Tag: Premium

Rachel Kolb, who reads lips, describes it as an “inherently tenuous mode of communication”:

Even the most skilled lipreaders in English, I have read, can discern an average of 30 percent of what is being said. I believe this figure to be true. There are people with whom I catch almost every word—people I know well, or who take care to speak at a reasonable rate, or whose faces are just easier on the eyes (for lack of a better phrase). But there are also people whom I cannot understand at all. On average, 30 percent is a reasonable number.

But 30 percent is also rather unreasonable. How does one have a meaningful conversation at 30 percent? It is like functioning at 30 percent of normal oxygen, or eating 30 percent of recommended calories—possible to subsist, but difficult to feel at your best and all but impossible to excel. Often I stick with contained discussion topics because they maximize the number of words I will understand. They make the conversation feel safe. “How are you?” “How’s school?” “Did you have a nice night?” Because I can anticipate that the other person will say “Fine, how are you?” or “Good,” I am at lower risk for communication failure.

Update from a reader:

There was a lot that I recognized in Kolb’s article.  I am deaf but lipread very well.  My husband and daughter are hearing and probably 95% of my interactions are with hearing people. My lipreading (which I call speechreading, which seems more accurate since I’m looking at much more than lips) is good enough that people frequently don’t realize that I’m deaf.

The main thing I wanted to comment on re: Kolb’s article is her seeming rejection of the Deaf community.  Why not be bi-cultural?

I have found that I need regular injections of effortless communication via sign language to be a truly effective speech reader.  Speechreading requires a level of relaxation and ease, and before I learned ASL and became part of the Deaf culture/ community, I would regularly have meltdowns where the sheer EFFORT got to me.  Where I became just too frustrated to sit back and let it all wash over me and make sense of it all.  Once I became fluent in ASL and started regularly socializing with other Deaf people, those meltdowns stopped.  Interacting with Deaf people became my recharging time, and I then was a much more effective speech reader overall.

Now I have my daily interactions (spoken, with occasional ASL) with my husband and daughter; my daughter’s (hearing) friends; my (hearing) friends and extended (hearing) community; and all of the regular everyday interactions we must have with grocery clerks and the like.  And then I also meet up with Deaf friends at regular intervals to just relax and communicate without a second thought.

I understand her fear that you must choose one community or the other, but that’s not the case.  With her background, she must know ASL.  There are plenty of interesting Deaf people out there, and she doesn’t need to limit herself to frustrating, effortful interactions.  By the same token, she doesn’t have to limit herself to the Deaf community.  You can be a part of both worlds.

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A reader writes:

I have a question for you and I hope you will consider your answer and its implications carefully. I have read quite a bit of testimony and argument on the same-sex marriage issue, and so often when the concept of bigamy or polygamy is equated with it, same-sex marriage proponents balk. The argument that challengers try to expose is that if people should be able to choose their spouse, why can’t free consenting adults choose a plural marriage?

Naturally, a far higher percentage of the American public opposes and would never practice polygamy than oppose or would never practice same-sex marriage, officially or unofficially. But same-sex marriage proponents never have a good answer for that challenge, instead relying on “it’s not the same issue”.

I’m not suggesting that same-sex marriage proponents do not have the better side of the argument already; they do. I’m not surprised that out of expediency proponents choose to deflect the inconvenient polygamy argument. Replacing “one man and one woman” with “one person and another person” as a definition of marriage or union is not really much of an improvement in perfecting our laws. It’s just as legitimate to attack the “one” portion of that rule as the “man” and “woman” portion. Any arbitrary definition restricting a routine contractual arrangement among consenting parties restricts everyone’s freedom. But note also that in most states polygamy is a CRIME by itself, not just an unrecognized contractual arrangement.

So consider this scenario: A gay man marries a woman because they want to have and raise a child in wedlock and because, apart from sexual reasons, they see marriage as a comfortable life arrangement. Then the gay man also wants to make a life commitment with another man and his wife is not opposed. Should that man have to divorce his wife of many years simply to be married to someone else? In other words, if all three parties consent to the union of the three of them, shouldn’t they have that right AND have that union receive equal protection under the law?

Note that under this scenario, if they did form that consensual union, they would have broken the law and be exposed to criminal sanctions. My overall point is that you can’t logically support same-sex marriage and oppose consensual polygamy.

