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jcmarchi · 6 months

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Forging climate connections across the Institute

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/forging-climate-connections-across-the-institute/

Forging climate connections across the Institute

Climate change is the ultimate cross-cutting issue: Not limited to any one discipline, it ranges across science, technology, policy, culture, human behavior, and well beyond. The response to it likewise requires an all-of-MIT effort.

Now, to strengthen such an effort, a new grant program spearheaded by the Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with the oversight and implementation of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, aims to build up MIT’s climate leadership capacity while also supporting innovative scholarship on diverse climate-related topics and forging new connections across the Institute.

Called the Fast Forward Faculty Fund (F^4 for short), the program has named its first cohort of six faculty members after issuing its inaugural call for proposals in April 2023. The cohort will come together throughout the year for climate leadership development programming and networking. The program provides financial support for graduate students who will work with the faculty members on the projects — the students will also participate in leadership-building activities — as well as $50,000 in flexible, discretionary funding to be used to support related activities.

“Climate change is a crisis that truly touches every single person on the planet,” says Noelle Selin, co-chair of the nucleus and interim director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “It’s therefore essential that we build capacity for every member of the MIT community to make sense of the problem and help address it. Through the Fast Forward Faculty Fund, our aim is to have a cohort of climate ambassadors who can embed climate everywhere at the Institute.”

F^4 supports both faculty who would like to begin doing climate-related work, as well as faculty members who are interested in deepening their work on climate. The program has the core goal of developing cohorts of F^4 faculty and graduate students who, in addition to conducting their own research, will become climate leaders at MIT, proactively looking for ways to forge new climate connections across schools, departments, and disciplines.

One of the projects, “Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies,” led by Professor Siqi Zheng of the MIT Center for Real Estate in collaboration with colleagues from the MIT Sloan School of Management, focuses on the roughly 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that come from the buildings and real estate sector. Zheng notes that this sector has been slow to respond to climate change, but says that is starting to change, thanks in part to the rising awareness of climate risks and new local regulations aimed at reducing emissions from buildings.

Using a data-driven approach, the project seeks to understand the efficient and equitable market incentives, technology solutions, and public policies that are most effective at transforming the real estate industry. Johnattan Ontiveros, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program, is working with Zheng on the project.

“We were thrilled at the incredible response we received from the MIT faculty to our call for proposals, which speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of interest in climate at MIT,” says Anne White, nucleus co-chair and vice provost and associate vice president for research. “This program makes good on key commitments of the Fast Forward plan, supporting cutting-edge new work by faculty and graduate students while helping to deepen the bench of climate leaders at MIT.”

During the 2023-24 academic year, the F^4 faculty and graduate student cohorts will come together to discuss their projects, explore opportunities for collaboration, participate in climate leadership development, and think proactively about how to deepen interdisciplinary connections among MIT community members interested in climate change.

The six inaugural F^4 awardees are:

Professor Tristan Brown, History Section: Humanistic Approaches to the Climate Crisis

With this project, Brown aims to create a new community of practice around narrative-centric approaches to environmental and climate issues. Part of a broader humanities initiative at MIT, it brings together a global working group of interdisciplinary scholars, including Serguei Saavedra (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Or Porath (Tel Aviv University; Religion), collectively focused on examining the historical and present links between sacred places and biodiversity for the purposes of helping governments and nongovernmental organizations formulate better sustainability goals. Boyd Ruamcharoen, a PhD student in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program, will work with Brown on this project.

Professor Kerri Cahoy, departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (AeroAstro): Onboard Autonomous AI-driven Satellite Sensor Fusion for Coastal Region Monitoring

The motivation for this project is the need for much better data collection from satellites, where technology can be “20 years behind,” says Cahoy. As part of this project, Cahoy will pursue research in the area of autonomous artificial intelligence-enabled rapid sensor fusion (which combines data from different sensors, such as radar and cameras) onboard satellites to improve understanding of the impacts of climate change, specifically sea-level rise and hurricanes and flooding in coastal regions. Graduate students Madeline Anderson, a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and Mary Dahl, a PhD student in AeroAstro, will work with Cahoy on this project.

