2:00PM Water Cooler 3/22/2023 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Wood Thrush, Sapsucker Woods–Severinghaus Trail, Tompkins, New York, United States. “Song.” Quite the virtuoso!

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

“UPDATED: Senate committee punts vote on Biden’s pick to head up FAA” [Politico]. “The nomination for Phil Washington, who is currently CEO of Denver International Airport, has been in question since he was first nominated last year, with some Republicans arguing that he lacks relevant aviation experience. Soon after his nomination, reports emerged that Washington had been caught up in a politically tinged corruption probe out of Los Angeles County related to his time at Los Angeles’ transit agency. The California attorney general eventually halted that investigation, but questions have lingered since. Moments before the committee was set to vote on the nomination, Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said from the dais that his nomination will be considered ‘at a later date.’ She gave no further explanation. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) said the vote was postponed due to ‘one person,’ but would not say who.” • I’d expect Buttigieg to be front and center on this. Personnel is policy, after all.

Biden Administration

2024

Trump not arrested! As of this writing…

“Trump news – live updates: Indictment decision on hold as grand jury cancels Wednesday hearing” [Independent]. “The Manhattan grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s role in hush money payments to Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election will not be meeting today. This delays any decision as to whether Mr Trump will become the first-ever president to be indicted on criminal charges. It was believed that the panel was expected to hear from at least one more witness before it votes on whether to indict the former president. Should he be indicted, the former president would be expected to appear for an arraignment sometime next week. .” • But the walls are closing in! (I’ve helpfully underlined the worst example of Kremlinology that I have seen in some time.)

“The Legal Intricacies That Could Make or Break the Case Against Trump” [New York Times]. “And the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, may have to pull off a difficult maneuver, connecting the hush-money cover-up — a potential violation of state law — to a federal election.” There’s no “may have to” about it; the statute of limitations on the hush money violation has passed. More: “[T]here is a possibility that the case will rely on a legal theory that has never been evaluated by a judge. A New York Times review and interviews with election law experts strongly suggest that New York state prosecutors have never before filed an election law case involving a federal campaign. Bringing an untested case against anyone, let alone a former president of the United States, carries the risk that a court could throw out or narrow the case.” Why on earth wasn’t this story written weeks ago? More: “But for falsifying business records to be a felony, not a misdemeanor, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors must show that Mr. Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. That crime could be a violation of election law, under the theory that the payout served as a donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, because it silenced Ms. Daniels and shut down a potential sex scandal in the final stretch of the campaign…. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said that the theory that the money amounted to a campaign donation is fatally flawed. One of the lawyers recently argued in television interviews that Mr. Trump approved the payment to protect his family from false accusations, noting that Mr. Trump has long denied a sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels.” • Well, since Bragg didn’t arrest Trump on Tuesday, I guess he’s going to straighten all this out today, and then arrest Trump on Thursday? Of course, I suppose he could arrest Trump at 5:00PM on Friday. What fun that would be!

“Trump fundraises off possible indictment” [The Hill]. “Former President Trump is taking advantage of his possible indictment coming this week by sending out numerous fundraising emails asking his supporters to donate to his third presidential campaign…. The email added that Trump knows ‘true vindication’ will come on Election Day in 2024, when he says he will take back the White House. The email asks for donations, urging the supporters to send a contribution to the Trump campaign “at the critical moment.’”

“Fake AI images of ‘Trump arrest’ hit internet” [The Hill]. “The images, created using artificial intelligence software (AI), show what appears to be the a large group of New York City Police Department officers arresting the former president as he resists be detained. Some of the images that were posted on Twitter even depict Trump being forced to the ground, while another image shows him running away from the police officers. The text in the images, like on the police officers’ uniform, is garbled — an indicator that they were fake. Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of investigative collective Bellingcat, first shared these images Monday on Twitter, and they have gained traction over the last several days. He explained in a tweet that he used MidJourney V5 — an AI software that creates images from a written prompt — to form the images. That prompt that he used read ‘Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage,’ and it produced many of the images that were posted on Twitter. Some users retweeted the photos without context, which could lead to misinformation spreading about Trump’s potential indictment.” • You don’t say. Good to know Higgens isn’t just a spook and a hack, but a Democrat spook and hack. What were the odds?