Another offers an excellent counterpoint:

There is a solid reason for restricting marriage to two-partner relationships, and it’s not simply that it flies in the face of monogamy or that it might leave some men without wives.  The reason is based in civil law.  If a husband were to have more than one wife, how would it be determined which wife would receive the federal benefits associated with marriage?  Who gets the Social Security survivor benefits, for example?  How are pension benefits distributed?

Even if one were to say these benefits should be distributed equally among the wives, there are still aspects of marriage that cannot be effectively shared.  Say for example that the husband in our imaginary polygamous marriage has contracted a rare disease that has incapacitated him and for which there are two or more treatment options, with different associated risks and potential outcomes.  Who gets to decide which path to follow if two wives disagree?

Dr. Rob Lamberts recently left his old practice to experiment with an insurance-less, subscription-based practice of his own. After his first month, he is surprised by the response:

We are up to nearly 150 patients now, and aside from the cost to renovate my building, our revenue has already surpassed our spending.  The reason this is possible is that a cash-pay practice in which 100% of income is paid up front has an incredibly low overhead. …

[And] as the enthusiasm for my new type of practice grows in the community, it may spur a boom in cash-paying patients.  Why?  One of the provisions in the Accountable Care Act (ACA) is that small businesses (with over 50 employees) who want to avoid the penalty for not having insurance can opt to contract with a direct-care physician like myself in conjunction with a high-deductible health care plan.  Even though I have made no effort to attract such interest, I’ve already been approached by 2 businesses of 100 employees to make such an arrangement.

He’s also been contacted by specialists interested in partnering with him to take advantage of this model:

This seems quite ironic to me – a sort of “trickle-up economics,” where I am spreading the benefit of offering discounted care in exchange for cash to the higher-paid specialists.  It is a win-win-win arrangement, though, as the specialists benefit from reducing their overhead while getting guaranteed payment, I benefit by increasing the value of my type of practice even more to my patients, and the patient benefits by getting cheaper care.  This, of course, raises the likelihood that more businesses will opt for this payment model, and the movement gains momentum. Who loses?  The “increased overhead” comes in the form of the front-office staff doing billing, coding, and collections.  This is the staff my simple-minded approach to finances has heretofore avoided, and hopes to continue avoiding.

Commenting on Clinton’s reversal, Richard Socarides explains why the Democratic president signed DOMA in the first place:

Inside the White House, there was a genuine belief that if the President vetoed the Defense of Marriage Act, his reëlection could be in jeopardy. There was a heated debate about whether this was a realistic assessment, but it became clear that the President’s chief political advisers were not willing to take any chances. Some in the White House pointed out that DOMA, once enacted, would have no immediate practical effect on anyone—there were no state-sanctioned same-sex marriages then for the federal government to ignore. I remember a Presidential adviser saying that he was not about to risk a second term on a veto, however noble, that wouldn’t change a single thing nor make a single person’s life better.

What we didn’t fully comprehend was that, sooner than anyone imagined, there would be thousands of families who would be harmed by DOMA—denied federal benefits, recognition, and security, or kept apart by immigration laws.

They didn’t fully comprehend that the federal law would do … exactly what it said it would do. Blogger, please. That’s like Stephanopoulos taking me out to dinner at the time to persuade me that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was going to reduce the number of discharges of gay servicemembers – when it did the very opposite. And Socarides won’t mention Dick Morris, who was the real force behind this move and who once actually told me (probably disingenuously) that his one regret in the Clinton years was DOMA.

But Socarides’ point – once you get past his ludicrous excuse that they were shocked, shocked that gay people would be affected by the law – is honest enough. They wanted votes. They thought signing a pro-marriage law would help elect Bob Dole. They had the eager backing of the gay liberal establishment, like the Human Rights Campaign, who wanted a place at the DNC money table and if gay equality hurt that, then gay equality would have to wait.

But was Bob Dole really a threat so great it was worth becoming the most substantively anti-gay president in history?

DOMA was signed in September 1996. At no point in the entire campaign had Bob Dole even come close to beating Clinton in the polls. When DOMA was introduced by Bob Barr (now also an apostate on the question) in May 1996, Clinton led Dole in the polls by 14 points. When Clinton signed the bill, in mid-September, he was up by 12 points. Dole never broke 40 percent in the polling all year. The reason DOMA was signed was because Dick Morris saw it as a key to re-establishing Clinton as a good ol’ boy. Socarides’ job was to sell this to his fellow gays. You can read his memo on how to snow the rest of us here. Here was his pitch:

The president believes that raising this issue now is divisive and unnecessary and is calculated only to score political points at the expense of this community. The president believes it is an attempt to divert the American people from the urgent need to confront our challenges together… the President does not believe that the federal government should recognize gay marriage [and] he does not believe it is appropriate for scarce federal resources to be devoted to providing spousal benefits for partners in gay and lesbian relationships.

So it was also about saving money! Look: there was profound cynicism and opportunism in the GOP on this. They bear primary responsibility. But they didn’t sign the law – and no president has to. And he doesn’t have to run ads in the South bragging about it later (something the former president and perjurer understandably omits in his new op-ed). Clinton, instead, insisted to the Advocate:

I remain opposed to same-sex marriage. I believe marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or reconsidered.

He sister-souljahed us – but, unlike the hip-hop artist, we were not celebrating the murder of cops, but seeking core civil rights. Kornacki sets Clinton’s opportunism and Socarides’ lack of principle straight:

If Clinton’s goal was to get reelected and to get gay marriage off the table without a constitutional amendment entering the equation, he succeeded. At the same time, he reinforced the assumption that no politician with national aspirations was safe going anywhere near gay marriage. And the law he signed had destructive consequences for same-sex couples for years to come.

It’s been a nightmare for countless human beings. I welcome president Clinton’s change of heart, just as I welcomed Barack Obama’s and Bob Barr’s. But I am not going to white-wash his or Richard Socarides’ records. The core test of a defense of civil rights is when they are unpopular – not when they have reached widespread acceptance. On that measure, Clinton failed. And Socarides failed too.

Their failures had victims. And neither will still actually, you know, apologize.

(Photo: Bill Clinton laughs October 7, 1996 in Manchester, New Hampshire, not long after signing DOMA. By Dirck Halstead/Liaison/Getty. )

The economy added 236,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.7%. Derek Thompson calls this “the most optimistic jobs report of the recovery”:

We added more construction jobs in February than any month since the Recession. If the numbers hold up — big if, you might say, but I’m just going off today’s stats — it will be the single best month for construction jobs added since March of 2007 and the third best month since 2006! The housing market is sort of (fingers crossed) on a roll. When it comes to recoveries, not all industries are created equal. A retail recovery is nice to have, a food services recovery is nothing to sneeze at, but when housing comes back, a recovery starts to really look like a recovery.

Jared Bernstein thinks “it’s too soon for the sequester to be seen in these numbers”:

The question is not whether the sequester will hurt—it’s likely to reduce growth by about half-a-percent and kill a bunch of jobs too.  The question is “off of what base?”  If the economy can strengthen such that it’s growing 2.5-3% this year then 0.5% slower growth still means at least slowly declining unemployment.  But if underlying GDP growth is 1.5%-2%, the impact of the sequester could be such that we’ll longingly look back on reports like today’s.

What Neil Irwin is hearing:

Robert Dye, chief economist of Comerica bank noted that auto sales and home sales data are both pointing toward economic growth, suggesting the private sector is so far powering through despite tighter fiscal policy. “If we can keep the labor market momentum up for the next few critical months, as fiscal tightening continues, many other good things will happen,” Dye said in a research note. “Solid hiring is the antidote to fiscal tightening. We got a dose of the antidote in February. More is needed.”

Floyd Norris notes that the government still isn’t adding jobs:

For the 31st consecutive month, the number of government jobs in February was less than it had been a year earlier. There is an employment recovery, but it is confined to the private sector. The only comparable period in government data, which goes back to 1939, came after World War II, when the government was shrinking for a very good reason. The year-over-year string of declines ended in December 1947 at 30 months. So we have a new record here — a record being set largely because governments, particularly local ones, have been squeezed by a dearth of tax revenues.

Yglesias picks up on the same trend:

[I]n my opinion the story of the recovery continues to be the “rebalancing” of the American economy toward more people working in the private sector and fewer people working for the government. This months 236,000 new jobs turns out to have included 246,000 new private sector jobs and a loss of 10,000 public sector jobs. Most months the overall numbers have been worse than that, but the general pattern is the same. You hear about this some from liberals who wish the federal government were doing more to bolster state and local governments, but I wish we’d hear about it more from conservatives. This is, presumably, the outcome they want. Are we laying the foundation for supercharged growth in years to come through this rebalancing?

Ryan Avent wonders whether the good news will continue:

The biggest uncertainty concerns whether improvement will continue. The American economy has been here before, after all. Indeed, hiring early in 2012 was considerably stronger than it is now. Despite the relatively strong run of employment growth since November, year-on-year employment gains are well below the best performances of the recovery to date. For employment increases to continue, economic growth must pick up. In the past half year, GDP growth has been only mildly positive. And while the payroll tax increase seems not to have slowed consumers too much, there is time yet for the spending cuts in the sequester to do damage (and there are more budget battles ahead). When all is said and done, fiscal tightening in 2012 will prove substantial, making it hard for hiring to generate much momentum.

