Krisya

A truly remarkable piece of reporting (including actual good news on maternal health) by Jina Moore in Al Jazeera America:

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of the Congo – At first glance, Central University Hospital in Brazzaville looks like so many other hospitals in so many other African capitals – home to dimly lit waiting rooms and dirty floors. But inside the freshly painted mint-green walls of the hospital’s maternity ward, a revolution is happening.

In 10 years, the country has reduced the number of women dying in child birth by more than 50 percent, with most of that drop occurring in the last two years.

Before 2005, even, “there was nothing” in most health facilities, says Dr. Léon Hervé Iloki, a practicing gynecologist and director of the national Observatory on Maternal and Newborn Mortality, established in 2010 to audit the causes of maternal and infant death. “Forceps? You didn’t have them. You didn’t have other instruments for helping in delivery. Even beds were not always there.

“The difference today is spectacular,” he says. “And for the women giving birth, it is incalculable.”

It’s also a rare rate of improvement in maternal health, on a continent that could use some good news: Fifty-six percent of women worldwide who die in childbirth are dying in sub-Saharan Africa. Less than half of all births in the region are overseen by qualified professionals, whether doctors or medically trained midwives. But peaceful Congo-Brazzaville’s improvements on maternal mortality have gone largely unnoticed, overshadowed perhaps as bad news from Africa dominates the bandwidth.

Yet the country is besting worldwide trends. Globally, maternal mortality has dropped by roughly 45 percent in the last 20 years, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) – far short of the 75 percent reduction envisioned by the Millennium Development Goals. Congo-Brazzaville has exceeded that global rate by a third. David Lawson, the country director for UNFPA, a partner in the maternal health projects, says that if progress continues at the same rate, Congo might, in fact, meet the Millennium Development Goal on schedule, in 2015. According to a recent study in the Lancet, only about a dozen countries are expected to meet that goal.

“The government is actually putting the resources and actions where they’re supposed to be,” Lawson says. “I have no doubt that the situation will continue to improve.”

Do read the whole thing. And if you like it, share it — AJA is one of the few entities giving space to long-form in-depth and complex reported pieces like this one, so do your part to promote and sustain good journalism.

Republicans still very down on 'Obamacare' but significantly more supportive of the so-called 'Affordable Care Act.'

by Mike Dang

Yesterday, the Republican-controlled House voted 217 to 210 to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next 10 years. A Census Bureau report released earlier in the week “found that the program had kept about four million people above the poverty level and had prevented millions more from sinking further into poverty,” according to the Times. Democratic leaders said that the cuts would plunge millions of Americans into poverty. Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, criticized her Republican colleagues for cutting food aid to the poor while spending significant amounts of money on food when traveling:

One member was given $127.41 a day for food on his trip to Argentina. He probably had a fair amount of steak. Another member was given $3,588 for food and lodging during a six-day trip to Russia. He probably drank a fair amount of vodka and probably even had some caviar. That particular member has 21,000 food stamp recipients in his district. One of those people on food stamps could live a year on what this congressman spent on food and lodging for six days.

Other Democratic leaders called the measure “a monumental waste of time” because it has little chance of advancing in the Senate.

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High School | Aberdeen, WA, USA

(I’m in chemistry class, and we’ve all branched out all over the room for an experiment. At this point, the teacher is on the opposite side of the rather large lab.)

Me: “So, first we need the bunsen burner.”

(I grab it to move it closer, but the two pieces aren’t secured right and the bottom falls off. I let out a short scream of surprise.)

Teacher: “Everything okay?”

Me: “Yeah, we’re fine—wait.”

(I notice that the teacher is suddenly right behind us.)

Me: “How did you do that? You were way over there not a second ago!”

Teacher: “When you work with chemicals, acids, and flames, and you hear a student scream, you suddenly develop the ability to teleport. Scientific fact.”

by Mike Dang

The Wirecutter has an exhaustive 6,000-word researched review of the best pen, and it’s not the Pilot Precise V5, which I’ve been buying and using exclusively for at least a decade (though it gets an honorable mention). There are very few consumer goods that I am loyal to, but pens are one of those things.

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Outdoors | NS, Canada

(My four-year-old son and I are walking home from day-care, when we have a small argument. After a moment, he takes my hand and gives it a kiss.)

Me: “Thank you for that, but you’re still in trouble.”

Son: “How will I not be in trouble?”

Me: “By listening to me.”

Son: “No… that won’t work.”

The Annals of Irrational Fear, GMO Division. The New York Times reports:

ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.

Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”

FrankenFoods. Playing god. It ain’t natural. Yuck.

Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice, and eventually in many other places in a world where rice is eaten every day by half the population. Lack of the vital nutrient causes blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune system that some two million die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.

So maybe, just maybe, destroying the field trial crop isn’t really such a brilliant idea.

The destruction of the field trial, and the reasons given for it, touched a nerve among scientists around the world, spurring them to counter assertions of the technology’s health and environmental risks. On a petition supporting Golden Rice circulated among scientists and signed by several thousand, many vented a simmering frustration with activist organizations like Greenpeace, which they see as playing on misplaced fears of genetic engineering in both the developing and the developed worlds. Some took to other channels to convey to American foodies and Filipino farmers alike the broad scientific consensus that G.M.O.’s are not intrinsically more risky than other crops and can be reliably tested.

And another thing: there are “risks,” known risks, in a diet that’s deficient in vitamin A. To repeat:

Lack of the vital nutrient causes blindness in a quarter-million to a half-million children each year. It affects millions of people in Asia and Africa and so weakens the immune system that some two million die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.

That’s a little more significant than “yuck” reactions to GMO foods.

At stake, they say, is not just the future of biofortified rice but also a rational means to evaluate a technology whose potential to improve nutrition in developing countries, and developed ones, may otherwise go unrealized.

“There’s so much misinformation floating around about G.M.O.’s that is taken as fact by people,” said Michael D. Purugganan, a professor of genomics and biology and the dean for science at New York University, who sought to calm health-risk concerns in a primer on GMA News Online, a media outlet in the Philippines: “The genes they inserted to make the vitamin are not some weird manufactured material,” he wrote, “but are also found in squash, carrots and melons.”

But god put the genes in the squash, carrots, and melons, but god didn’t put the genes in rice. Therefore the genes being put in the rice makes the whole thing gross and creepy and blasphemious!

Mr. Purugganan, who studies plant evolution, does not work on genetically engineered crops, and until recently had not participated in the public debates over the risks and benefits of G.M.O.’s. But having been raised in a middle-class family in Manila, he felt compelled to weigh in on Golden Rice. “A lot of the criticism of G.M.O.’s in the Western world suffers from a lack of understanding of how really dire the situation is in developing countries,” he said.

Privilege. That’s a classic example of privilege at work. It’s the same with vaccines – we have the privilege of having grown up in a world with vaccines, so unless we know something about history or otherwise investigate the subject a little, we are clueless about what it’s like to live in a world where an infectious disease can pounce on you and kill you at any moment. That is privilege. It’s privilege and it leads to horrendous irrational phobic ideas that, if followed, would lead to the reversal of much medical and technological progress. Yes progress. Being sniffy about the idea of progress is another example of privilege.

 

David Powers King and Michael Jensen were in the final stages of publishing their young-adult fantasy novel Woven when they saw a mistake on the back cover.

The biographical information for King was fine, but Jensen’s was missing this line: “He lives in Salt Lake City with his boyfriend and their four dogs.”

The Acquisitions Editor for publisher Cedar Fort, Inc. told him the reason in an email:

I was concerned about your bio and wondered what effect it would have with our [Mormon] buyers, so I spoke with [Cedar Fort owner] Lyle [Mortimer] about it. He says we can’t risk ruining our relationship with them by stating you live with your boyfriend, so we need to cut that part out.

Jensen suggested replacing the word “boyfriend” with “partner” (which is what his bio said in the book proposal) but the publishers would have none of it. They didn’t want to publish even a hint that one of their authors was gay. They cater to an LDS audience, after all, and they obviously didn’t want to burn any bridges.

The authors (rightly) refused to budge any further with the bios, so there was a phone call to discuss the situation, which the authors have summarized like this on their website:

Mr. Jensen called Cedar Fort‘s owner, Lyle Mortimer, and asked why he was being treated differently from Mr. King. “The conversation really devolved quickly,” says Mr. Jensen. “Lyle started yelling about my ‘agenda’ and how I was trying to destroy families. He even started saying inappropriate things about how God had given me a penis for a reason. It was very uncomfortable. Then he threatened to publish Woven without our names attached or without our bios at all — rather than print that one sentence. He told me that if he decided not to publish because of this, I‘d have to buy back the rights to our book and reimburse him for his work so far, and that would cost me thousands of dollars.”

