to finish out the story and close the system; it feels like, in a transactional relationship between artist and audience, the fact of a work remaining unfinished makes it more socially acceptable to steal from. For instance, think of the debt Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain owes to Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue. It feels like an attempt to create something with an ending, to satisfy a desire for the logic to reach its conclusion. The comics fulfill a certain set of expectations, I found them a pleasant enough experience, satisfying on a certain level. However, on a deeper level, I found them completely unsatisfying, because they speak so directly to a sense of unfulfilled potential. They lack the thrill that CF’s comics provide, of totally transcending any expectations placed on them.

Measuring the impact made by CF, Paper Rad, and the Fort Thunder contingent is difficult to calculate, because there were so many radical gestures inside that work, and while some have been metabolized, others have not. The “reclamation of genre material in an art-school context” is maybe the most readily understood. Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit probably wouldn’t exist were it not for these comics, but that’s such a “who cares” for me, such a dumbed-down and simplistic understanding of what makes these comics good. The silkscreening of covers is close behind, in terms of something that people really ran with. That’s fine, no one owns silkscreening, it looks great. What hasn’t really been reckoned with are the gestures against commodity fetishism. Paper Rodeo is progenitor of the free comics newspaper format, but the work that ran there is so much wilder than what you see in what followed, and most of it was anonymous. I understand why that was a gauntlet that wasn’t picked up, but is still one of the things that made an impact on its initial readership. Similarly, I haven’t seen anyone steal the CF format of the single-sheet xerox, with comics on the front and back. I guess that’s not surprising! But honestly? Sick format.

I’ve just been talking about comics, but Lightning Bolt playing on the floor is its own radical gesture, albeit one with an obvious precedent in the form of Crash Worship. The Forcefield oeuvre is its own thing. Those videos are great! The animation made out of photographing the cutting layers of multicolored clay… I wonder how much of this stuff hasn’t been picked up on because it’s the last stand of working with real world physical materials, before the coming of digital as the default medium for art students to work in. Obviously, the silkscreening has similar roots in physical media, and playing on floors relates directly to how you communicate with people when you’re in the same physical space as them. Real world community has distinct advantages, but many that came after took the trade for the benefits working digitally provides. Anyway. I could write a 33 1/3 book proposal for Lightning Bolt’s Ride The Skies that addresses all this stuff, but I also believe I would not be the best person to write such a book; I suspect those better suited would not be interested.

There is something so exciting about artists whose work feels overflowing with ideas, not just on a level of concept or drawing but also in terms of how the work is presented. That whole Providence/Picturebox crew was so abundant with this creative ferment that when I see others picking up on individual threads it makes sense on a certain level — you want more of a certain thing — but if it’s not backed up by something distinctly unique, as a reader I’m hyper-aware of what’s absent.

These artists also made books, and records, and it was their doing so that brought their work to a larger audience, including me. Not everything has to be a gesture against making money. But at the same time, radical gestures suggest the benefits made in fostering community work out better in the long term than leveraging oneself to be consumed as a commodity does. This is not to suggest that McCausland or Kyle are doing something wrong that will sabotage some sort of grand plan for utopia: I’m really just riffing here. If I buy electronic music mp3s online, I’m not necessarily going to lament the death of live music performance the same way I do when buying the mp3s of a jazz act. Looking at a contemporary superhero comic that feels dire and ugly will make me nostalgic for the Mike Parobeck comics of my youth, but a contemporary black and white zine exists in a completely different universe and might not remind me of anything. Certain things make you miss the world that was more than others.

It’s also worth noting that by all accounts Patrick Kyle has a bunch of people online ripping off his style but I have successfully been able to avoid such people. While Roaming Foliage is consciously modeled after the sort of weird adventure comics of not just Powr Mastrs, but also Brian Chippendale’s If N Oof,  What I am most often seeing and thinking “that’s a ripoff” is the presence of these geometrical patterns which are also similar to design choices made throughout his oeuvre. There’s a chaotic, obfuscatory energy approach to comics that he works with frequently, but so much of his other comics feel dark, melancholy, or paranoid whereas this feels much lighter in its tone. At the same time, compared to the claustrophobia of Don’t Come In Here, having his characters move about makes for an adventure narrative. Watching them wander, interact, and be given quests and goals belongs to this tradition that’s not unique to the Picturebox artists — but the feeling that this fantasy material was arrived at through adventure games like Zelda moreso than Tolkien makes for this sort of… generational level of familiarity, rather than seeming to occupy some sort of Campbellian myth-space, if that makes sense. The strangeness of Kyle’s art, where backgrounds overtake figures, suggests a sort of PC glitching, almost like the Cory Arcangel/Paper Rad collaboration Super Mario Movie, but achieved through photocopier technology of blowing up and distorting images. It is the sensation of a feeling being chased after that makes the book feel less exciting and more melancholy, though subsequently, that darker feeling might make the book slot into Kyle’s oeuvre so much that bigger fans of his might not even notice the resemblance I’m seeing.

McCausland has a list of acknowledgments in his book which includes CF alongside Herge and Otomo. I can sort of see them all, but Herge especially is an influence that’s been so widely absorbed by comics as a whole that I really only feel particularly aware of it in the case of Joost Swarte or something. McCausland’s resemblance to CF is reinforced by things as molecular as a resemblance in the lettering, which is really odd. The figures all have this youthful smallness to them, and I can’t tell if the characters are meant to be young specifically or if it’s just the way he’s learned to draw. I can see Otomo, but it’s definitely approached through the CF filter. Other trademarks, like the rendering of geometric shapes, the patterns of parallel lines, seems integrated, highlighted, by the “racetrack” premise that gives the book its name. However, he distinguishes himself because his work is more constantly busy, with the same general level of detail. There’s also these trees in the background, which seem like they’re rendered as these painted soft grey daubs, a type of texture you don’t see in CF’s darkened pencil work.

His storytelling is different, prone to large spreads, or showing the same character multiple times in a panel as they move across the landscape. (The dimensions of Eight-Lane Runaways are considerably larger than those of Powr Mastrs.) There are nonetheless panels that seem exactly like CF drawings, but with a less cryptic sense of humor. It feels more populist, like it’s based around what a person liked, and in the act of working it out, subtracted the mystery. What would’ve been a detailed “money shot” in a CF sequence is here the baseline level of drawing detail that never gets subtracted from. It’s really fascinating to me how this makes it less good, I think many people would prefer it.

I wrote most of this before learning that Anthology is releasing a new CF book next week. You can order it and see preview images at the Floating World site. You can draw your own conclusions. CF’s on his own path such that you might not even note a resemblance between his new images and McCausland’s. We’re all living on the same planet, orbiting the same sun in an expanding universe, subject to the will of an accelerating time.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

I’m Billy Graham’s granddaughter. Evangelical support for Donald Trump insults his legacy.

American evangelist Billy Graham preaches to over half a million South Koreans at a plaza on Yoido Island in Seoul on June 3, 1973.

By supporting Donald Trump, evangelical leaders are failing us and failing the Gospel. Christian women must step up where our church leaders won't.

Jerushah Duford, Opinion contributor

USA TODAY Opinion • August 27, 2020

As a proud granddaughter of the man largely credited for beginning the evangelical movement, the late Billy Graham, the past few years have led me to reflect on how much has changed within that movement in America.

I have spent my entire life in the church, with every big decision guided by my faith. But now I feel homeless. Like so many others, I feel disoriented as I watch the church I have always served turn its eyes away from everything it teaches. I hear from Christian women on a daily basis who all describe the same thing: a tug at their spirit.

Most of these women walked into a voting booth in 2016 believing they were choosing between two difficult options. They held their breath, closed their eyes and cast a vote for Donald Trump, whom many of us then believed to be “the lesser of two evils,” all the while feeling that tug.

Jerushah Duford and grandfather Billy Graham in Montreat, North Carolina, in 2016.

I feel it every time our president talks about government housing having no place in America’s suburbs. Jesus said repeatedly to defend the poor and show kindness and compassion to those in need. Our president continues to perpetuate an us-versus-them narrative, yet almost all of our church leaders say nothing.

I feel this tug every time our president or his followers speak about the wall, designed to keep out the very people Scripture tells us to welcome. In Trump’s America, refugees are not treated as “native born,” as Scripture encourages. Instead, families are separated, held in inconceivable conditions and cast aside as less than.

The church honors Trump before God

Trump has gone so far as to brag about his plans, accomplishments and unholy actions toward the marginalized communities I saw my grandfather love and serve. I now see, through the silence of church leaders, that these communities are no longer valued by individuals claiming to uphold the values my grandfather taught.

The gentle tug became an aggressive yank, for me, earlier this year, when our country experienced division in the form of riots, incited in great part by this president’s divisive rhetoric. I watched our president walk through Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., after the tear gassing of peaceful protesters for a photo op.

He held a Bible, something so sacred to all of us, yet he treated that Bible with a callousness that would offend anyone intimately familiar with the words inside it. He believed that action would honor him and only him. However, the church, designed to honor God, said nothing.

It seems that the only evangelical leaders to speak up praised the president, with no mention of his behavior that is antithetical to the Jesus we serve. The entire world has watched the term “evangelical” become synonymous with hypocrisy and disingenuousness.

My faith and my church have become a laughing stock, and any attempt by its members to defend the actions of Trump at this time sound hollow and insincere.

One of my grandfather’s favorite verses was Micah 6:8, in which we are told that the Lord requires of his people to do justly, to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly. These are the attributes of our faith we should present to the world. We can no longer allow our church leaders to represent our faith so erroneously.

Women of faith know better

I have given myself permission to lean into that tug at my spirit and speak out. I may be against the tide, but I am firm in my faith that this step is most consistent with my church and its teachings.

At a recent large family event, I was pulled aside by many female family members thanking me for speaking out against an administration with which they, too, had been uncomfortable. With tears in their eyes, they used a hushed tone, out of fear that they were alone or at risk of undeserved retribution.

How did we get here? How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? Why do we feel we must express our discomfort in hushed whispers in quiet corners? Are we not allowed to stand up when it feels everyone else around us is sitting down?

The God we serve empowers us as women to represent Him before our churches. We represent God before we represented any political party or leader. When we fail to remember this, we are minimizing the role He created for us to fill. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.

If a plane gets even slightly off course, it will never reach its destination without a course correction. Perhaps this journey for us women looks similar. Perhaps you cringe at the president suggesting that America’s “suburban housewife” cares more about her status than those in need, but try to dismiss comments on women’s appearance as fake news.

When we look at our daughters, our nieces, our female students, and even ourselves, we feel the need to lean into that tug on our spirit. You might not have felt it four years ago; we do the best with what we know at the time. However, if we continue to ignore the tug we now feel, how will we ever be able to identify what is truly important to us?

I chose to listen to my spirit to speak out. Not because doing so feels comfortable, but because it feels like the right way to leverage the voice God has empowered me with. Now I am asking all of you who feel as I do, to embrace your inner tug, and allow it to lead you to use the power of your God-given voice and not allow Trump to lead this country for another four years.

Jerushah Duford is an evangelical author, speaker and member of Lincoln Women, a coalition of women in the Lincoln Project.

_______________________________________

A false gospel: Trump and the 'prosperity gospel' sell false promises to credulous evangelical Christians

_______________________________________

The forgotten figure who explains how Trump got almost 74 million votes

Why do so many evangelicals continue to deny that Biden won the election?

Six Surprising Ways Jesus Changed The World

Jesus ‘Bows to Moon’

The Korean background of the FFWPU

The FFWPU / Unification Church and Shamanism

The FFWPU is unequivocally not Christian

Sun Myung Moon – Emperor, and God

The Moons’ God is not the God of Judeo-Christianity

Hak Ja Han is ‘Female Jesus, the only begotten daughter of God, the LSA’ (October 24, 2015)

God, Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han achieved unity inside the womb…. Hak Ja Han was lifted up to God’s wife position.

#Billy Graham #Evangelical Christianity #Sun Myung Moon #Hak Ja Han

[gweniala]

Random fact: Hoodian favour system

The Neverhood has no money to speak of, but they use a very similar system: favours.

(Don’t mind me, just expanding some headcannons.)

Say, Nehmen wants to look great for the next carnival, so he asks Kalikat to sew him a gorgeous cape. Kalikat, however, has dozens of better things to do than to sew Nehmen a cape which will only be used once and then thrown away. So Nehmen ups the stakes: he offers Kalikat a favour.

In this example, Kalikat is called the contractor and Nehmen is called the obliger. The contractor is the one who owns the contract and who eventually calls in the favour. When that happens, the obliger must oblige to the contractor’s wishes. Fun fact: An obliger who doesn’t oblige loses all of their previously promised favours. Nobody will do a favour for someone who shows that kind of unfairness. There are two distinct kinds of favours: named favours and blind favours. Named favours are specified before the contractor does something for the obliger, so both sides know what they’re trading.

Nehmen: I could pose as your dress form for the next month. Kalikat: No thanks, you can’t stay still for the love of Quater.

Blind favours are more insidious, as the contractor can ask for almost anything. These are usually chosen when the contractor wants more time to decide what the favour will be. The magnitude of the resulting favour is given by the following five-point scale: 1. small favour – shouldn’t take up more than a few minutes and very little effort. Exchanged for tasks you were too lazy to do. 2. middling favour – takes up from half an hour to two hours and requires some effort. Usually exchanged for things that matter in everyday life. The most common type of favours, as most people don’t bother keeping tabs on small favours. 3. big favour – takes up about half a day but no more than a day. Requires significant effort, as it’s usually awarded for things that made the contractor quite uncomfortable. 4. jumbo favour – the smaller of long-term favours. Exchanged for things the contractor really didn’t want to do, it requires days to weeks of dedicated time. Quite rare; every jumbo favour kicks up an uproar. 5. outrageous favour – the larger of long-term favours, and the only favour which potentially lasts forever. (In that case, however, it only pertains to small tasks, like brewing the contractor coffee every morning.) Outrageous favours typically require several years of concentrated effort. Only a few outrageous favours have been called in so far.

