The Zero Room

This fortnight, I have been mostly working like a navvy, but also reading:

• Neither Elizabeth Warren Nor Other Congressmen Have a Plan for the COVID-19 Depression — Ted Rall: Kicking the can down the road with suspended debt collection and eviction moratoriums and putting off utilities shut-offs is a guaranteed ineffective, massively counterproductive wallop of magical thinking that pretends not only that everything is about to be fine, but that everyone is going to win the lottery and be able to use their newfound winnings to pay off their coronavirus debts. It’s ridiculous and stupid and unworthy of discussion by serious people.
• I Am Using My Free Time to Not Write a Novel — Scott Bolohan in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: They say the best way to not write a novel is to not write every day. When you first wake up is a particularly good time to not write. But as I join billions of others around the world in quarantine, I worry my newfound free time is going to get in the way of not writing a novel.
• The Financial Literacy Delusion — Agata Soroko in Public Seminar: An analysis I conducted of curriculum documents across the United States and Canada showed that financial literacy standards frame economic well-being primarily as a personal practice, overlooking the various mechanisms that generate inequalities. They ignore the role of Wall Street, the lack of government financial regulation, and a financial system in which crises are par for the course. Financial literacy standards extol the virtues of attaining personal wealth but in forty-one of the forty-three curriculum frameworks I examined, the word “capitalism” does not appear. Financial literacy is silent about the need for decent working conditions, unemployment insurance, paid leave, a living wage. It also leaves unmentioned the subject of rising economic inequality marked by income volatility and unaffordable housing. Mounting student loan bills are presented as a problem of financial smarts, not skyrocketing college tuition. Instead, a financial literacy narrative endures which maintains that people are in debt because they spend their money on luxuries like lattes and avocado toast.
• Scenes from a Multiverse — Jon Rosenberg:
  
• Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty? — Claire Kelloway in the Washington Monthly: Farmers increasingly raise foods on contract for one dominant buyer that can dictate what they grow and how (Heinz, for instance, has their tomato farmers use Heinz crafted seeds). Large swaths of foods may be raised for one specific plant that serves just one purpose, such as bottling milk for grocery stories or processing cheese for restaurants. While highly specialized products and plants create consistency, these rigid supply chains cannot easily redirect their products to different uses if things go awry. Take the case of eggs. Farmers such as Kerry Mergen in Minnesota raise laying hens on contract. Mergen’s 61,000-bird operation was specifically designed to supply eggs for pre-cracked fluid-egg mixes, used almost exclusively in food service. Most of what they produced went to one Cargill plant that temporarily shut down this week due to lost restaurant and food-service customers. Even though grocery stores report egg shortages, grading eggs for retail requires special equipment and likely new contracts with a different large buyer. Instead, the corporation that Mergen raised hens for, Daybreak Foods, decided to euthanize his flock and sell the birds to a rendering plant to become pet food.
• Did you ever wonder what you'd be doing during an apocalypse? — Frankie Boyle in the Overtake: 2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year. Remember at the beginning of the year when Rod Stewart lamped a security guard and Justin Bieber announced that he had Lyme disease? Dizzying times: it genuinely felt like the world was a wonderful place to be. For many of you, it will have been surprising to learn what was expected of you during an apocalypse. You always wondered whether you would be fleeing; fortifying a bunker; or camping on a motorway roundabout. Turns out you’re working from home. Trying to get a spreadsheet about bodybags finished before the provisional deadline of your own death. Mistakes have been made in the handling of the crisis. Like flying the Buckingham Palace flag at half mast when the Queen’s not in, which is just an advert for burglars. In my local park, someone has tried to cheer people up by chalking “You Got This!” on the ground. Literally the last thing you want to hear in a pandemic.
• To our brothers and sisters of popular movements and organizations — Pope Francis: My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven) are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humankind. Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share. […] Moreover, I urge you to reflect on “life after the pandemic,” for while this storm shall pass, its grave consequences are already being felt. You are not helpless. You have the culture, the method, and most of all, the wisdom that are kneaded with the leaven of feeling the suffering of others as your own. I want all of us to think about the project of integral human development that we long for and that is based on the central role and initiative of the people in all their diversity, as well as on universal access to those three Ts that you defend: Trabajo (work), Techo (housing), and Tierra (land and food) . I hope that this time of danger will free us from operating on automatic pilot, shake our sleepy consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money and places human life and dignity at the centre.
• Tom Toles:
  
