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home-halone · 6 years

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Long Post on Screenshots

Coincidentally, I had glimpsed the twitter thread in question (or something similar) before I saw a post about it and had some thoughts™ as well

I was going to straight up reply but it got out of hand and I ended up blabbing a lot about taking screenshots, mods and ReShade.

Mods. Literally just an aesthetic client-side change. I can't believe people are up in arms about this. Let people have their fun and ignore it if it's not to your taste. There's absolutely no need to shit on someone else's definition of fun. Your values for what comprises a good screenshot made with effort should not be imposed as the standard. (Unless you're holding a screenshot contest, it literally doesn't matter.)

I don't use mods personally, out of laziness and I cannot be bothered messing with my files. Partly because I don't have characters that have a particular appearance that I really want. But that's my reason, and if other people are happy with their mods, so be it. I'm happy with my own thing. Even a walk home next to a world-famous monument just gets dull when you see it so often. It's not a crime to appreciate it through a different lens.

I'm going to preface this by saying no one has to defend what they want to do for fun. And even if your reasons for using mods/ReShade etc doesn't fall in line with any of the ones offered below, it literally doesn't matter and you should have your fun.

Contrary to what some negative folks think, people are still fully capable of doing some really good glamour without mods. Although it makes sense when you play around with FFXIV's glams/character creator enough, you'll quickly realize that there are particular limitations (certain gloves don't show up with certain tops, some bottoms lose the pants/skirt when you wear certain things over them, etc) and some people simply want to portray the details of their characters accurately to their vision. I have seen a lot of really good designs that don't exactly match their in-game sprites. Some people might want to do an easy cosplay. Some people might just want to look pretty and sometimes it doesn't get deeper than that.

Nevermind that there are ordinary people behind modding, creating these for use. They didn’t spawn out of nowhere. They’re a product of someone’s hard work and skill too. Shout out to @keeperofthelilacs for the posts & a glimpse into the grueling, painstaking process just to make a deceptively simple mod and apply changes to each model. I cannot fathom people creating things that are not even in-game.

But obviously, with modding being the new shiny thing, there would be an influx of pretty pictures with people using them. The majority out there still does some creative things without the use of these programs. But their use isn’t indicative of a lack of creativity in taking screenshots.

Yes, the game is intrinsically beautiful and the sights are breathtaking, and there's no shortage of unmodded, unretouched, unReShaded screenshots littered about. I know there are more than a handful of reddit threads with such screenshots up. But, even with the built-in /gpose, the options can be limited and the vivid colors don't always show up the way people intend them to. This is why ‘different’ draws attention. Since we all have the same washed out color palette (suitable for actually playing the game. try raiding with an Aesthetic ReShade setting with Depth of Field on, it is agony.) it’s easier to pick out brighter looking, unusual colored screenshots. Moreso if they’re beautifully composed.

The improvement of colors from ReShade are only one aspect of it, as a lot of people who use them could tell you.

This screenshot has ReShade on and some /gpose settings, and it’s whatever. It’s meh.

It’s poorly lit, tilted to one side for some reason, the background lantern is grabbing all the attention, but the scenery is somehow cut off, my character is awkwardly posed, the colors, while MORE vivid, aren’t really inspiring the ‘hey this outfit is awesome and unique’ feeling. You have no idea what you’re meant to pay attention to.

Now, before you say I took a bad one on purpose, this was actually from the time I first got the diamond coat so I was ACTUALLY trying to show it off. This was one of many screenshots I’d taken, trying to nail down what I wanted to do.

It just goes to show even if you have the tools, you can still produce some pretty underwhelming stuff. And you could easily take a better one if you know what you’re doing.

It may be beyond the provisions of the game, but it’s not an easy task taking good screens with ReShade. Like said, it takes time and skill.

You have to know when to use angles and tilts and how to frame photos. Composition does SO much. The word gets used a lot but there’s a lot involved, whether you do it consciously or not. Do I zoom in up close or far out? How far? Do I want to put my subject in the center or a little to the right? How much of the background should I show? Do I blur? Do I use dutch angles? Do I take a high angle shot? Daytime? Nighttime? /gpose which filter? How much can I crop? Do I need the feet in the frame? Do I add special effects? Lighting setting 3 2 or 1? More green or more red? Those are basic questions people think about, but these are settings you use to tell a story. Then there’s questions like, how do I frame the photo to draw more attention to the feeling of being trapped? How do I use lighting to create a feeling of dread? How do I use the environment to help me tell the story and not just take a dull photo of my character?

And that’s just taking the photo. It’s easy to be tempted by all the shiny stuff you can pile onto a photo, but if it doesn’t serve a purpose other than “ooh”, then the intense sparkles floating around a photo can distract more than contribute.

So you have everything set. You switch ReShade on. You picked out a good preset. But when it comes to stuff like this one size does not fit all, in order to make it work beyond what a preset provides (as night can be pitch black, and daytime is a complete bloom-filled eyesore) you have to get your hands dirty. Presets can be pretty for sightseeing, and for most it’s enough and they work well enough to use consistently in screenshots. And that’s perfectly fine. The settings are very technical and have numerical values. I don’t understand all the values and effects myself, and finding the sweet spot to produce is an arduous process.

The same goes for Photoshop. There’s no magic button to make your art look good. You need a good eye for adjusting saturation, color balance, lighting, cropping, framing etc. to improve ANY photo. More than that, you need to be good at making believable visual effects for fancier edits. If you drag a brush randomly, no one’s going to be immersed in the way those hair extensions were made. Nope, people study the native look of a photo to make changes. Otherwise you just end up with spaghetti hair.

[it’s the same ugly photo but with spaghetti hair]

I literally used the color dropper. It’s not enough to do that!! Like GIRL I’m a fuckin digital painter and I don’t know how all those people paint/edit hair, it’s a SKILL they learned and not one I have LOL. You have to care about lighting and getting the right width and all that. It’s not that simple.

Photoshop’s got a magic wand but it’s not that easy!

People who edit photos are familiar with these... and each one has its own settings and values :,^) that can change the mood of a photo by making only certain colors be more muted or even making everything look a little lighter and brighter.

It’s not that easyyyy look at one of these windows if I didn’t do this for a living I’d be so confused

So going back to showing off my coat. After I saw the lineup of photos I’d taken, I was pretty dissatisfied, especially because I knew I could take better photos.

I identified the problems I saw:

1.Even though I wanted to showcase my outfit, I didn’t have to take a photo straight on. The photo earlier had her facing completely straight into the camera. And it felt very flat.

2. It’s zoomed too far out, you can’t really see the details on the coat.

3. I tweaked my ReShade settings. I worked on the lighting. When I realized my settings and the lighting in game (and on gpose) were not cooperating, I decided to wait for daytime. Kugane at night was distracting as hell with all the lanterns in the background. My clothes were the star.

Here’s another screenshot I took wearing the Far Eastern stuff.

I wasn’t showing off the details of the glamour here. Kugane at night has a lot of personality, lights and colors. When I looked at this old screenshot, I realized that it wasn’t a good setting for a simple photo that said “hey check my glam”. This photo told a story. My clothes weren’t the focus, it was the fact that Proxi was in Far Eastern clothes in Kugane. All of those facts were of equal importance, so she was a figure immersed in her surroundings.I didn’t need to capture the details of her dress, just show enough for it to be recognized. That’s why this photo worked. And only one of the many reasons why the badly lit one didn’t work. Contrary to the urge to do so, I didn’t need to tilt the camera angle to make it look interesting. I used her body language, paused an emote at the right second to get something more relaxed, her over-the-shoulder look gives an inviting feeling. I let the color contrast separate her from the background as a figure, but I kept her a part of that warm Kugane vibe with bits of red lighting. There’s a lot of thought that goes into this. How color and mood tie together. Knowing what is essential and what isn’t helps a lot, and sometimes it’s trial and error and you don’t really actually know what you want.

Here’s the final image of the Coat screenshot that I posted a couple months ago

The problem with the Diamond Coat is that I dyed it a dark blue color and I wanted to keep that sense of dark blue without shining a bright light on it, or lightening the color. I used stronger contrasts to bring out the blues, fiddled with settings I didn’t understand but it made details shaper lol. I used angles and some blur to add a little more dynamicity (being a more static photo) and focus on Proxi. While she is still mostly facing forward, I played with her pose more, to get more of a ~random well-dressed elezen on a stroll~ feel. And!! look at all the details on her coat, you can see them!!

But wait, you ask, aren’t you just proving that ReShade is a crutch wELL IT’S NOT. It’s a TOOL. You use. If it makes your life easier and more efficient and it makes you happier, like, honestly it doesn’t matter.

But here’s a non g-pose, non-ReShade screenshot I took during a Zurvan EX run early last year. My PC froze for a second lol. I was going to have a heart attack doing this but as a SMN I’m obligated to RELISH Teraflare. This is ONE lucky screenshot I got and you know what, even if the colors aren’t super vivid, this screenshot feels SO right. The explosions aren’t overwhelmingly bright, the arena is surprisingly a fitting background, and she’s got her leggy up but she didn’t give me a panty flash and I am fortunate this turned out to be a great photo I could put in a church mural.

Another non-gpose one. See! framing, contrast and all that. This was from my old blog circa 2016 and it got one note! LOL gpose didn’t even exist yet as we know it, and I don’t think ReShade was widespread or even a thing yet and I was super proud of this one. The trees gave her a soft background without making it too blindingly bright so she stands out and I love it.

So there’s’ your normal screenshot look, without excessive flash and eyesore while still being pretty.

But yeah anyway

TL;DR

1. Don’t be bitter about other people using tools and adding steps to enhance their aesthetic experiences or to create screenshots that are more faithful to their vision. If it’s not harming you, live and let live.

2. There’s more thought that goes into pretty screenshots than you think. Just because they don’t pick up a brush and draw, does not disqualify these screenshot posters as skilled artists in their own right.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ'✿ That’s all!

#long long post #personal

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vadnyl · 7 years

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Major Discovery: BotW’s Adventure Log = Link’s Diary?!

SERIOUSLY.

(Spoiler Alert)

At this point, our beloved game Breath of the Wild has been out for around half a year already. If you have played the game, you are probably very familiar with the Adventure Log feature in BotW that helps you keep track of all your missions and side quests. Or else its pretty much impossible to remember if you were catching chickens for this guy or collecting weapons to show that kid who’s boss.

But here’s the thing- Have you ever thought about the Adventure Log’s origin? Who or what is helping Link keep track of his missions?

If your answer is the Sheikah Slate or the “system”, which is what I’ve always thought, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you own an European/American copy of the game. Because apparently, in the Japanese version of the game, there is evidence that shows that LINK is the one who wrote the adventure log to keep track of his own journey.

“Ok… So what?”

So Link wrote the Adventure Log. Big deal. It’s not like this is gonna change the gameplay in any way.

…True. However, Link didn’t JUST record his missions in the Adventure Log. According to the Japnese version, Link would often type up some of his own thoughts and comments on what he was doing aside from his current objectives. This could give us a deeper insight of Link’s character.

Here’s an example:

This is what shows up after you complete The Hero’s Sword quest. The content of the two versions are very similar, but notice the use of “自分” (myself) in pic 1. This is evidence that the adventure log is written by Link, who’s talking about himself in first person narrative, instead of “the system”. With that in mind, the Japanese version can be translated to:

(I) Finally retrieved the legendary Master Sword. (I) Don’t know if it’s just an illusion, but the sword itself seems to be delighted about this.

To this moment, Princess Zelda is still inside Hyrule Castle, fighting to suppress the Calamity.

She is still holding on to the faith in me, believing that I will definitely come for her…!

But with the power (that I have) now, can she really be saved (by myself)…?

You see what they did there?

The English version replaced every first person pronoun Link has used with “you”!

As someone who owns an American copy, and has never set the system language to Japanese, I was absolutely SHOCKED when I was told about this (credits at the end).

Remember how we could find diaries of NPCs all across Hyrule? Link’s was right under our noses this whole time!

Now that you know about this, does your adventure log seem a bit different from before?

(I) finished visiting all 13 of the locations in the old pictures. I remembered everything I’ve been through together with Princess Zelda.

In those memories (of mine), Princess Zelda always strived to complete the task burdened onto her…

Even if it’s just a moment sooner, (I) want to save her as quickly as possible

(I) want to see her smile again, with these eyes (of my own).

The translation on this one is just OFF. I can’t believe the English version completely omitted the last part, and replaced it with some kind of mission instruction.

Link has been fighting all this time to see Princess Zelda’s smile again with his own eyes.

...*sniff*

Not to mention those side quest logs. Once you realize that all of the entries were written by Link himself, the seemingly trivial information recorded in those suddenly opens up so many more hidden sides of Link. It basically re-introduced Link as someone with normal human emotions instead of the silent hero depicted throughout the game.

The caring Link, who was worried about a girl he only met twice for putting herself in danger:

…(I) ventured inside and found part of the Royal Guard’s Series, famous among equipment collectors.

When those were shown to Parcy, the traveler at the stable, her curiosity about it seem to be provoked more than ever (by me). (I) Hope she won’t do anything reckless…

The compassionate Link, who felt glad for other peoples’ happiness:

…

As a sign of appreciation for bringing the town together and as compensation for the work done (by me), a hefty amount of gems that were unearthed during the town’s construction were given by Hudson (to me).

(I) wish the couple could live happily ever after.

The reckless Link, who apparently felt thrilled when he managed to knock out some monsters with his new companion:

(I) captured the giant horse in Taobab Grasslands

So that’s why. It’s indeed a really big horse. It trampled whatever kind of monster in its way with ease when it galloped. That was really cool.

When it was brought back to Straia (by me), he was very surprised.

Link the foodie, who carefully noted down new recipes he learned along the way for future use:

(I) brought Kiana the goat butter and hearty blueshell snail required for cooking seafood paella. She shared some of the dish (with me) as thanks!

/////Recipe/////

The playful Link, who tried to mimic the way Gorons speak- by adding “goron” at the end of every sentence- after he passed the Test of Will and became one of the bros:

……

Ah… (I) kinda want to write down Kabetta’s Bro Motto, but there’s not enough space goron?

That’s too bad goron…

The empathetic Link, who felt nervous for the guy in this side quest, then relieved when the couple finally got together:

…and… THIS:

The last line on the left is the Japanese equivalent of What the heck…

I guess the statue is a bit too weird even for our great adventurer.

Finally, we have the entry that shows up after you complete the DLC trial:

(I) finally conquered the merciless Trial of the Sword.

……

(I believe that) Princess Zelda would be quite happy about how much I’ve improved

As we all know, Breath of the Wild is a game that focuses a lot on the freedom given to the players. Even the main story line is broken down into the form of memories, waiting for the players to find. As the players venture on into the wild, they would eventually find the information they need to learn about this world. The amazing amount of details you can find about Hyrule and its people is an important reason why BotW is so attractive.

On the contrary, the info available about our protagonist is very limited. The only piece of description that directly describes Link is in Zelda’s diary, where she points out that he is a very quiet person, and that’s it for our hero.

…NOT!!

Link had always had the most extensive character description. Right under our noses.

Nintendo got us. They got us GOOD.

But now we know.

SIX months after the game’s launch.

…Better late than never.

End.

P.S.: Fun fact about BotW Link- he seems to like the sand seal game a lot. Of all the entires about racing minigames, the sand seal game is the only one where Link wrote “(I’ll) try to get a better score next time!”

He’s so adorable I can’t //////

CREDITS

Disclaimer: I did not discover this.

This discovery was made by a Chinese gamer @atomaruU about a week ago. To make sure that her theory is correct, she cross referenced the English version of the game, only to discover that the language is completely emotionless and robotic. Therefore, to allow more people to see who Link REALLY is, I was asked to write this post based on the Chinese article she published.

