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atrios_feedCanada will rescind a planned digital services tax in order to advance stalled trade talks with the U.S., Ottawa announced on Sunday.
atrios_feedatrios_feedThe Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.
Whatever the merits of such an idea (none, but let's pretend), a system implemented with no concern for accuracy and no way to correct errors is there for reasons other than the stated ones.
misha_verbitsky_feedlawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed
Whites in North Carolina who can read between the lines–Racism, fuck yeah!
Confederate supporters arrived first, establishing a Saturday morning base near the town waterfront with “Save our history” signs and Civil War information sheets. Some sported red MAGA hats and shirts that proclaimed “America First,” or, in one case, “If you don’t like Trump then you probably won’t like me and I’m OK with that.”
The opposition showed up about two hours later carrying stark white signs with black letters: “Remove this statue.”
For the next two hours, as they’ve done nearly every Saturday for the past three years, the groups mingled with confused tourists in a seemingly unending fight over a Confederate monument at the heart of this historic town, whichis nearly 60 percent Black.
What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite. A chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, long extinct locally,sprang to life. The forgotten Confederate Memorial Day was resurrected and commemorated again last month with a wreath-laying and roll call of the rebel dead.
And the town council, which had formed a Human Relations Commission in 2020to consider steps for racial reconciliation, last fall came up with a novel way to handle the statue of a generic Confederate soldier:
Take it down from the waterfront. Add it to the courthouse.
Facing north, the green-patina figure of the soldier — one of many that were once found throughout the South — stands atop a stone column on a grassy traffic median where the town market once stood. Enslaved people were bought, sold or offered for hire on that spot.
The Civil War is a small part of the long heritage of Edenton, a town of about 4,500 located in Chowan County near the western end of Albemarle Sound. Today the town thrives on tourism, its streets an Americana confection of pre-Revolution Colonial homes next to Victorian fantasies next to 1920s cottages. Broad Street is lined with shops and restaurants, a promenade of quaintness leading straight down to the water and the Confederate monument.
Now mired in legal challenges, moving the monumentwould be the first time in a decade that any locality in the United States has added a Confederate statue on courthouse grounds, according to a study published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation.
….
Head researcher Rivka Maizlish said the slowdown is at least partly attributable to the revival of Lost Cause sentiment by President Donald Trump, whohas called for reinstating Confederate names on military bases andhasissued an executive order that could restore Confederate monuments to federal property.
The tone from the White House gives an extra sense of empowerment to those who have come out to defend the Edenton monument every weekend for the past three years. On a recent sunny Saturday, Ron Toppin, 80, and two helpersset up a canopy over tables neatly lined with trays of Confederate information sheets and hit the sidewalk two hours before their opponents arrived.
Trump’s election “made the country a whole lot better,” said Toppin, whose late wife used to organize the informational materials for the group and who said his great-great-grandfather was a rebel soldier captured by the Union in 1863. “We’ve got America back.”
Just in case you weren’t clear what Trump means to his base, though I know you all are in fact clear on that.
The post The Post-Racial Society appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
smbc_comics_feed
Hovertext:
Still better than the deontology watch, which stops you from lying, even to tell a murderer not to look in your basement.
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I’m a huge fan of iNaturalist — I use it all the time for my own interests, and I’ve also incorporated it into an assignment in introductory biology. Students are all walking around with cameras in their phones, so I have them create an iNaturalist account and find some living thing in their environment, take a picture, and report back with an accurate Latin binomial. Anything goes — take a photo of a houseplant in their dorm room, a squirrel on the campus mall, a bug on a leaf, whatever. The nice thing about iNaturalist is that even if you don’t know, the software will attempt an automatic recognition, and you’ll get community feedback and eventually get a good identification. It has a huge userbase, and one of its virtues is that there always experts who can help you get an answer.
Basically, iNaturalist already has a kind of distributed human intelligence, so why would they want an artificial intelligence bumbling about, inserting hallucinations into the identifications? The answer is they shouldn’t. But now they’ve got one, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from Google. It’s advantageous to Google, because it gives them another huge database of human-generated data to plunder, but the gain for humans and other naturalists is non-existent.