• Home Alone at the White House: A Sour President, With TV His Constant Companion — Katie Rogers and Annie Karni in the New York Times: Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Mr. Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor campaign surrogate and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Mr. Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Mr. Trump was doing a good job. Mr. Lindell said Mr. Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Mr. Lindell said.
• Bye, Amazon — Tim Bray: May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
• Why CO2 Isn’t Falling More during a Global Lockdown — Benjamin Storrow in E&E News, via SciAm: The numbers illustrate just how intertwined oil is with the global economy. Cars and planes can be parked en masse, and yet widespread oil consumption continues. “The crisis shows how challenging decarbonizing the economy purely through behavioral adjustment would be,” Houser said, noting that individual decisions about not driving or flying deliver only limited emissions reductions. “What we need are technological solutions that allow our economy to operate at 100% with 5%-8% annual reductions going forward,” he said.
• The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more. — Brian Resnick in Vox: It was the follow-up work, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that found a stunning correlation: The longer kids were able to hold off on eating a marshmallow, the more likely they were to have higher SAT scores and fewer behavioral problems, the researchers said. The results were taken to mean that if only we could teach kids to be more patient, to have greater self-control, perhaps they’d achieve these benefits as well. But the studies from the ’90s were small, and the subjects were the kids of educated, wealthy parents. In fairness to Mischel and his colleagues, their findings, as written in 1990, were not so sweeping. In the study linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, the researchers acknowledged the possibility that with a bigger sample size, the magnitude of their correlation could decrease. They also mentioned that the stability of the home environment may play a more important role than their test was designed to reveal. It also wasn’t an experiment. The results also didn’t necessarily mean that teaching kids to delay their gratification would cause these benefits later on. “The findings of that study were never intended to be prescriptions for an application,” Yuichi Shoda, a co-author on the 1990 paper linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, says in an email. “Our paper does not mention anything about interventions or policies.” […] Yet their findings have been interpreted to be a prescription by school districts and policy wonks. “If you’re a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you’re just dancing around with proxy issues,” the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote in 2006. It’s not hard to find studies on interventions to increase delaying gratification in schools or examples of schools adopting these lessons into their curricula. Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster has even been used to teach the lesson.
• 30 million Americans are unemployed. Here’s how to employ them. — David Roberts interviews Pavlina Tcherneva in Vox: One big confusion is that people think the job guarantee is going to replace some must-do, ongoing, critical programs. But we are not replacing EPA inspectors or FDA inspectors, who have to be there at all times. If you have a care project — environmental care, community care — you could add a lot more hands, a lot more people to shadow teachers or nurses to do on-the-job training. These programs can be a buffer that absorbs unemployed people, and then, as they are ready to move on to better jobs, they leave. In recessions, social needs become more acute. We need extra helping hands for the food kitchens or the homeless shelters. It is the nature of the job guarantee that whenever there are more needs, there are more people to do them. Essentially it is a coordinating mechanism.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Michael de Adder (via Digby):
  
