The Northman — just a bit too down home for me

I count two films by Robert Eggers as just about the best movies of the last decade — The VVitch and The Lighthouse — they’re thick with an otherworldly atmosphere and a fearfully weird kind of horror. So of course tonight I had to go see The Northman.

It was OK. Not as compelling as the other two movies, but I enjoyed it as a grim, fatalistic saga of bloody revenge. I think it was less exciting to me because the primary elements of the story — howling with the wolves, vengeance, berserker rages, betrayal, and vicious fights against the backdrop of an erupting volcano — were so familiar. That’s the mundane experience of growing up in a Scandinavian-American family, don’t you know.

Also, finally, we get some affirmation of our religious beliefs. Yes, when I die in battle, a Valkyrie will descend to carry my soul into the sky to Valhalla, where I will spend eternity feasting and fighting. I saw it in a movie now, so you know it has to be true.

Which one is not beautiful?

You have to choose A or B. I’m sorry, them’s the rules, no waffling allowed, because we believe in a strict binary decision here.

Jordan Peterson took this simple test, and failed, perhaps because he’s one of those animals that can’t handle the mirror test. When Sports Illustrated announced its annual swimsuit issue with a picture of (A), a woman named Yumi Nu, he declared Sorry. Not beautiful. And now amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that. I guess he is the definitive judge of the swimsuit competition, and thinks beauty is a physical absolute instead of a personal opinion.

Many people on Twitter were jolted into tweeting by the jarringly stupid, nasty mind that would say such a thing, and jumped all over him. So he announced that he was quitting Twitter because everyone was a poopyhead to say such mean things about him.

Wow. I feel like saying “get a thicker skin”, the go-to response people make when they point out the cruelty of the internet, that he should just ignore that which he dislikes, the way I ignore the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Unfortunately, he made a very big deal of his departure.

The staunch proponent of free speech recently bemoaned “self-censorship as a multiplier of cancel culture” and in December called a critic with less than 70 followers a “fool and a coward.” Eventually, however, Peterson faltered under the intensity of the backlash.

He lamented the “endless flood of vicious insults” and opined that Twitter’s structure makes it “intrinsically and dangerously insane.” He also said that he’d recently taken a Twitter break for a few weeks and found it drastically improved his life. (His staff appears to have tweeted from his account in Peterson’s stead.)

So he’s decided to take leave of the platform once again.

“I told my staff to change my password, to keep me from temptation, and am departing,” he tweeted.

Wait. He’s got a staff to handle his Twitter account? And he’s having them change his password instead of deleting his account? That’s an entitled chickenshit move.

He then proceeded to tweet incessantly after making that announcement — I guess he was making a Minnesota good-bye. He may have sort of finally kinda left, though, with his latest and maybe last tweet, smugly announcing that he had 5 million followers on YouTube. It’s a version of I didn’t want to play stickball with you meanies anyway, ’cause I’ve got a Nintendo at home. Nyaa nyaa nyaa.

He’s one of those people who use their follower count as a measure of their worth.

I don’t follow him on Twitter or on YouTube though, so he can just petulantly march away and I won’t care, except to point and laugh at the whiner.

P.S. I won’t leave you hanging. The answer to my little quiz is B, B is not beautiful, using the principles of authoritarian tolerance, whatever that is.

The irrefutability problem and cryptocurrency

Something that bugs me: there are all these articles that explain why cryptocurrency will fail, and they’re good — but they’re all so long. Dan Olson’s video on the subject was over two hours long, and it was great, but it takes dedication to get through it all, and it’s not fair — there’s an asymmetry problem here, just as there is with creationism, where the zealots only have to shout a short slogan (“you’ll get rich!” or “God did it!”), and then the smart people who actually know something have to slog through a couple of textbooks or a pile of papers to show definitively that they’re wrong. Once again, here’s a LONG interview with Nicholas Weaver to explain what’s wrong with cryptocurrency. He makes a prediction:

It will implode spectacularly. The only question is when. I thought it would have actually imploded a year ago. But basically, what we saw with Terra and Luna, where it collapsed suddenly due to these downward positive feedback loops—situations where basically the system is designed to collapse utterly and quickly—those will happen to the larger cryptocurrency space. Because, for example, the mining process is horribly expensive. We’re talking [a measurable percentage] of the world’s electricity consumption, most of that has not been paid for. So the mining companies for the most part have been taking the cryptocurrency and borrowing against the cryptocurrency that they create, rather than sell it, because the market’s actually very thin.

This means there’s a huge amount that is subject to potentially catastrophic margin calls. And that creates a feedback loop where the price drops a little, somebody’s forced to sell. That drops the price more. They’re forced to sell more. This creates a feedback loop that drives the price into the ground, catastrophically.