On June 10 the nonprofit organization iNaturalist, which runs a popular online platform for nature observers, announced in a blog post that it had received a $1.5-million grant from Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI—an initiative of Google’s philanthropic arm—to “help build tools to improve the identification experience for the iNaturalist community.” More than 3.7 million people around the world—from weekend naturalists to professional taxonomists—use the platform to record observations of wild organisms and get help with identifying the species. To date, the iNaturalist community has logged upward of 250 million observations of more than half a million species, with some 430,000 members working to identify species from photographs, audio and text uploaded to the database. The announcement did not go over well with iNaturalist users, who took to the comments section of the blog post and a related forum, as well as Bluesky, in droves to voice their concerns.
Currently, the identification experience is near perfect. How will Google improve it? They should be working on improving the user experience on their search engine, which has become a trash heap of AI slop, rather than injecting more AI slop into the iNaturalist experience. The director of iNaturalist is trying to save face by declaring that this grant to insert generative AI into iNaturalist will not be inserting generative AI into iNaturalist, when that’s the whole reason for Google giving them the grant.
I can assure you that I and the entire iNat team hates the AI slop that’s taking over the internet as much as you do.
… there’s no way we’re going to unleash AI generated slop onto the site.
Here’s a nice response to that.
Those are nice words, but AI-generated slop is still explicitly the plan. iNaturalist’s grant deliverable is “to have an initial demo available for select user testing by the end of 2025.”
You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash.
The iNaturalist charity is currently “working on a response that should answer most of the major questions people have and provide more clarity.”
They’re sure the people who do the work for free hate this whole plan only because there’s not enough “clarity” — and not because it’s a terrible idea.
People are leaving iNaturalist over this bad decision. The strength of iNaturalist has always been the good, dedicated people who work so hard at it, so any decision that drives people away and replaces them with a hallucinating bot is a bad decision.
lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed
When I say what is going on with the Republican Party is more late 19th century than Nazi Germany, this is exactly what I am talking about:
In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.
Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.
Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There is nothing remarkable about a politician raising money for nonprofits and other groups that promote their campaigns or agendas. What’s unusual, experts said, is for a politician to keep some of the money for themselves.
“If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” said Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now leads the Brennan Center’s work on campaign finance.
In case you were wondering how Noem afforded the watch and all….
The post The New Gilded Age, Indeed appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
thedailywtf_feedIn ancient times, Rob's employer didn't have its own computer; it rented time on a mid-range computer and ran all its jobs using batch processing in COBOL. And in those ancient times, these stone tools were just fine.
But computing got more and more important, and the costs for renting time kept going up and up, so they eventually bought their own AS/400. And that meant someone needed to migrate all of their COBOL to RPG. And management knew what you do for those kinds of conversions: higher a Highly Paid Consultant.
On one hand, the results weren't great. On the other, the code is still in use, though has been through many updates and modernizations and migrations in that time. Still, the HPC's effects can be felt, like this block, which hasn't been touched since she was last here:
// CHECK FOR VALID FIELD
IF FIELD1 <> *BLANKS AND FIELD1 < '1' AND FIELD1 > '5';
BadField1 = *ON;
LEAVESR;
ENDIF;
This is a validation check on a field (anonymized by Rob), but the key thing I want you to note is that what the field stores are numbers, but it stores those numbers as text- note the quotes. And the greater-than/less-than operators will do lexical comparisons on text, which means '21' < '5' is true.
The goal of this comparison was to require the values to be between 1 and 5. But that's not what it's enforcing. The only good(?) news is that this field also isn't used. There's one screen where users can set the value, but no one has- it's currently blank everywhere- and nothing else in the system references the value. Which raises the question of why it's there at all.
But those kinds of questions are par for the course for the HPC. When they migrated a bunch of reports and the users compared the results with the original versions, the results didn't balance. The HPC's explanation? "The users are changing the data to make me look bad."
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lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed
Even though it wasn’t that long ago, we’ve almost forgotten how pretty progressive policymakers could come from the Rocky Mountain states. As Colorado, New Mexico ,and to a lesser extent Arizona and Nevada have moved to the left, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana have sprinted to the right. But not long ago, Utah had Frank Moss in the Senate. Idaho not only had Frank Church in the Senate but elected Cecil Andrus four times as governor. Even Wyoming had Dave Freudenthal as governor, a situation completely unimaginable today. Montana was more progressive than any of these states and that’s only recently ended with the defeat of Jon Tester. The Treasure State has had a lot of good politicians for a long time, going back to people such as James Murray and Mike Mansfield. One of them was Pat Williams, who was excellent and who just died.