* * *

“DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be ‘Broken Up’” [ProPublica]. Quite possibly popular among small businesses; see “The People Powering Amazon’s Trickle Down Monopoly” below. More: “Florida governor Ron DeSantis has frequently railed against ‘Big Tech.’ He has accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of silencing conservative voices. But in private, DeSantis has gone even further. In previously unreported comments made in 2021, DeSantis said technology companies like Google ‘should be broken up’ by the U.S. government. DeSantis, widely considered a presidential hopeful, made the remarks at an invite-only retreat for the Teneo Network, a ‘private and confidential’ group for elite conservatives. ProPublica and Documented obtained video of the event. ‘They’re just too big, they have too much power,’ DeSantis said. ‘I think they’re exercising a more negative influence on our society than the trusts that got broken up at the early 20th century.’ He added that large tech companies ‘are ruining our country. They’re a very negative influence. And so I think you need to be strong about it.’” • A bell that’s hard to unring — once rung in public.

“DeSantis opens Pandora’s box” [Axios]. “Hours after igniting outrage in Trumpworld with a shot at Trump over the former president’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, DeSantis told [British journalist Piers Morgan] that the ‘underlying conduct’ in the Manhattan DA’s investigation is ‘outside my wheelhouse.’ ‘At the end of the day as a leader, you really want to look to people like our Founding Fathers,’ [not Lincoln?] DeSantis said when Morgan asked if personal conduct in a leader matters. ‘[I]t’s not saying that you don’t ever make a mistake in your personal life, but I think, what type of character are you bringing?’” And: “‘I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels,’ DeSantis joked, referring to Trump’s ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ moniker.” ‘• Dude, you’re from Yale. If there’s anything a Yalie knows how to do — George W. Bush, after all, was a Yalie — it’s how to spell “sanctimonious.”

2020 Post Mortem

Sanders on Obama’s Night of the Long Knives:

Bernie on the 2020 dropout of Buttigieg and Klobuchar, and Warren’s decision not to concede. pic.twitter.com/sPMJUSClFy

— Department of HomeGoods Security (@joemayall) March 21, 2023

Warren really is a snake. I think she still looks in the mirror and sees a President, heaven help us all.

Democrats en Déshabillé

Patient readers, it seems that people are actually reading the back-dated post! But I have not updated it, and there are many updates. So I will have to do that. –lambert

I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (“the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that can’t bury itself”) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a “live” Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before:

The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). ; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. . (“PMC” modulo “class expatriates,” of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network — a Flex Net? An iron octagon? — of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community.

Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see ‘industrial model’ of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down.

Federal taxes don’t fund Federal spending:

So Sanders is proffering a fine example of auto-kinbaku-ji.

“The Progressive Takeover of Nevada’s Democratic Party Is Falling Apart” [The Nation]. “Over the past two years, the Democratic Party of Nevada—once, under Harry Reid’s tutelage, one of the most formidable political machines in the country—has been riven by divisions. In 2021, a pro–Bernie Sanders group managed to take over the state party and to capture key positions. Afterward, Reid’s allies walked, taking with them key voter data, hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations, and senior personnel, who regrouped under the auspices of the Washoe County Democratic Party (Washoe is home to Reno, the state’s second-largest city). They proceeded to establish National Democratic Victory, which Sanders’s supporters promptly denounced as a shadow party. The new leadership then embarked on what can only be described as a two-year flounder, failing in most of its efforts to activate a large, energized, progressive base, and ceding organizing ground and the image of political competence to the Washoe-centered grouping. Now nearly two years on, and one messy midterm election cycle later—a midterm in which the incumbent Democratic senator eked out a win, but the governor was defeated by his GOP opponent—that intraparty upheaval has reached its zenith.” And: “There are lessons in these elections: There is plenty of room for radical politics out West, and plenty of room for candidates looking to shake up the status quo. In many ways, it remains a petri dish in which new, and experimental, political ideas and alliances are cultivated. But at the end of the day, voters also want tangible results. Whitmer’s mediocre tenure, and her election defeat last week, is a wake-up call: If Democrats want to continue to hold power in places like Nevada, they need a party political machinery led by leaders who aren’t just idealistic but are also competent.” • Of course, competence is less easy to achieve than it should be; the Washoe County Democratic Party sounds a lot like Parliamentary Labor, sabotaging Corbyn at ever turn. What I wonder — not being from Nevada and having discovered, to my horror, that I subscribed to Jon Ralston’s newsletter — is how solid Whitmer’s faction was rooted in the working class (and unions in particular). Were they simply “idealists”?

