Andrew

The US egg industry worked closely with a government official and a major public relations firm to target Hampton Creek, The Guardian reports, on the belief that the food company's plant-based mayonnaise represented a threat to its business. Emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the American Egg Board (AEB), egg industry executives, and an official from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) discussed several strategies to bring down Hampton Creek and its Just Mayo mayonnaise alternative, which outgoing AEB president Joanne Ivy described as "a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business" in an August 2013 email.

San Francisco-based Hampton Creek is a food technology startup...

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Google's seen a lot of changes recently, and the latest came yesterday, when the tech company surprised everyone with their new logo. In one of the biggest changes since 1999, Google's new logo uses a simpler sans-serif typeface.

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You don't often hear about people transitioning from alternative healing to science-based medicine or vice versa. That's what makes someone like Dr. Oz — a highly credentialed surgeon who also believes in "energy healing" — so interesting. It's also why, when I stumbled across Britt Hermes's blog — Confessions of a Naturopathic Doctor — I was immediately hooked.

Hermes studied naturopathy, a type of alternative medicine focused on "natural" treatments like herbs and homeopathy, at Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington. She then practiced for three years in Washington and Arizona — all while becoming increasingly disillusioned with her chosen profession.

"Naturopathic medicine is not what I was led to believe," she wrote on her blog. "I discovered that the profession functions as a system of indoctrination based on discredited ideas about health and medicine, full of anti-science rhetoric with many ineffective and dangerous practices."

Last year, Hermes left naturopathy behind and enrolled in a Master of Science program in Germany. On her blog, she's been myth-busting alternative medicine, and writing about everything from the gaps in regulation to what it's like to find cancer in a patient as a young ND.

Her crusade is not only personal; it's about protecting public health. In a number of states, NDs can prescribe pharmaceuticals, do minor surgery, and essentially act as primary care physicians.* The problem is that they have only a fraction of the clinical training that medical doctors do, and their education, as Hermes and others have pointed out, is peppered with dangerously pseudoscientific health claims. This is her story.

Julia Belluz: Why did you go into naturopathy?

Britt Hermes: I started with really high aspirations and a really idealistic point of view. During my education at Bastyr, some of that was upheld. I felt quite motivated, like I was choosing the right path. I had a lot of perception bias and self-fulfilling prophecies. I saw myself getting better, friends having healing experiences, that now in hindsight I realize was due to other things — self-limiting conditions, evidence-based medicine sprinkled in with the naturopathic medicine we were doing.

I graduated from Bastyr and wanted to do a residency. They are so rare, and I thought a residency would give me a leg up. So I worked in an outpatient clinic, and it was rewarding. I administered vaccines, dispensed antibiotics, tried to stick to the standard of care as much as possible by referring evidence-based sources like UpToDate.

JB: Wait a second ... You were a naturopathic doctor, and you were essentially doing the work of a primary care physician?

(Marilyn Barbone/Shutterstock)

BH: In the US, there are 20 states and territories that allow licensed naturopaths to practice some form of medicine. Within those, the jurisdiction around naturopathy varies widely — but the states that allow naturopaths to do the most include Washington, Arizona, Oregon, Vermont, California, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Montana, and Utah. [NDs can effectively practice as primary care providers in Vermont, Oregon, and Washington — see note at bottom.]

I worked in Washington and Arizona, and I saw everyone from newborns to senior citizens. I did everything from newborn exams to jaundice checks to breastfeeding checks with moms, helping moms get pregnant, seeing kids with chickenpox, flus, colds, coughs, ear infections, broken bones. It was definitely primary care.

But I also had patients who saw me just for ND things — a child with autism who had an MD, but the mom brought him to me for some of the nutritional concerns. I saw a lot of kids for food allergy testing. I saw some chronically ill patients.

JB: Did you feel qualified or prepared for this kind of work?

BH: I felt very nervous and talked about that with my mentors. They justified it that all new doctors feel nervous. I still feel I was a good doctor in some ways. It’s absurd, because I never trained as a doctor. But I had really meaningful connections with patients, I really cared, I wanted to help that person get better.

JB: When did things start to go sour for you?

BH: I moved to Arizona, and I wanted to work with an MD in integrative medicine. I landed in a private ND practice. Because insurance reimbursement was nonexistent in Arizona, my patient base changed.

I went from seeing families, doing well-child visits, to doing more of the "naturopathic-y" stuff. I guided people through detoxes, saw patients with multiple chemical sensitivities, patients with chronic Lyme — more of the woo woo diagnoses that mainstream medicine [has rejected].

It was harder to make money because patients had to pay for the entire visit out of pocket. The fee to see me was expensive — $185 for a new patient visit, and if I recommended any supplemental treatment or care, it was more.

What was off-putting was watching the other naturopaths in my office practice, to be frank. One saw cancer patients. It was off-putting to watch the naturopathic care of cancer patients, to see the alternative and non-science-based therapies recommended for some very sick patients. The cancer patients — many got IV treatments with high-dose vitamin C and different herbs.

I was under the impression, when I was going through school, that these treatments were science-based and evidence-based and helpful for cancer patients. But one of the things I came to find out as I was doing more research was that these alternative therapies are not proven, and in some cases are harmful to patients. One study stands out: Researchers found that cancer patients who chose to use alternative therapies died sooner and had a lower quality of life.

JB: Were you also caring for cancer patients?

BH: I remember one patient who was very anxious and concerned about her health. When she came in to see me, she gave me a long description about all the different therapies she had been trying: acupuncture, cod liver oil, different herbs, yoga, and meditation. And when I did a physical exam on her, it was very clear to me she was very sick. So sick that my medical recommendation was to refer her to a gastroenterologist as soon as possible and let a medical doctor take over her care.

But the patient didn’t want to see an MD. She was a patient who had specifically chosen an ND because she didn’t like mainstream medicine.

This patient stopped care with me over the course of a week and started care with another naturopathic doctor in the office who agreed to see her even though it was against my recommendation. I remember saying, "She’s very sick. She has a giant liver, and other concerning signs." Even after I had this conversation with the naturopathic doctor, the ND decided to see the sick patient anyway. She recommended some nutritional therapies.

I later found out that this patient actually had liver cancer. The signs were so ominous. She had the biggest liver I could ever imagine feeling. She had weight loss. She was tired. She looked sick. That was one of many sorts of failures that I saw in the office.

It just became clear I was part of a profession that shouldn’t be operating as MDs. They were missing obvious signs, taking on terminally ill cancer patients with the promise of a longer life, better quality of life. It all felt super unethical.

JB: After this horrifying experience, what do you think about the fact that some NDs essentially act as doctors?