Mr. Williams championed wilderness protection, federal arts funding and family-friendly social policies. He retired from the House in 1997 after 18 years, the longest consecutive tenure by a Montana congressman.
His most notable election came in 1992, when Montana had been chiseled down to a single congressional seat, from two, after the 1990 census.
Mr. Williams, who represented the state’s more liberal forested western half, faced Representative Ron Marlenee, a Republican who served the conservative ranchland of eastern Montana.
The left-versus-right showdown was fought over the use of the state’s vast natural resources and whether the New Deal-era safety net for the vulnerable still mattered. Mr. Williams won narrowly, with 51 percent of the vote.
In Washington, he was a co-sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which gave workers 12 weeks of unpaid time off to care for a newborn or a sick family member. Multiple attempts to enact the law under the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had failed. Mr. Williams called those administrations “frozen in the ice of their own indifference” to working people.
The law was signed by President Bill Clinton, who boasted of it nearly every day during his successful re-election race in 1996.
A former schoolteacher, Mr. Williams was also on the front lines of a conflagration over the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservative senators in 1990 sought to abolish the agency because of grants it had made that supported the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, whose transgressive work was condemned by critics like Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association as blasphemous or obscene.
Mr. Williams was the chief author of a bipartisan compromise that preserved funding for the arts endowment while leaving decisions about obscenity to the courts. He became known as the savior of the N.E.A.
He was also the sponsor of a pet bill, the Professional Boxing Safety Act, which required safety standards for professional fighters. Congress passed it in 1996.
“Yeah, I fought as a kid in Butte,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times. “Back there you had to be a Democrat, and you had to be able to fight. Boxers are workers and deserve health protection.”
Alas, Montana has changed and it has changed 100% for the worse.
The post Pat Williams, RIP appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed
Last week Dan, Cheryl and I talked through the implications of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Cheryl gave us a damage assessment, we worked out the domestic politics, and Dan gave some thoughts both on Trump and on the broader international implications. I talked the airpower angle, contrasting the Israeli performance with Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine. Some links of note:
The post LGM Podcast: In the Wake of the Iran Strikes appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
pharyngula_feed
Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects of a few days of ill health. I was slow and halting and thin-voiced, and failed to express my enthusiasm for the topic. My apologies to everyone.
I haven’t taken it down because it made me appreciate the privilege of health and mobility. I’ve been brought low by an abrupt and seemingly spontaneous break in a lateral ligament in my knee capsule, which means I can’t bend my right knee without severe pain, and I can’t put my weight on that leg. This has been devastating in multiple ways. Obviously, I can’t walk. The world beyond my front door is suddenly unreachable — there are steps! But then there were other problems. I spend about 4 hours a night trying to precisely bend my leg to minimize pain, which never works, until I fall asleep in exhaustion, and then I’ll be awakened at random times with bolts of agony running up my leg. I’m feeling permanently worn out.
Then I’m currently malnourished, and it’s my own fault. Chronic pain kills my appetite, and I’m beginning to feel the effects, but I can’t be motivated to do anything about it. Mary has been doing her best to supply me with something to eat, but I hate to say it, but she has no sense of taste and minimal skill at cooking. She leaves me these horrible sandwiches — two slices of bread with nothing but a little peanut butter between them — and I have to be desperate to choke them down. That’s what I’ve been living on since Thursday, and it’s not good (she’s at the store right now getting some canned soups that should improve my diet). I’m beginning to think this is a drawback to marrying a woman of Scandinavian descent.*
I’ve been fantasizing about sneaking into the kitchen and whipping up a lazy bachelor’s sandwich. A couple of slices of bread toasted in a little olive oil, some chopped onions and garlic, scrambling an egg, and adding a slice of cheese, some salt and pepper, and adding a splash of hot sauce to wake it up…that would be fantastic. Except then I have to imagine prying myself out of a chair and straightening this painful limb and hobbling into the kitchen to stand on one leg for the three minutes it would take to make it, and then staggering back to my office chair, and somehow lowering myself into it with my right knee sending alarms for every degree of bend I subject it to, and then my appetite evaporates.
I have an appointment with an orthopedist this morning, and I’m hoping that will put this stupid leg back on the road to recovery, before I starve to death.