• The government is going to beat coronavirus using modern monetary theory — Richard Murphy: Last night Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News reported that the Coronavirus Emergency Bill included an increase in the UK government contingency fund for unexpected expenditure from just over £10 billion a year to more than £260 billion in the coming year. This morning I admit that I can find no reference to this in the media, or in the draft Bill itself, but I have a very strong suspicion that the figure was reported with good reason. Whether precisely correct or not, what this additional provision demonstrates is three things. The first is that additional government expenditure happens because the government decrees that it should. Second, the government can decree this without first having raised tax revenue to ensure that the expenditure is funded. And, third, the government can also do this without the prior consent of bond markets: there was no guarantee or underwriting from them for this action.
• What Trump's coronavirus briefings are really about — Windsor Mann in the Week: He prefers to discuss things that have nothing to do with the pandemic, such as his "very popular" wife and "Sleepy Joe Biden." While he has not called for the coronavirus to be locked up, he said, "We're building a wall." His logorrhea occasionally takes him into the unchartered territories of pseudo-empathy and complete sentences, as when he said, "Life is fragile" and "The whole concept of death is terrible." Also terrible is the credit Trump isn't getting. More than anything, he wants to be commended. On Sunday, he complained that "nobody said thank you" after he donated part of his presidential salary to fighting the coronavirus. He donated $100,000, which is $30,000 less than what he spent on silencing a porn star.
• As Bad As the COVID-19 Crisis Is Now, Life Will Eventually Go Back to Being Normal-Bad Again — Matthew Brian Cohen at McSweeny's Internet Tendency: While we might make coronavirus testing, and possibly even treatment, free of charge, rest assured, once this blows over, you will continue to go into debt for any other health issue. Nothing can stop the American way of life, not even a pandemic. We will not let this virus prevent our insurance companies from gouging us for basic services the way our Founding Fathers intended. We will not let COVID-19 change who we are — cruel, capitalist, and dog eat dog. Look, Americans are some of the toughest people in the world. We’ve been through a hell of a lot as a country – slavery, civil and world wars, recession after recession after recession, and we courageously ignored the lessons of all of them. I’m confident we can get through this epidemic without losing sight of the systemic problems that got us into this mess in the first place.
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Supply chains: a neoliberal crisis — Alistair Cartwright in Counterfire: The Atlantic magazine has highlighted how today’s ‘just-in-time’ distribution methods, which only keep 15-30 days worth of products in stock, have exacerbated the problem. The supplies manager at The Medical University of South Carolina put it like this: “I guess we’ve done a good enough job within the health-care supply chain of getting pricing down to the point that the vendors don’t have a lot of extra margin or slack to play with.” […] The more health is treated as a commodity, the more the production and distribution of essential medical equipment become keyed to the fluctuations of the market. One of neoliberalism’s favourite catchphrases even finds its way into an official NHS emergency response framework: ‘just in time’ contracts with suppliers will be activated in the event of a pandemic.
• Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds — Jon Stone at the Independent: Tactics by anti-Corbyn staff evidenced in the report include channelling resources to candidates associated with the right wing of the party, refusing to share information with the leader’s office, and “coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months” during the election campaign. The report says hostile staff created a chat so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other, with one participant stating that “tap tap tapping away will make us look v busy”. An election night chat log shows that 45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years”, describing themselves and their allies as “silent and grey-faced” and in need of counselling.
• Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic and U.S. Response — Ryan Goodman and Danielle Schulkin at Just Security: In our view, the timeline is clear: Like previous administrations, the Trump administration knew for years that a pandemic of this gravity was possible and imminently plausible. Several Trump administration officials raised strong concerns prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and raised alarms once the virus appeared within the United States. While some measures were put in place to prepare the United States for pandemic readiness, many more were dismantled since 2017. In response to COVID-19, the United States was slow to act at a time when each day of inaction mattered most–in terms of both the eventual public health harms as well as the severe economic costs. The President and some of his closest senior officials also disseminated misinformation that left the public less safe and more vulnerable to discounting the severity of the pandemic.
• Joe Biden says he ‘doesn’t have enough information’ on Iran to have a view. How odd – he negotiated the nuclear deal — Robert Fisk in the Independent: A few days ago, Bernie Sanders announced that US sanctions should not be contributing to Iran’s “humanitarian disaster” and that its economic war against Tehran should, at least temporarily, during the coronavirus crisis, be lifted. So what did Joe think about that? Well, the wordsmith frontrunner responded with this imperishable statement: “I don’t have enough information about the situation in Iran right now.” Now this was very odd. Was not Biden the vice president under the Obama administration that actually negotiated the Iran nuclear accord – and which Donald Trump tore up in 2018? Even weirder was Biden’s continuing blather on the subject. “There’s a lot of speculation from my foreign policy team that they’re [sic] in real trouble and they’re [sic] lying. But I would need more information to make that judgement. I don’t have the national security [sic] information available.” Well, he could have fooled me. Clearly Biden isn’t planning to help the Iranians, although – like a lot of voters – I’m not quite clear whom he’s accusing of lying. Does he think the Iranians are telling fibs? Or the Trump administration? Since the Iranians initially kept quiet about shooting down a Ukrainian airliner and may well have dissembled about the start of the coronavirus – and then Trump originally denied that the coronavirus even existed – we can safely conclude that both Iran and Trump lie through their teeth. So I guess it doesn’t matter what Biden meant. Which is one of his problems.
• Provenance unknown, via Bruce Sterling:
  
