The Zero Room

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• It’s the healthcare system, stupid — Thomas Frank in Le Monde diplomatique: Donald Trump’s prodigious stupidity is not the sole cause of our crushing national failure to beat the coronavirus. Plenty of blame must also go to our screwed-up healthcare system, which scorns the very idea of public health and treats access to medical care as a private luxury that is rightfully available only to some. It is the healthcare system, not Trump, that routinely denies people treatment if they lack insurance; that bankrupts people for ordinary therapies; that strips people of their coverage when they lose their jobs — and millions of people are losing their jobs in this pandemic. It is the healthcare system that, when a Covid treatment finally arrives, will almost certainly charge Americans a hefty price to receive it. And that system is the way it is because organised medicine has for almost a century used the prestige of expertise to keep it that way. Populism, meanwhile, was the reform impulse that tried (and failed) to change the system so that it served ordinary people. Which is to say that the pundits and the scholars and the thinktankers in their grave solemnity have got it entirely backward. Bowing down before expertise is precisely what has made public health an impossible dream. And the populism that our pundits so hate and fear is, in fact, the cure for what ails us.
• What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power — Justin Rowlatt: "It's just how opium poppy is farmed now," Mr Brittan tells me. "They drill down 100m (325ft) or so to the ground water, put in an electric pump and wire it up to a few panels and bingo, the water starts flowing." Take-up of this new technology was very rapid. The first report of an Afghan farmer using solar power came back in 2013. The following year traders were stocking a few solar panels in Lashkar Gah, the Helmandi capital. Since then growth has been exponential. The number of solar panels installed on farms has doubled every year. By 2019 Mr Brittan's team had counted 67,000 solar arrays just in the Helmand valley. In Lashkar Gah market, solar panels are now stacked in great piles three storeys high.
• Private Equity Captures Rather Than Creates Value — Oren Cass in Newsweek: Suppose a private equity fund pays $100 million to acquire a closely-held family business that treats its workers with generosity while earning the owners a healthy annual profit of $10 million. The fund managers slash compensation, renegotiate supplier contracts and move production offshore. These "operating improvements" save $5 million annually, boosting profit and delivering an "exit" price after five years of $150 million. The fund takes $20 million in "management and advisory fees" and returns the rest to investors, yielding them roughly what they would have earned had they placed their money in an index fund over the same period. What wealth has been created? What value? Investors are no better off than had the whole process never begun. Customers continue to pay the same price for the same product. The eventual acquirer has a more "valuable" company for which it had to pay a commensurately higher price. Suppliers and workers are worse off and receiving less income than in the past, while the fund managers now have $20 million more. No wealth or value has been created. There is no new capital to be invested. Resources that previously flowed to local businesses and families were rerouted to private equity partners and their lawyers and bankers in New York.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Why did England have Europe's worst Covid figures? The answer starts with austerity — Michael Marmot in the Guardian: The political mood of the decade from 2010 was one of the rolling back of the state, and a continuation of an apparent consensus that things were best left to the market. At times, this aversion to government action was made worse by a suspicion of expertise. This rolling back of the state was seen clearly in a reduction in public spending from 42% of GDP in 2009-10 to 35% in 2018-19. The fiscal retrenchment was done in a regressive way. If we look at spending per person by local authority, we find that the poorer the area concerned, the bigger the reduction. In the least deprived 20% of areas, local government spending went down by 16%; in the most deprived it went down by 32%. This is remarkable – the greater the need was, the more spending was reduced. Changes made to the tax and benefit system introduced in 2015 went on in a similar vein: the lower the family income, the bigger the loss as a result of the chancellor’s policies. I sat with a former minister in the Conservative government, showed him these figures and said: “Your government’s policy was ‘make the poor poorer’.” He looked uncomfortable and said that perhaps it was not their explicit policy. But there are smart people in the Treasury and they must have known that this would be the effect.
