[y66]

My favorite pig farmer reported that he is selling his farm after 16 years and moving to Oxford, Maryland to be a waterman. That nearly killed me. The double-cut pork chops, tenderloins, slab bacon, ground pork and sage sausage from his Tamworth pigs were sublime.

[johnu]

Lots of talk about AI and bridge playing bots on this forum, but not much about dogs.

Sony's robot dog Aibo vs. a real puppy

[y66]

The Tiger Woods story has been a fascinating story from the beginning.

Here's Tom Fordyce's take on the latest chapter:

https://www.bbc.com/...t/golf/45625712

"This is less about a tournament victory than what Tiger Woods won in trying to get back: a sense of who he is."

Perhaps this will be the year in which this happens for a lot of people, whole countries even.

[Winstonm]

It appears the U.S. is re-fighting its Civil War:

Quote

At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump David Dennison because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump Dennison as people who were doing badly.

What distinguished Trump Dennison voters was, instead, racial resentment.

https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage

In an editorial by Paul Krugman, Ta Nahisi Coates is once again shown to have a deeper understanding of white privalege than most.

[PassedOut]

A Tough Negotiator Proves Employers Can Bargain Down Health Care Prices

Quote

Marilyn Bartlett took a deep breath, drew herself up to her full 5 feet and a smidge, and told the assembled handful of Montana officials that she had a radical strategy to bail out the state's foundering benefit plan for its 30,000 employees and their families.

The officials were listening. Their health plan was going broke, with losses that could top $50 million in just a few years. It needed a savior, but none of the applicants to be its new administrator had wowed them.

Now here was a self-described pushy 64-year-old grandmother interviewing for the job.

Bartlett came with some unique qualifications. She had just spent 13 years on the insurance industry side, first as a controller for a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, then as the chief financial officer for a company that administered benefits. She was a potent combination of irreverent and nerdy, a certified public accountant whose smart car's license plate reads "DR CR," the Latin abbreviations for "debit" and "credit."

Most importantly, Bartlett understood something the state officials didn't: the side deals, kickbacks and lucrative clauses that industry players secretly build into medical costs. Everyone, she had observed, was profiting except the employers and workers paying the tab.

Now, in the twilight of her career, Bartlett wanted to switch teams. In her view, employers should be pushing back against the industry and demanding that it justify its costs. They should ask for itemized bills to determine how prices are set. And they should read the fine print in their contracts to weed out secret deals that work against them.

This article describes the steps she took to get medical costs under control and the strong opposition she faced. She wasn't universally popular:

Quote

Under Bartlett's proposed new strategy, the plan would use the prices set by Medicare as a reference point. Medicare, the federal government's insurance for the disabled and patients over 65, is a good benchmark because it makes its prices public and adjusts them for hospitals based on geography and other factors. Montana's plan would pay hospitals a set percentage above the Medicare amount, a method known as "reference-based pricing," making it impossible for the hospitals to arbitrarily raise their prices.

Fed up, Bartlett ended the plan's relationship with Cigna. Her battle to upend the status quo riled some employees of her own office, who complained that she was demanding too many changes. Some quit. Bartlett didn't let up.

That Christmas, the Cigna representative sent each employee in Bartlett's office a small gift, a snow globe. Bartlett didn't get one.

She probably did not expect one.

[Al_U_Card]

People act (including vote) for many reasons. Enlightened self-interest, capricious advantage, wilfull devotion but blissful ignorance usually manifests as apathy. Trump got votes from the disgruntled and the dissatisfied. Most may not be sure of the origin or cause, but it is an itch that must be scratched. Trump appears to have scratched that itch so he, and his cohorts, may do quite well next month. Winning, as long as you feel that you are on the winning side, promotes loyalty. Bitterness and regrets can sometimes turn around a personal philosophy but the constant harping only serves to consolidate and solidify already formed opinions. Preaching to the choir gets no converts. When Trump talks about winning and being great and better, at least he may be able to bring around some new support and produce something positive. Anything is possible.

[y66]

From Deadwood, HBO’s Western, is maybe the best drama ever made. Actually, scratch the “maybe.”

Quote

For the most part, the great TV dramas of the post-Sopranos era (so roughly 1999 to the present) ask how we function in a modern society that seems designed to turn us into cogs in a giant, implacable system that couldn’t care less about us. It’s about navigating civilization — whether poorly or well. And many of these dramas are about what it means to try to tear that civilization apart.

Not so with Deadwood, which is about the impulses that give birth to civilization, the idea that living in a society necessarily requires the slow negotiation of the self with other selves.

By the time Deadwood ended, it boasted over five dozen regular or recurring characters, any one of whom could take over any given scene they were in. But in the eye of creator David Milch, they were all part of the series’ true main character: the town of the title. Their negotiations led to a slightly more perfect union with every episode.

The show’s first season frequently invoked the New Testament’s 1 Corinthians 12, in which Paul explains that the church is one body made up of many smaller parts (or, rather, people). Milch expanded this idea to the community at his show’s center. There were leaders, yes, but things that happened at the lowest levels of the mining camp rippled outward to affect those at the very top. There were no gods here, just men and women, struggling to get by.

Throughout its three-season run, Deadwood tackled all of the ideas that lay at the center of our society, from the way that we all agree money will represent value (when there’s no real reason it has to) to how even the worst among us might become better people and citizens. Deadwood suggested that, at its best, society can even us all out, can make us realize there’s more to life than our own self-interest.

And throughout it all, Milch’s dialogue — which has been called Shakespearean so often that it’s a cliché, but he really did write much of the show in iambic pentameter — sang out as some of the best and most lyrical in TV history, spoken by some of its finest actors. From Timothy Olyphant as Sheriff Seth Bullock and Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane, to Paula Malcomson as prostitute Trixie and W. Earl Brown as henchman Dan Dority, the show mixed historical figures alongside fictional inventions with a panache dozens of other historical dramas since have struggled to replicate.

At the center of it all was Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, a venal, murderous saloon owner in episode one, who gradually evolves into a pillar of the community over 36 episodes, in completely believable fashion. At a time when TV was mostly about good men breaking bad, Deadwood went in the opposite direction and made it work.

.. Deadwood was about why society is necessary, why we keep coming together and building communities and villages and whole civilizations. But it was also about the inherent deception at the heart of most societies, about the fact that to keep things rolling along, we need to tell bigger and bigger lies, which cover up more and more horrifying things. Deadwood didn’t try to defend or pillory this fact of human nature. It just described its existence.

This confirms my bias.

[y66]

I stumbled on this quote after reading a 2008 exchange between newly minted Nobel laureate William Nordhaus and retired physicist, mathematician and futurist Freeman Dyson:

Quote

He [Dyson] is out of his beautiful mind.

This will come in handy the next time my wife and I don't see eye-to-eye.

[Winstonm]

President Porky today called Stormy Daniels "Horseface". Is that nice?

[kenberg]

There are times when I read a news story for no particular reason and find all or part of it hilarious. In WaPo today there was a story about a woman charged with scamming investors. No reason to read it in its entirety, this is the part that got to me:

Quote

And when federal investigators began to look into her business dealings, she turned to voodoo curses to try to ward off that threat — filling her freezer with jars labeled with the initials of Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers and turning to spells involving beef tongue — in hopes of silencing the tongues of authorities, the government said.

A person can be arrested for trying to kill someone even if the attempt is unsuccessful. Should it be illegal to try and curse someone even if the attempt is unsuccessful? And who knows if it has been unsuccessful?

[y66]

Personally, I think it should be legal to put curses on people or pay a witchdoctor to do this as long as there is full disclosure.

[y66]

From Robert Wiblin’s Conversation with Tyler Cowen:

Quote

WIBLIN: Speaking of Tetlock, are there any really important questions in economics or social science that . . . What would be your top three questions that you’d love to see get more attention?

COWEN: Well, what’s the single question is hard to say. But in general, the role of what is sometimes called culture. What is culture? How does environment matter? I’m sure you know the twin studies where you have identical twins separated at birth, and they grow up in two separate environments and they seem to turn out more or less the same. That’s suggesting some kinds of environmental differences don’t matter.

But then if you simply look at different countries, people who grow up, say, in Croatia compared to people who grow up in Sweden — they have quite different norms, attitudes, practices. So when you’re controlling the environment that much, surrounding culture matters a great deal. So what are the margins where it matters and doesn’t? What are the mechanisms? That, to me, is one important question.

A question that will become increasingly important is why do face-to-face interactions matter? Why don’t we only interact with people online? Teach them online, have them work for us online. Seems that doesn’t work. You need to meet people.

But what is it? Is it the ability to kind of look them square in the eye in meet space? Is it that you have your peripheral vision picking up other things they do? Is it that subconsciously somehow you’re smelling them or taking in some other kind of input?

What’s really special about face-to-face? How can we measure it? How can we try to recreate that through AR or VR? I think that’s a big frontier question right now. It’d help us boost productivity a lot.

Those would be two examples of issues I think about.

And this:

COWEN: I think most people are actually pretty good at knowing their weaknesses. They’re often not very good at knowing their talents and strengths. And I include highly successful people. You ask them to account for their success, and they’ll resort to a bunch of cliches, which are probably true, but not really getting at exactly what they are good at.

If I ask you, “Robert Wiblin, what exactly are you good at?” I suspect your answer isn’t good enough. So just figuring that out and investing more in friends, support network, peers who can help you realize that vision, people still don’t do enough of that.

And:

COWEN: But you might be more robust. So the old story is two polarities of power versus many, and then the two looks pretty stable, right? Deterrents. USA, USSR.

But if it’s three compared to a world with many centers of power, I don’t know that three is very stable. Didn’t Sartre say, “Three people is hell”? Or seven — is seven a stable number? We don’t know very much. So it could just be once you get out of two-party stability, you want a certain flattening.

And maybe some parts of the world will have conflicts that are undesirable. But nonetheless, by having the major powers keep their distance, that’s better, maybe.

[y66]

From Canada Begins a National Experiment by Dan Bilefsky at NYT:

Quote

Across the country, as government pot retailers opened from Newfoundland to British Columbia, jubilant Canadians waited for hours in line to buy the first state-approved joints. For many, it was a seminal moment, akin to the ending of Prohibition in the United States in the 1930s.

Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

[y66]

It's a small world. I see that Debra Granik, who co-wrote and directed Leave No Trace, which Elianna recently recommended, went to the same high school as some of kenberg's kids which he mentioned in a post today.

[kenberg]

deleted

[Al_U_Card]

I've been trying to wrap my head around the blockchain concept as it applies to bitcoin and internet security. Fascinating but I am not so sure that it can maintain identity and security as much as claimed. George Gilder is one of my sources for this feeling despite his gung-ho attitude towards this new paradigm. Not sure I fully grasp the implications but GG says that Bc and gold both serve as ultimate metrics of effort/time in the natural capitalist tendency to deflationary economy. I can only wonder about how governments will act.

[y66]

The Renwick Gallery in DC has an exhibit of art works from Burning Man including a poster which lists these 10 principles:

Quote

Burning Man co-founder and Chief Philosophic Officer Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.

Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

More

[Winstonm]

Marcy Wheeler delves into why attacks like the synagogue murders are not called "terrorism":

Quote

....the reason why the government won’t call last week’s attacks terrorism, however, is precisely the reason they should. Call them terror attacks, and the networks of support and enablers get investigated rather than just isolated men treated as lone wolves. Call them terror attacks, and we start to ask what responsibility Lou Dobbs or Steve King or Chris Farrell (or the people who vote for and fund them) — or Donald Trump — have for the attacks, in the same way we held Anwar al-Awlaki responsible for his role in the terrorist attacks...

[johnu]

This is a crappy story:

Bill Gates aims to save $233 billion by reinventing the toilet

[Winstonm]

Kellyanne Conway has just produced a great new argument for those busted for drug use or driving while impaired.

Kellyanne: “By that do you mean sped up? Oh, well that’s not altered, that’s sped up,” she said.

Defendent: "I sped myself up with a little (names drug of choice), but I wasn't altered, I was sped up!"