BH: Not all NDs are that bad. There’s no doubt — we’re just not qualified to practice medicine. We don’t have nearly enough patient contact. We don’t have nearly enough clinical training. The phrase that always comes up is that NDs see the worried well. That’s what they’d say at Bastyr. The idea is that we’re not actually seeing sick patients. This sets us up to miss things like cancer.

I think it’s a really sad situation for everybody. It’s sad for the naturopaths. We’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive an ND education. We’re told our education is accredited, which provides this facade that means it’s accepted by US Department of Education. But it doesn’t mean that. Bastyr uses phrases like "the same as medical training, on par with MDs."

They're duping patients into fake medical treatment for cancer and many chronic illnesses with dubious therapies and IV treatments or some of these outrageous detox protocols for people who have never had toxic exposure to anything. The danger it poses to patients is they come into contact with ill-equipped and incompetent naturopaths who miss dangerous and important diagnoses.

The other frustration is the seeming lack of oversight by the state board that manages the licensed naturopaths in their respective states.

JB: Besides fighting pseudoscience on your blog, what else are you doing since you retired from the profession?

BH: I’m in a Master of Science program in northern Germany. It’s in biomedical research. I’m focused on the application of molecular biology in a clinical setting. The classes here are much harder.

*Note: I checked with the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians about naturopaths' scopes of practice. This is what their director of government and public affairs told me:

• NDs are licensed in 20 states and territories. The widest scopes of practice are in Vermont, Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Montana, and Utah.
• NDs effectively practice as primary care providers in Vermont, Oregon, and Washington.
• NDs can perform "minor surgery" or "minor office procedures" in Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Variations on this language exist for NDs in Alaska, California, DC, Kansas, and New Hampshire.
• NDs have prescriptive rights in about half the jurisdictions in which they’re licensed, namely Arizona, California (with MD/DO oversight), DC, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The broadest formularies are to be found in Arizona, California, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Vermont did away with its formulary: NDs there can prescribe whatever medications are consistent with their education and training.

In 1995, Connecticut established a "permit to purchase" law, which required a background check and eight hours of safety training for those seeking to buy a handgun.

Missouri used to have a law like that, too, but repealed it in 2007.

New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.

Most gun deaths in the United States are suicides

There were 33,636 gun deaths in the United States in 2013. While homicides and mass shootings dominate the headlines, nearly two-thirds of those deaths — 21,175 — were suicides.

More than half of all suicides in the United States are carried out with a gun. The evidence is pretty compelling that reducing access to firearms could prevent at least some of those deaths. My colleague Dylan Matthews has written about it here:

There's a popular myth that suicidal people will find a way to kill themselves no matter what, and that closing off one method (like guns) will just lead to an increase in suicides through other methods (like hanging or overdoses). But most suicides aren't committed by determined people who can't be talked out of it. They're impulsive actions that can usually be prevented by small barriers. Many survivors say they deliberated less than a day, and sometimes for only a matter of minutes, before making a suicide attempt. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped."

Baldwin's change of heart isn't too unusual. Ninety percent or so of people who've survived suicide attempts do not end up dying by suicide. So blocking off particularly lethal suicide methods — ones where attempts almost always lead to death — saves life.

We know suicides are more common in places that have more guns. Research from other countries, including Australia and Israel, has shown significant drops in suicides in the wake of tighter gun control. This new paper shows something similar happening in the United States.

Stricter gun control in Connecticut — and a drop in suicides

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University looked at Connecticut and Missouri to understand what happens when access to guns gets, respectively, harder or easier.

Estimating the effect of one new law is, as the researchers admit, tricky. There are dozens of things happening in each state that could affect suicide rates and no perfect experiment to isolate each one.

To make their best guess, though, the Hopkins researchers compared the change in suicide rates among some comparison states (those that didn't change their handgun permit laws) with Missouri and Connecticut (which did). Researchers have used similar methods to do things like estimate how many deaths Medicaid prevents — again, not a perfect study, but the best they've designed for these real-world scenarios.

That research showed that Missouri's handgun suicide rate was 16.1 percent higher over the five-year period after repeal than would be expected looking at the comparison states. Likewise, Connecticut's rate over a five-year period was 15.4 percent lower.

Suicide is a massive public health problem in the United States, and the 10th leading cause of death overall. This new research suggests pretty compelling evidence that we know at least one way to reduce suicides: Make it more difficult to obtain guns. As Dylan put it in a recent Vox video, "If someone told you there was a pollutant killing 21,000 people a year, you'd want to do something about it. It's worth asking ourselves if guns are that pollutant."

If you were wondering how Asus would respond to the challenge of Google's OnHub wireless router, wonder no longer. Forged in an off-world colony and teleported here by its own sheer power of will, the artfully titled RT-AC5300 is a wireless portal like no other. It takes the spaceship looks of D-Link's Ultra router and ratchets them up to 11.

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Google revamped its logo today, and reactions to the change are already pouring in. But the company also gave us a glimpse of what else might have been. In the middle of a near-1,500-word blog post about the news sits an unassuming picture of Google employees who are weighing a number of different designs, all presumably riffs on the Google logo that didn't make the cut.

There are some attempts at making the typeface all lowercase, one that looks very close to the design that Google just abandoned, and a few that are close to what we now know is the real thing. Perhaps the most radical is the one all the way to the far right — a more graphical spin on the logo where where "Google" is spelled out in solid circles and blocks.

It would be...

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The transformation of the fan-made greeting "May the 4th be with you" into the foundation of an annual Star Wars publicity storm had the sharp smell of cynicism. But this week it seems quaint. Force Friday, a new, wholly corporate creation, will close this work week on September 3rd. The day is an announcement and celebration of the toys and merchandise fans will see by this holiday.

I'm thrilled to see The Force Awakens, but I'm already exhausted by the Star Wars hype that could continue indefinitely.

To get some healthy perspective on Star Wars as films, not the centers of promotional vortexes, I invited longtime fan Bryan Bishop onto the show. We chat about how technology has allowed the actual films to be changed over the decades,...

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’re new to using Microsoft Excel, or an experienced user looking for a good visual reference, this handy cheat sheet covers eight helpful tricks for becoming a spreadsheet pro.

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One of the oldest Hollywood truisms that everybody knows — even those who don't follow show business that closely — is that script notes from the network or studio executives are frequently, fantastically awful. They just make everything worse. Why can't writers be left alone?

This is especially true in TV, where legions of writers have complained over the years about the dumb network executives who thought they could make things better with their suggestions. More often, they've just made things worse, right?

I would argue that assumption is often wrong. Filmmaking is a collaborative medium, and that means getting input from others. No director or showrunner has all the right answers. Sometimes the right answers come from one of the actors, or someone on the crew, or even somebody in the executive suite.