Kalikat: I’ll sew you that cape in return for a jumbo favour. Nehmen: Are you kidding me? I’m not doing you a jumbo favour. Ugh. Fine, how about a big favour? Kalikat: That won’t do. I’ll be spending a lot more than a day on your cape. It wouldn’t be fair. Nehmen: It doesn’t have to have sequins all over it! I just need something to wrap myself in so that I can pretend I’m a bat.

Each favour magnitude comes with a rhyme: 1. Ten minutes for this or that / I won’t even break a sweat 2. Two hours tops / and no big probs 3. No more than a day / no tears to be paid 4. I’ll give you a month of my life / I’ll pay you with tears and with strife 5. I have an eternity / go on, ask me anything These rhymes are often recited when the contenders try to convince each other of the appropriate favour level.

Kalikat: So, a plain cape… Nehmen: Yeah, just something dark and cool! Come on, don’t say it will take so long. No more than a day, no tears to be paid. Kalikat: Hmm… Oh, alright. A big favour it is. Nehmen: Yay! (hugs Kalikat) Kalikat: (hugs back) Fine, now stand up straight. I have to take your measurements.

Fun fact: Big favours and larger are usually sealed with a hug. This goes to show that the two Hoodians are on good terms. It also reminds people that they shouldn’t promise favours which feel unfair. Fun fact: It’s very unusual to promise more than one blind favour at a time. Named favours, physical possessions and other things might be promised to leverage the fairness, but blind favours are only made one at a time. After the favour has been promised, the contractor can call it in any time they want.

Kalikat: Nehmen, hey! I want to call in a big favour from you. Nehmen: Oh… (checks his favour records) Oh yeah, it’s here... Well, what do you want? Kalikat: I need to sew a dress full of sequins. There’s a lot of them. Nehmen: Aw man, that’s going to be so boring. Kalikat: Hey, no more than a day, no tears to be paid. I’ll let you off the hook in the evening, alright? Does tomorrow work for you? Nehmen: (whines) Fine…

If the contractor calls in a favour that doesn’t correspond to the selected blind favour level, the obliger can request second judgement from other Hoodians. The number of Hoodians that have to vote is 1 for a small favour (meaning any passer-by can decide), 3 for a middling favour, 7 for a big favour, 15 for a jumbo favour and 31 for an outrageous favour (meaning the entire Hood has to vote). Fun fact: It’s basic manners to remember how many favours you owe to someone and how many you are owed yourself. As a result it rarely happens that two people fight over owing or not owing a favour. It’s so bad for their image that they’ll usually agree on a compromise. As to the importance of favours: No one really cares about small or middling favours. Some may  kick up a fuss about big favours. Jumbo favours are usually common knowledge. Outrageous favours are always common knowledge. To prevent favours from stacking up unreasonably, a Hoodian may only have three favours of each level from another given Hoodians (at maximum three small favours, three middling favours, etc.). If his friend wants to promise a fourth favour, the usual solution is to call in one or two favours right away. Favours can also be released, which means that they will never be called in. The Hoodians can also agree on transforming the “four favours” into one favour of the higher level. For instance, if Nehmen already owed Kalikat three big favours, Kalikat could formally release them and Nehmen would promise him a jumbo favour in return for sewing the cape. Finally, sometimes favours are not promised formally but rather between the lines. The ethics of such informal favours is referred to as “basic human decency”. A majority of small favours are handled within “basic human decency” because no one can be bothered to give them a proper form. As a matter of fact, most jumbo and outrageous favours are informal as well and they are fulfilled out of duty and/or gratitude. For instance, if Kalikat offered to make the cape for Nehmen out of the goodness of his heart, Nehmen might later offer to help with sewing the sequins. (Nehmen isn’t a great example for this, as he would probably conveniently forget. People like him are one of the reasons why an explicit favour system exists in the first place.)

#neverhood #random fact

[arcanalogue]

ON TYRANNY - An Unsolicited Tarot Tour, pt. III

I didn’t intend for these posts to be a catalog of how fast the world can change, but last week the UK officially left the European Union, and the GOP-led Senate voted to end the impeachment trial without calling a single witness, ending this week in acquittal.

From inside my home, you can’t tell the difference; walking around in my neighborhood, nothing seems to have changed. That’s the curious nature of trying to stay well-informed, isn’t it? All of the bad news has an atmospheric quality; we receive it digitally and then project it around ourselves like a vaporous envelope, the opacity of which we can adjust at will.

As I twiddle with the settings of my own envelope, I try to ask myself: am I remembering to rest and enjoy my time at home, or am I using the privacy as cover for tormenting myself? Am I a being a true neighbor and citizen as I scuttle about in the world, or am I merely perceiving others as obstacles, intruders, unwelcome distractions, and blocking them out? 

Am I embodying my fear? As I struggle to process and contain all the bad news, do I become the bad news? 

It often feels like I end up overcompensating in order to prove I’m not adversely affected. Sometimes that’s impossible, and the envelope around me is fully opaque. If I’m lucky I can ride my bike down to the river and sit for a while, dial it back, absorb a broader perspective.

If I’m lucky.

The book ON TYRANNY presents a series of tasks aimed at challenging our own perceptions while also tracking changes in the world around us. A historian, Timothy Snyder seems to appreciate the sort of mental hygiene that regular people must use to cope with the dread and futility that become our constant helpmeets as dangerous forces rise to power. We grow attached to their presence, and come to trust them more than the wild interlopers that sometimes come galloping through, such as, say, hope. Or bravery, which requires the possibility of great sacrifice. 

Dread and futility require nothing of us, except to observe, and to hurt. Oh that’s handy, I can do that! But these become such all-consuming preoccupations that we mistake them for activity. Sharing a news story is like bearing witness: I was here, I heard about it, I grieved, I passed it on. A complete cycle we can repeat until we’re limp with exhaustion.

Hope less comfortable, and harder to pass along. It requires one’s spirit to run counter to the movements of the tide. That’s why it’s so valuable, and why it’s a distinctly anti-fascist instinct. Hope represents everything about a human that simply can’t be predicted, or controlled.

Where do you go looking for it in your home, or in your neighborhood? That’s what drives me out into the world most days: I’m looking for hope. When I remember to look, I usually find it.

If I’m lucky.

Alright, enough of that. Having already combed for parallels between Snyder’s chapters and The Magician, The High Priestess, and The Empress, it’s time to soldier on and see if the next few cards offer anything illuminating. 

As I wrote before, The Empress and The Emperor represent the interior and exterior aspects of one body: their empire.

Snyder’s fourth chapter begins: 

“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the future, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”

When you go out into the world, you may not be fully in charge of your surroundings, but that doesn’t mean you’re powerless to make important changes. You can use your presence and privilege to protect others. You can counter the hatred that arises spontaneously, or intercept the message. 

The nastiest people are often the most cowardly, counting on the elements of shock and surprise and a quick getaway. This is always the case when people shout or hurl things at me out of car windows. Slurs scrawled in graffiti are basically the same — it’s a low-risk gambit that hurts many. And when people encounter something unpleasant, they tend to just quicken their pace, pass on by. It’s not “their job” to deal with it.

I totally understand that well-meaning people don’t want to risk a confrontation, or compound a victim’s embarrassment by drawing attention to what happened. But I tell you, as someone who has been harassed and physically attacked in public: the message this ultimately sends to victims is that they’re truly on their own. 

You may not be the Emperor of our nation, but you can go about righting some of the smaller wrongs, helping people feel as though it matters to someone. 

Like when I noticed that someone else had painted over the “NO FAGS” graffiti which had recently appeared on a wall in my neighborhood, and my very first thought was: Well shit, why didn’t I do that?

I think I know why. I wanted to prove that it didn’t bother me. I wanted to assume it wasn’t aimed at me directly, that it was none of my business, and that it wasn’t so easy to trigger my outrage. And here’s a big one: I really, really wanted someone else to care enough to do it. It wasn’t “my job” to deal with it.

But what about the kids who walk past there to get home from school? I hadn’t thought of them. Should they have to grow up with the same fear that I did? Do I want the people who did this (or those who weren’t bothered by it) to imagine this sort of thing will be tolerated here? 

Let’s take responsibility for what others are subjected to in life’s “common areas,” including the internet. May we ride as The Emperor, acting swiftly and according to the most benefic principles.

Authority is tricky: it asserts that some protocols simply must be followed because we say so, that’s why. Within certain professional institutions, there are many things that “just aren’t done,” or are done “just so” — often for good reason. 

We run smack up against this kind of thinking when it’s time to make way for better systems. This is by design. It’s supposed to be hard to revise certain standards, they’re meant to evolve slowly, if at all, to preserve a sense of continuity throughout our progress. And yes, this has conveniently allowed certain privileged parties to leverage their position across generations, and profit from the results. But it also prevents any johnny-come-lately demagogue from overturning or erasing standards to suit their particular will. 

Or at least, it used to!

The widely-lamented demise of expertise has led to corners being cut left and right, and somewhere along the way the concept of authority itself seems to have been atomized. 

Snyder writes: 

“Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as ‘just following orders.’ If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have considered unimaginable.” 

Many of us aren’t in professions where these decisions wield real power, but our decisions still affect others. And there are doctors, lawyers, teachers, business executives, and civil servants all across the country who are grappling with these distinctions as we speak, and we must perpetually remind them how much our collective fates depend on their adherence to professional ethics.

Everyone wants to cut the line. Everyone wants to be the exception to the rule. Everyone wants to just give up and take it easy. Writ large, this turns our entire civilization into a contest to see who can be the biggest cheater, who can cover up the grossest incompetence. And who does that sound like? 

It sounds like, for starters, a chiropractor in South Dakota who wants to decide which treatments medical doctors may offer to trans children. 

Did you know The High Priestess and The Hierophant are a partnered set, a duality, just like the Empress and Emperor? Writing about The Priestess and defending institutions, I invited you to “reflect on the mental architecture” that produced your own mind. 

This chapter asks you to examine how certain decisions end up contributing to others’ architecture, defining their experiences. You may be more powerful than you know! The Hierophant is part of a lineage of teachers and students, influencers and influenced, each of them just one link in the chain.

How many broken links does it take for our world to stop recognizing itself in recollections of the past? 

Of all the card/chapter pairings so far, this one admittedly seems like the biggest stretch...  and yet, if this isn’t a snapshot of the pro-leader paramilitary making nice with the official police/military, then what is?

Snyder writes about how paramilitary forces first challenge the police and military, then penetrate them, and finally transform them. There’s an undeniable courtship at work here, a sort of debauched mating ritual. 

FYI, this exact courtship was the subject of the recent Watchmen series on HBO — a truly excellent one-season arc that involved crisscrossing ties between military, police, and paramilitary factions, all tangled up in relationships between friends, lovers, and families. 

What Snyder warns about here is the recurring love affair between armed "freedom fighters” and those tasked with maintaining civil order. First they discover that they’re more alike than different... and then, eventually, there’s no telling the difference between them whatsoever.

Let’s keep these Lovers star-crossed, shall we?

This is Part III in a series of posts about Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY, which can be purchased via your local bookstore, and also here.

#the lovers #the hierophant #the emperor #major arcana #timothy snyder #on tyranny #tarot cards

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: What do you make of Prime Minister Theresa May as her rules slowly comes to an end with the election of a new PM, probably Boris Johnson. An improvement? Will he be the one to get the UK out of Europe?

I never rated Theresa May, she was an ambitious but risk averse careerist like most of the modern Conservative Party. When she finally achieved her life time’s ambition by becoming Prime Minister, she made a mess of it.

Many years ago Enoch Powell, the great Conservative politician who was treated pariah for being so prophetic, stated the fate of all who climb the greasy pole of politics.  He said, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

The same fate awaits Boris Johnson.

Is Johnson an improvement? He will be if compared to May who was as about as compelling as watching paint dry.

My main objection to him is character. he doesn’t have the character to be a good Prime Minister. Like Trump he is a charlatan who is entertaining but preening with man-child issues and narcissistic entitlement.

I don’t care about his messy personal life as he bonked women half his life while cheating on all his wives. Nor do I care for the scandal of his love children outside of marriage. You can argue that this shows his true character. Perhaps. But of course, it does show his personal morality but this doesn’t actually stop him being competent at his job. The trouble is that he has never been competent in his life.

By all counts, Johnson is clever but has always been quite lazy and a low attention span to follow through on tasks. When he was Foreign Secretary he never bothered to read his briefs or dive deep into the red boxes. He’s been fired as a journalist for lying - which is pretty hard to do considering many journalists bend the truth.  To many he is an opportunistic charlatan but with the confident artifice of Eton and Oxford grooming.

But I think he might be the only one who could takes us out of the EU. Make no mistake, we do need to get out of the EU.

But on what terms? At what price?

I fear his hands are tied, just like May, by the structural challenges of leaving the EU without a deal. The Irish backstop is of course biggest spanner to a meaningful deal. The prospect of a hard border between Ireland and Northern Island is one everyone secretly dreads in terms of what it might mean to return to the dark days of sectarian Protestant-Catholic violence. Ask any seasoned military veteran of the 70s and 80s and they will tell you Northern Ireland was their worst mission or posting than any they ever did. Even today the memories are bitter ones for British soldiers.

