Artist for Nova 44 | here for art and animal facts | she/they | enormous nerd | Chronic pain enjoyer. | I also sell stuff - my Etsy shop is dead but lives again at https://asterandorchid.com
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It may strike you as weird, but lenders love to lend money to poor people who will have trouble paying back their loans. Obviously, lenders want to be repaid, and obviously the more money you have, the easier it is to settle your debts, but (paradoxically) that means that if you have a lot of money, you expect to pay less to borrow.
In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower.
Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest?
Obviously, the fly in the ointment here is the risK in "risk premium." The reason the risk premium exists is that poor borrowers have a harder time paying their loans. That can be good, up to a point: if you're Klarna and you're originating loans to people Chipotle lunches on the installment plan, you want your borrowers to miss several payments. Klarna loans are free if you pay them back on time, but if you miss a payment, you're hit with a huge penalty charge and sky-high interest (on top of the principle and the penalty). On a small purchase, penalties and interest can quickly add up to a triple-digit APR.
That's where Klarna makes its money: people who miss their burrito installment payments. However: if a Klarna borrower goes bankrupt before they've repaid the principle, Klarna loses money. A successful loan-book of unsecured burrito mortgages depends on the existence of many missed payments and few defaults.
"Financial innovation" is often just a project to decrease the risk in risky loans, but without decreasing the risk premium you get paid for issuing those loans. It's a way to eat your cake and have it too: even though you've reduced the likelihood that you'll have to write off your loan, you still charge the borrower as though that risk is unchanged. As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself.
Remember the subprime crisis? The whole point of collateralized debt obligations and swaps was to offer loans to people with bad credit â even loans they obviously couldn't pay back â without incurring a default risk. Subprime mortgages supercharged the practice of loan origination and resale (where a bank offers you a loan and then sells that loan to someone else, so your default becomes their problem) by splitting the loans into pieces. These pieces were recombined according to complex mathematical formulas that supposedly "proved" that the default risk from poor borrowers had been "offset" by combining them with other borrowers' loans and wrapping them in opaque insurance contracts.
Those subprime mortgages came with cheap "teaser rates" â the interest rate you paid over the first couple years â but then the interest payments "ballooned" to farcical sums that borrowers had no hope of repaying. Those farcical sums were the risk premium. When financier transmuted these high-risk 30-year mortgages into complex derivatives, they were effectively promising their customers a piece of that risk premium for 28 out of the 30 years that the mortgage ran for.
But it wasn't all financial engineering: subprime mortgage salesmen could also promise customers that they wouldn't lose everything even after a wave of borrower bankruptcies and defaults. That's because mortgages are secured: they are backed by deeds for the homes the borrowers own(ed). If a borrower goes bust, the lender can repossess their house or apartment and sell it to recover the loan amount.
Now, the finance sector did repossess a fuckton of houses after the crash. Foreclosure and eviction became official policy: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Obama that a wave of foreclosures was necessary to "foam the runways" for the banks, so Obama encouraged banks to foreclose on their loans, rather than restructuring them so that Americans could keep their homes:
But even with these foreclosures, lenders and their customers lost hundreds of billions on the subprime crisis. That's because all that subprime lending pushed the price of houses up and up and up, so when the market collapsed, those mortgages were "underwater" â the money from selling the foreclosed homes didn't cover their outstanding loans.
Collateralization â backing loans with legally binding promises to surrender some asset if you default â is a way to reduce risk, but it can't eliminate it. Assets degrade: houses burn, cars get totaled, jewelry is stolen. Assets also devalue: a loan backed by bitcoin at $111,000 on the eve of Trump's election will be underwater today with bitcoin at $64,000. This devaluation can also occur when your house's value plummets because Elon Musk repeatedly bombs your neighborhood with flaming rocket debris, or when your Tesla's resale value collapses after Musk throws a string of Seig Heils on national television.
The point being that risk mitigation is never risk elimination, but markets have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Partly that's because of risk shifting. A lender who can "securitize" their loans (turn them into bonds and sell them off to investors) can insulate themselves from risk, because the people who buy the bonds are now carrying that risk.
So many of our crises come from the intersection of these two phenomena: the promise of reducing loan risks without losing the risk premium and the fact that risk reduction can fail suddenly (or be revealed as nothing more than risk-shifting). The first phenomenon creates vast credit bubbles, the second one pops them.