The previous times this has happened, we had the bubble at 100, powered by fraud at Mt. Gox. And that imploded down to 10. We had a bubble a 1000 powered by fraud, it imploded and went back down to 100. We had a bubble at 10,000 powered by Tether, it blew up and went back down to 1,000. And now we’re at a bubble where Bitcoin blew up to 60,000, fueled by Tether and falling. But I don’t think there’ll be a fifth bubble. Because basically, they will have broken all the suckers left to break. There’s only so many more suckers that can be brought into that space. Once you burn out a sucker, they don’t come back. They’re a non-renewable resource. So they’re going to end up running out of greater fools.

So I suspect that the cryptocurrency space will go fine absent regulation, until one day it goes and collapses greatly.

Unfortunately, that won’t change anything. If there’s one thing we should have learned from history, it’s that it doesn’t matter if bunkum is refuted by real world catastrophic consequences. Someone predicts the world will end on a specific date, the date passes, and their followers are unfazed. Undergo a pandemic, and the deniers will say it was just a bad cold even after a million Americans have died of it. Go ahead, say that Bitcoin is doomed to collapse, and the instant it fails there’s a train of True Believers who will announce another new cryptocurrency that they’ll claim is flawless…until it too goes boom.

I look forward to the day we can say “I told you so” and then watch befuddled as the idiots line up to do it all over again.

It’ll be…great?

Signing out for a while

I mentioned that I was messed up with some nasty lower back pain — I got in to the doctor this morning, and oh boy, I got some good drugs. I’m going to be doping myself with cyclobenzaprine three times a day for a while, so I don’t expect to be particularly perky for a while.

The pain has been pretty bad. On my personal scale I’d give it a 9 (10, the worst I’ve ever felt, was a ruptured eardrum). To put it in perspective, though, my wife went through labor and delivery three times, so it might have been a 3 or 4 on that scale.

Somehow I’ll have to wade through the lethargy and get the grading done. Maybe this will improve the student’s grades.

The American Way of Life

Why do we do this to ourselves?

It’s good to have an outsider take a look at us and give some insight. Here’s an excellent example: a Slovakian wondering what’s up with American suburbs.

I’ve asked those same questions myself. When I lived in Pennsylvania, we first got an apartment in a shiny glossy hellhole, in a town called King of Prussia. It was the most dead, soulless place I’ve ever been to. The apartments were clean and good, but imbedded in loops of freeways, and the sole attraction was a mega-mall. We got out of there as soon as we could.

The next stop was a house in a suburban development near Jenkintown. It met one of the criteria mentioned by the Slovakian: there was bus service. I made that a requirement by taking mass transit to get to any place we were seriously considering. But the rest of that list fit it perfectly. The only things in that development were residential housing. If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to have a car. On weekends, there were no coffeeshops to walk to, no movie theaters, nothing. You stayed home and mowed your lawn. I kind of hated it.

We had moved to Pennsylvania from Salt Lake City, and that was an unpleasant change. Salt Lake City is a weird place, but I’ll give it this: there were lots of parks in walking distance from anywhere you might live. There was a bagel place a block away from my apartment, and three movie theaters within a few blocks, one of them a funky art house kind of place. We were surrounded by restaurants, too, although with three little kids we didn’t get to partake very often.

There are enriching places for humans to live, and then there are festering, ingrown suburbs that were built by short-sighted developers and that are entirely dependent on cars for survival. For some reason, probably capitalist greed, many Americans are compelled to live in the latter, for lack of alternatives.

Oh, also, racism.

A few years ago, the city of Minneapolis took a bold step and changed zoning laws. Such a simple thing, with deep consequences!

Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.

On Friday, the City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.

“Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity—which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing—only goes as far as the housing stock.

It’s probably too soon to tell for sure, and there’s more to this problem than just zoning, but there are hints that we might be getting some incremental, evolutionary change. Here’s an article by a landlord <makes the sign of the cross, mutters a prayer of protection> that suggests there has been a subtle shift. First, she points out the racial disparities — maybe that ought to be one of the first answers to give that Slovakian. Race hatred poisons everything in this country.

I’ve worked on housing affordability since 1997. That whole time, the Twin Cities has been losing ground, with homes becoming steadily less affordable. Rents have been rising — sometimes very rapidly. The portion of people paying more than 30 percent or even 50 percent of their income in rent (the definition of “housing cost burden”) is stubbornly high, especially for Black households. While we increase public funding for Affordable Housing — the subsidized kind — the number of unsheltered people grows.

But then she looks at rents. It’s messy, and complicated by the fact that we’re in a pandemic, but things are looking slightly better.

This spring, I pulled all the median advertised rent information from the Minneapolis Rental Housing Brief into a spreadsheet. I didn’t adjust it for inflation. I used three-month rolling averages to smooth out the monthly noise. Check out these results.

Line graph showing 1, 2, and 3br rent trends in Minneapolis 2018 through 2022

Data: HousingLink Minneapolis Rental Housing Brief, chart by author
The actual advertised median rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments are lower — in actual dollars — in 2022 than they were in late 2018. Three-bedroom rents went up 2 percent over the four years, while inflation went up 11 percent over the same time. These shifts started more than a year before the pandemic. “Post” pandemic increases look big due to the atypical and extremely low rents during summer 2020. But trends show that Minneapolis rents have simply returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Rents are a rather narrow parameter to scrutinize livability in a city, but it’s something, at least.