How the Irish border question gets resolved in the face of EU insistence of no more negotiations and compromises is a severe headache once the politicians stop their posturing.

Of bigger concern is President Trump.

It may come as news to some Americans but Trump is wildly viewed as unpopular by many in Britain, regardless of political loyalties. Both left and right see his dissing of the UK and interfering in British politics as gross and uncouth.

No one trusts anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth because he is a proven serial liar. When he talks of of trade deals with the post-Brexit UK, we all know he will never seek an equitable deal but one that is about ‘America first’ and screwing us over.

In this regard I do think the encroachment of American big pharma into British health system as well as the relaxing of food quality standards (like chlorinated chicken) is setting off alarm bells because they think Johnson will be will cave and be an obedient poodle.

Johnson’s supine role in not backing the current UK ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, is a case in point. It doesn’t look good if you are seen to being dictated to by a foreign leader if you don’t back your own foreign ministry. Nor will the British people ever forgive him if Johnson acquiesces as if he was running the 51st state for the USA. It would be simply unacceptable because we are a proud nation with a proud history. 

Surprisingly, I’m not blaming Trump because his ‘America First’ beliefs. I think that is fine for the US as that’s his job to look out for his nation first. But conversely it’s bad for us. Trump as it’s now clear only thinks of deals in zero sum terms - there is only one winner so there has to be a loser. That’s his mind set. Again, I’m not holding that against Trump because he is being true to his nature.

America First is fine as far as it goes for American interests but for us we won’t get a fair deal because as a nation just breaking away from the EU umbrella we will not have any cover nor any leverage to punch back.

A pro-Brexit friend who actually worked under a minister told me that perhaps we should stay in the EU until Trump is replaced and then cut a deal. Firstly, I think he’s dreaming as no one can predict what the outcome of 2020 will be in the US. Secondly, who is to say whoever replaces Trump might be any easier to negotiate with? Thirdly, if the longer we delay leaving the more people will get used to us staying in and then it really will be harder to leave.

The big lie is that everything will be smelling daisies the day after we leave the EU with no deal. That’s BS. I know many corporate finance firms already making contingency plans to move to Ireland. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, the arch Brexiteer, has set up his capital finance holdings firm in Dublin. Everyone I know with any capital or wealth already have insulated themselves as best as they legally can.

At the same time, these very people are salivating at the prospect of making the UK a place where easy money and capital can come and go with little oversight or regulation. Most of these things I agree with in principle. I think the City of London would continue to remain an attractive place to do business despite being outside the EU.

However I sometimes think the City of London has got its head up its own arse and thinks more about quick short term gains and little about the long term impact of its actions. The rot is deep in our country with the continued decline of investment in manufacturing in the country and greater wealth and education gaps between people. McJobs and the gig economy are not going to restore Britian’s greatness only hasten its decline.

Of course small British businesses will be hurt in the short and medium term by a no deal Brexit but don’t forget this is what they voted for. It will be painful. But some might well think it will be a worthy sacrifice to lose jobs and business in order to rebuild properly for the long term free of Brussels and bureaucrats. But that price won’t be paid by capital holding classes.

A very wealthy high flyer working in City of London put it to me over dinner not so long ago that people think that politics is about left vs right but actually it’s about those who have wealth and those who don’t.

The trick is to vent the flames of public passions towards abstract straw men like ‘freedom’ or ‘sovereignty’ or in the US it would take the form of ‘guns’ or ‘abortion’.

People on BOTH sides of an issue expend volatile passion that they each entrench their (legitimate) grievances so deep into permanent persecution complexes. It’s further ossified by the relentless and constant echo chamber they each inhabit to reinforce their own entrenched beliefs and prejudices. So much so they forget about where the real obscene truth lies.

That this has always been a Darwinian world and there will always be winners and losers in life - there will always the rulers (oligarchies) and the ruled, the haves and the have-nots, and the rich and the poor. It’s a very cynical take on human nature and our society.

As much as I wanted to disagree with him, deep down I felt there was more than a tinge of truth to his words. It’s true. The corporate world is not personal nor is it political per se. It’s just about the making money for shareholders and to accumulate capital for the sake of it. It wields power to insulate itself from scrutiny and to have the freedom to do as it pleases. It appeals to people’s base motives at their purest - individual self-preservation. At some stage it’s going to clash with the principles and the institutions of democracy and questions of what takes precedence becomes acute. But that debate is for another day.

I still like to think we live in a world where ideas matter regardless how bare you strip life down to the bones.

In the case of Brexit, to me the sovereignty of Parliament serving at the pleasure of the Queen is paramount. It’s ruling one’s nation from first principles. If it’s your nation then you should have sovereign control over all decisions being made for its citizens. Moreover those making the decisions should be open to public scrutiny and be accountable. The nation state (under a constitutional monarchy in the case of Britain) is only accountable to its subjects and not to outsiders. All fine in theory except it’s an issue when these very elites charged with ruling over the masses have deep structural rot in them and they are just floating to get by like dead wood. Renewal and regeneration looks like a pipe dream.

I love Europe and I consider myself a proud European but I find it unacceptable to be partly ruled from a foreign capital whether it’s Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Moscow or Washington DC.

The hubris of a Franco-German led Europe is real. The EU began on a worthy premise that both France and Germany never go to war again. But it has mutated into some confederated nightmare today. The folly of its confederate policies are apparent and it will only worsen.

I doubt Boris Johnson has the political gravitas - even if he has the low cunning or the wit - to out fox other European leaders and their mad integration policies. They know him too well since he was for years a lazy and incompetent correspondent in Brussels.

It may well be Johnson is the ‘useful idiot’ Britain needs to take us out of the EU but Britain will need another leader with integrity, character and conviction to lead us to build proper alliances and repair relations with other Europeans to collectively face threats to our shared identities and nationhood.

The trouble is I don’t see that person in the current Conservative Party. But don’t take my word on this please, I have a natural allergic reaction to all politicians of all stripes.

I don’t know how things will turn out but i am beginning to be concerned that whatever path we take is going to be fraught with danger - greater incendiary issues down the road will come back to bite us up the arse. 

Thanks for your question

#question #theresa may #enoch powell #boris johnson #british politics

[ellcrys]

“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”

Burnout isn’t a place to visit and come back from; it’s our permanent residence.

This is a super long article but so worth the read.

The part that definitely resonated with me the most was the part on self-optimization. I can see this shit reflected in my daily habits and mindset. If I’m not being ‘productive,’ I’ve not had a good day. Every single part of my schedule is dictated by crossing things off my to-do list and what I’ve been able to accomplish. I’ve known this to be unhealthy since day 1 but couldn’t/can’t reverse the mindset. And now I get why.

Some great quotes below.

Topics that hit home for me in order of appearance:

On Branding:

“Branding” is a fitting word for this work[1], as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.

On Self-Optimization[2]:

Even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: You can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work.

This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.

The media that surrounds us — both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show to the lifestyle influencer economy — tells us that our personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one’s self and career. The end result isn’t just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back. The most common prescription is “self-care.” Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn’t care at all: It’s an $11 billion industry whose end goal isn’t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting.

On “The Double Shift”:

Millennial burnout often works differently among women, and particularly straight women with families. Part of this has to do with what’s known as “the second shift” — the idea that women who’ve moved into the workplace do the labor of a job and then come home and perform the labor of a housewife[3].

The labor that causes burnout isn’t just putting away the dishes or folding the laundry — tasks that can be readily distributed among the rest of the family. It’s more to do with what French cartoonist Emma calls “the mental load,” or the scenario in which one person in a family — often a woman — takes on a role akin to “household management project leader.” The manager doesn’t just complete chores; they keep the entire household’s schedule in their minds. They remember to get toilet paper because it’ll run out in four days. They’re ultimately responsible for the health of the family, the upkeep of the home and their own bodies, maintaining a sex life, cultivating an emotional bond with their children, overseeing aging parents’ care, making sure bills are paid and neighbors are greeted and someone’s home for a service call and holiday cards get in the mail and vacations are planned six months in advance and airline miles aren’t expiring and the dog’s getting exercised.

On “Adulting”:

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.

That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial.

On Errand Paralysis:

There are a few ways to look at this original problem of errand paralysis. Many of the tasks millennials find paralyzing are ones that are impossible to optimize for efficiency, either because they remain stubbornly analog (the post office) or because companies have optimized themselves, and their labor, so as to make the experience as arduous as possible for the user (anything to do with insurance, or bills, or filing a complaint). Sometimes, the inefficiencies are part of the point: The harder it is to submit a request for a reimbursement, the less likely you are to do it. The same goes for returns.

Other tasks become difficult because of too many options, and what’s come to be known as “decision fatigue.” I’ve moved around so much because of my career path, and always loathed the process of finding family practitioners and dentists and dermatologists. Finding a doctor — and not just any doctor, but one who will take your insurance, who is accepting new patients — might seem like an easy task in the age of Zocdoc, but the array of options can be paralyzing without the recommendations of friends and family, which are in short supply when you move to a brand-new town.

Other tasks are, well, boring. I’ve done them too many times. The payoff from completing them is too small. Boredom with the monotony of labor is usually associated with physical and/or assembly line jobs, but it’s widespread among “knowledge workers.” As Caroline Beaton, who has written extensively about millennials and labor, points out, the rise of the “knowledge sector” has simply “changed the medium of monotony from heavy machinery to digital technology. … We habituate to the modern workforce’s high intensity but predictable tasks. Because the stimuli don’t change, we cease to be stimulated. The consequence is two-fold. First, like a kind of Chinese water torture, each identical thing becomes increasingly painful. In defense, we become decreasingly engaged.” My refusal to respond to a kind Facebook DM is thus symptomatic of the sheer number of calls for my attention online: calls to read an article, calls to promote my own work, calls to engage wittily or defend myself from trolls or like a relative’s picture of their baby.

To be clear, none of these explanations are, to my mind, exonerating. They don’t seem like great or rational reasons to avoid doing things I know, in the abstract, I want or need to do. But dumb, illogical decisions are a symptom of burnout. We engage in self-destructive behaviors or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. Which helps explain one of the complaints about millennials’ work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.

Footnotes:

[1] For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.

[2] One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have. We’ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee’s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we’re gonna pay for something, it should either be an experience worth waiting in line for (Cronuts! World-famous BBQ! Momofuku!) or efficient as hell.

[3] (A recent study found that mothers in the workplace spend just as much time taking care of their children as stay-at-home mothers did in 1975). One might think that when women work, the domestic labor decreases, or splits between both partners. But sociologist Judy Wajcman found that in heterosexual couples, that simply wasn’t the case: Less domestic labor takes place overall, but that labor still largely falls on the woman.

#this! article! is! everything! #thoughts and more quotes under the cut #i read about 3/4 of this article on my phone and then was like #i need to pull out my laptop so i can copy paste quotes and take notes #a long but very good read #good reads

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago RIP, Aaron Swartz

  To the extent possible under law,       Cory Doctorow   has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to   "RIP, Aaron Swartz."

Update: Go read Lessig: "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."

My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.  

But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.

I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.

This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.  

Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.

The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.

He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.  

I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote back:  

  First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.

Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.

Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.

He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.

(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)

also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4

For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like, ...)  Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad.  Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.

anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this... hope you're well  

This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.

Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.

But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.  

I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.  

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.  

I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.

Goodbye, Aaron.

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html

[whereareroo]

100 DAYS AND COUNTING

WF THOUGHTS (5/4/21).

Joe Biden recently finished his 100th day as President.

There's nothing magical about the 100th day. It's just an interesting measuring point. It's like focusing on the first two seconds of the Kentucky Derby. Everybody wants to know how the horses were doing as they left the starting line.

I've read more than my fair share of articles about Biden's first 100 days. Let me share some insights from two of the best pieces.

Interestingly, I thought the best piece was by a Brit who works for the British Broadcasting Companies. Jon Sopel wrote an article entitled: "Biden 100 days: What we all got wrong about him." Here are some key segments:

▪ "As I remarked, perhaps unwisely, to an audience the other night, the transition from Trump to Joe Biden has been like going from a daily crack pipe to a small bottle of low-alcohol beer once a week.

The daily White House briefings now are a snoozefest. There are no fights, no name-calling.

No middle-of-the-night Twitter storms, no payments to porn stars, no rollicking MAGA rallies.

So does this all mean it's been a boring presidency? Absolutely not. This is a far more interesting presidency-- so far-- than I think any of us had imagined. I would go as far as to say it's fascinating.

Donald Trump always had an eye for the visual and outrageous. He knew how to make himself the centre of attention; Biden seems to relish the lack of histrionics, and seems to think it is more important for people to focus on what he delivers, rather than what he says. Most strange."

▪"The first 100 days is a statement of intent, a down payment on what you might do with the rest of your term. But frankly, who cares if you have a sparkling first 100 days if the subsequent 1,360 stink and sink? All that said, the statement of intent is big, and this is what makes boring old Joe Biden so interesting.

Biden- - for better or worse - - looks like he is using the pandemic and the woeful state of America's infrastructure to unapologetically say to the American people 'yep, big government is back.'

Make no mistake: this is a big break and a mighty gamble.

Perhaps Joe Biden is eyeing this as his moment to deliver a New Deal like Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Great Depression, or the war on poverty and the fight against racial inequality that was championed in the 1960s by Lyndon B. Johnson."

▪"The taunt of Donald Trump during the campaign was that Biden may have been in politics for over four decades, but what did he have to show for it. It looks like in power Biden is trying to give a mighty clear answer to that question--even if it doesn't make for great theatre."

