In Rob Walker's fantastic newsletter, The Art of Noticing, he recommends an activity called "Narrate A Piece of Quotidian Footage" which is from his book:
Basically, find or make a short, random, totally banal video of people or objects moving around; study
it closely; and invent a potential voiceover that makes it seem as if you are directing the action. This (weird? but fun!) idea was inspired by a John Smith’s wonderful short art film: The Girl With The Chewing Gum. I’m not going to try to explain it, check it out:
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It takes time, and it’s hard, and it need to be sustained for a significant period, but it’s effective:
The Seattle area, home of the first known coronavirus case in the United States and the place where the virus claimed 37 of its first 50 victims, is now seeing evidence that strict containment strategies, imposed in the earliest days of the outbreak, are beginning to pay off — at least for now.
Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Dramatic declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed. And preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington State suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed in the Seattle area in recent days.
While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number appears to have dropped, with one projection suggesting that it was now down to 1.4.
And competent leadership matters:
He said more restrictions may yet be needed, and that the state is not “within 1,000 miles of declaring victory.”
“It would be grossly irresponsible to stop these measures now,” Mr. Inslee said.
This also reminds me that Democratic presidential nomination field had a lot of impressive people in it — hell, even Michael Bennet, who was closer to the bottom of the field than the top, did outstanding work on the relief bill — which makes it all the more puzzling that Joe Biden emerged as the nominee out of it. (Which doesn’t make choosing liberalism over fascism in November somehow less difficult, of course.)
The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.
It's a war, we're told. With all our other wars, there's no limit to how much money is blasted into space, or burned making fighter jets that can't fly in the rain. But as congress passed a $2tn bailout, much of it for private corporations, another $1bn on life-saving medical equipment was sudden cause to worry about costs.
I grew up in the oil patch, so this email from TPM Reader DB resonated:
I wanted to write in with a different perspective than the one I’m seeing take hold among progressives. I work in oil and gas (yes; yes; I know. I’m sorry) and, as such, I interact with conservatives all the time. It’s interesting watching the conservative id coalesce as it does.
Initially, they have some diversity of opinion as new facts come to light and then they all eventually fall in line behind the command and control structure that is the conservative mind meld.
In the beginning, I saw a lot of what I think most people assumed was mainline conservative thinking: that the virus wasn’t a big deal; that it was just another H1N1 and we should just ignore it.
But, there was a second group that more closely aligned with this new Trump/Dan Patrick thinking. The comments I heard went something like this, “This is going to sound bad, but 2% really isn’t that many people and it’s mostly old people anyway. They’ve lived a good life. Overpopulation is a major problem and it will also help with social security.”
I’m writing in because I fear we are treating this as a more fringe idea than it actually is. I don’t think this is Trump reacting to his properties being forced to close or to a Fox News segment he saw. I think this has serious legs. …
It’s part Ebeenezer Scrooge morality; part inability/unwillingness to comprehend the scope of horror coronavirus is capable of inflicting on us. Of course, implicit in their thinking is that it won’t affect them.
We must be clear-eyed about what we’re up against. These people absolutely do not give a shit if 2.2 million people die. And they lack the imagination to understand what exceeding our hospital bed capacity by 30X looks like.
I really don’t think this is Trump sending out a trial balloon by himself. This is mainline Republican thinking and we should act accordingly.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
As of Friday, Louisiana was reporting 479 confirmed cases of COVID-19, one of the highest numbers in the country. Ten people had died. The majority of cases are in New Orleans, which now has one confirmed case for every 1,000 residents. New Orleans had held Mardi Gras celebrations just two weeks before its first patient, with more than a million revelers on its streets.
I spoke to a respiratory therapist there, whose job is to ensure that patients are breathing well. He works in a medium-sized city hospital’s intensive care unit. (We are withholding his name and employer, as he fears retaliation.) Before the virus came to New Orleans, his days were pretty relaxed, nebulizing patients with asthma, adjusting oxygen tubes that run through the nose or, in the most severe cases, setting up and managing ventilators. His patients were usually older, with chronic health conditions and bad lungs.
Since last week, he’s been running ventilators for the sickest COVID-19 patients. Many are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s, and have minimal, if any, preexisting conditions in their charts. He is overwhelmed, stunned by the manifestation of the infection, both its speed and intensity. The ICU where he works has essentially become a coronavirus unit. He estimates that his hospital has admitted dozens of confirmed or presumptive coronavirus patients. About a third have ended up on ventilators.
His hospital had not prepared for this volume before the virus first appeared. One physician had tried to raise alarms, asking about negative pressure rooms and ventilators. Most staff concluded that he was overreacting. “They thought the media was overhyping it,” the respiratory therapist told me. “In retrospect, he was right to be concerned.”
He spoke to me by phone on Thursday about why, exactly, he has been so alarmed. His account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
“Reading about it in the news, I knew it was going to be bad, but we deal with the flu every year so I was thinking: Well, it’s probably not that much worse than the flu. But seeing patients with COVID-19 completely changed my perspective, and it’s a lot more frightening.”
“I have patients in their early 40s and, yeah, I was kind of shocked. I’m seeing people who look relatively healthy with a minimal health history, and they are completely wiped out, like they’ve been hit by a truck. This is knocking out what should be perfectly fit, healthy people. Patients will be on minimal support, on a little bit of oxygen, and then all of a sudden, they go into complete respiratory arrest, shut down and can’t breathe at all.”
“We have an observation unit in the hospital, and we have been admitting patients that had tested positive or are presumptive positive — these are patients that had been in contact with people who were positive. We go and check vitals on patients every four hours, and some are on a continuous cardiac monitor, so we see that their heart rate has a sudden increase or decrease, or someone goes in and sees that the patient is struggling to breathe or is unresponsive. That seems to be what happens to a lot of these patients: They suddenly become unresponsive or go into respiratory failure.”