We often only hear about the bad network notes because they're the ones writers complain about, or they're the ones that used to serve to, say, make sure that if a show had gay characters, they never participated in any sexual activity or even got to kiss.

The good network notes, on the other hand, are so good we usually don't hear about them. Indeed, they often look like these innocuous but smart tweaks director Steven Soderbergh got from Cinemax for his medical drama The Knick.

@moryan @emilynussbaum @tvoti You're welcome! It's super nerdy. Stuff like this: pic.twitter.com/SgpdMHRxd7

— Corey Atad (@CoreyAtad) August 28, 2015

Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan got me to thinking about this with an excellent column about how the "hands off" approach Netflix and Amazon apply to their creative personnel (one that is spreading to other networks) has resulted in so many of the listless, uninvolving shows both services program.

Ryan writes:

I think Netflix and Amazon executives give their creative types a lot of rope, and I’ve often had occasion to wonder is they’re giving them too much rope. It’s common for their dramas to get tangled up and slow down, even at the pilot stage, and in the middle of seasons, Netflix dramas often sag and meander, and they take a long time to work up a head of steam.

So with that in mind, I thought I would point to some of the most famous cases in TV history where a network note didn't just improve a show — it arguably improved TV itself.

1) Lost doesn't kill Jack in the pilot

ABC

Is it possible to imagine an engaging version of the desert island drama Lost without its lead, the embattled doctor Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox)? Sure. That show was crammed full of great characters.

But Jack's journey over the course of the series — while occasionally irritating — ended up being one of the most effective, affecting things about it. Jack was probably the best thing about the show's final season, and the way he finally let go of much of his angst in the finale was deeply moving.

However, in their original conception of the show, creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof wanted to kill Jack in the series pilot. The network put a kibosh on that idea — and accidentally invented a great character arc. Lost writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach has the complete story in his excellent rundown of his two seasons on the show.

2) The Americans makes the leap from good to great

FX

The Americans, FX's '80s-set spy drama, was a very good show in its first season. But it wasn't yet the great show it would become in its second and third seasons. (The fourth is coming in 2016.) In interviews, co-showrunners Joe Weisberg (who also created the series) and Joel Fields have frequently pointed out tiny tweaks that FX president John Landgraf and fellow executives encouraged them to make, all of which made the show better.

Here's one in particular. Part of what made the second and third seasons so good was that they ditched the "Will the series' central marriage last?" arc that caused much whiplash in the first season. Instead, the show engaged with how dangerous a fake marriage turning into a real, loving marriage could be for two people in such a risky profession. In an interview with me after season two, Weisberg gave Landgraf credit for that initial idea:

I remember John Landgraf talking about that from very early days, how dangerous that would be. Yet I don’t know if we specifically thought [this] would be the moment where that starts to put them in danger. It feels to me that it’s been a much more fluid thing and it sort of happened. That was something that we thought about, and then it kind of burrowed into our unconscious minds.

3) NBC forces Dick Wolf to add women to Law & Order

NBC

For its first two seasons, Law & Order was a solid, sensible TV procedural, but not yet the juggernaut it would become. In the third season, NBC executives noticed that an episode featuring a prominent guest-star role for a woman caused a ratings spike — largely from women. Taking that knowledge to network president Warren Littlefield resulted in creator Dick Wolf being given an ultimatum: Add series regular characters played by women to the show or face cancellation.

Wolf capitulated, and the show ran for another 17 seasons — and won an Emmy for Best Drama Series in season seven. Littlefield's ultimatum resulted in great work from actors like Jill Hennessy and S. Epatha Merkerson, along with perhaps the most infamous moment in Law & Order history.

The full story of this shift can be found here.

4) Mary Richards goes from divorcée to jilted girlfriend

Getty Images Entertainment

Certainly a series about a young woman bouncing back from a terrible divorce could make for a great sitcom. But would it have made for a great version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

That was the original plan of creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, as recounted in Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's excellent history of the show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted. CBS executives were nervous that if Moore appeared as a divorcée, viewers would assume she had left Rob Petrie — the husband of Moore's character on the classic Dick Van Dyke Show.

This is one of the more ambiguous cases on this list. Certainly, Burns, Brooks, and Moore could have turned a divorced Mary Richards into a complex, nuanced character. But it's also quite likely CBS executives were right about how closely Moore was associated with her previous character — and about the willingness of 1970 America to follow a divorced woman through a lighthearted sitcom. And without MTM, many of the best sitcoms in history wouldn't have been made. I'll allow it.

5) NBC makes Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld add a woman to Seinfeld

Sony Pictures Television

This is the big one, the one that justifies the existence of all network notes for all time, even if they spin into incoherence and stop having any use whatsoever. If you watch the pilot of Seinfeld, you'll notice Julia Louis-Dreyfus isn't in it. And NBC executives, already leery about a show that had tested poorly, worried that it was simply too masculine to attract a broad audience.

They told creators David and Seinfeld to add a woman, the two cast Louis-Dreyfus, and Elaine Benes — one of the greatest sitcom women ever — was born. Louis-Dreyfus proved an essential part of the show's crackerjack ensemble and contributed to many of the best moments in the show's history.

And, look, say what you will about network notes, but do you want to live in a world without this?

No, you do not. Thank you, network notes. You gave us Elaine dancing. That is more than enough.

VIDEO: One of the most compelling shows on TV

Now matter how hard you try, sometimes you just can’t fall asleep when you want to. There are a lot of tricks for helping your brain head to sleepy town, but this scientifically supported method might be one of the simplest.

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Twitter’s commitment to transparency appears to end when it makes the powerful uncomfortable.

Back in 2012, Twitter decided to allow the Sunlight Foundation to collect and curate deleted tweets from lawmakers and people seeking public office in order to hold them accountable by preserving their public statements on the record. That behavior was in-line with a company whose founders constantly sold it as the nexus of free speech. "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party," Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo famously said that same year.

But in June of this year, Twitter shut down the deleted tweet project in the US under the guise of "honoring the expectation of user privacy." Then, this Sunday, Twitter dealt the final blow,...

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Twitter has shut down a network of sites dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from politicians around the world. The sites — collectively known as Politwoops — were overseen by the Open State Foundation (OSF), which reported that Twitter suspended their API access on Friday, August 21st. Twitter reportedly told the OSF that its decision was the result of "thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors," and that the social media site didn't distinguish between politicians and regular users.

"Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?" Twitter reportedly told the OSF. "No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a...

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It's looking more and more like 2016 will be a different kind of election, at least when it comes to the money. It's not just the sheer amount of it (though it will probably exceed the previous high of $6.3 billion). It's that more and more of it is coming from fewer people.