Her Twitter: https://twitter.com/atomaruU

Tweet Link: https://twitter.com/atomaruU/status/902172455661211649

Chinese article Link: http://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404145837893616605

Pic credits: @lulubuu0609 (She’s an amazing artist btw check out her blog)

Hope you enjoyed this :3

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smoliboops · 7 years

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heckie

hey idk if you care anymore or if im just bothering you but i wanted to talk about this n get it off my chest? ok here goes-

basically an extension of the cranbersher thing that happened yesterday

also this is gonna get v v long, sorry.

heres a link to the post made abt this: booperdoopcr.tumblr.com/post/166157910781/writeasoph-booperdoopcr-so-like-i-know

basically cranbersher/oliver beale- a stop-motion animator (and musician of sorts), who is best known for working for several youtubers- most notably several of marks older animations + a more recent reboot and one of jacks old outros- had a very cryptic message on his twitter (@cranbersher) yesterday.

his twitter header changed to black, his profile picture was a dark n glitched photo (seemingly of a face), his name changed to 6 black boxes and his description link changed to cranbersher.com/secrets.

he tweeted out a short video with no caption (i believe around 20-30s) of a black screen with glitched n garbled noises, with one bright flash near the middle.

he replied to people’s confused replies to the post with cryptic, short messages written in a small unicode text

shortly after this, he deleted the tweets n changed his twitter back to normal and set up a stream for cuphead.

this is all the clues there are cus oliver is a cryptic shit.

–

heres some stuff ive deduced/know?

the 6 black boxes he had as his name match up directly with the amount of letters in oliver- his real name. someone in the replies also noted this.

the strange video seems very similar to the cryptic videos mark posted lately on his twitter: 3 and 2.

the /secrets link in his info is NOT new. a while ago,it was up on his twitch under the command ’!secrets’- which would give you said link. he invited people to try n figure out what it meant/crack the password. (i remember one time in chat someone said they cracked it n cran mentioned it im not sure if it was for real/if they confirmed it w/ him which cran said he would.) however, it seems to not be up on his nightbot commands page anymore. (also, i swear im not lying w/ this- unfortunately w/ these cryptic things i have no proof to give but im certain it was there. the vods arent in his archive anymore but this is true, i promise.)

in the replies (some can be seen in the post linked @ the beginning) whoever cran is speaking as states they do not know who mark or dark is. this seems to directly contradict the theory that the dark situation n this is related, but 1) they could be lying or trying to avoid, 2) they could be unaware of the relation but still be connected, or 3) it could actually be completely unrelated- but i think this is a bit too much of a coincidence for that to be true. (the messages are just so cryptic n short it just seems unlikely, imo. also, if cran is just doing his own spoopy thing cus its october (which is possible n also cool), it seems odd he’d choose to address those questions b/c if he wanted to keep it separate, why not just ignore stuff abt other dark!egos n keep it his own? or im reading too far into this, but heck.)

(ooc) thinking more irl n literally, mark has worked w/ many artists, animators n fan creators in the past- even more so recently. as well as this, cran has worked w/ mark many times before- and is more closely related to him than other fan artists. (also hes in kinda like an ‘animator squad’ w/ other well-known animators/artists who worked closely w/ youtubers which basically has pixlpit, foolishcptnkia, grittysugar, nattcatt, and some others who are p close w/ mark n jack)

and thats all ive got for theories on that stuff (mostly idk i have bad memory n cant really explain that well w/ text)

–

and there’s more! wowie zowie. i didnt get a chance to look more at the video he posted cus i didnt get a chance to save it, but someone did reply to his next tweet w/ a pic of the glitched avatar so i tried to fuck around and see what i could get- heres the results.

this is the profile picture, unedited. (sorry if the image insert doesnt work idk if html works in submissions)

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLkuYe6W4AAc86s.jpg)

this is the profile picture, sharpened slightly. (this one is referenced for most of the other photos n such)

(https://i.imgur.com/xX1D6FC.png)

this is the profile picture, cross-referenced w/ a front-on pic of oliver from his twitter.

(https://i.imgur.com/7sVKrRB.png)

this is the profile picture, cross-referenced w/ a pic angled from below of oliver from his twitter. (i know this pic is really ~sketchy~ but it was the best one w/ this angle w/o digging through photos and videos so ye)

(https://imgur.com/awf6FgH)

this is the profile picture, cross-referenced w/ both pics. (kinda hard to really make it easier to understand)

(https://i.imgur.com/IWB8D48.png)

this is the profile picture, w/ a rough sketch of how the combined features would look overlaid the photos.

(https://i.imgur.com/n51oaJ4.png)

this is the profile picture w/ the rough sketch alone.

(https://i.imgur.com/M3X68tO.png)

–

thats enough pic spam- lets talk abt this. it seems p certain that its a glitched photo of oliver- the facial features seem to match up fairly well. his face seems to be tilted weirdly back to the right (our right, shown by the arrows)- this is a p stereotypical menacing pose- its odd and inhuman which makes it look creepy to the audience. this also gives some major anti vibes- hes moving his head in a way thats uncomfortable and almost looks broken- choppy or glitched- not really something youd usually do or see.

but aside from that- its v shadowy n dark. there are some key facial features missing- the eyes n mouth- (the ears n features in the back would be hidden anyway) we associate these features w/ being human. thats why it looks so weird when someones missing an eye or has a 3rd eye or a stitched mouth.

not just that though- cran has something else that is associated w/ him. and its puppets- his stop-motion puppets. if you dont know- cran likes to have self-inserts in his animations and works- he has large self-insert parts in both his most recent mark animation n his cranbersher’s guide series that have large plot points or hidden plots associated w/ them. point is- puppets have a lot to do with his channel n image on the web.

abt a month ago, cran posted a tweet finishing off a month or so old thread that was quite eerie, to say the least. (keep in mind that puppets take a long, long time to make n that he only scraps them when they break, n this is obviously not normal) that ended in this photo:

(https://i.imgur.com/MyiHvDI.png)

also, he had this photo as his header before and after this change. and what is clearly missing from this puppet thats different than his other puppets? well:

(https://i.imgur.com/DpcusuL.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/Ab3b8RR.png)

thats right fuckers- eyes and a mouth.

and what does that mean? quite frankly, i have no idea. im just rambling about my dumb thoughts.

(please validate me i spent 2 days on this,, fkin)

now for the super amazing end-card tournament!1!!

(holy toledo you really did your research that’s awesome! gg :O)

#if you're the same person who submitted another message to me yesterday tho i was litterally just about done answering it #i just gotta take care of a thing thats due at midnight first #submission

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leciell · 7 years

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AnimeOnStage & Buying services experience

Hello Tumblr,

I’m back. (kinda not really) I’ve taken a hiatus from this place and have found respite on other social medias. I still love my musical boys to death but life has caught up with me and has had me plenty busy. I still log in once in a while but you can definitey find me at other SMS where I’m much more active.

but I’m here to touch base on a subject that I’ve had some people DM me about since I guess my ASK box isn’t working? (Welp then)

I didn’t feel the need to make this post only because I feel so much of us have already have our ways to get our grabby little hands on all our favorite butai merch but to those who are new to the game and are looking at the right places to buy, tumblr and other butai blogs have long extensive lists and more detailed posts on how to procure your merchandise, as well as how to access DMM or even how to be a member on Toumyu’s website.

I’ll be blunt, I have a JP address and a card that allows me to gain access to all that.

How to get your own JP Address? Tenso. it does require you to do some verification but its really simple and easy from there. they will even provide you a phone number to use to gain access to all the other stuff They offer ems, dhl and regular shippping. Their basically a forwarding service, you buy the items yourself and you get it shipped to your tenso address and the warehouse guy wil contact you to let you know your stuff is in and forward it to your US/UK/overseas address.

Downside to tenso: Again you need to procure the items yourself, meaning you bid on your own and etc.

FromJapan: Good place to shop. They will source all items from rakuten, amazonjp and yahoo auctions and more. they are also a buying proxy with very good rates. They offer a variety of shipping and will do bids on your behalf.

AmazonJP: By far my favorite place to shop as their pricing are very very *very* competitive. If anything, sometimes even way cheaper than the regular retail price. for example: bakuten bluray originally was approx $85-95 USD. At amazonjp it was $65 USD with free global dhl shipping. Downside to buying from amazon or frommJP sellers, like buying from auction houses, your basically buying from a 3rd party seller and if your intention is to ‘support the show directly’ your better off buying directly from their sales division either by a 'in-person proxy’ or directly from the shows website and using tenso or personal shopper to buy in your place.

This post is getting quite long but let me get straightto the point as to why I’m bringing this post up, this was meant to be a walk through or talk through on my buying experiences with AnimeOnStage.

Let me start with, I’m not here to bash on a business, I’m not out to destory their reputation or anything like that. but its very apparent that so many people have been rather unhappy with their services as of late (ie; see twitter please)

Now, before we go on the whole 'why this business is bad and why you shouldn’t shop from them’, no. Stop. check yourself. And remind yourself that they are also a small business. For the fans by the fans if their motto, and for the longest time I appreciate what their trying to do. And that is to bridge the gap between western and eastern fans and basically feed us our 2.5D merch needs.

I’ve used their services a few times in the past and so far haven’t had any issues.

(but Chisa! Why would you use them when you have all these other accesses? - I’m lazy. Simple as that. I’ve said this so many times on all my other posts — yes guys i’m sorry i still have half the audio rips from the shinken ranbusai that i’ll eventually put up LOOo see how lazy i am?!.

but basically, I opted to join in on their 'group orders’ for certain live plays coz hey, i figured their going to watch the show and buy merch anyway I might as well put in a request for an item or two coz the price isnt any different if i pay for ems or dhl…etc…)

So how does AOS stage play orders work? let me run down on this real quick, they will post up the merch list on what will be on sale, you fill out the form on what you want and they invoice you for it. Simple enough right? After a few weeks when your merch is in their hands (in the US) they’ll then forward you a email/2nd invoice to shipping within the US. So in the end, you basically just pay priority mailing which is approx $7-10 depending on how heavy your package is. Simple enough.

Now, heres my gripe with them lately… their a small business, I get that. They travel all over the place, traveling wears you outand takes a lot of time. Vending at cons isn’t easy. I’ve been there, done that. So i’ve been pretty patient. But, I’ve been waiting on hold on my Engekki jacket orders for well over 9 months now, how long ago was the engekki reprisal show when the jackets were first announced? Still no word… Now fast forward June 2017…I’m waiting to hear from them.

I’ve emailed them a few times before and as of this post today, I’m still waiting on my refund. (Its been a few weeks, I won’t name a number because I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here)

again, I want to stress I’m not out here to destroy their reputation, I know a lot has been going on at twitter on how their business practices are; ie bootleg merch and all. But I would like to point out that from one thread I found on twitter (I won’t link them, please feel free to search on there) that they had no intentions on selling bootleg mech and will offer refunds to those who mistakingly bought bootleg items. So, I atleast gotta hand them that.

Tl;dr I’d shop with them at your own discretion. Because lgr, you could be duped by another seller when your trying to bid on items online but atleast finding bootleg merch on JP buying sites is almost impossible atleast.

So what happened to my engekki jacket orders? Basically, from what I can disect is that they were unable to procure the said jackets at the time of the event, for months I was led to believe that maybe they were on a pre-order basis considering the only people I’ve seen sporting them were the cast of engekki hq themselves and no other fans were posting them…but fast forward a few months later, I sent in an inquirey and the response I got was; “Hi, xxxx!

We are still trying to source the parkas from a reliable source and we deeply apologize for the delay. If you would like a refund at this time, we totally understand! ”

now, I knew full well that the jackets were gonna be a hot item to be sold at the venue so I guess in my mind it made sense that they would probably be on a pre-order basis but this response / email made me think other wise. Reliable source? As in, purchasing it elsewhere?

Anyways its been a good few mins since I started drafting this post and as I was about to hit 'post’ I got an email response from them (Finally, after a twitter blast later as well) and got a refund from a personal account. Ok.

I didn’t want to back track and rewrite the whole post. But this is my experience with AOS.

Again, I want to stress that their not a bad business, I’ve been pretty patient waiting all this time on their responses and I’ve been pretty forgiving coz I know how its like to run a small hub of a business and I just hope that this experience (and other peoples orders) go smoothly and would serve as a learning step or building block for them to grow their business better and to continue to (re)build their reputation coz I’d hate to see a vendor like this crash and burn because of a few unhappy clients. There is room for growth, I hope that they will continue to grow into being a better service provider by supplying legit merch if they insist on charging the prices they charge for other merch.

(But I would say that their buying service charges are actually very reasonable imho)

#butai #animeonstage #ramble #2.5d #butai touken ranbu #stage play #toukenmyu

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thehonorablejudgewhitey · 7 years

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“With Liberty and Justice for All”

(copious amounts of profanity ahead)

After the initial shock left me numb, then angry, then depressed, the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach took over and, funny enough, for a long time I was pissed off not because of what happened, but because it was allowed to happen. I wasn’t even furious with the key players anymore because they’re...well, real life versions of one dimensional characters, they did what they were supposed to do, what they would always do, what everyone knew for a fact they would do. I was mad at The People. The American People. Not at the - we’ll never really know how many - millions which were racist, misogynist, xenophobic, hateful and downright stupid enough to feel that donald was worth a genuine vote, but at the vast majority whom, between Clinton, 3rd party candidates, write -ins (and assorted silliness) didn’t vote for donald. Why was I so mad at these - mainly sane - folks? Because a majority let itself be ruled by a minority with, until recently, barely a peep in protest. Very few people took the fight as seriously as it needed to be taken and where we are today is a result of that.

Had this been a normal, fair election...it would be one thing, but it’s been clear since the start that things were far from an even remotely legitimate deal. The U.S. had bad Presidents before, it also had dumbass Presidents before, look at Bush Jr. who was as sharp as that kid in your nephew’s class who eats all the crayons; Jr., funny enough, found himself down in votes as well, but still “won”. However, and despite that - let’s call it - coincidental similarity, donald is frighteningly different from W. He’s not only ignorant and illiterate, he’s something Bush wasn’t: a vicious sociopath. donald isn’t just unbelievably stupid (and so very proud of his stupidity), he’s not just a loud clown, he is a fucking deranged monster and if you think I’m exaggerating, you haven’t researched him thoroughly enough because his track record will scare the shit out of anyone. The dude truly is criminally insane.

Now, donald supporters will argue till they’re blue in the face that non donald voters are sore losers, “libtards”, “snowflakes” and whatever else colorful little adjectives the not too bright amuse themselves with in order to have something with which to (try to) annoy others and thus, not having to confront their own stupidity. However, recently we’ve learned that not only has the corruption and treason which lead us to this situation been reliably and extensively documented, but also that American intelligence agencies had the information for months...and sat on it. The connections between donald’s minions and the shadiest shit imaginable has been established, foreign intelligence services have been frantically waving their arms in the air, begging US intelligence to, for fuck’s sake, look at their findings regarding very blatant treason...and yet, YET...here we are. Now the public knows all about it and the backlash has been until recently, pretty damn weak. Thankfully the public’s fighting morale picked up in a big way with the women's march, but it’s still a long way from effective. Plus the march was very rightfully so focused on specific topics, but what’s needed is an all out blitz of opposition and protest. For every - single - thing.

A lot contributed to donald’s - LOL - “victory”:

1) partisanship within the agencies (here’s looking at you, Comey)

2) the Russian meddling (through blackmail, money, influence, disinformation, paid trolls, and other endless etc’s)

3) vote tampering (took a shitload of lawyers and some serious bribe showers to keep that one on the low...seriously, look into it and your jaw will drop like an anvil on a road runner cartoon...but apparently, we’ll just ignore outright mathematical impossibilities and documented bribery because that’s the world we live in now)

4) voter suppression, critical in areas with large black communities because the overwhelming majority of black voters weren’t here for this fuckery - especially women, go Ladies, making us proud as always!