What do you think of Sopel's assessment? I agree with him. Biden could have built a "successful" presidential legacy by doing nothing more than bringing dignity and civility back to the White House. Clearly, Biden has a more ambitious agenda. He's swinging for the fences. He has big ideas and big plans. Who knew that Biden, a very understated guy, had such a grand vision?

The $64 million question is: Will Biden be able to achieve his ambitious goals? Right now, Biden is aided by the slim Democratic majority in the House and the fact that he has 50 votes in the Senate. In the first Congressional election after the Inauguration, the President's party historically loses seats in Congress. Biden knows this. There's a good chance that he'll be stuck with an unfavorable Congress at the start of 2023. What can he get done before then?

The second best article about the "First 100 Days" addresses Biden's Congressional dilemma. It was written by Joe Lockhart, a CNN political analyst who worked in the Clinton administration. Here's some of what Lockhart wrote:

"A creature of government for nearly five decades, Biden realizes that the time to go big is when the federal government is most relevant - - in times of crisis. And given the popularity of his proposals with the American people, Biden has a real chance of leveraging the federal government to attack inequities in our society like no other leader since President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Biden learned something crucial during the Obama administration - - there is no point negotiating with a political party that is not interested in solving the problems of real Americans. If Republicans are unwilling to support Biden's jobs plans, as they were with his Covid-19 relief plan, then he can and should use the majorities he has in Congress to go around them - - and speak directly to the American voters."

I hope that Biden listens to Lockhart. Dealing with the Republicans in Congress is useless. Instead of serving the American people, they've decided that their only job is to obstruct Biden. Biden has the opportunity to change America. He should use all available means to implement his agenda. Instead of talking to Congress, Biden should constantly explain his actions to the American people. In 2024, the American people will have their say about Biden's performance. Biden is not afraid of facing the voters. The next 1,350 days should be very, very interesting.

The federal government hasn't done anything big since the passage of Obamacare in early 2010. That was 11 years ago. Don't Americans deserve some big changes at least every 10 years? Here's Biden's answer to that question: "YES!" I hope that Biden can deliver.

[evanvanness]

Annotations for the latest Week in Eth News

I tweeted this week:

Feels like an accurate reflection of the broader week in the Ethereum ecosystem.  Just take a look at the most clicked:

“Yield farming” is the idea of figuring out how to leverage up to get the most yield, where part of the yield is usually a native token for the platform/protocol.  (Please do so very cautiously...if you get leveraged up, you’re juicing returns but taking large risk of losses).

With Compound, this meant various “trades,” which changed through the week.  First people were lending (and resupplying) Tether, because that had the highest rates.  Then the trade switched to BAT because some whale figured out (the advantages of scale!) that it wouldn’t be hard to drive BAT rates up even higher than Tether (USDT) and all the sudden an insane amount of BAT moved to Compound.  I kid you not: at the moment there is about $250m USD worth of BAT in Compound - though only 6% of supply as it gets circulated through a few times

Leveraged up?  Be careful!  If BAT price doubles, how many people would get liquidated?  

Hint: it’s those of you who are over 50% on the borrow limit you can see from your account page on the Compound UI.  Looking at exchanges, the order books are rather thin - how much would it cost a liquidator to drive all the BAT price up 2x compared to how much it could make liquidating?  Or what if Brave announces a big partnership?  Crypto is an adversarial environment (ahem, look at all those YouTubers with huge followings trying to sell you on the latest pump of some worthless token)

These order books are thinner than normal because....so much BAT got sucked into Compound from the exchange’s order books.  So the price is now easier to push higher.

Meanwhile, Balancer started its “liquidity mining” (same thing as yield farming) before Compound, but just released its token today.   And now it’s trading at $15 last I looked, or 1.5 billion USD fully diluted market cap.  

Signs of a bull market?  Feels like it to me.

These aren’t the only liquidity mining opportunities - and you’ll see a bunch more people do it now that this is what is bringing in users.

Back to Compound, it got listed on Coinbase Pro today and the price actually fell, as all the people who had “farmed” it got liquid, plus presumably some others as well.  However, it eventually held (at time of writing) at about $280. (that’s a 2.8b USD fully diluted valuation). It had been at $380 and looking at the orderbook when it opened, it appeared that the first trade (for a tiny amount) happened at $440.  We’ll see what happens when Coinbase opens it to retail.

The DeFi narrative is strong.  Seems clear that there is some demand for folks wanting to own a bit of what might be the next big financial platforms.

-------

The final thing I always call out in my intro is high-level things I suggest Eth holders might read:

Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is live – tiny transaction fees, withdrawals to Eth mainnet in 15 mins, 300 transactions per second (with 2000 tps coming)

Reddit announces scaling competition to move Reddit’s community points to mainnet

It seems the mysterious and massive transaction fees were from a hacked korean ponzi called GoodCycle. Various miners have handled differently: Ethermine (already paid out). Sparkpool (said it would pay out but then victim identified, unclear to me if yet resolved). f2pool (said they’d return to new address)

ETH disrupting SWIFT: why fintech VCs are missing DeFi

As always, reverse order: 

Looking at ETH as a distruptor for SWIFT is a pretty interesting lens.  I’ve always rolled my eyes a little at “fintech” because it seems like playing fast with regulations and then if you get a certain scale hiring lawyers and lobbyists to hopefully make your issues go away.   This article argues that the real innovation is further down in the financial “stack” - Ethereum taking the place of antiquated SWIFT.

Personally I don’t think the massive mistake/hack transaction fees are a big deal, but it seems to be something that the crypto clickbait jumps on.  It’s not a danger to any normal user.  Just check the transaction fee before sending.

Reddit wants to put its Community Points on Eth mainnet, likely through a rollup or sidechain.   Very neat - it does feel like their deadline is just a little ambitious for rollups which might make them use a sidechain, which would be a bit of a shame if they can get better trust assumptions from a rollup by waiting an extra month or two.

And speaking of rollups, ZkSync is live.  Fast, cheap transfers with the data onchain and the execution offchain.  Woot!

Eth1

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.36 (Python client) – BeamSync improvements, metrics tracking (influxDB/Grafana), partial eth/65 support

Updated Eth on ARM images. Geth fast syncs a full node in 40 hours on 8GB Raspberry Pi4

Miners began bumping up the gas limit (12m now), which sparked some polemics about the tradeoff between state growth versus user fees. Higher gas limit resulted in safelow gas fees in the teens for the first time in weeks.

Speaking of yield farming ruling the week, the gas prices are back to 30 gwei despite the fact that that throughput went up 20%.  My strong suspicion is that this has a lot to do with yield farming.

For the record, the max transactions per second of Ethereum right now is about 44 transactions per second.  It’s an easy calc to do (12m divided by 13.1 block time divided by 21000 gas per simple eth transfer). 

Of course that doesn’t include rollups, who put their data onchain to the point where they are arguably layer 1.5.

Personally I think we should make this gas limit increase “temporary” when gas prices go back down.  

Eth2

Prysmatic (Go) client update – stable Onyx testnet, 80% validators community run, RAM usage optimizations

Nimbus (Nim) client update – up to spec, 10-50x processing speedup, splitting node and validator clients

SigmaPrime’s update on their Eth2 fuzzer – found some Prysmatic bugs, fuzzing Lodestar (Javascript client), Lighthouse ENR crate bug, dockerizing the fuzzer so the community can run it

Jonny Rhea’s Packetology posts (one and two) on identifying validators

Attack nets – a testnet specifically for attacks

When Sigma Prime’s fuzzer is dockerized, does “are you fuzzing any eth2 clients” become the cool new question that Eth folks ask each other, instead of “are you running any testnets?”

There’s not much more to say otherwise.  This is the final slog to getting the eth2 chain launched.  The final tinkering, the testnets, thinking about validator privacy and cost of attack, an attack net for white hats.

Layer2

Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is live – tiny transaction fees, withdrawals to Eth mainnet in 15 mins, 300 transactions per second (with 2000 tps coming)

Minimally viable rollback in Validium/Volition

The flipside to high gas prices is layer2.  It’s hard to get people to excited about layer2 when you can get onchain transactions done in a couple minutes at 1 gwei.  At 30 gwei, people get more excited about layer2, and stuff is working.

Network effects are real: layer2 also becomes much better to use the more people who are using it.  So there is a silver lining to higher gas prices, because it provides the incentive to push people to superior alternatives.  Obviously a really fast and cheap ETH/token transfer rollup is increasingly more valuable the more people are using it.

Crypto

a GKR inside a snark to speed up SNARK proving 200x

Attacking the Diogenes setup ceremony for Eth2’s VDF

Isogenies VDFs: delay encryption

Kate polynomial commitments explainer from Dankrad Feist

Reputable List Curation from Decentralized Voting Crites, Maller, Meiklejohn and Mercer paper for construction of private TCR voting

Debut of the “crypto” section.  It seemed like it was getting lost in the general.

Placement (compared to other sections) was rather random.  Categorization can be somewhat arbitrary, that’s something the newsletter will hopefully constantly evolve.

This newsletter is made possible thanks to Matcha by 0x!

0x is excited to sponsor Week in Ethereum News and invite readers to try out our new DEX!

Sign up here to get early access to Matcha, your new home for fast, secure token trading.

Stuff for developers

Waffle v3 with ethers v5 support

WalletConnect v1 release, now with mobile linking

ethers-rs, a port of ethers to Rust

Solidity v0.6.10. error codes and bugfix for externally calling a function that returns variables with calldata location.

Inheritance in Solidity v0.6

Sorting without comparison in Solidity

Create dynamic NFTs using oracles

Deploying with libraries on Remix IDE

Wyre’s WalletPasses allow push notifications for dapps

Bunch of neat stuff in here. I’ve said it before, ethers is increasingly the thing that people use, even while most of the eth tutorials are still using web3js.

Code security

OpenZeppelin found a bug that affected 61 Argent wallets

Bancor bug: public method allowed anyone to drain user balances. Amusingly, the white hat draining got frontrun

DeFiSaver exchange vulnerability. They white hat drained it and also got frontrun.

Database of audit reports

Check out this newsletter’s weekly job listings below the general section

A special security section to break up the “stuff for devs” since it was a little big.

The whole “white hat drainers” get frontrun theme was...well, I used the word amusing in the newsletter, but I don’t think that’s quite the right word.

Ecosystem

Reddit announces scaling competition to move Reddit’s community points to mainnet

It seems the mysterious and massive transaction fees were from a hacked korean ponzi called GoodCycle. Various miners have handled differently: Ethermine (already paid out). Sparkpool (said it would pay out but then victim identified, unclear to me if yet resolved). f2pool (said they’d return to new address)

By default, Geth will no longer accept transaction fees over 1 eth

3box on demystifying the many facets of digital identity

The death (and web3 rebirth?) of privacy

Ethereum Foundation invests in Unicef’s CryptoFund startups

Unicef’s press release didn’t mention the Ethereum Foundation (and barely mentioned Ethereum! strange) but in fact EF did provide the capital.  Very strange that Unicef barely mentioned Ethereum.

And yes, I still love a good privacy essay.  I’m not a privacy nut, but I do think people should have the right to at least know when our every online action action is being surveiled.  

Enterprise

WEF, IADB and Colombian government project to reduce corruption in procurement

EY launches crypto tax reporting app

EY continues to push things for enterprise, and dealing with taxes is presumably just one more hurdle that they’re knocking down.  Of course many enterprises also still refuse to own crypto (even on a centralized exchange), so I remain curious as to whether 

the anti-corruption procurement project in Colombia suffers a similar problem: to be actually used, the Colombian government requires secret bids.  So they either have to change the law to try it, or they have to integrate...something like EY’s Nightfall  

DAOs and Standards

EIP2733: Transaction package

Anonymous voting using MACI and BrightID

Arguably the anonymous voting using MACI could’ve been in the crypto section, but it felt slightly more applicable here.

Application layer

$COMP was distributed and liquidity mining (“yield farming”) blew up. Compound passed Maker for #1 on DeFiPulse, and $COMP has had a fully diluted market cap over $3.5 billion

Uniswap v2 passes v1 in liquidity

Streamr’s data unions framework is live for anyone to create their own

5m KNC burned milestone

Yield farming on steroids from Synthetix, Ren, and Curve

A yield farming for normies (and the risks!) tweetstorms from Tony Sheng

this artwork is always on sale, v2 with 100% per year tax instead of 5%

My weekly what fraction of applayer section is DeFi: 5/7.

I was somewhat surprised Uniswap v2 took over this quickly. I suppose that’s a data point for “the power of frontends.”

Tokens/Business/Regulation

ETH disrupting SWIFT: why fintech VCs are missing DeFi

Nick Tomaino on the economics of Eth2

Personal token vote on Alex Masmej’s life decisons

Liechtenstein company tokenizes 1.1m USD collectable Ferrari

Opyn: hedging with calls

It does seem like the economics of Eth2 are still vastly underrated by “crypto” at large.  In my view that largely reflects the skepticism that Eth2 ever launches, as Silicon Valley went very skeptical on ETH 2 years ago when they pivoted away from FFG.  

New tokens from protocols valued in the billions and tokenized Ferraris.  It’s starting to feel like the true beginnings of a bull market.

No general section this week; I was surprised as you, but lately the general section had been dominated by cryptography and that got its own section.  

That’s it for the annotations!

Please RT this on Twitter if you enjoyed it:

  https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1275551414350237702

Job Listings

Synthetix: Deep Solidity engineer, 2+ years exp & US/EU friendly timezone

Chainlink: Product Manager for Blockchain Integrations and Lead Test Engineer

0x is hiring full-stack, back-end, front-end engineers + 1 data scientist

Celer Network: Android developer

Trail of Bits is looking for masters of low-level security. Apply here.

Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast -at-gmail

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter on Monday or Tuesday. Plus I tweet most of what makes it into the newsletter.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-june-21-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

June 24 – EIP1559 call

June 25 – Eth2 call

June 26 – Core devs call

June 29 – Swarm first public event

July 3 – Gitcoin matching grants ends (here’s my grant)

July 6-Aug 6 – HackFS Filecoin/IPFS and Ethereum hackathon

July 20 – Fork the World MetaCartel hackathon

Aug 2 – ENS grace period begins to end

Oct 2-Oct 30 – EthOnline hackathon

[junker-town]

Is an NFL players’ strike the best option in the CBA negotiations?

There was a lockout last time the owners and players had to negotiate a new CBA.

In this week’s mailbag, Geoff Schwartz tackles a few CBA-related questions.

There’s always NFL action, even in a week where there shouldn’t be. The NFL owners approved a current proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement. The NFLPA’s 11-member executive committee voted not to recommend approval of the new terms. On Tuesday, the NFLPA will meet with the owners at the combine for one last round of negotiations.

We shall have more answers next week, but for right now, let’s get to your CBA-related mailbag questions.

Do you have a question you’d like Geoff to answer next time? Hit him up on on Twitter or Instagram.

Do you think a players’ strike after the 2020 season is the only option the players have left right now in order to get what they absolutely need the most from the owners? — @dkrom59

The best leverage the players have in any collective bargaining negotiations is not playing. If we don’t play, then the owners don’t make money. However, we don’t make money either, and that’s the rub.

The owners are billionaires. Most players have a net worth under .005 percent of their owners. If the owners make no profit, or even incur a deficit during a strike or missed season, they can withstand it. Players cannot. Most players have a short career and any year in which they aren’t earning money is one less earning year of their career. But most importantly, players do not prepare well for these situations.

I was part of the lockout in 2011. We were told for years to save money for the lockout. Plenty of players did not. And when the lockout appeared to continue into training camp, players told NFLPA leadership they needed a deal because they couldn’t afford to sit out. So we signed a deal that wasn’t great.

And this becomes the issue with the players in these negotiations. The owners, with only 32 of them, are naturally more unified. The players, with 1,700 members, are not. The owners deal with business all the time; we (the players) don’t.

Now, I want to make clear that I appreciate the leadership, player reps, and all those who give their time, energy, and passion for the players’ cause. And we have leadership in place whose job it is to guide us, negotiate for us, and let us know what is best. However, players tend to be strong-willed and have our own opinions. We rarely agree on anything and even when presented with the facts and taking the advice of the people we hired to work for us, we ignore them.

Lastly, the vast majority of players don’t pay attention to CBA matters unless it directly affects them or until it’s time to vote on a new CBA. Players end up reading tweets, or other media outlets, and do not listen to the reps or follow along during the process. Then they are tasked with voting on the issues. (Sound familiar?)

How does each player benefit from the revenue split? Do they all get an additional check on top of their salary? — @cardindale

Great question and one I’ve gotten often. The revenue split for the players covers everything we get: salary and benefits. I’m not sure if retirement benefits are included in the players’ cut, or separate and covered by the owners.

Our benefits while playing are fantastic, and I do not think players complain about those. We get a full 401(k) match up to the limit. We have multiple retirement plans. We have a much better pension now.

The one issue for benefits is the post-career health care. We get insurance for five years after we retire, and then we are on our own. That needs to change and has reportedly been a holdout for the players in this deal.

The new revenue split on the salary side is just an increased salary cap. So there’s more money to be spent by the teams. That’s how the salaries continue to go up.

One, how involved are you with the NFLPA, and, two, would you ever consider leading it if the opportunity came up? — @TheMattKerns

I’m currently not involved in the NFLPA, as most retired players aren’t part of the process anymore. I didn’t hold a position as a player rep or in the executive committee while I played. I was approached a few times to be a rep, but always turned it down.

After the 2011 CBA negotiations, owners seemed to look down on players who became reps. I saw several players get released who were reps and while I might have been looking for something that wasn’t there, I didn’t want to risk anything that would possibly lead to getting cut.

In retirement, if someone reached out to me about joining or helping the cause, I’m 100 percent in. I’m always rooting for players to get what we deserve and if I can help that, I’d be happy to join forces.

[megacircuit9universe]

Venom

FRI JAN 10 2020

Ho-kay!.. the first full working business week of 2020 came to a close today.  You know how that first week back after the holidays goes... everybody just gettin’ back into the groove.

Impeachmas, if you’ll recall, was Wednesday, December 18th 2019... just one week before Christmas, and the Speaker of the House decided then, to hang on to the articles of impeachment... for a little while.

Actually, she said, until the Senate was ready to proceed with a fair trial, but most people heard, until after the holidays.

At any rate, that was a little over three weeks ago now, and as predicted by me here, and by others out there, those three weeks from Impeachmas through the Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Years Day (collectively known as, Orbital Completion Time) did allow America the chance to have a nice long conversation at home about the Impeachment, and the trial to come.

Not only that... it allowed some FOIA requests to come through, revealing that Trump himself ordered the suspension of the aid to Ukraine just 90 minutes after the phone call... and that everybody in his inner circle tried to talk him out of it because they all knew it was illegal and could get them in trouble with Congress.

Not only that... but John Bolton, who was National Security Adviser at the time this all went down, declared publicly that he would indeed testify to the Senate in the coming impeachment trial, if he were subpoenaed to do so.

Not only that... but a week ago, on only the second of January... or, the first day back to work after New Year, Trump was so desperate to change the national conversation from impeachment, that he had a guy murdered with a drone strike.

What followed, after the unprovoked killing of Soleimani, was a really fun few days of total mayhem and confusion, in which Trump first threatened to bomb 52 cultural sites in Iran, if they dared to retaliate, adding that it would not be proportional at all... after which he was told by his advisers that, actually, disproportionate retaliation... especially on cultural sites, would be a war crime of the highest magnitude... 

...and then Secretary of State, Pompeo and some generals had to go on TV to promise they would never obey such a monstrous order, so just relax.  It was just a kooky tweet.

Meanwhile, all the teens on TikTok... many of whom are eligible to vote right now, in this year’s primaries and general election, published non stop memes about being drafted to fight in WWIII. More about that later.

Meanwhile, all of our allies were backing away from Trump... because he’s an indefensible war criminal, and all of the Millennials on Twitter began screaming at the top of their lungs about how this was just like Iraq in 2003, and GenZ better stop making jokes about it because we were at war now and everybody was going to die!*

Meanwhile, servicemen and women all over the country were scrambled to their bases to stand by for further instructions.

Finally, Iran fired a bunch of missiles over the Iraq border at an American military base, and... made a huge light show, but didn’t really do much damage, and didn’t kill anybody... but claimed revenge was theirs.

Trump then tweeted, “All is well,” and both sides walked away.

It took the world another two days to cautiously realize that... we weren’t actually going to war after all... huh?..  Whuh?... Okay?

Over those two days, Trump’s team gave a closed presentation to Congress about why they’d killed Soleimani, and... stuff... and it had pissed off many in attendance, most visibly, Senators Mike Lee, and Rand Paul, who spouted off angrily to reporters outside the conference room, that Trump was trying to usurp the power to declare war, from Congress.

The House, then, passed a War Powers resolution the next day... as a kind of symbolic gesture to put Trump on notice that he’s not allowed to do shit like this without talking to them first... and the Senate is expected to do the same next week.

Meanwhile, the media, of course, has been trying to get Trump and his current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to explain to the public exactly what the rationale was for killing Soleimani, and... they have nothing but a bunch of vague, mismatched excuses... the likes of which you might get from two 6th grade boys in the Principal’s office... just... off the cuff bullshit that doesn’t line up, or seem remotely plausible. 

Trump said Soleimani was gonna blow up an embassy... then he later changed that to four embassies.  Meanwhile Pompeo said nobody was allowed to know what Soleimani was gonna do, but it was gonna be... in the next few weeks or months or... actually even he didn’t know. 

Almost lost in the chaos of the whole thing was the fact that, on the night Iran was performing their mock retaliatory strike, to save face, but not kill any Americans, so that they could both walk away from the brink of war... they accidentally shot down a passenger plane, leaving Iran, bound for Ukraine, and killed everybody on board.

No Americans on that plane, but several Canadians, leading Canadian President Justin Trudeau, with a very long face, and a very somber tone, to announce that according to his intelligence, and that of other countries, the plane was shot down by Iran... perhaps by accident.

What he didn’t say was... that Boing 737 had the same radar profile as a version of the Boing 737 the American Military uses for military purposes, and probably had flying in the area that night... so the mistake was understandable... given the warlike atmosphere of the moment... as created by the recklessness of Trump... in his bid to do something... anything... to distract from his Impeachment.

But then today, in the aftermath of this whirlwind of war panic, and the collateral damage of those poor people on that plane... the media got right back to the matter of Impeachment anyway.

Hey!  Why hadn’t Nancy Pelosi handed over those articles this week?  

What the fuck, Nancy!  It’s been three weeks!  Mitch McConnell just said he’s not backing down on the sham trial thing so just hand them over, you idiot!  You lost this one!

And today, she came out and said, basically, fuck that, I will hand the articles over when the Senate is ready to conduct a fair trial... but hopefully soon.

And while others argue that she has no leverage here, and is just being stubborn for no good reason... I’d argue the past three weeks prove just how much leverage she has right now, by hanging on to these articles of impeachment.

Polls show the majority of voters want witnesses at the trial.  More damning information has come to light. Bolton now says he’s willing to sing. And Trump did go crazier than ever before, causing a very visible and very angry crack to form in his Senate support in the form of Mike Lee and Rand Paul.

These are all things that would not have been thought possible before Christmas, but here we are.

Clearly... all the Speaker need do, is hold fast, and allow this deterioration to continue until McConnell says, uncle... no matter how long it takes.

As outlined in the entry entitled, Poison Dart, House impeachment is the stinger with the venom.  

Senate acquittal of Johnson didn’t save him from being a one term president. It never got the chance to try and save Nixon, and for lame duck Clinton, it was largely a formality that still could not stop his party from losing power for sixteen more years.

McConnell may be hell bound and determined for the Senate to acquit Trump no matter what, but... that’s not an antidote for the venom of impeachment.

Senate conviction and removal, however, as has happened to many a state governor over the years, is something else.  That sends a powerful message, that reverberates through the generations to come... though it’s never happened on the level of the President... yet.

Let’s put a pin in that, and get back to those TikTok youngsters... the GenZ teenagers who’ve been cranking out, “WWIII Draft,” memes, as relentlessly as they did with the, “Storm Area 51,” memes last summer.

Many older adults, while acknowledging that memes are fun, have been trying to let these youngsters know that we don’t actually have a draft anymore.

But... GenZ already knows that... and these memes, while hilarious, are not just fun and games.  This is their way of raising political awareness across their generation.

Yes, they know there is not currently a draft.  But they also know that they’re still compelled to register for the draft, and that the only reason there is not currently a draft, is because the voting age was lowered to 18, back in the Vietnam days.

They’re not stupid, and these WWIII memes are their way of saying, “This is what would be happening to us right now, if we... who have been compelled to register... did not have a say in who was President.”

If that’s not spelled out plainly enough for you, they’re saying that they’re gonna be showing up at the polls in 2020... not just in the General, but also in the Primaries... and that Donald Trump just fucked himself by threatening to send them all to war.

And that brings us back around to Bernie Sanders, who continues to be polling better and better as we approach the first Caucuses next month... even though those polls do not reflect his legendary support among the youngest voters... who now have a very existential reason to show up and vote like never before.

Well certainly, you may think, these youngsters will forget all about this Iran conflict by next November... if not by next month!  They pose no threat in this election.

That, I believe, would be a grave misunderstanding of this new generation.  Millennials, it’s true, have always felt more comfortable bitching on Tumblr, or occasionally protesting in the streets... than actually showing up to the polls on election day.

But GenZ knows what the stakes are... for climate change, health care, and now... world war three.  And despite how carefree they may appear to the casual observer, they are not about to sit this next election out... or any other in their long lives to come, I’d bet.

Tying this all back into a bow... as it’s getting late for me here, tonight... 

I said in the, Poison Dart, entry, that the discussion about a fair impeachment trial in public would be the impeachment trial itself.  And this is proving to be more true every day.

Only this public trial, is now one which includes the Senate, and unless they can pony up an amazing defense... Trump’s Senate sycophants, now more visible as such than ever before, will go down with him in November.

It’s only still early January, and already the Junta is looking worse than ever before, and there is no bouncing back from the horrendous shit Trump just took with his failed bid to start a war... on top of everything else.

It will only get worse for them, as we march toward November.

*Millenials were all children during the horrendous days leading up to the start of the Iraq war in 2003, and only know what a dark time it was from watching reruns of the Daily Show and talking to Gen X, who had to live and fight through that tortuous period as 30-something adults.

It’s a bit ridiculous to see them on Twitter decrying the onset of a new war as if they were there for the last one... especially after having proven themselves the most apathetic voting block of all demographics over the past sixteen years.

[ataoufiqmourtachou]

Rich Dad Poor Dad By Robert Kiyosaki: Summary

Here’s little Robert Kiyosaki. He has two fathers. One of them has a Ph.D., the other never finished 8th grade. Both earn substantial incomes, yet one always struggles financially, while the other is going to become one of the richest men in Hawaii. One is going to die leaving tens of millions of dollars to his family. The other is going to leave bills to be paid.