This observation has been brought into sharp relief by the fact that in the early presidential fundraising returns, half the $388 million contributed so far came from fewer than 400 families, with 62 donors giving at least $1 million. As the Huffington Post's Paul Blumenthal put it, "For the first time in more than a century, the majority of funding for a presidential election is coming in six-figure or larger checks from corporations and the wealthiest Americans."

It's now six years since Citizens United and related decisions ushered campaign finance into the Super PAC era. Things certainly feel different. And money in politics will probably continue to be a huge story in this election, since not only is it a kind of big deal, but also the steady release of fundraising numbers lends itself to the easy-to-produce, tick-tock, score-keeping kind of coverage.

While it's easy to get lost in the who's up, who's down, who's raising what stories, I see three major big-picture questions for the (sigh, 15) months of this political financing frenzy still ahead:

1. What is truly different about this new campaign finance system?
2. Who benefits and who is harmed?
3. Is anything going to change?

What is truly different about this new campaign finance system?

Okay, so a bunch of rich people dominating the campaign finance system is not exactly a new story. Well before Citizens United, candidates were spending most of their time sidling up to big donors, asking if they could spare a dime (well, really more like 20,000 dimes).

In that (now rose-colored) past, if you were running you'd mostly host fundraisers with a few dozen millionaire types (lawyers, financiers, CEOs, etc.) and get them all to write four-figure checks. Now the millionaires feel left out, because the candidates are going straight to the billionaires for the nine- or 10-figure checks. Pity the mere millionaire who laments that "most of the people I talk to are kind of rolling their eyes and saying, ‘You know, we just don't count anymore.' "

At least, this is how the early stages of the Republican presidential primary have gone down. But will those poor millionaires get to count at some point — maybe in the general election? Or have they been marginalized for good? If so, that's a big deal.

Also, will billionaire BFFing as the dominant mode of fundraising also extend to congressional primaries? Will these same (or maybe different) billionaires who have been funding candidates for president start throwing their nine-figure checks into congressional races where they could make an even bigger difference? We shall see. If they do, this would be a notable change.

As a thought experiment to see how much things have changed in presidential primary politics, do this: Think about how the 2016 Republican field might look and might play out if we still had 2008 rules, and then think about what will be different this time.

Arguably, one reason for the record 17 aspirants to the GOP throne is that in the past, one needed a somewhat well thought-out plan for building an organization. Now one can have a plan that starts with "Step 1: Find a billionaire who shares my vision for making America great."

As the primary season chugs along, two other things may also be different with all this early billionaire money.

The first is that the early-state primaries (New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina) may matter less, since candidates will have money to stick around regardless of how they do. A reasonable possibility in 2016 is that Jeb Bush slumbers through the early primaries but gains momentum as his backers keep his campaign organizations healthy and other candidates fail to keep up the fundraising pace.

A second possibility is that money could buy (reticent) love. Perhaps Ted Cruz, who seems unlikely to win many endorsements and doesn't appear to have much initial appeal, could somehow spend enough money on ads and door-knocking to make himself popular. Or maybe Jeb figures out how to propagandize himself past his lackluster early showing.

My guess is that we'll see a long, drawn-out Republican primary, with multiple candidates sticking it out on their billionaire fundraising. If so, this multi-sided war of attrition will be something newish, a more intense version of what we sort of saw in 2012, with Newt Gingrich overstaying his welcome on the Sheldon Adelson family fortune.

To be fair, there are superwealthy donors on both sides, and several million-dollar donations have gone to support Hillary Clinton. One can wonder whether we would see a similar billionaire frenzy among Democrats if Clinton weren't the clear frontrunner.

So are the billionaires now in charge? Who else benefits?

At this point, I can confidently predict one clear set of winners and one clear set of losers. Beyond that, I can offer the scientist's gift of testable hypotheses and the pundit's gift of predictions.

The clear winner will be the same winner in every election: the campaign consultants and operatives, those esteemed men and women who, win or lose, get paid generous sums of money to advise and lead, to produce advertisements and place them on television screens, to set up door-knocking operations, and now (bonus!) claim expertise in the new and wild world of social media. More money raised is more money spent on consultants and advisers and fundraisers.

I'm eager to see stories about what these consultants and advisers are actually earning and what value they are actually adding (usually very little). I still harbor the hope that if some business-minded billionaires actually understood how much of their political contributions would be wasted on consultants getting rich by making and placing ads that have minimal impact, they might stop spending so much.

The clear losers, of course, will be the same losers every year we have private elections funded by a tiny slice of superrich people: 1) the wide range of issues that are marginalized because no serious billionaire wants to fund a candidate who talks about them; and 2) the vast, vast majority of voters who are not superrich white men and therefore are left to adjudicate between the preferred candidates of warring clans of said superrich white men.

But that's an old and continuing story, so move along. Let's instead turn to the actual onstage dramatis personae in the great electoral potboiler ahead. Who will gain and who will lose?

Here I'll go through four sets of actors:

• The billionaires
• The candidates
• The outside groups
• The parties

The billionaires

It's not easy to generalize about such a complicated bunch. But to generalize in spite of such cautions, billionaire donors probably care about four things in varying mixes: 1) electoral victory, 2) general ideology, 3) specific policy promises, and 4) their own ego. The conservatives mostly seem to be pretty staunch small government conservatives who don't like paying money in taxes, and the liberals mostly care about social issues and are not exactly clamoring for high taxes.

A measure of their power, then, is whether or not they get what they want. The ego stroking (No. 4) is pretty straightforward, and running for president selects for this kind of talent (Just consider the suck-up-itude the candidates are demonstrating toward the Koch brothers). Electoral victory (No. 1) is the result of many forces, of which spending is one piece.

No. 2 (ideology) and No. 3 (policy promises) involve the most visible tests of billionaire power. If billionaires have power, we should see candidates shoring up their ideological and policy positions to fit the hopes and dreams of the donors. Perhaps this is why candidates are newly talking up their opposition to the Export-Import Bank, currently a policy passion for the Koch Brothers.

I'll be looking out for more of this kind of stuff. These are the stories that will convince me it's billionaires selecting candidates as opposed to candidates recruiting their fighting billionaires.

The candidates

On the other hand, maybe this new world really does help candidates, especially challengers. In more traditional times, challengers would first labor to gain the support of key party leaders and/or coalition interest groups in order to have a shot at running. If all they now need is a billionaire or two to believe in them, perhaps they can run with more independence from the establishment than ever before.

In 2014, there were 102 single-candidate Super PACs, which collectively spent $51.9 million. These numbers were relatively small compared with the money spent by the party committees and other outside groups. But it's possible that in 2016, single-candidate Super PACs will become more important (thanks to supportive billionaires).

