Lindsey

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

So we've already noted how the broadband component of the "bipartisan compromise" infrastructure bill was still helpful, but much weaker than many wanted it to be (pretty much the common theme across the infrastructure package). While there are some useful grant funds for underserved "middle mile" and other networks -- as well as the continuation of a helpful but flawed COVID broadband discount program -- the proposal itself doesn't really do much of anything about the core reason US broadband is so expensive: namely, regional telecom monopolization or the corruption that protects it.

Other aspects of the proposal started off well but were steadily eroded throughout the "negotiations" process. For example, many lawmakers wanted the country to boost its standard definition of "broadband" to symmetrical 100 Mbps to better represent modern realities. But the final package implemented a 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps standard -- and only as it pertains to who can get funding for broadband expansion. The overall definition of broadband remains unchanged.

As Ernesto Falcon at the EFF notes, this weakened standard was courtesy of fixed wireless and cable industry lobbyists, who know that much of their infrastructure can't actually do much better than 10-20 Mbps on the upstream. So we basically lowered the bar to make them happy:

"By defining internet access as the ability to get 100/20 Mbps service, the draft language allows cable monopolies to argue that anyone with access to ancient, insufficient internet access does not need federal money to build new infrastructure. That means communities with nearly decade-old DOCSIS 3.0 broadband are shielded from federal dollars from being used to build fiber. Copper-DSL-only areas, and areas entirely without broadband, will likely take the lion’s share of the $40 billion made available. In addition to rural areas, pockets of urban markets where people are still lacking broadband will qualify. This will lead to an absurd result: people on inferior, too-expensive cable services will be seen as equally served as their neighbors who will get federally funded fiber."

Ernesto has routinely pointed out that fiber broadband is future proof (and feeds most cellular towers in the first place), so if you're going to throw billions of dollars in subsidies at companies, you probably should be encouraging fiber as often as possible. Of course, the government rarely adheres to his advice, frequently throwing countless subsidies at wireless companies for service they don't deliver, or hundreds of millions of dollars at Elon Musk to bring inferior broadband to a couple of traffic medians and airport parking lots.

There were other nonsensical sacrifices made to the broadband component of the infrastructure agreement made under the banner of "bipartisan compromise," including the elimination of any attempts to lend a hand to the popular community broadband efforts taking root across the country out of frustration. Again, not based on any hard data or factual reality, but because telecom lobbyists don't really like anything that could potentially erode regional monopoly revenues.

As noted previously, these kinds of downgrades are uniformly framed in beltway DC coverage as a "bipartisan compromise." In reality, it's really only the people who want decent baseline standards and the barest levels of sector oversight who are having to compromise. And more often than not the press helps politicians frame their decisions to pander directly to sector lobbyists as simply being principled spendthrifts.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A Tennessee man was sentenced today to 45 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release for illegally obtaining classified national defense information and disclosing it to a reporter.

So begins the very dry press release from the Department of Justice. What this is, though, is another successful prosecution of a whistleblower. The "Tennessee man" is Daniel Hale, the whistleblower who exposed the breadth and reach of the United States' extrajudicial killing programs.

Hale's leaks followed shortly after Snowden's string of NSA bombshells. The intel gathered by the NSA's many programs formed the backbone for the drone strike programs Hale exposed: the "metadata" our government uses to "kill people."

Hale's house was raided by the FBI back in 2014, shortly after he was interviewed for the drone warfare documentary "National Bird." During his interview, Hale remarked on the risk he was taking discussing the program. Documents leaked to The Intercept by Hale resulted in the multi-part "Drone Papers" feature. The documents exposed the lengthy intel gaps that occurred between target acquisition and drone strikes. It also showed the Defense Department and CIA referred to collateral damage (i.e., the killing of nearby civilians) as "combatants killed in action," with minimal attempt made to tally up the number of people killed simply for existing near the government's targets.

The prosecution didn't begin until 2019, leaving Hale in suspended animation for nearly a half-decade. This prosecution under Trump pushed him past Obama for most whistleblowers prosecuted -- just another lousy addition to a lousy president's legacy.

This is the sort of thing Hale exposed and is now being imprisoned for sharing with journalists and US citizens expected to support these activities with their tax dollars.

Daniel knew cell phones could have been passed from presumed terrorists to other people entirely, and innocent people and those around innocent people would then be killed instead.

[...]

There was further evidence that when military-age males were murdered in a strike, they were classified as militants, an accounting trick that lowers civilian-death counts, and there was an account of a five-month period in Afghanistan in which U.S. forces hit 19 people who were targets of strikes and 136 who were not the targets. There were admissions that the intelligence on which strikes were based was often bad and that strikes made it difficult to get good information because the people who might have provided that information had just been killed by the strike.

Hale pled guilty to "retention and transmission of national defense information." This is a charge under the Espionage Act. His plea followed the judge's declaration that the court would not allow Hale to offer any public interest defense for his actions -- something that's almost always the case in espionage prosecutions. But Hale didn't hand this information to our nation's enemies. He handed it to journalists who published reports based on the documents. This wasn't an attempt to harm our nation. It was an attempt to inform Americans about the atrocities carried out in the name of national security.

For this act of courage, Hale will serve nearly four years in prison. And the war machine will roll on, not even momentarily interrupted by the publication of this supposedly sensitive information.

Bad news, Washington! There’s another new, invasive critter making people crazy, and this one might be even grosser than the cicadas. City and suburban Facebook groups and Nextdoor are, um, crawling with photos of the mass destruction the mysterious creatures are inflicting on their juicy flesh, as posters to the forums desperately try to crowdsource the culprit. […]

There have been several issues lately that have led to the Pokémon GO Community being very vocal in our concerns to Niantic, the most recent, and biggest, being the decision to roll back the ‘Covid Bonuses‘. Most specifically, the decision to decrease the Pokéstop distance back to their pre-pandemic distance, starting in New Zealand and the USA.

As content creators, influencers, YouTubers and more voice their concerns via articles and videos, the community have also been very vocal in their opinions too. With no communication at all from Niantic, to anyone in the community, it is time for us to raise our voices in other ways.

Post on Social Media

Posting on social media, and tagging in the NianticLabs, NianticHelp, and PokemonGOApp accounts, with constructive criticism and feedback, is a valid way of sharing your feelings on these issues.

Don’t send messages to individual staff members on their private accounts, instead make sure you use official social media accounts for Niantic and Pokémon GO.

Offer up your reasoning, and why this particular issue is important to you, and the more different people who contact them, the less we can be ignored.

Twitter has always been a vocal place for the Pokémon Go Community, so sharing your thoughts on other social media platforms will also help spread awareness, as many players are not on Twitter, so may not be aware of the movement.

I see a lot of Pokémon GO Content Creators being tagged and stuff, including those who've got a direct line with Niantic.

We hear you & we HAVE talked to Niantic about this, we're written essays, some have created videos and addressed feedback/concerns.

No response.

— REVERSAL – Pokémon GO (@REVERSALxPoGO) August 2, 2021

Share articles and videos that articulate how you feel, talk to your fellow players, and keep this discussion alive!

Sign the Petition

Sign the change.org petition to keep the increased distance here. So far over 130,000 players have signed this, and the more signatures the better. It is a tremendous amount of people who have shown that they disagree with this choice by Niantic, and as more people sign it, we get harder to ignore. A petition is a great and easy way to show that a large amount of people care about this, so sign it and share if you agree.

Go F2P

The absolute biggest way to impact Niantic is to talk with our wallets. Consider going F2P (free to play) and don’t put anymore money into the game until Niantic communicate with us on this decision, and hopefully reverse it.

This is a popular technique many of the popular Pokémon GO Youtubers are aiming to use, including the likes of solo Raid Queen KaitoNolan, and Serebii Webmaster Joe Merrick.

A drastic drop in in game spending will show Niantic how seriously the community are taking this. As many already F2P players can attest to, there are plenty of ways to play Pokémon GO without spending a penny, whilst still thoroughly enjoying the game.

I personally will be doing this to show my disagreement with the distance decrease, and will only use coins I earn from gym defending, rather than putting any real world money into the game.

Boycott

How many people would be willing to boycott playing Pokémon GO?

The parameters: Only do a catch, stop & free pass streak per day & nothing more.

WHY? Send a message to niantic about the stop distance & reversed changes.

Vote below

— The Trainer Club (@thetrainerclubb) August 1, 2021

The most extreme way you can share your feelings on this is the boycott the game in some way. Billy from thetrainerclub YouTube channel is encouraging people to only do the bare minimum in game to keep their daily streaks, and absolutely nothing else. No raids, no additional catching, just one catch, and one spin.

Other ways to boycott will be to refuse to interact with any sponsored PokéStops or Gyms, which many players suspect is the reason Niantic are decreasing the distance, as sponsors wish to encourage people to enter their stores/locations, rather than interact from a larger distance. This can actually be turned off in your settings if you are in a region that gets sponsored balloons.