Jensen argues that bending over backwards like this to try and appease a Mormon book chain, even for a publisher that caters to an LDS crowd, really makes no sense:

… I would imagine that major national retailers, like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, might hesitate to continue dealing with a publisher whose practices are so egregiously incongruous with their own adopted corporate philosophies on the subject of gay equality (I’m sure you’re aware that last year Jeff Bezos personally donated $2.5 million dollars in support of same-sex marriage in Washington state).

Fair point. As it stands, the authors now have the rights to their book back, so they’re shopping for a new publisher. But really, Jensen and King don’t even need one at this point. With this story, they have some publicity. Might as well just pay someone to design a new cover, slap their unedited bios on it, and publish it themselves ASAP.

Let Cedar Fort take the hit for siding with bigotry instead of the merits of the novel.

I've been reading and listening to a lot of interesting commentary on Amazon's financial situation from tech writers and a lot of it focuses on the question of whether Amazon can or ever will be able to "flip the switch" and go from being a high-growth high-revenue company to being a profitable one.

That's a fascinating question, but it's worth introducing the idea that you could imagine a successful company that never posts GAAP profits. Now you can't have a company that spends $100 to make widgets that it sells for $99, but that's not the sense in which Amazon is unprofitable. Amazon is unprofitable because it spends ~100% of its cashflow on capital expenditures oriented toward doing future business. The important thing here is that from a shareholder's viewpoint, a dollar of capex isn't like lighting a dollar bill on fire. The shareholders own the commpany's capital equipment. If for some reason the Amazon board decided to liquidate the company tomorrow, it's not as if the shareholders would be left emptyhanded. You'd auction off all of Amazon's office buildings and fulfillment centers and warehouse robots and AWS servers and patents and whatever else they have. By contrast, if you liquidated Apple you'd not only have the proceeds from that kind of auction but an enormous pile of US dollars.

So good for the shareholders.

But the point is that though stockpiling cash is a way of increasing the value of your enterprise so is stockpiling capital goods. Imagine 20 guys who pool their money together to buy a building and open a restaurant in it. Then instead of having the restaurant be "profitable" it spends all its surplus on buying a second building and opening and second restaurant. And so it goes year after year for twenty years. At the end of that time, they own 50 buildings and 50 restaurants. Then they decide to close the restaurants and sell the buildings (and the kitchen equipment the restaurants contain) to other investors and divvy up the proceeds. Depending on how the local real estate market evolved over that time, they might earn themselves some healthy capital gains for their trouble.

Now as far as I know, this kind of scenario doesn't play out in the real world. And certainly it doesn't play out with giant publicly traded companies. But I do think it goes to show that the idea that a rapidly-growing unprofitable firm might be a sound investment doesn't genuinely depend on the theory that the firm will be able to "throw the switch" at some point. Your share gives you a slice of the firm, and as long as the firm is growing in the sense of "amassing more firm-owned stuff" then the value of your investment is growing.

I used to hide in a back room in our basement where I had a stash of roadkill, and I’d … study … anatomy without telling my parents.

Parents, talk to your children. Don’t let them go down my path. You can point to me in public and whisper, “If you keep playing with bones, you’ll end up like him.”

Soft drinks, sports drinks and other sweetened beverages are now known to contribute to Americans’ obesity problem. This link has led some policy makers to address the problem by restricting...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Basic cable companies are attempting to convince the FCC that the current standard of what can be said and must be bleeped on television is outdated, restrictive, and in many cases just doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Allow Mr. Colbert and special guest Mr. Laurie to demonstrate.

Don’t forget to pick up your dry cleaning, Stephen.

(via Bleeding Cool.)

People who follow these things tell me that the specific changes Attorney General Eric Holder is introducing this morning tied to non-violent drug offenders are more symbolic than substantive. Not that many people are in the federal system on those kinds of charges. But the larger push to ramp back a generation of mass incarceration, driven in large measure by mandatory minimum sentencing laws, is just an incredibly important development. Especially when it comes from the very top of the criminal justice system in the United States.

But to put the news in perspective - not just today's news but the news of the last half century which has gotten us to this point - you need to look at this chart.

I would venture to say that while relatively few of us have been directly affected by what is behind this data it is unquestionably one of the most significant charts in any of our lifetimes. As you can see, it's the trend of US murder rates going back 51 years from 1960 to 2011. The rate starts a steep climb through the 1960s, bounces around a bit at a very high rate for about a quarter century and then starts a steep drop in the early-mid-90s. It stabilizes for a while in the Bush years and then starts falling again late in the Bush administration. It may still be falling.

It all kind of hit me a few years ago when I realized that murder rates had fallen so low that you're standard police procedural like Law and Order just wasn't realistic any more. There just weren't enough murders to go around.

If you're interested in US politics, I think there are few datasets that have more defined our politics over the last quarter century. The only other that really compares is the stagnating or declining incomes of the lower 3/4 on the income scale. But I think this may be even more important. You can pretty much chart the rightward turn in American politics against that first slope and plateau and the increasing openness to reformism of various sorts on the downward slope.

Look at this chart and you understand the paramountcy of Nixon and Reagan.

But what I take away from this is that as much as I'm a critic of much of many aspects of the war on crime over this period, certainly its excesses (as though we could agree on what those were), I think that if you stand back and look at that chart and try to take a disinterested analytical look, it's wildly unrealistic to think you wouldn't have a generation plus of draconian laws tied to people's fears of violence and personal safety. That's totally different from saying right or wrong. Just totally unrealistic.

One of the earliest pieces I wrote as a working journalist, was this piece for The New Republic on the politics of the death penalty in the United States and Europe. At the time, it was popular to contrast the US obsession with the death penalty with the fact that the practice had been outlawed across Europe. What I was able to show though is that if you looked at public opinion data, a very different picture emerged. Europeans wanted the death penalty almost as much as Americans. It was just that there political systems were less porous to populist politics. So they didn't get it.

But again, surprising that the death penalty became a winning political issue during that surge in the murder rate? Or, more specifically, that opposition to it became politically toxic in many parts of the country? Hardly.

I don't write this as a recipe for inaction in the face of public policies we believe are wrong or ineffective. But again, when you step back, it can't help but induce a humility that in political action and as citizens we are awash on a sea we don't control which dramatically constrains what is and is not possible.

And there's even a deeper level to it: not only do we not control it. We seldom even much understand it.

We've all heard numerous arguments about why murder rates (and to a lesser extent other violent crimes) began to fall in the early Clinton years. Broken windows and Comstat with Giuliani in New York. Abortion. Even lead poisoning (about which there's some pretty strong data). The simple fact that so many people are incarcerated and thus not on the streets committing crimes. But in that case, even many of the criminologists and sociologists who were the biggest supporters of the program of mass incarceration now say it's gone too far, that the degree of community disruption and criminalization behind bars is outweighing the 'upside' of keeping additional people off the street.

If you take New York City, where I live, the city has managed even starker drops in crime than most other cities in the country. But when you look at that downward arc, you realize that very clearly something was changing in the society nationwide (and by some evidence worldwide) that went way beyond whatever novel policing methods the NYPD had put into effect. I think good decisions in New York City catalyzed even great drops. But this chart makes it totally evident that something much bigger was afoot.

And what was it? I think the honest answer is we don't know. There are a few concrete things we can point to like the crack epidemic and crack wars of the late 80s that again spiked rates after a slight drop. But overall, we don't know.

There's an interesting book called The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History written by one of the country's most curious and idiosyncratic historians, David Hackett Fischer. The very, very simplified version of his argument is that the last couple thousand years of history have seen successive periods of inflation and price stability. If you lived in the periods of chronic inflation, things kind of sucked - good art, literature and philosophy maybe but living really sucked. If you lived in the periods of price stability things were pretty good.

I've thought for some time that eventually historians and sociologists decades from now will find similar trends explaining the rise and fall of lethal violence in our times. But they'll be things we're wholly unaware of or only dimly aware of.

Notably, if my memory serves, at the end of his book, Fischer notes that the historical patterns suggest we're entering into a period of long time price stability. And he was writing ten or fifteen years from now. So maybe that's the answer. And maybe we give Paul Volcker and Greenspan way too much credit.

However that may be, if you're open to history and data, it forces humility. We're in control of less than we imagine and know perhaps even less than that.