5) useless 3rd party voting despite the many, maaaaaaaany warnings not to engage in it because it was so DAMN clear what was gonna go down and people still did it cause stupid reasons no one cares about; how are you enjoying that skinny ass high horse now, fuckers???

6) the utterly shitty job by American news organizations who sucked donald’s lil dick dry for months in the name of ratings and which now are shocked, shocked I tell you!!! that the motherfucker turned on them...who could have possibly seen that one coming,unbelievable!!! And still, STILL they haven’t learned from it, they’re still airing donald’s mental diarrhea verbatim all - the - time, calling racist and xenophobic shit “controversial” and having lap dogs like Crack Barbie Conway talking about goddamn “alternative facts” on national television with a straight face!

7) the impotent and pathetic opposition put up by democrats, I mean seriously folks...some democrats voted in favor of donald’s cabinet members; have you learned nothing from 8 years of republican fuckery? Oppose ALL the things! If it wasn’t for Maxine Waters “fuck you AND this shit” attitude, Tim Kaine’s “I just think it’s funny how...” brand of shade and a few other good folks in there, we could just throw the whole damn party in the trash

8) republicans having been WHIPPED by donald’s cheap reality star popularity which was - sadly - more than enough to outshine the zodiac killer and whoever else they had lying around. Republicans had to drop to their knees for donald and, in exchange, they can pull off a U.S. fire sale like they’ve been aiming for for 8 years now. Make no mistake, there isn’t a terrorist organization in the world which can hold a candle to the American republican party, their business is death and destruction for profit and they excel at it

9) the “slow moving right wing coup” (Maher called it, just before the election), the almost decade long crusade of misinformation and public manipulation through garbage like fox news and breibart through puppets like hannity and kelly. donald’s fake shot at the Presidency would have been impossible without the massive groundwork that came long before he was even considered to be viable enough for this

10) the fact that a lot of folks adored donald’s catchy tune of hate and racism. trump voters didn’t vote for him despite this, they voted because his message was music to their ears. How an uncharismatic, orange, shar-pei looking motherfucker managed to establish a cult of personality would actually be impressive if it wasn’t terrifying.There’s no real “economic angst”, there was no “reaction against the status quo”, nobody wanted to drain no damn “swamp”, the “he tells it like it is” excuse is just that...everything which was used to justify donald’s popularity is utter BULLSHIT. donald got votes because a black Man was President, because women had valid sexual and reproductive health rights, because the LGBT community got basic rights recognized, because Islamophobia is a reality, because black folks were asking not to get killed for sitting and reading a book, or ringing a doorbell asking for help, or buying skittles

and of course, 11) the fact that trump made it totally cool to just go right for any pussy you fancy at any time, i.e. normalized sexual assault. If that doesn’t scream about the rampant engulfment of society in rape culture, I don’t know what does.

Yes, a lot helped donald get to where he is today, but the problem isn’t that this stuff happened, it’s that it was allowed to happen, the beginning of the shitstorm. It’s not like the asshole totally changed his tune overnight; everyone knew he was a risk and still, it was constantly underestimated. Just a few days ago the U.S. was forced to go with a 100% illegitimate President, one planted by a foreign power, under blackmail from that same power, with an estimated 1.5 billion (that’s billion with a B) dollars in debt, making him one of the brokest motherfuckers in the world (and oh boy, is he robbing the Presidency blind already...between selling access to himself and facilitating businesses abroad...), supported by the terrorist hate group formally known as kkk and every filthy, inferior white supremacist around, with a cabinet filled with incompetent, batshit insane, corrupt picks who’ll be responsible for everything from your tax dollars to nuclear weapons - fucking TERRIFYING - and who’s sole job is to burn it to the motherfucking ground and piss on the ash and oh yeah, let’s not ever stop talking about donald’s sex abuse history which includes confessed predatory behavior, strolling through teens changing rooms and rape accusations from minors to his ex wife. You really can’t expect much from a guy who once said “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?”; she was 13 at the time.

So while the rest of the world had been pulling its hair and collectively asking: “What, in the absolute name of FUCK is going on and why is it allowed to continue!?”, most people had been showing indignation...on Twitter, being extremely angry...at home. It took some pretty dark reality checks to shake folks up. The thought of 22 (now some sources say 30+) million Americans losing healthcare brought a few thousand people out, just a few thousands out of 71 million who voted for a different candidate. For months now I and many others have been begging anyone who’ll listen to go out, go beyond the fallacy of sticking solely to hashtag activism and actually act! Before the women’s march injected some much needed life into people, I was met with everything from sheer indifference to a sense of total hopelessness (useless sentiment), but the worst thing so far, the one that really angered me to the fucking core, was the sickeningly common sentence “we can’t do anything about it”. Buying into the fact that you’re powerless, failing to understand that people run the government and not the other way around is the most successful form of oppression ever deployed and let me tell you, there’s nowhere else on earth where it has been applied more successfully than in the US. Politicians running wild knowing there’s 0 accountability for their actions is what motivated the batshit insane last few weeks in which republicans have released a kind of greatest hits of nefarious fuckery which include the sentencing of millions to death or bankruptcy (or both) without health insurance, getting rid of what little oversight they have (though that was over with? Check again...), and paying the bill for donald’s dumbass wall which may be the most ridiculous, useless thing ever made...this kind of distancing between politicians an accountability is why crisis like Flint drag out for years with no resolution - or even interest for a resolution.

It really is a damn tragedy the situation has been allowed to run out of control, so now it’s time to get a handle on the lunacy. Before American women (actually, women everywhere) brought it, a few weeks back, LA and NY showed up early with marches of about 10 thousand people each, the most meaningful actions pre-post-inauguration; some folks burned a couple of trash cans in Portland (and conservatives have been crying out that “the cities are burning!!!” ever since, failing to mention, of course, that rioters are mainly paid elements to create this kind of disruption so people like donald can bitch about it later; see also Washington DC a few days ago) and that’s about it really...So what have we learned? Massive protests, shutting down streets, cities...it’s the only way to go. There needs to be a continuity to the kind of spirit which propelled the women's match. Politicians will never admit it, but they’re terrified of people in large numbers, they may despise voters but they also need them. So this “inauguration”, these disastrous first days, a ridiculous circus which would have been deemed too stupid to be featured in the cheapest of French farces can either mark the end of The American People’s chance to act or the start of a proper, comprehensive uprising. If you were waiting for the inauguration to then push for an impeachment...that won’t fly here, it’s too late for any of the regular democratic processes. Election was illegitimate, electoral college voted illegitimately...relying on this kind of stuff is dead and buried. Keep hearing folks talk about 2020, elections...bless their hearts...even if by some miracle we reach that date, do y'all really think there will ever, EVER be anything remotely close to a free election ever again? With these corrupt fucks in power? Nah, that ship has sailed. donald getting “elected” was what’s called a proof of concept and now, like a cancer, his so called administration will infect every nook and cranny of government, making it impossible to remove. Best case scenario, some key players get kicked out and there’s a chance to start repairing the damage, but the root is firmly planted and there will be massive problems for many years to come because donald and his posse got this far. Plus, external influence is and will continue to be massively powerful; Russia has republicans tightly grabbed by the balls which means all their decisions aren't really their own and that the US is now a satellite state. Cold War era communists would piss themselves in excitement like puppies if they had ever even dared to dream that such a thing could be possible. And the kicker is, the U.S. wasn’t even the main act, it was just a beta test. France and Germany are coming up next, efforts to end NATO and the EU are well on their way and in Europe, stupid people are falling for the same kind of “populism” (aka very poorly disguised racism and xenophobia and other assorted far right ideological diarrhea) that stupid people in America fell for when sprayed by golden boy himself. My faint hope is that a large enough number of Europeans will wake up in time. So far I remain disappointed. Twice now in fairly recent times Europe fucked itself up; soon it will be on its way to a third go. “Those who don’t understand history...” etc.

So here we are, 2017 and worried about world wars, nuclear wars, a Russian empire, nazis and the end of democracy. Ain't that a bitch? The real kicker tho, the part that made me so very pissed off at the reasonable, logic people out there is that the whole thing was so, so, SO very fucking avoidable...we got complacent and lost focus on how vicious the fight was and how vicious we had to be to win it. I love FLOTUS44 to no end but the motto should have been “when they go low, we get a motherfucking club and crack their head open cause they’re already in a convenient position to get bashed and we gotta take these fuckers out, pronto” - not as catchy, but it was the right attitude. To show just how soft and out of touch people have become, this week there’s been a debate about if punching a nazi is wrong. I shit you not! “If” it’s wrong...smh. And even if throwing hands isn’t your thing, all anyone ever really had to do was show up. Right at the start, show up, provide the numbers for “strength in numbers”, be a body in a crowd. Wasn’t hard, wasn’t costly, didn’t need a great deal of planning...call up a couple of friends who in turn call up 2 or 3 more and just...showing up and demanding the most basic legitimacy needed for an election, demanding that a line was drawn between free speech and hate speech, demanding that something as vile as donald and pence and bannon and kushner and flynn and every other piece of shit in the gang wasn’t allowed anywhere near a Presidential election. People knew what was at stake, people saw the democratic processes fail.

Like I said, the key players are predictable, they don’t break character; you know for a fact what they’ll do: donald will always be a sociopathic old perv and act like such; republicans will always be money hungry, moralless whores (and I use that word for the actions themselves, I mean no disrespect to hardworking, honest prostitutes who don’t deserve to be compared to something as disgusting as republicans); white supremacists will always be inferior whiny bitches; and the people who support all these aberrations will always be too fundamentally dense, too goddamn stupid to understand the seven ways till Sunday in which they’re getting fucked while cheering for the ones pounding their ass. But the people who know better, the people who’ve seen this ridiculous charade since the start for what it is and got lost in pointless shit like in house fighting (who had the best candidate cause of reasons) or simply didn’t lift a finger in any serious and meaningful way to try and stop it...they’re ones responsible for the mess being in play. It’s pretty simple: you see a toddler with a gun, you don’t wait till it shoots itself in the damn face, you take the gun away.

So where will we be a little while from now if things don’t change dramatically? Well let me put on my Carnac The Magnificent hat on (a lil something for the kids to Google, take their mind of this whole “we’re all probably gonna die horrible deaths” dealio): Our buddy Vladimir, finding out this shit actually works (whaaaaaat? Long shot win!), will try and succeed with the same model in other countries, Europe will be at war again, a short one because Russia will steamroll resistance as it takes over.NOT looking forward to that. The US will be carved like a thanksgiving turkey; first, the complete demolition of the Obama legacy because, you know, memories of a black Man in office for 8 years won’t do, gotta bulldoze that shit like, yesterday! Remind “the blacks” (as donald says) of their place, make aberrations of the LGBTs again, and fuck this environment shit cause who needs clean air and water when there’s fucking oil to drill, goddamn it!!! However, it won’t be just a gutting of government and liberties and rights, but also of territory. California will be the first to exit, also with - very indirect and covert - Russian backing, NY will follow. Texas will probably join in cause...well, it’s Texas, it’s just itching to shoot at something. The rest of the territory will be as miserable as any third world country. Sadly I won’t get the pleasure of shouting “MAGA!” and laughing my ass off in the face of every single Trump voter while they starve or die from most banal diseases in the book. A true shame. Russia will continue to fund terrorism like it does with ISIS, as well as planning/carrying out terrorist attacks whenever it suits their strategic interests (see Berlin, last Christmas), with donald being ISIS’ greatest poster child for recruitment while his buildings will make for great targets. Convenience! Oh and let’s not forget that in a pre-butchered US, Republicans will still need a war, so expect one. Republicans will also need 9/11 levels of terror, so expect a 2.0 version of that as well.

All of this of course if donald’s alarming mental decay doesn’t throw a wild card in the mix and he just decides: “fuck it, I’ll nuke everything” cause someone sent him a mean tweet. #Sad. And even if by some other wild card donald were to get impeach over prostitutes pissing on him or whatever the fuck else the shithead got recorded doing, the problem would still be the same: compromised government, completely invalid election, proven concept for aspiring global dictator, and resounding triumph of white Amerikkka’s “values”. The only way to do something which means a damn is to go out in force, quickly.

In a week marked by reporters get yelled at, at the White House, over crowd size “alternative facts”, a week in which we find donald had the inauguration pictures photoshoped to make his hands look bigger (what a fucking LOSER. That dick must really be in the micro category, I swear), a week in which the president elect goes nuts with executive orders to, out of pure spite, demolish the Obama legacy (donald is so insanely jealous of 44 that it clouds whatever shred of reason that pea brain of his can still muster) while simultaneously rambling about a blatant lie of millions of illegals voting while people in his goddamn entourage are actually guilty of voter fraud, a miserable week which saw government put a gag order on agencies divulging scientific facts, making them create “rogue” twitter accounts, an alarming week with revelations that staff and golden showers himself use all kinds of unprotected email services, the same thing which haunted Clinton forever without a shred of substance to it and that now, apparently, is totally cool, a sad week in which the megalomaniac embarrassment moved forward with orders to keep women in children stranded in war zones...is a week in which everyone should be planning exactly how seriously they want to contribute to the containment of this situation. personally, I suggest very and as soon as possible.

[This take on things is my own. Will not try to impose it nor debate it]

#the resistance #impeach trump #dump trump #illegitimate #illegitimate POTUS #PEEOTUS #ban trump #resist #resistence #Fuck Donald Trump #dumptrump #impeachtrump

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jeroldlockettus · 5 years

Text

Freakonomics Radio Live: “Would You Eat a Piece of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop?”

Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner listen to Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” an opera that may owe its remarkable creativity to Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. (Photo: Lucy Sutton)

What your disgust level says about your politics, how Napoleon influenced opera, why New York City’s subways may finally run on time, and more. Five compelling guests tell Stephen Dubner, co-host Angela Duckworth, and fact-checker Jody Avirgan lots of things they didn’t know.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Today’s episode is a special live installment of Freakonomics Radio. You’ll hear about New York City’s subway system and the man who’s trying to fix it. You’ll hear about the relationship between Napoleon and music — and the relationship between politics and disgust, which is not as obvious as you might think. If you’d like to attend a future taping of Freakonomics Radio Live, we’d love to have you. We have upcoming shows in San Francisco on May 16th, Los Angeles on May 18, Philadelphia on June 6, London on September 6, and in Chicago on September 26th. For details, visit freakonomics.com/live.

Stephen J. DUBNER: Good evening. I’m Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio Live, coming to you tonight from City Winery in New York City. As you know, Freakonomics Radio is typically a studio show based on lots of forethought and research and extensive interviews. In this live show, we throw all that out the window. No forethought whatsoever. Joining me tonight as co-host, would you please welcome the University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth. Angela, if you don’t know, is the author of the longtime bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She’s also C.E.O. of Character Lab and one of the founders of Behavior Change For Good. Angela, what else are you up to?

Angela DUCKWORTH: Through Character Lab, I’m hoping to quadruple the amount of behavioral science that’s done on kids and how they grow up to thrive. So we’ve been doing okay, but I think we should have more science so that we can have more to talk about on Freakonomics.

DUBNER: Excellent. So as you know, we play here a game called “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.” We bring guests onstage to tell us some interesting fact or idea or story. You and I will poke and prod them as much as we’d like. Then later on, our live audience will pick a winner. The criteria are very simple. No. 1, did they tell us something we truly did not know? No. 2, was it truly worth knowing? And No. 3, was it demonstrably true? Which is important. And to help with the demonstrably true part, would you please welcome our real-time fact checker. He’s the host and producer of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcasts. Jody Avirgan. Hey, Jody.

Jody AVIRGAN: Hello, Stephen.

DUBNER: Something I learned about you very recently, Jody, is you have a young daughter who has become an Internet phenomenon.