Felix Salmon throws some cold water:

All is not entirely sweetness and light, though, as Brad DeLong and many others have noted. The number of multiple jobholders rose by 340,000 this month, to 7.26 million — a rise larger than the headline rise in payrolls. Which means that one way of looking at this report is to say that all of the new jobs created were second or third jobs, going to people who were already employed elsewhere. Meanwhile, the number of people unemployed for six months or longer went up by 89,000 people this month, to 4.8 million, and the average duration of unemployment also rose, to 36.9 weeks from 35.3 weeks.

And Daniel Gross is more upbeat:

Compared with a year ago, there are 1.966 million more people with payroll jobs. They’re working about the same number of hours but at slightly higher wages, up 2.1 percent from February 2012. These gains aren’t nearly good enough to recover the losses suffered from the Great Recession, but they represent real progress.

(Chart from Calculated Risk.)

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg studied the brain activity of city dwellers to pinpoint the reasons for their heightened risk of emotional disorders like depression, anxiety and even schizophrenia:

Astonishingly, though, we discovered one particular region, the amygdala, whose activity under pressure exactly matched the subjects’ address: the more urban their home environment, the more engaged their amygdala became. This cherry-size structure, deep within the temporal lobe, serves as a danger sensor of sorts, prompting the “fight or flight” response. It also modulates emotions such as fear. In our study, the amygdala seemed almost impervious to stress among villagers and was only moderately active among those from small towns. For big city residents, stress kicked it into overdrive.

Meanwhile, there could be an app for this: Colin Lecher inspects the progress of two scientists looking to develop and market MoodTune to combat depression more broadly:

You’ll open the app and be directed to a simple game (there are “six or seven” games so far Konig says.) … A face appears onscreen. The user–or patient, depending on your thoughts about the app–looks at the face as words flash above it: “Happy.” “Happy.” “Sad.” “Happy.” The user gets slammed with some serious cognitive dissonance as they try to reconcile the faces and words. After the user is done, he gets a review of his score for the game, as well as his overall progress in treatment.

An exercise like that can cause certain parts of the brain to work overtime, Pizzagalli says. It’s enough, he says, to give certain parts of the brain a “tune-up” and enough, apparently, when done for 15 minutes every day, to counteract some of the symptoms of depression.

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Time’s cover-story features Sheryl Sandberg’s controversial new book, Lean In. An excerpt from the book:

[W]omen rarely make one big decision to leave the workforce. Instead, they make a lot of small decisions along the way. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A sales rep might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. Often without even realizing it, women stop reaching for new opportunities. By the time a baby actually arrives, a woman is likely to be in a drastically different place than she would have been had she not leaned back. Before, she was a top performer on par with her peers in responsibility, opportunity and pay. But by not finding ways to stretch herself in the years leading up to motherhood, she has fallen behind. When she returns to the workplace after her child is born, she is likely to feel less fulfilled, underutilized or unappreciated. At this point, she probably scales her ambitions back even further since she no longer believes that she can get to the top.

Caitlin Flanagan pans the book:

Sandberg claims she wants to end the Mommy Wars, and she provides plenty of boilerplate about how staying home with children is “demanding” and “important” work. But whenever she frets that her children might be better off if she spent more time with them, she reminds herself that the feeling is based on “pure emotion, not hard science.” She then goes on to provide research proving that children do no better when raised by their mothers than they do when raised by competent hired caregivers. In other words, staying home to raise one’s children really isn’t that “important” after all, or certainly not more important than making it to the top of corporate America.

Flanagan goes on to argue that, “if a young woman is interested in arranging her life so that she can spend a great deal of time with her children while they are young, Lean In has little to offer her.” Ann Friedman focuses on class issues:

Systemic solutions like more flexible family-leave policies and subsidized childcare would be game-changers for mommy warriors. But, ironically, when such policy solutions are on the table, the people on the front lines agitating for them aren’t professional-track mothers. They’re usually low-wage workers of all genders. 