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Fascism Drove Ukraine to Civil War. It Could Soon Do the Same to America” [Internationalist 360°]. “This process of defeat for Banderism that we’re now witnessing is the inevitable product of Banderism’s foundational ideas. This is an ideology that, upon its formation during the country’s Nazi collaborationist era, was created with the implicit acceptance that a civil war would be entailed in its rise to power. This is because its goal is to murder, terrorize, or forcibly relocate the entire Russian-speaking segment of Ukrainian society. Such a project was of course going to be met with resistance…. Within our generation, the equivalent type of conflict could happen in America. Such is the conclusion that can be taken away from the analysis by University of Alberta terrorism and criminology researcher Temitope Oriola, who’s said that ‘To avoid violence, the country needs urgent reforms [in the] criminal justice system.’ Oriola observes how a domestic insurgency could come from a black community that’s been driven to desperation by intensifying poverty and state violence, and such a civil conflict could indeed initially arise from these particularly subjugated parts of society. But this insurgency, and its adjacent popular struggles that utilize different tools than arms, has the potential to gain a broader base than black people. Because with work by the communist movement, it could act as the catalyst for a proletarian revolution, an uprising that’s participated in by workers of all colors. Should this breakdown of the country’s peace come—and I feel anyone paying attention on some level knows it’s coming, since neither party will make the concessions needed for keeping the peace—it will be America’s Ukraine moment.” • Hmm. It seems to me that if there is “revolutionary” energy, it comes from reactance among conservatives. It’s also worth remembering Mike Duncan’s thesis that revolutionary splits go all the way to the top of society, and include every class. Does anyone see that?

#COVID19

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data).

• Readers, thanks for the push. We are now up to 47/50 states (94%). I have helpfully added “______” to the states still missing data. We should list states that do not have Covid resources, or have stopped updating their sites, so others do not look fruitlessly. Could those of you in states not listed help out by either with dashboard/wastewater links, or ruling your state out definitively? Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (______); NE (______); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (______); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (1), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (6), JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, otisyves, Petal (5), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Utah, Bob White (3). (Readers, if you leave your link in comments, I credit you by your handle. If you send it to me via email, I use your initials (in the absence of a handle. I am not putting your handle next to your contribution because I hope and expect the list will be long, and I want it to be easy for readers to scan.)

• More like this, please! Total: 1 6 11 18 20 22 26 27 28 38 39 43 47/50 (94% of US states).

Look for the Helpers

“Six instances when Mr Rogers made the world a better place by being his wholesome self” [Upworthy]. “Model Chrissy Teigen also once tweeted one of her favorite stories. ‘Mister Rogers would narrate himself feeding the fish in each episode with ‘I’m feeding the fish’ because of a letter he received from a young blind girl who was worried the fish were hungry. Love you, Mister Rogers,’ read Teigen’s tweet.” • Indeed! Not Covid-related, except implicitly.

* * *

“Introducing: The Covid Underground” [Covid Underground]. The deck: “Welcome to The Covid Underground, a newsletter for the Covid-free movement and all of those who continue to avoid infection.” More: “True health is the ability to change. About 10-30% of the U.S. population has changed their lives in the light of the freeing revelations of 2020, and we keep changing. We are dynamically, creatively faithful to what was— briefly— plain to all: normal is a dangerous illusion.” • Worth a read.

“Covid Meetups” [COVID MEETUPS (JM)]. “A free service to find individuals, families and local businesses/services who take COVID precautions in your area.” • I played around with it some. It seems to be Facebook-driven, sadly, but you can use the Directory without logging in. I get rational hits from the U.S., but not from London, UK, FWIW.