AVIRGAN: Well, she had a moment as an Internet phenomenon, actually, a photo I took of my daughter went viral. It was a photo we took of her after she’d eaten pizza for the first time. The audience is seeing it right now. She went to this sort of blissful state with pizza sauce all over her face. And I put it out into the world, and it went nuts. I checked this morning. Fifteen million people have seen this photo off of my Twitter account, and then it got ripped on to all of the meme accounts, and people were sending us examples of it being used in random Czechoslovakian advertisements. And the morning shows were asking us to come on. And we kind of just laid low. But yeah, it was kind of wild ride.

DUBNER: All right, Jody, I’m glad to hear that your daughter is meme-worthy. I’m glad that you are here tonight to be our fact checker. Our first guest, would you please give a warm welcome. He is president of the New York City Transit Authority. Andy Byford. Andy, welcome to the show. Now, the audience — this puzzles me.

DUCKWORTH: They’re happy!

DUBNER: Here’s what we know about you so far. You are president of the Transit Authority, which means that you essentially run the subways and buses. Correct?

Andy BYFORD: That’s correct.

DUBNER: And most of these people, including myself — we ride your subways and buses. And yet, when you walked in, they applauded. Which to me, seems paradoxical. So by what magic has Andy Byford won over the transit riders of New York City?

BYFORD: A British accent goes a long way.

DUCKWORTH: It really does.

BYFORD: It’s British charm.

DUBNER: And I understand you come from a transit family. Correct? Third generation?

BYFORD: I do. My granddad drove a bus through the Blitz, actually, through the Blitz. I ride the subway or the bus into work every day. I have never owned a car in my life. I probably never will. I rely on public transit and I believe in it. I’ve also failed my driving test twice.

DUBNER: So, compared to the Blitz, and buildings being crumbled in the streets, I guess the New York City subways are easy.

BYFORD: Oh, piece of cake. Absolutely, yeah. We have a long way to go. But it is improving. And what I wanted to do tonight is just talk about what we’re doing to make it better.

DUBNER: Let’s start with a little history. Obviously, New York is one of the older subways — I guess London is the oldest in the world.

BYFORD: London dates back to 1863, our subway is 1904. Coming here, the challenge is the same, but it is exponentially bigger. Interestingly, I’d say 15 to 20 years ago, the London Underground was in a similar state to that in which we find ourselves here in New York today. Stations looking a bit shoddy, unreliable signaling, tired vehicles, lack of funding. Sustained funding has transformed the Tube. That’s what we need here today. And a focus on basics. That’s what I want to talk about.

DUBNER: I love that we’re getting applause for infrastructure funding. We’ve never had that before. So the New York City subway, as I understand it, has the worst on-time performance of any major transit system in the world. Is that accurate, first of all?

BYFORD: We certainly are nowhere near where we need to be. In January of 2018, our on-time performance — admittedly it was a bad month — but it was a woeful 58, just over 58 percent. Through relentless focus on basics and substantial investment, a year later we’ve got it up to just over 76 percent

DUBNER: Now, to be fair, New York’s subways generally get people where they’re going. They can be slow and crowded and unpleasant on occasion but they’re also transporting — how many million people a day?

BYFORD: Well, for the whole of transit, it’s 8 million people. It’s made up of 5.7 million people on the subway, 2.3 million on the buses. And on a good day, going from the Bronx down to Manhattan, where I work, southern tip of Manhattan, that train hammered down the express line. You try doing that in a cab, and you try doing that for $2.75, you’re not going to do it.

DUBNER: Right. When I think of New York, I think that one reason it was able to grow into the city it did was because it had subways early, and so it was able to move people around a lot, underground, without tying things up. The downside of that is it was an old system, and therefore I gather — like any old system — hard to retrofit, right? So can you just kind of set the scene for us, in terms of how good, I guess, the bones still are, and assuming they are good enough to upgrade as you’d like, what are the impediments to the higher speed, the fewer delays, etc.?

BYFORD: So, I think it’s fundamentally, the system does have good bones. And let’s look at the positives. We do have express tracks. We do have a lot of stations. We have the most stations in the world. We have 472 stations. So, we’re starting from a good basis. But on a less-positive side, for various reasons, primarily lack of investment — crippling lack of investment — over the past few decades, the subway has been allowed to degrade, to the point that now we really struggle with on-time performance, because of lack of two things: one, lack of service reliability; and two, a crippling lack of capacity.

DUBNER: Can you point some fingers, please? If your chief argument is that funding is necessary for maintenance of an expensive and complicated system — which seems obvious — where is it, has it been a lack of funding? Has it been poor spending? Is it the typical political hide-and-seek games, where the money is diverted? And I would like you to name some names, with email addresses, please.

BYFORD: So, I think one of the lessons that constantly gets learned in transit is, you cannot stop investing in maintenance and what’s called state of good repair. People point to the subway system in Washington, D.C., WMATA. That was built in, I believe it was 1976. It’s really groovy, it’s a very sort of nice system.

AVIRGAN: Usually on fire, though.

BYFORD: Well, that’s the thing. People in D.C. — it stands for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — I’m told people say it stands for We Make A Town Afraid. That’s a bad place to be. Why? Because it was a new system, you can put it off. Politicians can put off the investment, because it works perfectly fine. So to your question, here, much the same. Politicians have lots of draws on their time. You’ve got to sort the roads out, you’ve got to sort out education, you’ve got to sort out hospitals. And for various reasons, this has snuck up on us. And you see this slow but incessant, relentless decline in terms of service reliability. The city’s population has grown. The infrastructure has got older, the pressure on it has got higher, the funding in real terms has dropped. And that’s why we’re in the state that we’re in.

If what Byford is saying here about infrastructure and maintenance warms your heart, check out Freakonomics Radio episode no. 263. It’s called “In Praise of Maintenance.” Okay, back to Andy Byford.

BYFORD: So, let me tell you what we’re doing about it. The city and the state have jointly funded what’s called the Subway Action Plan. So it’s installing what we call continuously welded rail — better rail that is less prone to rail defects. It’s about fixing leaks. It’s about renewing components. It’s about unblocking drains. So it’s really about fixing those elements that were allowed to degrade on the existing system.

To me on arrival, what was missing was the complementary part — which is, you must get your operational disciplines right. So when I came here, it drove me crazy, as a railway man of 30 years’ experience, that you see trains sit in the platform, you all see it, doors open, close, open, close, open, close. “Can we please get going?”

There were speed restrictions that were not necessary — speed restrictions went in initially, for a valid reason, that either the track had a defect years ago, or because we had trains that were made of wood years ago, or didn’t have such strong brakes. Those speed restrictions are no longer necessary. We had what are called signal-grade timers that were put in for a safety reason, but they’ve been allowed to fall out of calibration.

DUBNER: So you’re saying, even when the equipment is capable and the tracks are fine—

BYFORD: It’s not properly calibrated. So that was my suspicion. Obviously, you listen to the customers, but you also look at data. What was it about 2012, suddenly the delays went exponentially up? That’s when we started putting in those signal-grade timers. They were wrongly calibrated. So we have set up a team called the SPEED Team. It stands for Subway Performance Evaluation and Education Development, because we love acronyms, right? We subscribe to the PUMA initiative at New York City Transit Authority. You know what PUMA stands for?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t.

BYFORD: Please Use More Acronyms. So we set this team up to cover, on a specialized train, every inch of New York City Transit’s 600 track miles. They drive at the signal at the speed that it should be set for. And if the train gets automatically stopped, then the signal is wrongly calibrated. So, so far, we have identified 320 such signals that are wrongly calibrated, and we’re working our way through correcting them.

AVIRGAN: Can I just clarify one thing? You’re saying that the only way to test a signal is to take a train and drive it as fast as possible at the signal and see what happens?

BYFORD: Well, just for the benefit of everyone listening on the radio — this fact checker is actually on his third bottle of beer. But just to clarify, to put everyone’s mind to rest — when I say drive the train at it, obviously it’s for the speed limit that should be, the signal should clear at that speed.

AVIRGAN: But you need a full train to test that one signal?

BYFORD: No, this is an empty train. This is an empty train. These are qualified people.

DUBNER: I believe Jody’s question is, isn’t there software or something that does that?

BYFORD: No, I want to test the reality. So, these people, qualified people—

DUCKWORTH: Oh, you definitely want to test it with an actual train.

BYFORD: —and if that signal, the signal plate, says that signal should clear at 15 miles per hour, but it’s actually what we call tripping the station, stopping it at a lesser speed, then it’s wrongly calibrated.

DUBNER: Can I can I ask a funding question? So there is — as I understand it, a relatively new congestion surcharge on taxis and car services. And now, there is talk of another congestion fee for vehicles entering certain parts of Manhattan, which is what we more typically think of as a congestion fee. That money, we’re told, is directed to “the subways.” So: how much money will there be? Is it really coming to you? What is the money going toward? Etc.

BYFORD: First of all, the for-hire vehicle surcharge, the one that you just described, and that will now start to see a flow of funding come towards — dedicated funding — coming towards transit, which I very much welcome, because the one thing, working in transit, that really cripples you, is stop-start funding. You can’t plan unless every year you’re thinking, well, what are we going to get this year? That’s no way to run a business. I need to be able to plan with certainty.

The real game changer will be made major, sustainable, affordable, long-term sources of funding. And one of those suggested is a congestion charge. Because it does two things. One, it cuts congestion. And the other half of my focus is of course buses, which have the lowest speed of any North American bus system. Why? It’s nothing to do with my operators, the buses can’t levitate. They’re stuck in traffic.

DUCKWORTH: Not yet.

BYFORD: We’re working on that, by the way. But they’re hopelessly stuck in traffic. So what it gives you is, less traffic, but the traffic that does come in, pay a fee, and that fee must be lock-boxed, ring-fenced, cannot be siphoned off anywhere else, guaranteed go into funding.

DUBNER: What’s your annual budget now, and what do you want, let’s say, two, five years from now?

BYFORD: So, at the moment, the operating budget of New York City Transit is around $8 billion. So it’s a big chunk of cash, but bear in mind this is a huge system, in that we run thousands of services 24/7, which is another reason this is a tricky system to upgrade, because no one wants their lines shut down while we upgrade.

DUBNER: It’s like the 24-hour diner, and you always wonder, when do they clean out the fryer? That’s what I wonder about you.

DUCKWORTH: Never.

BYFORD: I’ve often wondered that. That’s my next challenge. I’ve often wondered that. So, what we really need is to bite the bullet. And I’m saying, with the right funding, sustainable funding, we can turn this system around. No more tweaking. Let’s totally re-signal the network. Let’s make the system fully accessible. We can’t be proud of this system unless and until it is fully accessible to all New Yorkers. Let’s sort out the bus network. Let’s modernize the prevailing mindset, the bureaucracy of the transit network.

So, some specifics: within the first five years, properly funded, we can re-signal five lines. In the next five years, for a total of 10, we can modernize 11 of the lines. In that 10 years, completely modernize 300 stations. We can make 180 stations accessible within that time frame. I’d need, we’ve calculated, $40 billion over those 10 years. Can we really not afford $4 billion a year, maybe two from the state, one from the city, $500 million from Washington, D.C., $500 million — maybe we could find it in Transit.

We can move from state of emergency to state of the art within just 10 years. If we don’t do this plan, all that will happen is, the infrastructure will get even older, the population will grow even bigger, and the pressure on it will grow harder. But guess what? The price will go up. So now’s the time to bite the bullet.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, we heard a lot of interesting ideas, some statistics, massive optimism, and, I would say, energy, which I admire.

DUCKWORTH: Charm and charisma. And grit.

DUBNER: A lot of grit.

AVIRGAN: I want to talk specifically about one thing, which is, you said there is a lack of capacity. Are you running, at any given time, the maximum number of trains that could be on the system at that time?

BYFORD: No, we’re not. No. And that is, again, something that we are in the process of addressing. A classic example of that would be the L line, because that line is one of the two that has communications-based train-control, modern signaling, that currently runs 20 trains per hour. After the upgrade, we’ll be able to run more trains because we’re providing more power. The signaling system can handle it. There’s not enough power. Which is ridiculous. So we’re addressing that.

DUBNER: Andy Byford, thank you so much for coming on our show. Would you please welcome our next guest. She is an economic historian at N.Y.U. She studies creativity and innovation. Her name is Petra Moser. Petra. How are you?

Petra MOSER: Great.

DUBNER: Good. You teach quite nearby at N.Y.U. How did you get here tonight?

MOSER: Subway.

DUBNER: And it worked.

MOSER: It did.

DUBNER: What do you have for us tonight, Petra?

MOSER: So, I wanted to ask you whether you might know: how did Napoleon influence music?

DUBNER: How did Napoleon influence music? Angie Duckworth, do you have any thoughts?

DUCKWORTH: Did he commission a special piece for Josephine?

MOSER: I don’t know that.

DUCKWORTH: That’s not the answer then.

MOSER: No, that’s not the answer. You got to be a little bit more creative. You got to think a little bit out of the box.

DUBNER: Did it have to do with war-making?

MOSER: Yes.

DUCKWORTH: Did he conquer a nation and then have the musical traditions blend together—

MOSER: No.

DUCKWORTH: I was so close.

MOSER: It was good. If we put the two of you together, we’re actually getting somewhere.

DUBNER: Since we’re not going to get there on our own, why don’t you tell us?

MOSER: So, Napoleon started his Italian campaign at the end of the 18th century. And he won Lombardy and Venetia, which are two states in Italy. These states, by 1801 were under French control, and they got all the French laws, including copyright. But Italy did not have copyrights. So now in Italy, you have two sets of states. They have the same language, they have similar culture. They both get flooded with Napoleon, with the soldiers, with everything, with the gambling, all of that. But only two states have copyrights for the next 20 years.

So now we can actually look what that does to music. Because now we have these two states where composers own what they produce, what they create, and what we wanted to see is whether, once you give an artist an intellectual property right, whether that actually makes them produce more and whether it makes them produce better stuff.

DUBNER: What was your measure for quality?

MOSER: Opera is really great. You can quantify both quantity and quality. So quantity is fairly easy. It’s really helpful that opera is a public art form.

DUCKWORTH: You can count the number of operas.

MOSER: Exactly. So, it’s public. So you can count it. But then, the other thing is that lots of people really love opera and they write everything about opera. So we have lots of people who just say, “Oh, this was a really notable performance, there are tons of people at this performance. People were streaming at the doors.” And there’s a record of that. So we know which were the hits. Then another measure of quality is whether we still play something today. So if something still plays at the Met today, or whether it’s still available on Amazon today, whether people want to buy it.

DUBNER: But wouldn’t that be directly following on from whether they were popular or not, is that not the same thing?

MOSER: There’s some endogeneity there. So, if something is popular now, then it may be more—

DUCKWORTH: How about how many stars it gets on Amazon? Is that part of the academic scholarship?

MOSER: Not in this paper.

DUBNER: So I’m not surprised that an economic historian would want to understand the innovation impact of copyright, because copyright and patent — we know there’s a lot of debate over how strong it needs to be to encourage the right amount of innovation, without overprotecting, etc. Did you go looking for opera first? Did you go looking for Napoleon? Did you go looking for old copyright law?

MOSER: No. So, I’ve done a lot of work on patents. And when you do the same thing over and over and over again, you just get bored. And I sang a lot as a kid, and I was trying to sing opera in college, and then I took economics at the same time, and I liked that better.

DUBNER: Do you have an example for us of an opera that was composed during that era, in one of those states — that you said — Lombardy and Venetia, you said?

MOSER: Yeah, so we have a Rossini opera, L’Italiana in Algeri, which I think would be a nice one.

DUBNER: Let’s hear some. Petra, you’re welcome to join in, if you’d like.

MOSER: If you will, I will too.

Let me break in here to say I chose not to sing that night, because I wasn’t warmed up.

DUBNER: Okay, so tell us a bit about this Rossini piece, and how it’s an example of the phenomenon that you’ve measured.

MOSER: Rossini was a very peculiar character, as many of these composers. He was also poor. And so he is a good example of the way in which copyright influences composers. So, he really responded to what people paid him. So, we have records of him saying to the theater managers, “Look, you are not paying me enough, so I’m just going to give you the same stuff over and over and over again. I just take this aria, and I’ve changed a little bit, and that’s it.” And that’s precisely what we think is not novelty — what we think is not creativity. But when he actually got enough money, then he would really make something that was better.

DUCKWORTH: So what’s really interesting about that is that creativity, most people think of as being intrinsically rewarding, right? And in fact, people think that when you pay, you actually decrease the intrinsic amount of it. No?

MOSER: This completely fits economics. He is poor. His mother and father were itinerant musicians. So he didn’t come in saying, “Oh, I’m just gonna do this for fun.” So he did it, in part, to make money. So, suppose, say, a composer today needs $2,000 to live. And say before copyright, you get like just $1,000 per opera. And now with copyright, because they have to pay you for repeat performances, you get $2,000. So now he only has to write one opera instead of two. That gives him the freedom to do precisely what he wants to do. So we actually see this in Rossini and other people, that they make things more complicated, they play around with things and he now has more time and he has more freedom. So it’s a wealth effect.

DUBNER: I’m curious where you land on issues of copyright and patent ownership, in a world that’s obviously gotten a lot more complicated. And what your position is on the optimal copyright policy.

MOSER: Having basic copyright protection is important for two reasons. The first one is that it gives people an incentive to produce better work, but then the other one is if you actually make art something that people can make money off, you also change the type of person who can become an artist.

So we see this actually with 19th-century novelists. Before copyrights were really a thing, the only people who would write were people who, when we matched them with their parents’ wealth records, they were actually just wealthy — there’d be men and women, but they would both be wealthy. Once you have stronger copyrights in England, then, when you look again at the parents of the people who would become writers and become novelists, now all of a sudden we have people from humbler backgrounds.

DUBNER: Petra, thank you so much for playing with us. Our next guest is a psychology professor at Cornell who studies how people make moral and ethical judgments. Would you please welcome David Pizarro. Hi David, what do you have for us tonight?

David PIZARRO: Suppose that you walked into a public restroom, and there’s—

DUBNER: Whatever comes next is not good.

PIZARRO: And there’s just a mess, an un-flushed toilet. How disgusted would you be? Say, 10, really, really, really disgusted. Zero, wouldn’t bother you.

DUBNER: This one goes to 11, I’m gonna say.

DUCKWORTH: Depends on what’s in the toilet. As low as 5, as high as 10.

AVIRGAN: I’d probably be in the 3 to 6 range.

DUBNER: Really?

AVIRGAN: I’ve seen some stuff.

PIZARRO: My follow-up is, what do you think this has to do with who you voted for in the last election, say the Presidential election?

DUBNER: And do you study disgust?

PIZARRO: I do study disgust. I’m really easily disgusted. So it’s a difficult thing to do, but that’s what grad students are for.

DUBNER: All right. So the the example you’re using is an unflushed toilet. Could you use a different example?

PIZARRO: One of my favorite examples, actually: how disgusted would you be if you took a sip of a soda can and realized it wasn’t yours? It was a stranger’s?

DUCKWORTH: Zero. I ate food backstage that literally—

DUBNER: My plate, actually.

DUCKWORTH: Yes, and I didn’t even know whose it was.

DUBNER: I’m glad you brought that up, because I thought that was really strange. So you’re looking at how the emotion — is disgust an emotion, by the way?

PIZARRO: Yeah, most people call it an emotion. I mean, there’s some debate, because it seems a little different from the other emotions, because it’s so reflexive. But I think most people who study disgust would call it an emotion.

DUBNER: But what you’re getting at is, your research is about the relationship between disgust and political affiliation?

PIZARRO: That’s right, political orientation. So, how conservative or liberal are you on the spectrum? And what we’ve found — the more disgusted you were, the more likely you were to say you were conservative. We’ve now looked at this across different countries, in different languages. We keep finding this relationship. The more easily disgusted people say they are, the more likely they are to be toward the right of the scale, less easily disgusted, toward the left.

DUBNER: Let me ask you: so there’s a question we came across in a series we’ve been doing on creativity, and especially if you’re in the creative arts, the political orientation is way, way left. That led to conversations about, is there something about creativity in the arts that is correlated with liberalism? Because if you think of liberalism as essentially wanting to change the state of the thing, and conservatism as an attitude toward traditionalism, I’m curious whether you have anything to say about the mechanism by which that kind of relationship may exist.

PIZARRO: Yeah, that’s been the most interesting question to us, because if you just demonstrate a relationship, that doesn’t get at the heart of the question. The question was what is the nature of this relationship? So one way to ask that is, what part of conservatism is really being captured by this? And so in looking at various measures, what we see is exactly what you said, Stephen. It’s the traditionalism aspect. Keeping things the way they are. So the old ways of doing things are good, don’t do the new things.

This shows up in other ways that you could ask the question. So one of the big findings in personality psychology is the dimension called “openness to experience” — people who are more liberal are very high in openness to experience. They may want to try out new things. People who are more conservative are very low in openness to experience. So you can see disgust as one of those emotions that’s kind of like, “Well, I have a set level. How risky do I want to behave for a reward? So do I try a new food?”

DUCKWORTH: So is it true, then, that picky eaters and hypochondriacs are more likely to be politically conservative?

PIZARRO: I don’t know the answer to picky eaters. That’s a very good question.

DUCKWORTH: That would be your prediction maybe, right?

PIZARRO: It would be the prediction. Although, whenever I talk about this stuff, I always want to point out that this isn’t — it’s not as if how grossed out you are is 100 percent predictive. About between 3 and 10 percent of why you might be liberal or conservative seems to be captured by disgust measures.

DUBNER: Hey, something I’ve wondered about a long time is, the people who care for sick people, let’s say, I’m astonished that they’re able to do it so well and regularly, et cetera. And I often wonder, is that acclimation, or is it a trait?

PIZARRO: That’s a really good question, And in fact, Angela’s colleague at Pennsylvania, Paul Rozin, one of the pioneers who studied this, did a study looking at first-year med students asking this question, trying to see, if you ask a bunch of questions like the ones I asked you, in general how easily disgusted are you in everyday life, and you get a score — so if we asked everybody here, there’d be a nice normal distribution. Some people are really easily, some people are not.

He was asking those questions of incoming med students, and what he found was that most students were like the rest of the population coming in. After a year of medical school, when — as you might know, you have to poke into bodies, and you get used to bodily fluids and all that stuff — they were less disgusted when it came to that stuff. But not in general — they were still disgusted by all the other stuff, but they acclimated. So the answer to your question is, we’re really good at acclimating to specific things. Anybody who’s a parent knows you get used to certain things.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, David Pizarro has been telling us about the politics of disgust, which are really interesting, and lead to a lot of interesting thoughts and questions. Anything factual we should know?

AVIRGAN: This isn’t exactly a fact check. But I do want to go back to how you actually measure disgust. You ask people about hypothetical scenarios, and ask them to rate how disgusted they were. Do you trust that?

PIZARRO: That’s one way. Other people have done the work of correlating—

AVIRGAN: Of actually disgusting people in real time — love it.

PIZARRO: Of actually disgusting people. So they’ve brought people into the lab and they’ve asked them to do really gross but safe things. So, would you eat a piece of chocolate shaped like dog poop?

DUCKWORTH: Yes.

DUBNER: I think Angela’s answer says less about her liberalism than about her chocolate attitude.

PIZARRO: That may be right. And that’s why it’s a noisy measure.

DUBNER: Exactly. David Pizarro, thank you so much. I really enjoyed having you here.

* * *

DUBNER: Our next guest is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation. Please welcome Polly Trottenberg. Polly, nice to have you here.

Polly TROTTENBERG: Thanks for having me.

DUBNER: First of all, tell us what the New York City Department of Transportation is and does, and how it differs from Andy Byford’s New York City Transit Authority please.

TROTTENBERG: It’s a good question. Andy and I work together a lot, but New York City Department of Transportation, we’re responsible for roads, bridges, bike lanes, ferries, bike share, car share.

DUBNER: Before we get into what you’re working on and what you’re going to tell us, Andy began by describing the general state of transit. What about your overall view — what are the big problems, and how many different dimensions do they exist on?

TROTTENBERG: We actually have a different kind of challenge for a lot of my infrastructure, which is, it’s kind of a fun challenge. The city is growing in leaps and bounds. New York City now, population 8.6 million people, the highest it has been in the city’s history. Sixty-two million tourists last year. Incredible economic activity. Construction. And then of course, we have things like Uber and Lyft and Amazon, and Fresh Direct, which have just filled our streets, and made an incredible competition for space.

Side note: Fresh Direct is an online grocery-delivery company in New York. They’re famous for having their trucks idle on the streets for hours. But one other thing they do is they rate their fruit on a five-star scale. So whatever fruit has five stars this week — maybe it’s pixie tangerines or red plumcots — you know it’ll be at peak flavor. It’s a smart system, and I wish this practice would spread; just thought you might like to know.

TROTTENBERG: Meanwhile, a new generation that’s not so car-centric. They like transit, they want to ride bikes. They maybe want to ride scooters. There’s a big competition now, at least in my world, for street space.

DUBNER: So, what do you have for us tonight specifically, then?

TROTTENBERG: Well, when you build a bike lane on an avenue in New York City, what happens?

DUBNER: You’re asking about safety? Are you asking about congestion? Are you asking about density, speed, or whatnot?

TROTTENBERG: So, I mean all of the above. There’s a traditional view, when people who maybe aren’t cyclists think about bike lanes, they focus on the traffic elements of it. But there are actually a whole lot of other elements that come in when you put in a bike lane.

DUBNER: So, I do know that when you add a lane to a highway, let’s say, it actually doesn’t ease congestion because it draws demand, right?

TROTTENBERG: Induced demand is the phrase you’re looking for.

DUBNER: Right. So is it the case that when you subtract a lane of car traffic and replace it with a bike lane, that actually it does not cause car congestion problems?

TROTTENBERG: I’m happy to say, if you take out that lane but you redesign the street at the same time, you make the traffic move in a more orderly way, you put in turn lanes, and you change the signaling, you can keep the traffic speed some cases better, and a lot of cases sort of the same, while also adding in a safe space for cyclists. And just one of the statistics, where we put in bike lanes, we see huge safety improvements, not only for cyclists, who we consider a vulnerable population on the street, but for pedestrians and for motorists too, because it calms the traffic and it organizes it better.

DUBNER: I love the way that you frame the problem, which is that there’s a competition for a resource, and the resource is space — street space, lane space, and so on. One thing that I’m curious on your position — in terms of congestion in New York City, I believe that 97 percent of New York street parking is free. Transportation scholars have found that an enormous amount of congestion in New York, and other places that offer free parking, is caused by cars cruising around looking for a parking spot. So economists think this is idiotic, that you’ve got something of value — this parking space — that you’re charging zero for, especially when it has so many negative externalities — causing congestion for everybody else, pollution, etc. So, have you thought about eliminating or severely limiting free street parking, as a means to address congestion generally in New York City?

TROTTENBERG: Obviously from the economist’s point of view, it’s the same problem, both the parking and the road space, which is, it’s a scarce resource and demand greatly exceeds supply. We should price it. It’s a perfectly logical economic place to be. It is an impossible political place to be.

DUCKWORTH: Nobody wants to give up their free parking.

TROTTENBERG: The politics of parking has been, certainly for me, one of the most eye-opening parts of my job. It is something that is very intensely debated. We have, over the time that I’ve been in this job for five years, we have modestly raised parking rates. We have added in, in some places, bike share and car share, we’ve taken some of those spaces and repurposed them for uses that are more shared. But it’s certainly been a slow process.

DUCKWORTH: Is that because of the endowment effect, that now that people already have their free parking. I mean, hard to get, but free parking. You just can’t take it away.

TROTTENBERG: Yes. It’s not complicated.

DUCKWORTH: Can I ask — you are somebody who has a really hard job—

TROTTENBERG: And a lot of grit.

DUCKWORTH: Well, that is where I was going. A lot of grit. And I wanted to know how you got into this. I mean, I don’t know if you were a little girl and said, “I’m going to be the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation.”

TROTTENBERG: No.

DUCKWORTH: So could you just share a little bit of the story? How did you get into this calling?

TROTTENBERG: I went to college here in New York, back in what we would say were the bad old days, when the city was experiencing a lot of difficulties, a lot of crime, a lot of disinvestment. And I just got very interested in urban policy and transportation policy. And one of the great success stories of New York — again, why my streets are so full, why Andy’s subways are so full — we took a city where there had been disinvestment, and we really turned it around. At one time, the Williamsburg Bridge was shut down because it was coming to pieces. Now we really invest in our bridges and our roads. So I think being part of that process — and now, today we have bikes and scooters, and Uber and Lyft, and all these other really exciting changes.

DUCKWORTH: Does the bike lane innovation actually improve physical health? Because one of the other major trends over the last 50 years is that we just sit around all the time.

TROTTENBERG: If you think about cycling as a mode, it is an inexpensive mode to own and operate. And for us to provide for. I mean, basically it’s paint. It emits no carbon, burns no fuel. It gets you moving, it’s physical exercise. It connects you to your city. Of course, it is terrific for general individual health, public health, and the health of the city.

DUCKWORTH: Is there any evidence of that? I’m wondering whether when you put in a new bike lane, there is any measure that the physical health of, I don’t know, that community, that neighborhood has — that might be very difficult to quantify, but it would be very exciting if you could.

TROTTENBERG: Well, we’re going to be looking at the long term health statistics. Anecdotally, we see evidence that it is getting people moving, particularly kids. But I don’t know, maybe Jody will dig up some some better numbers than I have.

DUBNER: If you were able to start from scratch, would you have streets on a grid system? Because one thing that a grid does is it encourages speed, because it’s wide open, straight.

TROTTENBERG: There’s a wonderful book written just recently about how the grid came about in New York City. And it was sort of a bunch of half-drunken foreign guys who threw it together a little haphazardly, when you read the book, it’s very surprising. When I’m in other cities where they have less of a grid — and for example, they have alleyways. I like to joke, I have alley envy. Because here in New York without those alleys, there are no places for the garbage trucks and the deliveries and the utility poles. Everything has to happen on those same streets where the cars are traveling, the buses are traveling, the bikes are traveling, and the pedestrians are traveling. So no, I think there are places where a grid is very efficient, but I would design it very differently.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, Polly Trottenberg has been telling us about the roads primarily, and other things in her purview. Did you find anything that needs flagging?

AVIRGAN: Angela, to your question about effects on public health, there was one study from the Mailman School here at Columbia University. It tries to measure the effect of a bike lane on an increase in the probability of riding a bike, and then quantify the effect on health, and reduced pollution, and then measures that against other public-health measures. And the conclusion is that investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventative approaches used today, so we’ll see. That’s one study.

DUBNER: Polly Trottenberg, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It is time — I’m so sad to say — for tonight’s final guest. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Would you please welcome Katherine Hornbostel. Katherine, it is nice to have you. You are our last guest tonight, so make it good. What do you have for us?

Katherine HORNBOSTEL: All right. No pressure. So, if I handed you a bucket filled with water and laundry detergent, and asked you to tackle global warming, what would you do?

DUBNER: Oh, that’s so easy.

DUCKWORTH: You would wash something.

DUBNER: I would make a giant bubble bath and I would invite—

DUCKWORTH: With laundry detergent.

DUBNER: Hey, don’t yuck my yum. I would make a giant bubble bath, and I would invite the climate lions and the climate lambs to lie down together in the bubble bath and relax, and proceed to have an empirical, sane conversation about the best ways to address climate change. That’s what I would do with a big bucket of soapy water.

HORNBOSTEL: I really like that approach.