This leaves would-be usurers on an endless quest for new ways to lend money at a premium to poor people while reducing their own risk. You don't need technology to do this â all you need is a captive audience of broke people whom other lenders won't touch.
When the US government adopted the racist practice of "redlining" (denying government-backed loans to Black borrowers), they created a market for predatory pseudo-mortgages called "contract buying." Contract buying is like a mortgage, but without the equity: miss a payment and you get evicted, and you aren't entitled to any of the sale price of the house, even if it was 99.99% paid off when you got kicked out.
Lenders can tip the scales in their favor by making up arbitrary junk fees, and a smart lender waits until the house is almost paid off before whacking the borrower with a ton of these fees. The borrower misses a payment, the seller repossesses the house and sells it again:
Contract lending never went away. Wherever you find a desperate, disfavored group who are locked out of the credit system, you'll find scumbag contract lenders running this scam. Take long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America. Long before Uber made worker misclassification (treating an employee as an independent contractor) mainstream, the trucking industry was effectively indenturing truckers, exerting more control over their lives than a boss could ever impose on a waged worker, while disclaiming any employer-related responsibilities. Truckers don't get health insurance or sick leave â and they don't get paid if they have to sit at a port for 20 hours waiting to pick up a load.
But the exploitation of truckers doesn't stop with mere wage theft. Truckers also "contract buy" their trucks. Their bosses issue loans that let drivers buy their trucks on terms that allow the company to repo the truck after a single missed payment. And of course, bosses have total control over truckers' wages, so a canny boss can wait until a truck is nearly paid off and then stop the driver's wages, forcing them to miss a payment and lose their truck, which can be sold on to the next victim:
Subprime auto-loans bring this same profitable arrangement to regular drivers who just need a car to commute, pick up groceries, and shuttle the kids to and from school. A subprime auto-loan often contains the "teaser" and "balloon" rates at the heart of the subprime mortgage bubble: for the first year or two, your car payments are affordable, but then they shoot up to a sum that you can't possibly pay. The lender then repossesses your car, zeroing out your equity, and sells it to another victim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s
But the subprime car industry puts a decidedly modern spin on the contract lending scam that has been used to profitably rob so many Black home borrowers and long-haul truckers. Subprime lending's risk-reduction relies on repossession. A subprime car lender doesn't just get rich by charging poor borrowers more money that rich borrowers for shittier, older cars. Subprime car dealers repeatedly "sell" that car to many, many poor people, on conditions that all but guarantee that the borrower will default on their loan and lose their car.
This is where tech comes in. Ubiquitous digital networks and computing make it much easier to repo a car. This started with the humble lo-jack, a simple tracker marketed as a way to locate lost or stolen cars. Subprime auto-lenders were early and aggressive lo-jack adopters, because you can't repo a car if you don't know where it is. Installing a lo-jack is much cheaper than paying repo men to drive around looking for the cars you want to claw back, which means that you can sell cars to people who represent worse credit risks, charging a higher risk premium, and still find the car when those high interest rates force your borrower into default.
The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the borrower over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working:
But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car â it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives:
The cheaper the repo, the riskier the loan can be; the riskier the loan, the higher the risk premium. Digital tech makes repo much cheaper, so wherever you find digital tech, you find digital arm-breakers coming up with ways to robo-repo the things you buy.
There's India's subprime phone lenders, who pre-install usury-tech on their phones. This is a tool that spies on the phone's owner, building a dossier of the owner's most frequently used apps. When the owner misses a payment, the phone starts disabling the user's favorite apps, working its way up the list to the most indispensable ones:
It's the digital version of the mob loan-shark who breaks a finger, then your hand, then your arm. The more graduated the threat matrix is, the more payments you can capture. A borrower with a broken finger can get to a pawn-broker to sell their wedding-ring; a borrower with two broken legs has a much harder time.
Digital arm-breakers aren't an epiphenomenon of digitization alone. Usury tech only works if the device's owner can't disable it. Remember: a computer is flexible. The only computer we know how to make is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," defined as a device that can compute ever valid program. If your phone is running a program that disables your apps, then you can install another program that disables that program. Same goes for your car's lo-jack; the stereo system emitting ear-splitting complaints about your car note; and the immobilizer hooked up to your ignition.
That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."