Finding like-minded people on (sorry) Facebook:

Thought I’d add this here in case anyone is interested. Places to find people who “Still Covid” in your area & online: https://t.co/T4ND4XbrpF & https://t.co/sP5wq4fAw5 You can also search on FB “Still Coviding ____” & see if there’s a specific group on your area.

— Adriel Rose (@adriel_rose) March 1, 2023

Covid Is Airborne

Readers, any anecdotes on ventilation in boardrooms?

You’re supposed to be able to just refuse unsafe work but as long as public health says it’s safe …

So

Is public health back in small boardrooms with bad ventilation yet?

Will they quietly provide themselves good ventilation? Hmm.🤡

— Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston 🌬️🔅#COVIDisAirborne (@jmcrookston) February 27, 2023

Maskstravaganza

A long thread from an (Australian) mask designer. This caught my eye:

For Respiratory Protective Devices, i.e. respirators/masks , as part of “Personal safety — Protective clothing and equipment” the standards are the ISO 16900 and ISO 16976 series, covering technical information and data relevant to the performance and design of products.

— Kookaburra cove (@kookcove) February 22, 2023

But:

Commonly used N95’s are not tested to this standard.
Respirators/Masks that are used to mitigate transmission of Covid have been designed and tested to meet OHS standards as PPE. (NIOSH and others)

— Kookaburra cove (@kookcove) February 22, 2023

So people campaiging about “psycho-physiology effects” of mask-wearing have a point, though not the one I would have thought.

• I don’t suppose some kind reader has PDFs of the ISO 16976 series lying about? Perhaps in draft form?

Oakland votes for masks:

Yayy! The resolution passed! Thank you, Oakland city council, for your continued leadership! Thanks especially to @Kaplan4Oakland who provided clear, thoughtful guidance, and debunked mask disinformation in real time 🙌🏾 @KevinJenkinsoak @nikki4oakland @Janani4Oakland @TrevaReid6 https://t.co/KZbtmdIgj0

— Noha Aboelata, MD (@NohaAboelataMD) March 22, 2023

Scientific Communication

The concept of layered protection (“Swiss Cheese Model”) seems very difficult for people to get their heads around:

The everything or nothing narrative is still strong, on Covid. The people who want to do nothing say the only alternative is to do everything i.e. shut society down. Actually the answer is what it’s always been for infectious disease. To do something. Lots of somethings.

— Henry Madison 🦠x0 (@RageSheen) February 27, 2023

“Masks don’t work.” “They work as part of a protocol, which also includes avoiding 3Cs spaces, watching ventilation, opening windows….” Others add vitamins, diet, etc. I don’t get why people don’t get it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been accustomed to the cold. You add layers until you’re warm enough. I’m no risk analyst, and I stumble trying to follow Taleb, but it also seems to me that betting your survival on the one perfect thing “that works” is a risk-of-ruin scenario. The same approach is needed for climate, too; tranches of improvement, not just one thing (like shooting magic chemicals into the sky).

Sequelae

“COVID-19 and Traffic Accidents: Is a COVID-19 Personality Disorder Caused by Viral Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex?” [Infection Control]. Should have added this yesterday; my bad. From 2022, still germane: “However, we must consider the possibility that the observed behavior aberrations may directly result from the infection and the central nervous system damage it has caused. This theory centers around damage to the frontal lobe in the area of the prefrontal cortex…. The prefrontal cortex acquires and implements the ‘rules of the game’ needed to participate in our society. A particular area of the prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, is the essential area of the brain. It is also important in the modulation of antisocial behavior and in the modulation of reactive aggression. In other words, the prefrontal cortex is involved in determining when aggression is and is not appropriate. An autopsy study recently published in Nature also found extensive distribution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus throughout the body, including the brain…. There have been multiple studies that have documented damage to the frontal cortex with COVID-19. One of the first studies was a UK Biobank which described a ‘deleterious impact’ of SARS-CoV-2 on the olfactory cortical system, along with a reduction in grey matter thickness in the orbitofrontal cortex and damage to tissues connected to the primary olfactory cortex. This damage was associated with a reduction in brain size…. For those treated at home with uncomplicated respiratory symptoms, the decline approximated an average of a little over 1 IQ point (calculated from Figure 2 in the paper). Unfortunately, repeated infections can cause additive damage in those with long COVID-19; thus, even small decreases in IQ may become substantial. Thus, we must avoid reinfections.” • Hmm.