DUBNER: Are we done here? Is that the answer?

DUCKWORTH: That’s exactly what she was gonna recommend.

HORNBOSTEL: I can’t say I wrote about that approach in my paper. Do you have any other suggestions?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t really know what’s in laundry detergent — can you give me a hint?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes, so I’m actually talking about the active ingredient sodium carbonate. I don’t know if that helps.

DUCKWORTH: Sodium carbonate. Is that baking soda?

HORNBOSTEL: Very similar.

DUBNER: Would you wash the sky?

HORNBOSTEL: Not quite — what would I be wash— are you saying, like, throw a bubble bath in the air?

DUBNER: Like one of those geo-engineering schemes that run a giant hose into the stratosphere and spray out some benign material that refracts sunlight, that kind of thing?

HORNBOSTEL: Not quite. That is a very creative approach. So, I’ll give you guys a little bit of a hint: I’m going to send you to a coal power plant with this bucket of water and detergent.

DUCKWORTH: So, what is the specific, I guess, byproduct or whatever, of coal burning, that’s bad — and then maybe we’ll be a little closer.

HORNBOSTEL: There are a lot of things that come off of coal that are bad. Some of them, thankfully, we already have regulations against — things like SOx and NOx. They already scrub a lot of the crap that comes off of coal plants.

DUBNER: Can you give the full name of SOx and NOx, please?

HORNBOSTEL: So, sulfur oxides and nitrous oxides. Gaseous compounds that are bad for the environment.

DUBNER: Because we all thought it was a Dr. Seuss story.

DUCKWORTH: I was like, “That is so cute! Why would we want to legislate against them?”

HORNBOSTEL: So, carbon dioxide is the other obvious one, that there are no regulations for, currently, for coal plants.

DUBNER: Are some of the emissions in a coal plant, do they react in some way, negatively, I guess, with sodium carbonate? Is that the idea?

HORNBOSTEL: You’re on the right track, you’re getting very close.

DUBNER: So I don’t think we’re going to get closer without a mechanical engineering degree, which you do have.

HORNBOSTEL: So, this particular combination — water and sodium carbonate — if you dissolve it in water, can react with carbon dioxide and extract it from a gas stream coming off a coal plant. And the really interesting thing that I’ve studied is that if you put these chemicals into little capsules that look like caviar, you can actually pack them into a reactor, attach it to a power plant, and selectively take out the carbon dioxide that’s being released from the exhaust.

DUBNER: So you’re describing a form of carbon capture, correct?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes. It is a carbon-capture technology.

DUBNER: What stage is it in? Are you one of the inventors of said technology?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes, I was on a team at a national lab from the D.O.E. that invented and studied this technology. It’s been demonstrated at a lab scale. Currently we’re looking for partners to adopt it. Not at a power-plant scale yet, but at smaller scales to test out and figure out the kinks and try to scale it up.

DUBNER: And what you’re describing, there is obviously chemical reactions here. But is it essentially a filter?

HORNBOSTEL: It’s a good question. It’s not exactly a filter — I guess you could think of it from a big picture standpoint as a filter, though. So you’re sending the nasty gas from a power plant through it, it selectively takes out carbon dioxide. At some point it reaches capacity. And then you have to de-sorb or remove the CO2 from the full solution.

DUBNER: And how do you do that?

HORNBOSTEL: So, usually you have to heat up steam and send it through these capsules, and it’ll take the carbon dioxide back out. And then you pressurize it and put it underground.

DUBNER: Okay. So, it’s carbon capture, you bury the carbon underground, which some people have big concerns about there. What’s your level of concern on that?

HORNBOSTEL: I think that’s very safe, if you — it’s actually being done already in a lot of places — it’s fairly safe and there’s a lot of science to back up the fact that it’s not going to leak out or cause problems, if you—

DUCKWORTH: Does it just stay there forever?

HORNBOSTEL: Really, if you find the right formations — that’s kind of beyond my research area, but the scientists on that side are pretty confident you can store a lot of carbon dioxide underground. Just the sheer magnitude of carbon dioxide emissions requires that we put it underground at this point.

DUBNER: So the unit or machine that you’re talking about, what do you call it?

HORNBOSTEL: So I guess I would call it a reactor. So, it’s basically a giant vat filled with this solution that will react with carbon dioxide to hold it, until you need to release it and store it.

DUBNER: So, I can’t tell whether it’s because you cleverly began the conversation by talking about laundry detergent. Was it as simple, really, as just getting something kind of like laundry detergent and figuring out how that responded to these carbon emissions?

HORNBOSTEL: Yeah I mean, so it is simple compared to other technologies for carbon capture. By putting them in small capsules, what you’re essentially doing is raising the surface area. So imagine a big vat filled with caviar. You have a very large surface area of contact between the liquid in those capsules and then the gas flowing through, which really allows you to use these very simple ingredients, instead of a very tricky or corrosive solvent instead.

DUCKWORTH: So you said laundry detergent is a lot like baking soda. Now, this might be a digression, Stephen, but since I have a mechanical engineering professor — is that little box of baking soda that I have in my refrigerator, is it really absorbing the odors?

DUBNER: I love how she can tell us about carbon capture, and this is the tough question for her.

DUCKWORTH: This is the most important question of the evening.

HORNBOSTEL: The more degrees you get, the farther removed you are from practical solutions to things like that. So, sodium carbonate reacts with carbon dioxide. It actually forms baking soda. So that is the reaction — that is the product of this reaction. I guess to emphasize here is that both the initial chemical and the final product are both very safe, very cheap, very abundant.

DUCKWORTH: I have to ask this question: this is such a simple, elegant, commonsense, straightforward, hiding-in-plain sight — was your team composed mostly of women?

HORNBOSTEL: We had a very good proportion of women on my team.

DUCKWORTH: Just a hypothesis.

DUBNER: So, when I hear the words “safe, cheap, and abundant,” it does sound literally too good to be true. So let’s pretend that you were not involved with this project at all. But you knew about it, and you knew all the other competing carbon-capture systems that are being developed and funded and so on. What would you put the odds of this project succeeding — I’m not saying as the only carbon capture solution, but as a significant one?

HORNBOSTEL: So, I’m very confident that it could work if we invested and did it. Confidence in terms of whether or not this will be the winning technology — lower, much lower, just because there are a lot of technologies out there for carbon capture, there’s a lot of competition, there are some others that are much more mature than ours.

DUBNER: Does it have a name?

HORNBOSTEL: We call it M.E.C.S. It’s an acronym — so, Micro-Encapsulated Carbonate Solution.

DUBNER: Do you think we could crowdsource a better—

HORNBOSTEL: I just call them capsules, but I’m open to suggestions.

DUBNER: I like the caviar idea.

HORNBOSTEL: Carbon-Capture Caviar.

DUBNER: Carbon-Capture Caviar.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, I like that.

DUBNER: It says here you invented something else a few years back called the Pump2Baby Bottle.

HORNBOSTEL: I didn’t expect you to bring that little curveball up. Yes. So I had twins when I was in grad school. I was pumping for them. And they did not nurse well, and so I invented this little hack where you can actually feed your babies breast milk as you’re pumping it. So you attach it to any breast pump, as you’re pumping the milk, the baby starts drinking it.

DUCKWORTH: That is genius. Did you patent it? Did you make a lot of money?

HORNBOSTEL: In the process of patent prosecution right now. Filed for patent, working on it.

DUBNER: Congratulations.

DUCKWORTH: If you are not jumping up and down with excitement about it, then you have not nursed a child or pumped.

DUBNER: Yes, I haven’t. I’m gonna confess right now. Hey, Katherine Hornbostel, thank you so much for telling us something we didn’t know. And can we get one more hand here for all our guests please. It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. Obviously, all our guests have come here in the spirit of inquiry and information-sharing so we shouldn’t reduce this thing to a horse race but — well, this is America, and we really like to know who wins. Who’s it going to be?

Andy Byford, with “How to Fix New York City’s Subways,”

Petra Moser, with “Napoleon’s Copyright Legacy,”

David Pizarro, with “The Politics of Disgust,”

Polly Trottenberg, with “How to Fix New York City’s Roads,” or

Katherine Hornbostel, with “How to Launder Your Carbon.”

DUBNER: Our grand prize winner tonight — we had a dead tie. So thank you so much to both Andy Byford and Petra Moser, for telling us about fixing New York City subways and Napoleon’s copyright legacy. To commemorate your victories, you will each receive this Certificate of Impressive Knowledge. And it reads, “I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Angela Duckworth and Jody Avirgan, do solemnly swear that both Andy Byford and Petra Moser told us something we did not know. And for that we are eternally grateful.” Thank you so much. That’s our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you did not know. Huge thanks to Jody and Angela, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play “Tell Me Something—

AUDIENCE: I Don’t Know!”

DUBNER: Thank you very much.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace; we had help this week from Morgan Levey, David Herman, and Dan Dzula. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Grit.

Jody Avirgan, host of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcasts.

Andy Byford, president of the New York City Transit Authority.

Petra Moser, economic historian at New York University.

David Pizarro, psychologist at Cornell University.

Polly Trottenberg, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation.

Katherine Hornbostel, mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

RESOURCES

“Copyrights and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Operas,” by Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser (Journal of Political Economy, 2016).

“Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting,” by Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2011).

“The cost-effectiveness of bike lanes in New York City,” by Jing Gu, Babak Mohit, Peter Alexander Muennig (Injury Prevention, 2017).

“Packed and fluidized bed absorber modeling for carbon capture with micro-encapsulated sodium carbonate solution,” by Katherine Hornbostel, et. al. (Applied Energy, 2019).

EXTRA

“In Praise of Maintenance,” Freakonomics Radio Ep. 263 (2016).

Fresh Direct’s top-rated page.

The post Freakonomics Radio Live: “Would You Eat a Piece of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop?” appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freak-live-chocolate/

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populistmedia · 6 years

Text

Exclusive: Wall Street Journal Frames Roger Stone

In a public trial in the media, where journalists are acting as judge and jury for conservative activists and conservative political pundits, the Wall Street Journal has admitted they break the law by printing leaks from a taxpayer-funded government office with unlimited resources, and they like making money on denying an American his civil liberties. In an exchange with Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal, Roger Stone said,"This has been reported on so many times, I can’t believe the WSJ have any interest in rehashing it again." The media's current political target: Stone, a longtime friend of President Donald J. Trump, and Conservative/ Libertarian political icon. THAT IS CALLED A "LEAK" "Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is scrutinizing how a collection of activists and pundits intersected with WikiLeaks, the website that U.S. officials say was the primary conduit for publishing materials stolen by Russia, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Mueller’s team has recently questioned witnesses about the activities of longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone, including his contacts with WikiLeaks, and has obtained telephone records, according to the people familiar with the matter," reported Shelby Holliday, in the Wall Street Journal on Oct.19, 2018. Read Full Article Their next target: Could be you. Have you volunteered for a candidate or campaign? Are you a member of the GOP? Have you started a media company or blog? Have you posted about your political choices on social media? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you should care about this story. DEAR POLITICAL PUNDITS AND ACTIVISTS Imagine a world where you get an email from the Wall Street Journal framing you with treason, claiming they have proof of your criminal collision because they heard from the Top Cop in the land that you are basically guilty and they are going to publish the story to the world, after months of targeted harassment against you and your family. Scared enough to stay out of politics yet? Do you know who would be brave enough to print your side of that story, and stare down the monolith of the Leftist Mainstream Media in your defense, and in defense of American Civil Liberties? Populist Media is here for you, just remember. TIMELINE- FOR THE RECORD- ACCORDING TO ROGER STONE: According to Stone the following is his rebuttal to the constant Leaks to the Media and their coordinated drumbeat, declaring his guilt (without a trail) and what he calls "recycled fake news". This is his timeline, which the Wall Street Journal has received and which Populist Media has received. STATEMENT ABOUT ADVANCE NOTICE OF HILLARY EMAILS TO WSJ BY STONE: " On June 12, 2016, Julian Assange announced to CNN that WikiLeaks had obtained MORE Hillary Clinton email. In March 2016, WikiLeaks had already posted a searchable database of tens of thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Assange was widely reported to be planning periodic releases of all the information he and his organization had received. My comments reflect what was common knowledge and expectation. It was around this time that Randy Credico told me whatever WikiLeaks had was "big" and would shake up the race and would drop in October. He was correct," Stone told the Wall Street Journal. STATEMENT ABOUT GUCCIFER TO WSJ BY STONE: "I initially believed that Guccifer 2.0 had hacked the DNC because he(?) publicly predicted the e-mails from WikiLeaks. I even wrote a piece for Breitbart saying so. I no longer believe, based on forensic evidence published in the NATION, that the DNC was ever actually hacked at all. The evidence shows that, based on download times, the purloined e-mails were downloaded to a portable storage device and taken out the door. Therefore, I doubt Guccifer 2.0 or anyone else hacked the DNC. I explained this evolution in my thinking, under oath, to the House Intelligence Committee. I have also said it publicly elsewhere. As for "He actually released them several weeks ago. They got no traction. He took them to Assange. Well, Assange put them out to WikiLeaks." This was a tip I got from a Guardian reporter. Probably also false. As to whether Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian, I note this is the claim of the Intelligence Community who claim he (?) left digital fingerprints of its hacks which prove it was a Russian. The WikiLeaks disclosures (Vault 7) show Intelligence Services have the technology to make it appear a hack came from somewhere other than where it came from. I also question why Guccifer 2.0 would be using a software program registered to a DNC staffer. The point is moot. I no longer believe Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC. I noted this in my sworn testimony. Hopefully, in the lawsuit in which I am being sued by the DNC we will finally get discovery to inspect the servers which the FBI was never allowed to inspect to determine if they were hacked at all. My attorneys have asked that they be preserved for discovery. Please reflect in your reporting that my 24-word exchange with the persona of Guccifer 2.0 took place after the DNC material had already been published so based on timing, context, and the actual content the DM exchange provides no evidence of collusion, collaboration, or coordination. This exchange was gratuitously included in the DOJ indictment of 12 Russian Intelligence Agents although Rod Rosenstein noted at the time "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime." As CNBC put it, "Rosenstein also highlighted that Friday's indictment does not allege that any American knowingly participated in the Russian operation." STATEMENT ABOUT SAM NUNBERG CLAIM TO WSJ BY STONE: "I supplied airline tickets, a hotel receipt, and restaurant receipts to show I was in Los Angles on the very day Sam said I was in London. The Post article misquoted me…After trying for 40 minutes to get Sam Nunberg off the phone on a Friday night, he asked if I had plans for the weekend." STATEMENT ABOUT ASSANGE CONNECTION TO WSJ BY STONE "I never said I had direct communication with Assange and I clarified it was thru a back channel. Just because I dramatized the facts for a partisan audience does not mean I fabricated them. Credico was my confirming source." STATEMENT ABOUT CLINTON FOUNDATION TO WSJ BY STONE The prediction regarding the Clinton Foundation is based on an e-mail as detailed here (click link) https://dailycaller.com/2018/10/22/roger-stone-WikiLeaks-claim-reporter-email/ This is the so-called second source as reflected in my e-mails. My tip is based on the content of this e-mail which Charles Ortel has confirmed the authenticity of. Ironically it turns out to be wrong. STATEMENT ABOUT ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE OF PODESTA EMAILS TO WSJ BY STONE "My tweet is based on the Aug 14th Breitbart Story that identified Tony Podesta's work for the same Ukrainian Political Party as Manafort and the extensive report on the Podesta brothers�� lucrative Russian business deals in gas, aluminum, uranium and banking. All of this was brought to my attention by Jerry Corsi who subsequently sent me a very well researched memo on their dealings that I planned to feed to certain reporters. I was going to be the one parsing out Corsi’s report, I was going to make it their time in the barrel. I later wrote a piece about their Russian Bank deal." FULL STATEMENT TO WSJ BY STONE "Let's get it exactly right "I had no advance knowledge about the acquisition and publication of John Podesta's e-mail.” “I had no advance notice of the source content or exact release date of the WikiLeaks DNC disclosures. I received nothing including hacked e-mails from Guccifer 2.0, the Russians, WikiLeaks or anyone else and therefore passed on nothing to Donald Trump and the Trump campaign or anyone else. My testimony in front of the House Committee was accurate and truthful." What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk the Democrats on Twitter. This is called Politics. It’s not illegal “ My testimony to the House Intelligence Committee was 100% accurate and truthful despite claims by hyper-partisans who enjoy congressional immunity from lawsuit. Reread this https://stonecoldtruth.com/randy-me-truth-about-WikiLeaks/ And to recap In September I was told by former Congressman Walter Fauntroy that he had brokered an agreement between Quadaffi and the Clinton State Department for Quadaffi to abdicate and gains safe passage out of the country. I was supplied a signed agreement which appeared to be genuine. I noticed an interview in which Assange said he had documents reflecting disagreement over whether to take out Quaddafi. I asked Credico if he knew if they had been posted. Why would I ask Randy if I was in communication with Assange in 2016? His response “ I can't be asking them for things every day….I’ll ask one of the lawyers.” He provided nothing. You characterize this as “digging dirt”. I call it legitimate political research. Congressman Fauntroy is a credible source and his story detailed. To be clear Dr. Corsi never told me Podesta’s e-mail had been acquired or gave any e-mails from those eventually published or indicated that he had seen them. E-Mail and text messages confirm events as outlined above and make no reference to Podesta’s e-mail being acquired." END OF STONE STATEMENTS Remember that Stone has been banned from Twitter and other platforms, so his reach is intentionally reduced in an organized media attack on his reputation. BEGINNING OF PERSECUTION https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1056979130070302720 https://twitter.com/MotherJones/status/1056922808201166848 https://twitter.com/LawWorksAction/status/1056931906804219904 and so on and so forth... YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT IF YOU PROMISE TO ROLL OVER THE PRESIDENT Unless the Media is publishing constant political attacks, dressed up as journalism. Unless they are given authority to libel your name, brand and reputation. Back in the old days, Americans had "civil liberties" and the right to a fair court trial. The American Mainstream Media, including the Wall Street Journal, has pitched that old-fashioned notion. And American activists and pundits are helpless to stop them. Unless we are brave enough to make a stand like Stone has done. Read the full article