If so, maybe we will see more outsider candidates running, challenging incumbents, raising new ideas and new issues — issues they wouldn't have raised had they taken more traditional routes to running for office. One can at least hope. Alternatively, if billionaires are in charge, we might see more outside candidates who are basically running on their backers' agendas.

It is worth noting that post–Citizens United, the number of competitive Republican primaries (primaries in which challengers won at least 25 percent of the vote) has increased, though these are mostly challenges from the conservative right. Still, even at 50 Republican primary challenges in 2014 (46 House, 4 Senate), that still means that about 80 percent of Republican incumbents did not face a meaningful challenger. However, at the same time, the number of contested Democratic incumbent primaries has actually decreased since 2010.

(Campaign Finance Institute/graph by Lee Drutman)

Or maybe we will see more single-candidate Super PACs supporting incumbents. In a recent paper, Robert G. Boatright, Michael J. Malbin, and Brendan Glavin note that one of the most significant development in the post-Citizens era has been the rise of the single-candidate Super PACs, "with the most significant growth among those allied with incumbent office holders."

So this is another one to watch: If we see more money going into single-candidate Super PACs, that may signal some shift in power toward the candidates. Unless, that is, those candidates are just mouthpieces for billionaires funding them, in which case the billionaires will be in charge.

Outside groups

In the past (pre–Citizens United), stricter limits on non-party, non-candidate spending limited what so-called "outside groups" could spend. Now those limits are gone. Ergo, some think outside groups (predominantly Super PACs) are taking away the power of parties. As the New York Times's Nate Cohn has argued, "Super PACs are helping to form an alternative campaign finance model that is eroding party control over the primary process."

So who are these outside groups? Consider a list of the top 15 spending political committees in the 2014 election, which I pulled from the Center for Responsive Politics.

(Center for Responsive Politics/graphic by Lee Drutman)

Note for a second that most of the top committees are party-run committees, which I'll come back to in a second. But looking at the list of non-party committees (i.e., true "outside groups"), note that most (e.g., US Chamber of Commerce, the League of Conservation Voters) are pretty closely aligned with the core of the party they support.  Others (most prominently the Koch-funded Freedom Partners) are basically synonymous with their billionaire funders.

So one ongoing question is how many of the "outside" groups are all that separate from the parties. Is the Karl Rove–run American Crossroads (not technically a party committee) really an outside group? Or even the National Rifle Association — is it really an outside group, since it mostly just supports Republican incumbents?

If one views parties as networks, the answer is not really. Moreover, as Boatright, Malbin, and Glavin note in the aforementioned paper, the groups increasing most in importance since Citizens United have been those "tied to party leaders." Meanwhile, they found a "decrease in the power of factional outsiders."

But 2016 is a new election. Perhaps billionaire-powered outside groups will be more active in knocking off party-supported candidates in primaries, or will pull candidates toward a particular ideology or set of policies. Certainly if the Koch network spends $900 million at cross-purposes with the Republican Party, that would be pretty significant, since it would be about 14 times more than the leading Republican group spent in the 2014 congressional elections.

However, my guess is that most of that Koch money (assuming the $900 million actually materializes) will go toward supporting the same Republican presidential nominee as the rest of the Republican money. My guess is that true outside groups will become less important in comparison to the parties, which I'm about to discuss. But we will see: If outside Super PACs (or 501(c)(4) organizations) are very active in supporting challengers and bending incumbents to their positions, I will have been wrong.

The parties

Much has been made about the parties being in decline. These assertions seem strange to me, given that in 2014 almost all of the committees that spent most heavily were all party or party-aligned committees (look again at the above chart). Arguably, the parties should be in an even better position in 2016, since contribution limits to parties were significantly increased as part of the CRomnibus deal, and early reports suggest at least the Republicans are taking advantage of this.

Since more of the tippy-top donors are on the Republican side, Republicans may wind up raising more money. But Republican donors also appear more divided, so it's also possible that, as in the past, more of the money on the right goes to outside groups, especially in the Koch Network of organizations, causing some internecine fighting on the right.

Still, I'm predicting that parties will play an even more active role in the 2016 election, particularly in primaries where party leaders have a favored candidate. My guess is that when we look at the final numbers, party committees will dwarf outside groups, even in the primaries, and especially among Democrats.

Is this the election where money in politics becomes a genuine issue?

Here's a puzzle: In poll after poll, overwhelming majorities of people say our campaign finance system is broken, and that rich donors and special interests are bribing our politicians. In other words, people hate the current system. But nothing happens to change it. In fact, it only grows less appealing to the vast majority of voters.

So, for example, a recent New York Times poll asked people the following question: "Thinking about the role of money in American political campaigns today, do you think money has too much influence, too little influence or is it about right?" The vast majority of respondents — 84 percent — said "too much." That includes 80 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats.

When asked whether the campaign finance system needed changes, 46 percent wanted to completely rebuild it, and 39 percent wanted fundamental changes (accepting that there are at least some "good things in the system"). So, grand total: 85 percent for significant rebuilding, with percentages roughly equivalent across parties.

These findings are nothing new. Yet poll after poll has failed to put a dent in our campaign finance system.

I have four theories as to why nothing happens as a result. I'll arrange them in the order of most cynical to most hopeful.

Most cynical is that politicians like keeping this system around because it provides a poll-tested scapegoat. Whatever unhappy result emerges from Congress, they can always blame the big money, and they can always cast themselves as the fighters against it (somehow).

Second-most cynical is that much as they may dislike the current system, all elected officials have figured out how to work it reasonably well — they got elected under it, didn't they? Any new system might undermine that advantage.

The most likely explanation for nothing happening is that money in politics has become a partisan issue, and Republicans (under strict orders from Mitch McConnell) have decided that they are somewhat benefited by the current system. Which is probably true. The optimistic spin on this is that all the money results in a bitter and implosive Republican presidential primary, causing some Republicans to wonder whether this system is so good for them after all.

The most optimistic explanation is that while the public may hate the system as it is, campaign finance has yet to become a priority issue for voters, and so politicians mostly dismiss it. This is optimistic because it suggests that if voters ever were to amp up their passion to match their disgust, something might actually change. And maybe the outrageous statistics of 2016 will stir that passion, especially now that Larry Lessig has entered the race on the premise of stirring up precisely that passion.