The upcoming MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which has been in beta testing, was looking promising.  The game has been getting positive reviews and folks have generally been having fun.  I had been meaning to write a positive review of the game and community.  Folks on my server, Balmung, are generally friendly and I met anyone obnoxious, offensive, or hateful (yet!).  I was also delighted to find that the character design doesn’t seem to just be pandering to straight men.  Body types could be more diverse, but at least the female characters don’t look like pin-up girls in floss for armor.  I am excited to play a seven-foot-tall, muscular warrior woman:

Some of the armor that is skimpy on female characters is even skimpy on male characters, such as the infamous subligar armor:

Some straight male players complain about their avatar in a speedo and don’t see the irony!

So, despite a lot to be excited about, there is a big problem with FFXIV so far: homophobia.

Those of us planning to role-play have been researching the game’s lore in preparation for launch on August 27.  One big question is: what are the in-character views on homosexuality?  For those of us playing gay and bisexual characters, should we plan on stories dealing with being a sexual minority in a homophobic world, or should we expect sexual orientation is no big deal?

Well, according to the development team, most Eorzeans don’t really care what your sexual orientation is:

In general, how open-minded is the average Eorzean? (ex. Accept same-sex couples? Those who do not believe in the Twelve?)

Answer: Though many of the races experienced rocky pasts, currently, tolerance is, for the most part, the norm in Eorzea. The main reason behind this being that the region is a veritable melting pot of races who have worked together throughout recent history to survive the hardships thrust upon them. This does not mean that there are do not exist groups which are significantly more closed-minded. For example, while Gridania and Limsa Lominsa are fairly open about having dealings with the some of the more amicable beast tribes (such as the sylphs, goblins, and Qiqirn), the sultanate of Ul’dah are wary of the tribes, in part due to their prolonged conflict with the Amalj’aa.

OK, so some characters might be homophobic, but most don’t think anything of someone’s sexual orientation.  Then, what doesn’t make sense is the in-game policy on marriage:

Q: Will it be possible to get married? Also, will same-sex marriages be possible?

A: [...]

As for same-sex marriage, this is an extremely controversial topic that has been under discussion in the MMO world for the past few years. First we would like to start out with opposite-sex marriage, and then consider the feedback from our players in order to make a careful decision.I can’t say whether or not it will be possible at this point in time. I’d like to keep dialog open with our players as we deliberate the matter.

Now I am personally not that excited about marriage because of its patriarchal and heteronormative baggage.  I probably wouldn’t want to get married in an MMORPG.  But if we’re going to have marriage, I don’t want to exclude anyone from it.  For me, it doesn’t really make sense that a world where most people don’t care about sexual orientation would ban same-gender marriage.  A member of the Hydaelan Role-Players Coalition pointed this out on the beta-testing forums and was banned for “discrimination”. They received this message from Square Enix and reposted it:

Thread Title:
Arguments For Marriage Equality in Eorzea

Relevant sections from the FINAL FANTASY XIV Guidelines:
Posting aimed to create a negative impact on the community or its members.
Posting that constitutes discrimination against another forum member or group (also including forming groups for the purpose of discrimination), insults, slander, libel, harassment of a group or individual.
Posting spam, including meaningless characters and white space.

Original Post:
Recently it was announced that marriage would be a feature within Final Fantasy 14 ARR. The system as of now, is planned to be for opposite gendered couples only, with the possibility of same gendered marriages being implemented based on player feedback. I argue that waiting for this feedback is, statistically speaking, a complete waste of time. The numbers already exist to indicate that the players of the afore mentioned game approve of same sex marriage by a wide margin. Let’s consider the following, using the United States, a traditionally conservative country, as a model.

- Among millennials (people born after 1980), support for same sex marriage is over 70%

- Among people born after 1965, support for same sex marriage is over 50%

- According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2013 data, the average age of video game players is 30, with 64% of all players falling in the millennial category.

These numbers alone show that a good majority of video game players (if not a substantial majority), support same sex marriage. Assuming that Final Fantasy 14 players fall within the “video game players” demographic, it’s quite easy to see in advance that support among the player base would be high.

Square Enix is running a business though, and I understand that. After the debacle that was the initial release of Final Fantasy 14, and all the hard work they’ve put in to revitalizing the game, I can understand that they don’t want any niggling distractions to keep any potential players away. Fortunately, there are real world examples to show that SE shouldn’t be afraid to implement same sex marriage.

First, let’s look at the Old Republic. Bioware has a history of offering same sex relationships in their game, and well before their game launched, they stated that they intended to continue that tradition within the Old Republic. The usual suspects came out in protest, the American Family Association, One Million Moms, ect. (people who don’t play video games in any real numbers by the way), but Bioware was warmly received by the video game community. When the game launched, they had over 1 million subscribers within the first 3 days. The game ultimately took a tumble in the numbers, but that can in no way be attributed to the same sex marriage “controversy”.

Next let’s look at Trion’s game RIFT. In one of the game’s post launch patches, they implemented a marriage system without gender restrictions. There was no controversy, there was no fall out, but they did set the record for most marriages in a video game in a single day when the patch went live.

Historically, video game developers who have taken the bold step of supporting equality have been rewarded for their bravery by the good will of their player bases. There will always be detractors, but support for the issue among gamers has been rock solid, and support grows with every new poll. As someone who first realized he was gay thanks to your video games (Kuja you naughty thing), I humbly ask that you consider my arguments in deciding on the fate of marriage equality in Eorzea.

The suspension will last a minimum of 240 hours starting 08-10-2013 23:50 (PDT) during which time you will be unable to log in to the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Tester Forum.

For information on prohibited activities in the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Tester Forum, please refer to the Square Enix Account Terms of Use, FINAL FANTASY XIV User Agreement, and the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Tester Forum Guidelines.

NOTE:

Please be aware that during the suspension, we will review the case and determine if you are eligible to use the forums in the future. Depending on the situation, we may decide to take further action by terminating your access to the FINAL FANTASY XI Forum and/or FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Tester Forum.

In addition, actions taken against an account are accumulative. If you persist in violating the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Test User Agreement, we may terminate your access to the FINAL FANTASY XI Forum and/or FINAL FANTASY XIV Forum. We therefore ask that you do not repeat this behavior, and that you review the FINAL FANTASY XIV Forum Guidelines.
http://support.na.square-enix.com/rule.p…=betaforum

If you suspect the violation resulted from unauthorized access to the account or the actions of an unauthorized third party who is not your parent or legal guardian, or if there are other points you wish to clarify, please review the following information on the SQUARE ENIX Support Center.
http://support.na.square-enix.com/faqart…&kid=57402

This message has been sent to you for notification purposes only, and we are unable to address further inquires via replies to this email. Should you have any additional questions or concerns, we ask that you visit the SQUARE ENIX Support Center athttp://support.na.square-enix.com/

-SQUARE ENIX Account Administrator

So arguing for gay marriage promotes negativity, discrimination, and spam?  I am not impressed.  Some of us on the role-players forum have been discussing staging in character protests, but will we be banned too?

Some players have started a Change.org petition.  What do you think would be the best way to get same-gender marriage implemented in FFXIV?  Or should we just dismiss the game and move on to more pressing social causes?  Discuss in the comments!

by Michael Hobbes

I make a mean marinara sauce. I sauté onions, garlic and bacon (yes, bacon) for 10 minutes until they sweeten and become crisp, then add a big glass of red wine, a can of chopped tomatoes and generous pinches of salt, basil, oregano and rosemary. Then I leave the room. When I come back two hours later, the sauce is thick, sweet and almost purple. I throw in a handful of fresh basil leaves—done.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my marinara this week because I’ve been reading Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Tricked Us. Company after company, product after product, Moss shows how Big Food formulates products for maximum addictiveness and overeatability. Oreos, Cheetos, Lunchables, Wonder Bread, they’re all the same Iowa corn and Brazilian sugarcane, just liquefied, dyed and processed into different shapes and colors.

The same week I read Moss’s book cataloguing how Big Food is trying to kill us, I read David H. Freedman’s Atlantic cover story about how it’s also going to save us all. According to Freedman, big food companies—the same ones Moss accuses of nutritional euthanasia—are actually de-fatting, de-sugaring and de-salting their products one by one. McDonald’s is using whole-wheat buns, Cargill is selling a fullness-inducing tapioca starch, Stevia is fucking everywhere.