• Warren Buffett: America's Folksiest Predator — Matt Stoller interviews Dave Dayen about his book "Monopolized": The right to manage .COM and .NET domains is a government contract. It’s done through a a quasi-government entity, technically a nonprofit, called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Most recently in 2018, ICANN gave Verisign the right to increase the prices for that registry. Now these are small prices for each website, but every time you increase them, it's essentially billions and billions of dollars in free money that Verisign is allowed to grab. And Warren Buffett has nearly 13 million shares of this stock. This is not a well-known stock, not a high trading stock necessarily, but he recognized many years ago that they have a moat around their business. They're the only ones that get to assign .COM names and take 10 bucks a year for each domain name, which is a small amount in of itself. But if you take it from 150 million people, all of a sudden, you're talking about real money. He’s one of our nation's greatest monopoly spotters.
• To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo — Adrianne Jeffries at the Markup: As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual. The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.
• Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State — Masha Gessen in the New Yorker: The U.S. and Russia have vastly different cultures, incomparable histories, disparate ideological influences, and divergent economies. One similarity that unites them, however, is radical inequality. In the Soviet Union, members of the Party élite lived in a different universe than the rest of the country. They had their own neighborhoods, schools, roads, resorts, stores, and, of course, their own health-care system. This is still true. A wealthy and well-connected Russian can receive world-class medical care, while ordinary people are reduced, much like in Soviet days, to having to buy their own disposable syringes and pay cash for nursing care in the hospital. Wealthy Americans also live in a different universe, and when they get sick they land in different hospitals than middle- and lower-class Americans—which, as the coronavirus has shown, makes it much more likely that they will survive.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• 10 Reasons I Won’t Vote for Biden — Ted Rall: 1. My vote is a personal endorsement. It says, “I, citizen Ted Rall, approve of Joe Biden’s career in public office.” I do not. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his vote to invade Iraq, which killed over 1 million innocent people. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his long history of racism, beginning with his disgusting opposition to court-ordered busing. 2. Biden has never apologized for his numerous right-wing policy positions, such as writing the fascist USA-Patriot Act and the 1994 crime bill that expanded mass incarceration of Black men. Biden’s refusal to apologize indicates that he still believes he did the right thing, and that he would do them again in the future. Why should I forgive him? He has never asked for forgiveness. 3. Joe Biden lies a lot. He falsely claimed to hold three bachelor’s degrees and to have graduated at the top of his law school class with a full scholarship. He falsely claimed to have come from a family of coal miners in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He plagiarized in law school and when he wrote his speeches. He said he was arrested with Nelson Mandela; it didn’t happen. During his recent debate against Bernie Sanders, he looked Sanders and the American people in the eye and falsely claimed not to have repeatedly supported the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion. One of the biggest reasons to despise Trump is that he lies so often. What’s the point of replacing one liar with another? […]
• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• ‘No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?’ — as told to Eli Saslow of the Washington Post: Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter. I had a guy come in with no mask and a pistol on his hip and stare me down. I had a guy who took his T-shirt off and put it over his mouth so I could see his whole stomach. “There. A mask. Are you happy?” I had a lady who tried to tape a pamphlet on the front window about the ADA mask exemption, which is a totally fake thing. It’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s become popular here. She kept saying we were discriminating against people with disabilities. What? Why? How? None of what they say sounds logical. I can’t make sense of half the names they call me. They say I’m uneducated — uh, that’s kind of ironic. They say I’m a sheep. I’ve been brainwashed. I’m pushing government propaganda. I’m suffocating them. I’m a part of the deep state. I’m an agent for the World Health Organization. “How do you like your muzzle?” “Is this going to become sharia law?” “Are you prepping us to wear burqas?” “What’s next? Mind control?”
• Dems' Sternly Worded Letter Won't Stop Fascism — David Sirota: Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that President Trump deployed unidentified agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Ore., where they were filmed getting out of unmarked vehicles and abducting protesters off the street. A few days later, House Democrats responded by obediently advancing an appropriations bill that funds the department -- with no apparent restrictions on such deployments. “This bill as a whole will strengthen our security and keep Americans safe while upholding our American values of fairness and respect,” said Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, amid growing outrage at the situation in Oregon. With congressional Democrats on their way to approving $50 billion for DHS, Trump administration officials are now boasting about their plans to replicate the Portland invasion in other cities. Those officials seem emboldened to ignore local Democratic opposition to the federal deployments.