Still, even so, there's the partisan problem. It's conceivable that Democrats could pass a small-donor matching bill if they had unified control over the first two branches of government. But since that seems unlikely anytime soon, the key question is not so much what Hillary Clinton finally puts into the money-in-politics part of her plan to revitalize our democracy (which is so far short on specifics except for the unrealistic and thus purely symbolic constitutional amendment to reverse Citizen United). They key is whether any Republicans, particularly in congressional races, seize on this as a genuine issue, given public opinion on the subject.

On this last point, I'll be particularly curious to see whether the MAYDAY Super PAC, the Larry Lessig–founded organization devoted to making money in politics an issue, will have a bigger impact in 2016 than it did in 2014 (when it failed to do anything by getting in the game late and then just mostly supporting Democrats like any other liberal outside group). The creative Zephyr Teachout is now in charge. My free advice is that MAYDAY ought to spend all its money in Republican primaries, because if change is going to come on the campaign finance issue, it's going to be because enough Republicans have joined in support.

Ultimately, though, I remain skeptical as to how much voters are willing to prioritize this issue. Money in politics will continue to be an issue, and, yes, the public will be outraged. But that outrage won't translate into action and passion, in part because not enough politicians will make it a top issue, and few or no Republicans will get on board. Moreover, if Hillary Clinton pushes on this too hard, it could become even more of a partisan issue. So we'll be stuck with the same system for another round. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

Every modem rental fee you pay to your ISP is padding for their bottom line, and a total rip-off for you . Fortunately, you can buy your own modem for a small upfront cost in today’s Amazon Gold Box, and recoup the cost in savings on your monthly bill. [Motorola Modem Gold Box]http://gizmodo.com/5948616/how-to...

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Humans have been making glass in various forms for thousands of years, from glassblowing techniques developed by the Roman empire to the industrial methods of the 1950s, floating molten glass on huge baths of melted tin. One particularly ancient process though, in which molten glass is coiled around a solid core, has been revived with the help of modern technology. MIT's Mediated Matter Group has unveiled a new way to 3D print glass, removing the need for a solid core but coiling the material in molten strands just like our ancestors did thousands of years ago.

the first of its kind optically transparent 3D-printed glass

The method is mesmerizing to watch, with the coils of glass stacking up like a thick gelatinous glaze or poured...

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MIT scientists have designed a new camera that will never overexpose a photograph, no matter what the lighting situation is. Called a “modulo camera,” it captures a high dynamic range photo with every exposure.

Instead of capturing multiple photos at different exposures, as with traditional HDR imaging, the camera only requires a single exposure.

In conventional camera sensors collect photons like buckets collecting raindrops. When a “bucket” gets filled up, any additional “water drops” (i.e. photons) will be discarded, and that information is lost. In the resulting photo, that pixel will show up as pure white.

With the modulo camera, each bucket is emptied whenever it fills up during an exposure. This means that when the exposure ends, all the buckets have some kind of useful information in them. By taking into account the number of resets for each bucket, the camera can figure out the relative brightness for each pixel.

“No more will photographers or even ordinary people have to fumble with aperture size and exposure length,” writes lead scientist Hang Zhao. “The algorithm would enable people simply to click the camera button and let the computer deal with exposure problems.”

“The modulo camera can potentially transform the way everyday photography works.”

Here are some sample images showing the differences of the same scene captured with a traditional camera and with a modulo camera:

Here’s a short 2-minute video that explains how the modulo camera works:

No word yet on if or when we’ll see modulo cameras arrive in the photography industry and disrupt the way cameras are made. If you’re interested in learning more about the technology, you can read the research paper for yourself here.

(via MIT Media Lab via Imaging Resource)

Google has revealed what the M in Android M stands for: Marshmallow. The Android 5.2 update, set for release this fall, was first previewed at the company's I/O conference in late May. But as it's done before, Google held off on announcing the full name to build anticipation around the software. It's safe to say the company went with the obvious choice. Sorry, M&M's fans.

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// Dependencies var Cobol = require("cobol"); // Execute some COBOL snippets Cobol(function () { /* IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. HELLO. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. DATA DIVISION. PROCEDURE DIVISION. PROGRAM-BEGIN. DISPLAY "Hello world". PROGRAM-DONE. STOP RUN. */ }, function (err, data) { console.log(err || data); }); // => "Hello World" Cobol(__dirname + "/args.cbl", { args: ["Alice"] }, function (err, data) { console.log(err || data); }); // => "Your name is: Alice" // This will read data from stdin Cobol(function () { /* IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. APP. *> http://stackoverflow.com/q/938760/1420197 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION. FILE-CONTROL. SELECT SYSIN ASSIGN TO KEYBOARD ORGANIZATION LINE SEQUENTIAL. DATA DIVISION. FILE SECTION. FD SYSIN. 01 ln PIC X(64). 88 EOF VALUE HIGH-VALUES. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY "Write something and then press the key" OPEN INPUT SYSIN READ SYSIN AT END SET EOF TO TRUE END-READ PERFORM UNTIL EOF DISPLAY "You wrote: ", ln DISPLAY "------------" READ SYSIN AT END SET EOF TO TRUE END-READ END-PERFORM CLOSE SYSIN STOP RUN. */ }, { stdin: process.stdin , stdout: process.stdout }, function (err) { if (err) { console.log(err); } }); // => Write something and then press the key // <= Hi there! // => You wrote: Hi there! // => ------------ 

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There was a time in the not-too-distant past where you couldn't just open Spotify, your favorite torrent client, or iTunes and get hold of a song you wanted to hear. No, you had to obtain actual physical goods that they sold in things called stores. That is, of course, unless you were a member of the Columbia House music club.

Columbia House offered you Incredible Deals™ when you signed up: you'd get a bunch of free albums for a penny, and in turn you promised to buy a set number of albums over the coming year. (To make things easy for you, Columbia House would automatically send you some albums unless you told them not to.) Mail-order convenience was big back then, and the idea of a subscription music service that came to your door was...

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If you still "lol" at jokes online then you might be in the minority. A new report from Facebook into how users express laughter shows that "haha" and its variants are by far the most common terms used on the social network. They accounted for 51.4 percent of mirth in the anonymized comments and posts looked at by Facebook's data team, with laughter emoji claiming 33.7 percent, and "hehe" and its cognates 13.1 percent. The once-mighty "lol" only appeared in 1.9 percent of the text sampled by Facebook — a pretty staggering fall for an expression that was once synonymous with online txt speak.

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Donald Trump spoke for more than 11 minutes during the first Republican debate. Jeb Bush spoke for nearly nine. Marco Rubio spoke for six minutes and 46 seconds — a little less than John Kasich, a little more than Ben Carson. But the post-debate consensus in Washington was that he was the clear winner.

