Around the Zodiac

Aquarius - An unknown friend will secretly do a kind act for someone you don't know.  Remain uninvolved.

Gemini - Revenge is a dish best served cold, but your "refrigerator" is "on the blink."  Time to forget, but not yet to forgive. 

Libra - An episode of whimsy forces a change in travel plans.  A delicate situation is surprisingly defused by wearing mismatched socks.

Capricorn - All signs point to a bad hair month ahead.  Invest in a babushka.

Pisces - It is a propitious week for perspicacity, yet an auspicious time for epicaricacy.  That finely tuned personality of yours stands you in good stead with a former pet.

Taurus - A package arrives for you unexpectedly.  Take it directly to Goodwill without opening.

Leo - Reach out with an apology to that certain someone you have been accidentally implicating in a felony.  Your ambivalence about a business deal turns out to be actual dyspepsia.

Cancer - DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LEAVE THE HOUSE

Virgo - A wise man once said, It is a fool who straps a trout to his head in hopes of soaring with eagles.  Now is not the time to vacillate, but tomorrow could be .

Sagittarius. - Have you considered foot powder?

Aries  - An investment comes due just in the nick of time.  Forfeiture of an asset proves providential in the long run. Heed a wise friend's counsel on the diversity of your portfolio.  An old flame squashes your heart like a bug.

Scorpio - Bipedalism could work in your favor today. Your fingers seek to grasp an intangible but your thumb is opposed.

Community Lip Service

Last year, my firm-- an above average place to work-- added a new item to its menu of benefits.  This one comes in the form of time.  Specifically, it is an optional extra day of paid time off each year.  It comes with a catch: the time must be spent performing some act of community service.  In a recent recap of the kickoff year, some highlighted participant activities included serving lunch at a food bank, sorting diapers for a legal aid initiative, replanting saplings for a boy scout camp and participating in an event to commemorate the sacrifice of war veterans.  One more thing: of course, your supervisor needs to approve your time off.  Not an unreasonable condition of course.  Oh, and of course the committee that regulates the benefit must approve the organization for service activities.  It is noted in the announcement that 65 organizations have been pre-approved.  Should an activity already performed not be approved for this benefit, pay would come out of the employee's own leave.

Service to what community?  The dozen or so that the firm is situated in, naturally, but also in these unprecedented times of work-at-home, the much larger pool of them that comprise the home communities of the firm's employees.  Beyond that, in theory, any community for which service could be provided would almost certainly count.  It's inconceivable to me that an employee who happened to be in, say,  Iran on firm business who chose to take their community service day to help out at an orphanage in Tehran would not be approved.  One could imagine a scenario in which at some point in the future an employee who could be beamed to Mars for a day could get approved for a day terraforming that community.  I don't think it's the community that matters as long as it could in the eyes of the community service committee be viewed as benefiting however modestly from the service.

Could an employee get approved for blocking access to an abortion clinic?  Probably not at my firm.  Would participating in organized actions on behalf of antifa or MOVE be service that could be approved of?  How about painting signs to be carried in protest of the planet destroying activities of one of its many environmentally iffy clients?  These could all be rejected categorically as political activities as distinct from service to the community.  While I would argue that political activities are perhaps among the best service one could give to one's community, as a rule, the firm has made clear that a line exists beyond which the employee whose idea of community service is at odds with the "values of the firm" must surely tread on his own dime.  Consequently there's a built-in anodyne flavor to the type of service for which the firm would be willing to spring for 8 hours. 

Who benefits from this benefit? We presume employees who take advantage of it get the satisfaction of contributing to activities that benefit "the community."*  And for employees who regularly volunteer a portion of their off-hours to acceptable causes anyway, compensating 8 of those hours once a year is perhaps the least the firm could do.  What does the firm get?  The firm gets the better society it is modeling by offering such a benefit to its employees. Ok, now that we've all had a good laugh, of course it gets materially nothing from the pittance of service that it enables in ostentatious dribs and drabs by doling out the redirected labors of an employee for approved public service one day per year at a time-- and neither does society!  What it gets is really all that anyone could be expected to get from it which is the sort of easily conjured false liberal cred for itself that is so common these days among the meritocratic class of obscenely powerful and wealthy people at the helm of successful commercial concerns.  It gets to imagine (and in any case to claim) that it has mitigated to a miniscule degree some of the harm it causes in its normal day-to-day year-to-year pursuit of profit. And not unimportantly, it gets to do this, as it does nearly everything, by the sweat of its employees.  

