Obsidian Wings

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by Ugh

Because why not, eh?

I forget who said that capitalism needs to be kept safe from the capitalists, but gee ABC, what did you think you were getting?

Also, too, I'm spending way too much time on the twitters, and encountering some very special people.

My kids are casting Harry Potter spells on each other and I feel old.

Me me me, it's all about me!

Thread of openness.

Enough

by wj

As I noted in a comment earlier, one of my political goals would be
1) equality of opportunity,
2) NOT equality of outcomes,
3) adequate support for those who are struggling, funded by money from those who have been most successful.

But how do we get there? I think that first we have to accept the concept of Enough.

When you have income, what do you spend it on? First, you need food on the table, a roof over your head, and clothes on your back. Once you have funded that, you start on other necessities: e.g. transportation, information, etc. (We can have another discussion about what is and is not a necessity.) And you put money aside, both to deal with emergencies and to fund a tolerable retirement. Also, you start to provide some luxuries to make life more comfortable.

At some point, you’ve got all the necessities covered. And as for luxuries, you are essentially spending as much as you can on luxuries that you have time to actually use. At that point, you have Enough. There is no economic reason* to make more – we’ve already stipulated that you can’t usefully spend any more. So why do so?

I suggest that the only reason to make more is to demonstrate how wonderful/accomplished/important you are to folks who have no clue about the actual, objective, value of what you do. To put it bluntly, incomes beyond that point are nothing but a dick measuring contest. (Of course, some people may consider that to be necessary to their self-image. Tough.)

At that point, there’s no reason not to put the marginal tax rates at close to 100%. You may have a philosophical objection to the idea, but you don’t have a personal economic cause to complain. And that provides funding for a safety net for those who are still struggling with the basic necessities.

* Stipulate that there will be those who end up making more as a side effect of doing the things that they love doing. I would say that Warren Buffet appears to fall into that category. He’s not making ever more money for the sake of the money/status, witness the fact that he isn’t frittering it away on flashy luxuries.

Open thread - hidden worlds

by JanieM

russell’s post on drumming has reminded me that there are worlds and worlds that I know nothing about, and sometimes it’s fun to peek into them.

For instance – long ago a carpenter friend who worked in stained glass as a sideline took me to pick out some glass for a window he was helping me make. We went to a rundown neighborhood in Boston, then into a shabby-looking two-story house. Inside the building, the first floor looked like my grandma’s attic: stuff piled everywhere, everything dusty. I was starting to get a little dubious, but I trusted my friend, so I followed him when he headed up a flight of stairs.

At the top, it was like when The Wizard of Oz turns from black-and-white to color.

The second floor of the house had unbroken banks of double-hung windows on three sides, and on every sill – two rows per window – were little rectangles of stained glass. It happened to be a sunny day, and the whole place glinted with color.

It was like wonderland, a beautiful gem hidden in the most misleading of surroundings.

I had a similar experience – at least as to the unknown-ness – when another friend took me to a sailmaker’s shop on Cape Cod.

Conversely, I had a conversation a few years ago with a friend of one of my offspring. This young woman was smart and dazzlingly well-educated, and had been a varsity college basketball player. She had never heard of Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie…..or Bill Russell.

What worlds have you stumbled upon that you knew nothing about? Or conversely, what worlds do you know something about, that might surprise the rest of us as the stained glass shop did me?

Open thread.

*****

And – just saw this – RIP Texas school shooting victims. How long, oh Lord.....

what i learned from drumming, so far

by russell

time for a break from politics? 

I've been thinking about what I have learned from drumming.  About drumming, about music in general, about life in general.  Maybe it's of interest on its own terms, maybe it will make you think of what you have learned from the things you do.

I started playing when I was 10, so it's over 50 years now.  As an online friend once observed, "Playing drums is not hard, it just takes your whole life to be good at it".  I don't know if I have arrived at "good at it" or not, but I have been at it my whole life.  Not so many gigs right now, work is too all-consuming at the moment.  But I always think about it.

A lot of things I've learned, I retain in the form of muscle memory.  So, not so good for a blog.  Many other things I've learned, I retain in the form of of a brief phrase capturing some essential idea.  Most of them were spoken in passing by a teacher or co-player, almost as a throw-away, but for some reason they stuck in my head.  I take them out now and then, to see if I sort of understand them yet.

Thought I would share them with you all as a break from modern life.  Hope they are interesting, they are to me.