#Featured #JullianAsange #RogerStone #WikiLeaks

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hsews · 6 years

Link

Posted September 08, 2018 05:58:49

Photograph: The Wi-Fi was censored on my current China Japanese-Qantas codeshare flight from Melbourne to Shanghai. (ABC Information)

Not too long ago on a visit to Shanghai, I used to be confused to seek out that as my aircraft lifted off Melbourne’s Tullamarine tarmac, the web companies that I took without any consideration like Google, Fb, and Twitter didn’t load whereas WeChat and Weibo had been nonetheless accessible.

Key factors:

Australia technically owns the air contained in the aircraft however it’s additionally Chinese language territory

Each plane has its personal “nationality” below the Chicago Conference

The Nice Fireplace Wall is corresponding to a digital border that China in-built 1994-1996

I had been making an attempt to browse the web on my China Japanese-Qantas codeshare flight with no success, earlier than I realised the continual buffering was not because of low sign.

As an alternative, I had one way or the other hit the Nice Firewall of China whereas nonetheless in Australian airspace. This confused me as a result of my flight — that I booked on the Qantas web site — was listed with Wi-Fi companies.

Photograph: Social media like Twitter was blocked. (ABC Information)

As somebody born in China earlier than the start of web censorship within the mid ’90s, and having grow to be accustomed to limitless web entry in Australia over the previous decade, I felt uneasy about having to face 10 hours with out web — or extra particularly, restricted web.

With a whole lot of time on my fingers to assume, the censored web companies over Australia received me considering: why was my in-flight web censored in Australian airspace, and which nation’s legal guidelines are in impact once you’re inside an plane?

‘Plane a part of Chinese language territory’

Photograph: The house inside China Japanese aircrafts is seen as an extension of Chinese language territory. (Flickr: G B_NZ)

The questions sound easy sufficient, however they really traverse advanced problems with aviation and telecommunications legislation, in addition to particular person airline insurance policies — a number of pretty dense matters.

Fortunately there are some easy methods to clarify why Chinese language censorship legal guidelines might be enforced on a aircraft flying over Australian territory.

Photograph: Qantas and China Japanese signed a five-year settlement at Parliament Home in late 2014. (Provided: Qantas)

Based on Jae Woon Lee, an aviation legislation knowledgeable from the Chinese language College of Hong Kong (CUHK), the within of the aircraft I used to be travelling on is actually thought-about to be “Chinese language territory”.

He stated as a result of China and Australia have each ratified the Tokyo Conference — the worldwide treaty laying out which nation’s legal guidelines apply aboard an plane — Chinese language legal guidelines and rules had been in impact on my flight.

“The Chinese language registered plane is form of a part of the Chinese language territory, conceptually the concept is true,” Dr Lee stated.

Joseph Wheeler, the principal of the Worldwide Aerospace Regulation and Coverage Group, stated each plane has its personal “nationality” below worldwide legislation.

This implies in the event you’re flying on a Chinese language aircraft, the flight is below the authority of their nationwide regulator, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

He stated web regulation aboard the aircraft — whether or not it’s accessible and what’s accessible — was decided by a mixture of Chinese language legal guidelines and insurance policies, in addition to the airline’s personal situations.

However I purchased my tickets from Qantas?

Photograph: From left to proper: China Japanese chairman Liu Shaoyong, Chinese language President Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Qantas chief govt Alan Joyce. (Qantas, provided)

Qantas and China Japanese signed a five-year partnership settlement at Parliament Home in late 2014, in a ceremony attended by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and Chinese language President Xi Jinping.

How do codeshare flights work?

There’s one working provider (on this case, China Japanese) and a number of advertising carriers that promote the tickets

Advertising carriers like Qantas assign the airline code to the flight

It allows airways to coordinate schedules, present extra locations and reduce fares

This settlement led to a codeshare association between the 2.

After I booked my flight by means of the Qantas web site, inflight Wi-Fi was marketed on the itemizing.

The web page made it clear that the flight can be operated by China Japanese Airways, nonetheless there was no particular point out of the Wi-Fi companies being topic to the Nice Firewall of China.

When requested whether or not prospects are made conscious that the marketed Wi-Fi can be censored, Qantas stated:

“Whereas a buyer could guide by means of Qantas.com, it’s made clear that the flight is operated by China Japanese … and as such their onboard expertise is certain by the situation of carriage of China Japanese.”

When requested whether or not prospects on Qantas.com are advised particularly what these “situations of carriage” are, the corporate stated prospects are made conscious that “product options could fluctuate between plane”.

It stated its a matter for the working provider to find out what companies can be found on board.

China Japanese didn’t reply to my questions, whereas a spokesperson for the Australian Competitors and Client Fee — the authority who granted the Qantas and China Japanese joint operation — stated they may not touch upon the difficulty.

China’s Nice Firewall is getting taller

Photograph: The Nice Fireplace Wall first got here into impact within the mid 1990s. (AP: Eranga Jayawardena)

China has at all times saved a decent grip on what can and can’t be accessed on its web, and started regulating it virtually as quickly because it arrived within the nation in 1994.

Probably the most notable of those is the system of know-how most well-known because the Nice Firewall of China, which slows down, analyses and blocks on-line content material from abroad.

Similar to my in-flight expertise, Chinese language netizens can not entry widespread Western social media websites and apps, or international information retailers just like the New York Instances.

Jyh-An Lee, an knowledgeable on Chinese language web censorship from the CUHK, stated the Nice Firewall was basically a digital border.

“Most individuals would consider that there isn’t a border to the web,” Professor Lee stated.

“[But] if you’re flying with the state-owned flight firm, and if you’re utilizing the free Wi-Fi, you might be truly subjecting your self to the extension of the digital border which comes from the Nice Firewall.”

The Chinese language Authorities launched and promoted the idea of cyber sovereignty at its World Web Convention in 2014, earlier than tightening its cyber regulation and cracking down on instruments that permit customers to get across the Nice Firewall final 12 months.

Cyber sovereignty is the concept that states ought to have the ability to handle and include their very own web with out exterior interference.

Chinese language companies anticipated to ‘self-censor’

Photograph: China’s Nice Firewall is ready to form customers’ behaviour within the nation and is getting stronger.

Whereas there isn’t a easy rationalization as to why China is ready to censor Wi-Fi companies in Australian airspace, Professor Lee stated he wasn’t shocked Chinese language firm — particularly a state-owned enterprise like China Japanese — would implement self-censorship.

He stated there was an expectation from Beijing that corporations would self-censor delicate info and web sites even when it wasn’t enforced.

Professor Lee added that China’s Nice Firewall was capable of form customers’ behaviour within the nation and was getting stronger.

Whether or not that is the case or it is government-enforced censorship, specialists say there stays many gray areas on the topic that must be ironed out.

Subjects:

censorship,

internet-technology,

travel-and-tourism,

world-politics,

australia,

china,

asia

Supply hyperlink

The post The complexities of cyber sovereignty in Chinese language airways over Australian skies appeared first on HS NEWS.

#Breaking News

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flauntpage · 6 years

Text

DGB Grab Bag: More Goalie Interference, Absurdist Hart Trophy Debates, and Dress Shirts

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: Tuukka Rask – I'm not 100 percent sure why this GIF makes me laugh, but here we are.

Congratulations to Rask on the first moment in his NHL career when he wasn't the most out-of-control person on the ice.

The second star: Mark Scheifele – The NHL waded back into the "how to button a shirt debate" this week, and the results were reasonably fun. But the real punchline comes at the end, when we find out the Scheifele is a freaking psychopath.

Between this and Patrik Laine's beard I'm genuinely concerned that eight months without sunlight is making all the Jets players insane.

The first star: Predators fans – If we have to deal with lengthy, annoying, ineffective video replay reviews, at least we should have some fun with them.

Of course, if the review doesn't end the way you'd like, you'll have to find a different way to express yourself.

Debating the Issues

This week’s debate: As the season comes down to its final weekend, the race for the Hart Trophy still seems too close to call. Connor McDavid may be the league's best player, but with his team well out of the playoff hunt, should the MVP honors go to someone like Taylor Hall or Nathan MacKinnon instead?

In favor: Yes, absolutely. There's a reason the Hart Trophy description mentions the player who is "most valuable to his team," and not just the "best player." There's clearly an implied suggestion to factor team results into the voting. McDavid's great, but his team is terrible.

Opposed: That's one way to read the award's wording, sure. But it doesn't really fit with the history. The Hart Trophy has almost always gone to the player who had the best season. And with all due respect to Hall and MacKinnon, this year that's McDavid.

In favor: Well, hold on. A player hasn't won the Hart Trophy on a team that missed the playoffs since Mario Lemieux in 1988, and his team only missed by one point.

Opposed: Sure, but that was back when 16 teams out of 21 made it in. In an era in which half the league doesn't make it, ruling out any player who just misses seems silly.

In favor: But this year's Oilers aren't going to just miss. They're terrible. What value could McDavid have a really represented?

Opposed: The value of being the league's best and most productive player!

In favor: Right, but it's not like he lapped the field. He wasn't that far ahead of Hall or MacKinnon.

Flyers fan: Or Claude Giroux.

In favor: Right, or… wait, who are you?

Flyers fan: I'm the guy who shows up in all these debates to mention Claude Giroux.

Opposed: You think Claude Giroux should win this year's Hart Trophy?

Flyers fan: Not necessarily win it, no. But he definitely deserves to be in the conversation.

In favor: OK, fair enough. But right now we're talking about who should win, so maybe you could…

Kings fan: Anze Kopitar deserves some love too.

In favor: Guys, please, we're trying to keep this manageable so if you could…

Penguins fan: Also Evgeni Malkin.

Lightning fan: Nikita Kucherov has to be in there somewhere too.

Opposed: Yeah, sure, those guys are all very good, but none of them are going to win. So maybe we can just focus on…

Jets fan: Blake Wheeler deserves some votes too, you guys.

In favor: You think Blake Wheeler was the league's most valuable player?

Jets fan: No, of course not.

In favor: OK, good, because that would be completely…

Jets fan: He just needs to be somewhere on your ballot.

Opposed: I'm not sure he does.

Bruins fan: So does Brad Marchand.

In favor: Look, I hate to break it to you but…

Panthers fan: Hello, I'm here to talk to you about Aleksander Barkov.

Opposed: On what possible planet is Aleksander Barkov going to win the Hart Trophy?

Panthers fan: I'm not saying he should win, but you could have him in your top five.

In favor: Look, everyone shut up. This is getting ridiculous. This year's Hart Trophy winner is going to be Connor McDavid, Taylor Hall or Nathan MacKinnon. And I don't know if you've noticed, but the hockey world is basically this close to all-out civil war over just those three guys. We get that you like your favorite player and want to see him recognized, but this is not the time. We are all a little on edge right now, and we'd just like to get through the last few days without having to hear your sales pitch for every fringe candidate in the league that even you don't think should actually win.

Opposed: You OK man?

In favor: Yeah, I'm good. This has all been kind of stressful and I had to get that off my chest. I'm fine now.

Blue Jackets fan: Hey, sorry I'm late, but I would like to talk about why Sergei Bobrovsky deserves your fifth-place vote…

In favor: I WILL STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH MY VOTING PENCIL.

The final verdict: Seriously, if you all keep nagging us to try to get your guy to finish seventh instead of eighth we're all just going to vote for Auston Matthews out of spite.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

The Devils are headed back to the playoffs for the first time in six years, clinching a spot thanks to last night's win in Toronto. That's a surprise given where they finished last year. But it's not as big a shock to see the Devils in the postseason as it was 30 years ago, when the 1987-88 Devils made a frantic late run to qualify for the first time in franchise history.

That was a fun team that's shown up periodically in this column, including Doug Brown's soap opera romance. The roster also featured a rookie Brendan Shanahan, current Golden Knights' GM George McPhee, and 13 games of Sean Burke that were enough to earn him a Hart Trophy vote. So today, let's bestow obscure player honors on another member of the 1987-88 Devils squad: Jim Korn.

Korn was a tough-nosed defenseman who was picked in the fifth round of the 1977 draft by the Red Wings, one pick after future Olympic hero Jim Craig went to Atlanta. He debuted in Detroit in 1979 and was traded to Toronto in 1982 for two draft picks. That ended up being one of the toughest trades of all time, as the two picks ended up being used on Craig Coxe and Joey Kocur.

Korn spent three full years in Toronto, highlighted by a controversial incident in 1984 when he hammered former Leafs star Darryl Sittler, breaking his cheekbone. Korn missed the entire 1985-86 season to injury, was traded to the Sabres, and was dealt to New Jersey in time for that magical 1987-88 season, spending most of his Devils career as a winger (and often rooming with Shanahan) before finishing his career with nine games in Calgary. In all, he played 597 NHL games, scoring 66 goals and racking up 1,801 PIM.

Here he is as a Devil in 1990, living out every player's dream: Getting his hands on a lippy Maple Leafs fan.

The NHL Actually Got Something Right

There was yet another goaltending interference controversy this week, this one involving the Predators and Panthers (and by extension, the Devils and Flyers). People were mad. And not just regular people the league can ignore, but famous ones too.

Should they have been? Maybe, although it was nowhere as clear cut as many are pretending. We covered this on this week's podcast; I think there was fairly obvious interference on the play, although you could make a case that it didn't rise to the level of overturning the call on the ice. In the bigger picture, there's no way to stop this from happening, no matter how much we all wail about consistency. Interference should never have been subject to review, and the only way to fix it now is to get rid of it entirely.