“It’s called acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS. That means the lungs are filled with fluid. And it’s notable for the way the X-ray looks: The entire lung is basically whited out from fluid. Patients with ARDS are extremely difficult to oxygenate. It has a really high mortality rate, about 40%. The way to manage it is to put a patient on a ventilator. The additional pressure helps the oxygen go into the bloodstream.
“Normally, ARDS is something that happens over time as the lungs get more and more inflamed. But with this virus, it seems like it happens overnight. When you’re healthy, your lung is made up of little balloons. Like a tree is made out of a bunch of little leaves, the lung is made of little air sacs that are called the alveoli. When you breathe in, all of those little air sacs inflate, and they have capillaries in the walls, little blood vessels. The oxygen gets from the air in the lung into the blood so it can be carried around the body.
“Typically with ARDS, the lungs become inflamed. It’s like inflammation anywhere: If you have a burn on your arm, the skin around it turns red from additional blood flow. The body is sending it additional nutrients to heal. The problem is, when that happens in your lungs, fluid and extra blood starts going to the lungs. Viruses can injure cells in the walls of the alveoli, so the fluid leaks into the alveoli. A telltale sign of ARDS in an X-ray is what’s called ‘ground glass opacity,’ like an old-fashioned ground glass privacy window in a shower. And lungs look that way because fluid is white on an X-ray, so the lung looks like white ground glass, or sometimes pure white, because the lung is filled with so much fluid, displacing where the air would normally be.”
“With our coronavirus patients, once they’re on ventilators, most need about the highest settings that we can do. About 90% oxygen, and 16 of PEEP, positive end-expiratory pressure, which keeps the lung inflated. This is nearly as high as I’ve ever seen. The level we’re at means we are running out of options.
“In my experience, this severity of ARDS is usually more typical of someone who has a near drowning experience — they have a bunch of dirty water in their lungs — or people who inhale caustic gas. Especially for it to have such an acute onset like that. I’ve never seen a microorganism or an infectious process cause such acute damage to the lungs so rapidly. That was what really shocked me.”
“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.
“When someone has an infection, I’m used to seeing the normal colors you’d associate with it: greens and yellows. The coronavirus patients with ARDS have been having a lot of secretions that are actually pink because they’re filled with blood cells that are leaking into their airways. They are essentially drowning in their own blood and fluids because their lungs are so full. So we’re constantly having to suction out the secretions every time we go into their rooms.”
“Before this, we were all joking. It’s grim humor. If you are exposed to the virus and test positive and go on quarantine, you get paid. We were all joking: I want to get the coronavirus because then I get a paid vacation from work. And once I saw these patients with it, I was like, Holy shit, I do not want to catch this and I don’t want anyone I know to catch this.
“I worked a long stretch of days last week, and I watched it go from this novelty to a serious issue. We had one or two patients at our hospital, and then five to 10 patients, and then 20 patients. Every day, the intensity kept ratcheting up. More patients, and the patients themselves are starting to get sicker and sicker. When it first started, we all had tons of equipment, tons of supplies, and as we started getting more patients, we started to run out. They had to ration supplies. At first we were trying to use one mask per patient. Then it was just: You get one mask for positive patients, another mask for everyone else. And now it’s just: You get one mask.
“I work 12-hour shifts. Right now, we are running about four times the number of ventilators than we normally have going. We have such a large volume of patients, but it’s really hard to find enough people to fill all the shifts. The caregiver-to-patient ratio has gone down, and you can’t spend as much time with each patient, you can’t adjust the vent settings as aggressively because you’re not going into the room as often. And we’re also trying to avoid going into the room as much as possible to reduce infection risk of staff and to conserve personal protective equipment.”
“But we are trying to wean down the settings on the ventilator as much as possible, because you don’t want someone to be on the ventilator longer than they need to be. Your risk of mortality increases every day that you spend on a ventilator. The high pressures from high vent settings is pushing air into the lung and can overinflate those little balloons. They can pop. It can destroy the alveoli. Even if you survive ARDS, although some damage can heal, it can also do long-lasting damage to the lungs. They can get filled up with scar tissue. ARDS can lead to cognitive decline. Some people’s muscles waste away, and it takes them a long time to recover once they come off the ventilator.
“There is a very real possibility that we might run out of ICU beds and at that point I don’t know what happens if patients get sick and need to be intubated and put on a ventilator. Is that person going to die because we don’t have the equipment to keep them alive? What if it goes on for months and dozens of people die because we don’t have the ventilators?
“Hopefully we don’t get there, but if you only have one ventilator, and you have two patients, you’re going to have to go with the one who has a higher likelihood of surviving. And I’m afraid we’ll get to that point. I’ve heard that’s happening in Italy.”
This is a guest post by Dr. Jameson Quinn, a long-time activist and theorist of voting methods who’s a friend of the blog. You may recognize him as a frequent commenter here but please don’t mention his pseudonym in explicitly googleable form on this post.
Right now, the best-case scenario is that Joe Biden will be the next president of the USA; the worst-case is that Trump is the last one. That is to say, we will have a choice between a guy whose primary campaigns twice flamed out from self-inflicted errors and who, the day he takes office, will be the oldest president the country has ever had;¹ and a narcissistic, mobbed-up reality television star whose platform is focused on his core base of racists, trolls, and racist trolls.
If you were hoping for something different, you have been robbed, and you have a right to be furious. You have been robbed, not by a “smoke-filled room” conspiracy of powerful party insiders, but by a voting system with predictable and recurring pathologies. And if we want things to work out better in the future, now is the time to be planning the reforms that will make that possible.
