A few years back, I wrote a feature titled "Why you’ll never drive your car with a joystick." Today, I learned I spoke too soon (and that Ars' Creative Director Aurich Lawson is prophetic).
Over in the UK, Nissan and a company called JLB Design have finally done it. Courtesy of Carbuyer, I learned of a tie-in with the soon-to-be-released Gran Turismo Sport, wherein JLB converted a Nissan GT-R to be controlled by a DualShock 4 controller rather than the normal steering wheel and pedals. What's more, it's a completely remote-controlled GT-R—renamed the GT-R/C—as demonstrated by Nissan racing driver Jann Mardenborough, who drove the car around the Silverstone racing circuit from the passenger seat of a helicopter circling above.
Adam Ruins Everything explains that the popular myth of Christopher Columbus gets a lot wrong.
It’s Columbus Day again, so it’s as good a time as any to clarify that much of what a lot of people were taught about Christopher Columbus in elementary school was very wrong.
In a short video from 2017, Adam Ruins Everything goes through the major myths about Columbus, concluding that, contrary to the popular belief of a brilliant explorer, Columbus was actually “a murderous moron.”
“The real story of Columbus is even worse and weirder than you think,” host Adam Conover explained.
For one, Columbus did not disprove that the Earth is flat and discover that the world is round. “In his time, it was already common knowledge,” Conover said. In fact, humans have known that the Earth is round for more than 2,000 years, with ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Eratosthenes saying as much in their own works.
So if everyone knew that, why didn’t others try sailing west? “Back then, they didn’t know the Americas existed. So navigators thought there was no way a ship could make it all the way from Europe to Asia,” Conover said. In short, navigators thought they would run out of supplies mid-journey and die.
Okay. So maybe Columbus was at least brave for willing to try the long journey from Europe to Asia. But that’s not quite true either, Conover noted: “He set sail because he was a doofus who was terrible at math. Instead of trusting the experts, Columbus believed the Earth was thousands of miles smaller than it actually was.” As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker, Columbus even “reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance.”
In retrospect, this is obviously ridiculous. But competition in the spice trade, Conover explained, was fierce at the time. So the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand went along with Columbus’s proposal on the off-chance he was right.
Columbus landed on what he thought was Asia but was in fact some Caribbean islands. He’s often given credit for discovering these islands, but, as Conover pointed out, they were already occupied. This is key to Columbus’s story, because what follows was truly awful.
After the indigenous Taino people on the island of Hispaniola were hospitable to Columbus, he “repaid their kindness by returning with 17 ships and 1,200 men so he could enslave the Taino and steal their gold,” Conover said. “There was only one problem: They didn’t have any.” A slaughter followed, reducing the native population from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds. (Much more on all of this in Vox’s Dylan Matthews’s great explainer on Columbus’s tyranny.)
This is what Columbus would do for the rest of his days: sail around the Caribbean, murdering indigenous people. He died thinking that he had been doing all of this in India, never realizing he had set foot on lands that European navigators didn’t know existed at the time.
“To help prove that Italians were a part of the American story, Italian Americans latched onto Irving’s version of Columbus, and promoted it like crazy,” Conover said. “And that’s the true story of how an incompetent and vicious nobody became the national hero we celebrate today.”
Of course, not everyone celebrates Columbus. This Columbus Day, many people are pushing for another holiday — Indigenous Peoples’ Day — to honor the victims of Columbus’s cruelty.
Beto O’Rourke likes single-payer health care and has caught the eye of national Democrats. He’s also punk.
Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) told me in an interview in his House office late last month that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s single-payer bill was perhaps the best piece of health care legislation that had been introduced in Congress.
But a few hours later, in a phone call that night, the top Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 admitted that his staffers entertained doubts as to whether it was a smart move to get behind Sanders’s bill.
“Thank God we don’t have a pollster, or a consultant, or whatever. Because they’d fire me,” O’Rourke said. “I really don’t think about [the attack ads] too much, but I would be lying if I told you my team didn’t. I got some serious looks from the folks in my office, and for the right reasons. They were saying, ‘Look, there may be a better way to get to the things you want to get to.’”
But winning or losing isn’t the only reason national Democrats are starting to get excited about his campaign. They’re excited about a candidate who says, and even acts like, he’s unshackled from the normal practicalities of politics — like fundraising from corporate PACs and keeping to a centrist message in a red state. O’Rourke is not just taking on Ted Cruz; he also talks about his campaign as a challenge to both the Democratic Party’s big donors and its style of politics.
Not to mention: he’s punk rock.
“When you’re putting out your own records and booking your own tours and writing your own songs, you get to control what you say,” says O’Rourke, comparing his decision not to take PAC money to his days playing in a punk band named Foss and the 1980s punk label Dischord Records. “The campaign is the same thing.”
Beto O’Rourke: “Republicans are at least intellectually honest” about campaign finance
O’Rourke, in many ways, couldn’t be more different from Bernie Sanders — a 76-year-old Brooklyn-born Vermonter — or Donald Trump. But he says he gets something they both tapped into in 2016.
“Republicans are at least intellectually honest about [campaign cash] — they say, ‘Look, money is speech and corporations are people,’” O’Rourke told me in his office in the Longworth House Office Building. “Democrats say, ‘This is fucking crazy, the worst thing ever; our democracy is over, but I’ve got to play the game until we’re on top’ ... I’m the last to judge, but I think there’s a great opening for Democrats to connect with people who know — and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump used the same word, and it was the right word — that this is ‘rigged.’”
O’Rourke backs up his point with a recent poll another House Democrat recently showed him. Researchers, he said, asked two different groups of voters to evaluate the exact same policy. One group of voters was simply told what the policy consisted of. A second group of voters were told about the policy but were told it was a solution to the fact that they had been “getting screwed.” Support for the policy skyrocketed when cast as a solution to “getting screwed.”
O’Rourke brought up the poll in our interview, perhaps because it appears to offer powerful support for his interpretation of American politics. “[Voters] are understandably anxious and justifiably pissed off by those who have not played by the rules,” he said. “Here’s the big opening for candidates for Congress: Don’t just acknowledge that it’s rigged. Have the courage to walk the walk. And my bet is that you will be rewarded.”
Texas is still Texas, but maybe not for long
O’Rourke’s run may well come to nothing. (The candidate has pointed to early polling suggesting he’s running even with Cruz.) But part of the buzz around his rise is tied up in a broader seismic shift in American politics.
As Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy noted in an excellent profile of O’Rourke, Hillary Clinton actually improved Democrats’ standing in much of the increasingly diverse, increasingly Hispanic Sun Belt (Arizona, Texas, New Mexico), even as Republicans gained ground in the Rust Belt (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio).
O’Rourke, who speaks fluent Spanish and likes to refer to his upbringing in a border town, sounds like he’s trying to achieve a synthesis between Sanders’s anti-establishment critique of the political system and a message tailored for the New Majority voters who helped powered Barack Obama’s presidential victories.
He isn’t running like other red-state Democrats who stress their desires to cut taxes and talk about their pro-gun bona fides. Instead, he’s trying to win in Texas as a populist progressive — one who criticizes the hold of corporate money over both parties and refuses to take it, advocates for legalized marijuana, and gives TED talks extolling the virtues of immigration. (The journalist Christopher Hooks has chronicled O’Rourke’s more centrist 2012 congressional campaign — talk O’Rourke appears to have jettisoned more recently.)
This all makes top Democrats at least cautiously invest hope in O’Rourke’s bid. “Winning the Senate is really going to be a long shot in 2018. But if we're going to flip it, we're going to need to win in Texas,” one top Democratic strategist said of O’Rourke. “And who knows? Sometimes a Hail Mary works.”
I talked with O’Rourke about single-payer health care, his “road to Damascus moment” on campaign contributions, and how his time in a punk rock band informed his politics.
An edited transcript of our conversations follow.
How O’Rourke’s punk rock origins connect to his campaign style
Photo by Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images
Jeff Stein
One of the things a lot of the profiles about you have talked about is the extent to which you’re campaigning in small towns and districts where candidates from neither party has shown up in for years, and how you’re not taking any corporate or PAC money in your race.