At National Review Online, Jim Geraghty wrote, "Marco Rubio was really, really good tonight. Shining." Matt Continetti, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, said Rubio was "confident, energetic, eloquent, knowledgeable, and figured out the way to handle Donald Trump." Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard wrote, "If we were doing a sabermetric ranking of the candidates, [Rubio would] lead the field. Easily." Three of the seven Republican strategists in the Hill's debate roundtable picked Rubio as the debate's winner; only one named a different candidate in the primetime debate. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And it wasn't just Republican pundits who thought Rubio took home the prize. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza named him the winner of the debate, writing, "He looked the part of a president. Hurdle cleared." Vox's Ezra Klein tweeted "Rubio is better at delivering his story than any other GOPer and better at selling Republican policies than any other GOPer."

Here's how Rubio won.

A message against Hillary Clinton that also works against Jeb Bush

As Jon Allen pointed out when Rubio launched his campaign in May, the theme of Rubio's campaign — looking to the future rather than the past, "we must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them" — is an argument that works equally well against the Clinton dynasty and the Bush dynasty. And that's exactly how Rubio used it last night, in his opening answer.

Chris Wallace asked Rubio to tell Jeb Bush why gubernatorial experience wasn't necessary to be a good president. Rubio didn't take the bait. Instead, he said, "If this election is going to be a résumé competition, then Hillary Clinton's going to be the next president, because she's been in office and in government longer than anybody else running here tonight."

That freed him up to attack the Democratic frontrunner, rather than going after Bush. But the contrast Rubio wanted to draw between himself — younger, fresher, more energetic — and the Bushes was perfectly clear.

Rubio's opening also allowed him to play to one of his biggest political strengths: he's got a compelling family story, and he knows exactly how to use it. By the end of his answer, he'd built to "If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck." It was a really strong line — and as a bonus, it applied equally well not only to Bush and Clinton, but to Donald Trump.

Picking policy battles he can win

Because Rubio is young and telegenic, it's easy to underestimate his policy acumen, but many establishment Republicans (and Democrats, for that matter) are convinced it's real.

With a big assist from the moderators, he managed to stay out of the biggest, messiest policy arguments of the night, about civil liberties and the Iraq War. He directly engaged other candidates only on two of the policy issues he knows best: immigration and education. And both times, he pretty much won — at least among people who cared about the policy exchange.

Rubio's immigration experience has often been a liability to him in the primary — as the pop-up bullet points during his opening remarks were happy to remind everyone, he was a co-sponsor of the 2013 comprehensive immigration bill that conservatives came to loathe. But his reply to Donald Trump about the US/Mexico border was the first time during the debate that a candidate leveled up from policy generalities to policy specifics:

Let me set the record straight on a couple of things. The first is, the evidence is now clear that the majority of people coming across the border are not from Mexico. They’re coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Those countries are the source of the people that are now coming in its majority.

I also believe we need a fence. The problem is if El Chapo builds a tunnel under the fence, we have to be able to deal with that too.

It was a succinct, but sharp, deflation of Trump's know-nothing bluster on the issue, which Rubio followed with a call for better interior immigration enforcement via an entry-exit visa system and E-Verify. Jeb Bush also believes in those things — in fact, they were centerpieces of the immigration plan Bush released Monday — and mentioned them in his earlier immigration answer. But it got lost between a rambling attack on Obama and a defense of legal status for unauthorized immigrants, which Rubio wisely avoided.

The oldest debate trick in the book: answering the question he wished he'd been asked

The moderators' choice of questions to Rubio worked in his favor. Bush was asked directly about legal status for unauthorized immigrants; Rubio wasn't. Rubio got asked about veterans; other candidates weren't. Rubio also got a Facebook question about helping small businesses succeed that had to have had the other candidates on the stage salivating. "They might as well have asked him if he loved his mother (which he answered anyway; he does)," snarked Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast.

But Rubio also did a good job making his own luck. When he was asked questions he didn't like, he smoothly pivoted to the thing he wanted to say anyway. When Megyn Kelly asked him why he supported exceptions to abortion bans for rape or incest, he simply said "I'm not sure that's a correct assessment of my record ... I have never said that, and I have never advocated that," and started talking about how the unborn deserve full protection under the law. His campaign followed up with reporters by explaining that Rubio had supported laws that made those exceptions because they were improvements on the status quo, but Rubio didn't waste time with that argument.

The tactic allowed him to hold his fire even when asked to criticize another candidate. Rubio's only real head-to-head argument of the night, about Common Core with Jeb Bush, wasn't really an argument at all. Bush answered a question about Common Core by talking about the importance of high standards; asked why Bush was wrong, Rubio didn't disagree with anything Bush had said or get into Bush's record, but instead made a sharp conservative argument against Common Core itself:

Here’s the problem with Common Core. The Department of Education, like every federal agency, will never be satisfied. They will not stop with it being a suggestion. They will turn it into a mandate.

In fact, what they will begin to say to local communities is, you will not get federal money unless do you things the way we want you to do it. And they will use Common Core or any other requirements that exists nationally to force it down the throats of our people in our states.

As Vox's Libby Nelson writes, that's a decent characterization of federal education policy: "Common Core was never a federal mandate, but the Education Department did make lots of money contingent on states adopting either the Common Core or 'college- and career-ready standards.' And the federal government has enforced other education requirements, most notably the standardized testing regimen of No Child Left Behind."

The best thing that happened to Rubio: Bush underperformed

Rubio wasn't unknown before last night's debate. In fact, he's widely liked. He's the only Republican candidate seen favorably by a majority of Republican voters, according to a Gallup poll released the day of the debate. And among the broader electorate, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from the end of last month, Rubio is one of two Republican candidates with net-positive favorability; the other is John Kasich, about whom only 23 percent of Americans have any sort of opinion.

But Rubio hasn't been leading the polls (or anything close to it) because he's rarely anyone's first choice. In fact, for many donors and party leaders, he's second choice to a very particular opponent: Jeb Bush. Because Bush mentored Rubio in the early days in Florida, the men share a lot of the same donor and insider network, and some of those people committed years ago to support Jeb in 2016.

Bush and Rubio also occupy roughly the same space in the presidential election: If you want a candidate who might appeal to Latinos, or has serious domestic policy chops, or who understands tax policy and foreign policy but isn't going to pose much challenge to Republican Party orthodoxy — or even if you just like candidates from Florida — you might like Marco Rubio, but you also like the better-established and better-funded Jeb Bush.

That's why the best thing that happened for Marco Rubio during last night's debate wasn't anything he did — it was that Jeb Bush's performance was pretty lame. Rubio impressed a lot of people; Bush doesn't appear to have impressed anyone. "A weaker Mr. Bush probably benefits Mr. Rubio as much as anyone," Nate Cohn wrote in the New York Times, "and if Mr. Bush raised questions about whether he would be a great general election candidate, then Mr. Rubio added yet more reason to believe he could be a good one."