Our voting method was especially unfair to Elizabeth Warren. But it’s not just Warren fans who should be furious. Other people who never got a fair chance in this primary: Pete, Amy, Kamala, Cory, Julián, Jay, Kirsten. It’s debatable, but maybe even Bernie belongs on this list. And frankly, the 2016 GOP primary was even worse. If you hoped for any other options but the ones we have, you should want to fix things.
To explain this, I’m going to do 4 things:
Define what I mean by “a fair chance”.
Discuss, using examples, the multiple ways that our current system predictably fails to give candidates a fair chance.
Discuss the best-known reform proposal, “Ranked Choice Voting” (RCV), and why it would fix only some of those problems.
Discuss other reform proposals that could at-least-mostly fix all the different problems.
What I won’t do in this post, though we could discuss in comments:
Discuss pure multi-winner voting methods; the kind of thing that, applied to US House or state legislative elections, could fix gerrymandering and break the zero-sum polarization “doom loop” that makes modern US legislative politics so dysfunctional. I have plenty of ideas and opinions on that, and it’s arguably more-important than presidential politics, but it’s a separate set of issues from the broken primary that we saw today.
Talk about whether the US system — with partisan primaries and a strong president — is a good idea as compared to other models, or discuss how it could be reformed.
Goals and status quo
So, what does it mean to have “a fair chance”? Arguably, a candidate should win if they are an honest pairwise winner; that is, if they would be preferred by a majority over any possible rival in a one-on-one race. (Another term for this is “honest majority Condorcet winner”.) In theory, it’s possible that there is no such candidate, if there’s a cycle where A would beat B, B would beat C, but C would beat A; but such cycles seem to be rare in practice.³
Aside from finding the right winner, a good primary voting method should be reasonably easy to understand and use, both when voting and when looking at results. That’s why, even though I said above that a method should be designed to usually elect a Condorcet winner, I don’t think it should necessarily be a strictly Condorcet-compliant method. That’s because, in order to determine who the pairwise winner is, you would need something like a table which compares every possible pair of candidates. Since it’s tough to read such a table at a glance, it may in practice be better to use a voting method whose outcomes are easier to show graphically, even if it doesn’t quite guarantee electing a pairwise winner when one exists.
But our current Democratic primary process predictably fails to elect honest pairwise winners. To review the steps of that process:
It starts out with a staggered state-by-state series of choose-one, semiproportional primaries, in which votes for candidates under the 15% threshold are wasted.
Interspersed with the primaries are a few low-turnout, high-nuisance caucuses which at least allow supporters of “nonviable” sub-15% candidates to realign to viable ones. But since this viability threshold is applied locally, your voting options depend crazily on where you happen to live.
The results from those primaries and caucuses are converted to pledged delegates in a “proportional” process that almost seems designed to magnify rounding error and inter-regional inequities.
The delegates use iterated choose-one voting at the convention until some candidate gets a majority. If that process goes for more than one round, “superdelegates” (mostly elected in some other choose-one process for some other original purpose) get to vote as well.
In other words, it’s a hodge-podge of different voting methods, but the one thing they all have in common is a choose-one ballot format. (In the case of caucuses, the “ballot” consists of standing in a certain part of the room, but it’s still a choose-one format.)
Problems with the status quo
Among the pathologies of this Frankenstein’s monster of different choose-one methods are:
Unless and until the race narrows to two candidates, the “winner” is usually decided by a minority of voters. This makes all the other pathologies that follow more serious, both individually and in combination.
The primary predictably functions as a “Keynesian beauty pageant”, giving more power to voters who correctly guess which candidate(s) will be the frontrunner(s) among the electorate as a whole (or at least, who will pass the 15% threshold). This pushes voters to over-weight “objective” criteria like the amount of money a candidate has, the highest office they’ve held previously, their fame/name recognition, or the amount of media coverage they’re getting, and under-weight “subjective” criteria like the quality of their proposals or their qualifications for the job. That’s especially true when there are blocs of voters who want the eventual winner to “owe them one”, and so who are motivated to vote for the winner above and beyond how favorably they feel to that winner. But, since only votes for one of the two frontrunners can help those candidates get to a pledged delegate majority, even voters who only care who wins, and not who votes for whom, are pushed to vote strategically.
The primary predictably has problems with “center squeeze”. That is, “center” candidates whose support overlaps with those of multiple other candidates will be fighting a battle for voters on several fronts, and will probably end up having to drop out first. Meanwhile, more “extremist” candidates whose support groups only overlap with other candidates’ on one side, will be able to concentrate on just one opponent, and thus are more likely to survive. This is true even though it’s more likely that a “center” candidate is the honest pairwise winner.
The sequencing of primaries effectively gives more power to voters in early states. In particular, the first two states are two of the whitest.
If there were a contested convention, delegates would have no good way of knowing the true priorities of the voters who elected them, aside from the one top preference. This makes it less likely for the convention to find a good compromise winner in that situation, and even if they do, it would damage the democratic legitimacy of that winner.
Note that all of the above problems except #4 are related to the choose-one ballot format. So even though the primary uses different voting methods — choose-one semi-proportional in primaries, two-round choose-one semi-proportional in caucuses, and iterated choose-one majority threshold in the convention — the same choose-one pathologies run through the entire process.
Let’s run through a selective list of non-Biden candidates and see which of these pathologies they suffered from:
Cory Booker: Hurt by 1, 2, & 4
Pete Buttigieg: Hurt by 2. Helped by 1, 3, & 4; without that leg up, he probably would not have been a factor.
Julián Castro: Hurt by 1, 2, 3, & 4
Kirsten Gillibrand: Hurt by 1 & 2; dropped out before 3 & 4 could help her.
Jay Inslee: Hurt by 1, 2, & 3; dropped out before 4 could help him.