The problem with financial education is that it isn’t taught in schools, so the family decides to teach it. Now, the problem with this is that unless your parents are in the top 1%, they are going to teach you how to be poor, not because they don’t love you, they just don’t know what they’re teaching, and they don’t read books like Rich Dad Poor Dad. My story is very similar. I was taught how to be poor. Then I went to the Air Force Academy and studied economics and took accounting and investing classes. I did complicated regressions on economic data and balanced complex balance sheets. Yet, I have received more pragmatic advice by reading a single book from Kiyosaki than I did by taking four years of complicated classes. I never had a rich dad, but I have many rich dads now. Clason, Kiyosaki, Hill, DeMarco, the list goes on. So if you weren’t born into the top 1%, let’s learn from Kiyosaki who learned from his rich dad. You have to know these two words: assets and liabilities. Now forget what you might have learned in your accounting classes, we are going to define them in very simple terms. An asset is anything that puts money in your pocket. A liability is anything that takes money away from your pocket. Anything can be an asset or a liability. If you own a house and it eats a $1000 a month then it’s a liability. If you own a house and it brings in a $1000 a month then it’s an asset. Assets are things like businesses, real estate, paper assets, things like stocks and bonds. Here is why knowing this distinction is so important. Really try to focus on this. The poor only have expenses, the rich buy assets, and the middle class buy liabilities that they think are assets. After graduating if I had followed everybody’s advice, I would have gotten a job which increases my income, but there are so many problems with that. As I got my job, my girlfriend and I would have moved into a bigger house, we would have gotten a BMW in addition to our Mustang. I would have bought the iPhone 6. The problem with all of this is that I would think I was acquiring assets while I was actually acquiring liabilities. I would have to pay every month for the house, for the car, for my expensive phone. In essence, unless you make a paradigm shift about what you do with your money, which is to buy actual assets, no matter how much income you earn from your job, you will just match it with your liabilities and expenses. Your friends might admire your iPhone 6, and you might look rich but you will never actually be rich. Now there is nothing wrong with having your job. I just don’t have one, because I’m operating from the assets quadrant. But, if you are following the standard narrative of going to school and getting a job, chances are you’re acquiring liabilities which you think are assets. That is the problem. So keep your job, but make sure what you earn goes mostly towards real assets, rather than liabilities that seem like assets. And yes, eventually when you acquire enough assets, you won’t need your job either. It absolutely blows my mind how people say, well what if I lose money with the business, or the real estate, or the paper assets. They don’t say the same thing about buying their second enormous TV which will be worthless in a year, and which creates a liability every

month. I would rather lose all of my money starting a business than lose it by buying yet another TV I don’t need. Even if I lost all my money, the lessons learned from starting a business would be infinitely more valuable than watching Dr. Phil. Here is another problem. It’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you keep. If I told you I was going to pay you a million dollars a month, but then I took away $999,999, you’d have to be an idiot if you said you were making a million. My dad told me become a doctor and you will be rich. Yet a doctor pays a half or even more of what he earns just to the government. You get taxed when you earn. You get taxed when you spend. You get taxed when you save. And guess what, you get taxed when you die. On the other hand, you can operate from the assets quadrant and pay sometimes 0% in taxes. I have doctor friends who are more financially anxious than my absolutely broke friends. Here is a short history of taxation. Years ago, there was no tax in Great Britain or the United States. It amazes me how so many people don’t realize this. The government would sometimes collect tax during civil wars and extreme cases, but there was no actual tax. Well, the government realized that the poor and the middle class were idiots. The masses looked up to the idiotic story of Robin Hood and actually admired it. So, the government decided it was going to leverage that. It said, hey guys let’s put a tax on the rich, so you idiots can get money from them. Well of course all the idiots agreed and voted for it. The problem is that the government’s greed grew bigger and bigger until the taxation trickled down to everyone including the poor. But the rich didn’t care. They were too smart for little Robin Hood. They easily found ways to avoid being robbed of their hard earned money. So it actually hurt the idiots in the end, the poor and the middle class. That is why Warren Buffett pays lower tax rate than his secretary. I was born in 1992, in the Republic of Georgia right after the breakup of the Soviet Union. If you think I worked my ass off in poverty for two decades, so one day I could come to another communist state, you must be out of your mind. You must be out of your mind if you think I’m going to share over half of what I earn with blood and sweat with people who want to sit on their ass and watch TV all day and collect the benefits the government hands out to them, so they can get reelected. The rich are too smart for this. Yes, I am going to buy my BMW, I’m just going to buy it for my corporation. A poor person thinks of a bunch of buildings when he thinks of a corporation when in reality, it’s really a folder full of papers, a folder full of papers that allows the rich to make all the expenses and then pay the taxes at the end. So the rich will never actually be affected by any of this. It will always come down to the middle and the upper middle class, the people who work the hardest, to pay for the benefits of the person with a bag of chips in one hand, and a remote in the other.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

2:00PM Water Cooler 7/30/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/30/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Trade

“How Trump Is Sabotaging Trade’s Ultimate Tribunal” [Bloomberg]. “As the U.S. wages its global trade war, companies and governments alike are taking notice of a little-known unit of the World Trade Organization that, if President Donald Trump’s administration has its way, will soon cease to function. The WTO’s appellate body, the preeminent forum for settling worldwide trade disputes, may no longer have the capacity to issue new rulings by year-end, which critics warn will undermine the WTO’s ability to resolve conflicts among its 164 members and will usher in an era where economic might trumps international law…. Lighthizer told U.S. lawmakers this year that his ultimate goal is to reform the WTO and sees the appellate body impasse as a form of leverage in pushing his agenda forward.” • And, as usual, this Administration is intensifying what the previous admininistration began.

“A Democrat Floats Options to Trump’s Trade Tactics” [Bloomberg]. “[T]he plan Elizabeth Warren released Monday is interesting, even if it reads less like a bold vision document than a treatise on process…. Warren does not say how she herself would tackle China, or what she would do with Trump’s tariffs. But she lays out elements of an attack. ‘We’ve let China get away with the suppression of pay and labor rights, poor environmental protections, and years of currency manipulation.’

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of July 25: Biden up at 29.3% (28.6), Sanders flat at 15.0% (15.0%), Warren down at 14.5% (15.0%), Buttigieg flat at 5.0% (5.0%), Harris down 11.8% (12.2%), others Brownian motion. Harris reminds me of Clinton, in that her numbers are like a hot air balloon, which sinks unless air is pumped into it.

* * *

2020

Harris (D)(1): “Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator” [@ne0liberal]. My result: “Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a school lunch program for games journalists who open a mini golf that operates for 15 days in Greenwich Village.” • It’s about ethics in miniature golf.

Sanders (D)(1): “”You can’t call this plan Medicare for All”: The Bernie Sanders camp pans Kamala Harris’s health care plan” [Vox]. “The differences between Harris’s plan and Sanders’s plan come down to two main factors. First, it’s phased-in over 10 years, versus Sanders’s four. And Harris’s would allow private insurers to compete within the government-run program, similar to the way that Medicare Advantage currently works for older adults’ plans. Sanders’s plan effectively eliminates private insurance.” • Why ten years? Why not fifteen? Meanwhile, Neera Tanden is just as nimble as Kamala Harris:

Reminder that the publication of @NeeraTanden‘s own think tank cited Medicare Advantage plans as proof that more Medicare privatization would be bad https://t.co/m4ZMK4a0u5 pic.twitter.com/mzaUo8N8rW

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 30, 2019

Sanders (D)(2): Theory of change:

The billionaire class will be behind Trump with endless amounts of money. We need an energized population of young people, working-class people and people of color—and the largest voter turnout by far in history—to beat him. And our campaign is going to do that.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 30, 2019

Note this is not Warren’s theory of change, though she might be able to simulate it with #Resistance-style events dominated by professionals.

Sanders (D)(3): “Bernie Sanders: As a child, rent control kept a roof over my head” [CNN]. “I was born and raised in a three-and-a-half room apartment in Brooklyn. My father was a paint salesman who worked hard his entire life, but never made much money. This was not a life of desperate poverty — but coming from a lower middle-class family, I will never forget how money, or really lack of money, was always a point of stress in our home… [O]ur family was always able to afford a roof over our heads, because we were living in a rent-controlled building. That most minimal form of economic security was crucial for our family. Today, that same ability to obtain affordable housing is now denied to millions of Americans.”

* * *

“Democratic debate in Detroit: 7 things to watch for on Night 1” [Los Angeles Times]. “Although Sanders and Warren have a similarly adversarial approach to Wall Street — and both believe in eliminating private health insurance in favor of the type of government-run programs implemented in other Western democracies — they have very different political philosophies. Warren has called herself a “capitalist to my bones” who usually believes that markets just need to be better regulated; Sanders sees democratic socialism as the solution to fighting authoritarianism and plutocracy. A debate would normally be the kind of place where you’d see political candidates try to sharpen those sorts of differences, like how California Sen. Kamala Harris took on Biden over his position decades ago on busing for school desegregation in the last debate. But with so many candidates on the stage, Warren and Sanders could just as easily avoid each other if they don’t see an upside in picking a fight.” • Remember their constituencies are less than overlapping, and their theories of change are different.

“If Democrats Want to Win in 2020, They Have to Give Detroit a Reason to Vote” [The Nation]. “The Democratic presidential contenders who will debate this week in this city have come to a state where their party’s “blue wall” cracked in 2016… But what’s the best way to reach out to Detroiters? The Democrats can start by getting serious about urban policy. Both major parties once focused on the concerns of American cities, but in recent decades they have chased after suburban and exurban voters with such abandon that they have often neglected the beating hearts of our metropolitan areas.” • They have no place to go….

* * *

“Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg Hold Contrasting Hollywood Fundraisers” [Variety]. “Bernie Sanders held a ‘grassroots fundraiser’ in Hollywood on Thursday night, delivering his message of political transformation to an adoring crowd at the Montalban Theatre. At the same time, Pete Buttigieg was holding a sold-out fundraiser at the home of NBCUniversal international chairman Kevin MacLellan and Brian Curran, featuring co-hosts Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Chelsea Handler and Sean Hayes…. ‘Some politicians go to wealthy people’s homes and they sit around in a fancy living room, and people contribute thousands and thousands of dollars and they walk out with a few hundred thousand bucks or whatever,’ Sanders said. ‘We don’t do that. … To me, an $18 check or a $27 check from a working person is worth more than all the money in the world from millionaires.’” Cf., ironically enough, Luke 21:1-4.

RussiaGate

“Ex-Host Krystal Ball: MSNBC’s Russia ‘Conspiracies’ Have Done ‘Immeasurable Harm’ to the Left” [Daily Beast]. “Elsewhere in the six-minute monologue, [former longtime MSNBC anchor Krystal] Ball accused MSNBC of cynically following the Russia story in pursuit of ratings, making journalistic compromises along the way. She directly criticized hosts like Rachel Maddow (“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Ball said to her) and on-air analysts like Mimi Rocah (a Daily Beast contributor) for leading viewers to believe that there was a strong possibility that Trump and his family would be indicted. Ball also suggested that the ‘fevered speculation’ of guests like New York columnist Jonathan Chait and former British MP Louise Mensch would have been more at home on conspiracy network Infowars. ‘Russia conspiracy was great for ratings among the key demographic of empty nesters on the coasts with too much time on their hands,’ said Ball, who now hosts an inside-baseball streaming political talk show for The Hill.” • Oddly, this story got no traction at all.

Impeachment

“Impeachment, always a longshot, fades in wake of Mueller hearing” [Los Angeles Times]. “the window of opportunity has rapidly begun shrinking. About 90 House Democrats have joined the call to open a formal impeachment inquiry. That’s less than 40% of the caucus — far short of what would be needed to overcome the opposition of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who views the move as politically unwise and likely to backfire. To significantly change the current path, backers of impeachment needed a dramatic boost out of this week’s hearing with former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. His testimony fell far short of that mark.” • Yes, the 90 includes a few new faces, but I’d bet they’re revolving heroes. So, after three years of daily hysteria from liberal Democrats, this is where we are.

Health Care

“More than two-thirds of Obamacare cosponsors are now backing Medicare for All proposal” [Fast Company]. “Twelve of the current 17 House members who cosponsored the landmark 2009 measure known as Obamacare have signed on as cosponsors of legislation that would create a universal healthcare system, according to a MapLight analysis. The five incumbent House Democrats who cosponsored Obamacare but who have declined to endorse a “Medicare-for-All” proposal have received an average of $209,000 in campaign contributions since 2011 from the 10 largest U.S. healthcare companies, their employees, and five major trade associations. The dozen cosponsors have received an average of $65,000 from the industry…. The disparity highlights the importance of moderate and conservative Democrats to the healthcare industry, which has united against proposals to ensure that the United States guarantees health coverage for all citizens.” • Ka-ching. This may also explain Harris et al. moving up their assault.

“Obama Alums Tell Health Insurance Lobby ‘Medicare For All’ Won’t Happen” [Tarbell]. “Axelrod said that Medicare for All has “become a phrase as much as anything else.” He suggested that some Democratic presidential candidates may not want to go as far as Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent credited with sparking support for Medicare For All during his 2016 presidential campaign, and might support more limited reforms like a public option or allowing some people under the age of 65 to buy into Medicare…. The AHIP conference featured a slew of other former Obama officials, including Andy Slavitt, who led the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; Sam Kass, the former White House chef and nutrition adviser; and Kavita Patel, who served as a policy aide in the Obama White House. Patel, currently a Brookings Institution nonresident fellow and vice president at the Johns Hopkins Health System, harshly criticized Medicare for All. ‘People who are very serious about health policy on either side of the fence know this is not reality,’ she said. She suggested that Democratic presidential candidates’ support for Medicare for All is ‘all just campaign talk.’” • Why, it’s almost as if preventing #MedicareForAll was the liberal Democrats #1 policy priority!