• Sleeping — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops — Micah Lee at the Intercept: A week after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes while he lay handcuffed in the street until he died, triggering massive nationwide protests, a young political science major in Oregon was contacting lawyers. “I am a long time activist and ally of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she wrote to a Bay Area law firm. “Is there anyway[sic] that I could add your firm, or consenting lawyers under your firm, to a list of resources who will represent protesters pro bono if they were/are to be arrested? Thank you very much for your time.” A lawyer who read this message was infuriated and anonymously reported the student to the authorities. “PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED SOLICITATION I RECEIVED FROM AN ANTIFA TERRORIST WANTING MY HELP TO BAIL HER AND HER FRIENDS OUT OF JAIL, IF ARRESTED FOR RIOTING,” he typed into an unhinged letter, in all-caps, that he mailed to the Marin County District Attorney’s office, just north of San Francisco. […] An investigator in the Marin County DA’s office considered this useful intelligence. She logged into the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center’s CMS and created a new Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” and typed the student’s name as the subject. “The attached letter was received via US Postal Service this morning,” she wrote in the summary field. The student “appears to be a member of the Antifa group and is assisting in planning protesting efforts in the Bay Area despite living in Oregon.”
• Don’t Sell Your Mind — Janet Capron in Public Seminar: After a reading at Shakespeare & Company, I heard my favorite question, which came from an Upper East Side matron and sounded more accusatory than curious: “Don’t you ever regret having been a prostitute?” I paused for a second or two. “No. I’ve searched my soul, and the answer is still no.” Then, with a little gleam in my eye (I like to think), I said, “What I really regret are the more than two decades I spent working in pharmaceutical advertising.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Out of Control — Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today: Autonomous people experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that doesn't mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is experienced even by people in collectivist societies. Selfish individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of "human nature." Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what happens to us. In fact, when people are raised without support for their autonomy—overcontrolled by parents and teachers—two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy. And they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like selfishness. If they have grown up feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a larger community, as tantamount to "tyranny." They might insist that their convenience takes precedence over other people with immune-compromised vulnerability.
• #1516; In which a Visitor proves a Nuisance — Wondermark, by David Malki !:
  
• It's Time for an End-of-Life Discussion About Nursing Homes — Rose Eveleth in Wired: Even before the pandemic hit, nursing homes seemed like an odd, collective compromise. Most American adults, in a survey from two years ago, said they wouldn’t want to leave their homes or communities as they aged—and most also didn’t envision that they’d ever end up doing so. In 2016, 1.3 million Americans were residents of nursing facilities. “It's considered completely normal that we would take an individual and force them to give up their home, their family, and their life and place them in this institution. We just take that as a given,” says Bruce Darling, an organizer with Rochester Adapt, a disability rights organization. He and other advocates are wondering if now, finally, in the face of coronavirus, people might reconsider these spaces altogether. The present chaos and horror in nursing homes should come as no surprise. In 2018, 11 children died in a nursing facility in New Jersey from an adenovirus outbreak. A contagious fungus has meanwhile infected over 800 nursing home residents over the past few years, killing half of them. Tom Chiller, a fungal expert at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called nursing facilities “the dark underbelly of drug-resistant infection.” In 2014, a New Mexico nursing home was struck by an outbreak of Clostridium difficile that killed eight residents. These outbreaks happen to be among the ones we know about. As a Reuters investigation showed, many such events in nursing homes never get reported.