It’s a great article, and Freedman’s butchering of sacred foodie cows (Michael Pollan! Farmer’s markets! Granola!) is both essential and effective. But when it comes to his core argument, that America’s obesity problem is going to be solved by better processed food and bigger corporations, I’m not convinced. That’s not because I think it’s impossible to make a healthier Oreo or Pepsi or Lunchable—it wouldn’t actually be all that hard. Nope, corporations won’t make us healthier because capitalism makes it impossible for them to do so. Bear with me, I’ll explain.

 

1. Scale, Speed And Shelf Life

Let’s say I want to start selling my marinara, and I want to turn it into an industrial food megabrand—another Ragu, Hot Pockets, Lean Cuisine. The first thing I have to do is make it in huge batches and make each of those batches taste the same. No more willy-nilly tossing of spices, no more adding whatever veggies are in the fridge. I need to standardize every single element, from the weight of the onions to the heat under the pot.

To keep costs down, maybe I cut the simmering time in half, use salt instead of hours to make the flavors come out. Moss notes that herbs are up to 10 times more expensive than salt in industrial cooking, so that’s the first no-brainer modification.

The next problem is shelf life. Those Lunchables might look all crisp and fresh when you grab them out of the refrigerated aisle, but they sat around at room temperature for at least two months before they got there. Warehouses, wholesalers, truck beds, stockrooms, my marinara is going to need a lot of help not to go bad in all that time. That means preservatives (most of which, according to Moss, are derivatives and modifications of salt), chemicals, coloring agents to save my marinara’s magenta as it trundles across the country.

So now my sauce has been made in huge batches, jarred, shipped and shelved. It’s in the supermarket aisle. I win!

But wait. Thanks to all the preservatives and additives, my marinara tastes like an old sock. I go back to my simmering pot, add a glob of vegetable oil, a dash—OK, a deluge—of high fructose corn syrup, some thickeners and emulsifiers so it has that pasta saucey texture, and it’s ready for the store again.

Before I grew up and started cooking, I thought the pasta sauce I bought at the store was the same as the one I could make on the stove. I was just paying a bit extra so a factory worker somewhere did the chopping, seasoning and simmering for me. This is how our economy is supposed to work, right? I don’t knit my own clothes, I don’t build my own house, I don’t weld my bike together from parts. Why should food be any different?

There’s a scene in Moss’s book where he goes to a Cargill facility and they make him a slice of industrial-scale bread without any salt. The texture, the taste, the color, everything is wrong, Moss says. It tastes like a piece of tin foil.

This scene confused me. When I make bread at home, I use about half a teaspoon of salt for an entire loaf. If you cut the salt out of my homemade bread, yeah, it’s bland and a bit puffier (Alton Brown teaches us that salt counteracts the effectiveness of yeast), but it’s still bread, not some horrifying replicant.

But my bread, the one I spend the better part of a day kneading and proofing, is stale before I can eat about half of it. Wonder Bread, with 27 ingredients, half a teaspoon of sugar and 7 percent of your daily allowance of salt in every slice, lasts on the shelf for two weeks.

Processed food isn’t bad for you because the products—pasta sauce, macaroni and cheese, white bread—are inherently sweet and salty. They are bad for you because they are inherently industrial. Supermarket supply chains are long, slow and and unforgiving. Which means everything you buy at one has to be made in massive batches, perfectly standardized and capable of sitting at room temperature in a glass jar or plastic bag for months on end. If you took that kind of abuse, you’d need chemical assistance too.

 

2. Competition

My marinara sauce is now mass-produced, shelf-stable and OK-tasting. Sure, it’s got some extra salt and sugar, but it’s still one of the healthier brands on the shelves.

The only problem is, no one is buying it. Every other brand of pasta sauce at the supermarket has way more sugar and fat than my sauce, and they taste way better. To get people to switch to my sauce, I’m going to have to add even more sweeteners (sugar) and flavor enhancers (salt).

One of the most tragic sequences in Moss’s book is the story of Kraft in the early 2000s. The company, reeling with power from its huge market share in cereal (Raisin Bran), cookies (Oreos) and packaged pastas (the eponymous mac and cheese), started taking health and nutrition much more seriously. It added extra labels (alongside the miniscule USDA-mandated serving sizes, it listed nutrition facts for the whole package) and stealthily reduced the salt, sugar and fat in its most popular products. It even cut the calories in Oreos and started selling them in 100-calorie packs.

And then Hershey’s invaded. Starting in 2003, the chocolate company launched a line of S’mores cookies that were fatter and sweeter than Kraft’s newly trimmed-down Oreos. Kraft started to lose market share. It had no choice but to retaliate. And that’s how we got Banana Split Cream Oreos, Dairy Queen Blizzard Creme Oreos and Triple Double Oreos. They tasted better than normal Oreos, they had more sugar and fat and, not coincidentally, they sold better. Does Hershey’s even make cookies anymore?

The story of Kraft is one of the reasons I find Freedman’s “How Junk Food Can End Obesity” article so unconvincing. All of the major food companies—from Pepsi and General Mills right down the line to Monsanto—are publicly traded. They’re big, they’re multinational, they’re corporations. This means the only thing that matters to them is profits.

This isn’t a normative description or a moral judgment, it’s just a factual description of their corporate form. In a dilemma between earning more profit and protecting public health, profit will win.  In a dilemma between earning more profit and anything, profit will win. Again, not a judgment, just a description.

Freedman profiles the Carl’s Jr. Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich, a not-fried, not-sugared, not-terrible-for-you sandwich sharing menu space with fries and sodas. With the right marketing, the right “Would you like to try” push from employees, America might just start eating it. And, Freedman argues, just might get a little slimmer, a little healthier.

That’s a nice scenario, and it might even happen, and yay if it does. But Freedman doesn’t walk us through the scenario where Wendy’s or Burger King launches a similar fish burger, one that’s fried, that’s salted and sugared, that has triple the tartar sauce. That because of all these differences (and this is the killing stroke) tastes better. What can Carl’s Jr. do except retaliate in kind?

Two years ago, the New Yorker ran a feature detailing how Pepsi (and its subsidiary, Frito-Lay) were launching a “we’re healthy now” makeover. Less sugar and salt, more vitamins and whole grains. They even hired a guy from the World Health Organization to implement his own science-backed health standards right through the soda-and-potato-chips family.

And then, like Kraft before it, Pepsi buckled. The minute U.S. sales fell to third place (after Coke and—the horror—Diet Coke), Pepsi launched an all-hands-on-deck marketing campaign to go back to selling its old sugar-water staple.

Two years after the healthy makeover, Pepsi’s CEO told shareholders, “We refocused our efforts on our key global brands and categories in our most important developed markets to drive profitable growth,” annual report-ese for, “we marketed the shit out of our unhealthiest products.” Pepsi traded the guy from the WHO for Beyonce. The stock soared.

And that’s how it goes. Processed food companies are like drug addicts, promising “next time it’ll be different, watch!’ when they’re euphoric on market share and rising stock prices. As soon as they crash back down, they’re right back to their old habits. Cheap sugar, loud marketing, bogus health claims.

This is why Moss’s book and, in a different way, Freedman’s article are so depressing. Companies aren’t evil, they’re not greedy, they’re not pernicious. They’re just companies. As Moss points out, they’re as addicted to shitty food as we are.

Freedman’s right that just because a food is “processed” doesn’t necessarily mean its bad for you. And just because something is organic or local or homemade or “natural” doesn’t mean its good for you. But I can’t help but notice that a Starbucks muffin has 500 calories and that the one I make at home has 140. Ragu, the number one pasta sauce in America, has almost nine teaspoons of sugar, more than a day’s recommended amount of salt and as much fat as a milkshake in each jar.

Freedman would probably point out that my marinara sauce is not particularly healthy (wine and bacon, after all, are just foodie forms of salt, sugar and fat) and, serving for serving, must be more expensive than $2-per-jar Ragu. He might argue that in a few years, Ragu or General Foods or Kraft will offer a pasta sauce that’s nutritionally identical to mine, and that I’d be an asshole and a snob not to buy it. And he might be right.

But for now, neither of us can escape the reality that food, like everything else we buy, is designed to be cheap to make, to last forever and to taste better than the next product down the shelf. And also like everything else, after you buy it, you’re on your own.

 

Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. He blogs at rottenindenmark.wordpress.com. Photo: Bill Holsinger-Robinson

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Math and science majors are popular until students realize what they’re getting themselves into, according to new research.

In 1991, Texas faced a whopping $4.6 billion budget deficit. The legislature asked state Comptroller John Sharp to review the budget to find some face-saving cuts before they raised taxes. Sharp assembled a crack team and not only found a few savings here and there: He found enough to close the entire deficit. And then he kept going.