My firm should not be singled out for hypocrisy. It's not like it's out on a limb paying human resources professionals handsomely to devise pretexts for marshaling its workforce in benign extracurricular activities that accrue to its own glory and wishful image of itself in a way that can plausibly be packaged as a benefit (without really doing anything that would threaten the existing social structure).  Indeed, every firm should be singled out for hypocrisy.  But as any subject of a modern first world neoliberal economy is already aware, hypocrisy is one of the many gears that drive the wheels of society.  It seems to be the sine qua non of participation in it.

~~~~~

* Is it too cynical to think that working 8 hours in a food bank once a year "helps the community" by providing cover for the way that the community is structured in favor of those who partner in firms and who own companies that pay those partners for services that contribute to outcomes that create so many hungry people in need of a meal to begin with?

Sinking Feeling

From Wikipedia: "Ancient Greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt molded on one side and the inscription "ΔΕΞΑΙ" ("take that" or "catch") on the other side."

___________

It all makes sense now: 

Climate Change Denialism.  The American Health Care System.  Trickle Down Economics.  The Student Loan Crisis.  Criminalization of Gender Affirming Care for Children by State Legislatures.  For Profit Prisons. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  Ayn Rand.  Sean Hannity.  The Clintons.  The Magic Bullet Theory. Glenn Youngkin.  Q.  Dancing with the Stars.  

Let me face it: My Own Sad Life.

It comes down to 2 letters: Pb.  Not peanut butter, Fool!  Plumbum!  For you non-Latin speakers, that's Lead! Civilization tumbling, intelligence sapping Lead.  

From the 1920s to 1996 in the US (slightly earlier or later elsewhere across the planet), lead was a common ingredient in gasoline in the form of Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock and performance enhancing additive whose utility, ready availability and cheapness was discovered, patented, produced and promoted originally by a joint venture of Standard Oil and General Motors but adopted universally by the automotive industry across the globe.  Despite health warnings raised from the very start, its use became standard in fuels around the world.  Regular leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded, and as its use in cars and aircraft (above and beyond its use in paint and in plumbing) proliferated, the concentration of lead in the air and soil increased.  Encountering it in the environment became in many parts of the country for an extended period of time inevitable.  

Every schoolchild of the time learned that the downfall of Rome could be attributed to the lead pipes that carried its water, but there's apparently a reason we were too stupid to draw a parallel between Rome and what was happening in our own atmosphere due to the automotive explosion of the last century.  Per a recent study published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) website:

During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States, which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the average blood–lead level (BLL) for the general US population was routinely three to five times higher than the current reference value for clinical concern and case management referral (3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood). Consequently, millions of adults alive today were exposed to high levels of lead as children. While these exposures were deemed harmless at the time, animal studies and epidemiological evidence accrued in the intervening years reveal that such exposures likely disrupted healthy development across multiple organ systems (particularly the brain, bone, and cardiovascular systems), resulting in subtle deficits to important outcomes, such as cognitive ability, fine motor skills, and emotional regulation, that may influence the trajectory of a person’s life (e.g., their educational attainment, health, wealth, and happiness). These deficits largely persist across time and, in some cases, worsen and are now hypothesized to put individuals at risk for difficult-to-treat chronic and age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease and dementia.

 The upshot:

A total of 824,097,690 million IQ points were lost because of childhood lead exposure among the US population by 2015. This number equates to an average of 2.6 IQ point deficit per person.  

According to the study, "More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced BLLs in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered “safe” for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come."  

I don't put much stock in IQ.  Then again I'm one of those idiots born during the era of peak lead emissions during which an average of as many as 5.9 IQ points per person were lost.  Because of its ubiquity in the air, in the soil, in the infrastructure upon which the nation was built, the banning of lead from gasoline alone was not enough to eradicate its predicted effects for  generations of Americans to come.  As demonstrated by the water crisis of Flint, Michigan* that started in 2014 and is not yet fully resolved, in which austerity impositions on a public works project resulted in lead from ancient piping leaching into the water supply of over 100,000 mostly poor residents causing demonstrable health and cognitive issues in children,  we have not learned anything.  But maybe now we know why we have not learned anything.

 ~~~~~

* The most famous of the many lead incidents since 2000 that have been and will continue to be repeated elsewhere.