• The coronavirus response calls into question the future of super — Warwick Smith in the Conversation: The trouble with money is most people are so busy looking at it they are blind to what’s going on in the real economy - by which I mean the production and distribution of goods and services. […] If Australia as a whole consumes fewer goods and services in one year, it is likely to reduce rather than increase its future wealth because it is fully utilised labour and capital that drives investment and productivity. That’s what lies at the core of misunderstandings about the superannuation system. Foreign investment aside, it can’t allow an entire society to save for the future to support itself in retirement.
• What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage — Will Oremus in Medium: In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. […] If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused. […] Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• Coronavirus may precipitate a crash but it won’t be its cause, which will be the overstressed state of the world economy — Richard Murphy: Coronavirus would not be the issue it is in economic terms if we did not have such an interconnected world, where supply lines are stretched to their limits so that many companies are at risk from the slightest disruption to their systems, which coronavirus is already creating, and which could get much worse. And nor would coronavirus be such a threat if households in many parts of the world were not already over-stretched with debt, meaning any disruption will tip many over financial limits and into serious financial risk of bankruptcy.
• Animal on the Street - Flat-Earther dies trying to prove the Earth is flat. — Phil Are Go!:
  
  More…
• Joe Biden Would Be Donald Trump's Dream Opponent — Conor Lynch in Truthdig: Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that led to an explosion in mass incarceration; he played a critical role in passing the 2005 bankruptcy bill that stripped bankruptcy protection from some of the most vulnerable people. Biden also supported and championed the Iraq War. This list goes on and on. Beyond his extremely problematic record, which will make it hard for Democrats to go after Trump about, say, cutting Social Security (which Biden himself supported not too long ago), Biden has his own personal scandals that will make it very difficult for him to cast Trump as corrupt.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  
• The infinite scroll — David Roth at the Columbia Journalism Review: Even on the websites of august institutions ads interrupt the text every two paragraphs; ads follow you down the sides of the page like store security; ads pop up in boxes that resist being closed, the elusive little x evading your cursor. There have always been websites like this, usually the kind that we save for private browsing: places to stream out-of-market sporting events, or download bittorrents of hard-to-find films, or browse other things that no reasonable person would admit to. Now, a great many websites are at least a little bit like this. Not all of these sites are as hard up as they appear, but all of them—the authentically desperate and the merely thirsty, the ones trying heroically to sell their way out of a downward spiral and those blithely steering into it—have made the same choice. Which is to look and feel and be more friendly to advertisers than readers.
• Sshh! He's TRYING to SLEEP! — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In — interviewed by Halimah Marcus in Electric Literature: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
• Life in the stupidverse, part elventy-million — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• Solar Panels Could Be the Best Fad Ever — Clive Thompson in Wired: In a 2014 study, Yale economist Kenneth Gillingham and a colleague looked at the adoption of residential solar installations in Connecticut and found that it spread through neighborhoods in a “wave-like centrifugal pattern.” A subsequent study, by economist Stefano Carattini, then at Yale, and two colleagues, documented the same phenomenon in Switzerland. And when I dropped by the offices of Brooklyn Solarworks, the folks there showed me a map of where they'd installed panels. Sure enough, it was all epidemiological hot spots—you see empty streets with no solar at all, then blocks that are simply crammed with it, neighbors next to neighbors with arrays. […] Even language matters. In Switzerland, there are regions that speak Italian, German, French. If solar is spreading, it stops when it hits a language border. Solar virality is a matter of, quite literally, word of mouth. This points to an obvious corollary: If we want to encourage climate-saving behaviors, people need to talk more.