Over the course of the next decade, Sharp's Texas Performance Review (TPR) saved the state $10 billion and won awards for government innovation from admirers as diverse as Harvard and the Heritage Foundation. Sharp and his colleagues were called to Washington to help advise President Clinton and Vice President Gore on a National Performance Review -- whose most famous image was the $400 hammers at the Pentagon -- which resulted in $106 billion in savings the first year and helped to reduce the federal payroll to its lowest level since the Eisenhower Administration.

TPR staff also advised California's Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on a similar state review. My firm eventually absorbed some former TPR staff and adopted its methodology. We have since conducted similar reviews of individual agencies, local governments, or entire state bureaucracies in about a dozen states. Such reviews routinely identify annually recurring savings totaling roughly 5 percent of total operating spending. (By "annually recurring," I mean that cheap gimmicks and one-time savings like selling the state capitol don't count.)

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Let me give a few favorite examples: By unscrewing the tiny light bulb behind the big plastic display that covers almost the entire front of most soda machines -- which serves no purpose but to make the can of Coke look more delicious -- Texas saved about $200,000 a year in energy costs. (There are a lot of soda machines on state property!) Colorado used three different entities to deliver mail on the state office campus, including two government agencies and a private firm (proving that privatization alone isn't always the answer). You could literally stand outside the capitol and photograph three mail trucks following each other around from building to building. And West Virginia had never properly calibrated the salt-spreaders on its snowplows, so that whenever it snowed it was dumping far more salt on the highways than needed. Simply adjusting these devices saved the state about $3 million a year. None of these make a significant dent in structural deficits -- but put together 100 small changes like that and, as the saying goes, pretty soon you're talking real money. It's hard for anyone to be against that (well, except salt companies).

Of course, while such items make for good stories, and can certainly add up, that's not where most savings arise. The biggest item in any review we've conducted is, not surprisingly, fraud -- particularly in health-care programs. The biggest savings are generally achievable in health and human-service programs, in part because, as Willie Sutton said of banks, "that's where the money is." But it's not just entitlement programs beloved of liberals that are inefficient and costly -- prisons and other correctional institutions tend to be money sieves. Worst of all is where these fields intersect: To paraphrase President Kennedy, correctional health services tend to have all the efficiencies of our health system and all the charm of our corrections systems.

So there are many places to look to reduce costs without threatening public services. One cardinal rule: Look for how to do better rather than simply how to cut. Cuts are easy to find -- but they don't necessarily save money. Every state in the country could cut its budget by one-quarter or more overnight by eliminating Medicaid -- but taxpayer subsidies to hospitals for uncompensated care would skyrocket. Reducing governmental costs doesn't necessarily involve doing less; usually, it involves doing better.

The biggest impediment to "doing better" is that those in government -- as well as advocates and critics -- tend to think in terms of programs and functions that can, or might have to be, cut. To most, that's what government consists of. But this view of government -- and of how to trim government budgets -- is reminiscent of an old New Yorker cartoon, in which a father tells his family, gathered around the kitchen table, "Because of the recession, we're going to have to let one of you go." No family, of course, would really approach a tight budget that way, but that's pretty much how most discussions of government cuts proceed -- cutting budget "line items" wholesale.

Many programs should be terminated on the merits -- but that's not where to find waste or inefficiency, which don't have budget line items. Neither do most of the places where you'll find it in government. There is no line item in state budgets for electricity for Coke machines (or, in most cases, for the electric bill, period), or intra-office mail delivery, or purchase of road salt. It's an old adage: What gets measured gets done. And most budgets don't identify, track, and measure wasteful practices. That's why the waste occurs.

What should be cut is what's not in the budget. Another rule of thumb is that most of these savings will not be found in particular agencies or administrative units. While some large standard departments like health, human services, corrections, and transportation are reliable producers of inefficiencies, the real savings come in government-wide functions that affect all departments and, as a result, tend to be budgeted by none. Personnel and procurement functions are always good places to look for improvements to save money (remember Rule No.1: improve performance, savings will follow); utility costs like energy and phones also tend to be neither well-monitored nor cheap. These are not what most people think of when they think of government waste and inefficiencies -- but they are where most of the money disappears, just like in most organizations and probably your own household budget.

How do you ferret out all these hidden expense items? The first place to go is the very people the public likes to imagine as lazy, stupid sinkholes for tax dollars.

How do you ferret out all these hidden expense items? I'd like to say that it requires a team of well-versed experts like me, but, really, the first place to go is to public employees themselves -- the very people the public likes to imagine as lazy, stupid sinkholes for tax dollars. In fact, most public employees are conscientious and can tell you exactly how to make government work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately, in the current climate of disdain, they're rarely asked.

When we did ask, we learned about the salt spreaders. (I don't know anything about road salt otherwise.) We learned from state employees in West Virginia and city employees in Chicago the variety of pipes and lighting fixtures ordered and stored, and how greater standardization could lead to shorter lead times, lower storage costs, and more efficient replacement operations. One state employee in Colorado's transportation department had a great idea for using leftover asphalt from road-paving to stop weeds growing under highway dividers -- making use of something that was otherwise wasted to reduce weed-whacking costs.

Of course, probably not unlike your workplace, not everyone's in it to win it. All efforts at meaningful efficiency improvement require a top-down commitment. Some governors, like Chet Culver in Iowa, took the time to sit down with us and go through every single recommendation for savings and discuss how to make it work on implementation. Unfortunately, such a commitment from the CEO is needed. My favorite example was the department secretary who insisted to me that her agency couldn't possibly hit the savings targets we set, then bragged to me a year later about how she exceeded them. The kicker: When I complimented her and said that that ought to make it easy to hit the following year's targets, she protested, "Oh, no, we can't possibly do that!"

Former West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, now a U.S. senator, found a clever way to deal with that: He gave all agencies and their staffs a fair chance to shoot at the savings ideas and dollar targets, but then they had to sign "contracts" committing to the agreed savings. If they weren't met, the savings were cut from other parts of their budget. Actual savings a year later exceeded projections.

That's another basic rule: Don't listen to naysayers. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described three stages of response to a new idea:

1. Ridicule.
2. Outrage.
3. The declaration that it's obvious.

Recalcitrant bureaucrats have coined a variation on stage 3: "We've done it already." That usually follows with head-spinning speed after rejection of their preceding, months-long insistence that "it can't be done."

But it can be done, which is why it must be done. Again and again: Texas carried on the TPR for about 20 years -- and found new ways to save money every time. Some might say that shows just how inefficient "government" is, but that misses the real point: Every human organization -- including governments and businesses -- has inefficiencies. Those that aren't constantly finding, and correcting them, aren't, well, worth their salt.

This is a guest post by Molly Schoemann. Molly is a humorist from NYC who currently lives in North Carolina. She has written for Bitch magazine, Jezebel, and The Rumpus. You can find more of her work at www.MollySchoemann.com or follow her @iHeardTell.

Now that I have begun to take notice of this trend, it makes me tile-scrubbingly angry. Why is it that in television commercials for cleaning products, women are still doing all the work? We’re still the only ones trailing our fingers ruefully over dusty tabletops, fretting over grass stains on soccer uniforms, and grimacing through smudged windows. Just once, I’d like to turn on the TV and see a man drying his hands complacently on a dishtowel after washing a sink full of dishes. Am I dreaming too big here?

I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly confident that the sight of a male running a wet-jet across a kitchen floor on television will not leave me clutching my couch’s armrest with staggering vertigo. After all, it’s a scene I occasionally come across in my own kitchen. Not to mention, it is a sight I find very pleasing to the eye. Growing up, my father was the one who taught me how to scrub a stovetop and which cleanser to use in the bathtub—and he came of age in the 1940s. Perhaps television hadn’t yet taught him his proper place in the household—as a domestically befuddled male who is hard-pressed to identify the business end of a broom?

Men, I know you know how to vacuum! I have watched you! I have seen you sweep and mop! Perhaps not in that order, but your hearts were in the right place! I know that you are capable of doing a certain amount of housework! But it’s still not happening on television. By now we are probably all familiar with commercials in which a hapless husband or child knocks over a glass of juice and then stands there, stricken, as though they’ve just pulled the pin on a live grenade. They are utterly at a loss! Nothing in their lives has prepared them for this moment! Fortunately, Wife/Mom always comes to the rescue just in the nick of time with some new super-absorbent paper-towel or antibacterial wipe. Thank God she was there and knew what to do!