Looks like “leveling off to a high plateau” across the board. (I still think “Something Awful” is coming, however. I mean, besides what we already know about.) Stay safe out there!

Case Data

NOT UPDATED BioBot wastewater data from March 20:

Lambert here: Note that if we look at “the area under the curve,” more people have died after Biden declared that “Covid is over” than before.

For now, I’m going to use this national wastewater data as the best proxy for case data (ignoring the clinical case data portion of this chart, which in my view “goes bad” after March 2022, for reasons as yet unexplained). At least we can spot trends, and compare current levels to equivalent past levels.

The Ides of March. OK, that was last week, but you know what I mean:

Lambert here: This chart again debunks the talking point that Covid is seasonal. More importantly, despite the prevasive conviction that “Covid is Over,” we’re entering this March with cases at a higher level than any previous March. Of course, we may be just plateau-ing along. But still, I wouldn’t have expected this.

Covid Emergency Room Visits

From CDC NCIRD Surveillance, from March 18:

NOTE “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.” So not the entire pandemic, FFS (the implicit message here being that Covid is “just like the flu,” which is why the seasonal “rolling 52-week period” is appropriate for both_{MR SUBLIMINAL I hate these people so much}. Anyhow, I added a grey “Fauci line” just to show that Covid wasn’t “over” when they started saying it was, and it’s not over now. Notice also that this chart shows, at least for its time period, that Covid is not seasonal, even though CDC is trying to get us to believe that it is, presumably so they can piggyback on the existing institutional apparatus for injections.

Positivity

From the Walgreen’s test positivity tracker, published March 22:

-1.4%. Still high, but we’ve now reached a point lower than the low point of the last valley.

Deaths

Death rate (Our World in Data):

Total: 1,151,882 – 1,151,778 = 104 (104 * 365 = 37,960 deaths per year, today’s YouGenicist™ number for “living with” Covid (quite a bit higher than the minimizers would like, though they can talk themselves into anything. If the YouGenicist™ metric keeps chugging along like this, I may just have to decide this is what the powers-that-be consider “mission accomplished” for this particular tranche of death and disease).

Excess Deaths

NOT UPDATED (but updating). Excess deaths (The Economist), published March 7:

Lambert here: Based on a machine-learning model. Again, we see a high plateau. I”m not sure how often this updates, and if it doesn’t, I’ll remove it. (The CDC has an excess estimate too, but since it ran forever with a massive typo in the Legend, I figured nobody was really looking at it, so I got rid it.

Stats Watch

There are no official statistics of interest today.

The Fed: “Stocks Edge Down Ahead of Fed Rate Decision” [Wall Street Journal]. • At 2:00!! This is so exciting.

UPDATE The Fed: “Fed Raises Rates but Nods to Greater Uncertainty After Banking Stress” [Wall Street Journal]. “Officials sent a hint that they might be done raising interest rates soon in their postmeeting policy statement. “The committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate,” the statement said. Officials dropped a phrase used in their previous eight statements that said the committee anticipated ‘ongoing increases’ in rates would be appropriate.” • Because this is the stupidest timeline, I was betting on half a point. That’s why I don’t play the ponies!

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Fear (previous close: 38 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 18 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 22 at 1:46 PM ET

The Screening Room

Diminishing returns for the Tolkien franchise, if there’s any justice in the world:

Must we strip mine every existing narrative?