Professor Priya Donti, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Robust Reinforcement Learning for High-Renewables Power Grids

With renewables like wind and solar making up a growing share of electricity generation on power grids, Donti’s project focuses on improving control methods for these distributed sources of electricity. The research will aim to create a realistic representation of the characteristics of power grid operations, and eventually inform scalable operational improvements in power systems. It will “give power systems operators faith that, OK, this conceptually is good, but it also actually works on this grid,” says Donti. PhD candidate Ana Rivera from EECS is the F^4 graduate student on the project.

Professor Jason Jackson, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP): Political Economy of the Climate Crisis: Institutions, Power and Global Governance

This project takes a political economy approach to the climate crisis, offering a distinct lens to examine, first, the political governance challenge of mobilizing climate action and designing new institutional mechanisms to address the global and intergenerational distributional aspects of climate change; second, the economic challenge of devising new institutional approaches to equitably finance climate action; and third, the cultural challenge — and opportunity — of empowering an adaptive socio-cultural ecology through traditional knowledge and local-level social networks to achieve environmental resilience. Graduate students Chen Chu and Mrinalini Penumaka, both PhD students in DUSP, are working with Jackson on the project.

Professor Haruko Wainwright, departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and Civil and Environmental Engineering: Low-cost Environmental Monitoring Network Technologies in Rural Communities for Addressing Climate Justice

This project will establish a community-based climate and environmental monitoring network in addition to a data visualization and analysis infrastructure in rural marginalized communities to better understand and address climate justice issues. The project team plans to work with rural communities in Alaska to install low-cost air and water quality, weather, and soil sensors. Graduate students Kay Whiteaker, an MS candidate in NSE, and Amandeep Singh, and MS candidate in System Design and Management at Sloan, are working with Wainwright on the project, as is David McGee, professor in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.

Professor Siqi Zheng, MIT Center for Real Estate and DUSP: Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies

See the text above for the details on this project.

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landcentury · 10 months

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wolfrealestate · 1 year

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rlow1 · 1 year

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Fun Facts and Inspiration for February 17

Fun Facts and Inspiration for February 17 Inspiration…“Listen up: There is no war to end all wars.” Haruki Murakami Did you know that…During the Cold War, US spies were caught by the KGB because the US spies used high-quality American staples in their fake Soviet passports. Russian staples were known to rust. Alaska is the northernmost, easternmost, and westernmost state in the US. This is…

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#Alaska #cold war #fun facts #Inspiration #real estate #REALTOR

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

#pluralistic #class war #inheritance tax #death tax #mmt #modern monetary theory #intergenerational war #intergenerational wealth transfers #social security #ss

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boygiwrites · 11 months

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Living the Vida Loca Ep.

• Jesse Pinkman & Reader. (Platonic)

(Here’s part one.) (Here’s part two.) (Here’s part three.) (Here’s part four.) (Here’s part five.)

• (Find this story on Ao3.)

Summary — A short story about how a young teenaged girl gets wrapped up in Jesse's life.

Notes — Phew. The epilogue. Please enjoy :)

Bear Creek, Alaska.

The first thing you do when Jesse gets the keys to your new apartment is throw your bags on the floor and run around, poking your heads into all the rooms, pulling open all the kitchen cabinets, and laying like a pair of starfish on the bland carpet of the bedrooms.

Holy shit, you laugh.

Holy shit, Jesse laughs.

You lay there for a long time, waiting for your new lives to feel real.

Saul Goodman really missed out on being a real estate agent.

He picked the perfect apartment.

It’s got heating, for when the cold becomes colder.

It’s got two bathrooms, with an elephant’s worth of space in each.

It’s got spacious wardrobes that will eventually be filled with band shirts and beanies and thick, woolly socks, and a fireplace that with time becomes a mantle for you to frame your little polaroid's on, turning fleeting flashes into permanent memories above the cozy flames.

It’s got everything.

The first week goes by fast.