I was wondering if you see that as at all connected to your unusual path to Congress, given your time as a punk rock musician before seeking higher office.
Beto O’Rourke
I’m not sure how familiar you are with the punk rock that came out of DC, like Dischord Records that came out of the early ’80s. They were really one of the record labels in America that figured out how to put out your community’s own music — to record the bands, to start the distribution, to do the label, to book the tours.
And I loved their music; I’d order any new record on the Dischord catalogue with my $8. That inspired us in El Paso — we loved Dischord and SST Records in LA and Twin Tone in Minneapolis, or Look Out Records in California — and we said, “We should do that here.”
That was a big, profound influence because it gave me so much power over the things I really cared about as a teenager. The way I’ve talked about it is when you’re putting out your own records and booking your own tours and writing your own songs, you get to control what you say.
The campaign is the same thing. If I waited for the Democratic Party to pick me, I don’t know they would have. I don’t know I was the guy. There have been precisely zero candidates from El Paso to win statewide election.
We’ve started our own label and put out our own stuff and didn’t have any corporate involvement — I interviewed some potential managers out of Washington, DC, who ran campaigns before and were used to doing it a certain way. And I wanted us to do it independently, our own way. [O’Rourke is only hiring staffers who live in Texas.] So there really is a tie between those things.
Jeff Stein
I was in the Georgia Sixth for Jon Ossoff’s congressional campaign, and one thing Republicans successfully did was to make him out to be the “other.” There’s a lot of thinking that these cultural and identity factors are just way too strong, particularly in the South, for Democrats to overcome, and I’m curious how you think it can be overcome.
Beto O’Rourke
I just don’t think that’s the issue.
It doesn’t mean we don’t have serious challenges in Texas. I was just talking about voter suppression and how Texas has a horrific history that is still being made today — courts have found Texas is gerrymandering districts based on race and ethnicity. I love telling people that less than 100 years ago, we had an all-white Democratic primary. I don’t want to minimize the challenge we have in Texas.
But people really want to know whether I’m going to represent them — and really them, they and their families — or if there are other interests at play, including my interests in being reelected [O’Rourke has come out for term limits], or if I’ll be captured by people who have more money or have more access.
That is so fundamental. Republican and Democrat, that is so fundamental to the anxiety we all have right now about government and that you see reflected in elections.
Everything else flows from that. If you’re voting on a tax deal or on health care, are you voting for us? Is it really rigged?
Jeff Stein
Ted Cruz has a similar message, in a way. His whole 2012 campaign was about not being beholden to the Washington Republican establishment, but in a way you’re trying to outflank him on the question of anti-establishment ties.
Beto O’Rourke
Right. He’s become the quintessential Washington guy. Changing his support for Trump [during the 2016 presidential election] — and you never want to ascribe motive — but just the fact he did that.
The things Cruz said on the [presidential] campaign trail — supporting police patrols in Muslim communities in America; his shutdown of the government in 2013. It really did seem he was willing to take a pure ideological extreme, and it’s changed as the prevailing winds have changed.
He is the poster senator for PAC money and for playing the Washington game and parlaying that senator seat — and his responsibility for 28 million people — into a nearly successful run for the Republican nomination.
O’Rourke on single-payer health care
Photo by Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images
Jeff Stein
You’ve supported the idea of single-payer in the past but haven’t co-sponsored [Rep. John Conyers’s] HR676 in the past because of concerns that the bill eliminates for-profit hospitals.
It seems like Sanders’s new health care bill does meet your criteria.
Beto O’Rourke
It does, yeah.
Jeff Stein
So would Sen. Beto O’Rourke support Sanders’s proposal? I know you’re working on your own plan.
Beto O’Rourke
The answer is yes, I would.
And to address the premise of your question — I could care less about for-profit hospitals. I just think that if the whole idea is that Medicare works pretty well and therefore if we were to expand it to everyone, I don’t think you want to screw with how it works right now — which is to provide universal care in both for-profit and nonprofit capacities.
Maybe someone could successfully argue the other side and maybe change my mind on this. But why you would change some fundamental part of how care is reimbursed is beyond me — other than when I talk to some folks who argue for this, and this is a legitimate point of view, they say nobody should make a profit off of health care. Maybe that’s as it should be. It’s just not the way it works today, and it’s not the way I could see feasibly making the transition into a universal health care model.
So here’s what I like about Sanders’s proposal. It gets us to universal health care. There are many paths to get there, and there are as many proven paths as there are wealthy democracies in the world; everyone has their own path to get there.
I like that Sanders, as I understand it, essentially expands how Medicare works today and doesn’t have the provision to prevent private and for-profit providers from participating in the system. I think he’s done the best job of anyone up here ever in articulating the goal through legislation, and so I want to support it. There are probably some things with which I could quibble, but that is as good as I’ve seen it get — and so I want to get behind it and say I support it.
I’ve also tried to be clear that while [Sanders’s plan] is pretty close to ideal, there’s so much we can do to make what we have today better. I want to be working on that as well. Some of the ideas that are obvious to anyone looking at this include expanding Medicaid — and I have to think, in Texas as a state that didn’t expand Medicaid, now that Graham-Cassidy has failed and we think there’s no other likely successful attempt before the end of the fiscal year, the conversation in those states has to turn to, “How do you make this work?”
Expanding Medicaid is one of those ways; perhaps there’s some other formulation for it — including President Obama not being in the White House — that allows [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott or our US senators to say, “This is different enough that we’re going to get behind it and expand Medicaid.”
The other step beyond that would be to allow people to buy Medicare or Medicaid on the exchanges. We just had a conversation the other day of, “How do we get to where we want to get to?” We talked about the idea of getting Medicaid on the exchanges, which would force the private insurers to compete a little more aggressively.
Jeff Stein
There was an argument some made in 2018 that one of Hillary Clinton’s problems was that she was defending a status quo that was not working for too many people, and that the more important shift in the Democratic Party isn’t just on the policy of the legislation they’re supporting, but the more broad question of whether Democrats would stand up and proclaim, “Health care is broken; we have 28 million people uninsured; millions still struggle with outrageously high deductibles and premiums, and we need to radically overhaul the system to take care of them.”
Beto O’Rourke
I think you’ve really hit upon something. A colleague of mine, in their state, they’re running a poll. And they found that whatever policy statement is being tested, if the statement began with, “I know you’re getting screwed; therefore, I wanted to do X,” the very same question asked — without the “you’re getting screwed” bit — is off the charts.
And I’ve certainly seen that in Texas and all across the country. You have to recognize what we’re doing today — in health care, in the ability of people to find a job above a livable wage, in the ability to afford a good education — that too many people feel like they’re getting screwed or that they played by the rules and it’s just not worked for them. And they are understandably anxious and justifiably pissed off by those who have not played by the rules.
Jeff Stein
[In a follow-up conversation that night]
After we talked today, did you think, “Oh, shit, there’s going to be headlines and ads that say, ‘Beto wants to represent Texas to support socialist Bernie’s socialist medicine plan?’”
Beto O’Rourke
Thank God we don’t have a pollster, or a consultant, or whatever. Because they would fire me for telling you what I told you today. I really don’t think about [the attack ads] too much, but I would be lying if I told you my team didn’t. I got some serious looks from the folks in my office — for the right reasons. They were saying, “Look, there may be a better way to get to some of the things you want to get to.”
And I feel like they’re right, but also if there’s something that is the best articulation of the goal you’re trying to get to and you don’t have something better, [you have to support what is out there]. I had to answer your question, which was very direct, about whether I would co-sponsor his bill. Absolutely: I want to get that bill before a committee. I want it debated and to see if it’s something that can potentially pass.
It is the best articulation yet of how you get to universal [health care]. ... I feel like people are owed your honesty on this, and they gotta know you want to get to universal — and that if this is the best choice in front of us, that you’d be on it.
Beto O’Rourke’s “road to Damascus” moment on money in politics
Photo by Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images
Jeff Stein
Presumably, Democrats haven’t been trying to lose. I’m going to guess you’ll say you can do this [while] other Democrats have not because you’re almost alone in the party in not taking PAC money.