You’ll also notice that women in these commercials are never grumpy or irritable at the interruption when the call to action comes (and they’re never away at work, either). Apparently there’s no reason Mom would have anything else going on that she couldn’t drop at an instant’s notice to take care of more pressing matters. Keeping the house clean, after all, is clearly one of her most important jobs.

What is particularly strange is that these commercials tend to be for products that are intended to make cleaning easy, which makes their message contradictory as well as patronizing. “Cleaning up is an easy job, thanks to our product,” is the implication, “but Mom here sure is an expert at it anyway!” And Mom should certainly be proud of her easy, easy accomplishments, right? First advertisers undermine the difficulty of a task, and then they give women a big phony pat on the back and ask them to take pride in accomplishing it. It’s a twisted, counterfeit empowerment that gets to me every time.

In this modern age, I know of many men who either live alone or with other men, and yet somehow they manage to keep their places reasonably neat without female intervention. Our household demographics have changed a lot over the last several decades, but not according to advertisers. It makes me wonder who the good people at Proctor and Gamble think are purchasing the cleaning products in gay households with nary a long-suffering wife or mother in sight. And in homes headed by lesbian couples, do they imagine that the women fight over the chance to scrub the toilet and to remove stains from each other’s clothes?

These strangely old-fashioned commercials are part of the last stubborn, vestigial reminders of the days when a woman’s main job was to find a man and get married so she could spend her time cooking, watching the kids, doing everyone’s laundry and cleaning the entire house by herself. Unfortunately, at this point many women still do all of those things AND hold down a job—but we will come back to that another day. In any event, living situations have obviously changed. Now many people live by themselves, or with others whose sinks they are not responsible for keeping shiny.

It’s a good time for commercials to lurch into modern times and reflect these current situations. A little boy may as well learn from television that it is within the realm of possibility for him to know how to clean his own bathroom someday. His sister should be made aware that the heavy burden of wiping up every household spill need not rest solely on her shoulders.

I hope I live to see the following commercial: A man stands at the kitchen sink and cuts through greasy buildup on a pile of pots and pans with only one squirt of dishwasher liquid. He does not act as though doing the dishes is a confusing and foreign experience for him, one which he is sure to incompetently screw up, with hilarious results. He does not appear to feel demeaned by the task, nor is it implied that he is doing it grudgingly, in exchange for a reward of sexual favors. Rather, he gets an enormous satisfaction out of the dish-washing experience itself, as most women in commercials do. As he hangs up the dish towel, he smiles like he’s just been awarded the key to the city, and maybe even fist-bumps a floating apparition of Mr. Clean.

TV, it is way past time for an image like this. Make it happen.

“Mommy, what’s this?”

In her hand Sally held a condom, still in its wrapper. Sean had cleaned out his desk earlier in the day, and it had somehow ended up on the floor, a leftover from last summer between when Bobby was born and when I had my IUD put in. I could have just brushed the question off with a non-answer—Sally’s only in preschool, by the way—but I decided against that. Instead, I pulled out my copy of Our Bodies Ourselves and showed Sally diagrams of the female reproductive system. Some of this was stuff I’d told her before, but some of it was new.

I told Sally that women’s ovaries release eggs, and men’s testicles make sperm. I showed her anatomy illustrations of both. I told her that when an egg and a sperm come together, they make a seed called a zygote. I showed her pictures, pulling them up on the internet. I told her that this seed then implants in a woman’s uterus and grows into a baby. I showed her pictures of fetal development, moving from one stage to the next.

I told Sally how the sperm gets to the egg. I told her that an egg is released each month from the ovaries and showed her the path it follows. I told her that when a man and a woman have sex—which is something grownups do—the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina, and that sperm come out through his penis and go into her vagina, and up into her uterus. I traced the sperm’s path, and showed her where the sperm and the egg find each other to become a zygote.

I told Sally that sometimes people want to have sex just because it feels good, and they don’t want to grow a baby. I told her that in this case, they have to find a way to keep the sperm and the egg from finding each other. I told her that condoms were one way to do that. I told her that the condom goes over a man’s penis, and that way when the sperm come out of the penis it blocks them so they can’t get inside the woman, and can’t find the egg. I told her that Sean and I didn’t need to use condoms anymore, because I had an IUD. I found a picture of an IUD, and a picture of an illustration of an IUD in a woman’s uterus.

I told Sally that sometimes attempts to keep the sperm from getting to an egg don’t work, and they get together anyway, and form a zygote, a seed that will implant in the uterus and start growing into a baby. I told her that if this happens but a woman doesn’t want a baby, she can have an abortion, and I found an illustration in Our Bodies, Ourselves to show her. I told her that an abortion is where a doctor removes the seed so it won’t keep growing into a baby.

And then finally, after all of this, I paused. Sally had listened raptly, searching the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves for more pictures—but she had said little. And now, finally, she spoke.

“Mommy, there’s just one problem.” She looked concerned.

A problem? What was this problem that had her so worried? Was she going to tell me that this whole thing was disgusting? Was she going to ask why someone would ever not want a baby? Was she going to tell me that the entire concept of abortion was horrifying? (Someone once told me that every young child would be repulsed on learning what abortion was, since they would make the connections between themselves and aborted pregnancies.) Wondering what it was Sally found so concerning about this whole discussion, I turned to look right in her eyes and give her my full attention.

“The sperms could get over the top of your IUD!” she announced, her voice full of concern. “And they want to get to the egg, and they could do it!” 

And this is when I realized that while I’d explained barrier methods of contraception, I hadn’t explained hormonal methods. And so I did—I told Sally that my IUD has hormones that make it so that a woman’s body doesn’t release any eggs, so that when the sperm come in there are no eggs for them to find. I told her that other methods of contraception have hormones too, such as pills and shots and implants. And that seemed to satisfy her concern. And once we finished, her curiosity over the condom she’d found sated with honest answers, she brought me a storybook to read and we closed the door on the subject—at least for now.

Sally learned a lot that day, and so did I. I learned that even preschoolers aren’t too young to understand contraception. 

This post originally appeared in 2010.

Most of us familiar with Down‘s Syndrome know that it brings characteristic facial features and delayed or impaired cognitive development. People with Down, however, are also more vulnerable than the general population to diabetes, leukemia, and infectious and autoimmune disease, and about 40% are born with heart defects.

For most of history, then, the life expectancy of people with Down was very low.  But, with advances in knowledge and access to health care, life expectancy has risen dramatically… especially for white people:

The Centers for Disease Control explain that severity of Down does not vary by race, so most likely the cause of the gap in life expectancy is differences in the quantity and quality of health care.

Possibilities include differences in factors that may be associated with improved health in the general population such as socioeconomic status, education, community support, medical or surgical treatment of serious complications, or access to, use of, or quality of preventative health care.

This is just one striking example of the wide racial gap in health outcomes and access to care.  We see data with similar patterns most everywhere we look.  As examples, pre-term births, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and likelihood of living near a toxic release facility.

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, via Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner say lots of kids come into college thinking they want to major in science, but then quit because it's too hard:

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major, relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes, and, provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do. The data collection and analysis are based directly on a conceptual model in which a student’s final major is best viewed as the end result of a learning process. We find that students enter school quite optimistic/interested about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students end up graduating with a science degree. The substantial overoptimism about completing a degree in science can be attributed largely to students beginning school with misperceptions about their ability to perform well academically in science.

This is important to keep in mind when you hear people talk about the desirability of increasing the number of students with STEM degrees. To make it happen, you probably either need better-prepared 18-year-olds or else you have to make the courses easier. But it's not that kids ignorantly major in English totally unaware that a degree in chemistry would be more valuable.

Much of the commentary on Washington lately has been about the contrast between the functional Senate and the hopeless House.

There is good reason for this, of course. The Senate is on its way to passing a sweeping immigration bill with a generous supermajority supporting it. The "Gang of Eight" has performed in an exemplary fashion, despite the understandably strong views and different motives of its members; whenever an impasse occurred, other problem-solving senators stepped up to find a solution. Senators of both parties -- all the Democrats, and a number of the Republicans -- have decided not to make the perfect, if there is such a thing, the enemy of the good.

Meantime, the House has careened from one disastrous embarrassment to another, including a rare trifecta of dysfunction in the space of barely more than a week: the excruciating meltdown of comity and the regular order on the Homeland Security appropriations bill; the illegal and extreme antiabortion bill that passed the House, punctuated by cringe-worthy statements from the likes of Republican Reps. Trent Franks and Michael Burgess; and the farm-bill disaster.