DMCA 1201 is the reason you can't neutralize the digital arm-breakers by deleting or blocking the usury-tech in your car, phone or other device:
Here's where it gets interesting. Apologists for DMCA 1201 insist that the law is necessary, because it lets device makers lock malicious parties out of your devices. Apple leads the pack here: they use DMCA 1201 to block independent repair of their devices, insisting that this isn't done to extort high fees from you or to force you to throw away and replace last year's iPhone after you drop it. No, Apple does this to protect you â from unscrupulous repairers who might install malware on your phone:
And Apple says the reason it blocks you from installing apps without using its App Store is to protect you from malicious apps â not to control the app marketplace, where it makes $100b/year on payment processing junk-fees, siphoning off 30% of every dollar you spend in an app:
Apple's greatest accomplishment isn't technological, it's psychological. Apple managed to convince millions of people that buying products from a multi-trillion dollar corporation with close ties to both Trump and Xi makes them members of an oppressed religious minority, and those members of the "cult of Mac" tie themselves into knots insisting that Apple would only ever use its powers for good:
But moral behavior doesn't consist solely of resisting the temptation to do bad things â to be truly moral, you must not put yourself in temptation's path in the first place. Morality isn't the strength to resist the siren's song â it's the humility to recognize your own weakness and tie yourself to the mast:
By giving itself a veto over its customers' choices, Apple deliberately sailed into siren-infested waters, after first putting a gun on every mantelpiece it could find. Now the company is drowning in sin, while spraying gunfire in every direction.
Today, the company is getting into the leasing business. Having monopolized its markets and eliminated the possibility of growth by making and selling things, the company is becoming a lender. As a lender, Apple wants to maximize the risk premiums it can charge, while minimizing its actual risk. That's why the new version of iOS â the operating system for iPhones and iPads â comes with software that lets lenders brick your device if you miss a payment:
The code steals a trick from India's subprime phone lenders, giving Apple the ability to "restrict apps and services when payments are missed." It hooks into a "Partner Finance Lock," which allows Apple to sell devices to third-party userers who want to get into the subprime game, promising those customers all the imaginative flexibility a digital arm-breaker could dream of.
This was always the trajectory of Apple's decision to sell you a computer that takes orders from its manufacturer, rather than its owner. Apple didn't invent the subprime gadget. It also didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player or the smartphone. Rather, Apple took those gadgets mainstream â just as it will do with subprime gadgets. Just in time for the affordability crisis, the oil shock, the climate shock, the AI collapse and the tariff shock, the age of the digital arm-breaker has well and truly arrived:
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My local animal shelter (BARCS) just got an influx of 369 birds from a shitass pet store, which is a truly terrifying number of parrots to have inside a building. BUT: there's a donation drive going on right now where you can vote for a pet's face to go on a beer can for their annual BARCStoberfest. Every single vote is a dollar towards animal rescue!!!
You can vote for your favorites such as Tylenol, El Eiwi Gordito, and Cheese here on their website!
Itâs strange being a Gen Z lesbian with body confidence when I have a mom whoâs still enslaved to 90s heroin chic. Iâve been hitting the gym lately, and I just outgrew my leather jacket. I told my mom and she acted like it was something terrible and assured me Iâd lose the weight again. And I was like no. This is a good thing. I want to be a hot lesbian with jacked shoulders wtf are you on about
those were the days... Picture the scene: Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974. Nothing, I mean nothing, had been seen like this before on TV. To really appreciate their courage and brilliance you need to know something about these days when gay marriage was not even on the horizon and most people would lose their employment if they were outed at work. The first Pride Parade was in 1970 and it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association in their generosity declared that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. Being LGBTQ+ was gradually decriminalized in various parts of the UK and a bit later in the US starting slowly in the late '60's.
Meanwhile, Monty Python was winning over hearts and minds through the funny bone. Groundbreaking.
I think Graham Chapman, the 4th man to join the scene, being gay and being a member of Monty Python is worth noting. He had a partner, David Sherlock, and was publicly open with his homosexuality as early as 1972. I just think it makes a difference in how Monty Python treated queerness in sketches when one of their members, their good friends and collaborators, is himself gay.
i'd also like to make a small note that the ending is still incredibly progressive for THIS day and age, let alone back then. a polyamorous marriage, perfectly above board, where everyone is happy as a clam. and it ends up making the punchline completely avoid punching down on anyone by instead picking the route, "you know there's a rather simple solution to all this confusion!"
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it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.
and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.
If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules
Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u
Reminds me of Jason Kander, former Missouri Secretary of State. When he went to the VA hospital to treat his PTSD, he told the nurse that Obama told him he should run for president, and she thought he was delusional.
