The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Is your ‘experience diet’ making you unwell? — Jenny Donovan in the Conversation: Just as our food diet affects our physical and emotional health, so does our “experience diet”. This is the day-to-day mix of the things we do, see, hear and feel. And, just like our food diet, the quantity, quality and balance of those experiences need to be right. […] Unfortunately, many of us have lifestyles that make it difficult or even impossible to meet all these needs. This diminishes our lives and leaves us isolated and unwell. This happens for several reasons, among which is the range of experiences our surroundings invite us to enjoy, endure or miss out on. You might call this our experience menu. If it’s not on the menu it doesn’t get to be in our diet.
• The dark side of decision-making in groups: Nastiness to outsiders — Michal Bauer, Jana Cahlíková, Dagmara Celik Katreniak, Julie Chytilová, Lubomír Cingl, Tomáš Želinský in Vox (EU): Being anti-social is very different from being self-regarding. Economic agents motivated purely by self-interest will destroy the resources of others only when they stand to gain. But there is much more scope for harming others if they also derive utility from relative status or feel pleasure from beating an opponent. It is also important to understand whether simply being placed into a group creates an 'us versus them' psychology that influences behaviour of group members, or whether the behavioural difference is an outcome of deliberation. If the mere fact of deciding in a group makes an individual more willing to cause harm, a broad range of situations may create an increased tendency to behave anti-socially.
• Bloom County — By Berkely Breathed:
  
• The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer — Oliver Lee Bateman in MEL Magazine: “Nah, I’m nobody you’d know,” he assured me. “I’m here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It’s just a small part of the hustle.” The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez’s life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Death to the D.I.Y. Society — Ted Rall: Since the 1970s corporate efficiency experts have burdened American consumers with a constantly expanding galaxy of tasks that businesses used to perform for them. Craig Lambert calls it “shadow work”—labor imposed on you that you’re not conscious of. The Do It Yourself (because companies won’t hire workers to do it anymore) movement faced little resistance in a culture that elevates personal responsibility and rugged individualism. Which is how, in less than half a century, we have become accustomed to pumping our own gas and planning our own vacations and scanning our own groceries and running our own cable TV diagnostic tests, forgetting how much easier life was with service station attendants and travel agents and cashiers and technicians who came to your actual house. Not only do we work harder, we earn less due to the disappearance of service personnel jobs from the labor market.
• Economic Growth and Climate Change: Mistaking an Output Variable for an Instrument — Peter Dorman at Angry Bear: Economic growth is not, not, not a policy variable. There is no magic button available to society that delivers a given rate of economic growth, or degrowth for that matter. It’s an outcome of a host of factors, some of which are controllable, others not. Indeed, as we wait for quarterly GDP numbers to be revised several quarters later, we still don’t know what economic growth or contraction we’ve experienced. It is true that politicians often speak of the need to adopt some policy or other for sake of economic growth, but at best they are proposing to push on one of the many factors that influences it. There is no growth dial, and even if there were, twisting it a few notches would have almost no impact on carbon emissions, which need to fall by nearly 100% within two generations.
• Tome the Dancing Bug — by Ruben Bolling:
  