When I wrote about the 112th Congress in Foreign Policy, the editors entitled the piece "Worst. Congress. Ever." I got a lot of feedback from people saying things like, "C'mon, the worst ever? What about the period right before the Civil War?" I responded, "You are right. Isn't it comforting to be compared to the period right before the Civil War?" If things keep going this way in the House, the 113th Congress will make the 112th look productive by comparison.

If it avoids that ignominy, it will be because of the functionality we see in the Senate. But let's be realistic about that; things looked really promising after the 2012 elections. The Senate acted in a broadly bipartisan way at the 11th hour to avoid a fiscal-cliff disaster; provided huge supermajorities for aid for Hurricane Sandy and the Violence Against Women Act; and showed signs, after the ballyhooed dinners President Obama had with groups of senators, of finding common ground on a broader fiscal package.

But then came the failure to garner 60 votes on a commendable and restrained bill to tighten background checks on gun purchases, with cosponsor Pat Toomey, R-Pa., acknowledging that several of his GOP colleagues couldn't bring themselves to back something supported by the president, showing tribalism is still alive and kicking in the Senate. The continuing misuse of holds, filibusters, and filibuster threats across an array of executive and judicial nominations show that mass obstruction remained the modus operandi of the Senate minority. And after Obama took the first, second, and third steps to move the Senate toward that bipartisan fiscal bargain, putting Social Security and Medicare changes on the table that are deeply unpopular with the Democratic base, the response from his Republican interlocutors has been all take and no give, doing nothing except demanding more give on the president's part.

In other words, outside of immigration -- and despite an election Obama won handily, with Republicans suffering unexpected Senate setbacks -- it has been more tribal than cooperative. It is pretty obvious why immigration has been different. Lindsey Graham said bluntly what many other party-minded Senate Republicans feel: that the failure to pass immigration reform will send the GOP into a demographic death spiral. But it is also true that some Senate Republicans are focusing on solving problems. If they can't convince more of their colleagues to mend their ways, or at least calibrate better, the Senate may melt down in July over the filibuster rule, damaging deeply its post-immigration role.

As for the House, the farm-bill vote was particularly sobering. Despite commendable bipartisanship in the Agriculture Committee, the driving need to pass a farm bill, and the passionate pleas of Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, seven current and former committee chairs spurned him, as did two Appropriations subcommittee chairs with their own bills to manage, and voted against the bill, Politico reported. They joined 53 other Republicans who gave the finger to their collective leadership.

The fundamental reason the bill failed was that Majority Leader Eric Cantor actively and successfully pushed a punitive and destructive amendment adding a work requirement for food-stamp recipients that fractured the fragile bipartisan coalition of support for the bill. Most astonishing, perhaps, was that even after adding a bevy of such amendments, Cantor still could not garner enough conservative support for the bill.

That tells us that leaders in the House majority have little capacity to lead, to persuade or bludgeon their members to do what they would otherwise be reluctant to do. Jonathan Bernstein at Salon has said that blaming Speaker John Boehner for that reality is misplaced; Boehner's strategy of leading from behind is the most effective one he could employ. He is right, and the fact is that Boehner's passive-aggressive approach did work to get the House to deal with the fiscal cliff, Hurricane Sandy, and the Violence Against Woman Act.

But the votes on the farm bill show that the House majority's problems go beyond the fringe players who now make up a major bloc in the caucus. When committee chairs stick it to their own leaders and peers, it suggests emerging semi-anarchy. That will pose a challenge soon on immigration. But it may pose a more significant -- and potentially disastrous -- challenge when we hit the wall in the fall on appropriations bills and then on the debt ceiling.

Today's edition of Two Fucking Assholes is dedicated to Jessica Luther.

So Tuesday night’s big reveal of Xbox One – Microsoft’s new incarnation of their console – appears to have been a disaster of spectacular proportions. This is interesting in itself, though not totally unexpected; people often react to new things in less than positive ways. But what’s especially interesting are the things that Microsoft got wrong and the specific elements that people are finding so problematic. On Microsoft’s part, they first amount to a baffling inability to understand the actual living situations of its own market, but they also amount to the continuation of a trend that I’ve written about several times before, namely: the worrying inclination of companies and their designers to remove agency from tech owners.

In other words, owners increasingly = users.

The first – and again, baffling – problem about the reveal was that the new Xbox appears to have been designed for the world of ten or fifteen years ago, a pre-tablet and smartphone world where people have an entirely different relationship with their TVs. The TV is the center of what Xbox One is and does; the reveal seemed to focus just as much on new ways to watch TV shows as it did actual games that one might use it to play. In other words, Microsoft appears to be attempting to sell a game console by marketing it as something other than a game console – which is puzzling. Even more puzzling is who Microsoft appears to think their market is: People with large TVs and large living rooms (that can handle a Kinect, which is now a required component of the console; more on that in a minute) and lives that might conceivably revolve around a TV in the first place rather than a smartphone or an iPad. In a post for Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander takes particular issue with this:

[B]y the end of the console event, I sat disoriented, feeling like I’d seen one of the Big Three take a hard left into a past decade, a fictional privileged nation where everyone owns a giant television they want to talk to, where they entertain themselves with high-end fictional simulations of football season and futuristic, nebulous wars abroad. Where we supposedly want whole-body play. Where the fantasy is that all our living rooms are big enough for that.

This is a catastrophic misconception of how the lives of my generation – Millennials – tend to look and how we tend to use our technology. Maybe our parents had big living rooms and big TVs that were the centerpiece of the house; we carry around small, nimble, intensely portable devices through which we consume a growing percentage of our entertainment media. In essence, Microsoft – a tech company, by no means always bad at what they do – made it look as though they have literally no idea what the digital side of our lives looks like. Alexander again:

My parents and their Boomer friends have those theoretical American homes, the kind with the spacious sofa and the dominant television altar, where they mainly watch on-demand recordings of cable shows…I’ve got friends who love immersive worlds and epic battles, sure. They have thousands of dollars in student debt and tiny, impermanent living spaces; their generation isn’t exactly about to broadly become the next generation of home owners. We play games on consoles and we watch shows on television and we Skype and Tweet from laptops, netbooks, iPads, PCs.

I live in a basement. I’ve lived in a basement for the last four years, because I’m in graduate school and it’s what tends to be most conveniently available in my area. A Kinect is not on the table for me, even if I wanted it (I don’t). The living situation of most of my friends looks similar.

And hey, about that Kinect – apparently it’s always listening to you. Even when it’s “off”. Which isn’t necessarily as creepy as it sounds, but.

The second major – and, I’d argue, most important – thing about which gamers are up in arms is the degree to which a number of features seem to limit the control an Xbox One owner has over their own machine. First and foremost, the device will apparently require regular internet connectivity – not constant, but regular – in order to work. As usual, no one speaking in any official capacity is calling this DRM, because no one likes to officially label anything DRM, but it feels uncomfortably close to the kind of always-on feature that made SimCity such a disaster. A number of people have pointed out the practical issues with this: what about people who live in areas where broadband internet is sparse or nonexistent? What about people like members of the military stationed overseas, for whom gaming is often a valuable form of recreation?

But aside from even the practical issues, this is yet another instance of someone buying something but not really owning it – not being free to set the terms under which it’s used. It doesn’t matter to Microsoft if you want to play Call of Duty (primary selling point: now there’s a dog!) offline in single-player campaign mode. If you have no internet for any significant length of time – say, a day or more (as yet the actual timeframe is unclear) – that’s not happening. No dog for you.

Added to this, it doesn’t appear that the console will allow players to easily make use of used games, given that it won’t run games off of a disc (Microsoft is apparently working on a digital trading service). And then there’s the mandatory Kinect thing. All of these problems amount to a console that you pay for but don’t really control. Which isn’t new – I own a PS3 and I can either “choose” to install firmware updates or to be unable to play any new games – but it’s another step down the road.

But I’m actually pretty happy. Why? Because people are making a stink about this. People still care. Losing control over something they pay for is not an attractive prospect to them. As long as at least some people regard this state of affairs as unacceptable, I think there’s hope.

Don’t talk about it too loudly, though. The Kinect is listening.

Sarah flails their arms for the camera on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry

From: Mary Ann B., the New Mommy
To: Entire Contact List
Subject: Our New Gift Has Arrived!

Dear Friends and Family,

Thank you so much for all the well-wishes! After nine months of heartburn and sleepless nights, Dale and I are SO excited to announce … the arrival of my push present!!! (Which accompanied the birth of our baby girl, Sidney.) It’s an emerald pendant necklace and it’s absolutely perfect!!

