Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools
2 million
Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species
500,000
Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East
300,000
Daily usage of fire
70,000
Emergence of fictive language. Sapiens spread out of Africa
30,000
Extinction of Neanderthals
16,000
Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna
13,000
Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species.
12,000
The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent
settlements.
Let's put the US experiment in democracy in perspective. Let's step back from 24 hour cable news that requires sensationalizing the unimportant to keep viewers watching. Let's step back from Facebook and Twitter and Instagram which make what happened 10 seconds ago the most important event in history. Until the next post five seconds later. Sapiens destructive nature has sped up the destruction of the environment that we depend on, but not quite that much.
But let's also pay attention to the fact that where sapiens go, other species go extinct. I've abbreviated the timeline from Sapiens. I've left out the last 5000 years.
Did we remember all the things we need to take? Is it too much? (We always try to keep everything down to two carryon rolling suitcases and two backpacks so we can always handle our own stuff.)
Meanwhile the guy who replaced our old front steps - great job - was gone for the winter by the time the railing was finished in October. So he's back in town. Was coming Monday night, but we had a funeral to attend. Then yesterday morning, but never made it. He just called, he's coming now. (He's here! Yeah!)
And my wristwatch screen went blank last night with a tiny REM on the screen, which I assume means I should replace the battery. I got the screws out this morning so I could see what kind of battery I need. (Yes I bought a kit of tiny screw drivers long ago and it's occasionally useful.) But one screw escaped. [Recaptured!]
I'm excited. As much as I like to have everything planned out, I know that lots of surprises will occur. Good ones as well as minor (I hope) ones.
This afternoon we head for LA, Friday night for Argentina. Still trying to get what I need from my laptop onto the new iPad. And figure out how to use the iPad. It's Apple enough that it's no big surprises.
I keep updating notes for the house sitter as new issues arise. Tried to get a library book back to the library last night, but their new automatic drop off system said something like 'waiting for sorter.' Is that a human being? After hours?
So that's why I don't have more. But here are some presents from the garden.
First daisy bud opening yesterday.
The lilacs close.
And these little blue flowers whose name I once knew.
We have never had cable, though I've seen it at my mom's and in hotels. I remember when they were first starting to promote something called "Pay TV." The big advantage was going to be "no commercials."
I finally broke down and signed up for Netflix. It was to show my mom a movie when she was no longer able to get out of the house much. Netflix has a lot of good movies and shows. I'm amazed at the amount of raw talent that exists in the world. We get to see it because the cost of making a movie has dropped drastically with modern technology as have the distribution costs. And films we have access to nowadays, represent many different world views and show many different images of heroes. It's great.
But I really don't think I need to spend any more time on the computer beyond Netflix and my blogging and other non-entertainment activities. I just don't need Prime or HBO. I can't watch everything. And I'm particularly concerned about Prime after reading an article in The Sun that suggests it's the 'free sample of consumer heroin" to hook people into buying everything via Amazon, which, this article argues is trying to become the world marketplace and take a cut of every transaction there is. (This is an eye-opening interview!)
But with all the hype about GOT, I began to wonder if there was something so important, that not watching it makes me less capable in important ways. I've heard that it is riveting. That it's about ruthless people. Perhaps there's something to learn about our current national and international politics. But in what I have heard, no one has said it presents ideas and insights that you can't get anywhere else. Is it just really good story telling that plays on human emotions in a way that gets people hooked for however many seasons?
But then I began to wonder how many people who gave up other events so they could watch the latest episode of GOT, have also read War and Peace or Crime and Punishment? I'm sure many have done both, but many haven't. Is missing one more significant than missing the other? What about seeing a performance of King Lear?
I also wonder how many people who don't have time to read the Mueller Report, did watch Game of Thrones. How many of those folks are members of Congress?
I have enough to keep me distracted. I think I'll survive. I might miss some comedic references to characters or events in the series, but I don't think that will be debilitating.
We've been watching The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. It's entertaining in a bizarre way involving time travel, special powers, and a weird rich family. It also features time traveling assassins whose job it is to keep people from messing with the space-time continuum. We had just watched a scene where many (all?) of the people killed by these two assassins were in the room with a current torture victim (and the two assassins, who can't see or hear the ghosts) telling the torture victim - in many different languages - how they had been tortured and killed.
Not long after that scene our phone rang. It was late and we don't answer the land line anyway if we don't know who it is. They don't usually leave a message but this time there were two. As I was listening to the first message, a a third call came in.
My immediate reaction while listening to the messages was - it's from one of the assassins' victims. Or maybe someone from a different time is leaving a message for a time traveler. Here, you can listen yourself:
I looked up the number - 424 - 277 2647 - but didn't find much about it online.
It's probably a fairly mundane message in some language I can't identify or understand. Maybe she's just saying numbers. If anyone knows the language, please leave a comment explaining what is being said.
I used to think that imaginative fiction writers (especially science-fiction) were the ones who thought up new ideas and possibilities that less imaginative, but technically competent, engineers would eventually make real. Things like Dick Tracy's radio watch or sliding automatic doors and other inventions.
But after seeing this excerpt from a 1958 TV show featuring a con-man named Trump who scams a whole town into believing he can save them from the end of the world by building them a wall. .
Well now I'm sure it was the other way around. Time travelers went into the past and used their knowledge of the future to write stories like this one. He was warning us back then.
What the fresh hell. This is REAL. Filmed in 1958- about a conman who grifts a small town of suckers into building a wall. History not subtle enough for you? GUESS THE GRIFTER'S NAME
(And watch until the end) pic.twitter.com/6FA3p6KC00
Here's the whole episode for people looking for ways to avoid doing what they should be doing. You'll see how skeptics were scorned and even used to increase people's gullibility. How people lost all reason to fear.
As I said the other day (actually it was just yesterday) news stories fly by so fast and superficially, that there's hardly time to put all the pieces together. We get random puzzle pieces, bits of news, then they either disappear or get thrown into a big messy pile. So no wonder people don't understand much. Any story that requires remembering sixteen other stories that whizzed past, won't have any more meaning than the headline or talking point used to frame it by whatever news outlet one attends to.
Antipathy toward time rooted in the very human combination of vanity and existential dread is perhaps the most forgivable type of chronophobia. But more dangerous forms of time denial pervade our society. Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view of the future. Short-term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations find themselves out of office. Even two years of forethought seem beyond the capacity of legislators these days, when stop-gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions that do aspire to the long view — state and national parks, public libraries and universities — are increasingly seen as taxpayer burdens. . .
. . . We lack a sense of temporal proportion — the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, the intrinsic time-scales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.
We are, in effect, time illiterate, and this ignorance of planetary time undermines any claims we may make to modernity. We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. We think we’re the center of it all, unable to see either the past or future in proper perspective.
Another LA Times story, by Susanne Rust, tries to be timeful, after this year of horrific California fires, to look at the history of fires and other catastrophic events in California:
In 1860, a young botanist raised in New York and schooled in Connecticut found himself on the payroll of the newly formed California Division of Mines and Geology. His job: Roam the vast, new state, taking samples and observations of plants and animals.
Over four years journeying across California, William Brewer witnessed torrential rains that turned the Central Valley into a vast, white-capped lake; intolerable heat waves that made the “fats of our meats run away in spontaneous gravy;” violent earthquakes; and fires he described as “great sheets of flame, extending over acres.”
He, like explorers, journalists and settlers before him, wondered whether people could permanently settle in California, said David Igler, a professor of history at UC Irvine.
“People were flabbergasted by what was happening,” said Igler, referring to the droughts, floods and quakes of the mid-1800s. “They wondered whether this was a place where we could even really settle and where agriculture could be maintained.”
She writes about how the Indians who inhabited California lived in small groups that moved around and practiced controlled burns until the Spanish outlawed them. The Spanish. They were the landlords of California for a while before the US kicked them out through force and violence. But that's another historical amnesia when we talk about immigration.
And I began this morning working my way through another chapter of Seth Abramson's Proof of Collusion. That's a book that tries to put all the pieces together in the Trump-Russia collusion story. I've posted about that book already. It's an example of taking years of news stories and organizing them into sensible, in depth, cohesive organization of the facts. In the chapter today he writes about how Michael Cohen was a school boy friend of Felix Sater, who immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union when he was eight.
Abramson's book averages about five or six footnotes per page, so even Abramson is only telling us part of the story, but surely a lot more than most of us know despite the non-stop reports interspersed with click-bait and stories about the homeless, immigrants, murders, football players, weekly movie box-office earnings, and other relatively random bits of infotainment. So I checked footnote 78 from that chapter - a September 2017 article in the Nation on Felix Sater, by Bob Dreyfuss.
"Of all the characters caught up in Russiagate, none come close to Sater for having a decades-long record as a larger-than-life, outside-the-law, spy agency-linked wheeler-dealer from the pages of a John le Carré novel. His past record includes a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a bar brawl and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme. Despite that record, which came before he worked with Trump, Sater spent nearly a decade working with the Trump Organization in search of deals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But on August 28, Sater made the front pages of the Times and The Washington Post, thanks to leaked copies of e-mails that he sent in late 2015 and early 2016 to Cohen, concerning Sater’s efforts to work with a group of Russian investors to set up a flagship Trump property in the Russian capital.
In language that Cohen himself described to the Times as “colorful,” Sater seemed nearly beside himself as he reported on his work in Moscow on behalf of Trump:
“'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” wrote Sater. “I will get all of [Vladimir] Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” Echoing a line that would later become Trump’s own description of why he and Putin might get along, Sater wrote that the Russian leader “only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to deal.'”
Netflix and Prime and HBO should be doing these stories now, when they can make a difference. These characters and their misbehavior are as colorful and bizarre as anything they have up now. And learning about who all these people are now would help Congress members and voters understand how outrageous the Republic Congress' lack of integrity is.
All the President's Men - the Watergate tale - came out in June 1974 - not quite two months before Nixon resigned. The movie didn't come out until 1976.
Proof of Collusion came out November 13, 2018. But the Trump story is much less focused than the Watergate burglary. Trump's tentacles go out long into the past. His crimes and corruptions are myriad. His ties to Russia, Ukraine, and other nations - through his obsessions with putting up giant phallic buildings with with his name on them - require much more patience and attention from readers and viewers. And Bernstein and Woodward were better known as the two reporters who had been keeping the story alive.
Yes, long term, comprehensive knowledge packaged so that United States consumers of news can make sense of what is happening - in detail - is severely lacking. Instead of presenting the United States viewers with the picture of the completed puzzle (like on the box of jigsaw puzzles), or even sections of the puzzle as the pieces get pieced together, we get shown on piece at a time and little or none of how it fits into the larger picture.
The optimistic view of all this would be that technology has been changing so fast we haven't yet figured out how to slow down and get decent journalism for most people. Newspapers, trying to survive, are fighting for survival and clicks, and that eventually we'll figure this all out. More pessimistically, that hacking and trolling is taking us down the path to a version of Orwell's 1984. Just a few decades later than Orwell predicted.
You want more? An obvious part of the problem of getting the big picture is follow up of stories. So here's a video that was posted two days ago - a talk by Robert Tibbo, Edward Snowden's attorney in Hong Kong who is also the attorney for the refugees in Hong Kong who hid Snowden while he was there. It seems the Hong Kong bar association has created trumped up charges against Tibbo and are trying to disbar him. He tells us that they demand information from him, but the complaint against him is from an anonymous source and they refuse to give him any details.
I'd note that I lived in Hong Kong for a year when the British were still in charge. While it was nominally a democracy, people didn't have a whole lot of power compared to many democracies. Today it is part of China and the special protections Hong Kong people thought they'd gotten before they were handed back by the British, have little meaning. The fact that the bar association is doing what the government wants it to do is hardly surprising. China doesn't treat lawyers or anyone opposing them with much respect. Tibbo's arguments here are based on bar association standards in Western countries. I didn't hear him citing any Hong Kong rules or laws (though I may have missed it.) That's not to belittle his situation or his valiant efforts on behalf of his clients. But it suggests this video is aimed at the West, particularly Canada (his home) whose government is also dragging its feet in accepting this refugees.
Here's a Montreal article about Tibbo. It gives more background on Tibbo's life and legal career in Hong Kong. I can't figure out the date, but it seems to be much closer to when Snowden was in Hong Kong.
We landed with a thump and soon we were stopped. In line, waiting for other arriving planes to get gates, for planes to take off, and finally for a gate. It was about 45 minutes sitting on the tarmac when we arrive this morning. We had a long wait til our connecting flight to Maui, so it was sort of ok. Except the long layover was so we could catch the train in to Seattle to see our daughter and granddaughter. But we still had four hours of bliss. But this post is about the delays at Seatac.
When we got back to the airport and onto the plane, we left the gate on time. But it was another 45 minutes before we took off. But we made it to Maui on our scheduled time.
Here’s a plane that just arrived crossing the take-off runway.
And here’s part of the line-up of planes behind us once we got to the head of the line. There are four in the picture and there were four more behind the Alaska plane on the left.
The pilot said there’s a runway being repaired which is most of the delay.
I'm not complaining, just noting. We still had a wonderful time with the little one and now we're sweating in warm and humid Maui.
They painters are still working upstairs - the schedule is somewhat unpredictable - and most of our stuff is in two rooms downstairs. The bigger furniture is in the dining room crunched together or on the deck.
I've got a number of projects I'm working on, personal and community, including some longer blog posts like the Graham v MOA series. More from Denali. Thoughts on last night's Arctic Entries performance. The weather seems stuck in "temps between low 40s and mid 50s, mix of some sun, lots of clouds" for a while. The daffodils that were poised to bloom when we left for Denali last week are still poised.
So here are some old posts you may not have read.
1. How To Shoplift Without Getting Caught - Only Works If You're Black[White, obviously] - A visitor came to this post this week via a link in a comment (endof4th 10/13/2015 6:03 PM GMT-0800) on a Washington Post article about Georgetown shop owners alerting each other about suspicious black customers. It's still a topical and insightful story from Neil Degrasse Tyson - be sure to read the Tyson quote down to the bold section which answers the title question.
2. Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Flies or Fungus Gnats? - This is the post that has gotten the most hits ever (114,660 as of now on Google Stats) on this blog and continues to get most hits week by week.
4. Various posts from the Alaska Redistricting series are getting hits as the 2020 redistricting process is coming up soon. There's a lot there - here's a post that applies a lot of the concepts to how the Board created the house and senate districts in Fairbanks: Was Fairbanks Gerrymandered: A Look At the Riley Challenge to Alaska Redistricting Board' 2013 Plan Part 1 It's relevant to this November's upcoming race for Senate between Fairbanks Rep Scott Kawasaki (D) and Fairbanks Sen. Pete Kelly (R). There's also a link to Part II which looks at truncation.
The Anchorage Daily News had the following short piece in its collection of short stories on Monday:
"THE WORLD'S OLDEST PERSON DIES AT 117
At 117, Nabi Tajima was older than modern-day Australia, and everyone else known to live on the planet.
Tajima, born Aug. 4, 1900, in Araki, Japan, and recognized as the world's oldest person, has passed on that mantle. She died Saturday, having been hospitalized since January, the Associated Press reported, and was the last known person born in the 19th century.
She was living in the town of Kikai on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, the AP reported.
The title of 'world's oldest living person' is a remarkable, if not fleeting, one. Tajima claimed the distinction in September, when fellow 117-year-old Violet Brown died in Jamaica. Brown was the oldest person in the world for about five months.
Tajima straddled the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and is one of the few people who could recall a time before World War I. Two days after her 45th birthday, the United States dropped the first of two atomic bombs northeast of her home island. Tajima's secret to longevity was “eating delicious things and sleeping well,” the group said. She danced with her hands at the sound of a samisen, a traditional three-string instrument."
This is the kind of story the paper clips from elsewhere and so when I looked for it online, I found it in the Washington Post, with a few more paragraphs and some pictures.
My thoughts when I read this were about what was not in this piece. What was her physical and mental condition when she died? How long was she able to converse and recognize the people around her. Did she still do the things she liked to do? What did she eat and did she enjoy the food? And how long has it been since she did those things? What parts of her body were still functioning?
I think about my own mom's two and a half year decline from going out, walking on her own, mental alertness. The physical mobility went first. She had some ailments which didn't bother her when she was in bed, so she started spending more time in bed. That led to loss of her muscle strength and ability to walk. For the last year or so getting into the car was a problem. Eventually eating got difficult - things got caught in her throat and she'd start coughing. Her mobility was via a wheel chair and someone to move it. She sat out in the sun daily, reading, and I would walk her up the street and back. Sometimes around the block, but the next street over was very steep and had terrible sidewalk breaks.
While she had moments of confusion - particularly when she woke up in the morning and transitioned from her dreams to being awake - for the most part she was lucid and understood what people were saying and responded pretty normally. She could answer our questions about the past as we found things in the garage whose history we didn't know. My mom passed away at 93 after a vigorous life, which included working at a job she loved until she was 85.
My father had a distant cousin who lived to 102. The last time we saw him he was 101 I think and we picked him up at the assisted living home where he lived. He was dressed in a suit - how he dressed himself every day - and we drove to a nearby Thai restaurant where we talked and he ate with relish. I dropped him and J off and then parked the car. But he walked, without a cane, the quarter mile or so back to the car. At that point, I'd say he was in great condition and he helped fill me in on a lot of family history I hadn't known. So living that long isn't necessarily a painful thing, though i don't know how the last year or so went.
After watching my mom's decline, I read these stories about 'the oldest person on earth' with some skepticism. I guess it's a remarkable thing to live that long, but is it something anyone would want to do? The article says,
Tajima claimed the distinction [of being the oldest in the world] in September, when fellow 117-year-old Violet Brown died in Jamaica
I suspect people claimed it for her and I wonder what she thought about that title. Our Guinness Book of Records Syndrome makes us note these oddities, and I realize that for medical researchers there is significance. And if the title brought Tajima any joy, that's a good thing.
“She passed away as if falling asleep. As she had been a hard worker, I want to tell her 'rest well,'" said Tajima's 65-year-old grandson Hiroyuki, local media reported.Tajima was in the exclusive group of supercentenarians, people who have crossed the 110-year threshold. The U.S.-based Gerontology Research Group, which tracks certified people who become supercentenarians, reports 36 worldwide. All but one of them are women, and 18 of them are Japanese. Good diets and supportive family structure have been linked to Japan's world-leading life expectancy. Her legacy is similarly expansive; she had nine children and 160 descendants, including great-great-great grandchildren, the Gerontology Research Group said. Chiyo Miyako, also in Japan, has become the world's oldest person, according to the group. At 116 years and 355 days, she has about nine months to reach her countrywoman's mark of 117 years and 260 days. Miyako would not have to travel far to visit her male compatriot. Japan's Masazo Nonaka, at 112 years and 271 days old, was confirmed to be the world's oldest man by Guinness World Records this month. The organization had been set to recognize Tajima before she died, the AP reported."
One study in the journal Aging Research Reviews notes a deep-sea sponge from the species Monorhaphis chuni lived to be 11,000 years old.
"Ming, a quahog clam, died at the age of 507 when researchers tried to dredge the bivalve up from Icelandic waters."
"As far as mammals go, bowhead whales seem to have the most candles on their cake—over 200. It makes sense, since the marine mammals live in chilly waters, says Don Moore, director of the Oregon Zoo in Portland. . .
A cold environment causes a low body temperature, which in turn means slow metabolism—and thus less damage to tissues, Moore says.
I knew there was a good reason to move to Alaska.
"Currently the world's oldest known land animal is Jonathan, an 183-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise that lives on the grounds of the governor’s mansion in St. Helena, an island off West Africa."
Here's a picture of the still living Jonathan taken in 1900 [!] that I found at a website called ODDEE. (It also has picture of the oldest clam.)
I'm afraid the title question was not answered in the passing note of Tajima's death. The missing Washington Post does hint at the research interest in such people. For the ADN, it's just a newsy tidbit like the picture of Jonathan.
How should the media cover Trump? He is the president so what he does should be covered. And Trump has taken great advantage of that rule-of-thumb. His every tweet is news, the more outrageous the better.
My suggestion: Set up a "Trump Tweet" section in the back pages (say page 17, though for papers like the Anchorage Daily News, not every every edition has 17 pages. That just means no Tweet coverage that day.. They'd be there no comment. The section is just so the reader who wants to know, can go there. And also to maintain a record of his fickleness, his contradictions, and his breaches of decorum and law.
This removal of the tweets from the front page, takes away what I'm sure is one of his goals - to be on the front page every day and to divert attention from the more significant misconduct his administration is committing. This diminishes his ability to set the daily agenda.
There are lots of tricks we have to learn how to handle a president who disregards decency, truth, and the social norms that make a civil society possible. In many ways, Trump's tweets have offered a window into what he's really thinking, which I suspect is not radically different from what officials in in previous administrations were thinking - particularly in regard to race, gender, and the economically disadvantaged. Trump's tweets remind us of the truths about people in power we'd rather not know.
How we get rid of this president, I'm not sure. Since the Republicans are in the majority in both houses, and since they have this ability to look the other way on his racism and sexism and stupidism, (though apparently not his tariffs), we have to depend on Mueller's investigation. But what happens when he's got everything ready? Can he prosecute the president like any other person? I thought that was why we have impeachment.
This is different from Watergate. First, Democrats were in charge of the House and Senate. Second, the House Judiciary Committee did the investigation, not a special prosecutor, as the evidence began to mount, and the tide turned. But there has been so much evidence of Trump's wrong doings - his pussy grabbing tape, his incitement of racists and sexists, the Trump university scamming of students, all the women who have accused him of sexual abuse, his using the White House for financial gain. Any one of these would have pulled down past presidents. Will the Republican House ever take an impeachment seriously?
It's one thing for the people who elected Trump to get burned for their stupidity and willful ignorance. But the rest of us are just as screwed. Trump's directly or indirectly giving Putin exactly what he wants: the weakening of the US on the world stage, the deterioration of Western alliances and cooperation. All of these make it easier for Russia to get away with whatever Putin wants to do on the world stage.
The mid-term election is just a few days less than nine months away. Long enough to have a baby or do severed damage to the United States. And since the Republicans are dead set against abortion, we're likely to have to wait the whole nine months before serious action will be taken to get Trump out of the presidency. Unless Mueller has evidence that is so compelling that 20 Republicans in the House and 10 in the Senate are persuaded to join the Democrats to free us of this malignancy in the White House.
[Yes, this is a departure from my normal posts, but I learned early on blogging that 'neutrality' is not the goal of journalism. Neutrality in the face of clear cut malfeasance is no different from not intervening to stop an assault. Trump's presidency is the greatest crisis in my lifetime (and I lived through the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate). Staying neutral is a political act that supports Trump's vandalism against democracy.]
It's a gray, wet day today. Maybe that colored this post.
But things will get better. Be polite and respectful with the people you disagree with. Acknowledge their pain, their legitimate complaints. Counter their arguments with facts, but don't make it personal.
Someone sent me a link to this video that explains the economy. I'm always skeptical about people explaining the economy. Why? Because economists tell us the economy is doing well, all signs are positive. But we hear
about the people struggling to get by, (and probably know some of them too.)
that US income inequality hasn't been so high for a century.
(and see) a lot of homeless folks all over.
that to keep the economy growing we have to destroy the environment. (Well they don't word it quite like that.)
My reaction is that if these things are happening in a 'good' economy, then the economists aren't measuring the economy right.
But this video is a great start to learn how economist think about the economy, some of the jargon, and our options for debt reduction beyond the Republican mantras of no new taxes and spending cuts.
In fact, near the end of the video, Dalio explains why spending cuts alone exacerbate the debt problems.
"Raymond Dalio (born August 1, 1949) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist.[3] Dalio is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds.[4] He is one of the world’s 100 wealthiest people, according to Bloomberg.[5]"
So, when he says at the end, that this 'template' has helped him, I'm assuming it means it has helped him to time and direct his investments.
Crib Sheet
This video is content rich. He has reduced his presentation to the essentials. Every word is important. I couldn't listen to this while doing something else. In fact, I had to stop it repeatedly so I could take notes. But by doing that, I understood his conclusion.
Basically, he's saying:
The economy works in a simple, mechanical way.
A few simple parts
A lot of simple transactions, that are repeated over and over again.
These transactions are driven by human nature and create 3 main forces that drive the economy
productivity growth
the short term debt cycle
the long term debt cycle
He explains these three forces and uses the three visually superimposed on each other - productivity growth, short term debt cycle, and the long term debt cycle - to explain what people have to do to keep the cycles going in our favor.
He starts by talking about transactions (people exchanging goods and services for money and credit) and shows how these can lead to cycles of increasing and decreasing productivity and debt.
He puts CREDIT in the center of this model - as a critical means to increasing productivity and living standards (He points out there is $50 trillion in credit in the US, but only about $3 trillion in cash.)
You can agree or disagree with his presentation (I have a few questions and quibbles) but it does a great job of spelling out the basics of mainstream economics.
He tells us at the end that the short term debt cycles can be fixed by the central bank (The Fed in the US) decreasing interest rates. But each time it does this and restimulates the economy and productivity growth, it increases the long term debt until the long term debt cycle gets us to a depression.
He offers four solutions at that point. (Lowering interest doesn't work because it is already at 0% at this point):
Cut spending
Restructure the debt
Income redistribution
Print more money
He argues that cutting spending increases the problem, and the ultimate solution is a combination of all four, which, if done well (balancing inflationary and deflationary ways to deleverage) it is 'beautiful' and gets us balanced again with the least disruption.
I promise if you watch this carefully and take some notes, all this will make perfect sense.
This is useful to gather jargon and understanding for when you talk to your Republican congress members who only want to cut spending and taxes.
And, of course, economists don't agree amongst themselves, so take this all with a grain of salt. Consider it a starting point for finding out more.
[UPDATE 5:45pm: I've added the word 'video' into the title after seeing how relatively few people have looked at this post so far today. LA Rain got more hits faster. People apparently don't want to deal with the hard topics. The video is really well done, and maybe by adding video to the title more people will stake a look. Just musing here on blogging and people's interests. I do recognize that I too get overloaded and skip things I should read.]
Getting perspective is always good. Looking back 100 years helps do that. So as 2018 begins, let's look at who was born 100 years ago. And remember the babies you see this year may be on a list like this in 2118. Treat them well.
Also, consider that if they lived in the same neighborhood, these folks would have been classmates at school. We don't always recognize famous folks who were cohorts. I'm grouping them by areas they gained fame and in order of their deaths. These are just a few of the 1918 birth group who did noteworthy (a non-judgmental term) things. I'll do one or two more posts with other categories.
Politics/Government
Two African leaders and Nobel Peace Prize winners, but overall a sketchy group. One assassinated and two others executed.
Political prisoner then President of South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize,
[UPDATE Jan 2, 2018: AKBright reminded me in a comment below that Anchorage's Ruth Sheridan was born in 1918. She's still visible around town and still fighting for justice. Somewhere I must have a picture of her, but not sure where.]
When I first did a post like this back in 2007, I had to work hard to pull names together. Now there are lots of sites that do this, so I don't think my efforts here need to be as extensive as the original ones.
Shorts are fiction 10 - 55 minutes. In competition means they were selected to be eligible for a festival award. Super Shorts are under 10 minutes.
Shorts are generally shown in groups, called programs. The shorts in competition this year fall neatly into two programs. The first is "Shorts on the Edge" but it's also called "Opening Night Soirée."
The second program is called "Love and Pain." I've color coded them to make it even easier.
BUT, I've combined the shorts and super shorts on the chart below, since they are showing together in the programs. The super shorts have an * after them.
To make it easy for you to figure out when and where to see these films, I've divided the list of shorts in competition into two groups so you can see what program they're in, and when and where each program is shown.
[NOTE: I try to be completely accurate here, but there's a lot of details and I can make a mistake. To be safe, double check the times and locations before you go. If you see an error please let me know in the comments or via email - in right column above blog archive.]
The first program is:
Opening Night Soiree
Fri Dec 1 Bear Tooth 7 pm
Shorts on the Edge
Sat Dec 9 AK Exp Sm 9 pm
Shorts In Competition
Director
Country
Length
Cold Storage*
Thomas Freundlich
Finland
9 min
Game
Jeannie Donohoe
USA
15 min
Whoever Was Using This Bed
Andrew Kotatko
Australia
20 min
Iron
Gabriel Gonda
USA
17 min
Must Kill Karl
Joe Kick
Canada
12 min
The Robbery
Jim Cummings
USA
15 min
8:AM*
Emily Pando
USA
5 min
Brain Storm*
Christophe Clin
Belgium
6 min
Couples Night*
Russell & Robert
Summers
USA
4 min
Temporary
Milena Govich
USA
12 min
Remember, the blue ones are in the program called:
Love and Pain
Which shows:
Sat Dec 2 AK Exp Large 12 pm
Fri Dec 8 AK Exp Small 7pm
* means it's a Super Short.
###############################################
This first group of shorts in competition all are part of the Opening Night Soirée which repeats as the program "Shorts on the Edge." I've done it this way to help you identify which films are shown together so you can easily find when and where to see them. If they are in red, they are together in this program. Also, both Shorts and Super Shorts* are together in the same programs, but they are eligible for separate awards. The * marks the Super Shorts. These are films under 10 minutes long.
Opening Night Soirée
Fri Dec 1 Bear Tooth 7pm
Shorts on the Edge
Sat Dec 9 Ak Exp Small 9pm
**********************************************
Cold Storage* (*Super Short)
Thomas Freundlich
Finland
9 min
This one should appeal to all Alaskans, especially ice fishers, glacial archeologists, and dancers.
"Thomas Freundlich is one of the leading practitioners in Finland’s vibrantly growing independent dance film scene. Mr. Freundlich’s work ranges from dance shorts, documentary work, performance videography and 3D projects to music videos and projection design for the stage. His work has been seen at dozens of film festivals worldwide as well as broadcast TV both in Finland and internationally. From 2012 to 2014, Mr. Freundlich was the co-artistic director of Finland’s Loikka dance film festival."
This story takes place during tryouts for the high school basketball team. It's a very well made film. To add a little moral crunch to all this, the Weinstein Company was involved with this film. Just yesterday (Nov 20), I read an article from the Paris Review, "What Do We Do With The Art Of Monstrous Men?" I suspect that the Weinstein Company, particularly Harvey Weinstein had little to do with the making of this film. But it's something to think about as you watch this gem of a film. I know this film is good because you can watch it online, and I did. Below is a trailer. I'd note, watching it online probably won't take anything from the experience of seeing it on the big screen opening night of the festival. There's lots I'm sure I missed the first time.
**********************************************
Whoever Was Using This Bed
Andrew Kotatko
Australia
20 min
Go to the the film's website. Scroll through the credits and connections of the cast and the director and others. This is NOT a film by new faces showing what they can do in hopes of making it. But the fact that these aren't newcomers to the film industry tells us something about the competitiveness of the world of film-making.
"Iron is a short period drama set in the Pacific NorthWest inspired by the true stories of women railroad workers during the early 1900’s.
Lily Cohen escapes the the crowded tenements of New York to take on a demanding railway job. Determined to work on a steam engine, a position not traditionally held by women, Lilly faces the hostility of her fellow railroad workers while finding her own inner strength.
While America is very familiar with the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter, the women laborers of the First World War are mostly forgotten by history. The American railroad represented freedom and adventure in a time when most women had very little opportunity for either. These opportunities disappeared when the soldiers returned home."
I haven't seen the whole movie, but the trailer . . . judge for yourself. I had it up here for a day or two as I worked on the rest of the films. I decided to take it down because I thought the thumbnail was gross and I didn't see any redeeming features that would make it worth keeping up. I'm not censoring it - you can go watch it here. Remember, the programmers thought it was worth being 'in competition'. I'm waiting to be pleasantly surprised.
**********************************************
The Robbery
Jim Cummings
USA
15 min
Cummings won the best Short Award last year at AIFF with his film "Thunder Road." It also won at Sundance which led to a slew of opportunities which are described in this IndieWire article. The article also includes a full version of of The Robbery. I don't recommend seeing it now if you plan to see it at the festival. I'm not sure how much it offers with additional viewings.
It's about a robbery that goes badly. It's well made. It spoofs our national (global?) cell phone addiction among other things.
###############################################
This second group of shorts in competition all are part of the program "Love and Pain." I've done it this way to help you identify which films are shown together so you can easily find when and where to see them.
If they are in blue, they are together in this program Also, both Shorts and Super Shorts* are together in the same programs, but they are eligible for separate awards. The * marks the Super Shorts. These are films under 10 minutes long.
In this group, all but "Temporary" are Super Shorts.
Love and Pain
Sat Dec, 2 12pm AK Exp Large
Frit Dec 8 AK Exp Small 7pm
**********************************************
8:AM*
Emily Pando
USA
5 min Can't find much on this film, though it was at the festival in August 2016, the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival's Shorts Fest this year if I'm reading the Facebook page right.
**********************************************
Brain Storm* (Remue-Meninges)
Christophe Clin
Belgium
6 min
(Also Showing at Martini Matinee - Friday December 8, 2017 2:00pm - 4:00pm)
Another film that's got few internet footprints. From Augohr:
"What happens in our heads when we are about to meet someone on the street? Anguish, prejudice, expectation, surprise, disappointment … These few very brief moments are the nest of a real brainstorm!"
I had to look much harder to find Christophe's Vimeo page. (His Youtube page was blank. You really don't need a link to a blank Youtube channel.) But it was worth the effort. (Actually, if you only google his name, there's more, mostly in French.)
This is one of the most tantalizing trailers I've seen. It could be a super short all its own.
This is a four minute movie. What do you want? A ten second trailer? Christophe Clin found a way to do a trailer for a six minute movie (above) but . . . And why would you want a description? This is part of a program of other shorts. Just sit back and watch it. I can give you one hint - it's been in some horror movie festivals.
**********************************************
Temporary
Milena Govich USA 12 Min
The first few minutes of this probably tells you what you need to know about this film. It comes from her Kickstarter page and I found the embed code at Vimeo.
I'd also note there are other Shorts programs. Global Village has a series of international shorts.
There are Made In Alaska shorts. And Martini Matinee will play a mix of narrative shorts, short docs, and animation. I'm not totally caught up (and probably will never be) with all these programs but I did want to give you an alert that the narrative shorts and super shorts in competition aren't the only shorts.
I'm writing this on my old macbook because my newer (2014) MacBook Pro has, it says, 29 hours and 56 minutes to go before it installs the recovery OS X Yosemite.
I've spoken to six Apple advisors since October 23 when i started this venture. I didn't upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan because the 'genius' told me, when I asked what it would do to my version of iMovie, to stay with Yosemite.
But I'm getting notices now that my browser is no longer secure and with one bank that means I can't manage my account. At least not in Safari. If I go to Firefox or Chrome I can. The Apple advisors can explain why that is so - because they update independent of Yosemite, while Safari is built in as part of Yosemite, so it can't update independently of Yosemite. But it still is silly that other browsers work on my MacBook, but Safari, Apple's own browser, doesn't work that well anymore.
The first guy, Steven, helped me with an id/password problem. It turns out my original apple id no longer exists. Apparently when i registered my wife's iPhone, they gave me a new Apple id and disappeared my old one. So we got High Sierra (the new operating system) downloaded. I decided to install it over night because I knew it would take a while on my slow connection.
But when I tried to install it, it started and then just stopped. I let it sit a long time before I shut it down and tried the whole thing over again. It didn't work.
On October 26 I talked to Matt. He had me shut things down and reload High Sierra and start the install program again. "Call back if you have any more problems."
So I called back later that day and talked to Gina. She had me shut down and do a recovery thing. As soon as I turn it on, I had to hit command + option + r. That got me a black screen with a grey globe, and time line, and a clock image next to which it said 1:07. We figured that was how much time was left for it to work when the minute changed about every minute. I didn't think we should both wait an hour. She said call back if there were any problems.
There were, but I had something to do out of the house, so I called back this morning and got Kacerra (sp?). She wanted me to shut it down again and do an recovery opening again. Again, an hour plus a few minutes. So she scheduled a callback for 2pm.
Shekelia (sp?). She had me move along. Highlight the recover OSX and continue. Then agree to the terms. And then I get . . . Mavericks operating system. Continue. A popup window that says Since Mavericks is older than what I have (Yosemite), it can't install it. Shekelia looked in her book and then said to do the recovery reboot again. She set up a call back appointment for an hour and a half later as I wait another hour for this to happen. (Fortunately I have other things I can do while I wait. But I can't blog or anything. (Well, at that point I didn't really want to pull out my old Mac.)
At 3:30 Nick calls. I tell him the history again as he looks at the notes on my file. I've got it ready to install the operating system again, but I'm fearful it will give me the Mavericks option again. It does. But he has a new trick. command + option + r = internet recovery, he says. We'll do command + r.
It works right away, without having to wait an hour and Yosemite is available. So, he tells me, download Yosemite. That's when I got "about 35 hours and 28 minutes left" and it steadily rose up to 72 hours and then back down to 35 hours and slowly, but faster than real time, to 30 hours.
But it was clear that Nick and I would run out of things to talk about before the 30 hours was up, so he told me to try to download High Sierra when Yosemite was back up and call back if there were any problems. Or, just stick with Yosemite and use Firefox or Chrome if I needed a more secure browser for anything.
So that's where I am - two different Macs open. Let's see if different parts of the download go faster, or if it goes faster during the night. I'm just hoping it works at all.
[UPDATE Oct 28, 2017 8:35am: The recovery download of Yosemite (operating system) was complete this morning when I got up. Much faster than the 37 hours it was estimating yesterday. But essentially, I'm back where I started - with Yosemite. Hopefully, a cleaner version. But should I start again to try to download High Sierra. A couple of the Apple advisors I talked to in the last several days have posited that I might be better off keeping Yosemite and using Firefox or Chrome if I needed a web browser that was secure enough for my bank. Maybe I'll wait until I'm out of town where I can get much faster internet speed so each step doesn't keep me off the internet for long periods. But then again, maybe that's not a bad thing. And I have the old Macbook I can use as backup.]
[UPDATE Nov 15, 2017 11 am: I'm in Seattle now and so took advantage of faster internet speed to complete this process by installing High Sierra. It was painless. I have a short follow up post here.]
Back in late 2011, J and I went to some meetings of a group that was starting up a co-housing project in Anchorage. They were at the stage of announcing what they were doing in public to get other interested folks to join them. I posted about two of the meetings here. Here's a definition of co-housing from that post:
"Co-housing is a word coined by Chuck Durrett*, an architect who studied co-housing in Denmark in the mid-80's. Co-housing was his version of the Danish “bofællesskaber.” which his website says "directly translates to “living communities."
[*Not only does it say this on his company's website, but they even have the Oxford English dictionary entry that credits him and his partner with the term.]
I've been aware that this group bought property** (along Abbot Loop Road between Elmore and Lake Otis) and had built units and people had moved in. A year ago September it turns out. And I'd been meaning to go to one of their open house events, but just never got around to it.
Yesterday we went to their pumpkin carving event to see the reality of this deliberate housing development by people who want to share a sense of community that is being lost in this faster and more commercialized world.
This looks more like a condo association than a commune. In a condo situation, people tend to be looking for affordability and perhaps someone else to take care of the landscaping and maintenance. The condo association meetings and rules are the headache they have to put up with in exchange.
Here's a view from the parking lot. There are housing units on the left and the big greenish building in the middle is the common room where the pumpkin carving was happening. (And yes, the snow waited until after we got back home early Saturday morning.)
And here's the inside of the big common room. The kitchen is that open area in the back right.
And here's a closer look at the kitchen area. The architect for this project is one of the residents of Ravens' Roost too.
The wood for this counter (with the bins underneath) came from spruce trees (if I remember right) that were cleared to build the property.
Chris offered to be our guide and show us around when Tony, whom we'd met at a couple of returned Peace Corps volunteer events, had to leave for another activity. It turns out Chris is also a returned Peace Corps volunteer. I think he said he was in Swaziland.
This atrium is a neat feature. If you look at the top picture, this is inside the building on the far left. There are one story units on one side and two story units on the other. This is in between them. And this space is connected to the common room as well. I like the idea of a warm 'outside' where you can go and socialize with your neighbors in the winter time without having to get all your warm clothes on first.
Chris took us to another building where they have a wood shop. Since the architect lives here, there are a lot of projects that he does or supervises that helps improve people's living spaces.
One example was lofts in the one story units. They're one story, but with high ceilings. He also makes things for the common areas as well. I'd love to have access to a wood shop like this, especially if there was someone who would guide me a bit on how to use all the tools.
Aside from the main building with the housing and common room, there are other units on the property, including some still under construction.
In co-housing, a key ingredient is to have shared space and community with folks. Each unit is privately owned by the occupants, but they have common spaces, and there are group dinners four nights a week, though not everyone goes to all of them, or even most of them. As we talked with Chris and others, we learned that the meetings are often tedious as they work to reach consensus on major decisions.
I don't know what research has been done on the characteristics of people who can get along in group settings like this. I don't think it's simply something like political orientation. I think it's more about agreement on levels of civility, ability to abide by rules established for the common good, respect for others as human beings, and an ability to communicate and work out differences. Tolerance for other views is important.
We were tempted at the beginning, but when they picked their location, we lost interest. We're too attached to our ability to walk and bike to key places around town and they're just a little too far out to be able to do that. And we do like our yard. But as we get older, a community like this with mixed ages - not just other old people - is very appealing.
Most impressive to me is that a group of volunteers, in their spare time, pulled off a vision like this. No speculator developers did this with the hope of a big profit. These were just every day folks with the hopes of creating a friendlier and more cooperative neighborhood.
**As I understand it, they bought the property from folks who homesteaded up there and still live there. They didn't want to sell to a developer who would fill up all the land with houses. They liked the co-housing idea. The agreement was the couple could stay in their house until they wanted to move or passed away. The house is still there separated from Ravens' Roost by trees.
Thanks Chris for the tour and update. I'm delighted to see that this project has made it into reality and I know you've all put a lot of hard work into it.