Slow to revolve

On 9/11/2001, everything changed.   Forty days later, on October 23, everything changed again when Apple introduced the iPod.  It took a bit longer for the second change to reach me.  I didn't get the big deal until my firm gifted me with an iPod shuffle for "employee appreciation day" 3 years later.  Even then it took months of looking at the thing before I figured out what to do with it.  Was it just a glorified walkman for playing 45s of your favorite songs?  Meh.  When I learned it could be played over the car speakers with an auxiliary cord, it dawned on me, "It's a re-configurable mix tape!" Once I had made my first playlist for a long car trip, there was no turning back. By  2006, I was so ensnared in the iPod web -- which unlike traditional music accumulation could only be fed sitting on my ass in front of the computer, meeting me where I lived-- that when I heard that Tower Records was closing, I felt personally responsible.

I had a similar slow uptake with the mobile phone: I want people calling me when I'm on the toilet?  No thanks.  But my wife was the influencer on that technology.  Needless to say, when the iPhone first appeared (changing things once more no less) I had the luxury of pitying the first adopters as hopeless saps.   Two years later, looking for a replacement for my deceased Razr, I took the iPhone plunge and became a hopeless sap myself.  

With me, it was never about telecommunications.   In fact, who could have predicted an explosion in personal portable communication devices would spell the death of the phone call?  I use my phone as a phone maybe twice a week.  I have 233 unlistened to voicemails.  With my phone on silent mode, I ignore easily 90% of those who try to reach me. Nonetheless as it is with so many people, my phone is attached to my hand.  In an effort to be with my phone as frequently as possible, I acquired as many habits as I could-- crossword puzzles, language learning, star gazing, ocarina playing.  Mostly, I read books on my phone to such an extent that I can sense the same thing happening to Barnes and Noble that I perpetrated on Tower Records.  The more exclusively I read on my phone, the less and less Barnes and Noble is a book store than it is a tchotchke emporium.  I do still visit book stores, but it's mostly to find titles to search the iBooks* store for for my phone.

As the iPhone is to phone calls, so the iBooks app is to reading.  In the early days of the pandemic, my Books app one day out of the blue following an automatic update started notifying me when I had reached a daily reading goal I hadn't set. The default goal of  5 minutes could be met just by leaving the app open while doing something else.  As I discovered last year, reaching the annual goal required turning the final page on just three books in the span of 12 months.  Though I have no incentive to be honest and absolutely nothing is stopping me from cheating, I don't cheat.  I met the quota last year in February.  When the app began tracking my habit for me unbidden, the laughably low bar of accomplishment struck me as being possibly Apple's way of keeping my reading to a minimum, I imagined for nefarious capitalistic purposes.  But to maintain a streak of daily goal meeting requires a steady pipeline of books.  By year's end, I had read 24 books on my phone, old and new on a variety of topics.  But as I look back at the titles I read in unbroken succession from January to December, I ask myself: What does it mean to say I read a book?  

I read the Brothers Karamazov in one day when I was 18. Do I remember anything about it other than what everyone knows about it?  I remember it had a lot of pages.  And that was a physical book that I have carried with me and have had to find a place for with every move for nearly 5 decades.  What about these electronic books that are designed to conjure the page turning sensation of reading but that unlike a book can't be remembered to the touch in the way that is so useful for finding passages you'd like to read again in a physical book?  eBooks can be searched so easily; they can be highlighted and bookmarked.  But for practical purposes I find that there is only one direction in an eBook and that is onward to the final page.  I like to think that I am accumulating some kind of experience with each book, that intellectual absorption is an inescapable force of the mind, but as I look back over a lifetime of reading, it occurs to me that reading requires more activity, less passivity than an attention-deprived brain such as mine can elicit.  Have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  I purchased it last year;  I narrated its text word-for-word to myself for weeks over the summer until I was done with it; while it consumed my time, I thought about it, was moved by it, let it argue with me and inspire me; my iPhone Books app tells me I finished it.  Somewhere in there is that book-- if you quizzed me on specifics, I am not sure offhand whether my ability to respond would surprise or disappoint me.  I have read it something like the way I saw La La Land 5 years ago and yet could not on my own begin to tell you what it was about.  So have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  We may need a decision from the judges.

~~~~~

*iBooks, Books, whatever!  By dropping the i- prefix from its app, Apple is helping you to forget that reading books on the phone and "buying" books for the phone are not the same as owning those books.  Don't forget, as I so often do that the purchase of an eBook buys you merely heavily termed access to material that could be-- and in some reported cases has been-- rescinded by Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of digital readers without warning to unsuspecting readers.  Your digital life is yours only at the will of the big tech providers of it to you, not because they have found a loophole to proprietorship, but simply because the technology allows it.