You’re on a high and you won’t come down.

You and Jesse have become avid thrift shoppers in the wake of your old riches, determined to fill out your home with bits and bobs; knicks and knacks. On every second corner of this mountainous town, there’s a second-hand store bursting with charm. Oh, and someone’s grandpa’s collection of Christmas sweaters.

(Yes, Jesse buys one.)

You also buy a toaster, some sofa cushions, and a big, green blanket that will be perfect for your movie nights. You hit three more on your way back.

You also go bananas in the local supermarket.

You sit in the cart and swipe almost every cookie and frozen lasagna you can off the shelves, while Jesse hops on and scoots you both around.

Your fridge looks like an overstuffed suitcase.

You use the town library to print off a couple resumes, and some hours later, you re-converge at the same parking lot you started out in, and you both run up to each other and shout —

I got the job!

When the population is as small is Bear Creek’s, anything is possible.

You become a cashier at the supermarket.

Jesse starts bussing tables at a small steak-and-chips restaurant.

(They let him spray-paint a mural onto the side of the building. It takes three whole days and two broken ladders, but it’s beautiful, and Jesse walks around now with compliments on his shoulders and a pep in his step.)

The first week goes by fast.

A blur of shopping, moving furniture, and movie nights.

Two kids in a candy store.

Then, after that —

It’s the slow and steady Bear Creek lifestyle.

The slow Bear Creek lifestyle.

Everybody knows everybody in Bear Creek.

The elderly clerk at the corner store knows the man who walks in with his dog, and the man with the dog knows the lady from the bookshop down the street, and the lady from the bookshop knows you, and you know the guy who busks outside the library, and the busker-guy knows Jesse, and it just keeps going in circles, circles, circles, until it’s all a big web.

Some years ago, you might have perceived this as danger.

You might have perceived this community as a reactive entanglement of whispers, and stares, and one rogue phone call to the wrong people.

But one thing Bear Creek teaches you is how to let go.

How to let go of glancing over your shoulder.

How to let go of peeking out the windows at night.

How to let go of these things that have shaped you into something sharper than what you really are. The person you used to be.

The same goes for Jesse.

For a month, he tucks a gun in his pants-line.

He smokes cigarettes while he scrutinizes your new IDs.

Isaac and Riley Miller.

He has three different phones, and refuses to text anybody except you.

You can hear him, in the night, checking on you from your doorway, like you might’ve disappeared in the ten minutes he’s been in the other room.

It’s difficult, because old dogs can’t learn new tricks, but Jesse gets better.

He’s safe enough, now, to revert back to that teenage boy he’s always been at heart, even if he is twenty-nine years old.

You build lop-sided snowmen together in the apartment complex’s parking lot, and pelt each other with snowballs. It’s a parallel image to your nights back in New Mexico, throwing frisbees in the driveway, except with two completely different people who look like you and Jesse, but have been through and seen so much more.

You go for walks and shit, like normal, healthy people.

The DVD store becomes a second home for you.

You drink hot chocolate out on the balcony and argue over who got more marshmallows while you people-watch.

You take your sleds down to the edge of the forest, and you coast down the tall mounds of snow and hoot into the trees like happy children.

Some nights, you lay in bed and wonder about your old life. Are there ghosts of you, back home? Do people think of you?

Some days, it’s hard to keep looking forward.

There are just some things you will never be able to forget. Some things you will never be able to look at with the same eyes as everybody else.

Like how all meat looks like sheep guts.

And all flies come with a flash of dead eyes.

And how sometimes, when Jesse reaches to hold your hand, you’re back in that desert and you’re being grabbed, pinned, and shot.

The days are slow, and they give you time.

Sure, the apartment is nice and all, but Jesse’s always been your home.

He’s always there to pet and shush away the nightmares.

He’s there when you need him, and he’s not when you need space.

He’s a familiar face.

He’s family.

He’s your twin, trapped in the same echo of an old nightmare you survived together. He’s someone who knows what you’re thinking whenever you see a grate in the ground, or a bucket, or a paperclip. He understands.