• Touch the instrument every day
• Make the space between the notes as wide as you can
• One and three feel like down, two and four feel like up.  The 'and' of two and four feel like forward and away from you, the 'and' of one and three bounce back at you.
• Everything is really in three (an observation most relevant to music from the African diaspora)
• Record yourself whenever you can and listen back.  What you hear in real time on the gig is not what's really happening.
• If you're thinking about what you're doing, you're not doing it
• Practice slowly.
• Start with the simplest thing that works
• Make the bass player happy.
• Take your tempo from the vocalist.
• A practice regime - to play something fast, practice by playing it slowly many many many many times.
• A practice regime - play the same thing, over and over again, *exactly* the same way, until you can hear that it's not exactly the same.  Then, adjust to make it *exactly* the same and continue.  Repeat, including the "repeat".
• There will always be somebody better than you.  There is probably somebody in the room right now who is better than you.
• Be on time, be prepared, be nice to everyone, say thank you.
• We all have an ego.  Try to leave yours in the car
• If you can't hear what to do, don't do anything.
• Breathe (courtesy of the great Elvin Jones)

As I make it out at this point in my life, most of the craft of music is learning to listen and get out of the way.  Especially learning to listen.  What's actually happening, right now?  What do you actually hear?

The rest is commentary.  And, you know, practice, so that when the time comes you can just listen and enter into what you hear.

Dear God Make it Stop, Open Thread

by Ugh

Today in what must be the eleventy-billionth article on the subject, the WaPo makes the rugged, overland, sometimes I'm sure dangerous, journey to the restive provinces to find out just why Trump voters voted for Trump and what Trump voters think of Trump now that Trump has been Presidenting.  Farming, lamb processing, and a John Deere hoodie make appearances.

Also:  “I think Trump brought out the fact that — I mean, as crude and callous as he was at times — so many people had been almost discriminated against because they were Republicans and not Democrats that we felt inferior.”

And: “This is my observation, it is not necessarily my belief,” he said as he described their motivations. “Number one, they said minority political people have been well taken care of. Small business and working people have been identified as the source of income to take care of those people.”

And: Bustos knew that workers were losing faith in Clinton during the campaign. “You could just feel it,” she said. “You go into these labor halls and guns would always come up. I don’t care where I [would] go, it would be like the first question. . . . Where’s Hillary stand on guns?”

I give up.

Open thread

Corporate Power & Responsibility

by Ugh

Back in the day I suggested that perhaps the higher ups at VW would not run into any trouble for the emissions scandal.  Indeed, informed commentators deemed it "highly unlikely" that gaming the emissions system was a senior management decision and was "relatively contained" in VW.  Well, it seems my and others' surmisings were wrong:  

Volkswagen AG’s former Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn was charged in a Michigan federal court with conspiracy and wire fraud in relation to a probe into the German automaker’s efforts to cheat U.S. diesel emissions testing, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.  Winterkorn, who stepped down from his role as CEO days after the scandal was revealed, is accused of conspiring to defraud the U.S. and violate the Clean Air Act.

....

The carmaker pleaded guilty in January 2017 to using false statements to import cars into the U.S. and to obstructing investigations, and paid $4.3 billion in penalties.

Well, I guess no executive has gone to jail, since as the article notes 5 other executives have been indicted by the US but remain in Germany, not (yet) extradited.  

The discussion in that thread brought to mind the recent arrests of two African-American men at Starbucks, including the call made by the store manager to the police, the resulting protests, and the reaction/response of Starbucks' CEO.  Now, on the one hand, it seems a little cumbersome for a CEO of a company Starbucks' size to be responsible for the actions of a single employee at one of Starbucks stores, as well as taking the scale of remedial actions he's ordered (there are obviously broader forces at work here though).  OTOH what is the correct level of responsibility and action of the CEO with respect to corporate employees?

Large corporations with thousands of employees and limited liability seem to be a recipe for diffusion of responsibility and avoiding punishment for wrongdoing, with rare exceptions (VW appearing that it might be one of those).  Take the financial crisis, for example. But it doesn't seem to me the right course to have a CEO step-down or take corporate wide action because of one employee somewhere (absent other evidence) with poor, or even racist, judgment.

Anyway, just some free form thoughts in our lovely modern world. 

Wolf at the door open thread

by liberal japonicus

Not really a great title, but I've been taking in a little of the discussion about Michelle Wolf's monologue at the WHCD. And we are in need of an open thread and it's a bummer seeing "What is racism?" every time in the sidebar (and yes, that is privilege talking, cause I can step back from it) Anyway, stuff below the fold.