• Scientific Briefing — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• Joe Biden Obviously Has Dementia and Should Withdraw — Ted Rall: I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant. Years before her death, however, she was having a tough time keeping it together. I would have voted for her as president in 2012 but not 2016. It would have been wrong. No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Joe Biden. In online discussions Biden apologists sometimes say that a senile Biden is better than an evil Trump. Is this really where we are? Consider the 20 or so contenders for the Democratic nomination as of late last year. All of them except for one—Biden­—were mentally competent. Marianne Williamson came off as loopy and Tom Steyer was painfully awkward but both were in full command of their faculties. Congratulations, Democrats, you literally picked the worst of the bunch.
• Sutton Impact — by Ward Sutton:
  
• When it comes to sick leave, we’re not much better prepared for coronavirus than the US — Peter Whiteford and Bruce Bradbury in the Conversation: In Hobart on Sunday health authorities said a man infected with coronavirus ignored instructions to self-isolate while he waited for his test results because he didn’t want to miss his casual shifts at Hobart’s Grand Chancellor Hotel. The Bureau of Statistics Characteristics of Employment Survey shows that in 2019, 24.4% of Australian employees were casuals without any access to paid leave. Adding in the self-employed, the proportion of all Australian workers without paid sick leave would be 37%. As the chart shows, Australians without paid sick leave are over-represented in some of the sectors with the greatest degree of personal contact with members of the public. 63% of people working in the accommodation and food services sector have no paid sick leave, and 45% of sales workers and 42% of community and personal service workers.
• 2010 and 2020 — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders — Norman Solomon: “It is time to ask how we got to where we are, not only our lack of preparation for the virus, but how we end up with an economy where so many people are hurting at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said at the close of his recent debate with Biden. “It is time to ask the question of where the power is in America. Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage?” While so-called “moderate” Democrats like Biden don’t want to answer -- or even hear -- such questions, Sanders insists on continuing to ask them. Such perseverance has never been more needed than at this pivotal moment, with so many lives in the balance. “Where the power is in America” has everything to do with why the U.S. government’s response to the unfolding coronavirus catastrophe has continued to be so anemic, foreshadowing so many more deaths and so much more grief.

This month, I have been mostly not reading, except for things like this:

• Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? — Molly Young in Vulture: Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
• The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin: It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.
• How to Transition From a Democracy to an Autocracy — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Stop, breathe, and look around. What’s happening? Has your faith in democratic institutions been pulverized underneath the crushing weight of a sham trial that called zero witnesses? Was an already unhinged president just given carte blanche to do whatever he wants because he knows there won’t be any consequences? Perhaps a cadre of lawyers embroiled in various sexual assault scandals of their own have made a series of ludicrous claims to justify incontrovertibly corrupt behavior without a hint of shame or irony? Take stock of your surroundings, meet yourself wherever you are, and remember to reach out and say howdy to others who have recently made the transition from democracy to autocracy.