What's Good: Sep. 11, 2020

Boating, organized labor, and root vegetables.

Sep 11, 2020

Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week I accomplished two big goals I’ve been sitting on for a while!

First, I put together, sanded, and oiled my new work table, which I am quite pleased about. It’s a table that’s also a giant cutting board, it’s 1.5 inches thick of beautiful maple wood, I’m going to use it to make so many things.

Second, I pulled the trigger on parts to build a new desktop - the first full-build upgrade I’ve done since 2011. I got a 1080Ti when I was in law school, yes, but more graphics power only gets you so far when you’re running on a CPU that’s nearly 10 years old. And the new nVidia 3000-series cards come out next week, bringing with them additional RTX improvements, ridiculous speeds, etc., etc., so that’s worth upgrading, too. My old rig will move to the living room and become a couch gaming box - no good PC parts go to waste around here. Alas, my power supply won’t arrive until next week, so I’ll have to keep being patient and wait a little longer to put it all together.

Wake me up (wake me up inside)

I grew up boating. I got my boating license when I was like 12 or some shit, I had to watch videos and take a test, I have spent many hours driving boats large and small up and down the Columbia River. And so this article made a big splash with me:

Alphaville does not have an opinion on the political effectiveness of boat parades. Putting a Trump flag in a rod holder and motoring around on the weekend isn’t any sillier than putting a sticker on a car bumper and driving to work during the week. And the Trump flags are, legally, bumper stickers. They represent what the Coast Guard would call a “private signal,” since they’re neither a national ensign or a yacht club pennant, which are used to show origin.
Flags, like hats and bumper stickers and any other private signals, are inherently confrontational. If they heave into view, you cannot avoid them by clicking away. There’s no political science on boat parades yet, but yard signs, for example, do have an effect on the margins if a candidate is already advertising.
Alphaville does, however, have an opinion on how to run a political boat parade: at either very high or very low speeds, in open water, and not in single file. The Trump boat parade on Saturday in Texas failed to do these things, and ended up fighting an opponent more formidable than any Democrat: physics.

I think you need to make a (free) FT account to read the story, but I promise it is worth it. You will learn about physics! And boats!

Get along, little doggie

Ah:

Most of Arpaio's Cameo videos appear to be standard fare, such as birthday greetings, thank-you messages, congratulatory comments. But one that began circulating on social media on Tuesday evening, an encouraging message for the organizers of an upcoming event, raised eyebrows.
"Hey, good luck organizing the Arizona Furry convention," Arpaio begins, though he pronounces it "Fury," suggesting he's not totally certain what he's been asked to talk about. It's "for animal lovers," he adds by way of explanation.
"I've always loved animals, fought those that abused animals and will continue to do so," he continues. "In any event, have a great convention."
…
Many members of the subculture have defined it as one dedicated to artistic expression and helping people come out of their shells, but they've long had to endure jokes from people who mock "fur-suiting" as a sexual fetish.
Judging by the requester listed on Arpaio's Cameo, the person who ordered the video may be one of them. The username: Sir Yiffs A Lot.

How to succeed in business without really trying

The story of Defector is a kind of incredible one. In case you haven’t been following this saga, the former staff of Deadspin all quit after its newly-installed CEO tried to run it into the ground and suck the soul out of it. What made Deadspin great was its irreverence; its staff’s dedication to telling the truth and to punching up. I am not a sports person - esports yes, but traditional sports, not really - but I still enjoyed reading their pieces because they approached issues with such a clarity of purpose that you didn’t need to care about the teams or the game or any of that to find them valuable. They wrote about what was actually happening, not just what the scores or trades were. They recognized that everyone involved with making these leagues happen is an actual person, with emotions and aspirations and their own investment in what’s going on. And their new CEO did not like that, so he told them “stick to sports” and they told him “eat shit.” Which led to this piece, and now Defector:

Welcome to Defector, an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin. Let me tell you who we are, and how we got here.
We are 19 people who want to create a website that you will actually want to read. We hope to give you a publication that exists not just as a name that occasionally pops up in your various social media feeds, but as a daily destination. We aren’t here to gratify ourselves or churn out “content,” a word wholly devoid of ideas and values, but to create good work that will earn your loyal readership. To that end, this site is built to run primarily on revenue from reader subscriptions, and though we don’t ask for your money lightly, we do require it.