The most dramatic way to boycott, that many people on Twitter say they are partaking in, is to completely uninstall the app. By removing the app from their phones they are making the boldest statement, that this isn’t acceptable, and therefore they will no longer be playing.

Popular Dutch YouTuber Reversal has stated that he will be quitting Pokémon GO at the end of August if the situation is not resolved by the end of the month.

Conclusion

We know that a large majority of the Community disagree with this change, and we encourage you to share your opinions and stories about why this impacts upon you with the official social media channels for Niantic, in a constructive and polite way.

This decision affects player safety because the pandemic is still incredibly concerning in the US, despite the decision to reverse there. Players no longer had to congregate in small areas that inconvenienced other members of the public or businesses because they had to be so close to the gym to raid. No more crossing busy or dangerous roads to spin or raid.

The game became more accessible for disabled players. Have you ever paid attention to how many drop kerbs there are when walking? They can be few and far between, and no drop kerbs, means no wheelchair accessibility.

So much of our society isn’t accessible, and this small change in Pokémon GO opened up the world to disabled trainers so much more effectively than it ever had before.

so that means our double increased Pokémon stops/gyms are now are unable to be reached and many order bonuses and I will add this as someone who is in a wheelchair it’s difficult for me to get to the stops SAFELY on a regular basis now this makes it worse #Pokemongo pic.twitter.com/3qwsLVfZBs

— Heather McDonald (@Heather_22_87) August 1, 2021

Many players also struggle to accept that the distances for spinning PokéStops were ever genuinely 80m for the bonus, or 40m before. ZoëTwoDots discusses this in her recent video regarding her feelings on the changes.

For example, my local park has 2 PokéStops and a gym in it. The park as a whole is just less than 80m in length, and just over 40m in width. During the bonus I have been able to spin the stops from a greater distance, but using Google to work out the distance, this is roughly 40m.

I was unable to spin this before the pandemic, and can only just spin it now. Since distance was reverted in the USA, many players are reporting distances of 10m or less being needed, and practically needing to be right on top of the stop before they can spin in.

A lot of border towns in Canada have also reported issues, with their spin distance reverted, despite not being in a region that should have currently been affected by the rollback.

It has long been discussed on Reddit that PokéStop spin distance has been affected by how close you are to the Equator. The closer to the Equator, the smaller your spin radius becomes, and the further away, the larger it becomes.

People who live close to the Equator have expressed shock at how much further away they could be to spin a stop when they have travelled abroad to countries much further away. There is already an imbalance in the game in regards to the distance, and the increased distance would have aided those close to the Equator in their play a lot.

Many believe that this is a visual bug, but players who have travelled have confirmed the differences in distance.

Another issue is that initially Niantic shared that this distance would be a permanent change to the game, what an awesome Quality of Life update! When players noticed this had been amended in their original blog post, they then said that this had been a ‘mistake’ and that is why it had been updated.

Again, bad communication, and stating that it would be permanent, and then revoking this, is really unacceptable.

This isn’t about wanting to play from home permanently. This is about a genuinely great Quality of Life update that was taken away from us, that doesn’t make sense.

This doesn’t impact player spending, in any major way, and if anything, it encouraged us to go out and explore more safely, which should be a key aim of Pokémon GO.

We want communication, and transparency, and for this change to be reconsidered in a fair way.

The post How We As a Community Can Voice Our Concerns to Niantic appeared first on Pokémon GO Hub.

The day that trainers all around the world have been dreading is finally here. Niantic has decided to follow through with their initial decision to revert pandemic incentives which originally included an increase to the distance needed to spin a PokéStop/Gym.

This change made it so trainers were able to gather items from stops while still maintaining a safe distance from others. It was a quality of life update that everyone benefitted from. Taking this bonus away negatively affects the gameplay quality drastically. With this latest change, The range has been decreased from 80 meters to 40 meters.

Trainers have been verbalizing their frustrations on social media proclaiming that the timing of this decision is not appropriate considering we are still in the midst of a pandemic. This is the reason why “Niantic” is currently trending on Twitter. There have been countless amounts of comments towards Niantic over social media and even petitions that have had thousands of signatures to plead that they reconsider this decision.

Those living in America and New Zealand have already been impacted by this change. The reduction of the in-game radius has already been reverted to ‘normal’ which has drastically altered people’s views of the game.

It may come as no surprise but players in these regions along with the rest of the player base are outraged at this revert, not only because it impacts the game but also for the safety of our fellow community. The Delta variant is causing many states in the USA to have overflowing hospitals and rising COVID rates.

Some places around the world such as the UK were granted an extra 30 days of the bonus which is pretty much just a countdown to the inevitable as some players see it.

Benefits of Interaction Distances

1. Not having to cross the street to engage with certain PokéStops and Gyms.
2. Being able to interact with PokéStops/Gyms from safer locations.
3. Being able to raid more discreetly from further away to avoid possible harassment from others.
4. Being able to continue walking at a regular pace rather than having to stop abruptly, slowing down or change the walking route in order to get items.
5. Being able to mitigate the issues of drift and not move around erratically to get in range of a PokéStop or Gym.

This decision has caused many players to not be able to play Pokémon GO safely, thus not playing at all. It not only hurts the player base but also Niantic from a business perspective since they rely on their players to earn passive income. Fewer players, the less income for Niantic, which is why this decision doesn’t make much sense to many people.

The Aftermath

Despite the negative backlash from players over social media, what does this mean for the future of Pokémon GO? Players living in these affected areas are going to have to learn to adapt to these changes. Along with the majority of the player base, sadly, people living with walking impediments or disabilities are going to be affected severely by this change as it means that some PokéStops that were accessible before, may not be possible to get anymore.

Speculation & Theories 

The Pokémon GO community believes that this change was unnecessary mainly because it doesn’t harm Niantic at all keeping in these benefits and that it only takes away the quality of life aspect.

The real reason behind this change has not been confirmed but players have speculated that it’s because of Niantic’s sponsors. Originally, sponsored stops were a way of bringing customers into a business, with the increased range duration, players were able to spin stops/gyms without going into/near a certain building or business, thus losing customers.

On the one hand, this could have been a factor in their decision, but on the other hand, it does not make much sense because, in New Zealand, sponsored stops were not available in the first place.

Community Poll

We put out a poll into our Pokémon GO Hub Discord asking if these changes to the special bonuses will make a difference in their gameplay experience. The results were conclusive that it indeed will cause a large number of players to play the game less compared to those who will continue to play the game as normal.

Parting Words

While these may be dark days in Pokémon GO, we as a community can stick together and continue to voice our opinions. We hope that with the help of this article and your combined efforts that something can be done about this change.

We would love to hear from you. Will you continue your Pokémon GO journey despite these changes?

Until next time, stay safe and always remember to prioritize your health and safety over anything.

–Adam ‘Avrip’

The post Niantic Removes Special Pandemic Bonuses appeared first on Pokémon GO Hub.

Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

As if to complement this month’s frustrating Covid backslide, the universe has put cicadas back on the docket. Dealing with their lawnmower-level loudness and crunching carcasses on the sidewalk for a month wasn’t enough apparently, as we now have to watch out for cascades of their offspring. For the next few weeks, BILLIONS of juvenile […]

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This afternoon, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that, starting Saturday, the city will again require everyone over the age of two to wear face masks indoors, whether they are vaccinated or not. All Washingtonians will now need to mask up at restaurants, museums, gyms, and other public settings in the city. This news follows the […]

Non-expansion states saw a much smaller drop in new medical debt over the same period.

Medicaid expansion doesn’t just provide more people health insurance — it appears to cut medical debt enormously, a new study has found.

The Affordable Care Act offered states a huge infusion of federal money to expand Medicaid eligibility to low-income adults, and about 30 states took that deal right away in 2014. Since then, new medical debt in those states has fallen 44 percent, a dramatically bigger drop than was seen in the states that refused to expand the program over the same period. Those states showed only a 10 percent decline.

The study was published in JAMA by scholars from Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers noted that nonmedical debt had fallen by similar amounts in expansion and non-expansion states over the time period they studied, 2009 to 2020, strengthening the case that Medicaid expansion was the difference with medical debt.

Medical debt isn’t just bad for people’s finances or their credit rating. It’s bad for their health. The researchers noted high medical debt is associated with reduced health care use and, in general, people with more debt report worse mental health.

“This is a genuinely large effect,” Raymond Kluender, one of the authors and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, said in an email. “The Medicaid expansion was well targeted at a population that was extremely vulnerable to medical bills and who did not (and do not in states that have not expanded) have access to affordable health insurance.”

The states that expanded Medicaid in the years following 2014 experienced a meaningful but smaller reduction in medical debt than states that expanded that first year.