I’ll get back to trying to do more science outreach once I’ve restored my flesh and am able to get around again. There are spiders right outside my door and I can’t go to them now!
*My grandmother, in her final years, would just go to Arby’s, buy 20 or more roast beef sandwiches, freeze them at home and thaw out one a day for dinner. I cannot imagine living like that, but food was just fuel to her. My mother was skin and bones when she died, because she had so little interest in food, I think my sister kept her alive as long as she did by doing all the cooking. I’ve acquired this bias that my peasant ancestors probably just lived on chunks of dried salt cod with an occasional boiled turnip until they got so tired of it they decided to go Viking.
misha_verbitsky_feedlawyersgunsmoneyblog_feedThis is the grave of Alexander Crummell.
Born in 1819 in New York City, Crummell grew up in the free Black world there. Remember though that New York was the center of northern slavery and there were still slaves in the city and in the Hudson Valley when he was born. His father was a freed slave. His parents were involved in the abolitionist movement and taught their children of the evils of slavery and their duty to fight this horrible institution. In fact, the city’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was published inside their home. He attended the best schools he could in New York and then was sent to New Hampshire, where a Black boarding school had opened. This of course led the good whites of New Hampshire to burn it down. Live free or die.
That burning led Crummell to the Oneida Institute, where a lot of abolitionists had studied. He decided while there to become an Episcopalian minister. He went to Yale for further study in 1840 and was ordained in 1842. He had a church in Providence. I should find out where that was. But there were so few Black Episcopalians and whites were racist so wouldn’t be served by a Black minister. This leads to me another point, which is that since the only people who become priests these days are Africans, we are starting to see these racist whites who attend Catholic Churches every week in the United States have to deal with Africans giving them the host and confessions. In any case, Philadelphia offered him a church, but on a segregated basis. He rejected that offer.
Crummell ended up going to England, first to raise money for his churches, but then to speak about abolitionism and then to study. In fact, he became the first known Black person to graduated with a degree from Cambridge, though he is known to not be the first Black person to study there.
Crummell became deeply invested in Black migration out of the United States and to Africa. This was never really very popular in Black communities, but the idea to get Black people out of United States and to the new nation of Liberia was popular among a lot of whites and had some understandable appeal to some Black folks. The problems became obvious once it actually was put in motion–tropical diseases killed a lot of migrants back to Africa, those who survived legitimately thought they were there to convert the savage Africans and so treated the locals like a colonized people and caused a ton of resentment that still resonates in that country today, and of course whites were not going to see Liberia as equal to a white country anyway. Plus, most Black people considered themselves Americans and wanted equality at home, not to go to some country they did not know.
But for someone such as Crummell, Liberia meant freedom from whites and you can see why that would be appealing. Crummell moved to Liberia in 1853. He would stay there for most of the next twenty years, engaged in both the creation of a free state for Black Americans and the conversion of west Africans to evangelical Christianity. In the end, Crummell wasn’t very successful on either end of this project. Ideas for moving back to Africa continued after the Civil War, so that event didn’t make that huge of a difference here. Whether before or after the war, the vast majority of Black people had zero interest in returning to Africa. The fight was here, not there. Moreover, Crummell’s condescension toward Africans as savages who needed civilization did not play well with everyone. Of course most Black Americans were Christians, broadly defined, in the 1850s through the 1870s, but the inherent inequality in his vision of Africans did not go totally unchallenged, even if people would have broadly agreed that converting people to worshipping Christ was a good thing.
Even compared to other Black advocates of going to Africa though, Crummell really embraced the anti-African language. Some scholars have suggested that doing so was advantageous in dealings with the white funders of back to Africa projects. Perhaps that’s true. Like Booker T. Washington, it can be difficult to tease out his actual beliefs compared to what he needed to say to whites to maintain the funding and his status. He would state some pretty bad things though, such as denying that west Africans even had a history, talking of “the long, long centuries of human existence in Africa…Darkness covered the land and gross darkness the people.” Ugh. He also subscribed to some of the geological and environmental determinism rising in this era, saying that the reason for the Africans’ backwardness was that the Sahara Desert isolated them from the great advances of European civilization.
In fact, Crummell knew that things weren’t going that well among his friends who initially had come to Liberia. He started to criticize the corrupt leadership in Liberia and how they treated Africans, which eventually led him to leave Liberia, fearing for his life.