I think I'm gonna make this my go-to story. It's not the worst I've ever heard, which is an asset because people won't believe you if you tell them the actual bad stuff those people do. And it just perfectly sums up the casual arrogance everyone working in mental health seems to have. The way they treat you as inherently Lesser for being in their care.
If they can't even handle basic, easily verified shit like "I'm a lawyer" they are never going to believe you when you tell them that you know how to manage a condition you've been dealing with for decades better than they can or will.
And then there's Alexander Morris, who was put in a straitjacket, called racial slurs, and denied treatment for his potentially life-threatening heart condition when he told them he was the lead singer of the band he was lead singer of.
The lead singer of the Motown group the Four Tops has filed a federal lawsuit against Ascension Macomb Oakland Hospital in Warren, Michigan,
There are multiple parts of that article that are Jae droppingly awful but this one really gets me:
They almost let this man die in a straight jacket simply because they were too racist. And then when they realize their "mistake", they tell him that his life is worth a 25$ supermarket gift card. Of course he's suing them for $75,000 as he should but like. Can you imagine how insulted he must've been. The 4 Tops were one of the top Motown bands of all time. You can be at the top of the music scene and still, they'll kill you because you're black. And they'll use fake claims about mental illness and "aggression" to justify it
& to be clear: none of this is good for anyone. actually delusional people, people who actually hear voices or see things, do not deserve to be treated like this. there is nothing about a person harmlessly believing something fantastical (or which sounds fantastical to you) that requires you to put them in a straightjacket and drug them or deny them necessary drugs. Black mentally ill people do not deserve to be tortured and murdered in a hospital for being Black and mentally ill.
this kind of system is a weapon which can be pointed at anyone. in order to prevent shit like this from happening, we also need to deconstruct how we view mentally ill people, including people who are delusional and hallucinate, and what we view as "reasonable" or "necessary" when it comes to such people.
Black people- including famous black people- have been arrested for "breaking and entering" their own homes due to a neighbor witnessing them unlocking their own house door with their own house key and calling the cops. College professors, celebrities, politicians, and everyday people such as my own father.
It's common enough that young black kids are told to keep any identifying information on them at all times just in case someone reports a black kid breaking and entering by walking into the house they've lived at since they were born. Because that has happened.
When you add mental illness and the healthcare industry into the mix, things only get worse from there. To be clear, you don't need to be black or mentally ill to be treated poorly by a doctor or nurse that's decided they know you better than you do. But it sure doesn't make things easier.
And people have died as a result- or have we already forgotten the death of Adriana Smith who went to THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE reporting severe headaches and was dismissed as exaggerating and imagining the severity, only to be declared brain dead upon arrival less than 24 hours later and artificially kept alive to force her dead body to carry her baby to term- which couldn't even happen and they had to remove him via C-section anyway.
These are related problems. And until we fix the root cause, they will keep happening.
[image 1: Tumblr reply by thepolterheist: "lol I read an interview w a lawyer who was briefly in inpatient and he told a nurse he was a lawyer and she put âdelusions of grandeurâ on his chart"]
[image 2: a paragraph from the linked article, which reads: "The lawsuit states Morris was offered a $25 gift card to a supermarket as an apology by the hospital, but he refused the offer."]
Reminds me of Jason Kander, former Missouri Secretary of State. When he went to the VA hospital to treat his PTSD, he told the nurse that Obama told him he should run for president, and she thought he was delusional.
I think I'm gonna make this my go-to story. It's not the worst I've ever heard, which is an asset because people won't believe you if you tell them the actual bad stuff those people do. And it just perfectly sums up the casual arrogance everyone working in mental health seems to have. The way they treat you as inherently Lesser for being in their care.
If they can't even handle basic, easily verified shit like "I'm a lawyer" they are never going to believe you when you tell them that you know how to manage a condition you've been dealing with for decades better than they can or will.
And then there's Alexander Morris, who was put in a straitjacket, called racial slurs, and denied treatment for his potentially life-threatening heart condition when he told them he was the lead singer of the band he was lead singer of.