The days in Bear Creek are slow.

You spend them painting, laughing, exploring, and living.

It’s sort of like buying new shoes.

Uncomfortable, at first, but then it learns to work around you —

And everything is easy-peasy from there on out.

A visit from Uncle Goodman.

Jimmy has a thick moustache, and he can’t handle the cold.

These are the first things you notice when he shows up at your door, with that strip of carpet above his lip and the three coats he’s shivering in.

You’re in shock. Jimmy?

He is not. Are you gonna let me in, you little punk, or what?

He says he is freezing his nuts off.

Jimmy McGill is in your living room. He’s shed all his layers, toed off his boots, and apparently, he’s jet-lagged, so he helps himself to your coffee machine like he’s lived here all his life. You stare at him while he sips it.

There’s an awkward silence.

I thought I’d never see you again, you mutter, at this version of an old memory you forced yourself to forget, currently standing in your kitchen.

Jimmy sets the mug down.

He looks like he tries to say something, but then he just opens his arms.

You hug him for the first time in four years.

You’re an adult, now.

He must sense this change in you, not just physically but mentally, because when he pulls back, he doesn’t want to let go, and he’s just looking at you and crying, which looks wrong on a guy like Jimmy.

Why’d you have to go and get all grown up on me, huh?

Then he demands that you tell him everything.

You demand he tell you everything, because, How’d you even find us?

He says he knows a man who knows everything about everyone; someone who can make fake IDs and people disappear. He says it’s how you’re living out here, and you’re reminded of the night you were herded into the back of an electronics store and given a new name.

Jimmy helped you and Jesse out in the beginning, but only as a voice through a phone line, and then as an invisible force pulling strings.

Even when he’s 2,800 miles away, Jimmy’s been there for you.

You tell him about Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez.

You tell him about the phone call, and the sheep guts.

Then you try telling him about the desert, and the Welkers, but your voice gets caught in your throat like a fish hook, and he suggests going for a walk instead.

You trail the sidewalks until you bump into Jesse.

He’s on his way home from work, and when he sees you, he almost faints.

Yo, yo, yo, hang on a second, His mouth hangs open.

You giggle while they take each other in.

They even do a bro-hug, because Jesse does things like that, now.

He tells Jimmy that the apartment kicks ass, man, and that he can’t believe he flew all the way up here just to see you guys.

Hey, man, Jimmy holds up his hands, I just came here for the waterfalls and the moose. You people were second-to-last on my itinerary.

You both tell Jimmy to shove it, and then you walk together to the park.

Just like old times, right? Jimmy asks you.

These are nothing like old times, but you got your two favorite people in the world back together again — your weird little family — so that has to count for something.

Whatever you say, You chuckle.

You see a fire-colored fox sniffing along the frozen lake while you talk about everything that’s changed; everything that’s happened. The people you’ve become. You cry again when Jimmy says he’s proud of you, and Jesse gives you a hard noogie for being such a sap.

Apparently, Jimmy’s staying in Bear Creek for a while.

Today’s a good day.

The final piece.

You graduate college in May.

It’s been a long struggle, but you made it.

Jimmy’s there.

Jesse’s there.

Your friends are all there, too, in matching gowns and caps.

You hear your name, Riley Miller, being called, and you step up to the podium with the overwhelming sense of metamorphosizing from one cold husk of a life into a newer, brighter one. One where you have a new name and a new home, but the same old family cheering for you in the crowd.

You can’t believe how much everything has changed.

For one, Jesse shaved all his hair off, ‘cause he’s an idiot.

At least one thing makes you laugh every day, now.

(It’s usually Jesse shouting bitch at your Xbox, or Jimmy complaining about the people he works with, down at the Cinnabon, because the only young person he can stand to be around is you.)

It’s been a year since you last had a nightmare.

You’re back to walking dogs again.

You’re back to singing in the kitchen.