Fundamentally, Crummell was a Black nationalist. He was forecasting the work of people such as Marcus Garvey decades later. He simply did not believe that Black Americans could have anything like equality in the United States and that the only hope was to leave the United States instead. Again, he was filled with the cultural prejudices of the day created by whites toward Africans and was far from a perfect person himself in articulating this stuff, but it’s easy to see where he was coming from, He wasn’t the first person to articulate this stuff and it wasn’t that far of a distance from him to the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam in the late 20th century.
Crummell returned to the United States in 1872. He started a new church in Washington, D.C. and then another in 1875. He would remain involved in that until his retirement in 1894. He published a bunch of his sermons over the years. He then taught at Howard University for a couple of years, from 1895-97. He still pushed for Black pride and Black self-determination and spent quite a bit of his energy in his later years creating the American Negro Academy, which was intended to provide financial and institutional support for Black artists and intellectuals. He founded it in 1897 and it continued until 1928, so not a bad run. It became closely associated with W.E.B. DuBois and his ideas of the Talented Tenth that would lead the civil rights movement in the future.
Crummell naturally did not live to see much of this, as he was pretty old by the time it opened. He died the next year, in 1898, at the age of 79.
Alexander Crummell is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
If you would like to visit other 19th century African Americans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Eli Baptist is in Springfield, Massachusetts and Lucy Sprague is in Rochester, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,915 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
vox_feed
Dog people tend to be pretty confident they know what’s going on with their animals.
When we put out a call on the Explain It to Me podcast for dog owners to tell us about their connection to their furry friends, the responses ranged from “soul dog” to “love of my life” to “I believe I can read my dog’s mind.”
But how well can we see inside a dog’s mind, really? That’s a question Alexandra Horowitz has been investigating for decades. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York and has written four books on how dogs experience the world.
When we called her up for our episode, she told Explain It to Me guest host Noam Hassenfeld that understanding that experience starts with the nose.
“They are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense,” Horowitz said. “My interest is in saying, ‘Okay, let’s try to understand the dog’s way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they’re just like us, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I’m sitting on a couch.’”
Horowitz talked to Noam about her experience with nose-first living, how dogs’ smell shapes their perception of time, and whether, after all these years of research, she feels any more confident she knows what’s going on with her fuzzy friends. Below is a transcript edited for length and clarity. But make sure to listen to the whole thing—it’s a great interview.
How do you start to take a dog’s point of view? You did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? Or how should I put that?
Yeah, I tried to step into some of the dog’s behaviors in order to understand them a little bit. Humans are visual creatures, right? We see the world first, and we assume the world is out there looking like it is to everybody, the way it looks to us. Of course, it doesn’t.
But if you’re a smelling creature, how do you see the world? Smells don’t just appear when you open your nose. If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. Our sniffs are pretty feeble, and they’ll do seven sniffs a second if they wanna get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things.
That was just the first step, going around and saying, like, “All right, what are smells down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it?”
I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?
Well, I did this in New York City. Right where I live.
If a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.
So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it’s New York City.
Oh no, people moved away from me, that’s for sure. But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? I didn’t sniff other dog butts cause there are other issues involved there, but, you know, if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.
What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?
The big lesson for me was that, unlike the way I had characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell, or something unappealing, like in New York, garbage in the summer is a very distinctive smell. But for dogs, smells are just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images.
You know, when I think of looking at the world, I create a spatial map of the world, right? Like, I’ll walk through my apartment and I’ll look around. Here’s the door, here’s the window, here’s the hall. What does that mean for the world you live in if you’re mapping it by smelling it?
Smells move, and that’s one of the interesting things about them. We know this — you have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table. So where that coffee is, is a slightly different space to a, let’s say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It’s right in the cup to me, but to somebody who’s seeing the world through smell, it’s in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.
Oh, that’s fascinating.
So things are casting off smells all the time. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing concrete and real. It just means that it’s a little more transient than we see.
Does the way a dog relies on smell also change their perception of time?
Yeah, I think time is in smell. My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I’ve been gone for an hour, I’m still sort of in the room to them, but a little less. After a day, I’m a lot less in the room. And so they’re sort of…noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells.
There’s something reassuring in the fact that I’m still here when I’m not here for them.