JAMA

In states that expanded Medicaid, both the lowest- and highest-income groups saw their medical debt drop after expansion, but the amount of medical debt added annually decreased much more for the former (by $180, from $458 to $278) than the latter (by $35, from $95 to $60).

In non-expansion states, on the other hand, the lowest-income group averaged a $206 average increase in new medical debt, from $630 to $836. But the highest-income bracket still saw a small decline in new debt for medical care.

“Many of the states with the highest pre-ACA levels of medical debt did not expand Medicaid and subsequently did not experience substantial reductions in medical debt,” the researchers wrote when summarizing their findings.

Those states are concentrated in the South. Eight of the 12 non-expansion states are in the region. Nearly one in four Southerners have some medical debt in collections listed on their credit report, compared to 10.8 percent of people in the Northeast and 12.7 percent in the West.

This dramatic drop in medical debt after Medicaid expansion can be added to the large body of evidence documenting the benefits of the program. Research shows that people have more access to care and better self-reported health after Medicaid expansion. Cancer diagnoses come earlier, and patients are given the prescriptions for medications they need more often. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from 2019 concluded that states’ refusal to expand Medicaid had led to more than 15,000 deaths in one year that otherwise would not have occurred.

And as health economists Jonathan Gruber and Benjamin Sommers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, states were able to implement expansion without a negative impact on their finances. Expanding Medicaid enabled them to cut back on other spending — for uncompensated care, care for people who are in the judicial system, and so on — while expansion was fully subsidized by the feds.

Democrats in Congress are working on a proposal to cover the 4 million uninsured people in non-expansion states who would be insured through Medicaid expansion. They want to include such a provision in their budget reconciliation bill later this year. A new expansion incentive passed as part of the American Rescue Plan has so far not persuaded most of the non-expansion states to reconsider their position.

Overall, the improving economy from 2009 to 2020 led to a drop in all types of debt. But because medical debt declined less than nonmedical debt, there is now more of the former than the latter in the US, according to the new JAMA analysis of a nationally representative sample of depersonalized credit reports.

JAMA

The total medical debt detected in the TransUnion credit reports reviewed by the researchers would translate to $140 billion in debt nationwide. An estimated 18 percent of Americans have some medical debt on their record. But there may also be additional debt not shown in the credit reports — for medical care paid for with a credit card, for example.

Still, the research is a good starting point for understanding the scope of the medical debt problem in the United States — and the difference Medicaid expansion can make.

Earlier this year, the city of New York announced plans to send mental health professionals out to deal with mental health issues, rather than the standard-issue cops-and-EMS response teams. It's an idea that's gained recent popularity, given the difficulty law enforcement officers seem to have when dealing with things they're not specifically trained to handle. And by "difficulty," I mean a lot of people who need professional help were instead being "treated" with force deployment, arrests, and the far-more-than-occasional killing.

It's an idea so simple and intuitive it's a wonder it's taken this long to be experimented with in a small number of cities. The success stories seen elsewhere indicate this is something worth trying, if for no other reason than to free up limited law enforcement resources to handle the sort of thing law enforcement officers are trained to handle.

The results [PDF] are back on the trial run of New York City's "B-HEARD" (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) and they're similarly encouraging. (via Insider)

It was a limited deployment, but a successful one.

Under the pilot, teams operate seven days a week, 16 hours a day in Zone 7, which includes East Harlem and parts of Central and North Harlem in the 25, 28, and 32 police precincts. In 2020, there were approximately 8,400 mental health 911 calls in Zone 7, the highest volume of any dispatch zone in the city. During the 16 hours a day when B-HEARD teams were operational from June 6 – July 7, 2021, there were approximately 16 mental health 911 calls each day in Zone 7.

B-HEARD doesn't handle calls that involve weapons or "immediate risk of violence," but the team still handled 25% of all mental health emergency calls. The number would likely have been higher with more coverage, as police were routed to some calls when B-HEARD members were unavailable or in the midst of handling a call.

Despite these limitations, the B-HEARD team provided more help to more people than the traditional police response would have.

In 95% of cases, people received assistance from B-HEARD teams, higher than 82% for traditional (NYPD/EMS) 911 response.

So, greater responsiveness. And rather than simply turf mental health calls to the nearest hospital, B-HEARD teams were able to provide on-site help. The traditional (police-EMS) response resulted in 82% of calls ending with a ride to the hospital. With B-HEARD, the number dropped to 50%. One-quarter of all calls handled by B-HEARD were taken care of on-site, including de-escalation and referrals to counseling or other care options. Another 20% of cases resulted in B-HEARD transporting persons to community-based care locations.

And the police are more apt to call in B-HEARD than the other way around, suggesting officers are happy to utilize mental health care professionals if they're available.

NYPD has requested onsite assistance from B-HEARD 14 times.

B-HEARD teams have requested onsite assistance from NYPD 7 times.

There's no reason this shouldn't continue to work. And it should scale easily. Should. A lot depends on talking entities like the NYPD into diverting some of their (outsized) budgets towards hiring team members and funding their continued existence. If officers on patrol are utilizing the new teams, they obviously see the value of having mental health professionals on call. And if the beat officers can see the benefits, hopefully the brass isn't so disconnected from day-to-day operations that it would stand in the way of helping both the officers they oversee and the people who are paying the NYPD to keep them safe.

Shut up and get in line — that's the message Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recently broadcasted to FTC staffers. Within her first month as a new commissioner, Khan ordered a stop to all public speaking for "an all-hands-on-deck moment." Evidently, she wants the FTC speaking with only one voice — her own. The gag order is going to run out the top economists and harm the FTC's long-term effectiveness.

Khan rose to academic stardom at a young age as a vocal critic of Big Tech, especially Amazon. In her most famous writing, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, she argued for stronger antitrust enforcement even when companies are lowering prices for consumers. Khan's preferred antitrust approach would be a complete overhaul of the current antitrust system and would require a lot of work. However, even if one agrees with Khan that antitrust needs to be rewritten and that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, Khan's current regime will make that impossible by running out her employees, especially Ph.D. economists.

Imagine yourself as a recent Ph.D. in economics from a hotshot university. You're 30 years old, and you just spent 6 years in graduate school, earning $20,000. Before that, you may have spent two years as a research assistant to a professor, earning just as little. You're a top student in your program and have lots of career options in front of you. You could go work at Amazon or Netflix and earn $200,000 a year, base salary. After living on a strict diet of research and Top Ramen in graduate school, that sounds pretty good.

Traditionally, federal agencies, like the FTC, compete for the best economists the same way universities compete. They can't match the pay of an Amazon, but they can offer economists a valuable perk: the ability to do research and engage with the scientific community as part of the job.

For many economists, who have already demonstrated their passion for research by writing a dissertation and completing a Ph.D., doing research is a huge perk that most private companies don't offer. The FTC knows this. In their own job postings for PhD economists, the FTC explicitly emphasizes their economists' ability to do research. To date, that hiring strategy has worked pretty well for them. Many economists at the FTC are top-notch researchers, with thousands of citations, an impressive feat for a full-time researcher at a university. When the FTC hires new PhDs, they are saying "you can work in public service and still be a successful researcher."

Khan's recent policies signal the FTC is now less committed to research and independent thinking. Public academic seminars, where economists present their findings to colleagues throughout the profession, are a key part of the research and publication process. If you cut off economists' ability to present their research and get feedback, you cut off the ability to do research.

The real damage will take some time to show itself. Even if the gag order does not run out the current economists, who may be loyal to the FTC after years, the order will still hurt the agency over time. Any successful agency needs to hire quality employees year in and year out. If this policy persists, the FTC will have trouble down the line hiring and retaining high-quality employees, especially economists.

Khan might not think she needs these economists right now; after all, she has made clear she opposes the economic approach to antitrust. But when the FTC takes companies to court, as we can expect it will do even more often under Khan, it needs expert witnesses to persuasively argue its case. The private companies pay $1,000 per hour for economists at the top of the profession. The FTC must hire top talent too.

If you were against antitrust enforcement and wanted to ruin the FTC from within, Khan's strategy would be nearly perfect. Step 1: Run out all the competent lawyers and rigorous, scientific economists. Step 2: Bring forth a bunch of cases that are poorly argued and lack an economic defense. Step 3: Lose those cases at the current Supreme Court and set a bunch of precedents against the FTC.

Brian Albrecht is an assistant professor of economics at Kennesaw State University. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota. He is a Young Voices contributor and writes a weekly economics newsletter (pricetheory.substack.com). Follow him on Twitter: @briancalbrecht.

by Brooke Stephenson

]

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

For almost a decade, ProPublica has been reporting on the ways TurboTax has fought efforts to make tax prep easier and less costly. As part of that series, we published a story about how to get your money back from TurboTax if you were charged for a service that should have been free.

People flooded the TurboTax customer service line — maybe you were even one of the callers. Some of them told us all they had to do was mention ProPublica to get a refund.

All of a sudden, customer service agents were hearing a lot about ProPublica. Some of them started to give us a call.

It turns out that TurboTax’s customer service agents were part of a much larger group of agents who work as independent contractors for large companies like Disney and Airbnb without benefits or job security. Previously, our reporters investigated the layers of corporate insulation that protect these companies from being held accountable for these agents’ working conditions. This month, reporters Ariana Tobin, Ken Armstrong and Justin Elliott published a story highlighting the voices of customer service agents themselves.

Our reporters heard from hundreds of customer service agents with similar experiences. People were cursed at or called racial slurs. Male callers made sexually explicit comments or masturbated over the phone. One told an agent, “I really like the way you type.”

Almost all these agents felt that they were not allowed to hang up. Arise said in a statement, “Service Partners interacting with individual customers through the Arise® Platform are protected by both client and Arise policies and processes that include the ability to disconnect callers without penalty or transfer these calls to support resources if they are unable to de-escalate the situation.” Other companies gave similar statements saying agents were free to disconnect callers.

We spoke with Ariana about the project as well as the unique role gender plays in the world of customer service. Parts of our interview were edited for length and clarity.

How did you decide on the oral history style for this piece?

In this case, we are literally talking about the people who talk to us. So it’s a voice that you know — it’s just the voice telling you something about themselves instead of whatever it is that you’re used to hearing. To us what was really interesting was these people as characters, these people as people.

And customer service agents talk for a living, so I’ve also just had a lot of fun talking to them. Some of these people are so incredibly descriptive and nuanced and just good storytellers about their own lives, and I was like, “There is no version of this where I tell their story better than they can.”

Gender was an unexpected element for me in this piece. It comes up a lot in people’s accounts.

Arise actually brags about how 89% of their contractors are women, and a large percent are women of color.

We know from talking to different industry analysts and experts, most customer service representatives are women. There’s lots of different theories as to why.

A lot of the people we talked to were doing this work even before the pandemic. One of the promises that a lot of these contractors make when they’re hiring is flexibility. And the people who most need flexibility in their life are often those with caretaking responsibilities. So maybe they have kids, maybe there are older relatives, maybe they have some kind of disability. [Like] Christine Stewart, she needed to get her kids on and off the bus every morning.

A lot of times that [caretaking] work falls to women. So I think that’s part of why these jobs attract more women.

Potential recruits are promised both cash and “work-life balance.” (Screenshots from Arise’s Facebook page)

There’s some cultural critics out there who say people just feel more calmed talking to a woman in a customer service role. Different kinds of labor sociologists would call it pink labor.

But another kind of interesting historical reason is that stretching way back to when we were talking about textile mills, there’s the big company that’s going to have employees and have this central line of business. But underneath that, what happens is this process that labor economists call “fissuring.” Like a rock where you start breaking stuff apart. And if something is not just like a core part of that rock, you can take all this other stuff and just hire other people to do it. Hiring other people to do it is cheaper, because you don’t have to pay their labor costs, you don’t have to develop this kind of specialty in-house, you don’t have to go through all of the expenses of hiring and caring for workers. That has a pretty long history that is specifically gendered.

For example, in the 1970s, a company called Kelly Services had this whole advertising campaign for women who needed pocket money. And it was like: “Hire this temp for a couple of hours. Hire this secretary, you don’t have to worry about giving her vacation days, she’s just a temp.” And it was this way of bringing a part of the labor market in and creating these jobs specifically for women.

But it was marketed as perfect for women who were married and didn’t want their husbands to be threatened by the fact of them having a job, or women who had other obligations and social pressures in their life that meant this was the kind of work that they could get. We know that’s the history of where some of these companies came from.

The Kelly Girl “never takes a vacation ... never has a cold ... never costs you for unemployment taxes,” reads one ad reproduced by University of Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton in her book “The Temp Economy.” (Courtesy of Erin Hatton) Some companies seem to recruit women of color specifically. Did you find anything about why they were targeting those kinds of workers?

I couldn’t authoritatively say. One agent who we talked to who’s featured in the story — she herself is not a woman of color — I really thought she had some insightful observations about this.

She was in a cohort where pretty much everyone else was a woman of color. Her whole theory is that Black women, just by the nature of racism, have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make people calm and comfortable, and how to soothe people who might otherwise be aggrieved or upset. And that [customer service] is basically a professionalized version of doing that.

Anything else people should know?

A couple people have asked me the question: “How has this changed your behavior when you talk to customer service reps?”

There are a couple things that now I really make sure to do.

1. You absolutely should fill out the survey at the end of the call — and the survey is not about the service that you received. It’s about the agent, that’s how this thing is going to be processed and perceived. So, unless the agent was legitimately unhelpful and something bad happened, I really make a point of just giving my feedback generously. Then if I have a follow-up complaint, I might send it by email or tweet later.
2. If you’re ever doing customer service by chat: After you get the answer to your question, they’re going to ask you a follow up question like, “Is there anything else you need help with today?” And you always, always, always have to say, “No, thank you.” That’s it, close out the conversation. Otherwise, the agent gets dinged. We talked to an agent who lost her job because of this.
3. I also try to be really organized before I call because one of the strictest metrics is how fast they can deal with you, because the phone is constantly ringing. Just trying to have all of my paperwork in order before I get on the phone ends up being really helpful to the agent.

The craft store had acquired the 3,600-year-old artefact for its Bible museum, but court says it had been smuggled and should be returned to Iraq

A rare and ancient tablet showing part of the epic of Gilgamesh, which had been acquired by Christian arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby for display in its museum of biblical artefacts, has been seized by the US government.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) alleges that the 3,600-year-old “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet”, which originated in a region that is now part of Iraq, was acquired in 2003 by an American antiquities dealer, “encrusted with dirt and unreadable”, from the family member of a London coin dealer. Once it had arrived in the US, and been cleaned, experts realised that it showed a portion of the Gilgamesh epic, one of the world’s oldest works of literature, in the Akkadian language.

Continue reading...

Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for The New York Times compared time use in 2020 against time use in 2019, among different demographic groups.

As we know, the pandemic affected everyone differently. The slope charts show overall averages, so it would be an interesting next step to look at more granular variations. I suspect you’d see more pronounced shifts.

Tags: coronavirus, New York Times, time use

This morning saw one of the clearest signs of the DC’s return to pre-pandemic norms: the notorious Red Line—bless its heart—was delayed due to a “train malfunction.” Naturally, there was a bit of frustration from commuters who were running late. But one video of the scene circulating on Twitter shows a train car stuffed with […]

Vaccines are the solution to Covid-19. Let’s make the most of them.

All of a sudden, it looks like masks may have to be put back on.

With the rise of the delta variant and a rapid increase in Covid-19 cases, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling on vaccinated people to wear masks indoors again in places where the virus is quickly spreading. At least some school districts will likely require masks this fall. Local governments, from Massachusetts to California, are reviving mask mandates.

A year ago, requiring masks as cases spiked would have been an obviously smart decision. Mask mandates work, and for most of 2020, they were among the best methods we had to stop the spread of Covid-19. But masks were never meant to be the long-term solution; they were a stopgap until the US and the rest of the world could stamp out epidemics through vaccination.

Now those vaccines are here. And the changed circumstances of summer 2021 call for new approaches. Any entity thinking about a mask requirement — from private businesses to local, state, and federal governments — should consider mandating something else first: vaccination.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Unvaccinated people, whether they’re apathetic or resistant, are the reason the coronavirus remains a threat in the US. The country and everyone concerned about the rising case rate should do everything in their power to push these people to get a shot.

The federal government could require vaccination for its own employees, as President Joe Biden is reportedly considering, and offer incentives, financial or otherwise, for others to do the same. Local and state governments could require vaccines for their employees, health care workers, schools, and public spaces, from restaurants to museums. Even without any government support, private organizations could act alone, requiring vaccinations for their employees and, ultimately, proof of vaccination for anyone on their premises.

The US Department of Justice seemed to clear the way recently for vaccine mandates, declaring in a recent memo that “entities” can impose vaccine requirements for shots authorized under emergency use without full federal approval. And some government agencies, including New York City, California, and the US Department of Veteran Affairs, are now requiring public employees or health care workers to get vaccinated.

I’ve been talking to experts about mandating vaccines for months. Earlier this year, when I wrote about vaccine passports, many argued that mandates should only be tried as a last resort — we should try improving access and offering incentives first. Only if those options failed should we rely on the more drastic steps.

Well, we’re here. America has made the vaccines much more available to just about everyone who’s eligible. The nation has tried rewards, ranging from free beer to gift cards to a cash lottery, to nudge people to get a shot. Yet we’re stuck. Half of the US population still isn’t fully vaccinated.

It’s time to try that last resort.

Vaccine mandates work

France has historically been one of the more vaccine-skeptical countries in the West, and it’s struggled more than some of its peers to get people vaccinated. Two weeks ago, the country announced that it would require proof of vaccination for everyday activities, like restaurants and shopping centers. The news of the requirement led to a record rush for vaccine appointments, with 1.3 million people signing up in less than one day. (It also led to some protests.)

Israel has used “green passes,” proof of vaccination that’s required for everyday activities like restaurants and movie theaters, for as long as it’s been administering the vaccines. That requirement is cited as a key reason Israel has led much of the world in vaccination: More than two-thirds of its population has received at least one shot; more than 60 percent are fully vaccinated. (The US, by comparison, is less than 57 percent with at least one dose and below 50 percent fully vaccinated.) Israel recently reimposed some masking rules, but only after going hard on vaccination first.

Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

In the US, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys have consistently found for months that about 20 percent of Americans are resistant to getting the vaccines. But even among these resisters, about 30 to 35 percent say they would get the shot if it was required. If a mandate would move even some of the most hardcore skeptics, then it would almost certainly boost vaccination rates across the country, also pushing the other 13 percent of the country who are still in “wait and see” or “as soon as possible” mode to get going.

In a follow-up interview, a 51-year-old man who said he would only get the vaccine if it was required told Kaiser he ultimately got it, and did so because he felt he had “limited options without it.” In New York, where he lives, the government has kept some restrictions for unvaccinated people, and employers have required the shot in some places as well.

None of this should be surprising. Vaccine mandates have been a part of American public health policy for decades, especially for health care workers and anyone attending school.

A 2019 review of the evidence on school mandates found that the requirements “appear largely associated with increased vaccination coverage” (while calling for better studies). And a 2015 review of the evidence on mandates in health care settings found they’re the most effective out of several options to encourage vaccination.

Meanwhile, the vaccination rate among American 2-year-olds for diseases like polio and measles — shots required for decades for public school attendance — surpasses 80 or even 90 percent.

Schools don’t require students to go through elaborate restrictions or rituals for these other diseases. They just require the vaccine. We can and should learn from that.

Universal vaccination would protect all of us

There’s also the less empirical case for requiring vaccination: It’s simply the right thing to do.

Based on all the evidence, the vaccines really work, including against the variants. Vaccinated people may still get infected by the coronavirus, leading to flu-like symptoms. But the vaccines nearly eliminate the risk of hospitalization and death — the real threat of Covid-19 — even with the variants.

The reason, then, that mask mandates are now coming into consideration is largely to protect unvaccinated people, who are truly at risk from the virus. As White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci declared in June, the Covid-19 epidemic in the US is really becoming the tale of “two Americas” — vaccinated and not.

A New York Times analysis in June found that places with more than 60 percent of their population vaccinated report about one-third of the cases as those with a lower vaccination rate of zero to 30 percent. And other data suggests that the current rise in coronavirus cases is almost entirely among the people who haven’t gotten vaccinated, with the new outbreaks hitting the low-vaccination states harder.

This presents a conundrum: Places that reinstate mask mandates are effectively asking vaccinated people to care more about unvaccinated people’s risk of Covid-19 than most of these unvaccinated people do (or else they’d get the vaccine).

There are important exceptions. Children under 12 are still unable to get the shot (and that will likely force mask mandates in K-6 schools this fall). The immunocompromised may not always get full protection from the vaccines. Yet the best evidence we have indicates these people would also be most protected if everyone who can get vaccinated did so, because it would reduce the spread of the virus.

The biggest hurdle to that kind of universal vaccination is no longer access. Vaccines are everywhere: I can, as I write this in Cincinnati, find appointments at multiple grocery stores and pharmacies in the next hour, including in some of the poorest neighborhoods, and appointments aren’t even needed in many of these places. The share of Americans who want to get vaccinated “as soon as possible” but have not is tiny: about 3 percent in June, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys.

There’s more work to be done to make sure people have all of the information they need to get vaccinated and to actually access the shots. But the problem is no longer that people desperately want the vaccine and can’t get it; it’s that people need to be swayed to want it at all.

A mask mandate could even work against the vaccine campaign. Some research has found that people can be motivated to get vaccines with the promise that they’ll be able to stop masking up. As one vaccinated 52-year-old told the New York Times, “I just honestly got sick of wearing the mask. We had an event yesterday, and I had to wear it for five hours because I was around a lot of people. And I was sick of it.”

Requiring vaccinated people to keep masks removes an incentive for the shot.

And it doesn’t address the core problem: People who are eligible for the vaccine are still unvaccinated. That’s what needs to be fixed. If nothing else, all tools — up to and including mandates — should be used to move unvaccinated people before vaccinated people are asked to make more sacrifices.

A mandate could be a last resort — but it needs to be an option

For some of the population, a vaccine mandate would almost certainly produce a backlash. It could lead some of the resisters to harden in their refusal to get a vaccine, or polarize the US even further.

This is what some experts worry about. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has told me, “You take someone who is generally uncomfortable but willing to have a conversation, and you make it about them and an infringement on their liberties, and then they wind up getting more hardline on their views about the vaccines than they otherwise would have been.”

It’s a genuine public health conundrum. A mandate needs to lead to more people getting the shot than otherwise would, not fewer. And while the Kaiser Family Foundation surveys suggest that mandates would lead to more people overall getting the shot across the country, that may not be true in every town, city, county, or state.

Policymakers can address this by moving slowly, at first requiring public employees, health care workers, and schools to get the vaccine before phasing in mandates to the rest of the population. It may help these will likely be local and state decisions, given that the Biden administration has repeatedly resisted setting up a green pass–like system in the US. Different local and state governments may make different decisions about which settings require vaccination. And mandates should be treated as a last resort: The cities and states that, for example, haven’t tried cash incentives for vaccination could try that first.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Even with all that, there may still be a backlash. Yet the mask mandates being discussed right now risk a backlash, too, in exchange for a much less permanent solution; many of the same people who refuse to get vaccinated are the same as those who most vehemently refuse to mask up. Ultimately, for cultural or political reasons, some places might not be able to impose a mandate of any kind.

But far more could than have tried so far, and far more should try. Even a patchwork system in which you need a vaccine to do some things in some places, but not everywhere to do everything, will push more people to get the shot than today’s reality, where you most likely don’t need a vaccine to do anything at all.

Yes, a vaccine mandate, like a mask mandate, infringes on a person’s ability to make their own personal health decisions.

But as Brown University School of Public Health dean Ashish Jha previously told me, “Freedom cuts in both directions.” If people’s resistance to getting vaccinated leads to more Covid-19 outbreaks and, worse, the rise of a variant that can overcome existing vaccines, the ensuing caution and restrictions would hinder people’s freedoms far more. That’s what we’re seeing right now as places consider adopting mask mandates again due to outbreaks caused by unvaccinated people.

To put the threat of Covid-19 behind us, people need to get vaccinated. As a country, the US has tried just about everything else in the toolbox. Before we go back to 2020’s policy ideas, we should make full use of the best tool we have in 2021.

Public health crises require a dynamic government that makes quick decisions. GOP judges want to prevent that.

Imagine if, in the spring of 2020, Wisconsin’s public health agencies had needed to get permission from the state’s heavily gerrymandered, GOP-controlled legislature before they could implement policies intended to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

That’s the sort of future that a raft of recent court decisions, including two handed down last Friday, could be setting the country up for — one where the government has limited ability to fight this pandemic and any others that arise.

The first court decision, written by a Donald Trump appointee to the United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, imposes strict limits on California’s ability to close down in-person instruction at private schools. Judge Daniel Collins’s opinion in Branch v. Newsom claims that such restrictions run afoul of parents’ rights “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

(All of the relevant schools in Branch are currently allowed to hold in-person classes, but the Ninth Circuit’s order prevents California from imposing many new restrictions even if the pandemic worsens and public health officials believe that they need to limit in-person gatherings to prevent outbreaks.)

Then, in Florida v. Becerra, the 11th Circuit reinstated a lower court order blocking various rules handed down by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which are supposed to help prevent cruise ships from becoming incubators for Covid-19. (Although most of the judges on the panel that heard Florida were appointed by Democratic presidents, the outcome in that case was likely controlled by a recent decision handed down by the conservative Supreme Court.)

The decisions in Branch and Florida, moreover, are part of a wave of decisions — mostly handed down by Republican appointees or by judges who ran for election as conservatives — that could permanently hobble the government’s ability to address future public health crises.

In May 2020, for example, four Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court stripped that state’s Department of Health Services of much of its authority to close businesses and limit public gatherings. Notably, the deciding vote in this case, Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm, was cast by lame duck Justice Daniel Kelly, who’d recently lost his seat in a nearly 11-point landslide.

Almost immediately after the court’s decision in Palm, bars throughout the state reopened — many of them packed with unmasked patrons celebrating in close quarters months before Covid-19 vaccines became available. By October, Wisconsin had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country.

The US Supreme Court also imposed tight restrictions on many state and federal public health agencies. Shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave conservatives a 6-3 supermajority, the Court started handing down decisions preventing state governments from limiting in-person gatherings at churches and other houses of worship.

Late last month, the Supreme Court decided to let a federal eviction moratorium — which was enacted to prevent people kicked out of them homes from spreading Covid-19 — to remain in effect until it expires at the end of July. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief opinion suggesting that the CDC may never impose such a moratorium again under existing federal laws.

These court decisions are not happening in a political vacuum. According to the Washington Post, “at least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies.” If these state legislatures pass these bills into law, that is their right. Elected lawmakers have the power to enact unwise laws.

But it is not the job of the courts to rewrite laws that their favored political party disagrees with. Nor is it their job to invent novel and often outlandish constitutional limits on public health agencies. Many of the court decisions restricting public health agencies aren’t just harmful because they could enable the spread of a deadly disease, they are also an end-run around democracy.

And many of these limits on public health officials are likely to permanently hobble the nation’s public health agencies.

Congress and state legislatures gave public health agencies very broad powers for a reason

Let’s make one thing clear before we dive too deep into the recent court decisions: Public health officials, like nearly all executive branch officials at the state and federal level, can rarely act without legislative approval. But Congress and a number of states have already passed an array of laws giving certain powers to the CDC and other public health agencies — including broad authority to respond to a public health emergency.

So, when courts limit public health officials’ power under these existing statutes, they are altering the legal regime set up by democratically elected lawmakers.

Many of these existing laws are broadly worded to give public health agencies expansive power to arrest the spread of a deadly disease. Federal law, for example, gives the CDC power to “make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

Similarly, the Wisconsin law at issue in Palm gives the state’s health department the power to “close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics” and to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.”

It is a little unusual for a legislature to give such open-ended authority to an agency, but there are very good reasons to do so in the public health context. It’s impossible to know in advance how to respond to a public health crisis, so officials need to have broad authority to adapt to unpredictable events.

As Covid-19 taught us, infectious diseases can spread exponentially — so a small outbreak in, say, a single neighborhood in Milwaukee can rapidly grow to infect thousands or even millions unless state officials act swiftly to contain it. If no public health agency has the power to act quickly, the outbreak is likely to spread beyond the point of containment before the state legislature can act.

Public health agencies also need to make these calls in an ever-shifting environment. Even if there were no Covid in Milwaukee today, it might arrive tomorrow. And, if an agency successfully suppresses an outbreak in one community, it may make sense to lift some of the localized restrictions that quashed that outbreak — then reimpose them if a new threat emerges.

At oral arguments in Palm, attorney Colin Roth, who represented the state health department, offered a helpful analogy: Imagine that a massive wildfire was tearing through the state of Wisconsin.

In order to combat such a fire, the government could have to take several actions that would impose severe burdens on many Wisconsin residents. It may need to close highways and businesses to keep people out of the way of the fire. Firefighters may even need to create a firebreak by cutting down large swaths of forests, or even demolishing buildings in order to deny fuel to the growing inferno.

“The Covid-19 virus is a wildfire that is spreading across the state,” Roth told a hostile bench dominated by Republicans, and the state health department “is the fire department.”

It would be inane to require firefighters to get legislative approval for each highway they closed, or for each tree or building that they destroyed, in order to prevent the entire state from going up in flames. And, for the same reason, it would be equally inane to require the state legislature to micromanage the state’s response to a pandemic. Sometimes, a state encounters a crisis that cannot be addressed if it waits for hundreds of elected lawmakers to debate the problem and come up with a solution.

And yet, conservative judges are increasingly hostile to the view that public officials may exercise meaningful authority without constantly seeking approval from the legislature.

Why these court decisions could permanently disable our response to the next pandemic

The court orders limiting public health agencies’ powers typically fit into two different boxes. The first box consists of orders imposing novel constitutional limits on these agencies. Think of the Supreme Court’s decisions requiring public health officials to exempt churches and other places or worship from many pandemic restrictions — decisions that revolutionized the Court’s approach to “religious liberty.” Or the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Branch, claiming that the Constitution protects the right of parents to send their kids to in-person classes at private schools.

The second box of cases arise out of a growing belief among conservatives that executive branch agencies should never be given broad authority to exercise policy discretion. In Palm, for example, Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court required the state health department to jump through a series of procedural hoops that take weeks to complete in order to exercise many of its public health powers, and it gave a committee within the state’s highly gerrymandered legislature the power to suspend many of the department’s actions.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state health department’s order temporarily closing many businesses at the height of the pandemic to “the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.” She also described a system where a state agency can make swift public health decisions — even if it does so pursuant to an act of the state legislature — as a “tyrannical concentration of power.”

In other cases, courts have read statutes very narrowly in order to confine public health agencies’ power. Consider, for example, Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS, the US Supreme Court case involving the CDC’s eviction moratorium.

To understand this case, it’s helpful to quote the relevant federal statute at some length. That statute gives the CDC authority to make regulations “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.” It also includes a non-exhaustive list of ways that the CDC may exercise this power, including by providing “for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings.”

Republican officials, however, have urged the courts to read this non-exhaustive list as if it were a limitation on the CDC’s power to fight communicable diseases. Under this approach, the CDC’s authority would be limited to activities such as “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, [and] destruction of animals or articles.”

And, while the Court’s order in Alabama Association of Realtors is brief and does not fully explain its reasoning, Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion suggests that at least he agrees with this narrow reading. He wrote that he shares the plaintiffs’ belief that “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its existing statutory authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium.”

The courts, in other words, are imposing new constitutional limits on public health agencies. They are limiting legislatures’ power to give discretionary authority to public health officials. And they are reading public health statutes in unnatural ways to limit the government’s power to fight deadly diseases.

These are not the sort of court decisions that can be easily overcome by legislatures. Even if Congress or a state legislature attempted to override these court decisions, the sort of judges who would hand down decisions like Palm or Alabama Association of Realtors — decisions that curtail powers that lawmakers already granted — are unlikely to allow lawmakers to re-expand public health agencies’ power very far.

Many of these public health decisions are very poorly reasoned

Several of these decisions limiting public health officials’ power are haphazardly written. They give contradictory instructions to state officials. Or they fail to consider the implications of their own reasoning.

In some cases these errors are relatively minor. In Palm, for example, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack wrote the Court’s majority opinion holding that the court’s decision takes effect immediately, but she also wrote a separate concurring opinion stating that “although our declaration of rights is effective immediately, I would stay future actions to enforce our decision until May 20, 2020” — about a week after the Court’s decision. That sparked immediate confusion about whether the court’s decision took effect right away or not.

In other cases, however, judges appear to be so eager to impose limits on public health officials that they invent legal rules that are utterly nonsensical.

Consider the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Branch, the case holding that parents have a constitutional right to send their children to in-person classes at private schools. As mentioned above, Judge Collins rooted his opinion in a constitutional right of parents “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” and there is some basis for courts to enforce such a parental right — but not to read it as expansively as Collins did in Branch.

In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) the Supreme Court struck down a state law forbidding teachers from teaching “any subject to any person in any language other than the English language.” And, in Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (1925), the Court struck down a law requiring parents to send their children to public (not private) school. Both decisions were rooted in the idea that the 14th Amendment gives parents a limited right to decide how their children will be raised and educated.

But this right cannot be unlimited. Suppose that a parent wishes to send their child to a private school run by white supremacists, or one that would train their heir to become a child solider in an insurrection against the United States government, or one that refuses to teach math to girls. Or suppose that a parent chooses not to educate their child at all, preferring to keep the kid at home to perform menial labor. Or that a parent rents their child to a cotton mill that produces cheap textiles.

Collins attempts to square this circle by arguing that “historical practice and tradition confirms” that parents must be allowed to send their children to in-person classes. “As historically understood,” Collins writes, “the Meyer-Pierce right necessarily embraced a right to choose in-person private-school instruction, because ... such instruction was until recently the only feasible means of providing education to children.”

But, if parents are allowed to raise their children however they want, so long as their decisions comport with the “historical” understanding of Meyer and Pierce, then parents would have a constitutional right to engage in all sorts of abhorrent practices. The Supreme Court, for example, did not permit Congress to ban child labor until 1941 — 16 years after Pierce — so the historical understanding of that decision could permit parents to rent their children to cotton mills. Similarly, it was hardly unusual for schools, especially in the segregated South, to teach white supremacy when Meyer and Pierce were handed down.

In his apparent zeal to limit the power of public health officials, in other words, Collins handed down a legal rule that simply makes no sense. He would give parents a constitutional right to engage in destructive or genuinely cruel parenting, so long has that sort of cruelty was common at some ambiguous point in American history.

Moreover, to the extent that Meyer and Pierce could ever have been read to give parents an absolute right to send children to in-person classes during a public health emergency, more recent Supreme Court decisions read those cases far more narrowly. As the Court held in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), “the Court in Pierce expressly acknowledged ‘the power of the State reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils.’”

Conservative judges appear to be inventing new, unworkable legal rules on the fly. And, even if Covid-19 is someday eradicated, these new rules are likely to linger for decades or even centuries — sabotaging the nation’s response to the next pandemic in the process.

“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” said a DC police officer.

The first hearing of the January 6 Select Committee contained harrowing accounts from four law enforcement officers about the physical, emotional, and racial abuse they suffered that day — and served as an indictment of Republicans who have spent recent months trying to downplay the insurrection and deflect criticism.

One of the main themes of Tuesday’s hearing was that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was a really big deal — one that imperils the future of American democracy. DC police officer Michael Fanone drove that point home during perhaps the most memorable moment of the proceedings, pounding on a table as he alluded to the disinterest of GOP leadership like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is boycotting the committee: “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he said.

“Nothing has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day and in doing so betray their oath of office,” Fanone added.

Fanone, who like the other officers was appearing in his personal capacity, later detailed how he was beaten unconscious by rioters and pleaded for his life by telling them, “I’ve got kids!”

The two Republicans on the committee, Reps. Liz Cheney (WY) and Adam Kinzinger (IL), also sounded off on members of their party for not treating the January 6 attack on the Capitol with the gravity it deserves.

“On January 6th and in the days thereafter, almost all members of my party recognized the events of that day for what they actually were,” Cheney said during her opening statement, contrasting that with more recent efforts to downplay January 6. “No member of Congress should attempt to defend the indefensible, obstruct this investigation, or whitewash what happened that day.”

Whitewashing is exactly what most Republican members of Congress are trying to do. Take the structure of the commission itself: For two of his five spots, McCarthy chose to nominate House Republicans who voted in January against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to seat each of them, McCarthy decided to dissociate from the committee altogether.

One of those House Republicans, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), went on Fox News as soon as Tuesday’s hearing ended and shrugged it off as “scripted by Nancy Pelosi.”

Another Republican who voted against certifying the election results, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), took to Twitter earlier Tuesday and called for Cheney and Kinzinger’s expulsion from the House Republican conference.

Kinzinger, for his part, repeatedly became emotional while questioning the officers. Choking up, he concluded by telling them, “we thank you for holding that line.”

“Like most Americans, I’m frustrated that six months after a deadly insurrection breached the United States Capitol for several hours on live television, we still don’t know exactly what happened,” Kinzinger said at another point. “Why? Because many in my party have treated this as just another partisan fight. It’s toxic.”

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t appear as though the first January 6 select committee hearing persuaded Republican leaders to take the insurrection more seriously. McCarthy said he was stuck in meetings and didn’t see any of it, while McConnell told reporters he was too “busy doing work.” But both of them made clear months ago that with the 2022 midterms looming and January 6 being a political loser for Republicans, they wanted to move on as quickly as possible.

The hearing drove home that the insurrection wasn’t a “normal tourist visit”

The four officers who took part in Tuesday’s hearing humanized some of the statistics from that day — 150 officers injured, and five deaths, including four Trump supporters and Officer Brian Sicknick (there’s some controversy over his cause of death). Each of their respective body cam videos from that day was played.

While Republicans like McCarthy and Banks have sought to shift the focus from how Trump and his supporters encouraged the insurrection to law enforcement failures that contributed to the Capitol being overrun, the officers who testified on Tuesday linked Trump’s rhetoric to the unrest. They urged the select committee to focus on the bigger picture.

It’s worth noting that security planning failures helped enable the insurrectionists to overrun law enforcement officers and come perilously close to laying hands on members of Congress — the Senate last month released a bipartisan report outlining some of those failures. But that report didn’t tackle the root causes of the riot.

“The rioters that attempted to reach the Capitol were shouting, ‘Trump sent us,’” said US Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell: “I recall thinking to myself, ‘This is how I’m gonna die.’”

Gonell later said he views Trump’s comments about how the insurrectionists were actually a “loving crowd” on a “normal tourist visit” who were “hugging and kissing” officers as “a pathetic excuse for his behavior,” adding, “I’m still recovering from those ‘hugs and kisses’ that day.” (Gonell testified that he’ll have to undergo multiple surgeries to address injuries he suffered that day.)

In one of the hearing’s few lighter moments, DC officer Daniel Hodges — who in one of the most indelible images from January 6 was filmed being crushed in a Capitol doorway during a struggle with rioters — highlighted the absurdity of Republicans comparing the insurrection to a tourist outing.

“Well, if that’s what American tourists are like, I can see why foreign countries don’t like American tourists,” he said.

Capitol officer Harry Dunn — a Black man who testified about being showered with racial slurs at the Capitol that day — commended Cheney and Kinzinger for serving on the committee, but suggested the involvement of Republicans in an effort to get to the bottom of an attack on the Capitol shouldn’t be remarkable.

“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are being lauded as courageous heroes. And while I agree with that notion, why? Because they told the truth? Why is telling the truth hard? I guess in this America, it is,” Dunn said.

Tuesday’s hearing was meant to get the January 6 committee off to an emotional and headline-grabbing start, and on that front, it succeeded. It’s unclear when their next public hearing will be held, but panel chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) recently told the Washington Post that he’s prepared to subpoena Republican members of Congress and perhaps even Trump himself.

“We’ll follow the facts,” Thompson told the Post. “I would say we need to have as much factual data from any and all individuals implicated. And so that goes from the top down — it could be leadership in the House, it could be members of Congress, it could be financiers of the people who came to Washington on that day. It could be people who paid for the printing of material, people who paid for robocalls to go out, inviting people to come to Washington to help ‘stop the steal.’ All of that is a part of the review.”

Dunn closed the hearing by indicating that he and his fellow officers are supportive of that plan to take a big-picture view.

“There was an attack carried out on January 6, and a hitman sent them,” Dunn said. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

Simone Biles stepped back from the Olympic gymnastic women’s team finals. Here’s why.

The only way that an Olympic silver medal, a token signaling that you’re second best out of all of planet Earth’s 8 billion inhabitants, is considered a disappointing shock is if you’re on the United States gymnastics team. For nine years, the team and their American fans have grown accustomed to relentless dominance.

On Tuesday, the United States Gymnastics team did not succeed in its bid for a third consecutive gold medal in the Olympic women’s team final, losing to Russia by a score of 166.096 to 169.528. As huge as this news is, the result, the mistakes the US couldn’t overcome, and the resurgent Russian team were all footnotes to a bigger story about the well-being of Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast and arguably the greatest athlete of all time.

After shakily completing one vault, Biles briefly left the arena and then took herself out of the competition. Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Grace McCallum had to finish without her. The move was unusual, particularly because, in a sport riddled with unpredictability and risk, Biles’s greatness had taken on the force of inevitability. Since first competing at the senior level in 2013, Biles has never seemed to let anything — rivals, difficult moves, even harrowing abuse — keep her from winning. This year’s delayed Games weren’t going to be an exception.

And then they were.

Initial reports from the arena speculated it might be an injury, but Biles told reporters she didn’t feel right mentally going into the day’s competition. She said her health was more important than going through with the day’s events and more important than a possible gold medal.

“This Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself when I came in — and I felt like I was still doing it for other people,” Biles told reporters after the team event. “At the end of the day, we’re human too so we have to protect our mind and our body rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do.”

Biles’s withdrawal immediately impacted the American team, which heavily relies on her — but it also made a powerful statement about the importance of mental health.

What happened to Simone Biles

At the start of the competition, which took place on July 27, the Americans and Russians, who were in the top two spots, were both on vault, one of the Americans’ signature events. Traditionally, going back to 2012 (see: Maroney, McKayla), Americans have thrived on vault. Biles was set to go second and perform an Amanar — a vault that consists of a layout flip and 2.5 twists, which she’s hit over and over throughout her career, including at the 2016 Olympics. This time, Biles unexpectedly bailed out of the vault early, not completing the full skill, and barely saved the landing.

Biles scored a 13.766 for her vault. At the 2019 world championships, Biles scored a 15.233 on the apparatus. Gymnastics is a sport that’s usually scored to tenths and hundredths of a point — full points represent a big difference.

After her vault, Biles left the competition floor and did not warm up on the uneven bars, the Americans’ next event. This was a surprise, and cause for concern. Biles eventually returned to the arena, and it was announced that she would not compete for the rest of the night.

How Biles’s withdrawal affected the Americans

Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Obviously, losing the best gymnast of all time is going to adversely affect a team. It’s akin to a Bulls championship basketball team not having Michael Jordan suit up. The team just isn’t going to have the same firepower. But gymnastics’ scoring makes a withdrawal especially difficult.

In the Olympics team finals, teams have a pool of four gymnasts. From those four, teams pick three gymnasts to compete in each of the four apparatuses. Those three gymnasts’ scores — 12 in total across the four events — will count no matter what, but the wrinkle is that you don’t have to submit the same three gymnasts across all events. You can theoretically use the fourth gymnast as a substitute (again, see McKayla Maroney’s vault in 2012) to cover for a gymnast who might be weaker or to really play to your strengths.

Biles was slated to compete in all four events for the team, and losing her meant that her teammates had to make up for Biles’s scoring, 33 percent of the team total. Logistically, it also meant that teammates Jordan Chiles and Suni Lee would have to compete across all four events. Initially, Chiles was going to skip the uneven bars and balance beam and Lee would skip the floor exercise.

Lee and Chiles having to adjust and prepare last minute is a huge blow. But they’re both extremely talented gymnasts.

Even without Biles and with an unusually slow start, the Americans were within striking distance after three rotations, having outscored the Russian team 41.232 to 39.532 on the balance beam. The problem came in the fourth rotation as the team suffered mistakes on the floor exercise, an event that’s traditionally been an American strong suit and one of Biles’s best events. It’s difficult to say whether mistakes were “unusual” as international competition was put on pause because of the pandemic and Biles’s withdrawal was an extraordinary circumstance, but the Americans’ final tally was some three points behind the Russian team.

The US gymnastics team took Simone Biles’s greatness as a given

Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

As the dust settles on the results, one of the lingering criticisms from commentators and fans of gymnastics is that US team coordinator Tom Forster failed to make the best, most strategic choices for the team. Instead of assembling the team by highest scoring potential, he went by team rank and results. And the gist of the criticism is simple: Forster did not bring the highest-scoring team he could have to the Olympics.

“We’re so, so fortunate that our athletes are so strong that I don’t think it’s going to come down to tenths of a point in Tokyo,” Forster told reporters after the Olympic trials. “We didn’t feel like it was worth changing the integrity of the process simply for a couple of tenths.”

Forster was referring to selecting Grace McCallum over MyKayla Skinner. Though she was outscored by McCallum in the all-around competition at the trials, Skinner’s specialties, especially in vault, would have given the US a higher potential team score. With the way the current scoring system favors difficulty, the highest potential scores are something coaches have to seriously consider if they want to win.

Observers also say it’s curious that Forster used that language: the “integrity of the process.” Back in 1996, Forster coached a gymnast named Theresa Kulikowski who finished sixth at trials and would have made the team that would go on to be known as the Magnificent 7. But Kulikowski was bumped from the team for Shannon Miller and Dominique Moceanu, which drew Forster’s ire. Forster’s lack of flexibility and insistence on maintaining “fairness” and standings seems to be a reaction to his disappointment with the ’96 decision, even though critics believe that kind of thinking is outdated.

“All-around standings aren’t a process. They’re just results. What you do with those results, how you interpret them, that’s the process,” wrote Dvora Meyers at Defector, explaining that scoring during trials is just one consideration rather than the end-all and be-all. Meyers’s article puts into words a lot of criticisms voiced against Forster: that he didn’t do his job to scout his athletes, assess who was peaking or slumping, figure out the competition with the thoroughness of someone determined to win gold.

Forster’s comments also, as critics pointed out, showed how much he was taking Biles for granted, unintentionally or not.

That mentality puts a lot of pressure on Biles who, despite appearing superhuman, has talked openly about the toll of mental stress and injuries.

Forster didn’t seem to consider what would happen and what did in fact happen if Biles wasn’t herself or worse, if she was taken out of the equation. During the qualifying portion of the competition, in which all the US gymnasts compete, the best-performing US gymnasts who weren’t Biles or Lee were actually Jade Carey and Skinner — both of whom outscored McCallum and Chiles.

That said, with the way the competition played out and silver medal shock, it’s temptingly easy for Team USA fans to fantasize about all the “what if” possibilities. At the same time, though, there’s a group of young women who performed under chaotic circumstances and still won silver.

And then there’s Simone Biles and how we appreciate her greatness.

“Today it’s like, you know what, no, I don’t want to do something stupid and get hurt,” Biles told reporters after the team event, alluding to a feeling of mental stress and fatigue. “And it’s just it’s not worth it, especially when you have three amazing athletes that can step up to the plate and do it, not worth it.”

Biles added, “Coming here to the Olympics and being the head star isn’t an easy feat, so we’re just trying to take it one day at a time and we’ll see.”

Biles’s withdrawal is a wake-up moment for anyone who’s watched her become the greatest gymnast of all time. She’s achieved it so effortlessly and gracefully that it’s easy to forget the massive amount of pressure she faces day in and day out or the adversity and abuse she’s endured. Every time Biles steps into the arena, she’s expected to dominate. If she’s anything short of dominant, there are whispers about what went wrong.

Not participating in the team finals was a decision by Biles to step away, but also a moment for all of us to reflect on the importance of mental health. Similarly, in tennis, Naomi Osaka has also been having forthright conversations and addressing mental well-being. Despite spots of sour backlash, there’s been an outpouring of support for Biles from Olympic athletes like figure skater and Olympic medalist Adam Rippon, former teammates Aly Raisman and Laurie Hernandez, and 1996 gold medal gymnast Kerri Strug.

Biles will not participate in the individual all-around finals and may not join the event finals, which she’ll need medical clearance for. But it’s not as though she needs to do anything more to prove her greatness.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Over the last few weeks there's been a weird, wasteful, and just silly dispute in which the White House has tried to blame Facebook (and misinformation on Facebook) for not enough people agreeing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 (in light of cases ramping up again). Things have gotten so stupid that two Senators have released a terribly unconstitutional bill attempting to hold Facebook liable for "health misinformation" on its platform.

But... is Facebook actually to blame? Mark Zuckerberg (who, um, is obviously not an unbiased party) made a completely valid point in response to all of this: Facebook is available around the globe, yet much of the rest of the world is not seeing the same levels of vaccine hesitancy (indeed, the problem elsewhere tends to be a lack of supply), and that might raise questions as to why Facebook is facing the blame for vaccine hesitancy.

"..if one country is not reaching its vaccine goal, but other countries that all these same social media tools are in are doing just fine.. should lead you to conclude that.. platforms are not the decisive element.."

Of course, there's more to it than that, but what strikes me as most notable is that actual health experts in places where there are high levels of vaccine hesitancy don't seem to think that Facebook is the problem. They seem to recognize that it's actually a Fox News problem. In an article talking with health officials in states like Alabama and Louisiana, where vaccine hesitancy is the highest, they're saying the real problem remains Fox News.

Doctors and health officials in Alabama and Louisiana say their only hope for getting people vaccinated is if the media outlets that message to these areas, primarily Fox News, start advocating people get the shot, instead of pushing them away from the jab.

“I have people come up to me and say, ‘Why on CNN? Couldn’t you go on Fox?’ They are still very angry over the last couple of years. There’s an irritation. They are super frustrated. They need to hear it from the people that they trust. They need to hear it from where they get their news every day. And I don’t know why not Fox. Why not?,” O’Neal said. “But it has to change this week. Every single show. And it has to be about the community, not the ‘you’ because there’s been too much about the ‘you.’ ‘You’ they got indoctrinated. It is not about ‘you,’ it is about the community. You’re going to kill your community.”

Others have been making this point as well.

But despite the enormous reach of Facebook, only one media outlet has devoted itself to injecting falsehoods about the pandemic into the nervous systems of its audience on a 24/7 basis. That, of course, would be Fox News, the right-wing cable station that tells its viewers, over and over, that vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a mask to prevent COVID-19 is ineffective — and, in any case, is not worth the price we’d pay in giving up our freedom.

None of this should be surprising. For years now we've been pointing people to the detailed, data-driven research findings of Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts in their book, Network Propaganda, which traced the actual flow of mis- and disinformation regarding the 2016 Presidential election, and found that the main vector (by far) was not Facebook, but Fox News. Yes, things would spread on Facebook eventually, but only after Fox News would make it into a story. A later study they did regarding disinformation about mail-in ballots found the same thing.

That's not to say that mis- and disinformation don't travel on Facebook. Clearly it happens all the time. But focusing on social media, as if it's the primary culprit, or that somehow getting Facebook to delete the propagandists on that platform will magically solve all disinformation is clearly folly. Of course, you won't see Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Lujan introducing bills to make Fox News liable for the health misinformation they spew -- they at least recognize that that would not only be blatantly unconstitutional, but would be interpreted as an attack on conservatives' favorite TV news channel.

Mis- and disinformation remain a real problem, but kneejerk attempts to blame social media are not helping and not getting at any of the root causes of the credibility crisis currently facing people throughout the US.

We’re all familiar with the Covid-19 line charts that show cases over time, which highlights absolute counts. There are peaks. There are some valleys. Emory Parker for STAT shifted the focus to how quickly the rate is changing, or acceleration, to emphasize which direction rates are headed.

Tags: baseline, change, coronavirus, STAT