You moved into the apartment next to Jesse’s, and he tells you every day how much he doesn’t miss finding your dirty dishes in the sink. But you know he hates that you’ve grown up so fast. He comes around for dinner almost every single night, swaddled in that big, green blanket you bought when you first landed in Alaska, and you’ve upgraded from watching Tinkerbell to old Disney movies. He cries every time at Lion King.

Jimmy lives ten minutes away, in a proper but small house.

You know there’s days where he yearns to live on that same pillar of glory he had back in New Mexico.

He plans on heading back to the states in the coming months.

He says he’ll miss the crisp air, and the caribou, and watching the snow roll over the caps of white mountains while he eats breakfast croissants with you in quiet cafes, but it’s just not in his nature to stay in one place for too long. You can’t trap a butterfly in a bird cage.

Besides, he’s basically the poster child for burner phones.

He’ll find a way to contact you.

That skatepark seems like a million years ago.

You throw your cap in the air.

Now when you spend nights at Jesse’s place, ‘cause the two of you are like teenage girls obsessed with sleepovers, and you warm yourself up by the fireplace, there’s one more photo sitting there, now.

Dead center. Ceramic frame.

The final piece of the puzzle.

It’s you, holding your degree and laughing while the sun blooms on your shoulder, with Jimmy and Jesse on either side of you, throwing up rock-star hands like they’re at the sickest concert they’ve ever been to.

You smile to yourself.

Because you love those fucking idiots.

And they love you, too.

End notes — Oh my God! The epilogue, it’s finished!! I hope you enjoyed reading, and I hope I was able to wrap this up in a satisfying way. Thank you for reading, everyone :)

#Breaking Bad #breakingbad #daddy issues #jesse pinkman #jesse pinkman x reader #fanfic #reader #saul goodman

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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After the closure of their flagship shopping location in Winnipeg in 2020, what’s going on with Canada’s beloved retail department store, the former fur trade monopoly leader, once a central force in the British Empire’s control of North America, the Hudson’s Bay Company? The empire lives on, continuing to control land through Canadian and US real estate companies. Liquidating real estate can keep the money and keep the land in the same hands.

Regarding the decline of the oldest European company in North America, and “new” manifestations of imperialist conceptions of land: I wanted to summarize the reporting work of Don Gillmor, in an article for The Walrus published in January 2023. (Credit to Gillmor for piecing together these threads of thought and framing the story, here.)

So the “oldest company in North America” is the Hudson’s Bay Company. After chartering in the 1670s, HBC “owned” vast stretches of land and was central to British and later Canadian control of “the West,” and then enjoyed decades of celebration in the twentieth century as a retail department store chain. HBC’s flagship store in Winnipeg was finally closed in November 2020. At the time, commercial real estate firms “valued the building at $0.” As Gillmor puts it: “Millions of Canadians grew up with the Hudson’s Bay Company as a place to buy towels and clothes, but land has always been at the heart of HBC. Canada’s oldest company began as a land deal (at least from the European perspective) during an outbreak of the bubonic plague and may end as a real estate deal in another plague.”

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In 2022, as part of what many observers and some Indigenous critics considered a superficial public relations campaign, HBC “gifted” the 500,000 square-foot downtown Winnipeg building to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, an “alliance of southern First Nations communities in Manitoba.” Critics haven’t all been impressed.

Here, Gillmor cites some local commentary: “[A]n episode of Media Indigena, a podcast broadcast from Winnipeg by journalist Rick Harp, [...] offered another perspective. A guest, Kenneth Williams, an assistant professor with the University of Alberta’s department of drama, suggested that, as reparations, it wasn’t enough. HBC exploited Indigenous people for centuries [...]. And the Winnipeg store was ground zero for this trade, with the largest fur storage facility in western Canada, a vault that could hold 12,000 furs. Williams suggested ‘the inspired act of reclamation’ was merely HBC getting rid of a toxic asset.”

Current HBC governor and chairman, Richard Baker, seems to be purposely liquidating HBC’s assets, to cash out, so to speak. In a 2020 interview, Baker said: “We’re not a department store chain. We’re a holding company that owns many billions of dollars of real estate.”