None of this is new, and the whole topic has been beaten into the ground over the last few months. But this week, something subtle did change, and it's worth a quick mention.

Did you catch it? The NHL didn't just cut-and-paste their standard non-explanation about how the play was reviewed and the officials determined that interference occurred. Instead, they gave us a little bit of detail.

It was only a little, and nowhere near enough—we need video explanations of these calls, just like we get for suspensions. But even a few extra words helped steer the conversation, and at least let us know what it was that the league war room saw. And just in case you thought that might be a one-off, it turns out the league has been doing it all week.

Again, fans deserve more than this, and there's still no excuse for not having the referees on the ice briefly walk through the reasoning on game-altering calls. But fair's fair. We've been asking for more detailed explanation on replay review for over a year; now we're seeing some baby steps in that direction. That’s worth something.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

Henrik and Daniel Sedin announced their retirements this week. They said an emotional farewell to Vancouver last night, and will play their final game tomorrow night in Edmonton. That will spell the end of two remarkable careers—identical twin brothers who were drafted together and played virtually their entire careers side-by-side, with each winning a scoring title.

So today, as we prepare for the end, let's look back at the beginning, with a trip back to the 1999 entry draft.

It's June 26, 1999, and the draft is coming to you from Boston. Our host, appropriately enough, is Jim Hughson, who's about to join the Canucks broadcast team and will go on to become the voice of Hockey Night in Canada in a few years. He's going to mention these Sedin kids once or twice more over the course of his career, I'm guessing.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. As our clip begins, there's still at least a little mystery hanging over the proceedings. Brian Burke and the Canucks have been hard at work trying to put together a series of trades to get both twins, but nothing is official yet. Well, it probably is, but we don't know that because this is before Twitter ruined our ability to ever be surprised by anything.

Burke has taken plenty of heat over the years, much of it deserved, but man that guy could work a trade. I'm honestly not sure there's been a better GM at pulling off deals since Sam Pollock. Check out the beginning of this clip, where we see some brief footage of Burke swinging the deals on the draft floor. He's just standing there with multiple other NHL GMs and telling them what they're going to do and who they're going to pick. It's half negotiation, half hostage situation, and I love every second of it. Someone please make Burke a GM again somewhere.

Gary Bettman takes the stage to only light booing because Boston isn't a real hockey town. He drops a "We have three trades to announce" on the crowd, which gets their attention, and then lays out all the deals. He stumbles through the details, but recovers nicely and concludes with a "What that all means" summary. Bottom line: Atlanta moves up to No. 1, the Canucks get the next two picks, and Tampa picks fourth.

And with that, the Thrashers take the stage to announce the first overall pick. What could go wrong?

Oh right, they take Patrik Stefan. We don't actually get to see the pick in this clip, presumably because it would violate YouTube's guidelines for obscene content. But it's fair to say Stefan was quite possibly the biggest bust of any first overall pick ever. Some of that was injury-related, but when you go first overall and the only thing anyone remembers about you is this, that's not good.

A reminder: that Stefan blooper ended up costing the Oilers Patrick Kane. That franchise might literally be cursed.

How great would it have been if the Thrashers had double-crossed Burke right here and used the first overall pick on a Sedin? What would have happened? I mean, we can all agree that Burke would have immediately rushed the stage and fought everyone in the Atlanta front office until the national guard arrived to pull him off the bodies, but what about after that? This has to be a top-ten "what if?" moment in modern NHL history and I feel like we don't talk about it enough.

We skip ahead to the Canucks picks. I love the "Team Needs" screen, which informs us that Vancouver needs offense, defense and goaltending. Other than that, they're all set.

Burke heads to the stage and picks both twins at the same time. He doesn't even pause, he just takes them as one unit. But he says Daniel's name first, which is why he went into the history books as the second overall pick and Henrik was third. You know Burke toyed with just saying "The Sedin twins" just to annoy the pedants.

This is the only known instance of anyone in Boston applauding the Sedins for anything that didn't end with them looking around for a referee while a Bruin repeatedly uppercut them in the throat.

You get a bit of a sense of it as the commentators discuss the picks, but back then there really was a sense that only Daniel was going to be a star, while Henrik was a tier below. I'd offer that as a reminder that draft experts don't know anything, but we just saw Patrik Stefan go first overall so I'm guessing the point has been made.

We get a few words from the Sedins and a few more from Burke, who does his patented "credit the GM I just blatantly ripped off for driving a hard bargain" routine. Brian Burke was the best. Are we sure he can't be the GM of the new Seattle team?

With that, we skip ahead to all the other good picks in the first round, which is to say our clip ends. Good lord that was a terrible draft. Seriously, the only decent non-Sedin in the entire first round was Martin Havlat. The fourth overall pick was another huge bust, Pavel Brendl. The sixth overall pick was a goalie who never won a game. By the 15th overall pick we'd reached the guys who never made the NHL at all. Three of the draft's top five players in terms of NHL games played were picked in the seventh round. What a mess.

And that's it. Roughly 19 years and 2,600 regular seasons games later, the Sedins will wrap things up tomorrow. They'll go into the history books ranked fifth and sixth among players who spent their entire career in one city, trailing only Nicklas Lidstrom, Alex Delvecchio, Steve Yzerman and Stan Mikita. Three years from now, they'll join those four guys in the Hall of Fame.

Patrik Stefan will probably not.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .

DGB Grab Bag: More Goalie Interference, Absurdist Hart Trophy Debates, and Dress Shirts published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 6 years

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DGB Grab Bag: More Goalie Interference, Absurdist Hart Trophy Debates, and Dress Shirts

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: Tuukka Rask – I’m not 100 percent sure why this GIF makes me laugh, but here we are.

Congratulations to Rask on the first moment in his NHL career when he wasn’t the most out-of-control person on the ice.

The second star: Mark Scheifele – The NHL waded back into the “how to button a shirt debate” this week, and the results were reasonably fun. But the real punchline comes at the end, when we find out the Scheifele is a freaking psychopath.

Between this and Patrik Laine’s beard I’m genuinely concerned that eight months without sunlight is making all the Jets players insane.

The first star: Predators fans – If we have to deal with lengthy, annoying, ineffective video replay reviews, at least we should have some fun with them.

Of course, if the review doesn’t end the way you’d like, you’ll have to find a different way to express yourself.

Debating the Issues

This week’s debate: As the season comes down to its final weekend, the race for the Hart Trophy still seems too close to call. Connor McDavid may be the league’s best player, but with his team well out of the playoff hunt, should the MVP honors go to someone like Taylor Hall or Nathan MacKinnon instead?

In favor: Yes, absolutely. There’s a reason the Hart Trophy description mentions the player who is “most valuable to his team,” and not just the “best player.” There’s clearly an implied suggestion to factor team results into the voting. McDavid’s great, but his team is terrible.

Opposed: That’s one way to read the award’s wording, sure. But it doesn’t really fit with the history. The Hart Trophy has almost always gone to the player who had the best season. And with all due respect to Hall and MacKinnon, this year that’s McDavid.

In favor: Well, hold on. A player hasn’t won the Hart Trophy on a team that missed the playoffs since Mario Lemieux in 1988, and his team only missed by one point.

Opposed: Sure, but that was back when 16 teams out of 21 made it in. In an era in which half the league doesn’t make it, ruling out any player who just misses seems silly.

In favor: But this year’s Oilers aren’t going to just miss. They’re terrible. What value could McDavid have a really represented?

Opposed: The value of being the league’s best and most productive player!

In favor: Right, but it’s not like he lapped the field. He wasn’t that far ahead of Hall or MacKinnon.

Flyers fan: Or Claude Giroux.

In favor: Right, or… wait, who are you?

Flyers fan: I’m the guy who shows up in all these debates to mention Claude Giroux.

Opposed: You think Claude Giroux should win this year’s Hart Trophy?

Flyers fan: Not necessarily win it, no. But he definitely deserves to be in the conversation.

In favor: OK, fair enough. But right now we’re talking about who should win, so maybe you could…

Kings fan: Anze Kopitar deserves some love too.

In favor: Guys, please, we’re trying to keep this manageable so if you could…

Penguins fan: Also Evgeni Malkin.

Lightning fan: Nikita Kucherov has to be in there somewhere too.

Opposed: Yeah, sure, those guys are all very good, but none of them are going to win. So maybe we can just focus on…

Jets fan: Blake Wheeler deserves some votes too, you guys.

In favor: You think Blake Wheeler was the league’s most valuable player?

Jets fan: No, of course not.

In favor: OK, good, because that would be completely…

Jets fan: He just needs to be somewhere on your ballot.

Opposed: I’m not sure he does.

Bruins fan: So does Brad Marchand.

In favor: Look, I hate to break it to you but…

Panthers fan: Hello, I’m here to talk to you about Aleksander Barkov.

Opposed: On what possible planet is Aleksander Barkov going to win the Hart Trophy?

Panthers fan: I’m not saying he should win, but you could have him in your top five.

In favor: Look, everyone shut up. This is getting ridiculous. This year’s Hart Trophy winner is going to be Connor McDavid, Taylor Hall or Nathan MacKinnon. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the hockey world is basically this close to all-out civil war over just those three guys. We get that you like your favorite player and want to see him recognized, but this is not the time. We are all a little on edge right now, and we’d just like to get through the last few days without having to hear your sales pitch for every fringe candidate in the league that even you don’t think should actually win.

Opposed: You OK man?

In favor: Yeah, I’m good. This has all been kind of stressful and I had to get that off my chest. I’m fine now.

Blue Jackets fan: Hey, sorry I’m late, but I would like to talk about why Sergei Bobrovsky deserves your fifth-place vote…

In favor: I WILL STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH MY VOTING PENCIL.

The final verdict: Seriously, if you all keep nagging us to try to get your guy to finish seventh instead of eighth we’re all just going to vote for Auston Matthews out of spite.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

The Devils are headed back to the playoffs for the first time in six years, clinching a spot thanks to last night’s win in Toronto. That’s a surprise given where they finished last year. But it’s not as big a shock to see the Devils in the postseason as it was 30 years ago, when the 1987-88 Devils made a frantic late run to qualify for the first time in franchise history.

That was a fun team that’s shown up periodically in this column, including Doug Brown’s soap opera romance. The roster also featured a rookie Brendan Shanahan, current Golden Knights’ GM George McPhee, and 13 games of Sean Burke that were enough to earn him a Hart Trophy vote. So today, let’s bestow obscure player honors on another member of the 1987-88 Devils squad: Jim Korn.

Here he is as a Devil in 1990, living out every player’s dream: Getting his hands on a lippy Maple Leafs fan.

The NHL Actually Got Something Right

Should they have been? Maybe, although it was nowhere as clear cut as many are pretending. We covered this on this week’s podcast; I think there was fairly obvious interference on the play, although you could make a case that it didn’t rise to the level of overturning the call on the ice. In the bigger picture, there’s no way to stop this from happening, no matter how much we all wail about consistency. Interference should never have been subject to review, and the only way to fix it now is to get rid of it entirely.

None of this is new, and the whole topic has been beaten into the ground over the last few months. But this week, something subtle did change, and it’s worth a quick mention.

Did you catch it? The NHL didn’t just cut-and-paste their standard non-explanation about how the play was reviewed and the officials determined that interference occurred. Instead, they gave us a little bit of detail.

Again, fans deserve more than this, and there’s still no excuse for not having the referees on the ice briefly walk through the reasoning on game-altering calls. But fair’s fair. We’ve been asking for more detailed explanation on replay review for over a year; now we’re seeing some baby steps in that direction. That’s worth something.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

So today, as we prepare for the end, let’s look back at the beginning, with a trip back to the 1999 entry draft.

It’s June 26, 1999, and the draft is coming to you from Boston. Our host, appropriately enough, is Jim Hughson, who’s about to join the Canucks broadcast team and will go on to become the voice of Hockey Night in Canada in a few years. He’s going to mention these Sedin kids once or twice more over the course of his career, I’m guessing.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. As our clip begins, there’s still at least a little mystery hanging over the proceedings. Brian Burke and the Canucks have been hard at work trying to put together a series of trades to get both twins, but nothing is official yet. Well, it probably is, but we don’t know that because this is before Twitter ruined our ability to ever be surprised by anything.

Burke has taken plenty of heat over the years, much of it deserved, but man that guy could work a trade. I’m honestly not sure there’s been a better GM at pulling off deals since Sam Pollock. Check out the beginning of this clip, where we see some brief footage of Burke swinging the deals on the draft floor. He’s just standing there with multiple other NHL GMs and telling them what they’re going to do and who they’re going to pick. It’s half negotiation, half hostage situation, and I love every second of it. Someone please make Burke a GM again somewhere.

Gary Bettman takes the stage to only light booing because Boston isn’t a real hockey town. He drops a “We have three trades to announce” on the crowd, which gets their attention, and then lays out all the deals. He stumbles through the details, but recovers nicely and concludes with a “What that all means” summary. Bottom line: Atlanta moves up to No. 1, the Canucks get the next two picks, and Tampa picks fourth.

And with that, the Thrashers take the stage to announce the first overall pick. What could go wrong?

Oh right, they take Patrik Stefan. We don’t actually get to see the pick in this clip, presumably because it would violate YouTube’s guidelines for obscene content. But it’s fair to say Stefan was quite possibly the biggest bust of any first overall pick ever. Some of that was injury-related, but when you go first overall and the only thing anyone remembers about you is this, that’s not good.

A reminder: that Stefan blooper ended up costing the Oilers Patrick Kane. That franchise might literally be cursed.

How great would it have been if the Thrashers had double-crossed Burke right here and used the first overall pick on a Sedin? What would have happened? I mean, we can all agree that Burke would have immediately rushed the stage and fought everyone in the Atlanta front office until the national guard arrived to pull him off the bodies, but what about after that? This has to be a top-ten “what if?” moment in modern NHL history and I feel like we don’t talk about it enough.

We skip ahead to the Canucks picks. I love the “Team Needs” screen, which informs us that Vancouver needs offense, defense and goaltending. Other than that, they’re all set.

Burke heads to the stage and picks both twins at the same time. He doesn’t even pause, he just takes them as one unit. But he says Daniel’s name first, which is why he went into the history books as the second overall pick and Henrik was third. You know Burke toyed with just saying “The Sedin twins” just to annoy the pedants.

This is the only known instance of anyone in Boston applauding the Sedins for anything that didn’t end with them looking around for a referee while a Bruin repeatedly uppercut them in the throat.

You get a bit of a sense of it as the commentators discuss the picks, but back then there really was a sense that only Daniel was going to be a star, while Henrik was a tier below. I’d offer that as a reminder that draft experts don’t know anything, but we just saw Patrik Stefan go first overall so I’m guessing the point has been made.

We get a few words from the Sedins and a few more from Burke, who does his patented “credit the GM I just blatantly ripped off for driving a hard bargain” routine. Brian Burke was the best. Are we sure he can’t be the GM of the new Seattle team?

With that, we skip ahead to all the other good picks in the first round, which is to say our clip ends. Good lord that was a terrible draft. Seriously, the only decent non-Sedin in the entire first round was Martin Havlat. The fourth overall pick was another huge bust, Pavel Brendl. The sixth overall pick was a goalie who never won a game. By the 15th overall pick we’d reached the guys who never made the NHL at all. Three of the draft’s top five players in terms of NHL games played were picked in the seventh round. What a mess.

And that’s it. Roughly 19 years and 2,600 regular seasons games later, the Sedins will wrap things up tomorrow. They’ll go into the history books ranked fifth and sixth among players who spent their entire career in one city, trailing only Nicklas Lidstrom, Alex Delvecchio, Steve Yzerman and Stan Mikita. Three years from now, they’ll join those four guys in the Hall of Fame.

Patrik Stefan will probably not.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you’d like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .

DGB Grab Bag: More Goalie Interference, Absurdist Hart Trophy Debates, and Dress Shirts syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com

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