Wow. That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don’t know, imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience.
Maybe I haven’t ever thought of it as sad. I mean in a way, there’s something reassuring in the fact that I’m still here when I’m not here for them. When I come home and I’ve been with another dog or I’ve had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, they can experience that by just smelling me, and seeing where I’ve been. To me, that’s extra neat, you know, not melancholy.
A lot of the people we’ve heard from in this episode — they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to you, it seems we’re actually just really different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?
As an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they’re quite different than we are perceptually, and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There’s a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn. As a person who lives with dogs, there’s the mystery of it — the mystery of what it’s like to be a smelling creature. Even though there’s this fundamental difference between us, we co-exist and seem to share a lot of things. We share space and share a life. I find that mystery delightful, and I don’t try to solve it in my ordinary life.
vox_feed
According to my phone, I’ve been averaging about 6,600 steps a day so far this year. My meager effort pales in comparison to the 15,000, 20,000, or even 30,000 steps I see influencers on my feed bragging about regularly.
The algorithm likes to remind me of my shortcomings. Although the long-held standard benchmark of 10,000 steps has been debunked, it seems many are aiming even higher these days. TikTok and Instagram feed me clip after clip of productive people racking upward of seven miles over the course of three-plus hours and multiple walks. They wake up at 4 am to walk. They walk and check emails. They walk and read. They walk to the grocery store or during meetings. They stride on walking pads, treadmills, and outdoors. They flash their Apple Watches to the camera to show their progress.
To be clear: There is nothing wrong with walking — it’s a free and low-impact exercise that, compared to running, has greater mass appeal. Americans are overwhelmingly sedentary, spending an average of 9.5 hours a day seated, and anything that inspires people to move more is good news. But quantifying your every step, tracking every ounce of protein ingested, or hours slept can border on obsessive. The current cultural fixation on nutrition and fitness also speaks to a shift toward beauty standards that once again idealize thinness. Mix that with American hustle culture, and you have a recipe for turning a low-key activity into a compulsion.
“This all comes down to how much our culture values productivity above everything else,” says Keith Diaz, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. “It’s just another metric that we measure ourselves by.”
Walking is perhaps one of the most functional and accessible forms of movement: It gets you where you want to go, and you don’t need any special equipment to do it. The vast majority of people walk at some point during their day without having to think too much about it. It makes sense, then, that walking has come in and out of fashion as a form of exercise throughout history. In the late 1800s, leisure walking became a popular sport. A century later, at the height of the fitness boom in the 1980s, walking got a rebrand and a refresh, thanks to a book called Heavyhands touting the benefits of walking with weights. “That became,” says Danielle Friedman, the author of Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped The World, “a way to make walking not seem weak.”
To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals.
The pandemic was a major boon for walking. With gyms and fitness studios closed and cabin fever setting in, many took to strolling as a way to get moving out of the house. Walking was gentler and less punishing than the high-intensity fitness trends of the early 2000s, Friedman says. “The pendulum swung a little bit more toward just appreciating movement for movement’s sake,” she says. But as social media caught on — the original “hot girl walk” clip was posted on TikTok in January 2021 — walks became more performative. Walking now had a purpose. To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, for instance, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals. Over time, the step counts ballooned.
Keeping careful track of your mileage also has a long history. The first modern pedometer was designed in 1965 in Japan. Called the manpo-kei, or 10,000 steps meter, this simple act of marketing helped cement the 10,000-step threshold as a benchmark that one should strive to hit for good health and well-being.
The science doesn’t quite back up the marketing. Recent research has found that among women in their 70s, as few as 4,400 steps a day is related to lower mortality, compared to 2,700 steps or less. Those who walked more had even less risk for early mortality, but those benefits tapered off at more than about 7,500 steps. Another study of middle-aged adults found that those who took 8,000 steps were less likely to die early from heart disease and cancer compared to those who only took 4,000 steps. Again, the benefits plateaued after 8,000 steps. Similar findings suggest that 7,000 steps was the magic number (the studies, it should be noted, were observational and could not prove causation.) If you’re walking for health, 7,000 to 8,000 steps, however, seems like a pretty good bet.