The Gallery

“Ai Weiwei’s Lego Version of Monet’s Water Lilies” [Kottke.org]. “Lego bricks and Impressionism are a natural pairing, and so Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has recreated Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies triptych with 650,000 Lego bricks. Spanning nearly 50 feet across, the Lego sculpture is part of Ai’s upcoming show at the Design Museum in London. Here is a tantalizing behind-the-scenes view.” • A close-up pof Weiwei’s brushwork:

Zeitgeist Watch

“Torment Nexus” [Know Your Meme]. “Torment Nexus is a trope of creating a product that was originally described in fiction as something that for the benefit of humanity should never be created. Spawned by a viral tweet, the catchphrase “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus” has been used to describe such occurrences. Examples include MoviePass’ eye-tracking technology, similar to a Black Mirror episode, and Netflix’s Squid Game reality show, based on a show of the same name that was intended as a commentary on capitalism and human exploitation.” • At some point in the not-too-dim past, we had a discussion about finding a word for all the little impediments put in our way by gatekeepers trying to screw is out of the delivery of services, especially services that ought to be universal concrete material benefits. Phone trees, “missing” data, logins that don’t work, losing people put on hold, asking you things only they know, and so forth. My word was caltrop, which didn’t take (nor should it have). It strikes me that “torment nexus” might be the right word. One might conceive, for example, of ObamaCare registration as a series of torment nexuses. Or any rancid customer service experience, many of which have been described by Yves as part of her project of altruistic punishment for evil-doers. Creating a chain of torment nexuses would be one implementation strategy for crapification. See also Dark Patterns.

“Six Recent Studies Show an Unexpected Increase in Classical Music Listening” [The Honest Broker]. “Over the last 12 months, I’ve started to see surprising signs of a larger audience turning to classical music… [T]he impact is clear. Starting about 12-18 months ago, something shifted in music consumption patterns…. In the past, elitist institutions gave classical music support because the grassroots audience was so small. Now the resurgence is happening on the ground level, and the petrified institutions that dominate our culture aren’t even paying attention. I could lament this gap between perception and reality. But instead I prefer to celebrate it. What’s happening among the audience is what really counts. That’s always been true and always will be true. If powerful decision-makers at the BBC and elsewhere don’t recognize this, that’s their loss. This shift started with little or no support from the top. And it may even become more vibrant if out-of-touch mangers and administrators aren’t involved.” • I’ve seen a lot of classical music, back in the day, both in Montreal under Dutoit and in the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. I say go for it! The enormous mass and precision of a top classical orchestra can be exhilirating. It’s not for Q-Tips at all! This whole piece is well worth a read.

Class Warfare

“Down East wreath business cited for record-keeping and workplace safety violations” [Maine Public Radio]. “This past Christmas season, as it has for many years, the nonprofit Wreaths Across America coordinated the placement of wreaths at thousands of graves at Arlington National Cemetery and other military burial grounds, generating glowing headlines for honoring those who sacrificed for the country… But behind the scenes is another story. It’s a story of federal labor department fines against Worcester Resources for failing to submit required reports on illnesses and injuries involving the mostly migrant workforce of wreath makers. The company has also been penalized for violating rules on workplace safety and housing conditions. The company and its affiliates have been fined more than $21,000 by the federal Department of Labor and its agencies for 10 violations since 2017, records show…. The latest Worcester violations were settled in May, less than two months after Worcester Resources announced plans to build the 2,500-acre Flagpole of Freedom development in Columbia Falls. The Worcesters say it would attract 6 million visitors and 5,000 employees, most of them year-round. At Worcester’s request, the Legislature passed a bill last year that would allow the project to avoid review by a state planning commission by allowing Columbia Falls to annex some 10,000 acres of Worcester’s property. But town officials have since grown concerned about the impact of the development on the small town, and Worcester has said it “paused” the project while assessing funding options. Town voters will consider a moratorium on new development on March 21.” • That’s yesterday–

“Columbia Falls votes to pause Flagpole of Freedom project” [News Center Maine]. “olumbia Falls residents voted to establish a moratorium temporarily pausing all large-scale developments, including the Flagpole of Freedom Park. A total of 63 voted in favor of the moratorium, while 17 voted against the measure. The ordinance takes effect immediately, putting a 180-day delay on all large-scale developments to give the town time to create regulations like zoning or a building permit ordinance. In 2022, the state passed legislation to annex about 10,000 acres owned by the Worcester family, which made the piece of land part of Columbia Falls. That takes the burden of planning approval off of the state and puts it entirely on the small town. Prior to Tuesday’s vote, Columbia Falls didn’t have any land use ordinances. A Columbia Falls selectman, Jeffrey Greene, said the town has seen multiple proposals for big developments it might not be ready for. ‘It’s [Flagpole of Freedom Park] really the largest, one of the largest proposed projects in Maine state history in this tiny, little town,’ [Columbia Falls selectman, Jeffrey Greene] said. ‘Then it was just really more incentive to get on top of our ordinances that we have in place.’” • 63-17. Once again, there are not very many of the Shing. How come whenever we hear the word “freedom,” it’s always a cover for some kinda scam, in this case screwing the workers?