• Forget UBI, says an economist: It’s time for universal basic jobs — Pavlina Tcherneva interviewed by Cory Doctorow for the LA Times: Governments guarantee all sorts of things: loans, contracts. It’s not novel for the public sector to provide guarantees. We don’t rely on the market to solve poverty or education. So, if we’re going to manage unemployment by creating jobs on demand, how should we do it? Not necessarily with big federal projects. Rather, the government could fund jobs proposed by agencies, states and localities, but also folks who are doing social work on the ground, through nonreligious, nonpolitical, nonprofit organizations struggling to fill gaps left by the market. We’d solicit projects: concrete things for the communities where we live. Environmental rehabilitation, renewal and monitoring, the invisible green work that has to be done. On top of that, all our care needs! Being a companion for elderly people, helping with housework and errands. We need to reassess what we class as productive jobs. Community theater is enormously productive. […] I want to stress, this is not punitive. We are providing jobs, not requiring them. The progressive answer to structural unemployment is a jobs guarantee. The reactionary version is workfare. If we leave this to right-wing authoritarian governments, they’ll have punitive public works programs. They’ll make unemployed people build border walls. Unless progressives wake up to something bolder and bigger than just solving this crisis, I fear that the future is bleak. And, in related but sad news about somebody who took up a government invitation into community theatre:
• Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98 — Robert Berkvist and Peter Keepnews do the obit for the NYT: Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 20, 1922, to Irving Reiner, a watchmaker, and Bessie (Mathias) Reiner. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he went to work as a machinist’s helper and seemed headed for a career repairing sewing machines. Then one day his older brother, Charlie, mentioned seeing a newspaper article about a free acting class being given by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs agency. Carl tried his hand at acting, found he was good at it, hung up his machinist’s apron and joined a theater troupe.
• 'Deplorable Act in Face of Global Crisis': Trump Condemned as US Buys Up Nearly Entire Supply of Covid-19 Drug — Jake Johnson at Common Dreams: The Trump administration's decision to purchase almost all of California-based Gilead Sciences' projected stock of remdesivir through September was also viewed by observers as a glaring example of the "dysfunctional character" of a patent system that gives pharmaceutical giants decades of monopoly control over a drug that could save lives in the near-term. "This is what happens when the world relies on a broken system driven by greed and profit during a pandemic," tweeted U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, which is urging governments to override Gilead's patent through compulsory licensing. "Governments have a right to override this ludicrous patent system under international law, and they should take the opportunity to do that now, saving the [National Health Service] and patients around the world from the profiteering of these dysfunctional corporations," Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said in a statement.
• Joan Robinson On Public Sector Deficits And Debt — V. Ramanan in The Case For Concerted Action: The National Government which was formed in 1931 went in for a great economy campaign. Local authorities were compelled to cease work on building schemes, roads, fen drainage, and so forth. An emergency budget was introduced, increasing taxation, cutting unemployment allowances and reducing the pay of public servants, such as teachers and the armed forces. Private citizens felt it was patriotic to spend less. Some Cambridge Colleges gave up their traditional feasts as a recognition of the crisis. All this helped to increase unemployment and make the economic situation of the country still more depressed. Nowadays there is considerably more understanding of how things work and it is unlikely that such a completely idiotic policy will be tried again.
• I have a hard time taking compliments — James Miller and The Oatmeal:
  

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Will he go? — Lawrence Douglas interviewed by Sean Illing in Vox: When I was researching the book, I was asking myself, well, what does the Constitution and the federal law do in order to secure the peaceful transition of power? And one of the things that I realized is they don’t secure the peaceful succession of power. They presuppose it. They assume that it’s going to happen. So if it doesn’t happen, well, no one knows ...
• “Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired — Brian Resnick in Vox: Many states opened up in early May, hoping the economy would recover while a winning battle against Covid-19 continued apace. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that in the areas where the virus has come roaring back, few gains against it were made in the last month. “We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” said Jeff Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University.
• Preprint — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written — Nicholas Barber on P.G. Wodehouse for the BBC: Maybe you can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie’s lack of interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends, however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that Wodehouse was revolutionary because his characters didn’t defeat villains in fist fights or shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen’s helmets on Boat Race night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can’t all be high achievers, let alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it, “You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection: you just bask in its warmth and splendour.”
• How JK Rowling Betrayed the World She Created — Gabrielle Bellot in Literary Hub: That this is the issue she has chosen to focus on in the wake of international protests against anti-Blackness and police brutality—most protests of which contain many LGBTQ people—is all the more absurdly tone-deaf, suggesting her fanatical obsession with trans people. People who deeply despise one group or another—homophobes, racists, transphobes—so often seem unable to let go of those groups, orbiting them like angry moons, scarcely able to function unless we are there for them to denigrate.
• Via Dave Barry: