The outrage economy

My Sunday movie was Mrs. Harris goes to Paris. This is a delightful and sweet movie that I enjoyed and recommend. It’s 1957 and Mrs. Ada Harris is a cleaning lady in London. Her husband did not come home from WWII. At the home of one of her upscale clients (one that is slow in paying her) she sees a gown by Christian Dior and is captivated by it. Se decides to save up to buy one for herself. IMDB’s trivia about his movie says 500 pounds in 1957 is about $12,000 in 2022. So a lot of saving to be done (and a few lucky breaks). She figures she’ll fly to Paris, pop into the Christian Dior store, buy the frock, and head home. Two days max. It doesn’t work that way. The gowns are modeled and the upper crust clients resent her being at the showing. And gowns must be fitted, which takes two weeks, well perhaps we can do it in one. That gives her time for her sweet, direct, and unstuffy personality work on those around her. This movie was filmed in 2021 so in the credits were such things as a COVID testing company. The last time I discussed a book was about six weeks ago. This is a long time given the rate at which I usually read books. Six weeks ago I started an issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. It’s only 200 pages, but it took me five weeks. A big reason is that my eyes were still healing from cataract surgery. There were nights in bed when both my standard glasses (with post-surgery lenses) and drug store readers weren’t working for me. Several nights I gave up after reading only a couple paragraphs. Reading at the table (and in the bathroom) were also a struggle. My vision has improved and the readers work well for reading in bed, at the table, and in the bathroom, when I remember to slip them on. And after I read the magazine I was able to get through a 325 page novel in less than a week. That novel is Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy. The story is of Ryan Wesley or Wes from Boston, and Jamie Canning from San Rafael, California. They met at hockey camp at Lake Placid in middle school and are best friends through high school. Then Wes, infatuated with Jamie, did something he regrets and ghosted his friend. The story opens with Wes and Jamie as seniors in college on opposing teams at the Frozen Four hockey playoffs. Both have offers from professional teams, Wes in Toronto, Jamie in Detroit. Before reporting Jamie returns to Lake Placid as a coach for the hockey camp and Wes decides to join him there. This is another gay love story written by a woman (two in this case). I had heard some women enjoy writing sex scenes between two men. And there are several (and an R rating isn’t strong enough). It is also a story where one, Wes, is definitely gay, and the other, Jamie, isn’t. He has a female friend-with-benefits. So should Wes get involved with a straight guy? Wes is also adamant that he spend his rookie year in Toronto being celibate. He doesn’t want the news of being the first out player in the NHL distracting him from his rookie year. While he may be right about the distraction we know the celibacy thing isn’t going to work. While I enjoyed this one, in spite of the several f-bombs in the first few pages and liberally thereafter, I’m debating whether to get the sequel. Online reviews say the lads would do a whole lot better if they would just talk about their issues. Meteor Blades of Daily Kos discussed about a new peer-reviewed paper soon to be published in Environmental Research Letters. Blades wrote:

For years, natural gas—composed primarily of methane—has been touted as a bridge fuel to a new world of sustainable clean energy, a way to get off coal without waiting for renewables (and many would add nuclear) to fulfill all our electricity needs. This has worked in the United States to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% since 2005, with coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation dropping last year to less than 20%. That’s because burning methane releases on average about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal. But there’s a big problem. Over 20 years, unburned methane has a global warming potential that is 84 times greater than that of carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal.

A natural source of methane is melting permafrost – and the Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the planet’s average. Human source of methane are agriculture, landfills, leaks from oil wells, and natural gas fracking operations. It takes only a tiny leak for natural gas to be as harmful as coal and fracking sites are notorious for leaking. So the idea that natural gas can serve as a bridge fuel should be rethought and discarded. As for the rest of the fossil fuel industry, no new infrastructure should be built. Clay Bennett posted a cartoon to Kos. It shows a man in a bookstore finding the Farmer’s 2023 Almanac with its weather forecasts in the horror section. I’ve taken one trip on a cruise ship. That was 15 years ago and I went with my parents to Alaska. This seemed the easiest way to see the parts of the state we wanted to see. I knew we would have over 30 meals together so I took a notebook and asked them about their lives. I’m very glad I got that first hand account while I could. We had an enjoyable time and saw some amazing scenery along the way. I haven’t been on a cruise ship since and no desire to do so. The kinds of things the ship offered as entertainment on board – shows, casino, spa, and I don’t remember what else – had little interest for me and there was little to do beyond that. The shore excursions were pleasant, but mostly seemed too regimented (we took some and went on our own at other stops). I’m glad I had that time with my parents, but once was quite enough. That leads to a discussion by Hunter of Kos about the Icon of the Seas, by Royal Carribbean, due to take its first passengers next spring. This cruise ship is huge! It is able to host 5,610 guests (I think the one I was on could hold 2,000). It is too big to permit anything that people take cruise ships for – no spray of the sea 20 stories up, no rolling waves, no way to get anywhere close to the quaint seaside villages. But why would one need a ship this big? Cruise ship designers figured out being on the boat is boring. Between the restaurants, bars, pools, spas, water park, mini golf, arcade, shows, gift shops, and whatever else they have on this ship one wouldn’t need to actually go to port. That sounds like a mall with a hull and lifeboats. Since the future can only be boats bigger than this one and because cruise ships are more polluting than airplane travel...

What's even the point of turning this thing into a boat? We're pretending it's travel? Here's a better suggestion: Build the next generation of cruise ships as oceanfront hotels. Just stick them on the beach in the general vicinity of Miami and instead tow the quaint Caribbean villages to them. ... In fact, we can do even better: We can put multiple cruise ship-sized luxury hotels on one big floating wheel, anywhere in landlocked America. You board from a single entrance, and each evening the wheel slowly spins while you're asleep so that you wake up with a completely new theme park outside your window. Every day brings new sights and new things to do.

Hunter suggests some of those theme parks could be the quaint Caribbean village, a water park, Westworld, Jurassic Park, and Blackjack Lagoon.

We wanted to sail off to new adventures, we got floating germ bombs with gift shops. I don't think we're going to bring back bloodthirsty megafauna, even. We'll just get a stuffed tiger in a cruise ship gift shop after all the wild ones have gone extinct, and it'll cost you $10 to get your picture taken with it.

Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about California Gov. Gavin Newsom taking on Moms for Liberty. The Moms pushed to elect three conservative people to the board of the Temecula Valley Unified School District. Just after being sworn in they passed a resolution condemning critical race theory, which got them an appearance on Fox and Friends. In May the board reviewed new social studies books for grades 1-5. They rejected the one recommended by the state because the teacher’s supplement, not the actual textbook students see, had a photo and short biography of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated. Board president Joseph Komrosky repeated a now common but false slur when he said, “Why even mention a pedophile?” There is a parent backlash. Politico wrote:

“We don’t want culture wars. We don’t want Fox News appearances,” Alex Douvas, a parent of two kids in the district who previously worked for two Republican congressmembers in Orange County, told the board recently. “Our schools are not ideological battlegrounds. They’re not platforms for religious evangelism. These are institutions for learning and growth.”

Newsom, who is becoming known for taking Democratic ideals on the offense, got involved because refusing to upgrade their social studies curriculum means the district is now in violation of state law. In response Newsom said if the district didn’t lift its ban the state would buy the banned book, send it to the parents and students of the district, and bill the district for violating state law. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the outrage economy. He begins with:

We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few. ... Just as late-stage capitalism is engrossed in wiping away every benefit workers gained over centuries of negotiating the relationship between labor and reward, the outrage economy has risen up to guarantee that, no matter the intention, every venture into social media trends toward disaster.

The reason is because social media is a system that rewards those who gain and hold public attention. Prizes range to likes and views, to money, to appearances on Fox News. Reasonable people doing reasonable things is boring. Which leaves ... outrage. One can be outrageously funny, outrageously sweet, outrageously talented, outrageously brilliant, or outrageously vile. To be funny, sweet, talented, or brilliant one must work at it. But anyone can insult others based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, or anything else. “It doesn’t take years of training or research: It just takes a willingness to take joy from causing pain. The more pain, the better.” On many social media platforms this tolerated and it’s profitable. And if it draws outraged replies it increases the payout. And that drags the site down. Sumner wrote this post because Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads, his competitor to Twitter, will have automated moderation, with settings controlled by the user. That sounds like trolling won’t be banished from the site, just (maybe) banished from your feed. Sumner concludes:

The only thing that can arrest that slide is moderation. That moderation must be done by people who understand the subtleties of meaning, rather than trying to match replies to a set of simplistic rules. But moderation costs money. Good moderation costs a lot of money. And why should Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk want to moderate in the first place? This is the outrage economy. Bring on the outrage.