I have not signed up for a membership - yet - because, again, not really a sports person. But I probably will soon, because I like their work and I want to see it continue. If you were a Deadspin fan, please consider subscribing to Defector. It is a big deal for them to be taking this employee-owned risk, they deserve to make beaucoup bucks from it.

Normal country

Things are bad, yes, but I don’t think a lot of people realize just how dire the circumstances are:

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Rose Jusino was waking up after working the graveyard shift at Taco Bell when a friend knocked on her door at the Star Motel. The electric company trucks were back. The workers were about to shut off the power again.
The 17-year-old slammed her door and cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go, hoping that a final blast of cold air might make the 95-degree day more bearable. She then headed outside to the motel’s overgrown courtyard, a route that took her past piles of maggot-infested food that had been handed out by do-gooders and tossed aside by the motel’s residents. Several dozen of them were gathered by a swimming pool full of fetid brown water, trying to figure out their next move.
The motel’s owner had abandoned the property to its residents back in December, and now the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic was turning an already desperate strip of America — just down the road from Disney World — into something ever more dystopian. The motel’s residents needed to pay the power company $1,500.

This shit is like a sci-fi horror movie. And it’s happening all across the country.

Not everything is for you

I do not have kids, obviously, and yet when I read things like this I am infuriated:

OAKLAND, Calif. — When the coronavirus closed schools and child care centers and turned American parenthood into a multitasking nightmare, many tech companies rushed to help their employees. They used their comfortable profit margins to extend workers new benefits, including extra time off for parents to help them care for their children.
It wasn’t long before employees without children started to ask: What about us?
At a recent companywide meeting, Facebook employees repeatedly argued that work policies created in response to Covid-19 “have primarily benefited parents.” At Twitter, a fight erupted on an internal message board after a worker who didn’t have children at home accused another employee, who was taking a leave to care for a child, of not pulling his weight.

This issue has better-permeated our collective consciousness in recent years, but still there seems to be an impermissible number of people who think that parental leave (or any “time off” for the purpose of parenting) is a vacation. Unequivocally, it is not. If you’re taking time off of work to take care of your kids - while your project-based tasks still accumulate and the world moves on regardless - that’s not a break. You have to catch up when you get back, you have to make sure things keep moving in the interim, and you have to, obviously, keep your kids sane and healthy.

Obviously things are hard for everyone! They are hard for me! But I am not tasked with ensuring the livelihood of tiny human beings who cannot care for themselves, and I realize that I am therefore less burdened than my friends and colleagues who are. This should be uncontroversial and people should chill the fuck out. How much money or time do you really need? And, honestly, if you do need time off, take it! We should all give each other space and understanding, right now. Always, really, but especially now. Jesus fucking christ.

What they actually mean is “acceptable losses”

A common conservative talking point lately is that we should treat covid like the flu and just deal with it whilst reopening the country, because it is “not that bad,” or some shit like that. They assert that we will achieve “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to wash over and through our populations, and then everything will be fine. This is an absolute load of garbage:

One of the pandemic’s most insidious misconceptions is getting closer to explicit national policy. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a top Trump medical adviser, Scott Atlas, has been “urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy.” Atlas subsequently denied the report, though during his time as a Fox News commentator he consistently argued in favor of fringe approaches that go hand in hand with the idea: namely that city and state shutdowns are deadlier than the coronavirus itself.
The idea of abandoning preventive measures and letting the virus infect people has already gotten traction in the administration. Just last week, Atlas moved to ease up on the most important strategy to fight the virus—widespread testing—by telling the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change its guidelines to advise against testing asymptomatic people. On Monday night, the president referenced the concept in an appearance on Fox News, explaining, “Once you get to a certain number—we use the word herd—once you get to a certain number, it’s going to go away.”
But “herd-immunity strategy” is a contradiction in terms, in that herd immunity is the absence of a strategy. Herd immunity is an important public-health concept, developed and used to guide vaccination policy. It involves a calculation of the percentage of people in a population who would need to achieve immunity in order to prevent an outbreak. The same concept offers little such guidance during an ongoing pandemic without a vaccine. If it were a military strategy, it would mean letting the enemy tear through you until they stop because there’s no one left to attack.

Very good piece by James Hamblin. Bookmark it and deploy it on Facebook as needed.

Good news can be fake, too

Let’s debunk some fake news, shall we:

Human trafficking has been having an eventful summer. In July, internet sleuths accused online retailer Wayfair of selling missing children in overpriced cabinets. In August, QAnon supporters (along with some well-meaning if ill-informed influencers) held nationwide “Save the Children” rallies.
And last week, there was the trailer story.
…
Well, to answer a one-sentence question with a one-sentence answer, 39 kids being rescued from a trailer in Georgia is not the biggest news story in America because 39 kids were not rescued from a trailer in Georgia.
…
The actual drivers of underage sex work are far more complicated than airport posters and Liam Neeson movies would have you believe.
First of all, decades of social science research has found that the vast majority of children are abused by someone they know, usually their parents but sometimes other children or figures of authority they trust. “Stranger danger” kidnappings, on the other hand, are extremely rare — the latest estimate is 115 per year in the entire United States.
Second, the summer-long panic about missing children is almost entirely based on faulty statistics. Though it’s true that more than 400,000 children are reported missing each year, that is not even close to the number who disappear. The vast majority of these reports are misunderstandings or runaways. Roughly 10% are kidnapped by a parent as part of a custody dispute. Over 99% return home, most within a few days.
Finally, when it comes to child sexual exploitation, the problem persists for complicated, heartbreaking reasons that have more to do with the failure of America’s social safety net than the rapaciousness of its criminal sex offenders. In 2016, the Center for Court Innovation published a survey of nearly 1,000 young sex workers in six American cities. The average age at which they had left home was 15. More than half had dropped out of high school, and more than 1 in 3 cisgender female sex workers had children of their own.

This also feels like a good place to throw in an article about QAnon and its “save the children” bullshit:

Kelly Ferro is a busy mom on her way to the post office: leather mini-backpack, brunet topknot, turquoise pedicure with a matching ombré manicure. A hairdresser from Kenosha, Wis., Ferro didn’t vote in 2016 but has since become a strong supporter of Donald Trump. “Why does the news hate the President so much?” she says. “I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research.”
When I ask what she means by research, something shifts. Her voice has the same honey tone as before, and her face is as friendly as ever. But there’s an uncanny flash as she says, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”
Ferro may not have even realized it, but she was parroting elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a pro-Trump viral delusion that began in 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-right corners of the Internet to infect ordinary voters in the suburbs. Its followers believe President Trump is a hero safeguarding the world from a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals.

Archive of our own

You would think it would be easy enough to make a functional, enjoyable website for people to share book recommendations with each other. You would think that, and you would be wrong, apparently:

On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world’s largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they’re losing their mind. After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them. Sometimes even checking what they’ve already read will be next to impossible. Across a huge range of reading habits and preferences, this the one thing that unites millions of Goodreads users: that Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable.
There should be nothing in the world more benign than Goodreads, a website and app that 90 million people around the world use to find new books, track their reading, and attempt to meet people with similar tastes. For almost 15 years, it has been the dominant platform for readers to rate books and find recommendations. But many of the internet’s most dedicated readers now wish they could share their enthusiasm for books elsewhere. What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster.

Never forget

It is September 11th, I feel obligated to include some article about the history of the day. But this is something a little different, from the always-wonderful MEL Magazine:

On September 27, 2001, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a new issue following a brief hiatus due to the September 11th terrorist attacks. It was a precarious time in comedy, with many humorists having yet to return and guys like Letterman and Jon Stewart deciding to play it straight instead of crack a joke. But in their first issue back, The Onion did what it always did — it told jokes. With headlines like “Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake,” The Onion found the pitch-perfect way to approach humor in a very sensitive time. Now, nearly 20 years later, the issue is widely considered to be an important part of comedy history — even an important part of the broader cultural history surrounding 9/11.
While The Onion’s headquarters back in 2001 may have been in downtown Manhattan, to get the proper context for their landmark issue, the story doesn’t begin in New York. Instead, it begins in Madison, Wisconsin, where The Onion operated from 1988 until just a few months before the 9/11 attacks.
Founded in the late 1980s by University of Wisconsin students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, The Onion was born as a weekly humor print publication at their college campus. A year after its debut, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to humorist Scott Dikkers and publisher Peter Haise, who, over time, oversaw The Onion’s transformation into a more satirical form of comedy.