Case in point: New York City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn is single-handedly blocking a bill that would ensure paid sick days for all workers in the city. This news item, which should be at the heart of the work-life balance conversation, has rarely been noted as we huff and puff about Sandberg’s circles and Mayer’s nursery. “While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement,” British feminist Laurie Penny once wrote, “and the basement is flooding.” Have you read much about the domestic workers’ strike in California, much less participated in a Twitter debate about it? Me neither. The “mommy wars” is like a discourse borg that manages to absorb and distort all conversations about women and work.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett thinks Sandberg should pay more attention to the power of mentors:

[W]omen with sponsors are 27% more likely than their unsponsored female peers to ask for a raise. They’re 22% more likely to ask for those all-important stretch assignments, the projects that put them on the radar of the higher-ups. The more progress they make, the more satisfied they are, and the likelier they are to lean in — a “sponsor effect” on career advancement that we’ve quantified at 19%. As we noted in Harvard Business Review last October, sponsorship is the one relationship you’ve got to get right.

Jennifer Victor asks whether any of Sandberg’s “suggestions affect the likeable factor”:

Women hold themselves back from achieving success in part because people (men and women) tend to see success as a likable characteristic in men, but an unattractive characteristic in women. A successful man tends to be seen as charismatic and having leadership qualities that are appealing. A successful woman tends to be seen as being bossy, selfish, and all together unpleasant to be around. [Sandberg] cites studies, using compelling experimental design, to make this point.

Kira Goldenberg finds that the book neglects various types of women:

[T]hough she makes a clear effort to include all women—single, married, lesbians, with or without children—in Lean In, her whole philosophy is built around corporate climbers with supportive husbands that shoulder half the childcare. (Where do butch women fit into that suggestion to adhere to societal rules of femininity?)

And Anna Holmes defends Sandberg:

In much of the commentary, I’ve encountered the erroneous assumption that the book is written for corporate power players, which it isn’t, and an odd expectation it should speak for all women, which it shouldn’t. As Erin Matson, writing in January on another high-profile and controversial feminist agitation, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” put it: “In my experience, people can speak profoundly well for themselves, and do both themselves and others a disservice when they try to speak for everyone else at the same time.” Judged on its merits, “Lean In” is an inauguration more than a last word, and an occasion for celebration. Its imperfections should be regarded not as errors or exclusions but opportunities for advancing the conversation.

Earlier Dish on Sandberg’s book here.

Earlier this week, freelance journalist Nate Thayer publicized an attempt by The Atlantic to get him to repurpose one of his recent articles into a new post, an offer he vehemently rejected once he learned they were not willing to pay him for it. Felix uses the case to take a broader look at the online freelance journalism scene:

The exchange has particular added poignancy because it’s not so many years since the Atlantic offered Thayer $125,000 to write six articles a year for the magazine. How can the Atlantic have fallen so far, so fast — to go from offering Thayer $21,000 per article a few years ago, to offering precisely zero now?

The simple answer is just the size of the content hole: the Atlantic magazine only comes out ten times per year, which means it publishes roughly as many articles in one year as the Atlantic’s digital operations publish in a week. When the volume of pieces being published goes up by a factor of 50, the amount paid per piece is going to have to go down. …

[In digital], everybody does everything — including writing, and once you start working there, you realize pretty quickly that things go much more easily and much more quickly when pieces are entirely produced in-house than when you outsource the writing part to a freelancer. At a high-velocity shop like Atlantic Digital, freelancers just slow things down — as well as producing all manner of back-end headaches surrounding invoicing and the like. The result is that Atlantic Digital’s freelancer budget is minuscule, and that any extra marginal money going into the editorial budget is overwhelmingly likely to be put into hiring new full-time staff, rather than beefing up the amount spent on freelancers.

Alexis sees both sides of the freelancer coin:

[T]he truth is, I don’t have a great answer for Nate Thayer, or other freelancers who are trying to make it out there. It was never an easy life, but there were places who would pay your expenses to go report important stories and compensate you in dollars per word, not pennies. You could research and craft. And there were outlets — not a ton, but some — that could send you a paycheck that would keep you afloat. … I don’t like to ask people for work that we can’t pay for. But I’m not willing to take a hardline and prevent someone who I think is great from publishing with us without pay. My main point and (to be normative about it) the main point in these negotiations is this: What do you, the writer, get out of this?

But the fact is, a lot of people *do* get stuff out of it. They’re changing careers into journalism, say. Or they’re a scholar who wants to reach a broader audience. Or they’ve got a book coming out. Or they’re a kid who begs you (begs you!) to take a flier on them, and you have to spend way too much time with her, but it’s worth it because you believe she’s talented, even if you know the story isn’t going to garner a big audience.