These days, everyone’s got a step counter in their pocket or on their wrist. Health tracking apps on phones and wearables like the Apple Watch, Oura, Fitbit, and Whoop have made it much easier to account for every single step. Health-related tracking can be extremely motivating when it comes to behavior change. When you have specific health or fitness goals, tracking is a good way to measure success. “You have a target and you have a means to measure it,” Diaz says, “which is great.”
At the same time, you should want to engage in that activity because you like it and not because your watch or an influencer is telling you to move. Unless you’re intrinsically motivated to achieve that goal — I walk because I like the way it feels — tracking can veer into compulsion. Once you’ve hit a benchmark of 10,000 or 15,000 or 20,000 steps, you may feel compelled to meet, or exceed, it every day or else fall into a shame and anxiety spiral. “When the Fitbit first came out,” Diaz says, “I used it for a couple weeks, and I just had to put it away because I couldn’t do it anymore. If I didn’t hit 10,000 steps in a day, it’d be nine o’clock at night and…I’d be circling my little, tiny living room for 20 minutes just to get my steps to where I need them to be. I’m sitting there, like how is this healthy in any way, shape, or form that I’m obsessing over a number?”
Although quantifying an activity increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less.
Soon, something that previously brought you enjoyment can start to feel like work. Although quantifying an activity (like counting steps or the number of pages read) increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less, a 2016 study found. This change can happen within a few days of tracking, the study’s author Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke University, says.
When participants were able to see their results, they would continue the activity. But when they weren’t shown their data, they lost the motivation to continue. “The reasons for doing the activity shift from being because you like it or find some other value in it,” Etkin says, “to being because it gives you this sense of accomplishment and productivity. When you don’t get that anymore, because you’re not tracking how many of these things you’re doing, it’s less valuable to you.”
Instead of just moving for movement’s sake, perpetual tracking assigns status and morality to basic bodily functions. Hitting a certain step count is “good” and having a low readiness score is “bad.” The number acts as a marker of wellness. These days, the ideal embodiment of that wellness has pivoted back toward thinness. No longer is a step just a step or a gram of protein a bit of nourishment — it’s all in service of optimization of a skinnier, healthier self. People who track their health want every step to count, to matter, Etkin says. If it isn’t being documented, it may as well not have happened. “That introduces new dynamics into how people decide what and whether and when to do things,” she says, “based on whether it’s going to be recorded.”
By no means should you stop walking if it improves your mental and physical health. But if the pressure of hitting a specific target every day causes anxiety or you’re unable to forgo walking for a day, you may need to reconsider your relationship with your goals. This is “because you’re obsessing over this outward signal, and it becomes this unhealthy striving for perfectionism,” Diaz says. People can start to ignore their body’s cues for rest and push themselves to injury.
In order to maintain a more flexible outlook on your goals, Diaz suggests setting a range target — maybe 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day — or weekly benchmarks. If you know you’re going to be moving a lot on the weekend, you won’t be so fixated on a weekday where your step count is lower.
Any wellness lifestyle should be sustainable. If your body and schedule allow for 20,000 steps a day, go for it. If it feels like a chore, you run the risk of burning out. It’s worth asking yourself if any of your fitness-related hobbies are still enjoyable or if they inspire stress or obligation, Diaz says. Fitness isn’t always fun, but it should, hopefully, relieve anxiety, not cause it.
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Ay, oh, way to go, Idaho:
Two firefighters were killed Sunday and another was wounded when they were ambushed by sniper fire while responding to a blaze in a northern Idaho mountain community, as crews endured a barrage of gunfire over several hours that the governor called a “heinous” assault.
A shelter-in-place order was lifted Sunday night after a tactical response team discovered the body of a man with a firearm nearby, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said. Officials did not release his name, nor did they say what kind of gun was found.
Authorities planned a news conference later Sunday to provide more information.
Sheriff’s officials said crews responded to a fire at Canfield Mountain just north of Coeur d’Alene around 1:30 p.m., and gunshots were reported about a half hour later.
Sheriff Bob Norris earlier said officials weren’t immediately sure how many people were shot and deputies were “actively taking sniper fire as we speak.”
Three victims were brought to Kootenai Health, said hospital spokesperson Kim Anderson. Two were dead on arrival and the third was being treated for injuries, Anderson said. The wounded firefighter’s condition wasn’t known.
There is a Supreme Court supermajority dedicated to the proposition that Americans lack sufficient access to military-grade firearms.
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