“One Nation Launches Campaign To Stop Medicare For None” [One Nation]. • A Republican front group, whose ads have been spotted by alert reader JM in California.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Activists Urging Lacey to ‘Do Her Job’ in Second Ed Buck Death” [Los Angeles Sentinel]. “Local activists are urging District Attorney Jackie Lacey to ‘do her job’ and find that the evidence presented to Los Angeles Sheriff’s is probable cause to immediately charge and prosecute Ed Buck in spite of his ‘Whiteness, wealth, and her political ambitions,’ in the death of Timothy Dean, the second man to die at Buck’s residence. ‘We’ve done all that we could do to aid the sheriff’s investigators with their investigation,’ said community activist and advocate, Jasmyne Cannick. ‘Once again, we gathered evidence and brought the sheriff’s other young men who could speak directly to their experiences with Ed Buck. I hope that this time around, the political will and prosecutorial creativity that we’ve seen used so often against Black people is used to bring charges against Ed Buck for the deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Two men have died on the same mattress, in the same living room, of the same drug, at the same man’s house within months of each other …’”

“House Democratic Campaign Chair Vows To ‘Do Better’ After Senior Staffers Quit” [HuffPo]. “The chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee admitted to making mistakes and vowed to “do better” after several senior staffers resigned on Monday. The staff exodus came on the heels of a report that the committee, whose primary mission is to help Democrats maintain and expand their House majority, was ‘in chaos’ over concerns about hiring and a lack of diversity…. ‘I have never been more committed to expanding and protecting this majority, while creating a workplace that we can all be proud of,’ Bustos said in the statement. ‘I will work tirelessly to ensure that our staff is truly inclusive.’” • Bring back DWS?

“Can a New Think Tank Put a Stop to Endless War?” [The Nation]. “[A] newly formed think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft… states that its mission is to ‘move US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.’ The group is still raising money, but with a projected second-year budget of $5 million to 6 million, enough to support 20 to 30 staffers, it aims to match the scale of more established think tanks and to disrupt the foreign policy consensus in Washington…. [T]he Quincy Institute includes the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros among its founding donors—each has committed half a million dollars—and is intended to serve as a counterweight to the Blob, as the bipartisan national security establishment dedicated to endless war has come to be known… When it comes to foreign policy, [co-founder Eli] Clifton says, there’s little difference between CAP and Republican-aligned think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. One way Quincy will distinguish itself from its better-established rivals will be to refuse money from foreign governments.”

Stats Watch

Personal Income and Outlays, June 2019: “The month-to-month breakdown of consumer spending shows slowing in what will offer support for those on the FOMC who want to cut interest rates this week” [Econoday]. “Core inflation which is under target and which suggests that an increase in demand would be sustainable.”

Consumer Confidence, July 2019: “Boosted by an evermore favorable view of the jobs market, consumer confidence jumped sharply” [Econoday]. “Jobs-hard-to-get is down sharply… One interesting point in the report is a drop in inflation expectations… [T]he overall strength of the consumer, whether in confidence or spending which are both tied to the health of the jobs market, does not speak to the need for lower rates.”

S&P Corelogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index, May 2019: “Home prices continue to slow to underscore what is becoming another difficult year for the housing sector” [Econoday]. “Despite low mortgage rates and consumer strength, housing data whether for prices or sales or construction have been flattening out in recent reports in what will support arguments to cut interest rates at this week’s FOMC meeting.”

Pending Home Sales Index, June 2019: “A fast break just when housing needed one appears in a …. surge in pending sales of existing homes” [Econoday].

Housing:

The age of the housing stock gives a fascinating insight into the development of settlement across the US. The predominance of pre-1939 settlement in North/Eastern corridor is striking.https://t.co/mlWUKDlylu pic.twitter.com/aJr89vVuNK

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) July 30, 2019

In ME-02, blue (“1939 and earlier”) is, like, new!

Real Estate: “Supply-chain automation is gaining ground in logistics as companies look to get the most out of real estate close to consumers. Startup Attabotics will use $25 million raised in a new funding round to expand its platform in the growing e-commerce market. … [T]he company’s focus is on bringing efficiency to the tight spaces companies are turning to for fulfillment operations The Canadian company makes automated vertical systems for storing, retrieving and sorting goods that it says use less space than traditional warehouses.” [Wall Street Journal].

Manufacturing: “Air Canada Removes 737 Max Flights Until 2020” [Industry Week]. “Air Canada has removed the Boeing 737 Max from its schedule until January pending regulatory approvals, joining Southwest Airlines Co. in scrapping plans for flights of the jetliner into 2020…. The Montreal-based airline said that third-quarter projected capacity is expected to fall about 2% compared with the same period in 2018, contrasting the originally planned increase of about 3%.”

Manufacturing: “Boeing needs to come up with a Plan B for grounded Max jets” [Financial Times]. “As a researcher of confidence-driven decision making, 2020 looks woefully optimistic to me, as does the company’s special charge. In fact, based on what I see, it is not too early for Boeing to start considering a Plan B for the existing Max series fleet. First, the extreme overconfidence that existed at Boeing prior to the two crashes suggests that there may be more problems still to surface. Second, the aerospace industry is uniquely vulnerable when it comes to confidence. Confidence requires perceptions of certainty and control, but aeroplane passengers are inherently powerless: they can’t and don’t fly the plane. Finally, everything that has unfolded to date has occurred with consumer confidence near all-time highs. The crowd is inherently optimistic today and demand for air travel is soaring. Should the broader mood decline ahead, not only will passenger and regulatory scrutiny naturally intensify, but interest in travel itself will drop. In an economic recession, airlines will have little use for the now-grounded planes.” And the Plan B? “Given the industry’s prior experience with the DC-10, which struggled to regain passenger confidence after a series of early safety issues, one option could be a conversion of the existing fleet to air freight. Establishing trust with a small group of professional freight pilots is likely to be far easier.” • Yikes.

Manufacturing: “Boeing drops out of competition to replace Minuteman III” [Wyoming Tribune Eagle]. “Boeing confirmed this week that it had withdrawn from bidding on the contract for the U.S. Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program. The contract is to replace the Air Force’s Cold War-era Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. Experts have estimated the project could be worth about $85 billion…. Boeing’s departure from the project creates a situation where only one company [Northrop Grumman ] will be bidding on a massive military contract to supply the nation with the ground-based portion of its nuclear triad system.” • So no bailout for Boeing that way.

The Bezzle: “Millions use Earnin to get cash before payday. Critics say the app is taking advantage of them.” [NBC]. “But critics say that the company is effectively acting as a payday lender — providing small short-term loans at the equivalent of a high interest rate — while avoiding conventional lending regulations designed to protect consumers from getting in over their heads. Earnin argues that it isn’t a lender at all because the company relies on tips rather than required fees and does not send debt collectors after customers who fail to repay the money.” • Hmm.

Tne Bezzle: “FBI found bucket of human heads, body parts sewn together at donation facility: report” [The Hill]. “The center’s owner, Stephen Gore, was sentenced to a year of deferred prison time and four years of probation after pleading guilty in October to illegal control of an enterprise.” • Ick. I’m sure the same thing will never happen at cryogenic facilities….

The Biosphere

Metaphor:

Massive Rock slide triggered in Monsoon. An excellent example of rock joints failure. Be careful while travelling to #Himalayas. @RockHeadScience @BGSLandslides @NatGeo pic.twitter.com/XD9zczxEEq

— Aamir Asghar (@jojaaamir) July 29, 2019

“Modest (insipid) Green New Deal proposals miss the point – Part 2” [Bill Mitchell]. “At the basis of the [standard neoclassical microeconomics] ‘solution’ is the belief that there is a trade-off between, say, environmental damage and economic growth (production). And the market failure skews that trade-off towards growth at the expense of environmental health. So all that is needed is some intervention (a tax) that will skew the trade-off back to something more preferable. The problem is that the whole idea that there is a trade-off between protecting our environment and economic production is flawed at the most elemental level. There is no calculus (which underpins this sort of microeconomic reasoning) that can tell us when a biological system will die. The idea that we can have a ‘safe’ level of pollution, regulated via a price system, is groundless and should not form part of a progressive response. Carbon trading schemes (CTS) are neoliberal constructs which start with the presumption that a free market is the best way to organise allocation.” • Worth repeating: Mark Blyth says that “Markets cannot internalize their externalities on a planetary scale. They just can’t. It’s impossible.” I’m wondering if carbon tax failure is a lemma from that (heretical) proposition. Also, somebody tell Elizabeth Warren.

“Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be ‘Good Business’” [Jacobin] (review of Bill McKibben’s new book, Falter). “McKibben mistakenly believes that the problems of climate destruction stem from bad ideas and policies, rather than systemic issues. The 1970s turn toward neoliberalism in fact originated with a general crisis in capitalist profitability, not with Ayn Rand’s ideas…. If you believe [with McKibben] that all working-class led revolutions end in disaster, and that it is therefore necessary to prioritize collaborating with the existing rulers of society (the capitalists and their governmental representatives), then a radical alternative to the status quo is not possible.”

“How much does your flight actually hurt the planet?” [Quartz]. “Flygskam (translated as ‘flight shame’) is a burgeoning Sweden-led movement which calls on people to consider limiting their flight use…. Michael Mann of Penn State University, and some other climate scientists, have argued against making individual sacrifices in the name of climate change, even big ones, because they feel the only true impact can be made at the level of government…. It’s true: despite incontrovertible evidence of the toll our collective lives are taking on the planet, any action an individual takes carries with it the knowledge that, however huge the personal sacrifice, the result will be nothing more than a dot in the vast global matrix. One person’s actions can’t make a difference; only collective action can…. Perhaps ‘flight shame’ is a misnomer: It denotes a sensation of embarrassment, and implies something hidden, rather than a strong ethical choice.” •

Water

“Overpopulation, Not Climate Change, Caused California’s Water Crisis” [The American Conservative]. “The issue is population. California has grown from 10 million to at least 40 million since 1950, making it necessary to move water over long distances to where people live and work. Close to two thirds of the state’s population is bunched in a few water-dependent coastal counties. Only about 15 percent of California’s water consumption is residential. Most of that is used outdoors to make the desert bloom and hillside pools sparkle and shimmer David Hockney-like, and millions expect that water at will.” But: ” Farm water comprises an estimated 70 percent of annual state water use. Private water ownership and 1,300 competing irrigation districts complicate matters…. Agriculture’s $40 billion contribution to the California economy is only about 3 percent of the state’s GDP. Rural California is still a potent voting bloc in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress, but less so every decade.” • The headline seems oversimplified, even agenda-driven.

Health Care

Original Medicare took only a year to implement, back in the era of steam:

Harry Truman’s application card for Medicare, co-signed by Lyndon Johnson on same day he signed Medicare bill at Truman Library, today 1965: pic.twitter.com/Gecp2uzYWc

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 30, 2019

I wonder who we should give the first #MedicareForAll card to. Jonathan Gruber? Nancy Pelosi?

Yikes:

NEWS: 75% of rural hospitals have now closed in states that chose not to expand Medicaid.https://t.co/1Urak8yQOg

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 29, 2019

“‘Leaving billions of dollars on the table‘” [Gatehouse News] (source of map above). “‘The irony to me,’ said John Henderson, who heads The Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals and supports Medicaid expansion, ‘is that we’re paying federal income taxes to expand coverage in other states. We’re exporting our coverage and leaving billions of dollars on the table.’… High rates of poverty in rural areas, combined with the loss of jobs, aging populations, lack of health insurance and competition from other struggling institutions will make it difficult for some rural hospitals to survive regardless of what government policies are implemented. For some, there’s no point in trying. They say the widespread closures are the result of the free market economy doing its job and a continued shakeout would be helpful. But no rural community wants that shakeout to happen in its backyard.” • Good reporting! I wonder who those “for some” are. I bet a lot of them don’t live in rural areas.

Games

“A teen who frustrated his mom gaming 8 hours a day became a millionaire in the Fortnite World Cup” [Business Insider]. “More than 40 million players participated in the qualifying events for the final, which took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City on Saturday and Sunday. Fifty duos and 100 solo players made it through the final and were competing to take home a cut of the $30 million prize pool, the largest prize pool in the history of e-sports.” • Filling a stadium. This old codger thinks that’s quite remarkable, a new thing on the face of the earth.

MMT

“The Invention of Money” [The New Yorker]. • Fun factoids, but a serious attempt would include Michael Hudson, and MMT on the origin of money as well.

Class Warfare

“When I joined my father on the building site, I saw a different side to him” [Guardian (DG)]. “It was on those building sites that, for the first time in my life, I saw a different side to my father. At home, my mother was not only the main breadwinner but also did practically all the cooking, cleaning and organisation. She was the engine of the family: paying the mortgage, asking me about my homework, remembering my friends’ names, picking up discarded socks and cooking dinner every night from scratch. My father was, at times, little more than a lodger. But at work, he suddenly turned into something like a figure of authority: intelligent, in charge, hard-working, exacting. He knew about things I had never even heard of, such as building regulations, damp-proof courses, rendering, load-bearing walls and lintels. He was patient, informed. He may have lost his pencil, hammer, spirit level and saw every 30 seconds, but he knew what he was doing. As I watched him briefing a bricklayer or discussing some finer detail of a knocked-through dining room with a plasterer, I saw someone who rarely came home. Since then, I have often suggested to friends struggling with parental relationships that might feel disappointing and strained to try meeting that parent at work, to visit them in situ, have lunch on their territory, watch them in action, and try to find this other side to someone with whom you are so familiar… Being a young woman on a building site, I also learned that the class system is alive and well in modern Britain. People I knew from school would fail to recognise me as they walked past the building site… There is nothing innately superior about life with a boardroom or swivel chair. The income discrepancy between so-called white-collar and blue-collar work is unfounded. …. work is work is work is work.” • A really splendid article.