Hats off to Joanne, who guessed a necklace by the shape of the box I found in Dale’s sock drawer. I could have sworn I was going to get a pair of diamond baguettes because baguettes usually come in a box that’s round just on top, but I was wrong. Stranger things have happened!

The necklace is 18 inches long, less than a pound, and is bright green, just like its mama’s eyes. Mom, push present, and Dad’s bank account are all doing well.

I know it sounds so cliché, but I will never forget the moment Dale gave me my push present. It was right after I delivered Sidney. I had her on my chest, because the nurses put her there, and all of a sudden, I looked up, and there’s Dale, holding a small, wrapped present. 

I remember thinking, “this is a special moment,” because normally I wrap my own presents that I pick out at Tory Burch myself. And now here’s Dale with a present that’s practically got hospital corners it is wrapped so well! (I later found out that it was the fine people at Saks who wrapped it. I of course sent a thank you note immediately for the role they played in making my push present so special.)

I opened the beautiful wrapping, careful not to ruin the paper with any ick from the baby still on my chest. Dale was so proud because I unwrapped it all by myself, with no help from the hospital staff. (They didn’t offer anyway – Boo, Beth Israel!)

Under the wrapping paper was a small gray velvet box. It was the softest thing I have ever touched. Ever. I cannot repeat this enough. Nothing in and around me at that moment or ever before has been as soft to the touch as this velvet box. Not even the blanket the doctors wrapped Sidney in.

Right before I opened the velvet box at 5:17 p.m., I thought to myself, “Remember this moment, Mary Ann.” Of course, Dale got the whole thing on video anyway. I said, “Okay you can record it as long as you don’t go below the knees!” (I hate my knees.)

When I opened the velvet box and gazed upon my new emerald pendant for the first time … I think my heart skipped a beat. This was MY push present. Suddenly it was all worth it — getting pregnant, carrying a baby for nine months, slogging through “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

All of a sudden I knew that this was what I was put on this Earth to do: to own this beautiful emerald pendant necklace. When I put the necklace on and felt it curl around my neck, I knew I would never love anything as much as I loved my push present.

Uh oh. I think I hear the baby crying. Which reminds me I need to polish my necklace, so I better get going! You are all welcome to come by to visit whenever. The appraiser is coming by on Thursday. Don’t worry, it’s just a formality. The jeweler already told Dale the necklace was in perfect condition and worth a lot.

Kisses,

Mary Ann, Dale & Li'l Pendant

Kassia Miller is an improviser and sketch writer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York and is a member of the sketch group CARDIGAN. Kassia is also a freelance writer, commercial actor, and country music listener. 

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If you order a nice scotch from a bar, how do you know that the bartender's serving you the real thing and not some garbage dressed up in a nice bottle? Well in theory if you're prepared to pay a premium for your liquor you ought to be able to taste the difference. But New Jersey investigators' "Operation Swill" revealed today that quite a few Jersey establishments are pulling the wool over their customers' eyes. One unnamed bar mixed rubbing alcohol with food dye and sold it as scotch.

Perhaps most striking is that 13 of the 29 cited establishments are outlets of TGI Fridays, so it's fully possible that similar issues exist at other Fridays' in other states.

A teacher in Moore, Oklahoma, finds one of the students in his class that he thought he'd lost in [yesterday's] tornado. Via Curt Autry NBC 12.

All the blubs.

[H/T to Portly Dyke.]

Eesha Khare is an 18-year-old science student who may have fundamentally changed the way we charge mobile devices:

An 18-year-old science student has made an astonishing breakthrough that will enable mobile phones and other batteries to be charged within seconds rather than the hours it takes today’s devices to power back up.

Saratoga, Calif. resident Eesha Khare made the breakthrough by creating a small supercapacitor that can fit inside a cell phone battery and enable ultra-fast electricity transfer and storage, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds instead of several hours.

The nano-tech device Khare created can supposedly withstand up to 100,000 charges, a 100-fold increase over current technology, and it's flexible enough to be used in clothing or displays on any non-flat surface.

It could also one day be used in car batteries and charging stations not unlike those used by the Tesla Model S, which includes "supercharger" technology that promises to charge vehicles in 30 minutes or less.

"I'm in a daze," Khare told CBS San Francisco after being honored among the three finalists at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix over the weekend. "I can't believe this happened."

...Khare was the runner-up to 19-year-old Romanian student Gorden E. Moore, who created a low-cost artificial intelligence that can drive vehicles. She tied with Louisiana 17-year-old Henry Wanjune, who figured out new ways to measure dark matter and energy in space.

Kids these days! Get ON my lawn!

[H/T to Susie, who has at her place video of Khare talking about her invention.]

Prior to the Iraq War, the war in Libya, and any intervention we may or may not undertake in Syria, some hawks insistently argue(d) that there is a humanitarian imperative to step into the breach.

Their arguments can be powerful.

Innocent people are dying at the hands of a tyrant. We have the most powerful military on earth. If we do nothing, the slaughter will continue. And don't most of us agree that some military interventions, like the one that stopped the Holocaust, would've been justified on purely humanitarian grounds, even if stopping the death camps wasn't the rationale for WWII at the time?

There are many non-interventionist counterarguments. One is that even in situations where death is guaranteed absent intervention, it is still possible to unwittingly make a terrible situation worse.

Another is that war is very costly in U.S. lives and treasure.

And isn't it unfair to order people who joined the military to defend their country to risk their lives for a different cause, however noble?

While open to interventions in the most extreme cases, I'm generally a non-interventionist, and although there are several reasons I feel that way, one in particular seems to be missing from the national debate: Almost every time someone calls for a war to be entered on humanitarian grounds, there's a way to save more lives more cheaply and reliably with philanthropic spending.

(They are often, to be sure, different lives.) 

International development is itself a complicated subject. Well-intentioned efforts often fail and sometimes unintended consequences do harm. But compared to a war gone wrong like Vietnam or Iraq, the downside risk is much lower, and success doesn't require any Americans to come home in caskets or any foreigners to be killed. Against Malaria Foundation, one of the most efficient little charities out there, is really good at saving lives with mosquito nets. Or take this passage from the interview that Ezra Klein has just done with Bill Gates about his charity work:

EK: What's been the biggest surprise? What has the data shown works, or doesn't work, that you simply didn't expect?

BG: I was completely surprised that nobody was funding some of these vaccines. When I first looked at this I thought, well, all the good stuff will have been done. It was mind-blowing me to find things like Rotavirus vaccine were going unfunded. One hundred percent of rich kids were getting it and no poor kids were. So over a quarter million kids a year were dying of Rotavirus-caused diarrhea. You could save those lives for $800 per life. That's like $20 or $30 per year of life. It's just ridiculous that an intervention like that isn't funded.

It's easy to think of a hypothetical where a very cheap military intervention could save a lot of lives. Perhaps Rwanda is a genocide that could've been stopped at a price such that no alternative expenditure of the same resources could've saved more lives. Perhaps we should've stopped it.

But a situation like Syria?

A humanitarian call to intervene there by putting weapons in the hand of one faction or American boots on the ground has a hefty price-tag in dollars alone, huge downside risk, and unpredictable consequences. And even if it's true that doing nothing will result in sure death for many, the same is true if we do nothing about disease or sanitation or infrastructure or working conditions in much of the developing world. That isn't an argument for doing nothing. It's an argument for directing whatever we decide is the right amount to spend on humanitarian causes in a way that maximizes the utility of every dollar. When an interventionist wants to put boots on the ground, arguing that it's necessary to save lives, it means asking ourselves, before acceding, "can more lives be saved by spending this money on anything other than a war"? The fact is that, even granting the smartest critiques of international development work, it is usually a better way to help people than war, and it engenders good feelings rather than blowback.

by Logan Sachon

At The Root, a woman named Laquita writes in for advice about changing her name: “I’m a young black woman with what you would call a ‘ghetto’ name. I’d have no problem with my name if it weren’t for the fact that for my entire life, white people have made fun of me … I’ve had hiring managers tell me that they would hire me only on the condition that I ‘shorten’ my name for the customers.”

She’s decided the name has to go, and she wants to know how to tell her parents without offending them. Jenée Desmond-Harris replies that the real question is, is it worth giving into racism for convenience, or should she own her name and work to change stereotypes? (“While ‘all names are inventions,’ we tend to dismiss black-identified names as if they’re bestowed upon children without any thought or care. But if white people embraced ‘Laquita,’ she says, we’d treat it with the same straight-faced deference as ‘Mary.’”)

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