The lead singer of the Motown group the Four Tops has filed a federal lawsuit against Ascension Macomb Oakland Hospital in Warren, Michigan,
There are multiple parts of that article that are Jae droppingly awful but this one really gets me:
They almost let this man die in a straight jacket simply because they were too racist. And then when they realize their "mistake", they tell him that his life is worth a 25$ supermarket gift card. Of course he's suing them for $75,000 as he should but like. Can you imagine how insulted he must've been. The 4 Tops were one of the top Motown bands of all time. You can be at the top of the music scene and still, they'll kill you because you're black. And they'll use fake claims about mental illness and "aggression" to justify it
& to be clear: none of this is good for anyone. actually delusional people, people who actually hear voices or see things, do not deserve to be treated like this. there is nothing about a person harmlessly believing something fantastical (or which sounds fantastical to you) that requires you to put them in a straightjacket and drug them or deny them necessary drugs. Black mentally ill people do not deserve to be tortured and murdered in a hospital for being Black and mentally ill.
this kind of system is a weapon which can be pointed at anyone. in order to prevent shit like this from happening, we also need to deconstruct how we view mentally ill people, including people who are delusional and hallucinate, and what we view as "reasonable" or "necessary" when it comes to such people.
Black people- including famous black people- have been arrested for "breaking and entering" their own homes due to a neighbor witnessing them unlocking their own house door with their own house key and calling the cops. College professors, celebrities, politicians, and everyday people such as my own father.
It's common enough that young black kids are told to keep any identifying information on them at all times just in case someone reports a black kid breaking and entering by walking into the house they've lived at since they were born. Because that has happened.
When you add mental illness and the healthcare industry into the mix, things only get worse from there. To be clear, you don't need to be black or mentally ill to be treated poorly by a doctor or nurse that's decided they know you better than you do. But it sure doesn't make things easier.
And people have died as a result- or have we already forgotten the death of Adriana Smith who went to THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE reporting severe headaches and was dismissed as exaggerating and imagining the severity, only to be declared brain dead upon arrival less than 24 hours later and artificially kept alive to force her dead body to carry her baby to term- which couldn't even happen and they had to remove him via C-section anyway.
These are related problems. And until we fix the root cause, they will keep happening.
[image 1: Tumblr reply by thepolterheist: "lol I read an interview w a lawyer who was briefly in inpatient and he told a nurse he was a lawyer and she put âdelusions of grandeurâ on his chart"]
[image 2: a paragraph from the linked article, which reads: "The lawsuit states Morris was offered a $25 gift card to a supermarket as an apology by the hospital, but he refused the offer."]
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Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
fatphobia, ableism, and acephobia/arophobia are all intertwined because at their core they rest on a bedrock of âbeing Healthy is a moral imperative; fixing your Unhealthiness is a moral requirement; and I get to decide what counts as the health standard that you need to strive for, and if you choose not to do, if you dare to be happy with yourself in a way I deem unhealthy, that is a moral failing I am morally allowed to punish you forâ
"Fixing what I have decided is wrong with you is both easy and your highest priority. Therefore, if you are still in that state, it's because you're doing it to spite me personally and I should fight back."
In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:
Taylor Farms
Earthbound Farms
Little Salad Bar (Aldi)
Marketside (Walmart)
Kroger House Brand
Target private label greens
Costco salads and greens etc
Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce
Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.
This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.
We need a fully funded and staffed FDA, and regulations with teeth - and that's exactly what we don't have under Trump. To make things worse, the CDC is no longer tracking these outbreaks. We're on our own.
My library queue includes all of the suggestions I pick up from everywhere; I often donât remember how books got on there. So how did Yesteryear get on here, and am I going to be happy with the damage Iâm inflicting on myself?
The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.
I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widderâs work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals canât perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And thatâs how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!
To tag onto the last comment: Dr. Widderâs even got a book that talks a lot about this! (itâs interesting for many reasons, not just this bit, and you can probably get it from your library if youâre curious): https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5243dd7f-1757-4507-affb-f5a3749f7a59
A pioneering marine biologist takes us down into the deep ocean to understand bioluminescence, th...
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The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.
I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widderâs work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals canât perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And thatâs how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!
Here is her TedTalk talking about the footage, which had covered first in a documentary for the Discovery Channel.
âThe only difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale starts with âonce upon a timeâ while a sea story begins with âthis ainât no shitââ.
The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.
I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widderâs work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals canât perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And thatâs how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!
She was also featured in an episode of Radiolab not too long ago! It became one of my favorites very quickly. I love the way she talks about and describes bioluminescence
A story of light that sparkles and glows, drips and squirts. Andâmaybeâtalks.
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