As for my situation now: I’m in a small town that would find it difficult to lock down a large chunk of land and reserve it for single family housing, although they’d like to try, I’m sure. There are some nascent suburb-like areas near town where the local construction company has put up rows and rows of houses. We looked at those when we were on the market, and crossed them all off our list when we noticed their common feature: they all had gigantic garages, another affliction of American housing. We don’t own three gargantuan trucks, which would have easily fit into those garages, so we didn’t see the point. Now we live in a quirky older home with all the commercial amenities within a half-mile walk, and a university next door, which is a much nicer way to live. We’ve gone for weeks without driving a car!

I guess the bottom line explanation I’d give the Slovakian would be two words: cars and racism.

The virus is still evolving? INCONCEIVABLE.

The latest from Science informs us of more COVID variants taking over, and they’re good at avoiding our immune systems.

Once again, South Africa is at the forefront of the changing COVID-19 pandemic. Epidemiologists and virologists are watching closely as cases there rise sharply again, just 5 months after the Omicron variant caused a dramatic surge. This time, the drivers are two new subvariants of Omicron named BA.4 and BA.5, which the Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa first detected in January.

The new strains didn’t have much of an impact initially, but over the past few weeks case numbers in South Africa jumped from roughly 1000 per day on 17 April to nearly 10,000 on 7 May. A third subvariant called BA.2.12.1 is spreading in the United States, driving increases along the East Coast.

It’s still unclear whether the new subvariants will cause another global COVID-19 wave. But like the earlier versions of Omicron, they have a remarkable ability to evade immunity from vaccines, previous infection, or both—a disturbing portent for the future of the pandemic and a potentially serious complication for vaccine developers.

In most cases, vaccination or earlier infection still seem to provide protection from severe disease. “There’s no reason to freak out,” says John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. The new strains are “an additional hassle,” he says, but “there’s no indication that they’re more dangerous or more pathogenic.”

I guess no one in my university’s administration ever reads Science, though.

The University of Minnesota president sends me warm wishes!

Gosh. How nice.

When Biden pledged to “follow the science,” it was hard to imagine that the country could have ended up here. But the administration made a big bet that vaccines would provide sterilizing immunity and end the pandemic, allowing it to move on to other priorities. Leaving behind the insanity of ivermectin, hydroxy­chloroquine, and bleach was certainly a great step forward. However, evolution has had other plans, and variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome corona­virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) have kept the pandemic going. This left the White House in a very tight spot: There was little political will to keep pushing nonpharmaceutical interven­tions, yet the pandemic was far from over. Add to this mounting inflation worries and concerns about the war in Ukraine, and the response has been a clumsy pivot to a message that politicians always turn to: personal responsibility. Get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask, get a prescription for the antiviral Pax­lovid—if you want to. This may be fine if you have a healthy immune system, great health insurance, and the ability to navigate the US health care system. But what about everyone else?
COVID-19 is at a similar place to where the HIV/AIDS global pandemic was when the antiretroviral drugs came along. Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves told me about important parallels between both pandem­ics. “The HIV epidemic didn’t go away,” he said. “It just went to where people could ignore it. It went into the rural South, it went to communities that were already facing disparities in health.” At that time, confusion between medicine and public health was also an im­portant factor. “The discourse shifting to private choice and private adjudication of risk is really not what public health science is,” he said. “We work in populations. And if we’re talking about medicine, it’s about private risk and private choices.”

Oops, no. That isn’t Joan Gabel’s message! That’s from the editor of Science magazine, explaining that it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and he concludes,

SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly mutating and recombining, and more variants and subvariants—potentially more pathogenic—are on the horizon. The world is still barely vaccinated, and even in wealthy countries like the United States, resources are inequitably distrib­uted. It absolutely ain’t over. And this is no time to drop the ball.

The message from the university president is a little different. She is announcing that it is time to drop the ball.

The university administration will “respect and honor the decision of those who choose to wear a mask,” but they’ll respect the yahoos who refuse to wear a mask a little more.

“Respect” also means telling me I’m required to teach in-person to classes full of unmasked students in the fall.

Please, Joan, don’t ever wish me anything ever again, warmly or otherwise.

Christian masculinity

It’s a horrifying thing. Look at the effect it has on men, amplifying their sense of entitlement.

I find the insistence on “daddy” as a name for your partner to be deeply perverse. If my wife tried it it would probably set me aback, and no, I’m not going to call her “mommy”, or in a Pence-style move, “mother”. Ick.

For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever addressed my wife with a pet name. She’s a person, dang it, not a toy or a child or a stereotypical role, and she has a name, a real name, and her own identity. Same as me.

If two people in love have nicknames for each other, that’s fine, just not my thing — but if you insist on “sir” or “lord” or “master”, you’re not in love, you’ve got a possession.

(OK, another possibility: if it’s part of a role-playing scenario, that’s also fine. Yeesh, interpersonal relationships are complicated.)