News of the Wired

“The Pirate Who Penned the First English-Language Guacamole Recipe” [Atlas Obscura]. “British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. … He gave us the words ‘tortilla,’ ‘soy sauce,’ and ‘breadfruit,’ while unknowingly recording the first ever recipe for guacamole. And who better to expose the Western world to the far corners of our planet’s culinary bounty than someone who by necessity made them his hiding places?” • So globalization has a culinary upside; always has!

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (meeps):

Meeps writes: “The columbines are pink and yellow this year.” Columbines are so stylish and old-fashioned.

* * *

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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/30/2019

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Liam Booker (Faking It): ISFP

Dominant Introverted Feeling [Fi]: Liam has very strong morals and is first and foremost concerned with doing the “right” thing. His conscience rules him, and if he does anything that contradicts his internal values, he obsesses over it until he’s able to correct his perceived shortcoming. Liam takes a stand for what he believes in. He is socially, economically, and environmentally aware, and wants the way he lives to reflect his principles. He’s opposed to lying and sneaking around, which makes his relationship with Karma difficult for him because he’s under the impression that Karma is dating Amy. He doesn’t want to get in the way of their relationship, and even though he cares about Karma, he feels that getting in the middle of their relationship is wrong. That’s just not who he is. Liam values honesty and hates that Amy is forcing him to keep their secret from Karma. He just wants to fess up, tell her the truth, and deal with the consequences. He can’t live with the guilt. Liam believes in punishing himself when he breaks his moral code and vows to abstain from sex after sleeping with Amy. He doesn’t like to openly discuss how he’s feeling, and prefers to do something to fix things rather than talk about it. Liam is very loyal to the people he loves and gives up his dream to get Karma and her family out of jail. He doesn’t tell her about this, though, because he didn’t do it to gain favor with her. He wants to earn her forgiveness and had no intention of using his good deed to sway her. He’s outraged when Karma considers taking the $250,000 check Mr. Booker wrote her to keep her away from Liam. He turned Zita down after she threw herself at him while Karma was contemplating accepting the bribe money, which hurts even more, because he knows she wouldn’t consider it for a single second if the money was given to her to stay away from Amy.

Auxiliary Extroverted Sensing [Se]: Sometimes, Liam makes shortsighted decisions in the heat of the moment and often comes to regret them after having time to reflect. He keeps seeing Karma, even though he’s against being with her behind Amy’s back. When he’s angry or upset, he tends to react without considering the ramifications. After his breakup with Karma, he learns that she had faked her relationship with Amy. In his outrage over being lied to for so long, he sleeps Amy and becomes immediately remorseful of his actions following the incident. Liam enjoys sensory pleasures, particularly sex, and is a talented artist. He expresses himself by creating, and is very good at translating his feelings into the works he produces (Fi-Se). Liam tends to work through his feelings physically – whether it’s by producing art or going to a mixed martial arts class with Theo.

Tertiary Introverted Intuition [Ni]: If Liam gets a hunch about something, he usually believes in it, fully committing to the idea, even if he’s completely mistaken. When Jackson Lee takes a special interest in him and his art, Liam is convinced that Jackson is his real father. He begins investigating to confirm his suspicions, and believes that he found “evidence” to prove it (his mother in the same photo as Jackson). However, it never occurs to him that it’s just a coincidence and his theory turns out to be incorrect. When Liam has a goal in mind, he can become singularly focused on achieving it, particularly if it’s something that is important to him morally.

Inferior Extroverted Thinking [Te]: When Liam believes in something, he does something about it. He organizes protests and inspires others to rally around him and fight back. When in protest mode, Liam is able to take charge, make decisions, and shout commands to the crowd. He doesn’t like when things are done for money, power, or control, which is why he refuses to drive a fancy car or buy expensive clothing, even though he comes from a rich family. He doesn’t like what money has done to them and rebels against that lifestyle. Liam is very upfront and lays down rules when need be – he tells Brandi upfront that their relationship must be casual sex or nothing. He’s not looking for a girlfriend, and if she can’t handle that, they have to stop hooking up. He knows what he wants, and has no problem speaking up.

Enneagram: 1w9 4w3 7w8 Sx/So

Quotes:

Brandi: Where have you been, Pooh Bear? Who’s this bitch? Liam: Whoa, Brandi, you’re drunk. Brandi: He’s mine, so keep those nipples to yourself. Karma: That was my goal from the beginning, I promise. Liam: Look, I am not your boyfriend. We’re just good friends who occasionally have sex, but if that’s too confusing for you, then we have to stop. [to Karma] What? Karma: Nothing. Liam: Look, I’m not a douche bag, all right? I’m always clear about my ground rules. And girls, they always agree to them, and then they get- Karma: Clingy? Women are genetically wired to mate and start a family. In fact, if we weren’t, our entire species would’ve died out, so have some respect.

Shane: They’re here, they’re queer, they need your votes. Nice work, minions. Liam: Anything to help the gays.

Karma: Liam’s parents are rich, but he drives a beat-up biodiesel, which means he’s socially aware. His best friends are a gay guy and a feminist, which means he’s tolerant and accepting of strong women. And he’s an artist, which means that deep down inside he’s wounded.

Liam: I’m glad you got back together with your girlfriend. You two are like the school’s Portia and Ellen. Karma: Which one am I? Please say Portia. Liam: Trust me, you’re the Portia. Which is why we probably shouldn’t make out again. I don’t want to be the asshole that breaks up Hester’s cutest couple.

Liam: We can see through your lies! She’s just trying to buy us! Robin: Trust me, no one is trying to buy you. Though you’ll each be getting new Skwerkel smartphones and tablets. Liam: What do you get out of this? Robin: The satisfaction of helping a school in desperate need of money. Also, Skwerkel will own all data collected on these devices. Karma: That means our photos, our emails, our text messages. They want to make us their digital slaves. Are we gonna let them? Crowd: Hell, no! Liam: Time to occupy Hester. Man your stations!

Liam: Money has made my family secretive, image-obsessed ass. I want nothing to do with it or them.

Liam: Look, maybe you two are okay with this sneaking around thing, but I’m not. I tried to be, but it’s just not who I am.

Liam: They’re right. I knew Karma had a girlfriend, but I kept seeing her. Shane: Why are you beating yourself up like this? It’s not your fault they broke up.

Liam: Six months? That’s forever. Karma: I know, I’m sorry. But if people at school think I left Amy for you, they’ll hate us more than oil companies. Liam: And Amy is okay with this? I just, I really don’t like lying.

Amy: This is kidnapping. Shane: It’s really more blackmail. Lauren: We’re going to take photos of this assjolr that are so shocking and deviant, he’ll never tell anyone my secret. Shane: Conveniently, my mom sells sex toys out of the trunk of her car. Amy: Guys, guys, this is illegal and highly disturbing. Lauren, how bad could this secret be? Lauren: Ugh, I’m not telling you my fucking secret. Shane: She’s not. Trust me, I tried. Liam: Guys, I’m with Amy. Maybe it’s a good thing this thing gets out. They say you’re only as sick as your secrets. Amy: What? No, who says that? Who, the voices in your head? Tell ’em to shut up. I changed my mind. I’m on board. This is America. We are all entitled to our secrets. Will you excuse us for a second? What the hell was that? “You’re only as sick as your secrets”? I’m sorry, but the guilt is killing me. Amy: Oh, this little piggy went boo-hoo-hoo all the way home. Man up. Look, it’s killing me too, but what would it do to Karma if she found out that her soul mate slept with you? Liam: So what, we just pretend it never happened? Amy: What happened? See how easy that was? And before we never speak of this again, do I need to add contracting syphilis to last night’s list of tragic events?

Shane: You’re still hung up on Karma, aren’t you? I don’t get it. Are her lips dusted with cocaine or something? Liam: No, this is not about Karma, and I’m only hung up on her because Little Liam wanted to meet a lesbian, so he needs to be put in time-out. Shane: Why are you punishing your penis? Hey, Karma is the one who lied. Liam: Trust me, I deserve to be punished. Shane: No, you deserve to move on, and the best way to get over someone is to get under someone new, stat. Unless you don’t want to get over her. Liam: Of course I want to get over her. I just think celibacy is the best way to do that. Shane: I don’t know. In my experience, it only leads to blue balls and long, incoherent speeches about wolves.

Amy: This is your last chance. Promise me you won’t tell Karma or I’m about to make a scene so juicy I might win a daytime Emmy. Liam: What if I tell her I slept with someone and I don’t say that someone was you? Amy: Not a negotiation, last chance. Liam: Wow, you’re completely mental. This is what secrets do to people. Amy: Three, two – Liam: You wouldn’t dare ’cause then you’d have no leverage. Amy: [hits Liam in the face] How dare you? That was one. Liam: Amy, come on. Amy: Don’t touch me! Liam: Amy. Amy: Do you know where I met Liam? At a protest. And do you know what we were protesting? Skwerkel. Mr. Booker: Liam. Amy: But it turns out, he was just seducing me. He never told me his father founded the company. Who are you, Liam Booker? Liam: That’s hilarious. Amy has been taking improv classes, and she’s getting very good. Amy: And if that weren’t enough of a betrayal, I also found out that he slept with my best friend.

Liam: I cannot believe – Did I just really say all of that out loud? Amy: You did. And your family… Liam: Probably disowned me, but right now, I do not give a fuck. I have a huge weight off my back. Amy: Now I get why you’re so hung up on honesty. Liam: Yeah, well a few years ago I accidentally found my original birth certificate and my whole world cracked. It weighed me down ever since. I wish somehow I could un-know it, but, I can’t. I don’t want to tell Karma something she can’t un-know, I care about her way too much. Amy: That’s just how I feel, thank you.

Shane: Quit taking it out on these innocent art supplies. Liam: Shane, really, I don’t want to talk about it. Shane: That’s just your straight guy resistance to talking about your feelings. Push through it. Theo: What are y’all on about? Shane: It’s Karma’s birthday, and Liam can’t be with her for reasons too complicated and fucked up to specify. Theo: Wanna go hit stuff? Always makes me feel better. I’m taking this mixed martial arts class downtown. Shane: Nice try, Theo, but what Liam needs is to talk it all out over some grilled cheeses at Millie’s Diner. Theo: What is this, The View? Liam: Shane, I’m sorry, but that class is just what the doctor ordered. Shane: You’re not the doctor. You’re the patient. You can’t prescribe your own medicine. Theo: Wow, you really think you know what’s best for everybody, don’t you? Shane: It’s a gift. Liam: We’ll talk it out later, I promise. But right now, I just want to punch someone in the face without getting arrested. You wanna come? Shane: I’ll pass. It all sounds a bit too aggressively heterosexual for me.

Karma: If she can’t handle our relationship, then maybe it’s not meant to be. Do you want some dessert? They have homemade doughnuts. Liam: She doesn’t want doughnuts. She wants Reagan. Karma: Amy loves doughnuts. Liam: Karma, we get it. You know all of Amy’s favorite foods, but can’t you see that she’s really into Reagan? You can fix this, but you’ve gotta go and stop her. Amy: You’re right. Liam: No, Karma. Karma, this isn’t about you. You need to give them space.

Karma: You gave up art for me? Liam: Zita told you? Karma: The real question is why you didn’t. Liam: Because I didn’t do it to buy your forgiveness. I want to earn that. But do you think I ever will? Karma: Look, I want to forgive you. You’re doing all the right things. I’m just scared of getting hurt again, which is why I need to be in control. Liam: I’m okay with that. Karma: Then put your hands behind your back.

Shane: Grr! Young Jackson Lee was cute. Liam: And that’s Robin in the same picture. That’s proof! Shane, he’s my dad! Shane: I don’t know. I’ve been in plenty of pictures with people I haven’t impregnated. Liam: No, it all makes so much sense now! Being an artist is in my blood, and now my dad has come back to build some kind of relationship with me. I’ve dreamt about this moment. Shane: Liam- Liam: Shh! When I dreamt about it, there was no talking.

Amy: Who wouldn’t consider taking $250,000? Liam: I’ve been such an idiot. Karma: It could help my parents get back on their feet, help pay for college. How could I not consider it for even a second? Liam: After you left L.A., Zita kissed me. She made it very clear she wanted more, but I turned her down. It didn’t take me a week to think about it. Karma: Oh, yeah, well, too bad you didn’t think before you slept with Amy. Amy: Karma, please leave me out of this. Liam: Here we go again. You’re taking a bribe to stay away from me, but I’m the one defending myself? Karma: I’m not rich, Liam! I didn’t fall asleep in class because I’ve been studying. I’ve been working every catering gig I could get. And I live in a freaking juice truck! Liam: It’s so besides the point, it’s not even funny. If you were offered that money to stay away from Amy, you wouldn’t have considered it for one second!

Principal Turner: These are all of the school’s known visual artists. One of them has to be “B.” All right, you Banksy wannabes. You’ve had your fun. Now if someone doesn’t admit to being “B,” you will all be suspended. And yes, I can do that. Again, read the Terms & Conditions. Liam: It was me, okay? I am “B.” Now, let everyone else go. Principal Turner: B for Booker. You know, I think we might just skip right past suspension to full-on expulsion Penelope: Stop! It wasn’t Liam. It was me. “B” is for Beaver. I mean, Bevier.

Liam Booker (Faking It): ISFP was originally published on MBTI Zone

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