What's Good: Jun. 25, 2021
Burnout, gel pens, and a beer shortage.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. It’s been quite the weather week in Chicago! On Sunday night there was an absolutely wild thunderstorm and an accompanying tornado warning in my neighborhood - the tornado itself tore through the western suburbs, but didn’t end up getting near me. Still, very scary! And now it’s raining quite a lot today, too.
What else? Free Britney, Scooter Braun can suck it and fuck his redemption tour (not even going to link the undeservedly glowing interview), the Supreme Court is eroding significant labor rights, happy 30th birthday Sonic. Loki continues to be great. (Minecraft server Reddit post.)
Sorry one more thing, as I was writing this post Revolution announced that the VSOJ release three weeks from today won’t allow proxies. And there will be an in-person release party with three special draft variants. This rules, I can’t wait.
Sun goes down
Our lead story this week is a heavy hitter, sorry, but it is really important that I share it and that you read it. We need to talk about burnout:
Last August, Dr. Scott Jolley came home at 3 am from a busy emergency room shift looking pale, far older than his 55 years. It was the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he had been the only physician on duty at his hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. One of his patients had gone into cardiac arrest after Jolley removed his personal protective equipment to meet his next patient. Jolley, athletic with dusty brown hair, had to frantically gown up and run back to perform a resuscitation. The patient survived, but Jolley felt agitated.
When Jolley’s wife, Jackie, woke up at 6, she found him at their kitchen table, hunched over and unable to sleep. He was worrying that in his hurry, he hadn’t put on his PPE correctly, that he might expose Jackie and their three daughters to the coronavirus. He was also mortified about what he’d muttered to himself as he left the patient’s room: “I can’t take this anymore; this is not good for me.”
If you are like me, this story is going to hurt you, and it’s going to do so in a deep, emotional, extremely crushing way. And then it’s also very possible that it will feel sort of unbearably familiar. I mentioned this recently, but I haven’t had a proper vacation since before the first pandemic lockdowns. Not even traveling, just, you know, time off. The constant stress and pressure of working all the time always, and being expected to keep going without breaks, in the face of a literal global pandemic… I don’t know, it’s all a bit much, right?
This story mentions how many doctors decline to seek care for mental health issues because the profession disfavors them for doing so, and that is a story I know all too well. In law school, classmates frequently mentioned that they were terrified to use the counseling resources provided by the university on the basis that some kind of record might be created that would eventually make its way to the bar. And UChicago’s counseling services in particular have a shoddy record - there were a non-zero number of instances where students were involuntarily committed to inpatient psych wards where the circumstances did not merit such treatment, and their continuation at the university was threatened as a result of that committal.
When you apply to join the bar, a common question is whether you have ever been diagnosed with a mental health issue. And while the common line is that the bar is only concerned with untreated diagnoses, it is extremely common for law students to forego seeking a diagnosis and treatment until after they are admitted to the bar for fear of being interrogated by a character and fitness panel with zero investment or interest in their individual success. After all, they’ve just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to go through law school - why even take a minor risk?
The medical field is similar, but even worse - as described by the article, any issues with mental health must be disclosed in many cases, and even those issues for which the individual is receiving treatment and managing effectively can be disqualifying. It is a godawful system.
The article discusses some potential solutions - for one, completely eliminating mental health questions from the relevant questionnaires. And while I endorse this change, I worry that it won’t be enough. We are already so far deep down this rabbit hole.
Can we fucking not
The Fulton decision was described by many as a limited compromise for religious liberty advocates, but it’s actually much worse than that:
The Supreme Court on Thursday handed a narrow victory — unanimous in result but not reasoning — to a Catholic foster-care agency in Philadelphia that refused on religious grounds to place children in same-sex households. A coalition of liberal and conservative judges seemed to have crafted a compromise of sorts — one that grants organizations contracting with governments some freedom to deny services to gay and lesbian clients for religious reasons. Yet the decision did not go as far as the most conservative members of the court would like in redefining religious liberty.
The compromise in Fulton v. Philadelphia is built on sand. It invites extensive and messy litigation by religious entities seeking to discriminate or impose their views of sexual morality on nonbelievers. That litigation will thwart efforts to balance competing values. Rather than tamping down the culture war between the conservative religious lobby and its progressive opponents, Fulton is likely to fuel grievances on both sides.
There is ostensibly a version of the rule at issue in Fulton that can be applied broadly, and so not implicate the religious “discrimination” concerns at issue in the decision, but I agree with Professor Huq that this is a bad decision that will cause a lot of problems. Both, you know, facially, in that not letting gay people adopt children is a farcical and baseless discriminatory practice, but also because the application of the rule is going to be a nightmare.
Elsewhere in the category of Supreme Court content: Retirement politics (Stephen Breyer retire already), segregationist throwback.
Open internet for all
Speaking of the general Republicans Bad theme:
Ohio state lawmakers are attempting to ban community broadband at the demand of telecom giants. If approved, the effort would severely harm the ability of local communities to build and expand better, faster, and cheaper broadband.
On June 9, the Ohio Senate approved a new budget bill. But a last-minute amendment shoveled into the bill is angering state residents and locally-owned ISPs, who say it’s an underhanded effort by AT&T and Charter to protect their regional broadband monopolies.
The amendment would ban the building of community run broadband networks in any areas where consumers already have access to broadband speeds of 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. Such a standard doesn’t even meet the FCC’s definition of broadband (25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up), and community ISPs routinely deliver far faster options.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, built a fiber broadband network on the back of its local energy utility providing fiber broadband as fast as 10 Gbps. Studies have repeatedly shown community networks better, faster, and cheaper options, forcing regional monopolies to not only compete on price, but improve their own local offerings.
I mean this doesn’t even make any sense. There is no good argument in favor of it. But you’re going to start seeing bills like this more and more often as consumers grow wary of their local semi-monopolies with poor stability and limited speeds. At some point, it actually will be infrastructure week, and communities will make the investments needed to support themselves if the companies won’t. Well, unless the Republicans stop that, too, I suppose:
Twenty-one senators, led by Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican, announced a new outline agreement for an infrastructure package last week. Disagreement over tax changes derailed previous talks, but this bipartisan group claimed to have identified a set of proposed financing sources that could pay for new spending “without raising taxes.” Reportedly, the largest among those was $315 billion from alternative financing schemes known as public-private partnerships.
The legislators are jumping through these hoops in the first place because for the past three decades, the Republican Party has organized its agenda around an absolutist principle: no new taxes, ever. But despite the senators’ insistence, these arrangements do not actually avoid extractive charges on residents. They just launder the new fees through private investors.
Rather than the government financing the rebuilding of roads and bridges that get you across town, you pay a private company operating in contract with the government — while policymakers pretend that they have avoided imposing new costs.
This seems very bad for our country, to me.
Everything all of the time
Hustle culture is Bad, Actually, and I will fight people about this:
Before starting this job, I blew $50 at CVS on neon gel pens, pleather-bound notebooks, and felt-tipped highlighters because a TikToker told me they’d make me enjoy working more. In the past month, I haven’t used a single one.
The TikToker in question, @Studynotesideas, is an 18-year-old with nearly 650,000 followers who produces content for the overstressed and underprepared student. Each video is shot at her desk, which features a bubblegum-pink keyboard, a collection of rainbow gel pens, and a peek at her greeting card-esque handwriting. She tells us which pens you need for seamless notes (no smudging), study methods that guarantee results (active recall), and gadgets that prevent procrastination. Her schtick is gently intimidating and reminds me of when you’d ask the overachiever in your history class for the notes you missed.
Networking
The other side of that coin is obviously that creators need to get paid for their work, or else they can’t pay rent or bills or any of the things they need to keep creating. So here is an interview with the co-founder and CEO of Patreon about platforms and relationships:
If you’ve been listening to Decoder or reading The Verge, you know that the idea of paying creators directly is popping up on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and in a range of new startups, like Substack. Basically, every platform is looking for a way to let creators charge their audiences directly, while taking a cut along the way.
The buzzword for all of this is the “creator economy,” which is just an overloaded way of saying that individual creatives can become businesses with multiple lines of revenue and a direct relationship with their audiences, instead of relying on a platform’s advertising model.
Patreon’s been supporting that economy for eight years now and has grown into a formidable business because of it, tripling its valuation to $4 billion just this past April. Several weeks after securing the investments that earned Patreon its new valuation, Jack announced the company was laying off 36 people from Patreon’s product and design team to refocus on a new product approach.
I have mixed feelings about Patreon - those layoffs suck, but the platform has made it extremely simple for me to keep my Minecraft server funded and provide benefits to our community’s supporters. The interview is interesting, though.
Brewskis
What makes a beer shortage? A pandemic, sure, but there’s a bit more to it:
In the spring of 2020, as a brand-new disease spread rapidly across the United States, millions of Americans arrived at the same conclusion: They wanted a beer.
This was, to be fair, the same conclusion that many of us were coming to before the pandemic began, but the ways we could satisfy that thirst had changed dramatically. As beer spoiled in kegs inside idle bars and restaurants, Americans set out in search of six-packs. Liquor stores and grocery stores, which were both categorized as “essential businesses” and allowed to operate during even the tightest local lockdowns, saw their alcohol sales spike. Booze-delivery services such as Drizly more than tripled their sales. As with things like paper towels and flour, beer producers and distributors scrambled to divert their product into the right packaging and onto the right shelves.
This swing has caused people to speculate that Americans might be drinking more overall, a theory that sounds plausible enough—life has been bad and also boring—but hasn’t really panned out, in the aggregate. Total alcohol consumption in the United States has been quite steady for years, including last year, says Lester Jones, the chief economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. What has changed, though, is virtually everything else about drinking. Swirling beneath the placid consumption rate was all the cultural and logistical chaos that has defined American life in the past 15 months: Supply chains broke down at the same moment that our lives changed in ways that had us scrounging around for sources of comfort. Now beer sales offer a glimpse of the lives we want for ourselves—and how disaster-borne limitations are still getting in the way.
ACAB
Lori Lightfoot wasted half of the year’s entire S&S budget on useless power flexing:
The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation spent $3.87 million on overtime in April, according to internal records—more than half the amount budgeted for the entire year. Most of it paid City workers to sit in hundreds of trucks in anticipation of possible protests of police killings of Black and Brown people in Chicago and Minneapolis. About ninety percent of that month’s overtime went to truck drivers and truck supervisors.
On April 1, the department was already over budget on overtime. Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 budget allocated $7.36 million to Streets and Sanitation for overtime this year. Heavy snowfall in January and February cost a combined $11 million, and staging trucks across Chicago to defend against civil unrest that never materialized pushed overtime spending to nearly $15 million by the end of April.
The mayor’s fears of Chicagoans reacting to police killings of Adam Toledo, George Floyd, and Daunte Wright led her to mobilize an army of City workers. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) also preemptively switched to twelve-hour shifts and canceled days off in anticipation of protests.
The Weekly obtained records of overtime hours and pay from the Department of Streets and Sanitation via a Freedom of Information Act request, and has similarly acquired data on police overtime as part of a months-long investigation of the CPD. The documents reveal a blizzard of overtime that accumulated over an eleven-day period that saw mild weather and no looting.
Crypto liquidity
Oh look it’s another story about a cryptocurrency scam:
A pair of South African brothers have vanished, along with Bitcoin worth $3.6 billion from their cryptocurrency investment platform.
A Cape Town law firm hired by investors says they can’t locate the brothers and has reported the matter to the Hawks, an elite unit of the national police force. It’s also told crypto exchanges across the globe should any attempt be made to convert the digital coins.
Following a surge in Bitcoin’s value in the past year, the disappearance of about 69,000 coins -- worth more than $4 billion at their April peak -- would represent the biggest-ever dollar loss in a cryptocurrency scam. The incident could spur regulators’ efforts to impose order on the market amid rising cases of fraud.
The first signs of trouble came in April, as Bitcoin was rocketing to a record. Africrypt Chief Operating Officer Ameer Cajee, the elder brother, informed clients that the company was the victim of a hack. He asked them not to report the incident to lawyers and authorities, as it would slow down the recovery process of the missing funds.
Crime is bad, obviously, nobody should do crimes or steal money or anything like that, but on some level you want to cheer for these guys - they just totally disappeared with literal billions of dollars. But on the other hand they probably obtained those billions of dollars from like, regular people who should not be gambling with crypto, not rich people who can afford to eat the loss. So ultimately you would hope the money can get found and returned.
Joyride
I don’t know, I feel like I have to include this, here is the story of Trump getting covid:
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s phone rang with an urgent request: Could he help someone at the White House obtain an experimental coronavirus treatment, known as a monoclonal antibody?
If Azar could get the drug, what would the White House need to do to make that happen? Azar thought for a moment. It was Oct. 1, 2020, and the drug was still in clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration would have to make a “compassionate use” exception for its use since it was not yet available to the public. Only about 10people so far had used it outside of those trials. Azar said of course he would help.
House of cards
Finally here is just a little more doomsaying:
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s British Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, was voted National Newspaper of the Year. At the time, many journalists, including me, likened the award to anointing Sweeney Todd as Barber of the Year.
But the Society of Editors, which made the choice, said they were swayed by the sheer number of scoops delivered by the paper’s newsroom.
There was certainly a titillating cascade of scandals: a cabinet minister sharing a mistress, a married American publisher, with a left-wing journalist; the charismatic young soccer star David Beckham betraying his wife by sleeping with his personal assistant; the manager of the England soccer team likewise with a secretary at the Football Association.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
QAnon’s economic explanation. Lina Khan is a privacy hawk, too. What if your TikTok feed is… bad? Yelling cameras. Blue box? When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray. Do we have to pay businesses to obey the law?1 Conservative critical race theory feedback loop. Amazon PR bullshit. Why Every Hot Girl Has IBS… Or Anemia… Or Depression. Your body just stops.
This is an old article, the answer is now “yes,” which is a fucking problem.