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Since inception, it been all about land.

So the “company’s roots can be traced back to 1665″ when Pierre-Espirit Radisson traveled to London to ask for the financial backing of King Charles II. This was the same year that up to one-fifth of London’s population had died during an outbreak of bubonic plague. By 1670, King Charles II “granted the charter that started the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the ownership of the land was largely an abstraction. He had no idea of its size and viewed it as a commodity. [...] The imbalance of power meant that the colonizer’s mercantile philosophies” including apparent human detachment from and lordship over land “became the foundation” for British imperial power in Canada.

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In 1867, “the Dominion of Canada was formed, but much of the west was still controlled by HBC.” In that same year, “the Americans bought Alaska from the Russians,” and so, to compete with the United States, both the British government and infamous Canadian prime minister Macdonald pressured HBC to sell much of western North America to the Canadian government at a discount price, giving Canada so-called “ownership” of a massive stretch of land "twice the size of Alaska.”

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And now, the chairman of HBC is cashing out. And the Empire’s found new ways to mask its activities while still keeping land in the same hands.

According to Gillmor: “In 2012, he took the company public and acquired the upscale department store Saks [...]. In March 2020, [...] Baker won his bid to take the company private once more [...]. In Canada, the last of the big homegrown department stores (Simpson’s, Eaton’s, Sears, and Zellers) were all gone. In the US, Macy’s was closing stores; Neiman Marcus, Barneys, JCPenney had all filed for bankruptcy [...]. Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and a former CEO of Sears Canada, saw it as a thinly veiled strategy to strip the assets of HBC so only the real estate remained [...]. ‘It’s a financial play,’ he said, ‘which gives him the ability to manipulate the real estate assets of Hudson’s Bay, both in Canada and the US.’ [...] ‘Baker will liquidate the Bay,’ Cohen predicted. ‘He will liquidate.’ If he does -- its Bay Days sales and Stanfield underwear finally gone -- all that will be left will be the land. Currently, it is controlled by deeds, leaseholds, and leases that are shared by Baker, venture capitalists, equity partners [...].”

Meaning that the future of the HBC stores and other properties across North America remains similar to the initial colonization project. Again from Gillmor: “[T]his version of the land echoes that of the seventeenth century: its ownership [...] complex [...] and profiting someone in another country.”

Land profited kings. Land now profits CEOs and venture capitalists and property management companies.

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All quotes above were excerpted from Gillmor’s article: Don Gillmor. “Why Hudson’s Bay Company’s Future Is in Question.” The Walrus. 4 January 2023. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Related.

In an article from October 2020, on the eve of the Winnipeg store’s closure, Manitoba-based reporter Niigaan Sinclair offered some commentary. Following quote from: Niigaan Sinclair. “Right place, right time: Downtown Bay building a monument to colonization’s brutality, but it could be transformed into a place of Indigenous positvity, reconciliation.” Winnipeg Free Press. 5 October 2020.

Three-and-a-half centuries after Hudson’s Bay Co. received its first charter -- giving Prince Rupert and his “Company of Adventurer’s of England” an exclusive trading monopoly over the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin -- it’s biggest symbol of colonization is coming to an end. [...] [T]he company plans to close its six-storey flagship store at Portage Avenue and Memorial Boulevard, literally Canada’s gateway to the West. So this is how colonization ends. The people who profit the most take all they can from the land and people within it, and then quietly leave when there’s nothing left to take. Soon, all that will be left is an empty [...] pile of plaster and metal that will cost millions to repair or remove for those who actually live here. Really, though, this is how colonization continues. HBC is not a retail empire -- never really was -- but a massive real estate company. Just as King Charles II gave Prince Rupert lands that were not his to give, HBC holds deeds to billions of dollars of global property [...] and will march on. [...] HBC’s legacy of exploitation, violence and theft is permanent, though. HBC began with profits from the slave trade and cheap goods from the British colonies. It was instrumental in manufacturing goods for the Commonwealth [...]. Alongside were billions built off Indigenous lands and resources.

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