Prolix, but worth a read:

“The People Powering Amazon’s Trickle Down Monopoly” (interview) [Moira Weigel, Tech Policy Press]. The “people” are not workers, but sellers, mostly small business. WEIGEL: “I started interviewing people. After you speak to a dozen, a couple dozen people, you start to realize or I started to realize that I was hearing certain stories or versions of certain stories again and again, what a social scientist might call saturation, what we call saturation…. there were a few … narratives that recurred and even specific phrases that recurred… But among the English speakers, I repeatedly heard these three phrases of the Old Times, the Wild West, and the Jungle.” The Old Times: ” In that era, when Amazon offered sellers was basically just an online catalog, and subjects described to me faxing Amazon to apply to sell to it, giving Amazon their cut, and then every day, or couple of days or week, whatever it was, Amazon would send them orders with the names and addresses of the customers, and they would mail them off. So, in that era, people who got into it were mostly people with pre-existing small business experience.” The Wild West: “Shortly after introducing the Prime program or subscription for customers in 2006, 2007, Amazon undertook this renovation of the third-party marketplace and importantly, opened their warehousing and fulfillment or logistics services to third-party sellers…. [B]y 2010, they launched this program called Fulfillment by Amazon that sellers could use, paying Amazon to do those things for them as a service, and that also became obligatory in most cases to be eligible for Prime, for Prime shipping. So sellers were strongly incentivized, if not practically required to use that.” The Jungle started around 2015-2016: “[T]his metaphor of the Jungle was really talking about two things. It was talking about the marketplace getting denser and more complicated, less the open terrain where you could scale in a very rapid way relatively easily as some people did in the Wild West period. Much more competitive, much trickier in terms of all sorts of policies, and regulations, and programs. … [T]he main causal factor, the main thing that had changed was that Amazon opened their global, opened their marketplace in the US globally…. [China has] 50% of all sales to the US marketplace. So all third-party sales through Amazon.com come directly from China. Amazon has tried to recruit merchants, particularly in South Asia and increasingly in Latin America, especially in Mexico, to sell through the platform, especially in light of growing geopolitical tensions and instability between the US and China. But in practice, for better and worse, what opening the platform globally meant was a flood of Chinese manufacturers and small capitalists coming onto the marketplace, and that changed the dynamics dramatically in ways that everyone I spoke to pretty much recognized and saw as impacting their daily life. On the Chinese side too, of course.” INTERVIEWER: “[I]n the jungle, there’s a ‘killer be killed’ mentality.” • Hmm. I wonder if this could be mapped to Doctorow’s cycle of enshittification.” And also: “WEIGEL: , which to me at least was a shockingly high number. The most recent robust number I’d heard for that was from a few years ago and was more like 34%, 35%. But to the extent that small businesses or state project, public resources go towards supporting small businesses. I think it’s important to recognize that if Amazon is increasingly taking 50%, 55% of a piece of every sale a small business makes, that’s a matter of public interest and not just, not just to the sellers.” • Paging Stoller on that one, though he probably knows it.

News of the Wired

“The ‘Everything Shower’ Goes Way Beyond Shampoo and Conditioner” [Wall Street Journal]. “Sales of hair products grew 22% in 2022 compared with the previous year, according to market-research firm Circana, formerly IRI and the NPD Group. Hair masks and scalp products have jumped the fastest: 30% and 47%, respectively…. On TikTok, the everything shower trend is showing how consumers use a parade of hair, body and skin products during showers. The process can often last closer to an hour. There were nearly 123 million views by Monday for the #everythingshower hashtag on TikTok.” • A jump in automobile accidents, classical music on the rise, and now people spending an hour in the shower…. My head is spinning!

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