You’re rare because some members, like [Rep.] Ro Khanna [CA], never took money. But you did and then changed. What changed in your life after you stopped taking that money?
Beto O’Rourke
It went from a conscious decision to a non-conscious decision. When I ran in 2012, there was only one PAC that gave us a check that was not solicited by us — it was the Marijuana Policy Project. We beat the incumbent through many small contributions.
But the day I won the primary, the PAC checks just flooded in. And I was like: “Cool. Great.” I didn’t ask for the contributions. They came in. Free money.
And then when I came up here, as most people do, I hired a DC fundraiser. And that really consists of going to mixers, where you’re going to meet the representatives of the interests who have business in front of your committees. The people we just met with [today in our office] were from Novartis — a pharmaceutical manufacturer that wants us to allow Medicare Part D to pay for obesity drugs. I assume Novartis has a PAC. And what you’d do is you’d call Novartis later and say, “Hey, love what you guys are doing fighting obesity; by the way, I have a tough reelection so you should help me out.” That’s how it works.
But I did have a “road to Damascus” moment. I was meeting a lobbyist for lunch at Tortilla Coast [a Mexican restaurant one block from the Capitol]. And they also gave me a $10,000 PAC check, which didn’t feel good, and I was thinking, “I guess that’s just how this place works.”
It was an agricultural interest. And they had one lobbyist — like the sherpa [or handler] who brings you around — who brings you around, and he organized the lunch. And then there were 10 farmers in this given industry — who were very good people trying to deal with a government that works this way, where you buy influence and access and, hopefully, outcomes. That’s what they were trying to do: chip in, and go to lunch with this guy, and tell him our personal histories ...
Then we’re voting on the floor [of the House] on the farm bill, and there’s an amendment that’s specific to their interests. My team had recommended I vote against it ... And for a second — and I don’t have this industry in my congressional district — for a second the thought crosses my mind, “I should just vote for this, because it really doesn’t matter to my constituents; it’s like a few million dollars in a $1.2 trillion [federal] budget, and it will ensure next year that they support me.” Obviously, I wouldn’t be telling you this story if I voted yes [laughs]; I voted no.
But that was my moment. And then I said: “I’m done. I’m never doing this again.” And that was before I served on the Armed Services Committee, and that, for me, it underscored the importance not just of not being captured but not even appearing to be conflicted — I never want anyone to think, “Did he just do this because he got $30,000 from Boeing?”
Jeff Stein
Sen. Elizabeth Warren makes this point that the influence of money in the Capitol isn’t literally lobbyists trundling through the halls carrying briefcases full of cash, but that money has a much more subtle, gas-like effect where it creeps up quietly behind you.
Beto O’Rourke
Absolutely, yes — that’s a great way to describe it. In describing it that way, it actually takes away some of the complicity from members of Congress. Because they were elected into a system that works this way, and their No. 1 goal is to get reelected, if any of them are honest with you. The system as it works today, one of the only ways to get reelected is to traffic in this stuff.
Jeff Stein
So how do you see Congress differently as a result of no longer taking money? Are you now making this case to fellow Democrats that they should also stop taking PAC money?
Beto O’Rourke
Absolutely. Republicans are at least intellectually honest about this stuff, or many Republicans are — they say, “Look, I agree money is speech and corporations are people and, therefore, corporations should spend unlimited amounts to effect outcomes. That’s just what I believe, so I’ll do business accordingly.”
Democrats say, “This is fucking crazy, the worst thing ever; our democracy is over, but I’ve got to play the game until we’re on top, and then I’ll change the rule so this won’t continue.”
I very much feel that way. I’m the last to judge, and so no judgment, but I think there’s a great opening for Democrats to connect with [the fact that] people know — and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump used the same word, and it was the right word — that this is “rigged.” From the inside, I can tell you that it is absolutely rigged. And rigged in kind of a perverse, almost unconscious way, in the way Sen. Warren talks about.
Lawrence Lessig makes this really good point — items 1 through 10 on the reasons you came here, no amount of money is going to change your mind on it. But you’ll vote on 1,200 items in a given session of Congress. So items 11-1,200 are open to influence, because you might get a couple of minutes per vote from your staff. You’re in an inch deep on this stuff and one mile wide, so it’s much easier for money to factor into your calculation — I have subject matter expertise on like three things, and you’re not going to change me on any of those.
So here’s the big opening for candidates for Congress. Don’t just acknowledge that it’s rigged. Have the courage to walk the walk. And my bet is that you will be rewarded by people who are so grateful someone is actually going to live accordingly.
Do you enjoy the sensation of petting a cat or dog, but hate the unconditional love and the fact that they have heads and limbs? Japanese company Yukai Engineering has unveiled the solution to this classic conundrum with Qoobo: a soft, round cushion with a robotic tail that reacts to strokes, just as a loving pet would.
“Tails: a communication tool that doesn’t require words,” the demo video begins. It goes on to show everyone who might find peace with the “cushion-tailed therapy robot”: young people living alone in immaculate apartments, children, the elderly. The process to healing is easy: just give it a good pat and watch the cushion’s tail wag softly in response. It’ll also wag and curl the tail on its own, via an accelerometer in...
"No responsible economist thinks that this package, including its giveaways to the most affluent, will somehow produce so much economic growth as to offset a $2.5 trillion hole in the budget. The growth effects of tax cuts (itself a controversial topic) would be vitiated by soaring national debt, and with it, higher borrowing costs for businesses, whose own borrowing rates are set by reference to the rate at which the Treasury can borrow."
Here is what you need to know about the Republican tax plan released Wednesday: It’s not a tax reform plan at all.
It is a sketch of an outline of a preliminary notion of a tax cut for some — and a tax hike for others. The components read like the jumble of ideas you might expect a table of slightly inebriated Chamber of Commerce types to shout out when polled for their tax reform suggestions.
The plan is sketchy, as I say, but this is the gist: Where individuals are concerned, the seven current individual income tax brackets will become three: 12 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. The standard deduction will be raised to $24,000 for couples and $12,000 for individuals. There will be a substantially bigger child tax credit.
It’s not just the nerdiest details that are missing: We don’t, for example, know what the top tax rate would actually be (the proposal dangles the possibility of a fourth tax bracket, for high earners, on top of that 35 percent rate). We don’t know where the new tax brackets begin and end, or the magnitude of the enlarged child tax credit. In many cases it is impossible for me or anyone else to tell you whether you will be better or worse off, given the lack of detail.
We know that some lower-income Americans will be worse off, because the skimpy document says so. The lowest tax bracket increases by fully 20 percent, from 10 to 12 percent. The larger standard deduction, the unspecified larger child tax credit, and “additional tax relief” to be named later will protect “typical” low-income families from a tax hike, we are told, but others will see their bills actually climb. And the aged and the elderly will lose their additional standard deduction, which under current law offers them up to $5,000 in additional deductions.
The “doubling” of the standard deduction (to $24,000 for married couples filing joint returns) is offset in part by disallowing personal exemptions. Today, taxpayers are entitled to one standard deduction per tax return, plus a personal exemption (a $4,050 additional deduction) for each family member. The proposal would take away these personal exemptions. This means that a family of four will go from $28,900 in these deductions (standard deduction plus four personal exemptions) to $24,000 (larger standard deduction but no personal exemptions). That’s a decrease, not a doubling.
The framework contemplates an enhanced child tax credit that will make things better, but there’s no detail here at all, including on the income point at which the enhanced child credit will start to phase out.
We also know from today’s announcement that itemizers will lose their state and local tax deductions, and that this benefit is enjoyed primarily by relatively affluent residents in blue states. But other itemized deductions will also disappear, including the deduction for extraordinary medical expenses. A family that’s forced to devote substantially all its current income to supporting a critically ill family member will now pay tax on its income without any relief for those circumstances.
Guess who benefits?
We can identify at least one taxpayer who will hugely benefit from the proposal: President Donald Trump. We still haven’t seen his tax returns, but thanks to leaked documents we know that at least at some point in the past, the only income tax he paid was the alternative minimum tax (the AMT). We also know that his businesses operate through “pass-through” vehicles (partnerships, LLCs and S corporations). A regular corporation pays tax on its income; shareholders in turn pay tax on the dividends they receive. In pass-through vehicles, by contrast, business income is taxed only in the hands of the owners of the business, rather than at the entity level.
And we know that Trump is very wealthy, and therefore in the ordinary course of events might be expected one day to leave behind a large estate, which, to the extent not left entirely to his wife at that time, would attract a substantial estate tax bill.
What does the Republican proposal do in this case? It eliminates the AMT. It subjects income derived from pass-through businesses like Donald Trump’s empire to a special 25 percent tax rate (rather than 35 percent or 39.6 percent, the individual rate), because owners of these businesses are special, in some indeterminate way. And the proposal repeals the estate tax.
Here you see the real agenda at work. When it matters, the proposal has more than enough detail to signal to President Trump and the Republican Party’s coterie of oligarch financial backers that their personal taxes will be slashed, not by a few hundred or thousands of dollars, but by millions and millions.
The 25 percent tax rate for pass-throughs is particularly galling, because it has no principle at all behind it, and will be the subject of widespread abuse, as taxpayers maneuver to squeeze their incomes into the pass-through business box. The proposal describes this as some sort of discounted rate for small business owners, but that is simply dishonest. It applies to all pass-through vehicles, including those owned by Trump and his counterparts.
Little evident concern for the effect on the deficit
As best as can be determined today, the numbers behind the proposal are so off base as to make the whole enterprise laughable. The document released this morning makes no projections as to its cost. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the figure at roughly $5.8 trillion over the 10-year budget window; other estimates put the price tag at $5 trillion or so. To put this number into context, the total Treasury debt held by the public today is about $15 trillion; a $5 trillion revenue shortfall would by itself require federal borrowing equal to one-third of the debt currently in the hands of the public.
The CRFB estimates that revenue increases (many of which are completely unspecified in the proposal) would offset about $3.6 trillion of the gross $5.8 trillion cost, for a net deficit increase of $2.2 trillion over 10 years. But even that figure is ludicrously large in terms of its impact on deficits and outstanding Treasury debt, as the CRFB points out.
What’s more, to get legislation through Congress relying only on Republican votes, the majority must rely on reconciliation instructions contained in a budget resolution. The Senate majority has already begun that process by agreeing that its budget resolution will lose $1.5 trillion in revenue over the 10-year budget window. This means that even if the proposal were to include revenue raisers of the magnitude that has been suggested, it would still yield deficits that were two-thirds larger than those contemplated by the Senate majority in its budget resolution negotiations. Therefore, it would have to be trimmed to fit.
The House is further behind in the process, because of internal divisions, but it is improbable that the House will aim for a budget resolution providing deficits two-thirds larger than the figure negotiated by the Senate majority.
No responsible economist thinks that this package, including its giveaways to the most affluent, will somehow produce so much economic growth as to offset a $2.5 trillion hole in the budget. The growth effects of tax cuts (itself a controversial topic) would be vitiated by soaring national debt, and with it, higher borrowing costs for businesses, whose own borrowing rates are set by reference to the rate at which the Treasury can borrow.
What’s more, a deficit-increasing bill can rely on the reconciliation process — the process that allows a simple majority vote in the Senate — only if it does not raise deficits in years after the 10-year budget window, which means the tax breaks here would have to be temporary. That itself is a big negative in making the case that this sort of raid on the Treasury would be growth-enhancing.
In short, where personal taxes are concerned, the proposal is a surefire winner for the very top of the income ladder, including the president. It’s also a budget buster, and it may turn out on balance to raise the income tax burden on you, the reader.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.
On Tuesday, Proterra revealed that one of its Catalyst E2 Max electric buses just set a new world record for the longest distance traveled by an electric vehicle on a single charge. The bus, which packs a hefty 660kWh of storage—equivalent to 11 Chevy Bolts—drove a total of 1,101.2 miles (1,772.2km) at the Navistar Proving Grounds in Indiana. It's quite an impressive feat, considering the previous record holder was a lightweight experimental single-seat EV.
While 1,100 miles is a lot more than an average bus drives in a day, Proterra's record may prove quite helpful in persuading range-anxious transit authorities to ditch internal combustion in favor of battery power for future fleets.
Of course, the other factor is how long it takes to recharge. This is probably less of an issue with vehicles like buses, delivery trucks, and garbage trucks that spend their lives crawling around cities, since that kind of low-speed, stop-and-go duty cycle plays right into the strengths of an electric powertrain, and the vehicles can recharge at the end of their route. Proterra also developed a high-speed charging system for buses (which it's offering to anyone without licensing fees), although even with its high-voltage system in operation, the 660kWh record-breaking bus would still need at least an hour to get back to a full charge.
The final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, just came out. It completes an incredibly satisfying exploration of the overlap between scifi and fantasy.
Sometimes a book series is so important that you want people to put everything aside and just read it. I'm not the only one who feels this way about N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The first and second novels in Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate won the prestigious Hugo Award for the past two years in a row—the first time this has happened since Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead won sequential Hugos in 1986 and 87. Now the final Broken Earth book, The Stone Sky, is out. You can gobble up the whole series without interruption.
There are very light spoilers ahead.
A mesmerizing world
There are a lot of reasons why this series has been hailed as a masterpiece. There are unexpected twists which, in retrospect, you realize have been carefully plotted, skillfully hinted at, and well-earned. There are characters who feel like human beings, with problems that range from the mundane (raising kids in a risky world) to the extraordinary (learning to control earthquakes with your mind). The main characters are called orogenes, and they have the ability to control geophysics with their minds, quelling and starting earthquakes. Somehow the orogenes are connected with the lost technologies of a dead civilization, whose machines still orbit the planet in the form of mysterious giant crystals called obelisks. To most people on the planet, the orogenes are known by the derogatory term "rogga," and they're the victims of vicious prejudice.
"A feature so blatantly obvious it seems impossible that Google is only adding it now"
Google is adding the ability to automatically recognize addresses, phone numbers, and contacts to the Gmail website and mobile apps today (including Inbox), in the rollout of a feature that seems so blatantly obvious that I refuse to believe that Gmail didn’t have it already.
A feature so blatantly obvious it seems impossible that Google is only adding it now
But yes, somehow in the year 2017, Gmail did not have this incredibly basic functionality. A feature that the company — which makes one of the most used email services on the planet — has been beaten to the punch with what I have to assume is every single other email application ever made, including the awful trash heap that is Apple’s default iOS one. Seriously.
I want Abinadi to be as good as I am. He's got his post-process workflow down, but now it's time to focus on the basics.
When it comes to composition “rules”, it’s important to understand the concepts so that you have them in the back of your mind while shooting. You’re not going to jail if you break them, but you will likely end up with a better image if you follow them! This 6-minute video from photographer Evan Ranft runs through 4 common composition mistakes that photographers make, and how to avoid them.
Ranft has created before and after images to go along with his tips so that you can see the impact that the mistakes have on the image. The 4 mistakes are:
1. Double Subject
The first example is what Ranft refers to as the ‘double subject’ – where you position two subjects in an image with equal weighting. This splits your attention and creates conflict in the image.
Instead of splitting the image, select a subject to be in the foreground and create isolation using a shallow depth of field. This creates a primary focus for the viewer’s eye to settle on.
2. The Look Out
In this example, Ranft has again split the focus in his image and directed his subject to look out of the frame. This creates tension in the image by directing the viewer’s eye outside of the image.
This can certainly be used effectively depending on the situation, but a more balanced image would be to have the subject leading out gaze in to the image and towards the forest backdrop.
3. Tangent Lines
This example has background elements cutting through the subject in a way that reduces isolation of the subject and cuts up the image.
By finding a more open backdrop, Ranft is able to frame his subject in the image and capture a similar sense of motion, using leading lines to draw the viewer towards the model.
4. Being Lazy
Ranft’s favorite example of this is the “pet photo test”, which is a typical lazy snapshot that many people might take of a cute pet. This is an image taken without much thought to composition – only aiming to include the subject somewhere in the frame.
Improving this photo doesn’t take much work. Simply finding another angle (in this case from eye-level) drastically improves the image. Ranft’s advice is to try not to be lazy and keep on the lookout for better composition opportunities.
Watch the video at the top to learn these concepts from Ranft, and to find more of his great photography-related videos, subscribe to his popular YouTube channel.
The 2017 World Beard And Mustache Championship was held this past weekend in Austin, Texas, and people from near and far flocked to the Austin Facial Hair Club to show off their glorious (and meticulously groomed) facial hair. Las Vegas-based photographer Greg Anderson was on hand to shoot portraits of some of the best contestants.
Here’s an incredibly weird beard that won 2nd place in the Freestyle category, worn by a man who goes by the name “Incredibeard:”
And here are some other portraits of showstoppers this year:
Man, I really don't want to be anti-police... but man, these guys need some extra training (or a chill pill) at least!
An Ohio newspaper photojournalist was shot by a police officer last night after the cop mistook the camera and tripod the photographer was holding for a rifle.
The New Carlisle News reports that its photographer Andy Grimm was shot by Clark County deputy Jake Shaw at around 10 p.m. last night while he was trying to shoot some photos of a traffic stop.
Grimm had left the office late at night to shoot photos of lightning when he came across the traffic stop. He pulled into a nearby restaurant parking lot and pulled his camera and tripod out of his car to shoot some photos when suddenly gunfire rang out. Shaw had opened fire, hitting Grimm in the side.
“I was going out to take pictures and I saw the traffic stop and I thought, ‘hey, cool. I’ll get some pictures here’,” Grimm tells the New Carlisle News. “I turned around toward the cars and then ‘pop, pop.'”
“I immediately dropped to the ground, and I saw the deputy and that’s when I realized ‘oh man, he shot me’,” Grimm tells FOX45. “He came running over and said ‘oh I thought that was a gun.'”
Grimm says he was given no warning before the shots were fired, and that he was simply trying to do his job. The photographer was rushed to a nearby hospital for surgery and is expected to make a full recovery, the New Carlisle News reports.
Andy Grimm says he was shot twice by a Clark Co. deputy–the first grazed his shoulder and second hit near his rib cage. @ABC22FOX45
After surveying Hurricane Harvey damage in Corpus Christi on Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed victims of the storm and praised those who had gathered to hear his remarks, “What a crowd, what a turn out.”
According to a press pool report,Trump spoke to a “throng of hundreds” outside of the Annaville Fire House, though not all were supporters. Some, apparently, were protestors: “One banner read ‘Liar, cheat, racist’ another read ‘Latinas against Trump’ and another ‘You pardoned Joe, what about José?’” per the pool report.
The purpose of Trump’s visit to Texas was to survey damage and coordinate federal support for the storm-ravaged area. Harvey dumped more than 4 feet of rain on Houston, setting a new record for the greatest amount of rain recorded from a single tropical storm or hurricane in the continental United States. So far, at least nine people have died in the storm, and FEMA predicted Monday that at least 30,000 people will need temporary shelter.
But Trump, in the wake of the disaster, appeared focused on crowd size, treating his remarks like a rally.
“Thank you everybody, I just want to say: We love you, you are special, we are here to take care, it’s going well, and I want to thank you for coming out. We’ll get you back and operating immediately,” Trump told the crowd before remarking on the size of the gathering. He also said, per the pool report, “It’s historic, its epic, but I tell you it happened in Texas and Texas can handle anything,” and held up a Texas flag to applause.
This isn’t his first comment of this nature in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Monday afternoon, when asked during a press conference if he had timed his pardon of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for Friday evening so that storm news might push it under the radar, Trump replied that he “assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally” on Friday as the storm was about to hit the Texas coast.
It’s all because over six days, 27 trillion gallons of water fell over Texas and Louisiana, as Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, told CNN. (The calculation is simple, he says on Twitter: It’s depth of rain multiplied by the number of square miles covered.) That’s one million gallons of water for nearly every person who lives in Texas. For reference, here’s what one million gallons of water looks like hovering above an average-sized person.
Twenty-seven trillion gallons is much harder to fathom. To help, we wondered what 27 trillion gallons would look like in one giant raindrop. Its size is reminiscent of a mushroom cloud.
Harvey’s total rainfall dwarfs the amount of rain dumped over Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That storm produced 6.56 trillion gallons over those states, the Washington Post’s Jason Samenow explains. (Which goes to show how different Katrina and Harvey are. Katrina brought destruction via storm surge and the crumbling of New Orleans levees. Harvey stalled over the coast after making landfall.)
For reference, here’s Harvey’s rainwater over Manhattan:
"What was somewhat remarkable is that those two conclusions flatly contradict what Perry and Pruitt have been saying about the “war on coal” and baseload power plants being necessary for reliability. Oops."
The analysis finds that the grid is perfectly reliable without coal plants.
Back in April, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that his agency would be conducting a review of power grid reliability. His comments at the time, as well as similar comments from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, led many observers — me included — to expect that the study would be agitprop, designed to justify keeping coal and nuclear power plants open.
Somewhat surprisingly, career staff at DOE got to work on the report and were, by all accounts, unimpeded. But those staffers were understandably nervous about what might happen to the report upon, ahem, political review, so in July, they leaked a mostly finished draft.
As analysis, it was thorough but not particularly remarkable. In particular, two of its central conclusions have been echoed in scores of similar reports:
Coal and nuclear plants are retiring primarily because of cheap natural gas. Next to that, renewable energy subsidies and environmental regulations play a marginal role in their shutdowns.
The retirement of these “baseload” plants has not impacted grid reliability. In fact, the power mix is more diverse than ever, and more reliable, too, “due to better planning, market discipline, and better operating rules and standards.”
What was somewhat remarkable is that those two conclusions flatly contradict what Perry and Pruitt have been saying about the “war on coal” and baseload power plants being necessary for reliability. Oops.
It turns out, leaking the draft was a smart move on some staffer’s part. It makes a before-and-after comparison easy, so interference at the political level is simple to discern.
That forced transparency seems to have restrained the hand of political appointees at DOE friendly to coal and nuclear. To be sure, the report has been changed. Some baseload-friendly language has been added and the straightforward conclusion about reliability I quoted above is gone. A few coal-friendly policy recommendations were added. It’s definitely been massaged.
But the bones of the analysis remain the same and still indicate the same conclusion: There’s no reason in the world to keep coal plants open and only one reason to keep nuclear plants open — climate change, which the report never mentions.
(Shutterstock)
Necessary?
Underneath the political graffiti, the report exonerates renewables
Over at ThinkProgress, Joe Romm has a great rundown of some of the more notable changes between drafts. As he says, even those changes are a bit of a hack job, contradicted by other parts of the report.
For instance, the final report says “dispatch of VRE [variable renewable energy, i.e., wind and solar] has negatively impacted the economics of baseload plants.” And in his cover letter, Perry says “certain regulations and subsidies are having a large impact on the functioning of markets, and thereby challenging our power generation mix.”
“Certain regulations and subsidies.” Wink, wink.
But as Romm notes, deeper in the report it says: “the data do not show a widespread relationship between VRE penetration and baseload retirements.”
Similarly, the blunt assessment of grid reliability is gone, but later in the report it notes that bulk power system (BPS) reliability “is adequate today despite the retirement of 11 percent of the generating capacity available in 2002” and that “overall, at the end of 2016, the system had more dispatchable capacity capable of operating at high utilization rates than it did in 2002.” That means the grid has become more flexible and reliable, not less.
Also, those effects on wholesale markets Perry warns about? First, VRE makes bulk power cheaper. And second, it “performs a price stabilizing role.” So, lower and more stable prices — hardly seems like an emergency.
Policy recommendations, mostly banal
There are seven official policy recommendations in the report. Five of them are relatively banal, things that have been recommended by many, many similar reports — power market reforms to better value grid services, formalizing fuel-agnostic criteria to assess grid reliability, supporting R&D on advanced energy, and so on.
Of the two Trumpish recommendations, one — reminding DOE to focus on “energy dominance” — is utterly meaningless.
The other is that DOE accelerate and prioritize infrastructure development, which in itself is inoffensive, except the only instances of infrastructure mentioned are hydro, nuclear, and coal plants. That’s a rather pinched vision of electricity infrastructure in the 21st century.
Specifically, the report recommends that coal plants be allowed to upgrade without triggering New Source Review obligations, which would force them to meet modern pollution standards. That’s a dumb idea for a million reasons, but it would require congressional action, so it will never happen.
All told, in terms of policy recommendations, the report could have been much worse.
(DOE)
A problem?
The report is a Rorschach test, soon forgotten
Perry and his staff took a perfectly solid report on the grid and added a (surprisingly light, to my eye) coating of political propaganda. The result is a muddy report, with findings in it to please (or enrage) every onlooker.
The coal lobby expressed pleasure that the report acknowledged the importance of coal plants. The nuclear lobby said the study “reaffirms our view that nuclear energy is a key and necessary contributor to a clean, reliable and resilient electric grid.” The energy storage lobby was pleased that the report “plainly states that advanced energy storage systems are critical to ensuring that electricity is reliable, affordable, and secure.” And so on.
Environmentalists, meanwhile, expressed the requisite outrage. Graham Richard of Advanced Energy Economy, a clean-energy business group, said, “this report seriously overstates the challenges associated with new energy resources.” Jim Marston of EDF said the report “is no surprise from an administration determined to prop up the coal industry at taxpayers’ expense.” Kim Smaczniak of EarthJustice said the report “is not worth the paper it’s printed on.” And so on.
Stephen Lacey and Julia Pyper of Greentech Media are right: The report is a Rorschach test. There’s something in it for everyone. That means everyone will issue their statements and reinforce their priors ... and then the report will be forgotten.
It has no legal force. It was only meant as advice and guidance to Perry and DOE. It mostly contains sensible recommendations that DOE, FERC, regional RTOs, and utilities have been working toward for a while. It does suggest, in various subtle ways, that Perry prioritize coal and nuclear plants, but he was almost certainly going to do that regardless. It’s what Trump has instructed.
Open office hate? or open office love? (or open office indifference...)
During a new episode of The Talk Show on Daring Fireball, John Gruber touched on the topic of the open floor plans that Apple has implemented within its new campus, Apple Park. Unlike office spaces at One Infinite Loop and other Apple-owned buildings -- which give most employees their own office -- Apple Park sports a large open floor plan with long tables for programmers, engineers, and other employees to work at.
Apple Park's open office spaces have been highlighted in numerous profiles on the campus, most recently by The Wall Street Journal in July, and now Gruber has reported that he's received emails from numerous Apple employees who are particularly dissatisfied with the design (via Silicon Valley Business Journal).
Standing desks within one of Apple Park's open offices
Judging from the private feedback I've gotten from some Apple employees, I'm 100% certain there's going to be some degree of attrition based on the open floor plans. Where good employees are going to choose to leave because they don't want to work there.
One source is said to have been with the company for 18 years. They emailed Gruber, telling him that they're working on something that is "going to blow people's minds when we ship," but before that happens their team is transitioning to Apple Park. Gruber noted that the email was very level-headed and had a "perfect Apple sensibility," but the source nevertheless said that if they don't like the Apple Park workspaces, they're likely to leave the company after the product ships.
Gruber said he got a "couple of similar emails," with employees stating that they won't outright quit before they move to Apple Park, but if it's as bad as they think it's going to be then they will consider leaving Apple. During the podcast, Gruber and special guest Glenn Fleishman pointed out numerous disadvantages to an open work space, particularly for coders and programmers who aren't used to a lot of foot traffic and noise in their vicinity while they work.
Gruber went on to mention Apple vice president Johny Srouji as one of the employees dissatisfied with the Apple Park office spaces. Srouji was allegedly so against the changes that Apple "built his team their own building" outside of the main spaceship building.
"I heard that when floor plans were announced, that there was some meeting with [Apple Vice President] Johny Srouji's team,” said Gruber. “He's in charge of Apple's silicon, the A10, the A11, all of their custom silicon. Obviously a very successful group at Apple, and a large and growing one with a lot on their shoulders.”
Gruber continued, “When he [Srouji] was shown the floor plans, he was more or less just 'F--- that, f--- you, f--- this, this is bulls---.' And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus … My understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, 'F--— this, my team isn't working like this.’”
The idea that open work spaces at Apple Park could potentially "irk" employees goes back to some of the original profiles on the building. Last year, Bloomberg explained that there will be "few traditional offices" at Apple Park, and management will have to be at a vice president level or above to get their own formal office space, although there is reportedly potential for employees below this level to be eligible. During the company's presentations to the Cupertino city council, Apple's viewpoint indicated an open floor plan is "conducive to collaboration between teams."
In other Apple Park news, some Snapchat users have recently noticed that a handful of construction workers and visitors at the campus have been taking enough snaps to accumulate into a Snapchat Story of its own. If you're on the app, you can search "Apple Park" from the main screen to find the Story. The new "Snap Map" also shows an increase in picture-taking activity at Apple Park.
Apple Park opened to the first round of employees over the summer, and the campus will eventually house close to 12,000 workers. Over the past few years, drone footage has consistently documented construction on the site, originally referred to as Apple Campus 2, with more recent updates focusing on the advancements made to the area's landscaping and the Steve Jobs Theater.
All the Disney content was one of the last reasons to keep Netflix around... this makes me really sad...
Disney plans to pull all of its movies from Netflix as it prepares to launch its own streaming services, the company said in its latest earnings report (via CNBC.)
Starting in early 2018, Disney will launch an ESPN video streaming service that will feature approximately 10,000 MLB, NHL, MLS, collegiate, and tennis sporting events every year.
Then, in 2019, Disney will launch a Disney-branded direct-to-consumer streaming service that offers Disney content.
It's not clear when Disney plans to remove its content from Netflix, but in 2012, the two companies inked a deal that saw Netflix getting exclusive access to Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar films. Currently, there are dozens of Disney movies available on Netflix, like The Chronicles of Narnia, Moana, Zootopia, Finding Dory, The Jungle Book, Pirates of the Caribbean, and more.
The deal, though initiated in 2012, didn't fully go into effect until 2016, so Netflix has only had access to a wide range of Disney content for under a year.
With its huge range of content, Disney stands to become a major competitor to existing streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, and for Apple, this essentially means that if the company ever does manage to launch a streaming service, it may not be able to include any Disney content.
I will literally never use "literally" figuratively.
Steven Pinker, the famous linguist who’s not Noam Chomsky, doesn’t think using “literally” figuratively is all that bad. “The figurative use doesn’t mean the language is deteriorating,” he says in a 2014 interview, comparing it to the hyperbolic use of “terrific” or “wonderful.”
This just feels wrong - who turns a taco around and eats from the back?
A hard-shell taco can break apart in your hands after just a couple bites if you’re not careful. The trick is to hold it the right way and take bites from both sides as you go.
"So it’s official: One of the first major pieces of bipartisan legislation to pass Congress during Trump’s presidency has been explicitly designed to sharply limit his powers."
I really would love to see him veto the bill. #moron
The president just grudgingly signed a sanctions bill that puts him on a leash.
It’s official: Congress has handcuffed Donald Trump on Russia.
On Wednesday morning, President Trump grudgingly signed a bill into law that imposes new sanctions on Russia and sharply limits his ability to lift them. Since the bill sailed through Congress with a veto-proof majority, his only options were to sign it or to veto it and then endure the humiliation of seeing Congress — controlled by his own party — override him with ease, as lawmakers in both parties pledged to do.
When he signed the bill, he issued a statement calling the law “significantly flawed” and claiming that it contains “unconstitutional provisions” in its restrictions on presidential authority.
The bill is a major blow to Trump’s agenda to warm relations with Moscow, and demonstrates that even in a time of partisan rancor and near-total legislative dysfunction, both parties can agree that Trump simply can’t be trusted to deal with Russia without their input.
The bill takes Obama-era sanctions against Russia that are in place under executive orders — that is, directives that only the president has authority to enact and rescind — and officially enshrines them in the law. It also establishes a new congressional review process that would allow Congress to block the White House from taking steps to ease sanctions if it wanted to. And it imposes a fresh batch of sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Trump wanted to keep sanctions under his control as he angles to turn things around in the rapidly souring US-Russian relationship. Moscow despises US sanctions, and their removal would be central to any kind of major reset between the two countries.
But now that’s not happening, and Russia has already made its fury over the legislation plain: On Friday, after the Senate passed the bill, Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced that it was cutting the number of US diplomatic personnel in Russia down to a number that matches the number of Russian diplomatic personnel in the US.
Russia also said that it will seize a dacha, or country house, outside Moscow that US personnel use, as well as a storage facility.
“Any new unilateral actions by the US authorities to reduce the number of our diplomats in the United States will be met with a mirror response," the ministry promised in a statement.
Russia has lost interest in Trump’s outreach
The response is a major setback for Trump’s ambition to turn over a new leaf with Russia, and stands in stark contrast to Moscow’s response to the last time the US took strong actions against it.
Back in December, after President Obama announced a raft of new sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats from the US as a penalty for its meddling in the 2016 election, Vladimir Putin refrained from retaliation. No diplomats were ejected from Russia; no compounds were seized. In fact, he went a step further, inviting the children of US diplomats to join Christmas parties in the Kremlin. And there was only one reason he did that: He was optimistic about Trump’s interest in warming ties with Moscow and wanted to give him a chance to reverse Obama’s sanctions.
That window of opportunity appears to have closed, and it’s Trump’s own fault.
The Republican Party has extraordinary strategic discipline. They haven’t been particularly keen on hitting Trump hard with investigations over his inner circle’s ties to Russia during the campaign, but they do realize how politically risky it is for Trump to have free rein to lift sanctions on his own while he’s being investigated.
Many of them also genuinely think that Putin will play Trump for a fool in any deal they strike, and want to make sure he doesn’t give away the US’s biggest bargaining chip without them having a say in it.
Now the big question is what does Trump’s statement of concern about the new law mean? It suggests that when it comes to actually executing future sanctions he could interpret the law in a manner that clashes with Congress’ understanding of it. That could mean more fights over Russia sanctions are in store.
I’m sure there are plenty of serious, business-y applications for iOS 11’s ARKit framework, but bless humans, because it’s also being used for very important and practical things like space cats and little BB-8 sidekicks.
Now, Chicago-based TRIXI studios has seemingly done the impossible and created an application for ARKit that is more monumental than space cats (and cats are one of the pillars of the internet) — an augmented reality version of A-Ha’s iconic sketch video for “Take on Me.”
“We had portals in [first-person shooter] PHANTOGEIST on Project Tango last year,” TRIXI founder Chip Sineni tells The Verge, “and instantly thought of the ‘Take on Me’ video... When ARKit came along, we were very excited by the idea that just ‘normal’...
The world can be a bleak and unforgiving place, but there are bright spots. Such a spot exists in the form of this kitchen tool that nobody really needs—but everyone deserves—known as Tricerataco.
Carlson is training the biggest audience in cable news to view difference as dangerous.
Since taking over Bill O’Reilly’s slot on Fox News, Tucker Carlson has had the most-watched news show on cable. His populist rhetoric and cutting interview style have earned him millions of nightly viewers, prompting Forbes to ask if Carlson is “the new king of cable news.”
But Carlson’s rise to stardom has also earned him the attention of another group: white supremacists. Richard Spencer celebrated O’Reilly’s replacement, arguing Carlson showed an “open-mindedness” to white supremacist ideas that O’Reilly didn’t. Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke frequently tweets praise of Tucker’s show. And the white supremacist website Daily Stormer has called Carlson “literally our greatest ally.”
White supremacists’ affection for Carlson has a lot to do with the way he talks about immigrants. Unlike other conservative pundits, who focus their anti-immigration rhetoric on illegal immigration, Carlson spent the first few months of his show depicting both legal and undocumented immigrants as potentially dangerous criminals. He’s gone after Mexicans, Muslims, and refugees, often cherry-picking stories of immigrant crime and inviting anti-immigrant extremists to depict “foreigners” as threatening invaders.
Carlson’s immigrants-are-criminals shtick is just part of his broader rejection of multiculturalism, which he sees as a threat to “European culture” and “Western civilization.” That kind of language is eerily similar to that of white supremacists, who use similar coded speech to argue that immigrants are a threat to white America. And it suggests that Carlson’s anti-immigrant rhetoric isn’t actually about immigration — it’s about teaching the largest audience in cable news to view difference as dangerous.
Watch the video above to see why Tucker Carlson has become a hero to some of the country’s most notorious white supremacists.
Verizon Wireless customers this week noticed that Netflix's speed test tool appears to be capped at 10Mbps, raising fears that the carrier is throttling video streaming on its mobile network.
When contacted by Ars this morning, Verizon acknowledged using a new video optimization system but said it is part of a temporary test and that it did not affect the actual quality of video. The video optimization appears to apply both to unlimited and limited mobile plans.
But some YouTube users are reporting degraded video, saying that using a VPN service can bypass the Verizon throttling. The Federal Communications Commission generally allows mobile carriers to limit video quality as long as the limitations are imposed equally across different video services despite net neutrality rules that outlaw throttling. The net neutrality rules have exceptions for network management.
Whenever Jane Austen comes up, her fans immediately feel the impulse to start ranking her novels and arguing over which one is best. It’s a reasonable inclination: There are only six completed Austenbooks, so you can get comprehensive easily, and arguing over rankings is alwaysfun.
The downside is that because Austen only has six novels, after a while you’ve heard every variation and you know the history of each argument. One person will reasonably say that everyone loves Pride and Prejudice, so that one’s best, and another person will explain that Pride and Prejudice is for basics and real Austen fans love Emma. One person will pop for Persuasion, and another person will counter that Persuasion is so uncharacteristic for Austen that saying it’s your favorite is as good as saying you don’t really like Austen. It’s an argument that’s been happening for a while, with little variation. In the 19th century, the hipster litbro pick was Mansfield Park, but everyone wanted to marry Elizabeth Bennet.
So on the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, I’d like to propose an alternative to ranking her novels: Let’s make like a high school yearbook and give them superlatives instead. Each of her books does at least one thing perfectly, so let’s pinpoint what that one thing is for each one and celebrate it. Everyone wins.
Northanger Abbey wasn’t published until after Austen died in 1817, but it was the first novel she ever sold to a publisher (in 1803). It’s a little lighter than Austen’s other work, and a little more brittle, with a palpable contempt for most of its characters. Northanger Abbey is fond of silly, flighty Catherine Morland, its heroine, and of patronizing Henry Tilney, its hero, but it isn’t about to let its fondness get in the way of mocking them. And it has so very much fun mocking them that you’d be sad if it stopped.
Sense and Sensibility, the first novel Austen published during her lifetime, is not as good at any one particular thing as many of her novels, but it holds all of her strengths in beautiful balance. Its love stories are not quite as developed as Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but its portrait of the sisterly love between Marianne and Elinor is better than the corresponding relationship between Elizabeth and Jane. It’s not as funny as Northanger Abbey, but it has more heart, and it’s not as moving as Persuasion, but it’s funnier. It’s where Austen figures out all the skills she’s about to deploy so skillfully over the course of her career.
This one’s easy. Everyone loves Pride and Prejudice, because it is such a very lovable book, and because it is nearly impossible not to adore the witty and stubborn Elizabeth Bennet as soon as you meet her. “I must confess that I think her as delightful a character as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know,” Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra. Pride and Prejudice sparkles and bubbles from its iconic first line all the way through to its conclusion, and it dares its readers not to be charmed.
Mansfield Park used to be a popular candidate for Austen’s best novel, but it’s currently going through an unpopular phase. It’s never been a personal favorite of mine: It’s an oddly dark and didactic book, in which the characters who are endowed with that sparkling Austen charm all turn out to be wicked or amoral and the morally upright characters are pinched and humorless. But its portrait of its heroine, Fanny Price, is a stunner. Fanny is a neglected child who latches onto the only person who has ever shown her any affection — her cousin Edmund — and when he withdraws his attention from her, it affects her developing psyche in sad and painful ways. I’ve never loved Mansfield Park, but it’s worth admiring.
Austen famously remarked that Emma Woodhouse was "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” but in fact Emma Woodhouse is enormously lovable. That’s because Austen lets you into her head so cleverly: You see all of Emma’s happy self-delusions about how kind and helpful she means to be those around her, and simultaneously you see that she is a snobbish busybody taking out her boredom on everyone in her path. Emma is serenely joyous in her self-aggrandizement, and that makes her a delight. On a purely technical level, it’s a beautifully achieved effect, and some critics have argued that in Emma, Austen more or less invented and perfected the use of the free indirect discourse that the modernists would love so deeply.
Persuasion is also the most melancholy Jane Austen, and the most lyrical, and arguably the most romantic, all of which are perhaps part of why it’s such a beautiful book. If Pride and Prejudice is a sparkling and babbling brook, Persuasion is a quiet pool with still, deep waters. It’s laced with regret and nostalgia, but it’s not as dark as Mansfield Park because at the end it explodes with that triumphant, cathartic love letter Wentworth slips into Anne Elliot’s hands. The claim that it’s uncharacteristic for Austen has some truth to it: It’s not the witty drawing room comedy of manners she’s known for, but rather the thoughtful work of a writer at the height of her powers, beginning to engage with the Romantics writing all around her. It’s an entirely different aesthetic mode than the rest of Austen’s work, but that mode is incredibly beautiful.
After introducing them to the world with buzzy, pop-up vending machine drops and then eventually expanding to direct web orders, Snap has begun selling its Spectacles camera glasses through Amazon. All three colors — black, coral, and teal — are available for the usual $129.99 price and are eligible for next-day delivery. The Spectacles are sold directly by Snap and fulfilled by Amazon.
Spectacles were Snap’s first hardware product and had their big moment last fall, when Snapchat rebranded itself as “a camera company” and began distributing the glasses, capable of recording short 10- to 30-second video clips, at randomly chosen locations. The vending machines attracted long lines, and Snap even opened a retail location in New York City...
Now this is clever: a group of street artists in Russia have “deleted” the graffiti covering a dumpster and abandoned car with a clever anamorphic illusion. Using paint, the artists covered the graffiti with Photoshop’s transparency checkerboard to make it look like someone had cut out the graffiti from a layer in Photoshop.
The artwork is aptly titled “Ctrl-X.”
It was created as part of the Stenograffia street art festival. Here’s what the original scene looked like before the artists began:
First, the artists painted the dumpster and car white.
Next, after the sun went down, a projector was used to project the Photoshop checkerboard pattern onto the dumpster and car from a specific point of view. The artists used the projection as a guide to trace lines.
The next day, the artists used the guide lines to mask off the white checkers with masking tape and then spray paint everything else gray.
Here’s the final comparison showing the scene before and after “Ctrl-X”:
This is sad. I definitely thought Windows Phone had potential when it first came out... but when the ecosystem never materialized, it became a dead man standing, so to speak.
Microsoft is killing off Windows Phone 8.1 support today, more than three years after the company first introduced the update. The end of support marks an end to the Windows Phone era, and the millions of devices still running the operating system. While most have accepted that the death of Windows Phone occurred more than a year ago, AdDuplex estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Windows-powered phones are still running Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, or Windows Phone 8.1. All of these handsets are now officially unsupported, and only 20 percent of all Windows phones are running the latest Windows 10 Mobile OS.
Windows Phone 8.1 was a big update to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 operating system, and included the company’s Cortana...
An explosive new report in the New York Times says that Donald Trump Jr. was told in advance of his meeting with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya that she had negative information to offer about Hillary Clinton and that the source of the information was the Russian government.
According to the Times, citing “three people with knowledge of the email,” Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who set up the meeting, contacted Trump and told him that he should meet with Veselnitskaya because she could share information sourced to the Russian government. After the Times first reported Saturday on the meeting’s existence, Trump acknowledged that it took place, but made no mention of the Russian government being a source of Veselnitskaya’s alleged information.
It’s not clear at this point that she actually had any such information — from what we can tell, she sought the meeting to discuss with the Trump campaign her longstanding attempt to get a set of sanctions related to human rights abuses lifted. And there’s no indication that the Veselnitskaya meeting had anything to do with the emails pilfered by Russian-backed hackers from the Democratic National Committee or John Podesta.
Still, the fact that the Trump campaign took a high-level meeting — Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner were also present — whose ostensible purpose was for the Trump campaign to work with the Russian government to take down Clinton certainly increases the level of plausibility around the possibility that people from Trumpworld were involved in the anti-Clinton information operation that we do know took place.
Donald Trump Jr. is getting in a lot of trouble
Even before this latest revelation, Donald Trump Jr.’s participation in the meeting was a potential source of legal trouble for him.
That’s because it’s essentially illegal to seek foreign help of any kind in a political campaign. Under 52 USC 30121, 36 USC 510, the law governing foreign contributions to political campaigns, you don’t have to actually get useful help from foreigners, according to this law: The mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton, and heard her out as she attempted to describe it, might have constituted a federal crime.
“If what Donald Trump Jr. said was true ... then they should have never had the meeting in the first place,” Nick Akerman, an assistant special prosecutor during the Watergate investigation who now specializes in data crime, says.
Compounding his trouble is the fact that his story about the meeting keeps changing. He had earlier maintained that he’d had no meetings with Russians having anything to do with the campaign. Then when the Veselnitskaya meeting first came to light, he said it was a discussion about adoptions. When it was further revealed in the press that Veselnitskaya came to him with the offer of opposition research on Clinton, he acknowledged it was actually about that but said there’s nothing wrong with seeking some oppo. Now it’s come out that he neglected to mention that the Russian government was the source of the information.
This raises the question — as several other rounds of Trump-adjacent figures meeting with Russians has — of why there’s been the need to lie if nobody did anything wrong.
The specter of collusion
For a long time now the specter of “collusion” has loomed large in the Trump/Russia investigation, with no clear evidence having come to light that the Trump campaign was in any way involved with the hacking of Democratic emails.
Today’s revelations do not exactly change that.
But if the Times’ reporting is accurate, it established that the Trump campaign was willing — and even eager — to work with the Russian government to secure political advantage. That makes the leap to Trump involvement in the actual Russia-backed anti-Clinton information campaign that we know happened — the DNC email hack — a lot narrower.
Whether Trump himself knew anything about the meetings his son was setting up is, of course, another matter. But it’s inherently difficult for Trump to put distance between himself and his own son — especially seeing as how the son in question is currently charged with running the business empire Trump still runs.
There’s boudoir photography, and then there’s… this. A reader spotted this strange “wedding photographer needed” ad posted on Craigslist by someone in Wisconsin. Apparently there’s an engaged couple looking for a wedding photographer who’s willing to double as a consummation photographer.
“Hello, my fiance and I are getting married later this year and are looking for a wedding photographer,” the poster writes. “We are hoping someone will document the whole day from beginning to end.”
Seems pretty normal so far, right? Except by “whole day,” the couple means an actual day, rather than the wedding preparation, ceremony, and reception.
“We are specifically hoping someone will document the end, which we are finding difficult to find someone who will,” the ad continues. “We have both saved ourselves for marriage and understand our first time will be awkward but do not think it will be that much more awkward for the photographer to be there and we’d really like it documented (in a beautiful and tasteful way).”
“If you are ok with being with us the whole day, please send pricing and some examples of your work. Thank you.”
So if you’ve been yearning to add “consummation photographer” to your resume and list of accomplishments, keep your eyes peeled — that genre may be following on the heels of “pro birth photography.”
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Standing desks within one of Apple Park's open offices 
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ITV
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Columbia
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Miramax
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Miramax
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Clerkenwell Films