• 20th anniversary for the euro — no reason for celebration — Lars P. Syll: When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary. Already since its start, the euro has been in crisis. And the crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract. And it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries, but also in countries like France and Germany. Alarming facts that should be taken seriously.
• The Democrats Are Climate Deniers — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin: Elizabeth Warren is instructive in this respect. She is considered one of the most progressive candidates in the race in 2020, but Warren has never really shown any leadership on the issue, as numerous environmental activists attest to. The leading piece of legislation she authored (“I’ve got a plan to fight back,” she said at the time) only came in September of last year, and it’s a bill that — drum roll — would force public companies to disclose climate risks, so that “investors would have the information they need . . . [to] make smart decisions with their money.” If that sounds like what might generously be described as a quarter-measure that relies on market solutions to a problem actively being driven by the market, that’s because it is. [Ignore the misguided "pay-for" bits in the article. And, on the subject of pay-fors:]
• We Can Pay For A Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal, and Greg Carlock in the Huffington Post: Are taxes an important part of an aggressive climate plan? Sure. Taxes can shape incentives and help change behaviors within the private sector. Taxes should be raised to break up concentrations of wealth and income, and to punish polluters for the cost and consequences of their actions. In a period without federal leadership on the climate crisis, this is how many state and local governments are considering carbon pricing. That’s useful ― not because we “need to pay for it” but to end polluters’ harmful behavior. The federal government can spend money on public priorities without raising revenue, and it won’t wreck the nation’s economy to do so. That may sound radical, but it’s not. It’s how the U.S. economy has been functioning for nearly half a century. That’s the power of the public purse.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 Percent Tax on the Rich Isn't About Revenue, It's About Decreasing Inequality — Vanessa Williamson in Common Dreams: Progressive taxation should work as a corrective tax, like tobacco taxes or a carbon tax. Sure, tobacco taxes raise some revenue for the states. But their primary purpose is to curb smoking. While a carbon tax could produce a lot of government revenue, the real point is to limit global warming pollution. In essence, corrective taxes try to put themselves out of business; if tobacco tax revenues decline because people quit smoking, or if carbon taxes stop rolling in because the economy becomes fossil-free, that is victory, not defeat.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Wondermark — by David Malki !:
  
• The DNA Industry and the Disappearing Indian: DNA, Race, and Native Rights — Aviva Chomsky for TomDispatch: In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them. So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
• Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students. — Nancy Bunge in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Some students understand the implications of all this. When I first told a class that one of the students would have to collect and submit the evaluations so that I couldn’t tamper with them, one of them asked, "Doesn’t that make you feel demeaned?" Another student wrote on an evaluation, "Why don’t you get off your ass and see for yourself what a great job she is doing?" And, indeed, the administration, not the students, should undertake the difficult task of appraising how well a class works. A colleague once remarked, "When we agitated for student evaluations in the ’60s, we never guessed we were handing the administration a club."
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• Education…education…education — The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies: Instead of higher education being about learning, exploration and creativity, it is increasingly becoming commodified; serving the interests of capital rather than the development of the individual for life and the benefit of society. Already, as Steve Watson notes, there is the potential for subjects that do not have a direct link to the world of work to disappear or be reconfigured for employability. And while universities struggle for funding and try to cut costs, students face the prospect of a lifetime of education debt without even the certainty of finding a good, well paying job at the end of it.
• Tom Toles for December 02, 2018:
  
• Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system — Lane Greene in Aeon: It is a delight to be able to use a good literally: when my son fell off a horse on a recent holiday, I was able to reassure my mother that ‘He literally got right back in the saddle,’ and this pleased me no end. So when people use literally to say, for example, We literally walked a million miles, I sigh a little sigh. I know that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and many others used a figurative literally, but as a mere intensifier it’s not particularly useful or lovely, and it is particularly useful and lovely in the traditional sense, where it has no good substitute. So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. Not the end of the world, but harm.
• Evil Mansion — Phil Are Go:
  
• Urban planning is failing children and breaching their human rights – here’s what needs to be done — Jenny Wood in the Conversation: When children are asked about their favourite places to play, the playground is rarely their first choice. And most adults will often agree that they also favoured places other than the playground when they were children: parks, woods, riverbanks, fields and beaches were the places that captured imagination, not a few swings in an enclosed tarmacked space. Similarly, skateparks offer only limited recreation potential and tend to be favoured more by boys than by girls. Playgrounds often lack a range of equipment to suit children of different ages and abilities and are not always well maintained. Children also have to be able to reach the playground safely on their own, otherwise they have to be accompanied. This can limit the time children have to play outdoors and contributes further demands on the time of already pressured parents and carers. These exclusions and misunderstandings of what children really need contribute to environments that favour adults over children, and can leave children feeling disempowered, discouraged, inactive and dependent on the adults around them.
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Just You Wait, History Proves That Someday Liberals Will Love Donald Trump — Ted Rall:
  
• The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ — Gavin Evans in the Guardian: Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.
• Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam — Douglas Rushkoff in Medium: The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them. […] Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.
• The Rise and Demise of RSS — Sinclair Target in Motherboard: About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology. The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.