Bush's campaign isn't collapsing anytime soon — he has way too much money for that, and donors who've already committed to him won't back out on the strength of one debate performance. But for other Republican donors, looking for someone who can hold his own against Donald Trump in 2015 and against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Marco Rubio just made a strong play for attention.

Watch: Why people should tune in for the primary debates

Popular YouTube filmmaker and VFX artist Freddie Wong released this video a couple of days ago that has a lot of people talking. It’s titled “Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn’t).” Over the course of 7.5 minutes, Wong argues that computer generated visual effects often get a bad rap because it’s the bad CG that everyone notices — by definition, good CG is largely invisible to audiences.

It seems that much of what he says and shows can be applied to photography and Photoshop retouching/manipulation as well (for certain areas of photography, at least… not photojournalism). Here are some quotes from the video that we changed to be about photography rather than filmmaking, and Photoshop rather than CG:

“I think the reason we think Photoshopping looks bad is because we only see bad Photoshopping. Amazing, wonderfully executed Photoshopping is everywhere, you just don’t know it. When done well and paired with solid storytelling, you will rarely notice that what you’re looking at was churned out by some dirty, soulless computer…”

“Great Photoshopping serves story and character, and in doing so is, by its very definition, invisible.”

Mad Max: Fury Road has been praised for its combination of practical effects and computer-generated imagery.

“So maybe the reason people seem to think Photoshopping is ruining photography isn’t a problem with the Photoshopping. Maybe it’s just a problem with the photos themselves. Because ‘Photoshopping’ has, from the beginning of photography, always been a part of this art form.

And Photoshopping, just like any innovation in photography, is simply a tool on the photographer’s tool belt to tell a story. But when the end result is bad, maybe it’s really not the tool’s fault — maybe it’s on the photographer to use the tool wisely.”

What do you think? Do Wong’s arguments hold for photography as well?

(via RocketJump Film School via Reddit)

Donald Trump is running for president. But his performance in last night's debate shows that he clearly hasn't forgotten his other job as America's imaginary boss, teaching the nation how to get ahead in the workplace.

When Fox News's Megyn Kelly asked Trump a question about his past treatment of women during the first GOP debate, he gave an expert seminar on a subject that every boorish misogynist executive needs to master: how to belittle and dismiss women's discrimination claims and enable a hostile work environment.

"Mr. Trump," Kelly said, "you've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' and 'disgusting animals.' Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women's looks, and you once told a candidate on Celebrity Apprentice that it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of someone we should elect as president? And how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the nominee, that you are part of the war on women?"

Trump's response to Kelly's question was essentially a step-by-step guide on how to dismiss valid complaints about discriminatory behavior in the workplace. It was a two-minute primer on how to get away with sexism.

Step 1: Claim that the complaint is an exaggeration in order to imply that the complainant can't be trusted

Before Kelly even finished her question, Trump interrupted her to imply that she was exaggerating. After Kelly mentioned his comments calling women disgusting and comparing them to fat pigs, dogs, and animals, Trump broke in to claim that "it was just Rosie O'Donnell."

That wasn't true, of course — for instance, Trump once called a lawyer "disgusting" when she asked to take a break from a deposition in order to pump breast milk for her 3-month-old baby. But it holds an important lesson for any executive seeking to foster a hostile workplace: If you immediately claim that any complaint is an exaggeration, that takes the focus off of your behavior and motives and puts it onto the complainant's. You want to make sure that she's the one under scrutiny, not you.

Step 2: Dismiss demands for respect and equality as mere "political correctness"

When Trump began his answer in earnest, he went straight for one of the best tools any misogynist has available: the claim that the complaint is just about "political correctness," not real wrongdoing.

"I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct," he said. "I've been challenged by so many people, and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time either."

As I wrote last January, "political correctness" isn't a real thing. Rather, the term is a sort of catchall charge that's used against people who ask for more sensitivity to a particular cause than we're willing to give — a way to dismiss issues as frivolous in order to justify ignoring them. It's a way to say that their concerns don't deserve to be voiced, much less addressed.

As Trump showed, that strategy offers all kinds of benefits for the would-be discriminator. It allows you to shift focus off of your problematic behavior, such as, say, appalling comments about women being animal-like and disgusting. And it also lets you claim that your victims' behavior is actually a much bigger problem: It's contributing to the scourge of political correctness that's hurting the whole country. Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Step 3: Insist that this complaint is too minor to bother with when there are more important things to worry about

Trump, because he is an expert in such matters, was able to combine this step with the previous one: He rolled straight off of his point about political correctness and into a claim that he "didn't have time" to be challenged on his behavior.

The really great thing about this argument is that it turns high status into an advantage instead of a liability. Instead of being someone who ought to meet a higher standard of behavior because you are in a position of authority, such as a boss or perhaps a candidate for this nation's highest office, you recast yourself as someone who is far too busy and important to have his behavior second-guessed and can therefore do whatever he pleases.

Step 4: Say it was just "fun"

"Frankly," Trump went on, "what I say, and oftentimes it's fun, it's kidding. We have a good time."

This one's a classic: Claim that you were just having fun or just joking. That way, anyone who questions your behavior is just a killjoy, out to spoil your fun. Better yet, if a third party is raising the complaint, imply that everyone else was in on the joke and thought your harassment and derision were "fun." How will anyone know for sure if you're lying?

Step 5: Pretend the complaint is really just about personal animosity

Like the pro that he is, Trump finished with the clincher: He implied that Megyn Kelly was only questioning his treatment of women because she disliked him personally.

"Honestly, Megyn, if you don't like it, I'm sorry," he said. "I've been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn't do that."

Poor Donald Trump! Savaged by a ruthless, hostile Megyn Kelly, even though he has been "very nice" to her. If anyone is the victim here, surely it's him.

Aspiring harassers take note: This strategy offers impressive results. It not only undermines the person making the accusation by implying she has ulterior motives, it also turns the accused into the victim of the story. He's just a nice guy, trying to have some fun — is it his fault this woman is out to get him?

This tactic is so powerful that it is a potent defense against even the most serious allegations. (Woody Allen, for instance, has used it to deflect claims that he molested his daughter Dylan — in his version of events, the abuse allegations were just a story made up by his jealous ex-wife Mia Farrow.)

So there you have it, folks: a two-minute master class in how powerful men can dismiss women's claims of harassment or discrimination.

Or, as Trump would probably want me to put it, the best, most important primer on how to get away with discrimination that the world has ever seen in a Republican primary debate.

Watch: How Donald Trump is trolling the Republican Party: