NASA says it can’t afford to build a space telescope considered the fastest way to identify asteroids that might impact the Earth with terrible consequences.
A 2015 law gave the space agency five years to identify 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters in diameter, which could devastate cities, regions and even civilization itself if they were to impact the planet. NASA isn’t going to meet that deadline, and scientists believe they have so far only identified about a third of the asteroids considered a threat.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer, developed a proposal for a space telescope called NEOCam that would use infrared sensors to find and measure near-Earth objects. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report this spring concluding that NEOCam was the fastest way to meet the asteroid-hunting mandate. But NASA will not approve the project to begin development.
“The Planetary Defense Program at NASA does not currently have sufficient funding to approve development of a full space-based NEO survey mission as was proposed by the NEOCam project,” a NASA spokesperson told Quartz this week.
The agency said it was prioritizing funding for ground-based telescopes looking for asteroids, though the NAS report concluded that they would not fulfill its mandate. The agency is also funding the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission (DART), which will pilot the technologies needed to do something about any threatening near-Earth objects. Still, the agency said the infrared telescope proposed for NEOCam “could be ready for any future flight mission development effort.”
Scientists say that NEOCam is caught in a game of “cosmic chicken” between Congress and NASA. NASA managers are reluctant to prioritize planetary defense over scientific missions, while Congress has yet to appropriate specific funding for an asteroid survey. The NAS report recommended that “missions meeting high-priority planetary defense objectives should not be required to compete against missions meeting high-priority science objectives.”
“Although highly unlikely, being taken by surprise by a catastrophic asteroid impact that could have been detected would be an epic failure in the history of science,” MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel told Quartz. “We now have a capability to know what’s out there, meaning we have no excuse for an ongoing lack of knowledge.”
Binzel says that the onus is now on Congress to increase NASA funding for planetary defense by $40 million annually, which would allow the agency to develop the spacecraft and eventually launch it in the years ahead.
NASA, however, did not ask for that plus-up in the White House’s budget proposal to Congress this year. Instead, the agency has asked for $1.6 billion in new funding to support a human return to the moon that could cost as much as $30 billion over the next five years. In contrast, the total cost of the NEOCam mission is estimated to be $500 to $600 million. But NASA funding is a fairly low priority in Washington, as Congress has yet to agree on even a broad outline for 2020 funding.
Lawmakers haven’t been enthusiastic about funding the lunar return, but asteroid hunting might be an easier sell. A national poll of Americans taken in May found 68% supported missions to find asteroids that might impact Earth, while just 23% thought a return to the moon would be a good idea.
Washington Crossing the Delaware. Painting by Emmanuel Leutze (1851).
July 4 is almost over. But there is still time to address claims that history would have taken a better course had the American Revolution failed (or never started). In the United States, such arguments made mostly by people on the left. This 2015 Vox article by Dylan Matthews is an excellent example. But similar claims are also made by a few libertarians, such as my George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan, and by some Canadian and British conservatives. Here are the main arguments typically advanced by modern critics of the Revolution (most elaborated at greater length at the links above):
1. British rule would have led to an earlier and less violent abolition of slavery. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, some thirty years before the United States, and it did not require a bloody civil war to do it.
2. A British-ruled America would have treated Native Americans better (as witness their apparently superior treatment in Canada).
3. A British America would have had a parliamentary form of government rather than separation of powers, which—among other advantages—would have led to a larger welfare and regulatory state. This latter point, of course, is usually made by left of center critics of the Revolution, not conservative and libertarian ones.
4. The history of Canada (and later Australia and New Zealand) shows that the British Empire was capable of gradually granting colonies increased autonomy and rights without the need for a bloody revolt.
5. The Revolutionary War caused enormous bloodshed. Some 25,000 Americans died (a larger percentage of the population than were lost in any of our other wars, besides the Civil War). To that figure, we should add numerous casualties suffered British and French troops, and by German mercenary soldiers hired by the British. The possible gains of the Revolution were not enough to justify this terrible loss of life.
This is a weighty critique that Americans should take seriously. We should not adopt a blindly celebratory attitude to our history, but should instead seek out the truth. Still, the critique falls short.
Here are my responses:
1. Far from retarding the abolition of slavery, the Revolution actually accelerated it. Its triumph gave a big boost to Enlightenment liberalism, which inspired the First Emancipation in the US (the abolition of slavery in the North that became the first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history), and boosted antislavery movements in Europe, as well.
2. Had the Revolution been defeated, Enlightenment liberal ideology would have been dealt a setback in Britain and France, too. That would have set back antislavery movements there, as well. It iss no accident that many antislavery leaders in Europe were also sympathizers with the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette was just one of the most famous examples of European liberals who actively backed both.
3. The West Indian slaveowner lobby in Parliament was strong enough to block abolition of slavery until 1833. Had Britain also been saddled with the much larger proslavery lobby of the American South, it would have taken far longer. Especially when you combine the impact of the larger slavery lobby with the force of point 2 above.
4. A defeat for the American Revolution would have set back other liberal causes too, not just antislavery. That includes, among other things, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and increased rights for women. Each of these reforms (and others, too) was given new impetus by American Revolution, which inspired European liberals to imitate them.
Ideally, people should evaluate political ideas purely on the basis of logic and evidence. But, in reality, many are often attracted to a seeming winner. Military victory often increases the attractiveness of an ideology, and defeat reduces it. Think of how fascism's appeal plummeted after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, and communism's appeal increased after the Bolshevik triumph in the Russian Civil War and Stalin's successes in World War II. The American Revolution similarly gave a boost to Enlightenment liberalism around the world. A British victory would have had the opposite effect. The impact would have been felt on both sides of the Atlantic.
5. The relatively better treatment of natives in Canada owed more to the lower number of settlers and the somewhat less desirable nature of the lands in question, than to any intrinsic superiority of British policy in that regard. The horrendous treatment of Australian aborigines underscores that the British could be just as brutal towards native populations as Americans often were. While I am no expert on this subject, recent historiography also paints a more negative picture of the nineteenth century Canadian government's treatment of Native Americans/First Nations. I should emphasize that this critique of the British/Canadian record on forcible displacement of native peoples does not excuse what happened in the United States. The sad truth is that neither society has much to boast about when it comes to this issue.
6. Britain's generally benevolent treatment of Canada in the 19th century was in large part a product of lessons the British learned from the American Revolution (that oppression would be likely to lead to revolt). Moreover, they knew that a dissatisfied Canada was ripe for conquest by the US (which did in fact try to seize Canada twice).
7. It may actually be true that a parliamentary British North America would have a larger welfare/regulatory state than the US does. I see that as a negative, not a positive. Still, I can understand why many on the left take the opposite view. But it is also worth noting that Canada and the US actually score very close to each other on standard measures of economic liberty and government spending as a percentage of GDP (40.3% for Canada; just under 38% in the US). In recent years, Canada sometimes scores a bit higher (in the sense of being slightly more free market). And while separation of powers is not the ideal regime for all nations, I think it is often superior to parliamentary government, for reasons I summarized here.
8. Points 1-5 above (along with other benefits of the Revolution I do not have time and space for here) strongly suggest that the good accomplished was worth the admittedly terrible loss of life.
Some conservatives occasionally make the argument that the failure of the American Revolution would have forestalled the French Revolution and the resulting massive bloodshed of the Napoleonic wars. We can also take this further and suggest that preventing the French Revolution might have also blocked the later rise of revolutionary socialism and the horrific atrocities of communism. Robert Sobel's classic 1971 alternate history novelFor Want of a Naildevelops a scenario somewhat like this.
It is difficult to evaluate such wide-ranging claims. But it seems to me unlikely that the absence of the French Revolution would have prevented a war comparable to the Napoleonic Wars from arising. The period from 1688 to 1783 saw numerous bloody wars between Britain and France, including three that resulted in massive pan-European conflicts (the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Seven Years War). Given this history, it is highly likely another such conflict would have occurred even absent the French Revolution. It is notable that the Napoleonic Wars dragged on for many years even after France abandoned most of the ideological pretensions of the Revolution.
As for the rise of socialism and communism, it likely would have occurred anyway, as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution and its associated intellectual and social changes. Indeed, a world with no American and French Revolutions might well have been one where socialism and reactionary conservatism and nationalism were the only major ideological alternatives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But, admittedly, we cannot totally exclude the possibility of a world dominated by more moderate forms of conservatism emerging from this scenario. In that event, modern society would have fallen short of the heights achievement reached by liberal democracy, but it might also have avoided the depths of communist and Nazi totalitarianism.
Since we are talking about a really big counterfactual, it is entirely possible that some low-probability event would have happened to upset one or more of my conjectures above. But, overall, I believe the evidence suggests that the American Revolution did a lot more good than harm.
The revolutionaries were far from perfect, and often failed to live up to their own principles. But their triumph nonetheless did much to advance the cause of freedom—not just in America, but around the world.
Some historians argue that counterfactual reasoning of this sort is worthless. How can we possibly evaluate events that didn't happen? It is hard enough to understand those that did. But, over the last several decades, scholars such as Niall Ferguson and Philip Tetlock have shown that careful counterfactual analysis can shed useful light on many aspects of the past. Among other things, the claim that Event X caused Event Y implies that Y would not have happened in the absence of X (or at least would not have happened on the same scale or extent). To assess such causal claims, it is important to consider what might have transpired had X been prevented.
I consider the value of counterfactual history in greater detail in this article, which assesses a much more modest counterfactual scenario than the failure of the American Revolution.
A magnitude 7.1 earthquake shook Southern California around 8:20 pm on Friday night — just one day after a 6.4 magnitude quake struck the Ridgecrest area on July 4, AP reports.
Why it matters: Following a quiet stretch in California's seismic history, these are the largest reported earthquakes to affect the state in nearly 20 years. Scientists say the fault causing the quakes seems to be growing, per the LA Times.
The big picture: Lucy Jones, a Caltech seismologist, said Friday's temblor was 10 times larger than Thursday morning's, and that "there's no reason to think we can't have more large earthquakes," the LA Times reports. In a tweet, Jones said another magnitude 5 quake is likely, and a magnitude 6 quake is possible. Aftershocks could continue for months, if not years, per the Weather Channel.
What we know:
There are no reported deaths, but some injuries. Several buildings and homes were damaged, along with fires and ravaged roads, according to the Washington Post.
"The quake was felt as far north as Sacramento and Reno, Nevada, as far south as northern Mexico and as far east as Phoenix and Las Vegas. The temblor was felt throughout the Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco Bay areas," the Weather Channel reports.
According to the U.S. Geological Service, more than 600 quakes of at least a magnitude of 2.5 have been identified since July 4 in the Mojave Desert. More than 20 were magnitude 4.5 or greater, per the Weather Channel.
A U.S. Navy weapons testing facility outside of Ridgecrest was harmed, rendering it incapable of completing missions, says the LA Times.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom mobilized the state's office of emergency services and requested an emergency declaration from President Trump to receive federal aid.
A UN report presented today says that since the start of 2018 more than 6,800 people have been killed by Venezuelan security forces while resisting arrest. The report cites interviews with hundreds of victims’ relatives and concludes that Venezuelan police are staging crime scenes and using torture against political opponents. From the BBC:
Its most damning findings relate to the number of deaths the Venezuelan government has ascribed to resisting arrest.
That figure for last year was 5,287, with another 1,569 up to 19 May this year.
Referring to these figures as “unusually” and “shockingly” high, the report says: “Information analysed by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights suggests many of these killings may constitute extrajudicial executions.”
The UN says witnesses reported how the Special Action Forces (FAES) “manipulated the crime scene and evidence. They would plant arms and drugs and fire their weapons against the walls or in the air to suggest a confrontation and to show the victim had ‘resisted authority'”.
It adds that the UN “is concerned the authorities may be using FAES and other security forces as an instrument to instil fear in the population and to maintain social control”…
On accusations of torture it says detainees have been subjected to “one or more forms of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags, water boarding, beatings, sexual violence, water and food deprivation, stress positions and exposure to extreme temperatures”.
Back in February, a report from Reuters alleged that the National Police’s Special Action Force (FAES) was targeting protesters based on tips from government loyalists. The FAES would show up in the slums, pull people out of their homes and shoot them dead. Venezuela claimed these were efforts to round up gang members, but none of these cases ever ended in a trial. The victims are simply shot, often in the street. Why in the street? Because FAES wants everyone in the neighborhood to know what happens to those who oppose the government.
Maduro’s regime has issued an 11-page response to the UN report. The response takes issue with the idea there is a humanitarian crisis in the country and instead claims its problems are the result of economic sanctions by the US. There is a site which offers a communist take on what is happening in Venezuela called Venezuela Analysis. So far, the site hasn’t published a story about the UN report but it’s coming.
Of course, having the UN issue a report about what is happening won’t change things for victims of the Maduro regime. The only thing it will do is provide a further signal to the media that what is happening there is not simply an economic collapse but a violent dictatorship holding onto power by any means necessary.
The body representing America’s lawyers has staked out an eye-opening position in recent years—lobbying against efforts in Congress to close a loophole that enables terrorism, human trafficking, money laundering, and a host of other crimes.
The legislation would force the owners of US companies to disclose their identities to the authorities. The move would make it much harder for criminals to hide their money in shell companies with anodyne names; something anti-corruption experts and law enforcement say is a crucial step in fighting financial crime and ending America’s status as the world’s biggest tax haven. It’s also relatively timid compared to what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic, where the UK has set up a fully public registry of company owners, and the rest of the EU is following suit.
In these divisive times, the bills boast the rare distinction of serious bipartisan support. After a decade of failing to make headway, the lawmakers behind the legislation have gathered steam by talking up the national security threats posed by shell companies. Earlier this month, the House Financial Services Committee approved Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney’s bill with a hefty majority. It is likely to win a later vote on the House floor, while bipartisan sister bills are being debated in the Senate.
That many business lobbies dislike the bills is no shock. More surprising is that, despite the legislation’s modest nature and bipartisan backing, it has found a constant opponent in the American Bar Association (ABA). That’s worth restating: the chief lobbyist for American lawyers is fighting a bill that seeks to stop rampant law-breaking.
The ABA declined to comment on the record for this piece, but has said it objects to the legislation because, they argue, it would burden small businesses and pose privacy concerns for entrepreneurs. In a recent letter of opposition, the ABA’s president said the organization supports “reasonable and necessary” measures to fight money laundering and terrorist financing, and offered to discuss other solutions with lawmakers.
These arguments are met with deep cynicism among corruption scholars and pro-transparency advocates. While describing the ABA’s case in a blog post earlier this year, Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson wrote, “I’m trying to find a polite euphemism for ‘self-serving and intellectually bankrupt,’ but I’m having trouble.”
The ABA’s critics point out that there are influential sections of the legal world who make a lot of money from setting up anonymous companies.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a key backer of the legislation and ex-US attorney for Rhode Island, is scathing about his former profession’s role in the world of money laundering. “The estimates of how big this international dark economy is run up into multiple trillions of dollars. As a lawyer, I’m embarrassed to say that there are lawyers who have dedicated their professional lives to facilitating clients to navigate this darkened world,” he told Quartz in March, speaking generally about the industry rather than the ABA specifically.
How the Bar came to oppose anti-corruption legislation
The ABA’s original complaint was that the law threatened attorney-client privilege—a stance stemming from a policy drawn up 16 years ago. Legislators have since removed the offending clause, however, and ABA president Robert Carlson doesn’t even mention the matter in his latest letter of opposition to Maloney.
But the Bar has stayed resolutely opposed. It has found a surprising ally in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which argues that the bill’s definition of the beneficial owner of a company is too vague. (The ABA also makes this point, though in less detail.) That vagueness, they argue, means small business owners could face jail-time for making a simple mistake on a disclosure form.
“These claims are groundless,” Stephenson said of the ACLU’s arguments. He and other backers of the bill say the definition—which was actually adopted in a different US law (p.604) last year—is “flexible,” rather than vague. They believe this flexibility will prevent criminals from finding loopholes to game the system, and point out that to face a criminal penalty business owners would have to “knowingly” or “willfully” misrepresent their identity, so couldn’t be punished for a mistake.
Despite publicly offering to help lawmakers find a solution to all this, the Bar apparently has made little effort to do so. “The ABA has shown very little willingness to work with us on this important bill despite our having reached out and met with them on our own initiative,” representative Maloney, a New York Democrat, said in a statement.
The ABA’s actions trouble many members, said John Sherman, a lawyer who helped draw up the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. He gathered up a slew of seasoned business and human rights lawyers to write to the organization, noting that its opposition to a bill that would help crack down on human trafficking doesn’t jibe with its oft-stated desire to end modern slavery. Carlson replied that the Bar still opposes the bill because of the “burdensome federal beneficial ownership reporting requirements they impose on small businesses and their lawyers.”
The bill’s supporters say this argument baffles them. The requirements are merely to keep the Treasury updated on the name, address, date of birth, and ID number of businesses’ real owners, says Gary Kalman, executive director of the FACT Coalition, an anti-corruption civil society network that is lobbying for the bill. He suggests that more work for small businesses’s lawyers is surely a good thing for ABA members. “I don’t know how filling out compliance paperwork for your clients—which you’re getting paid to do—is a burden,” Kalman said. “If you’re in DC that’s 500 bucks an hour to fill out paperwork, so I’d think there’s a lot of people who would like that job.”
Lawyers and laundering
There’s a more cynical explanation for the ABA’s apparent obstinacy.
“There’s a faction of lawyers who are heavily represented not necessarily in the ABA as a whole but on relevant ABA committees on this issue, that make a lot of money from registering companies anonymously,” Stephenson told Quartz. “They’re worried about losing business because in some cases the anonymity is precisely what the clients care about, such that if they can’t register companies anonymously they won’t do it at all or will go to another jurisdiction and lawyers will lose out on their business.”
In other words: Passing the bill would be a serious dent in America’s tax haven status, and lose a lot of lawyers a lot of money.
Anti-corruption NGO Global Witness exposed the allegedly questionable ethics of some lawyers in a stunning 2016 sting, titled “Lowering the Bar.” They sent an undercover investigator to 13 corporate law firms, posing as the advisor to a corrupt cabinet minister from an African government who wanted to stash millions in the United States. He asked for the lawyers’ advice on how to do it. Only one lawyer point bank refused to help, and another said they wouldn’t take him on as a client after the meeting, Global Witness reports. Twelve of them suggested using exactly the kind of anonymous shell companies targeted by Maloney’s bill.
That dozen included then-president of the ABA James Silkenat, who, alongside two colleagues, gave the fake ministerial advisor detailed advice on how to wend money into the US system with as little regulatory oversight as possible. The first line of defense against money-laundering in the United Sates is the strict checks banks are forced to do on potential customers. Silkenat, however, advised the would-be client to take his money offshore.
“There may be other banking systems that are less rigorous on this than the US would be,” he said. “The usual banking havens, I think, would be ones you would want to consider. We could provide you with a list of countries where the banking systems require less detail on ownership or source of funds.” Silkenat also described how to structure opaque webs of companies to “insulate [the minister’s] ownership from public view.” The plan: “Company A is owned by Company B, who is owned jointly by Company C and D and your party owns all of or the majority of the shares of C and D.”
Maloney’s bill would make it much harder to build those secretive webs.
Silkenat and his colleagues didn’t take on the client, and nothing they did was illegal. They also warned him that they would need to ensure no crimes had been committed before working for him. The lawyers told Global Witness through their attorneys that after the meeting they informed a member of their firm’s management committee they found the client “dishonest and untrustworthy” and that they had decided not to take his business under any circumstances.
Regulating lawyers
Unlike banks, law firms don’t legally have to do due diligence before taking on clients—the closest thing they have to regulation is ABA guidelines.
“We did that sting to prove a point and we feel like our worst fears were confirmed, yet it was still striking to see how uniformly the lawyers documented in that investigation were all too willing to give advice on how to structure company ownership in a way that would evade or skirt anti-money laundering rules or monitoring,” said Mark Hays, the anti-money laundering campaign leader at Global Witness.
He says the sting was indicative of a broader trend in the legal industry. When the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering organization, analyzed 106 global cases of the owners of illicit money hiding their identities, it found that most schemes used either lawyers, trust or corporate service providers, or accountants. Lawyers were the most likely of those three to be used in the real estate schemes outlined in the Global Witness sting, FATF found.
Many anti-money laundering advocates would like lawyers to be forced to do similar background checks to bankers. For now, they’ll settle for tackling the webs of anonymous companies that some lawyers help set up for criminals—but the ABA’s opposition doesn’t help.
‘They’re the Bar Association and lot of people on the Hill are lawyers, so when they speak with the voice of the legal industry, people feel like they need to listen,” Hays said. “Frankly, that’s a bit concerning.”
Residents of Guadalajara got a reprieve from the summer heat after a storm covered parts of the Mexican city in a thick blanket of hail.
Ice rose up to a meter and a half (about 60 inches) in some areas, bringing traffic to a standstill and damaging at least 200 homes.
The mounds made for a strange scene in Guadalajara, where summer temperatures have been known to top 100°F (about 38°C). Temperatures, which had reached the high 80s before the storm, dropped to the high 50s today (July 1).
Navigate the new landscape in Guadalajara
The ice mounds were big enough to bury trucks.
Guadalajara, which sits about 200 miles east of Mexico’s Pacific coast, routinely gets rain during the summer. Authorities had warned residents to be cautious at the start of the rainy season in June, but yesterday’s storm was unprecedented, a Department of Defense spokesman told local media (link in Spanish.) The military and local authorities have been working to clear streers since the storm hit.
The hail made for treacherous terrain even for those tasked with clearing it.
Heavy machinery was also needed for the job.
Hail storms are caused when higher temperatures in the atmosphere turn the warm air that rises from the surface into ice, the BBC explained. Guadalajara’s mayor chalked it up to climate change. “And we ask ourselves if climate change exists,” he tweeted on Sunday.
Muy temprano, antes de ir a la CDMX para el arranque de la Guardia Nacional, estuve en el lugar para evaluar la situación y fui testigo de escenas que nunca había visto: el granizo a más de un metro de altura, y luego nos preguntamos si el cambio climático existe. pic.twitter.com/cognB1JHg6
No surprise there. Still a long way to go of course.
A Morning Consult Democratic primary poll puts Harris and Warren in third place, just behind Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
Sen. Kamala Harris had a few memorable moments during Thursday’s Democratic primary debate, from ending a shouting match with a quip to challenging Joe Biden on his record on busing. According to a new poll from Morning Consult, those moments seem to have had a highly positive impact on her candidacy — following the debate, she now places third among likely voters.
Harris now polls at 12 percent, up 6 points from the previous week. This puts her in third place alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also polled at 12 percent, a one percent dip compared the previous week (a change within Morning Consult’s margin of error). Warren and Harris now stand behind Sen. Bernie Sanders — his support stands at 19 percent.
Joe Biden remains in the lead with 33 percent; however, his support saw a decline nearly as steep as Harris’s rise — he lost 5 points following the debates. Some of this erosion of support may have been Harris’s gain, and a segment of Biden’s base does view the California senator in a positive light: 15 percent of Biden backers said they would pick Harris as their second choice choice of candidate.
Warren and Harris both were both found to be favored as second choice candidates; each was the preferred second choice of their respective supporters. Backers of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg also ranked the two women high among their second choices — 29 percent said they would back Harris if the mayor left the race, and 22 percent said they would back Warren.
No other candidate saw the kind of surge Harris did following the debates. Buttigieg and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke dropped slightly (Buttigieg fell from 7 percent to 6 percent; O’Rouke fell from 4 to 2 percent) but, again, these drops were within the poll’s margin of error.
Biden maintains the highest favorability rating among likely voters at 71 percent, with Sanders trailing him at 67 percent. Warren came in third at 63 percent, and was followed by Harris with 55 percent.
The new polling suggests the race is changing. While Biden remains a dominant frontrunner, Sanders’s support has slipped in recent weeks, while Elizabeth Warren has risen in the polls. Harris will look to capitalize on her gains in the weeks to come, particularly when it comes to siphoning off Biden supporters. As Vox’s Ezra Klein has written, Harris is well positioned to make a pitch to voters that she represents a candidate of balance: progressive, but not a democratic socialist; experienced, but lacking in decades and decades of controversial decisions:
Sen. Kamala Harris is the closest Democrats have to a potential consensus candidate. She doesn’t suffer from the enmity that Hillary Clinton voters have for Sen. Bernie Sanders, or that leftists hold for former Vice President Joe Biden, or that the Obama administration has for Elizabeth Warren. She’s not another white guy running to represent a diverse party. She’s got enough political experience to be a credible candidate, but not so much that she’s been on the wrong side of dozens of controversial issues.
The California senator has also recently shown she can command the debate stage. Her boost in the Morning Consult poll is likely tied to a moment from her debate that was much discussed: when she challenged Biden on his work with segregationist senators.
“I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris said to Biden. “But I also believe, and it’s personal, and it was actually very hurtful, to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their careers and reputations on the segregation of race in this country.”
Harris then spoke about integrating Berkeley Public Schools 20 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, telling Biden: “You also worked with [segregationists] to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Biden struggled to respond, answering defensively before saying to the moderators, “My time’s up.”
The exchange not only likely helped Harris’s polling, it also has helped her fundraising: In the 24 hours following her strong showing at the debate, Harris raised more than $2 million from small donors, her campaign said.
We asked you to support our campaign #ForThePeople and you delivered. In the 24 hours after the #DemDebate, we raised more than $2 million from 63,277 people. I am so motivated and inspired by all of you. Now let’s go win this fight.
Stranger Things 3 is both smarter and lazier than Stranger Things 2. But at least the Hawkins gang is still having wacky ‘80s adventures!
Stranger Things 3 is almost here, and it sees all the characters from Hawkins, Indiana growing and evolving. And yes, I’m including a few monsters in that mix.
The second season of Stranger Things came in for its fair share of criticism, including from Vox, for a meandering and sometimes disjointed plot, and writing that clearly undervalued and underused the show’s female characters. And yet, as my colleague Emily VanDerWerff noted in her season two review, “when it works, it works. I’m powerless to resist it. You probably are too.”
That’s still true in season three, debuting July 4. I enjoyed Stranger Things 3 much more than Stranger Things 2, and for the most part, I feel like the series’ creators, the Duffer brothers, were paying sharp attention to their critics. Most of season two’s flaws and frustrations have been ironed out in satisfying and interesting ways in season three.
This time around, however, a new set of problems arises — and weirdly enough, a lot of them don’t concern the story itself, but the show’s aesthetic and technical choices.
Stranger Things doesn’t usually struggle with those elements; more often, its aesthetics help smooth over the moments when the narrative gets stuck and starts spinning its wheels. But season three’s plot journey is actually pretty engaging — except when it’s handwaving the larger questions it raises and relying on technical tricks to distract us. As a result, the story feels more stuck in place than it really is.
Don’t get me wrong, Stranger Things is still as slick and stylish as ever; season three really feels like the cover of an ‘80s pulp horror novel, in the best way. But I sure didn’t expect to be criticizing the show for suddenly developing a cinematic tic that makes it seem more narratively discombobulated.
The positive side is that for viewers whose main concern is hanging out with the kids of Hawkins and enjoying the quirky, nostalgia-laced humor and fun that Stranger Things excels at, season three is pretty much on top of its game.
Here’s a spoiler-free rundown of what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s somewhere in between about season three.
Good: the main cast is divided into smaller groups again — but this time, it’s engaging and makes emotional sense
Netflix
Weekly D&D campaigns are getting more difficult.
One of reasons Stranger Things 2 was frustrating was that for most of the season, characters were siloed away from each other, pretty inexplicably. Eleven went on a random quest while Hopper was incapacitated, with no larger plot ramifications; her adventure gave us interesting character backstory, but mainly seemed designed to delay the inevitable showdown between El and the season’s Big Bad, a giant spider-thing known as the Mind Flayer. Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan were off in their own totally separate subplot, and it felt largely tangential and inessential relative to the main action.
But Stranger Things has figured out how to fix this issue in season three! The show once again takes a creative risk by splitting up its main cast, but this time, the separate groupings are clearly grounded in emotional logic: Characters are growing, changing, exploring new relationships, and embarking on new phases of their lives, and it’s all good. We get to see our faves interacting with new characters and each other in interesting new ways. It’s fun, and it generally feels like forward momentum for everyone in a way that season two couldn’t offer.
Mostly good: season 3’s plot actually feels like a plot, and its various strands are far more integrated than season 2’s
Netflix
Steve and Dustin have spotted a plot point!
The narrative of season three is still split between different subplots, but they’re all obviously connected to each other from the start. This creates a level of urgency around the fact that no one is able to communicate with each other due to a mix of technical issues and/or frequent states of peril, or aware that they should be communicating, since they don’t know their various dilemmas are all connected.
And the subplots are fun! Although the writing in season three feels heavier and less breezy than before, its narrative feels more substantive and interesting. The cheesy, Red Dawn-influenced plot is instantly more memorable than whatever the hell happened in season two, and while it’s imperfect, it’s also entertaining.
There is one major flaw with the plot, in that the show mostly neglects to provide any larger reasoning for it. But that’s mostly fine — because by the final moments, we realize that it serves as scaffolding for ongoing plot developments in future seasons. Granted, it’s a toss-up as to whether Stranger Things will be able to successfully expand its story; the show might ultimately choose to just ignore any loose threads from this season, the way it seems to have largely jettisoned the US military’s covert interest in Hawkins from last season. But let’s be real: If you’re into Stranger Things for the vast military cover-ups, you’re probably watching it wrong.
Bad: the pacing frequently lags, and WHAT IS UP WITH THE EDITING?
Courtesy of Netflix
Yeah, we’re confused, too, kids.
Stranger Things’ season three editing is erratic at best. It relies so much on flashbacks — either to scenes from season two, or to scenes that literally just happened in the previous episode — that I felt not only condescended to as a viewer, but slightly confused about why so much time was devoted to showing us things we’d already seen.
On top of the flashbacks, the editing frequently jumps confusingly between cross-current action sequences in different locations, in ways that create avoidable narrative confusion rather than suspense. At times, the cross-cutting is used to gloss over how characters got from point A to point B, and while a certain amount of this is acceptable, there are a couple of instances where it jolted me out of the story completely and I actually wound up rewinding to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. When your edits confuse your audience instead of moving the story along, that’s a problem.
And I’m not done! In addition to the flashbacks and the narratively confusing cross-cuts, the editing also deliberately suspends our temporal location. It occasionally jumps backwards in time by a few minutes to pick back up with scenes we just saw, returning to characters who are still exactly where we last saw them, even though the narrative has jumped to simultaneous action occurring somewhere else and carried that action forward. In other words, when the cross-cutting isn’t skipping over several narrative steps in an action sequence, it’s keeping characters in place without any action. The effect is disorienting, but to no greater emotional or narrative purpose. It just feels lazy, confusing, uninspired, and inexplicable.
The consequence of all these edits is that the pacing frequently stutters, and in fact sometimes grinds to a halt. Since the flashbacks and cross-cuts carry zero emotional weight — even when they’re meant to — the whole project occasionally feels like a tedious cinematic experiment. But it also doesn’t help that the season’s writing frequently cycles back through things we’ve seen before, to no apparent point. There’s only so many times, for example, that Will can slap the back of his neck and feel the sensation of the Mind Flayer still being around before it starts to feel like Stranger Things is just having him do this out of narrative laziness rather than putting in work to build dramatic tension.
Great: the cast is as sparkling and fun as ever...
Netflix
Robin! Look, everybody, it’s Robin!
One of Stranger Things’ greatest assets is the show’s irresistible cast dynamics, and in season three, the teen ensemble, led by Millie Bobbie Brown as El and Finn Wolfhard as Mike, is as capable as ever. At times Wolfhard doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with himself, perhaps because the writing asks Mike to take on whole new levels of cluelessness regarding the state of his new, hot-and-steamy relationship with El. But Brown remains astoundingly good at everything she’s asked to do. Given how blatantly pain-filled Eleven’s life has been and continues to be, it’s a testament to what a tremendous actor she is that Stranger Things doesn’t feel more melodramatic.
Meanwhile, Gaten Matarazzo’s Dustin and Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington, everyone’s favorite babysitter, are two of the show’s strongest comedic weapons, and the decision to keep them together at all times this season is a smart one. And the upbeat energy between the cast helps compensate for the season’s editing issues. One of the great things about Stranger Things is that it’s especially good at treating new characters like they’ve always been around. In season two, that mostly worked with new arrivals Max and Billy, though the show ultimately suffers in both season two and season three by referencing but then glancing over their abusive home life without a lot of deeper scrutiny.
Where it really works in season three is with the arrival of new character Robin (Maya Hawke), who finds herself mixed up with Hawkins’ zaniest friends group and proceeds to steal every scene she’s in. Deadpan and lowkey, she fits in effortlessly with her designated troop of mallrats: Steve, Dustin, and Lucas’s little sister Erica, whose own role is beefed up this season.
Bad: ...but most of the new side characters are kinda eh, whatever
Courtesy of Netflix
Remember when Billy was a potentially interesting deconstruction of vaguely homoerotic masculine stereotypes of the ‘80s? Yeah, you can forget all that.
That said, nearly all of the season’s other new characters are ciphers, present to serve plot points or deliver comedy without substance. One character exists solely as a running Arnold Schwarzenegger joke, which is... fine? On the one hand, this is just what Stranger Things does, but on the other, between throwaway gags and disposable characters, the show spends a whole lot of time glancing over characterization and backstory that could have deepened the drama and our connection to the characters.
As I hinted above, this is especially notable in the case of Max and Billy, because they, for all intents and purposes, are still new characters, and Billy’s motivations and backstory in particular are largely still unknown to us. When we’re asked to accept parts of the plot that revolve around him in season three, we know so little about him that it seems like an unfair tradeoff.
And the lack of emotional connection is especially obvious toward the end of the season, when narrative subthreads that should be moving us most seem to fizzle and resolve without much intensity at all. I found myself ‘eh, whatevering’ a couple of major plot spoilers, because Stranger Things just didn’t make me care enough even when I wanted to.
Bad: the jokes often feel forced — and the Starcourt Mall, season 3’s biggest comic backdrop, doesn’t fulfill its narrative potential
Courtesy of Netflix
Yep, they sure are in the mall!
Stranger Things has definitely moved away from parroting familiar ‘80s tropes as closely as it once did, and while that’s a good thing, it seems to be relying even more on belaboring the ‘80s in-jokes it does include. It just doesn’t always work. While there’s still plenty of charm and amusement to be had, there are a few running jokes in season three that aren’t nearly as funny as Stranger Things would like them to be, and a couple of moments where the show’s patented throwbacks to ‘80s esoterica are downright cringeworthy.
The biggest of these is Hawkins’ new mall, Starcourt, in all its colorful, funky detail. The mall functions as both a giant ‘80s throwback and a blatantly unsubtle commentary on corporate greed wreaking havoc on small-town America — season three’s anticapitalist undertones being an unexpectedly woke new addition to the show.
But what it isn’t is innovative. Although the setting of the mall food court and the retro logos of stores like the Gap and Sam Goody’s are fun to look at, after a while they’re just kinda there, and the mall starts to feel like a wasted opportunity. Even though a few climactic scenes that take place in the mall, the show doesn’t really use the mall. It’s the mall! Go grab some nerf guns and golf clubs! Make some weapons out of lingerie and underwire! Anything’s possible. But Stranger Things doesn’t really get creative, and that’s disappointing.
Good: the creators know there are only so many times they can rely on El’s powers to save the day before it gets tiring
Courtesy of Netflix
Take a breather, El, you’ve earned it!
The Duffer brothers have developed a bad habit of relying on El as a kind of deus ex machina to rescue her friends and make Eleventh-hour arrivals (get it?!) to save the day. This still happens in season three, but the Duffers finally seem to have accepted that if they want to keep evolving and keep expanding Stranger Things’ cast, they can’t keep using El’s powers as the ultimate trump card. Plus, if you’re anything like me, you have spent far too much time thinking about how El’s nosebleeds can’t be great for her permanent neurological health, so the less she has to use her special abilities, the better!
Thankfully, Stranger Things has well-established that its teen characters aren’t just any group of adolescents; they have tons of talent and smarts and resourcefulness to go around, even without El handy. There are plenty of moments in season three when the Hawkins gang and their ability to problem-solve gets a little eyebrow-raising, but if anything, that just makes the season a little more enjoyably silly.
Good (or at least improved): finally, the women get to drive the plot in meaningful ways
Courtesy of Netflix
Don’t let the patriarchy rattle you, Nance.
In Vox’s round table wrap-up of Stranger Things 2, we dissected how unsatisfying the season’s treatment of women was, from Nancy’s largely token side plot to the unnecessary jealousy subthread between El and Max. In season three, Stranger Things seems to have made a concerted effort to address many of those concerns — with caveats.
The show finally has more than one female character per generation, and season three finally offers scenes where these characters bond over something other than a boy. The women on the show also have deeper relationships with each other in season three — though they also seem a little phoned-in. In particular, Nancy has a heart-to-heart with her mom that feels like a stab at mother-daughter bonding, but is also the only scene they’ve had together, maybe ever? Shrugsies! It’s easy to feel the same way about the “girls bonding over Madonna and the local Claire’s” vibe that season three applies to Max and El’s new friendship — like Stranger Things couldn’t figure out what to do with two teen girls except send them to the mall.
Meanwhile, after two seasons in which her main role was to fret and be erratic, Joyce finally gets a chance to take charge of her own subplot — though said subplot also kinda paints her as being as kooky and erratic as ever.
Still, in one of the season’s more interesting arcs, Nancy gets her own ‘80s trope in the form of a Working Girl story that sees her tackling sexism at the local newspaper where she’s interning alongside Jonathan. The storyline lets Stranger Things pay lip service to a few progressive ideas about intersectionality and class and gender privileges.
And while it may sound like these themes and storylines are a bit shoehorned in — yeah, they are, but they represent far more effort than Stranger Things has bothered to expend on its women characters in the past. This effort is also applied to characters we’ve known for three seasons now, and Stranger Things is better than just about any other show at always caring about its characters and their happiness first and foremost.
That said, season three oddly loses sight of some of its best characters and their relationships.
Bad: Stranger Things winds up undercutting some of its most crucial relationships
Courtesy of Netflix
We stan an ace king, Will Byers!
The Duffer Brothers have said in the past that they recognized how good the chemistry is between Eleven and Chief Hopper, so it’s strange that they deliberately keep the two apart for most of season three. It’s not as if the storyline really demands this; instead, it frequently feels like the show just didn’t know what to do with Hopper, in particular, or with El and Hopper together, so it separated them instead.
In fact, season three seems to shrug at multiple character relationships; it’s forgivable, for example, if you’ve forgotten which siblings were related and whose parents the season is following around, because the main families don’t spend any time reinforcing their family bonds. Granted, the show has always been more focused on its main group of teens and their friendships, and some of the show’s best emotional moments this season revolve around watching the kids clash and deal with the reality that they’re growing up and, in some cases, growing apart. But overall, these moments feel like beats the show has played before; meanwhile, the Hawkins community is expanding, but it’s not deepening.
All of this is a reminder that writing has always been Stranger Things’ biggest weakness: When it’s not closely following pre-established tropes, the show frequently feels like it doesn’t know what to do next. And while it’s committed to its characters, it still doesn’t quite know how to write meaningful character interaction and meaningful plot action; it’s often one or the other.
Season two mostly delivered on developing characterizations, but its plot was frequently marching in place without a lot of direction; season three manages to provide an engaging plot, but falls down on the character development. It would be nice to have a version of Stranger Things that really levels up and commits to both.
All eight episodes of Stranger Things season three will premiere Thursday, July 4 on Netflix.
Jony Ive, Apple's longtime design chief, is leaving the company, the firm announced on Thursday. He will be launching his own independent design company, and Apple will be among its primary clients.
Enlarge / This undated picture released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on October 18, 2016, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (C) inspecting the newly built Ryugyong General Ophthalmic Hospital in Pyongyang. (credit: Getty | KCNA)
North Korea is experiencing an explosive outbreak of HIV amid limited access to diagnostic testing and treatments, according to an exclusive report by Science.
Independent researchers and government health officials tell the outlet that the isolated East Asian country confirmed its first HIV case in 1999 and has quietly watched infections balloon to over 8,300 cases in the last few years. The researchers and North Korean officials have submitted a report on the matter to the new medical preprint server medRxiv, which is scheduled to go live on Tuesday, June 25.
The case estimate stands in stark contrast to a celebration in Pyongyang last year on December 1—annual World AIDS Day—in which government officials declared that North Korea is an “AIDS-free zone” and that there is “not a single AIDS patient” in the country.
Definitely recommended, talking to strangers is one of the most important things you do and it can even save your life. This book is the very best entry point for thinking about this topic. Here is a summary excerpt:
We have strategies for dealing with strangers that are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it — and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with each other about just how terrible at it we are.
One recurring theme is just how bad we are at spotting liars. On another note, I found this interesting:
…the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of 50 years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, “Pft, that’s just getting started,'” the alcohol researcher Kim Fromme says. She says that the heavy binge drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.
And:
Poets die young. That is not just a cliche. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, they have far and away the highest suicide rates — as much as five times higher than the general population.
It also turns out that the immediate availability of particular methods of suicide significantly raises the suicide rate; it is not the case that an individual is committed to suicide regardless of the means available at hand.
Returning to the theme of talking with strangers, one approach I recommend is to apply a much higher degree of arbitrary specificity, when relating facts and details, than you would with someone you know.
In any case, self-recommending, this book shows that Malcolm Gladwell remains on an upward trajectory. You can pre-order it here.
Debt-saddled Americans are giving rise to a new industry of financial tech companies: Those that provide loans for cash-strapped couples to pay for their weddings. The Washington Post reports that these companies—amongst them Prosper, Upstart, and Earnest—are offering five-figure-plus loans with up to 30% interest. Unlike other types of personal loans (which, in 2019, typically have interest rates between 5% and 36%, according to personal finance site Value Penguin), these loans are specifically for brides and grooms to help pay for their special day.
According to the Post, these lenders say that, already in 2019, they have issued up to four times as many “wedding loans” as they did last year for couples paying for their own weddings.
What’s driving this trend? It seems to be the confluence of several different factors. First, the majority of those taking out wedding loans are millennials, a demographic that is under substantially more financial pressure than previous generations. Millennials are spending more money on things like education (or, rather, paying off student debt), healthcare, and rent; their average net worth is $8,000, 34% less than Americans of the same age 20 years ago. That leaves a lot less money to spend on extravagant nuptials.
On top of that, the average cost of a wedding is rapidly rising. According the Brides‘ 2018 American Wedding Study, a wedding in 2017 cost around $27,000. A year later, in 2018, that number nearly doubled to $44,000.
Screenshot from Earnest.com.
Adding to that cost is the so-called “wedding tax,” the premium that party vendors—such as photographers, caterers, and florists—place on a product or service when its meant for a wedding.
It’s perhaps the rise in the cost of wedding—paired with the fact that couples are marrying later in life—that has led to a shift in how American families actually pay for weddings. According to wedding industry site Brides.com, tradition holds that the bride’s family writes the check. But per the site’s 2016 American Wedding Study, 73% of couples are now paying for or chipping in for their own weddings. Conceivably, there has also been a change in values that affects who bankrolls the affair: women are more often becoming financially independent before they get married, so they don’t have to rely on their parents’ budget to achieve the blowout of their dreams.
The last, and perhaps most insidious, factor: the advent of social media and its effect on weddings. The fervor for increasingly extravagant weddings has no doubt been fueled by wedding culture on platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. It’s in these spaces where the aspiration for an out-of-this world wedding festers; influencers—many of whom have their weddings wholly financed by the brands they partner with—are wont to share the whole affair on a highly-curated feed.
Indeed, entire weddings and honeymoons have been faked as a PR stunts. Just today (June 20), the Atlantic reported that an influencer’s “surprise wedding” and the viral proposal that preceded it was actually pitched to brands like Goop and Flywheel for sponsorship months prior.
And as the Post notes, the loans themselves are marketed as a way “to fund extras like custom calligraphy, doughnut displays and ‘Instagram-worthy‘ venues.”
The result of all this? You guessed it—more debt. Many couples who choose to spend on a wedding defer or forgo investment in their financial future, which can be unwise financial decision to make in your 20s or 30s, where you’re money is probably better spent on long-term investments. As personal finance expert Stefanie O’Connell told the Post: “You could spend $30,000 on a one-day celebration, or you could use it to put a down payment on a house. These loans sound great when you’re planning your wedding, but afterward, I hear a lot of regret.”
It’s unclear if the wedding industrial complex will continue snowballing, but considering the current state of affairs—and the way lenders are capitalizing on it—it seems that weddings aren’t going to be getting much cheaper anytime soon.
Interesting take. I'm sure Venezuelans would love to use Libra instead of their own currency.
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The FT has a new piece by a Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, which argues that the proposed Libra cryptocurrency could undermine the power of central banks. I’m generally skeptical of that view, but in this case Hughes does make a respectable argument:
Let us imagine that Libra works as planned. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be able to send money across borders as easily as they send a text message. The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that ability will encourage “decentralised forms of governance”. In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations.
The Libra Association promises to choose stable currencies and assets unlikely to suffer inflationary crises. The sponsors are right that a liquid, stable currency would be attractive to many in emerging markets. So attractive, in fact, that if enough people trade out of their local currencies, they could threaten the ability of emerging market governments to control their monetary supply, the local means of exchange, and, in some cases, their ability to impose capital controls.
This is the most plausible argument for the claim that Libra could undermine monetary policy. If Libra were so successful that local currencies stopped being the medium of account, then Libra could completely take over the monetary system, effectively dollarizing the local economy. In that case, it would not be Facebook that controlled local monetary policy, it would be the Fed.
I’m still skeptical that Libra could be successful enough to make currencies like the India rupee or the Turkish lira disappear, but to the extent that Libra is a threat to monetary policy independence, it’s in the developing world, not the USA.
The tech entrepreneur Ross McNutt wants to spend three years recording outdoor human movements in a major U.S. city, KMOX news radio reports.
If that sounds too dystopian to be real, you’re behind the times. McNutt, who runs Persistent Surveillance Systems, was inspired by his stint in the Air Force tracking Iraqi insurgents. He tested mass-surveillance technology over Compton, California, in 2012. In 2016, the company flew over Baltimore, feeding information to police for months (without telling city leaders or residents) while demonstrating how the technology works to the FBI and Secret Service.
The goal is noble: to reduce violent crime.
There’s really no telling whether surveillance of this sort has already been conducted over your community as private and government entities experiment with it. If I could afford the hardware, I could legally surveil all of Los Angeles just for kicks.
And now a billionaire donor wants to help Persistent Surveillance Systems to monitor the residents of an entire high-crime municipality for an extended period of time––McNutt told KMOX that it may be Baltimore, St. Louis, or Chicago.
McNutt’s technology is straightforward: A fixed-wing plane outfitted with high-resolution video cameras circles for hours on end, recording everything in large swaths of a city. One can later “rewind” the footage, zoom in anywhere, and see exactly where a person came from before or went after perpetrating a robbery or drive-by shooting … or visiting an AA meeting, a psychiatrist’s office, a gun store, an abortion provider, a battered-women’s shelter, or an HIV clinic. On the day of a protest, participants could be tracked back to their homes.
In the timely new book Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, the author Arthur Holland Michel talks with people working on this category of technology and concludes, “Someday, most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance.”
At first, he says, the sheer amount of data will make it impossible for humans in any city to examine everything that is captured on video. But efforts are under way to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to “understand” more. “If a camera that watches a whole city is smart enough to track and understand every target simultaneously,” he writes, “it really can be said to be all-seeing.”
The trajectory of this technology in the U.S. is still unwritten. It may depend on everything from public opinion to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to restrictions that policy makers impose before wide-area surveillance is entrenched.
According to KMOX, McNutt plans to consult with city leaders before starting his planned three-year project somewhere. Did his company retain video of the Baltimore officials who could approve or thwart its return? I’d wonder if I were them.
The 2019 NBA Draft took place last night (June 20) at Barclays Center in New York. Dozens of young men from across the world finally learned which NBA teams they will join and where they will spend the formative years of their basketball careers.
With the No. 9 pick, the Washington Wizards selected Rui Hachimura, the first Japanese-born player ever chosen in the first round. When he suits up for an NBA game, Hachimura—whose mother is Japansese and whose father is from Benin, in west Africa—will become just the fourth person of Japanese descent to play in the league.
Japanese players are a rarity, but they hold an important place in NBA history. Wat Misaka, a Japanese-American man, became the league’s first non-white player when he joined the New York Knicks in 1947. Back then, the Knicks were actually in the Basketball Association of America—an NBA predecessor. (African American players didn’t join the NBA until 1950.) The 5-foot-7 Misaka played three games before he was cut from the roster.
Hachimura is the latest of a new generation of international players that are helping lift the NBA and basketball to a vast new audience. While European players have dotted NBA rosters for years, in the last decade there has been a growing influx of players from around the globe. The world champion Toronto Raptors often started two players from Africa (Pascal Siakam from Cameroon and Serge Ibaka from the Congo) while getting significant contributions from players from Spain, Lithuania, and the UK. This year, the two most significant individual NBA awards—Most Valuable Player and Rookie of the Year—may go to Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Greek of Nigerian descent, and the Slovenian Luka Doncic, respectively.
Over the years, a handful of other Japanese players have appeared on NBA teams, with negligible impact on the league, but none of these men possesses Hachimura’s skill—he starred last year at Gonzaga University—or his complex identity. As a half-Japanese, half-Beninese individual, Hachimura hopes to become a role model for “blackenese” children, he told The Japan Times.
Rui Hachimura will be the first Japanese player ever drafted tonight. His mother is Japanese, his father is from the West African nation of Benin. The inside of his suit is a tribute to both cultures. pic.twitter.com/ekSkXaJksf
He also realizes what his career could mean for basketball in his homeland. “It’s big for Japan because we’ve never really had a player like me … playing basketball in the NBA,” said Hachimura. “It means a lot for me, my family, Japanese basketball — the whole country.”
Sports economist Mark Nagel also recognizes Hachimura’s preeminence. “He’s a great player, and in a lot of ways, he’s the first player Japan has really had that’s really, really good,” Nagel told The Japan Times. “You’re going to see more and more kids saying, ‘I want to follow the NBA. I want to follow Hachimura. I want to play basketball.’”
Nagel predicted that merchandise sales for Hachimura’s new team (the Wizards) might spike in Japan.
As the NBA’s profile grows in Japan, Hachimura could soon become a national star. Twenty-three Japanese media outlets attended the NBA Draft, and prior to being drafted, Hachimura signed an endorsement deal with Nissin, the Japanese company behind Cup Noodles.
Indeed, Hachimura may quickly become to Japanese fans what Bucks’ star Antetokounmpo is to Greek fans, and the timing couldn’t be better for catching the attention of fans in Japan. Though the Wizards won’t be playing, the NBA has two preseason games scheduled at Japan’s Saitama Super Arena in October.
“The cross came into widespread use as a symbol of Christianity by the fourth century, and it retains that meaning today. But there are many contexts in which the symbol has also taken on a secular meaning. Indeed, there are instances in which its message is now almost entirely secular,” US Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito writes in American Legion v. American Humanist Association (pdf), decided today.
Alito’s assertion in a case challenging the 32-foot Bladensburg Peace Cross—mounted on an 8-foot tall pedestal on public land in Maryland as a tribute to World War I veterans in 1925—will no doubt come as a surprise to many. But according to the Catholic justice, everyone knows that the cross isn’t just a religious symbol, as evidenced by the fact that brands like Blue Cross Blue Shield use it in their trademarks and that people of all faiths the world over mourned when Notre Dame Cathedral burned. He writes:
Although the French Republic rigorously enforces a secular public square, the cathedral remains a symbol of national importance to the religious and nonreligious alike. Notre Dame is fundamentally a place of worship and retains great religious importance, but its meaning has broadened. For many, it is inextricably linked with the very idea of Paris and France. Speaking to the nation shortly after the fire, President Macron said that Notre Dame “is our history, our literature, our imagination. The place where we survived epidemics, wars, liberation. It has been the epicenter of our lives.”
The slew of concurrences supporting Alito shows just how tricky the issue was, however, and indicates that it’s not so obvious the cross isn’t just a Christian symbol. Seven justices agreed the monument should stand, but each wanted to say their piece about the Peace Cross and why it did not violate the First Amendment’s mandate to separate church and state. And they didn’t align on the issues according to their personal faiths.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, noted that there was no evidence to suggest that the creators of the war memorial “sought to disparage or exclude any religious group.” He too argued that the cross stands for secular values, like patriotism and commemoration.
However, Brett Kavanaugh, an avowed Catholic, wasn’t quite buying that claim. He too supported Alito’s decision but wrote a concurrence. “I have great respect for the Jewish war veterans who in an amicus brief say that the cross on public land sends a message of exclusion. I recognize their sense of distress and alienation,” he writes. “Moreover, I fully understand the deeply religious nature of the cross. It would demean both believers and nonbelievers to say that the cross is not religious, or not all that religious.”
Meanwhile, Neil Gorsuch—who is possibly Episcopalian—also wrote a concurrence, agreeing with Alito’s conclusion but questioning the case’s existence. He wasn’t sure that “offended observers” even had a right to challenge the monument’s presence to begin with.
Elena Kagan’s concurrence seemed to want to smooth any ruffled feathers. The Jewish justice noted that the Court’s decision reflects “sensitivity to and respect for this Nation’s pluralism, and the values of neutrality and inclusion that the First Amendment demands.”
Clarence Thomas, a devoted Catholic, also concurred. In his opinion, the Establishment Clause shouldn’t even be applied to states. He wasn’t certain that the cross in question could be challenged constitutionally, but agreed that if so, this monument passes constitutional muster. Still, Thomas was disappointed that his colleagues didn’t adequately clarify what standard should be used in future cases like this one, snubbing Alito’s opinion even while supporting his decision.
Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have resolved the case differently. Ginsburg, who is Jewish, dissented, joined by Sotomayor, who is Catholic. The Jewish justice schooled her colleagues in basic Christian theology, explaining, “The Latin Cross is the foremost symbol of the Christian faith embodying the central theological claim of Christianity: that the son of God died on the cross, that he rose from the dead, and that his death and resurrection offer the possibility of eternal life.”
She accused her colleagues of sending “a starkly sectarian message” with their decision. Ginsburg writes, “[M]aintaining the Peace Cross on a public highway…elevates Christianity over other faiths, and religion over nonreligion.” This monument on Maryland public land is, in her view, clearly a Christian symbol maintained by the state and in violation of the Establishment Clause.
Hopefully more organizations will adopt hiring policies like this.
The contest for the presidency is like an elaborate job interview process with the American people. For decades, the interviewees have mostly been white men. This time, we’ll choose from the most diverse candidate pool in history.
With nearly two decades of experience helping organizations from Coca-Cola to the National Football League put together diverse candidate pools for their hiring processes, I can say this with confidence: In the 2020 Democratic primary, the playing field is substantially more level for diverse candidates than it has ever been—and that means we are more likely than ever to elect a woman or person of color as president.
You might ask: Isn’t this just because there are more women and people of color running than ever before?
It’s not that simple. My experience as a civil rights attorney addressing systemic employment discrimination shows there is a world of difference between processes in which only one diverse candidate is interviewed (the 2016 presidential elections, for example) and processes in which two or more diverse candidates are interviewed (the 2020 Democratic primary). A single diverse candidate faces an enormous headwind—and a tiny chance of being picked for the job in the end. In contrast, when interviewers take the time to interview multiple diverse candidates in a fair and competitive process, the dynamic shifts norms and expectations, and creates a situation in which a diverse candidate is much more likely to end up winning the position.
A 2016 study by Stefanie K. Johnson, David R. Hekman and Elsa T. Chan published in the Harvard Business Review revealed just that. Their research showed there is statistically zero chance of a woman being hired if she is the only woman in the finalist pool. But those odds go up dramatically when she is joined by a second female finalist. The same effect was seen when examining pools with more than one person of color. The difference was staggering: Companies were 79 times more likely to hire a woman and 194 times more likely to hire a person of color when the finalist pool included more than one woman or minority. This held true regardless of the number of finalists. (The researchers looked at pools ranging from three to 11 candidates, with an average size of four).
What’s going on? Companies are known to prefer the status quo, which in most cases is hiring white males. So, if only one diverse candidate ends up in an interview pool, companies will favor hiring a white man. But, as the authors of the study found, when multiple diverse candidates enter the field, the status quo actually changes, and company decisions do, too. The playing field starts to level out.
I saw the importance of a diverse interview pool in practice nearly two decades ago when I helped the NFL develop its Rooney Rule, which requires NFL clubs to interview at least one candidate of color for head coach and general manager openings. (I had first used the “diverse slate” concept in a lawsuit settlement against Coca-Cola for racial discrimination—at the time, we referred to it as a proposal for the company to engage in “fair competition.”) Fifteen years after the Rooney Rule’s 2002 enactment, 22 minority candidates were selected for head coach, compared with only four in the prior 15 years. Since 2007, 10 NFL Super Bowl teams have had a minority head coach or general manager, underscoring the nexus between diversity and success, and the credibility of a fair and inclusive process.
As proud as I am of those results, over the years, we noticed a potential flaw in the process: The only time a person of color got the job was either when that was the only person truly considered, or when the hiring team cast a wide net, ensuring there were multiple people of color in the finalist pool. That’s why, in 2017, we updated the Rooney Rule to include an expectation (not a formal rule) that decision-makers on NFL teams would interview more than one person of color.
Today, I’m working with another major company to adopt their version of the Rooney Rule. Under the company’s pilot program, when there was only one woman in the candidate pool, she was never selected, but when two or more women were in the candidate pool, women were frequently chosen. The “aha” moment of this pilot program finding has led this major company to interview at least two women and one person of color for competitive management openings.
Of course, presidential election “interview” processes aren’t exactly equivalent to corporate hiring. Business applicants for a job typically come to the table with similar qualifications, and get the same amount of face time with those doing the hiring. In a pool of electoral candidates, qualifications and experience vary widely. And we can’t, and don’t, expect all candidates to be given equal speaking time or media coverage. But elections, like corporations, are also plagued by the status quo, and single diverse candidates can face a daunting uphill battle. Multiple diverse candidates in politics can help break barriers in the same way they can in business.
In other words, it’s too much to ask one woman to break the glass ceiling. But collectively, the half dozen women running for the nation’s highest office can do it.
A poll by the ESPN’s Undefeated shows that approximately 70 percent of NFL fans—a good proxy for Americans in general, as these fans represent a remarkably broad cross section of America—“somewhat” or “strongly” support the Rooney Rule. There are good reasons for Americans to support a diverse 2020 field, too. For one, a fair fight increases the chances that the best and most impactful candidate will be selected in the end.
Research has also long shown that increasing diversity in company leadership leads to increased innovation and better returns for shareholders. This year, a candidate pool that is diverse in terms of race, gender and sexuality, as well as life and work experience and geography has already put forward a wide array of innovative policy proposals and new ideas. That’s no accident. The data from the past 20 years indicates that the process used in the 2020 primaries will result in a diverse national ticket and Democrats will have the opportunity to catapult the country forward in countless ways.
This is pretty extraordinary. One of my relatives just left for Argentina.
Venezuela is not at war, yet it’s starting to look like Syria based on the exodus of people fleeing the country.
The country’s basket-case economy and escalating confrontations between the government and the opposition have made life untenable for many Venezuelans. Food and medicine are hard to come by, and so is cash. The government is also stepping up its crackdown on opponents.
As in Syria, the number of people looking for refuge has rapidly climbed. Since 2015, four million people have left Venezuela, according to the latest data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR.)
And like Syrians, most Venezuelans are escaping to neighboring countries, which have seen a surge in asylum seekers. A large share of them have crossed the border into Colombia, often only with whatever belongings they can carry.
In the case of Syrians, millions have headed to Turkey:
To be sure, the 6.8 million Syrians who have left their country—according to UNHRC’s 2018 count—far exceeds the number of fleeing Venezuelans. Still, the mass flight from both countries is a reminder of how quickly local conflict can spill over into the surrounding region. In the case of Syria, the effects of its civil war have spread even further, into European politics.
It’s only a matter of time before the crisis in Venezuela begins resonating more seriously in the United States and beyond.
So.... There's going to be a 7th trial? I'm surprised there isn't some sort of limit since this alleged crime happened in 1996.
The US Supreme Court reversed the quadruple murder conviction of Curtis Flowers today. Few individuals are as familiar with the legal process as Flowers has become since he was first arrested in 1996 for a crime in a Mississippi furniture store and tried six separate times for it. The case became famous nationally after the popular In the Dark podcast aired its investigation into the case, including racial discrimination in jury selection.
Flowers may face another trial now that his last trial, in 2010, was deemed illegitimate today by the high court. in Flowers v. Mississippi (pdf), the majority concluded, 7-2, that racism infected the prosecution’s jury selection process.
“The Constitution forbids striking even a single prospective juror for a discriminatory purpose,” Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the decision. “In the eyes of the Constitution, one racially discriminatory peremptory strike is one too many.” He was joined by six other justices, while Clarence Thomas dissented and was joined in part by Neil Gorsuch.
Flowers is black. Three of the four murder victims were white. And the same prosecutor has continually tried Flowers for this crime, successfully, continually excluding 41 of 42 black jurors from sitting on the trial. Courts have repeatedly sentenced Flowers to death. But on appeal, Flowers has shown prosecutorial misconduct over and over and has succeeded in having the convictions reversed.
The latest decision stems from a 2010 trial that also ended in a conviction. Ultimately, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed this conviction in a narrow 5-4 decision. Dissenting Mississippi justices argued that their colleagues were ignoring Supreme Court precedent when it comes to racially neutral jury selection. The US Supreme Court majority agreed.
Kavanaugh provided four reasons for the Court’s conclusion that Flowers’ latest trial didn’t pass constitutional muster. Evidence from all six trials showed discriminatory intent by the prosecution in jury selection. In the sixth trial, the prosecutor struck five of six black prospective jurors and asked them”dramatically disparate” questions from white prospective jurors. Finally, the reasons the prosecutor gave for striking one black juror in 2010—supposedly because she knew Flowers’ family—while allowing another white juror who also knew the Flowerses to serve on the jury at the sixth trial, didn’t convince the court that the prosecution wasn’t being discriminatory in its jury selection.
The case “breaks no new legal ground,” Kavanaugh pointed out. He emphasized the fact that the court was simply applying the standards set out in prior precedent, namely the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky. In Batson, the high court ruled that a prosecutor cannot use peremptory challenges in jury selection in a criminal case to exclude jurors based on race. Peremptory challenges allow trial attorneys to dismiss a juror without stating a valid reason, but they can’t be used as a pretext for discrimination.
Kavanaugh today called the Mississippi high court’s holding that there was no discrimination in the peremptory strike of a black juror in Flowers’ sixth trial “clear error.” He writes:
A review of the history of the State’s peremptory strikes in Flowers’ first four trials strongly supports the conclusion that the State’s use of peremptory strikes in Flowers’ sixth trial was motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent. The State tried to strike all 36 black prospective jurors over the course of the first four trials. And the state courts themselves concluded that the State had violated Batson on two separate occasions. The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury.
The case was remanded back to the Mississippi courts, and Flowers may well face yet another trial. If the state hopes for a conviction that sticks, it would do well to hand the matter over to a new prosecutor, and one without a record of discriminatory jury selection.
Note: Fiscal years begin October 1 of the previous calendar year; Data: Department of Homeland Security; Chart: Chris Canipe/Axios
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported more immigrants this fiscal year than any full fiscal year of Donald Trump's presidency, but it has yet to reach Barack Obama's early deportation levels, according to new internal Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: With four months left in the fiscal year, it puts Trump's deportations in perspective and shows the reality behind the anti-immigrant pledges that have come to define his presidency.
By the numbers: Under the Obama administration, total ICE deportations were above 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009-2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012. The numbers dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
Under Trump, ICE deportations fell to 226,119 in fiscal 2017, then ticked up to over 250,000 in fiscal 2018 and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year (as of June).
ICE and DHS didn't respond to a request for comment.
State of play: Trump kicked off his 2020 campaign with a familiar pledge to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., and announced that ICE will begin a series of raids across the country next week.
Yes, but: Such a pledge is ambitious given the current pressures on the agency and its limited resources. As the AP points out, ICE is "already overwhelmed, lacking staff, funding and detention space for its current work. And any massive roundup that includes deportation of families would be sure to spark outrage."
How could a modern jumbo jet operated by a national airline simply disappear without a trace, erasing 239 lives in the process? The mystery of Malaysia Flight 370 gripped the world five years ago, with media outlets like CNN obsessing over it for a while. Traces of the aircraft finally began turning up on beaches in and around the Indian Ocean, but the craft itself and the bodies of its passengers have never been located, let alone recovered.
What happened? Writing in The Atlantic, William Langewiesche believes he has deduced the sequence of events that led to the destruction of MH370, and also the culprit — pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Langewiesche’s theory provides a chilling narrative that explains hours of flight data that continued long after radar centers lost touch with the flight:
In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error. Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God—none of these can explain the flight path.
Second, despite theories to the contrary, control of the plane was not seized remotely from within the electrical-equipment bay, a space under the forward galley. Pages could be spent explaining why. Control was seized from within the cockpit. This happened in the 20-minute period from 1:01 a.m., when the airplane leveled at 35,000 feet, to 1:21 a.m., when it disappeared from secondary radar. During that same period, the airplane’s automatic condition-reporting system transmitted its regular 30-minute update via satellite to the airline’s maintenance department. It reported fuel level, altitude, speed, and geographic position, and indicated no anomalies. Its transmission meant that the airplane’s satellite-communication system was functioning at that moment.
By the time the airplane dropped from the view of secondary—transponder-enhanced—radar, it is likely, given the implausibility of two pilots acting in concert, that one of them was incapacitated or dead, or had been locked out of the cockpit. Primary-radar records—both military and civilian—later indicated that whoever was flying MH370 must have switched off the autopilot, because the turn the airplane then made to the southwest was so tight that it had to have been flown by hand. Circumstances suggest that whoever was at the controls deliberately depressurized the airplane. At about the same time, much if not all of the electrical system was deliberately shut down. The reasons for that shutdown are not known. But one of its effects was to temporarily sever the satellite link.
An electrical engineer in Boulder, Colorado, named Mike Exner, who is a prominent member of the Independent Group, has studied the radar data extensively. He believes that during the turn, the airplane climbed up to 40,000 feet, which was close to its limit. During the maneuver the passengers would have experienced some g‑forces—that feeling of being suddenly pressed back into the seat. Exner believes the reason for the climb was to accelerate the effects of depressurizing the airplane, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.
It’s impossible to excerpt enough from Langewiesche’s lengthy and detailed narrative while respecting “fair use,” so be sure to read it all. Briefly, from that point on, the person in the cockpit had the plane to themselves. Pilots have access to better and more plentiful supplies of oxygen, and the perpetrator would have made sure to have that on before depressurizing and ascending. No one would have had any time to make a run at the cockpit door, nor perhaps any sense at all that they would have needed to do so. As Langewiesche next notes, that would have been the only way to ensure that no one could interrupt his plans. And data shows conclusively that at least one person was alive and operating the plane long after these maneuvers.
So who did all this? Langewiesche discards hijacking as unlikely, given the security built into the cockpit. The lack of any stated intent also makes that scenario unlikely, especially since the significant debris found all around Indian Ocean beaches proves the plane never made it to land — despite having plenty of range to do so.
That leaves either the pilot or the co-pilot as the perpetrator. Langewiesche dismisses the co-pilot as an unlikely suspect; Fariq Hamid was young, happily married, and destined for great things in his career with Malaysia Airlines. Shah (referred to by his first name in Langewiesche’s essay), on the other hand, appears to have been in a personal collapse in the months before the plane’s disappearance:
The truth, as I discovered after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is that Zaharie was often lonely and sad. His wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models, whom he encountered on social media, and for whom he left Facebook comments that apparently did not elicit responses. Some were shyly sexual. He mentioned in one comment, for example, that one of the girls, who was wearing a robe in a posted photo, looked like she had just emerged from a shower. Zaharie seems to have become somewhat disconnected from his earlier, well-established life. He was in touch with his children, but they were grown and gone. The detachment and solitude that can accompany the use of social media—and Zaharie used social media a lot—probably did not help. There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed.
What about Zaharie’s reported use of an odd flight simulation on his home computer? The significance of that was dismissed early, but Langewiesche argues persuasively that the dismissal might have been premature. It’s possible that Zaharie left it as “bread crumbs” to explain what took place:
Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone. Iannello believes that Zaharie was responsible for the diversion. Given that there was nothing technical that Zaharie could have learned by rehearsing the act on a gamelike Microsoft consumer product, Iannello suspects that the purpose of the simulator flight may have been to leave a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye. Referring to the flight profile that MH370 would follow, Iannello said of Zaharie, “It’s as if he was simulating a simulation.” Without a note of explanation, Zaharie’s reasoning is impossible to know. But the simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as a random coincidence.
Unfortunately, there still is no definitive explanation for MH370’s disappearance, although Langewiesche is certainly convincing. Until the remains of the plane and its passengers and crew are recovered, we have no way to confirm some of this information. Langewiesche notes that even finding the “black boxes” might not provide much more information, other to corroborate the satellite data on which this theory is based. If Shah offered a vocal valediction in the cockpit, that might be preserved — but if he wanted to give a valediction, why not pick up the microphone and do it instead?
Apart from the details, though, it seems clear that whoever was at the controls of MH370 deliberately caused its destruction, for whatever motive — although the absence of a declaration points pretty strongly toward mental derangement rather than anything political. We can only hope the passengers went as peacefully as Langewiesche suggests.
If you were to conjure up the ideal California politician, you could do worse than Garcetti, a Jewish Mexican American Rhodes Scholar with a gift for gab, in English and Spanish, and a winningly unpretentious style. As if channeling a young Barack Obama, the mayor is fond of invoking storied moments from the American past—the Great Depression, the Second World War, the civil-rights movement—to suggest that if previous generations were able to turn daunting challenges into historic accomplishments, then we ought to hold ourselves to the same exacting standard, a welcome alternative to the sourness and fatalism of other politicians on the left and right. But when it comes to Los Angeles’s long-running battle with homelessness, the mayor’s rhetoric looks more delusional than inspirational.
The mayor’s response has been to increase public spending on homelessness sharply, but he’s had frustratingly little to show for it. When the homelessness issue burst onto front pages a few years ago, Garcetti jumped into action with an ambitious plan to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts of the city. But as the mayor soon discovered, the issue with an “emergency” plan oriented around construction is that Los Angeles is a far cry from Bob Moses’s New York. Eighty percent of the shelters have been held up by red tape and community resistance. The short-term measures, then, must take the city’s built environment as a given.
A new sales tax boosted the city’s budget for dealing with homelessness to more than $600 million, or $20,000 per homeless person, while a bond issuance brought in $1.2 billion to go toward constructing an estimated 10,000 housing units over the next decade, all of which would be preserved for people transitioning off the street or in danger of ending up there. Los Angeles has taken about 16 percent of the funds from its recent sales-tax increase and packaged it as vouchers to offer to a share of its homeless population, allowing them to buy into the rental marketplace with the understanding that their subsidy will fade over the course of a year, shifting the burden onto the new renter.
While Los Angeles is right to want a program that moves people toward self-sufficiency—both for the sake of the homeless themselves and to protect the city’s coffers—the steep monthly increases as the vouchers fade out often outpace the low-wage, part-time work the recipients are able to find. Unsurprisingly, for an alarming share of recipients, the program is more of a one-year reprieve than the start of a new, stable life. Short of doing something serious about the underlying cost of housing in Los Angeles, a limited pool of voucher dollars will forever chase rising rents.
Before the city’s new homelessness count was released, the mayor had been touting the 20,000 people the city had moved off the street and into some form of housing. What we now know, however, is that while the Garcetti administration was helping to move 380 people off the street each week, some 480 others were joining the ranks of homeless Angelenos. Put another way, until someone does something about the city’s larger housing crisis, homelessness will be as much a part of the city’s landscape as Runyon Canyon.
Would building more housing bring an end to homelessness in L.A.? That might be too much to ask. As in most U.S. cities, a large share of the city’s homeless are thought to be mentally ill. The slice of Los Angeles’s homeless population dealing with mental illness is believed to be about 25 percent—relatively modest when compared with San Francisco, where an estimated 35 percent are struggling with mental illness, but still a substantial portion of the total.
Moreover, the city’s mild climate makes living outdoors a more viable option than in colder communities. The notorious encampments at Skid Row and in Venice Beach do not have counterparts in Manhattan, and it is safe to assume that a large number of seriously mentally ill people live in these parallel communities. Los Angeles also attracts an enormous number of homeless young adults from elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Among the 18-to-24-year-olds living on L.A.’s streets, whose numbers grew by nearly 25 percent this past year, a disproportionate share are newcomers to the city, who don’t have strong ties to the region.
These populations present knotty issues for city officials. Still, the fact that these populations are a distinct minority ought to give us hope that the majority of the city’s homeless can be reached through conventional public policy—that is, through reforms designed to increase the supply of housing, including low-cost, no-frills housing that can meet the needs of the very poor. If 10 years down the road, Los Angeles’s median rent has been pushed downward as a result of denser building, Skid Row might very well still exist as a home to people facing down hellish battles with mental illness and addiction. But at that point, the city would have the breathing room to focus on helping the hardest cases. Getting there is the hard part.
One of the ironies of this unfolding humanitarian disaster is that homelessness is a problem most pronounced in successful cities, where dynamic economies all too often meet rigidly regulated housing markets. As my Manhattan Institute colleague Stephen Eide observed in National Affairs, homelessness is not the product of poverty per se. Rather, homelessness is in no small part an artifact of being poor in a place where ferocious competition for a severely constrained supply of homes drives up rents. To offer one example of this dynamic at work, Detroit’s poverty rate is twice that of New York City’s, but because of its notably inexpensive real estate, it maintains a homelessness rate a third the size.
Los Angeles offers an example of this dynamic in extremis. In his incisive American Affairsessay on L.A.’s homelessness crisis, Jacob Siegel highlighted a study by Zillow that showed that you start to see a rising rate of homelessness once a city’s average rent reaches 22 percent of median income, and an even more rapid rate of increase once that number hits 32 percent. In Los Angeles, the average rent is 49 percent of median income. Some studies have shown that the city has as many as 600,000 people who regularly put as much as 90 percent of their monthly income toward rent. Simply put, these people need a lucky bounce to not end up homeless.
This was a controversial stance for a progressive politician whose ideological allies often prefer to blame profit-hungry landlords and absentee owners. The substance to make good on Newsom’s promise was to be found in Senate Bill 50, an ambitious proposal from Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco with unimpeachable left-wing credentials. In essence, S.B. 50 would have preempted local restrictions on density within neighborhoods that are well served by public transportation or in close proximity to employment centers.
In a nod to political reality, Wiener and his allies softened some of the bill’s more controversial provisions as it made its way through the legislature. Both its supporters and detractors understood that the bill would have done a great deal to boost California’s housing stock over time. But the bill died in committee, sunk by anti-growth legislators who denounced it as a threat to local control.
When a bill to help the most vulnerable people in California fails, one can hardly blame Sacramento’s dwindling band of conservative legislators, because they are very much on the margins of the state’s political life. They can hardly muster the votes to name a park bench, let alone decide the fate of California’s housing regulations. As Michael Hendrix, also of Manhattan Institute, has observed, the real culprits are self-described progressives, such as Paul Koretz, who represents most of the west side of L.A. on the Los Angeles City Council and suggested that S.B. 50 would take his district’s neighborhoods of single-family homes and make them “look like Dubai in 10 years.”* Then, from the other side of town, Damien Goodmon, the president of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition, suggested that the potential gentrification of his neighborhood amounted to a “Twenty-first century Trail of Tears.”
I sympathize with Koretz’s and Goodmon’s devotion to the built environment they know and cherish. Many of the sprawling single-family neighborhoods of Los Angeles are quite beautiful. It is hardly surprising that they’d want to fight against what they perceive to be disruptive change. The trouble is that their resistance to one form of disruptive change, as represented by the gradual replacement of single-family homes with higher-density apartment buildings that could house many more families at far lower cost, is contributing to another form of disruptive change—the transformation of large swaths of Los Angeles into unsanitary homeless encampments, where women, men, and children are forced to spend much of their waking hours fending off vermin.
And what did Garcetti have to say about S.B. 50? Though he refused to sign a Los Angeles City Council resolution denouncing the bill, the mayor didn’t come out in favor of it either, choosing instead to triangulate. In an exchange with Liam Dillon of the Los Angeles Times, Garcetti suggested that while he favored allowing the construction of duplexes and triplexes in keeping with the character of existing single-family neighborhoods, which he claimed had the potential to boost the city’s housing supply by as much as 50 percent, he felt Wiener’s bill went much too far.
It was exactly the sort of statement one would expect from a shrewd politician. By touting the virtues of duplexes and triplexes, Garcetti sounded righteous without committing himself to anything concrete enough to anger the likes of Paul Koretz. Meanwhile, L.A.’s homelessness crisis rages on.
* This article originally stated that Paul Koretz represents West Hollywood on the Los Angeles City Council. In fact, he represents District Five. West Hollywood is a separate city.
I’ve previously argued that George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is implicitly a great pacifist work. While rewatching season 2 with my younger son, I re-discovered a scene worthy of a pacifist ovation. While Talisa, the crucial pacifist character, appears only in the show, the following exchange sheds great light on the role of martial negligence in Martin’s fictional universe. For context, Robb Stark is the King in the North, Talisa is a battlefield medic, and they’re surrounded by the bodies of maimed and dead soldiers.
Talisa: That boy lost his foot on your orders.
Robb: They killed my father.
Talisa: That boy did?
Robb: The family he fights for.
Talisa: Do you think he’s friends with King Joffrey? He’s a fisherman’s son that grew up near Lannisport. He probably never held a spear before they shoved one in his hands a few months ago.
Robb: I have no hatred for the lad.
Talisa: That should help his foot grow back.
Robb: You’d have us surrender, end all this bloodshed. I understand. The country would be at peace and life would be just under the righteous hand of good King Joffrey.
Talisa: You’re going to kill Joffrey?
Robb: If the gods give me strength.
Talisa: And then what?
Robb: I don’t know. We’ll go back to Winterfell. I have no desire to sit on the Iron Throne.
Talisa: So who will?
Robb: I don’t know.
Talisa: You’re fighting to overthrow a king, and yet you have no plan for what comes after?
Robb: First we have to win the war.
Notice: Rather than argue that war can never be justified, Talisa shows that Robb is unleashing the horrors of war casually. He has no master plan to bring great good from great evil. Instead, he has a master plan to do great evil, motivated by vague wishes to do great good. Proverbially, however, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Is this scene an unfair caricature of the practice of moralized warfare? Hardly. U.S. leaders of both parties barely thought about what would happen after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Roosevelt’s view of Stalin was mind-bogglingly naive. Wilson, a former Princeton professor, wrote his sophomoric 14 Points, then dumped most of them in a failed effort to build a sophomoric “League of Nations.” This is what a morally serious case for just war sounds like, but don’t expect to hear anything like it for as long as you live.
Why do even well-intentioned leaders so carefully plan for war, and so negligently plan for peace? Simple: Despite their self-righteousness, they’re drunk with power. Well-intentioned? Don’t make me laugh. Yes, with great power comes great responsibility… which politicians routinely fail to exercise in reality and Westeros alike.
When you walk into the bathroom, you probably aren't paying much attention to the toilet paper until you reach to use it. But, when you finally go to tear a sheet off, you may notice if the roll is run with the paper facing over or underneath. While you continue on about your business, you may be wondering to yourself, which way is the right way?
Some quick history for you: Toilet paper rolls were invented in 1891. Ever since then, people around the world have grappled with how to correctly hang a roll of toilet paper. Should it be over or under? While your personal preference may take the lead in your own bathroom, we spoke to Melissa Maker, cleaning expert extraordinaire and author of "Clean My Space," to settle the debate of how to hang a roll of toilet paper once and for all.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
A couple of years ago, Mark Perry did an excellent post about prices in the health care industry. He presented a table that suggests the price of plastic surgery has risen much less rapidly than other medical costs:
I’m surprised by these results. To see why, consider the two big distortions in health care:
1. The government imposes onerous regulations on health care, which one would expect to sharply boost prices.
2. The government massively subsidizes health care, which one would expect to sharply boost quantity.
Because expenditure equals price times quantity, these distortions would be expected to dramatically boost total spending on health care. Perhaps they do. So why am I surprised by the plastic surgery data?
As far as I know, plastic surgery is heavily regulated in ways similar to other forms of health care. There are tight limits on the ability of health care practitioners to migrate to the US from places where costs are far lower. And doctors in the US must undergo training far beyond the needs of the job. In addition, certain tasks that could be done by nurses are restricted to doctors.
Where plastic surgery differs from traditional health care is in the payment system. Plastic surgery is far less subsidized than other forms of health care, rarely covered by insurance. So if you think in terms of two distortions—subsidy and regulation—then it’s mostly in the area of subsidy where plastic surgery differs from other forms of medical care.
A priori, I would expect plastic surgery to cost about the same as other forms of surgery. I’d expect the biggest difference to occur in quantity, where plastic surgery would be done at close to the optimal level, while other forms of health care get provided at levels far beyond the optimum due to subsidies. In fact, it seems like the subsidies also impact price, indeed quite dramatically. This means that our health care regime might well be even more inefficient than it appears, with government subsidies boosting both price and quantity, while regulation further boosts price.
In other words, while the 32% boost in the price of plastic surgery trails the 47% rise in the CPI, and is far below the overall rise in medical costs, it seems plausible that even this modest price increase is excessive due to government regulation. In a truly free market in plastic surgery it is likely that prices would be far lower.
Bryan Caplan has a new post that discusses a recent book by Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok. Bryan is not persuaded by their argument that the cost disease in health care and education is largely driven by the “Baumol effect” (rising wages in industries where productivity is stagnant):
So while Helland and Tabarrok are not wrong to invoke the Baumol effect, they are wrong to fail to blame government for dramatically amplifying it. If paying customers bore the full financial burden of education and health care, prices could easily fall by 50% or more.
In conversation, Alex objected that the growth rate of health care prices did not dramatically increase after Medicare was adopted. This would be a reasonable objection if my story were speculative. But “spending hundreds of billions of extra dollars a year on anything will make it much more expensive” is anything but speculative. Indeed, it’s virtually bulletproof; are we really supposed to imagine that the supply of health care is perfectly elastic despite a thicket of licensing requirements?! If prices did not grow more rapidly after the adoption of Medicare, the sensible inference is that price growth would have slowed if Medicare hadn’t happened. “Unfalsifiable”? No, but it is an application of a general principle so well-established that it’s crazy to doubt it now.
I haven’t yet had a chance to read their book, so I’ll reserve judgment on the relative importance of the Baumol effect. (I suspect they are broadly correct for the service sector as a whole.) Here I’d like to comment on the adoption of Medicare in 1965. The following graph in Mark Perry’s post suggests that Medicare’s impact was less significant than one might have suspected:
Private health insurance is heavily subsidized by our tax system. Once people are pushed into using insurance (by any means) to pay for expenditures, they have far less incentive to economize on purchases. This was already a problem even before Medicare was adopted in 1965. In my own life and the lives of people I know I see frequent examples of large health care expenditures that only occur only because private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid are picking up the bill. That fact doesn’t mean these government subsidies increase prices, merely that they boost quantity (and hence expenditures.) But if we combine the gradually increasingly level of government subsidies with the data on plastic surgery prices, I suspect that subsidies are increasing both prices and quantity in the health care industry.
I suspect that health care is the single biggest factor explaining mediocre wage growth, with education subsidies a close second. The left focuses on redistributing wealth from the rich to the other 99%, but the biggest need is to reduce the bloated spending levels in health care and education, which is massively inflated by subsidies and regulations. This would free up enormous resources to produce more housing, tourism services, and other goods of real value to average Americans. To conclude:
1. Basic economic theory predicts that our system of subsidy and regulation would produce vastly excessive spending on health and education. If not, then much of the EC101 taught in principles textbooks is flat out wrong.
2. All of the empirical studies I’ve seen suggest that there is little or no evidence that this extra spending produces significant gains.
The burden of proof is on those who favor trillions of dollars in government subsidies for health care and education. So far they are not even close to meeting that burden.
Even some free-market economists, such as Duke University’s Michael Munger, argue for a UBI that would replace the current welfare state. But assuming unrealistically that the existing means-tested welfare state programs could be completely replaced, a UBI of $12,000 a year or even of $10,000 a year would require large increases in federal government spending and large increases in taxes.
[Professor Matt] Zwolinski argues against the current welfare system by pointing, correctly, to the enormous implicit marginal tax rates paid by people who decide to get a job. Under our current system, making a certain amount of money can cause a welfare recipient to lose more in government aid than she makes on the job. (I say “she” because the vast majority of adults receiving welfare benefits are women.) That aspect of the system causes many people on welfare not to work.
In a 2013 article, Zwolinski cited Cato Institute economist Michael Tanner’s calculation that federal, state, and local expenditures on 126 anti-poverty programs in 2012 totaled $952 billion. Zwolinski calculated that the average expenditure per poor person was a whopping $20,610. He then asked, “Wouldn’t it be better just to write the poor a check?”
Maybe, but that’s not what’s at issue. Zwolinski cited these figures to make a case not just for writing the poor a check, but for writing everyone a check. And that’s a much more expensive proposition. Using Zwolinski’s numbers and updating to 2015, I showed that even if all means-tested welfare programs were eliminated, funding a $10,000 UBI to every American adult would take another $1.068 trillion in federal spending. In 2015, when I wrote, this would have required raising tax revenue by 45.7 percent. And to raise tax revenue by 45.7 percent would have required raising tax rates by more than 45.7 percent. Why? Because large increases in tax rates would substantially discourage work and production in general.
There is one way to avoid raising tax rates on everyone. That would be to adopt a proposal made by Charles Murray when he suggested a $10,000 UBI in 2006. The federal government could guarantee all American adults $10,000 and then phase out the $10,000 as their income increases beyond a threshold. So, for example, anyone with other income of $15,000 gets to keep the whole $10,000 for a total of $25,000. But as their other income increases beyond $15,000, they lose some percent of this $10K. Say that percent is 25 percent, a number I have heard tossed around in informal discussions with libertarians who propose a UBI. That means that someone would have to make an extra $40,000 beyond the $15,000 before he loses all of his federal subsidy.
Consider the implications for work effort for the whole society. Everyone making between $15,000 and $55,000 ($40,000 + $15,000) in non-UBI income would receive some of the subsidy. But the median individual income of Americans is about $40,000. So, a majority of Americans would receive some subsidy. That means that the majority of Americans would face an implicit marginal tax rate from their loss of the subsidy of 25 percent. That might not sound bad at first, but remember that this is on top of their other marginal tax rates, including the federal income tax, the Social Security (FICA) and Medicare (HI) payroll taxes, and their state income taxes. So, a majority of Americans would give up about 50 cents of any additional dollar they make. Even this version of the UBI, therefore, would dramatically reduce the incentive to work for tens of millions of Americans.
Also, I note how one under discussed issue in the whole UBI debate, the 1996 welfare reform, means that the disincentive to work under the current system is not as strong as many people think. The relevant paragraph:
Don’t forget that a good reform, welfare reform, was done in the 1990s. There were two key elements of the welfare reform that Republicans in Congress pushed, and President Clinton signed, in 1996. First, one cannot receive welfare funded by the federal government for more than two years in a row unless one works. Second, there is a five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare. Thus the word “Temporary” in the name of the program: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Those two provisions offset the disincentives caused by the pre-reform welfare state. It’s still true that while you are on welfare, you can literally make yourself worse off financially by getting a job that pays a fairly low wage. But if you are about to bump up against the two year in a row limit, or if you want to “bank” a few years of the five for when life gets tougher, you might well take that job. And that’s good, not bad.
Also, note that I referenced my 2015 piece on this. It’s part of a symposium in The Independent Review. Mike Munger, whom I reference above, has an article in the symposium in which he claims to show that “a negative income tax would save tax dollars.” But he doesn’t actually do so. Instead, he uses a hypothetical income distribution that has very little connection with the actual income distribution in the United States. With any kind of realistic numbers and with the $10,000 UBI or anything even close to it, the increase in both government spending and taxes from a UBI would be huge.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), around 4% of US businesses offer student loan assistance as a company benefit. That amounts to dozens of majors companies, including IBM, Staples, Peloton, Penguin Random House, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
But some companies are finding more interesting ways of helping employees with their debt: They're letting employees trade vacation days for student loan benefits, while others offer signing bonuses, company stock, or 401(k) contributions.
Here are six companies that are taking a unique approach to alleviating their workers' student debt.
Unum, a Tennessee-based insurance company, lets its US employees trade unused vacation-day wages for student-loan payments.
csm242000 Photography/Flickr/CC 2.0 Attribution
It's hard to enjoy a vacation if you have the dark cloud of student debt hanging over you.
That's what insurance company Unum figured when they made their benefits policy, which lets employees exchange unused vacation days for student-loan payment money.
Employees are given 28 vacation days a year (compared with the national average of 15), and they can use up to five of those days for their loans. The average Unum employee has $32,000 in student debt and makes $350 monthly payments. Vacation money is based on their hourly salaries, so an employee making $60,000 a year would make $230 in a workday.
Trading five of those workdays would mean $1,150 in student-loan assistance a year. And since 30% of Unum employees are plagued by student debt, that's no small sum.
Connelly Partners, a marketing services company, gives new employees a $1,000 signing bonus to be used toward their student loans.
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Aside from a standard student loan assistance program, Connelly Partners gives new employees a $1,000 signing bonus to pay their student loans.
The company partnered up with Gradifi, a business designed specifically for employers to make student-loan assistance a benefit. In addition to the signing bonus, employees get $100 a month put toward their loans.
Employees even get a second $1,000 student loan bonus after five years with the company.
Healthcare company Abbott Laboratories has a 401(k) match program tied to student-loan payments.
Thomson Reuters
Typically, when a company has a 401(k) program, it matches whatever an employee contributes to their retirement accounts. Abbott Laboratories, however, has a slightly different policy.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Abbott contributes 5% of an employee's pay into a 401(k) as long as that employee is contributing 2% of their paycheck to their student loans. Abbott even got special approval from the IRS for their policy.
The policy is growing in popularity, with 1,000 Abbott employees (out of nearly 79,000) opting for it.
The trend might continue on to other businesses. According to the same report, one company, California-based CSAA Insurance Group, offers a 6% match, and employees can redirect as much as 4% to student loans.
Netflix doesn't love long-running TV shows, and sometimes that means great shows get the ax early.
The streaming giant has canceled plenty of shows that upset fans but were panned by TV critics, such as "Everything Sucks!" and "Gypsy." But it's canceled ones that were critically acclaimed, too.
Netflix often doesn't see the value in shows that exceed 30 episodes (usually two to three seasons) because they become too expensive and too difficult for new viewers to jump into, Deadline reported last year. That means shows like "American Vandal," "One Day at a Time," and more have been given the boot earlier than fans, and critics, would have hoped.
On Tuesday, Netflix canceled the variety talk show "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj."
Other Netflix critical darlings to get the ax recently are "The Kominsky Method" and "Dead to Me" after their upcoming third seasons and "Ozark," which was renewed for a fourth and final season after season three was its best reviewed yet.
We've rounded up 22 great TV shows that Netflix has canceled. We highlighted shows that received an average score over 85% on Rotten Tomatoes or whose final seasons were above 85%, and ranked them based on the average scores. We broke ties with audience scores and if those were the same, with the final season score.
We limited the list to shows that ended with four seasons or fewer on Netflix, which didn't include "BoJack Horseman" and other shows. In the case of a show like "Lucifer," which Netflix revived for a fourth season after Fox canceled it, and has renewed for seasons five and six, we included it because it received just three new seasons on Netflix.
In the case of "Patriot Act," it aired six "volumes" but only lasted two years, so we counted it. It didn't have enough reviews for an average score on Rotten Tomatoes, so we ranked it based on just its season one critic score.
To fans' and critics' delight, though, a couple of these shows have been revived elsewhere.
"One Day at a Time," which Netflix canceled after three seasons, debuted its fourth season on the Pop network this year. "Tuca and Bertie" was revived for a second season by Adult Swim.
Below are 22 canceled Netflix shows that critics loved:
22. "Ozark" — canceled after 4 seasons
Average critic score: 81%
Audience score: 91%
Critic score for most recent season: 97% (season 3)
Netflix description: "A financial adviser drags his family from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks, where he must launder $500 million in five years to appease a drug boss.
What critics said: "Season three is the best season of the series so far. The story line arc works pretty well, with seeds planted early on that bloom in the later episodes." — Boston Globe (season 3)
21. "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" — canceled after 4 seasons
Average critic score: 84% (includes winter special)
Audience score: 69%
Critic score for most recent season: 90% (season 3)
Netflix description: "Magic and mischief collide as half-human, half-witch Sabrina navigates between two worlds: mortal teen life and her family's legacy, the Church of Night."
What critics said: "The character growth of Part 3 is simply put, delicious. The emotional payoffs of each journey keep the show from slipping into WTF!?! territory and firmly ground CAOS as a show with something to say outside of quippy one-liners." — TV Guide (season 3)
20. "The OA" — canceled after 2 seasons
Average critic score: 84%
Audience score: 84%
Critic score for most recent season: 92% (season 2)
Netflix description: "Seven years after vanishing from her home, a young woman returns with mysterious new abilities and recruits five strangers for a secret mission."
What critics said: "The OA is kind of genius, while simultaneously being incredibly silly. And you know what? I love it! I love its goofy, loopy vibe." — Vox (season 2)
Arranmore is a tiny island off the northwestern coast of Ireland.
People in Arranmore have written an open letter to citizens of the US to sell their homeland as a great place to live.
The island is known for scuba diving, great seafood, and beautiful, drastic cliffs.
Recently, it added high-speed broadband to give remote workers an internet connection that's "as good as any office in America," according to the letter.
People in Arranmore, a tiny, idllyic island off the northwestern coast of Ireland, are trying to recruit Americans to move to their homeland.
Traditionally a home for fishermen and farmers, Aranmore has lost a considerable percentage of its population in recent years as young locals flock to bigger cities for work, according to The Irish Post. Now, a video by Three Ireland details how the islanders are embarking on a project to welcome new neighbors by adding high-speed broadband across the region.
In light of this fundamental change, the people of Arranmore have written an open letter to citizens of the US to sell their beloved island as a great place to live.
Check out 11 beautiful photos of the remote Irish island that could be your new home.
Arranmore is a small island located off the northwestern coast of Ireland.
Lukassek/Shutterstock
According to its website, the County Donegal island, also known as Árainn Mhór, has been inhabited since prehistoric times.
The island is rustic and relatively undeveloped, but it boasts undeniable natural beauty.
AdamWebster89/Getty Images
Arranmore is home to dramatic cliffs, sandy beaches, grassy planes, and sea caves.
Diving spots off the coast of Arranmore such as "Paradise Cavern" and "Green Island" are some of the most spectacular diving sites in all of Ireland, according to Dive Arranmore.
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Wedding of my dreams @fedez
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I’m surprised by these results. To see why, consider the two big distortions in health care:
Private health insurance is heavily subsidized by our tax system. Once people are pushed into using insurance (by any means) to pay for expenditures, they have far less incentive to economize on purchases. This was already a problem even before Medicare was adopted in 1965. In my own life and the lives of people I know I see frequent examples of large health care expenditures that only occur only because private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid are picking up the bill. That fact doesn’t mean these government subsidies increase prices, merely that they boost quantity (and hence expenditures.) But if we combine the gradually increasingly level of government subsidies with the data on plastic surgery prices, I suspect that subsidies are increasing both prices and quantity in the health care industry.
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