Kamala Harris: Hurt by 1, 2, 3, & 4
Amy Klobuchar: Hurt by 2. Helped by 1, 3, & 4.
Elizabeth Warren: Hurt by 1 & 2. Hurt by 3 perhaps more than any other candidate; I’d say that her campaign could function as a textbook example of center squeeze. Helped by 4 (and maybe would have been helped by 5), but not enough to cancel out the others.
That leaves Bernie Sanders, who was arguably “helped” by all five of the above pathologies. However, I think that even he was ill-served by this process. The advantages he got were all more-or-less fleeting and illusory. They all pushed him to campaign as more of an extremist, but in the end, that was a dead-end strategy. In a healthy primary process where a crowded field didn’t make it so hard to see voters’ true preferences, he would have been pushed instead to appeal more broadly, and it’s entirely plausible that in that environment he could have found a message to beat Biden.
So, can these problems be fixed?
The best-known proposal to reform choose-one voting is RCV: ranked-choice voting. Note that like “choose-one”, “ranked choice” is really just a ballot format, not a full voting method. In practice, it’s used to refer to two related voting methods: IRV (instant runoff voting) for single-winner contests, and STV (single transferable vote) for multi-winner ones. In both cases, after the voters rank the candidates, the candidates are sequentially eliminated in a bottom-up process, transferring their tallied votes to voters’ next preferences, until all remaining candidates are above some threshold (50% in the case of IRV; lower in the case of STV).
Saying “the primaries should use RCV” sounds like a simple proposal, but in practice, it’s inevitably just as complex as the system it would replace. You’d have to use STV with a 15% threshold in each individual state to choose delegates, then IRV at the convention itself;⁴ in other words, it would still be an ungainly hybrid of different voting methods; difficult to explain, audit, or analyze.
Furthermore, of the pathologies I listed above, RCV would only ameliorate 1 (minority winners) and perhaps 2 (establishment advantage), but would do nothing to address 3 (center squeeze). In IRV, if the final 3 candidates are a “centrist” and two opposite “extremists”, it’s likely that the centrist will be the honest pairwise winner, but will nevertheless be prematurely eliminated, leaving a runoff between two extremists, neither of whom could have beaten the centrist one-on-one. Furthermore, because of the way RCV results are reported — inflating the apparent vote totals of frontrunners while minimizing those of other candidates — some aspects of problem 2, establishment advantage, could actually be worsened.
Are there other voting reforms that would do a better job at resolving the pathologies above? Yes. We’re looking for a voting method that’s easy for voters; and where the results can be counted separately in multiple states (either simultaneously or sequentially) and then added up to find a clear national winner; and which tends to find Condorcet winners. A few methods that would do that are:
Approval voting: the simplest of all voting methods. Each voter approves of as many candidates as they want to; the candidate with the most approvals, wins. The main organization promoting this method is the Center for Election Science (disclaimer: I used to be on their Board of Directors.) This method is easy to understand, and easy to add results across states. Unlike the current situation, voters in later states would have a strategic advantage over voters in earlier states. This isn’t my favorite option — I’d rather one that had fewer strategic incentives — but it certainly would be a HUGE step up from the existing system. It would resolve problem 5 (principal-agent issues in the convention); certainly ameliorate problems 1 and 2 to at least some degree, and, depending on voter behavior, might also help ameliorate problem 3.
STAR voting:⁵ voters rate each candidate 0-5 stars. The two candidates with the most stars are the finalists. Of the two finalists, the one rated higher on the majority⁶ of ballots is the winner. This method is promoted by the organization Equal.Vote, which is campaigning to get it adopted for local elections in several Oregon cities & counties. This would resolve problem 5, almost eliminate problems 1 and 2, and substantially ameliorate problem 3 (center squeeze).
Other voting methods such as ranked-pairs or 3-2-1. These have some minor theoretical advantages over the above suggestions, but probably not enough to justify their additional complexity.
You may notice that I didn’t mention problem 4, the White-voter-frontloaded schedule, in talking about the above reforms. That’s not to say they couldn’t resolve it; any of the above proposals would work just as well if all states voted simultaneously. But there are arguments that the current system has some advantages. Certainly, not enough to justify always letting Iowa and New Hampshire go first; but I can sympathize with the idea that “retail campaigning” might give a better chance to a high-quality candidate who didn’t start out with an established fundraising machine.
This is less a matter of voting theory than the above, so in this case I don’t pretend to have any special expertise that you don’t have; but, if it were up to me, I’d replace the staggered primaries with a staggered series of regional Citizens’ Juries. That is, I’d give randomly-selected groups of citizens — a couple hundred or so in each group — a chance to meet the candidates, analyze their proposals, and take non-binding but highly-publicized votes. The results of those votes would then help inform the actual binding vote, which would be simultaneous across all states, with early voting only starting after the last of the Citizens’ Juries.
Conclusion
Our primary system failed us. Ultimately, it was unfair to almost all the candidates except Joe Biden. We can fix it. RCV would help a little, though it would be more complicated than it sounds; approval voting, a bit more; and STAR voting would be an excellent system in all regards.
Footnotes
¹ I don’t want to exaggerate Biden’s faults or minimize his strengths. His friends say that he’s a good, loyal man, and while I don’t know him, I think they’re probably right. As a presidential candidate, he has arguably the most-progressive platform any nominee in US history, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton’s. And overall he has pretty good relationships with the people he will need in order to get stuff done: Democratic incumbents, domestic bureaucrats and wonks, and foreign leaders. It may be hard to get excited based on these factors, but they could end up being very good for the country, especially if they end up minimizing the backlash in 2022 and 2024.
² There’s no question that in 2016, Bernie lost the primary fair and square; that is, if you believe in small-d democratic primaries at all, Hillary was the normatively “correct” candidate. But on a purely practical level, there is a real argument that with a reasonable voting method, Bernie could have won any race among the top 3-5 candidates. You can certainly argue that he would have lost such a race due to the trove of opposition research that was never really used; but that’s a speculative argument that, reasonable as it is, goes against a naive reading of the polls just before election day.
³ Some argue that, because of the possibility of a majority preference cycle, a better goal would be to elect the candidate that maximizes “utility”; the one that makes the average voter “happiest” by winning. However, because self-reported utility measures are subject to strategic and other distortions, it seems that voting methods designed purely on this basis may have more-common strategic pathologies than pairwise-majority-based voting methods.
⁴ Why couldn’t the primaries use IRV on a nationwide basis, instead of the state-by-state-STV-followed-by-IRV-at-the-convention hybrid I suggested above? Because RCV methods (both IRV and STV) require at least some steps of the ballot-counting process be centralized. Doing that on a nationwide basis would be difficult to execute and nearly impossible to audit.
⁵ The name “STAR voting” is nominally an acronym, standing for “Score Then Automatic Runoff”.
⁶ In STAR voting it is in principle possible for neither of the finalists to be rated higher on a majority of ballots, if they are tied with the same number of stars on the median ballot. Usually, STAR voting would then choose the one rated higher on a plurality of ballots. In a Democratic primary, this might be the case where the superdelegates would help decide. In any case, it would be rare.
One thing we’re already starting to see is that the current COVID-19 pandemic is only one part of, though clearly the biggest and driving part of, an unfolding global crisis. The economic knock-on effects are now ramifying across the globe in ways that will not only complicate the disease response but create new realities and crises that have a life of their own.
You can see today’s dramatic drop-offs in equities markets around the globe. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the the S&P 500 are both currently off more than 6% since markets opened in the US this morning. Part of the immediate trigger is what can only be called a collapse in oil prices which began late yesterday US time.
The key point I want to emphasize here is that that began when Saudi Arabia launched what amounts to an aggressive price war with Russia. Russia wouldn’t agree to production caps to stem the drop of the price of oil. Saudi Arabia responded by dramatically cutting prices. It has some dimensions of a game of chicken. The bigger picture is that all countries with heavy reliance on oil exports were struggling to contain the economic impact of the crisis. Unable to operate jointly to do so, they’re now moving into an every man for himself mode, thus accelerating the overall decline and chaos.
Historically, Saudi Arabia has always been the country that has the biggest margins and biggest supply elasticity. They almost always have the ability to pump a lot more than they’re currently pumping. So in the context of a price collapse the Saudis have more ability to just pump more oil and limit the impact on their overall revenues. Countries like Russia have much less flexibility on that front. There are many other countries heavily reliant on oil export revenues that will be hit hard by this. Just to pick an example closer to home: the oil turbulence triggered a dramatic drop in the value of the Mexican peso.
Note that a key accelerant here is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman (usually called MBS), a man whose recklessness we’ve known in calmer times. In the two days leading up to yesterday’s events he had already arrested four key members of the royal family, including his uncle, the brother of his father the king and a cousin who was Crown Prince before MBS replaced him. All were charged with treason.
Whether this was a reaction to threats to his power amidst the current crisis or an effort to use the crisis to consolidate power isn’t clear to me and I don’t think anyone is quite sure yet. But again, big picture: the primary crisis is generating secondary crises with a life of their own. Here we have the primary health crises generating economic knock-on effects which have immediate and potential vast geopolitical repercussions.
In an age where blockbuster MMOs and aggressive action-adventure games dominate the landscape, there’s always something to be said for smart, atmospheric, slow-burn gaming that truly forces players to stretch their minds rather than their firepower to notch a victory.
That’s why the sci-fi themed, first-person puzzler Lightmatter has already started building a following as one of the most engaging and demanding new games of 2020.
A descendant of past puzzle classics like Myst and Portal, Lightmatter finds the player stuck in the halls of the seemingly abandoned Lightmatter Technologies building. The company’s mad scientist of a CEO has unleashed a new power source called Lightmatter. As always, scientific tampering has its downsides — and the unholy side-effect of this experiment are weaponized shadows.
Yes, all the shadows in this mostly darkened building can kill you dead. Unfortunately, there’s no simple light switch to be found either. You’re going to have to get creative and be resourceful to maintain constant access to life-sustaining light, solve the widening pool of mysteries found in the building and ultimately stop Lightmatter’s sinister plot before it’s too late.
In addition to surviving the trek through seemingly endless tunnels and rooms holding both hidden knowledge and doom, you’ll also be sucked in by the visual creativity of Lightmatter as various light tricks and tactics offer some eye-candy dazzle to this tightly-wound story.
Created by Tunnel Vision Games, Lightmatter is already kicking up a lot of attention in gaming circles, generating a host of very positive reviews on game platform Steam. It’s also racking up some awards as well, including honors from the Tencent GWB Game Awards, Game Connection Paris and Indiecade Europe. It’s also currently ranked among the top 15 games of 2020 on review hub Metacritic.
Right now, you can also save 20 percent off the price of Lightmatter, now available to play for just $15.99.
As David noted below, we’re in touch with several readers who live near the assisted living facility which appears to be the main epicenter of the outbreak in Washington state. One reader has generally high marks for local authorities, others more skeptical reports. All are concerned about the schools, both for the welfare of children and as a potential vector for the spread of the disease. People find themselves having ambiguous symptoms that might be signs of the virus but could just as easily be the kinds of mild colds we generally ignore every winter. The one common refrain is the lack of information and unclarity about just what you’re supposed to do.
One reader tells us of being told both to avoid contact with others and to go about your normal routine. Obviously these are at least partly contradictory messages, though one can certainly see the logic of each independently from local officials. The big thing is the lack of tests. People simply don’t know whether there are a small number of infections in their community – a few dozens or hundreds – or whether it is already widespread. What you would do in each case is pretty different. People are experiencing symptoms and not knowing where they are on a spectrum from infection (with COVID-19) to common colds to paranoia.
The critical driver here is the lack of testing and the lack of knowledge. But the reality is that public officials pretty clearly don’t know either. Everyone is to significant degree in the dark. And that is not a comfortable feeling.
It is clear that in addition to all the sensible precautions and preparations everyone needs to be prepare themselves for uncertainty. We think in binary terms about calm and panic, various levels of panic. But for most of us we’re simply not going to know precisely what’s happening. And at least in the short term, we’ll be in communities where the potential spread of the virus in areas we live simply isn’t known. Some of us handle risk and uncertainty better than others. But it is a stress for everyone. We need to prepare ourselves for more of it.
“Ugliness is a pathway to intimacy. You can’t have intimacy without trust, and you can’t have trust without vulnerability. In order to be vulnerable, you have to reveal parts of yourself that are dismissed as capital-U Ugly. There’s also this piece around disability — the interdependence of disability is inescapable. I feel like access is not a burden, it’s an amazing opportunity to be generative, to deepen community, relationships, everything.
When I think about intimacy and its connections to beauty, I feel like it’s more connected to ugliness than beauty. I think the only way that we can build intimacy is through ugliness. For example, there is something very magnificent about how disabled people build access to intimacy — that kind of intimacy that comes with not being afraid to state your access needs. Not beauty, but the magnificence or the learned experiences that ugliness teaches you on how to survive. People see this as an extremist thing, but what I’m saying is that it’s been a way in my life to not let go of people, and to live in that interdependence that doesn’t always feel revolutionary and good. Sometimes it fucking sucks — sometimes you just want to be able to take a walk by yourself. Sometimes it sucks to have to depend on someone to help you take a walk by yourself.
There are times when it’s incredibly hard. I’ve learned and we have all learned so many different pieces of how to survive, how to be and thrive within our lived experiences. The alternative is to pretend it away, but I also think there is something with disability that doesn’t allow you to turn away. You could try to pretend it away even though your reality is not such. But there’s a concreteness to me about disability that doesn’t allow you to pretend it away.
Shitty things happen. Ugliness is all around us all the time. Sometimes shit is not beautiful and that’s okay, that’s actually more generative, there is a depth to that. If I was able-bodied and I didn’t fall all the time, I would never know that experience and that depth. There have been so many amazing strangers who have helped me pick up all of my things from the sidewalk, from the floor, helped me get some ice. All of these pieces of everyday life are so connected to those moments of intimacy. There’s something in that.”
i can confirm, i left a huge stack of DVDs on the tokyo subway and picked them up at the end of the line untouched
When I was in Tokyo in 2017, I left my daypack in a taxi. I asked the person who was running a cooking class I was attending if there was anything I could do about it. He made a phone call and within an hour the backpack was returned. This article in Mental Floss explains why it's so easy to recover lost items in Japan. The reason is that large cities like Tokyo have lots of tiny police stations, called kōban (交番) in every neighborhood. People who find purses, wallets, etc., take them to the nearest kōban. Here's how it works, according to Mental Floss:
In 2018, 4.1 million missing items were turned in to police, and the chances of reuniting them with their owners is pretty good. That same year, 130,000 of 156,000 lost phones (83 percent) were returned and 240,000 wallets (65 percent) went home.
Missing items are typically held at the local koban for one month in case the owner retraces their steps and comes back. After that, they’re sent to a Lost and Found Center at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, where the item is cataloged, searched for information relating to its owner, and then put into an online database that the public can check. Belongings are held for three months. After that, they might be handed over to the person who found it. If not, they become the property of the local government, where they might eventually trickle down to secondhand thrift sales.
Ammann organizes his monsters into several broad categories ("Humanoids" from goblinoids to githzerai; "Monstrosities" from ettercaps to krakens; "Celestials" from angels to pegasi; etc) and then proceeds from a set of basic premises: every creature wants to survive; physical abilities define fighting styles; intelligence determines tactical nous; wisdom determines self-preservation instincts; etc.
Each monster is then given a set of tactical notes that nudge DMs into creating combat encounters that are different for every kind of adversary, with explanations of how the monsters will roleplay as well, creating a springboard for some really rich play.
This is a massive and ambitious project that I'm frankly in awe of. A companion volume, Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters, will come out in June, is aimed at players, rather than DMs, and explains how to use combat as part of your role-playing.
Like all good RPG sourcebooks, The Monsters Know What They're Doing is a hoot just to read, and transported me back to my days of poring over the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio. I can only imagine how much fun it is to play a session with a DM who's using it to guide their work.
“Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork - or underground work - often laid the foundation.”
My twin got me a signed copy of Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit for our birthday, and it’s been a comforting read this winter break.
“I was talking to a friend and I said, “I am undestroying myself.” The phrase just came to me, but it also felt right because that is where I am in my life—undoing the damage, both emotional and physical, that I did to myself, that was done to me. I’m trying to become a better person. I am trying to become myself.”
hey here’s a trait in abuse survivors that not enough ppl talk abt: loss of autonomy. it’s such a weird thing be whether it’s at home, school, work, etc it’s nearly impossible to do anything unless u’ve been given instructions to do so. it’s like, ur scared to use ur initiative and do something urself for fear of doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble. so u kinda just wait for someone to give u commands (and often get in trouble for not doing anything) and it’s just so stressful not knowing what to do with urself and whether or not to trust ur instincts
want a shirt that says YOU SHOULD FEEL VISCERALLY VIOLATED BY THE UNSTOPPABLE CORPORATE ENCROACHMENTS ON YOUR ATTENTION SPAN, BY THE FACT THAT YOU STARTLE LIKE A TRAINED ANIMAL AT EVERY NOTIFICATION, BOTH OVERSTIMULATED AND BORED, LETHARGIC AND JUMPY, WAITING FOR THE NEXT BIT OF VALIDATION WITH THE SAME SICKLY EXCITEMENT AND FEAR AS A GAMBLER AT THE TABLE
this posts the day after we binge the same channel?? i see you oo___oo
Michael Epler, AKA Pilot Red Sun, (patreon) warps his digital smeartool paintings with glitchy audio and crude pseudo-3D datamoshed effects that highlight the claustrophobia and deepen the nightmare. The latest, embedded above, is titled "Not So Fast" and is about a traffic stop that ends badly for the well-luded driver.
Below is "Ultimate Fuel". If you like this (or hate it in an interested way) check out the YouTube channel.
Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "A new investigation from Gizmodo just revealed that anyone, anywhere can get geographic coordinates of Ring devices from Amazon’s Neighbors App. Not only can someone find out where users live, they can use footage to track bystanders, locate children, and monitor people going into buildings, like clinics, for private appointments. Amazon sells these devices under the guise of keeping us safe. They’re lying. Their surveillance devices and network puts us all in danger. We need lawmakers to fully investigate the threats associated with Amazon’s dragnet and its impact on our privacy, security, and civil liberties. Fight for the Future has launched a campaign calling for Congress to investigate Amazon's surveillance practices. You can add your name here." (Image: Dan Calacci/MIT)
Liebestrasse is a new original digital graphic novel from Comixology, but it follows more in the European tradition of small, character-focused slice-of-life stories than the bombastic speculative fiction that's made the American graphic novel field so popular. In less than 100 pages, it tells the story of an American businessman named Sam who takes a job in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, where he meets and falls in love with an art dealer named Phillip.
Of course, the dramatic irony abounds. As readers, we know what Germany's immediate future holds—and soon enough, that other shoe does indeed drop. But also as readers, it's easy to get wrapped in the simple tenderness of burgeoning romance and ignore the warning signs that lurk in the shadows—just like Sam and Phillip.
A preview page from Liebestrasse, with art by Tim Fish and colors by Hector Barros.
The rapport between the two lovers is charming and realistic, with Phillip's witty flamboyance playing perfectly off of Sam's strong silent Americanisms. Artist Tim Fish does tremendous work with the subtleties of facial expressions; though the style is slightly more cartoonish than what most American readers might expect, I found myself consciously commenting on the acting as I read through the pages, as if these were actual people rather than drawings. I read a lot of comics, and that's something rare and unique, at least in the American market. The color palette by Hector Barros also gives the story a very classical comic vibe that fits the time period. Though the pigments are digital, the simple, solid color patterns evoke a more innocent era. The overall artwork reminded me of Dick Tracy in a way, as if this were a story set in the same universe, but in the queer Berlin underground scene that we never get to see in those crime stories.
But once the story reaches its inevitable conclusion—these are two gay men on the cusp of Nazi Germany—it really starts to resonate. "The parallels between the end of the Weimar Era and today’s global political landscape are too terrifying to ignore and we want readers to see those parallels, too," explained writer Greg Lockard in an interview with Pride magazine, and this connection is hard to ignore. Artist Tim Fish expanded on this in the same interview, saying "I couldn’t help thinking about the gay men and lesbians, living in a relatively liberal place and time, their lives abruptly changed. … Ultimately, I wanted people to be reminded that despite our steps forward in acceptance, there’s always a threat of steps back."
And that's the real strength of Liebestrasse: it's a simple and quiet period piece that starkly juxtaposes our current political climate, while also being eerily similar in ways that are all too easy to forget. These parallels are not an explicit part of the story, but they don't have to be—the bare facts of the reality faced by these queer men makes their story even more frighteningly relevant.
Liebestrasse is written by Greg Lockard, a former editor for DC's Vertigo line, with art by Tim Fish, colors by Hector Barros, and lettering by Lucas Gattoni. It's available exclusively as a digital graphic novel on Comixology.
Pack rats, aka woodrats, build their nests, called middens, from plant debris, rocks, animal parts, paper, and almost any other bits of detritus nearby. Frequently, they urinate on their middens. The urine crystalizes and encases the nest material, preserving it for as long as 50,000 years by some estimates. For paleobotanists, middens are a great source of information about how flora has changed over time. Zoologists study the animal remains and poop. And climatologists analyze the material for insight into past climates, even the most recent ice age that ended more than 11,000 years ago. In Smithsonian, Sadie Witkowski digs into the topic, including a story about what historians learned excavating rats' nests in the walls of the 1808 Charleston, South Carolina home of slave trader Nathaniel Russel:
Among the mass of organic matter, they found sewing pins, buttons, marbles, part of a uniform waistcoat, and even fragments of printed paper that could be dated to November 1833. The paper was darkened and curled but still legible once it was gently opened.
“It was protected from rain and moisture, and even though it’s sooty, it didn’t burn,” (University of Delaware art conservator Susan) Buck says. “So we just have all these fragile materials that normally wouldn’t survive.” Among the material, the team recovered scraps of an early writing primer, suggesting some of the enslaved workers living in the kitchen house has been learning to read and write.
To move beyond the written record, historians and conservators have looked for new clues in unlikely places. Common rats that surely plagued the occupants of the kitchen house on Nathaniel Russell’s estate have left behind an invaluable cache of items that reveal new details about the lives of people who are too frequently absent in the historical record.
“When you open up a rat’s nest, it’s completely unexpected. You just can’t be prepared for it,” (architectural preservation researcher Rucha) Kamath says. “Sometimes you come across nothing; sometimes you come across a whole treasure chest.”
“During the Universal war, it was theorized that placing an intact devil mask upon a living human, still containing some of that devil’s essence, could create a fused being – a devilskin warrior. The human would benefit from the devil as a sort of armor, the devil from the direct access to the human soul flame. Such a warrior could be pushed far beyond the limits of both devil and man, employing the strengths of both, and could eventually rival the demiurges in sheer power.
In practice, many attempts were made at creating such warriors, but in almost all cases, the human ended up mentally rejecting the devil, or the devil ended up quickly subsuming its host and burning out. Two powerful beings sharing the same flesh – one can only imagine the clash of egos that would take place, or the sheer mental control to fight with such a powerful body. The few that did survive became terrors on the battlefield but did not survive the war.
The practice still persists among devilkind in a more degenerate form, with the creation of ‘hollows’. Well-connected devils will go to great lengths to kidnap human chattel, which are ritualistically ‘hollowed’ out, personality and face alike, their life force preserve through arcane means until the devil may possess them at its leisure, without any inconvenience.
Both rituals are abhorrent in any case. Though I do wonder if any extant records of the practice exist…”
I highly recommend McKinley Valentine's email newsletter, The Whippet. In each issue she presents interesting ideas, art, videos, and articles.
Here's an item from the latest issue (#85):
How to survive solitary confinement
I like to read things like this, keep it in my pocket, so I worry less about what if it happens.
The recommendation is more or less -- you'll go crazy anyway, so go crazy with intention, to protect your brain.
The human brain does very badly in social isolation - we're not built for it, and people start hallucinating and dissociating very quickly when it's complete. It's actual torture, but people don't expect it to be because it sounds so low-key.
So the people in this article - both people who've survived solitary, and psychologists - suggest using a lot of visualisation. Imagine yourself in a much bigger space than you are, get to know it. Have a "workspace" where you train, maybe practice a sport in your mind. Every day, regularly, like you were outside and had a proper life. Imagine meeting a friend and having conversations with them.
Part of what makes you go crazy in isolation is the lack of external cues and structures, so it has to be structured visualisations, not just panicked uncontrolled daydreaming.
From someone who survived 7 years in almost total solitary confinement (again, this is torture, it is amazing he came out of it relatively okay):
"He he used to kill time for hours working out detailed visualizations of himself in a vivid alternate reality, where he could inhabit open spaces and converse with people.
“I might imagine myself at a park and come upon a person sitting on a bench,” he says. “I would ask if she or he minded if I sat down. I’d say something like, ‘Great weather today.’ The other person would respond something like, ‘It is indeed. I hope it continues until the [football game].’ ‘I know what you mean. In another couple of weeks it’s going to be cold as a witch’s tit in Wisconsin.’ As we conversed, I would watch joggers, bicyclists, and skateboarders pass by. The conversation might go on for half an hour or so. When I opened my eyes and stood, I would feel refreshed and even invigorated.”
IT'S A WHITE SUPREMACIST CODE NUMBER YOU DUMB FUCKING JOURNALISTS
Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York today and surprised attendees with the good news that his daughter Ivanka has created "created 14 million jobs" in the United States. That's almost 10% of the US workforce. Thanks, Ivanka!
At a speech to the Economic Club of New York today, President Trump declared that his daughter, Ivanka, has personally created 14 million new jobs. The president announced this figure — so astonishingly ludicrous it would embarrass a Stalin-era pronouncement — and then repeated it twice more as the crowd applauded politely.
The entire U.S. economy has created fewer than 6 million new jobs since Trump took office. So Trump is crediting his daughter with having personally created more than 200 percent of all new jobs in the United States. This is like supply-side economics but for authoritarian nepotism.
Image: Mark Frauenfelder. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.
The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.
Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”
Aries sun: competes with others when they feel inferior Aries moon: competes with themselves when they feel inferior Aries Rising: competes with the world when they feel inferior
Taurus sun: obtains for others when they feel incomplete Taurus moon: obtains for themselves when they feel incomplete Taurus Rising: obtains for the world when they feel incomplete
Gemini sun: moves on from others when they’re bored Gemini moon: moves on from themselves when they’re bored Gemini Rising: moves on from the world when they’re bored
Cancer sun: nurtures others when they feel unsafe Cancer moon: nurtures themselves when they feel unsafe Cancer Rising: nurtures the world when they feel unsafe
Leo sun: entertains others when they feel insecure Leo moon: entertains themselves when they feel insecure Leo Rising: entertains the world when they feel insecure
Virgo sun: improves others when they feel imperfect Virgo moon: improves themselves when they feel imperfect Virgo Rising: improves the world when they feel imperfect
Libra sun: mediates others’ conflicts when they need peace Libra moon: mediates their own conflicts when they need peace Libra Rising: mediates the world’s conflicts when they need peace
Scorpio sun: unearths others when they crave change Scorpio moon: unearths themselves when they crave change Scorpio Rising: unearths the world when they crave change
Sagittarius sun: runs from others when they feel confined Sagittarius moon: runs from themselves when they feel confined Sagittarius Rising: runs from the world when they feel confined
Capricorn sun: shuts out others when they feel unsteady Capricorn moon: shuts out themselves when they feel unsteady Capricorn Rising: shuts out the world when they feel unsteady
Aquarius sun: reinvents others when they’re inspired Aquarius moon: reinvents themselves when they’re inspired Aquarius Rising: reinvents the world when they’re inspired
Pisces sun: heals others when they feel hurt Pisces moon: heals themselves when they feel hurt Pisces Rising: heals the world when they feel hurt
Each monster is then given a set of tactical notes that nudge DMs into creating combat encounters that are different for every kind of adversary, with explanations of how the monsters will roleplay as well, creating a springboard for some really rich play.
