Posts Tagged ‘spam’
“Nothing scares corporate radio like public radio”*…
These are tough times for those who love (and/or depend on) local radio. The Trump administration has eliminated the federal funding on which many local public stations have depended, and consolidation has “homogenized” local commercial radio. And this, at a time when the civic and cultural news and engagement that local radio provides has never been more important.
Still, community-rooted local radio perserveres. Consider ldial, a curated collection from Adam Scott— a list that let’s you sample some of the best independent and community radio stations in the US (and, ideally, encourages you to find your own local options).
Then, remembering that the best local radio is your local radio, consider supporting your local station(s).
* Tom Petty
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As we tune in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Hormel registered the name and trademark “Spam” for its canned meat product. It is interesting to note that the company had marketed the product since 1937, and only felt the need to protect the name 13 years later.
“This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II”*…
Food is a major topic of conversation these days. Americans feel that they’re paying more for less, with explanations ranging from rising production costs and supply chain disruptions, to concentration among suppliers leading to profit-gouging. In an excerpt from his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, Austin Frerick reminds us that, while those issues are all too real, the emergence of food behemoths has brought other issues as well…
Like the broader Gilded Age economy that Walmart exemplifies and has played a role in shaping, the wealth in Bentonville obscures the hardship surrounding it. After all, the Walton family has so much money to spend on museums and bike trails because they have extracted it from the communities in which Walmart operates—from shoppers but also from the company’s employees, the towns themselves, and even from taxpayers through a series of hidden government subsidies.
For example, as Walmart expanded its traditional stores into Supercenters, it would often construct a new, larger building nearby instead of simply adding on to the existing one. Those old stores frequently sat empty or underused, just like the original Walmart in Rogers. That may be why Walmart openings have been linked to declines in nearby home values.
Walmart and other major retailers have made the situation even worse by including restrictive covenants in the deeds of old buildings, which prevent other retailers from using the space for competitive purposes. These provisions perpetuate food deserts and tie the hands of communities struggling to figure out what to do with these ghost buildings. After all, it’s not easy to find a use for an old Walmart that doesn’t involve grocery or retail. One former Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Texas, became the center of a national debate when it was bought by a firm detaining migrant children.
Limiting competition is apparently not enough for Walmart. The company understands what happens to communities when its stores are abandoned, and it uses this knowledge to leverage a tax break. The company often engages in what is known as the “dark stores” loophole, a tax dodge that lets it evade millions in property taxes by valuing its stores as if they were closed.
These shenanigans further tilt the scales in Walmart’s favor and deprive local communities of needed tax revenue. They are particularly egregious in light of the fact that many of their stores were built with massive taxpayer subsidies in the first place. Of course, this isn’t the only tax loophole the family has exploited. In 2013, Bloomberg reported that the family pioneered an estate tax loophole that is now widely used by American billionaires.
As bad as Walmart is for communities as a whole, it creates conditions that are particularly damaging for workers. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein noted, Sam Walton built a company rooted in a “southernized, deunionized post-New Deal America.” Walmart has long been defined by transnational commerce, employment insecurity, and poverty-level wages, which is an ironic geographic twist on history given that the region was at the heart of the New Deal and the antichain movement.
Walmart employs about 1.6 million people in the United States alone, making it the nation’s largest private employer. In fact, more people are on the company’s payroll than the populations of eleven states. The company’s impact on the labor market is so big that it drives down wages in the areas in which it builds Supercenters. In the words of one academic, Walmart effectively “determine[s] the real minimum wage” in the country. That’s why it’s national news when the company decides to raise wages.
From its founding, Walmart has been notorious for its poverty-level wages; in its early years, the company exploited a loophole in order to pay the mostly female store employees half of the federal minimum wage. It took a federal court battle for the workers to receive the minimum wage. In 2021, Walmart employees’ median income was about $25,000, whereas CEO Doug McMillon took home $25.7 million that year.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that Sam Walton hated unions. “I have always believed strongly that we don’t need unions at Wal-Mart,” he stated in his memoir. Over the years, the company has aggressively fought efforts to unionize, and it seemingly closes stores whenever they gain traction. For example, after deli counter workers in a Texas Walmart Supercenter voted to unionize in 2000, the company switched to prepackaged meat and closed the department. In 2015, Walmart suddenly closed five stores to deal with what it said were extensive plumbing issues, which it said would take six months to fix. Some speculated that the real reason it closed the stores was to let the employees go as retaliation for labor activism.
And it’s not just labor laws that the company has eluded. A 2017 report based on a survey of over one thousand Walmart employees found that the company was likely violating worker protections such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, among others. According to the New York Times, the company “routinely refuses to accept doctors’ notes, penalizes workers who need to take care of a sick family member and otherwise punishes employees for lawful absences.”
As the company’s power grew, it reshaped labor options and norms for millions of Americans. Gary Chaison, a labor expert, told the New York Times in 2015, “What you’re increasingly finding is that it’s the primary wage earners who work at Walmart, because a lot of workers have more or less given up on getting middle-class jobs.” Meanwhile, many older Americans are working at the store past the normal retirement age because of their financial insecurity, a sad reality reflected by the recent TikTok trend of elderly Walmart employees asking for donations.
This power imbalance between Walmart and its employees explains the poverty-level wages for many of Walmart’s 1.6 million workers but also for employees of its competitors. Some unionized grocery stores have even used the opening of a Supercenter as an excuse to demand cuts to their own employees’ wages and benefits.
These low wages also obscure a generous hidden subsidy that the company receives from taxpayers. Many Walmart workers depend on government public assistance programs such as Medicaid (health care), the Earned Income Tax Credit (a low-wage tax subsidy), Section 8 vouchers (housing assistance), LIHEAP (energy assistance), and SNAP (food assistance), among others. In 2013, one estimate by congressional House Democrats found that taxpayers subsidized Walmart to the tune of more than $5,000 per employee each year through all of the government assistance programs that its workers need.
In effect, instead of paying a living wage to these employees, the Walton family shifts the burden onto taxpayers. Although many people may recoil at the idea of the public filling the gap between Walmart’s pay and the income its workers need to survive, not all policymakers see an issue with this sort of billionaire welfare. Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, wrote a paper before joining the administration titled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story” that called for even more of these subsidies to Walmart’s bottom line.
There is, of course, another way to address the issue. Walmart failed to establish dominance in Germany because of the country’s strong labor protections and antitrust guardrails. These market protections may explain why the company eventually threw in the towel and sold off its operations there.
In some instances, Walmart even receives a double subsidy. Its workers and shoppers frequently rely on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps.” The program originated as part of the New Deal as a temporary measure and was made permanent by President Lyndon Johnson in a bill signed in 1964. This program and several smaller food assistance programs are now part of the Farm Bill. In fact, these food assistance programs make up more than 75 percent of the most recent Farm Bill.
SNAP is in many ways a triumph of progressive social policy, with an average of 41.2 million people participating in the program each month in 2022. The use rate is so high because, unlike many other programs, SNAP was structured by the US Congress so that anyone who qualifies is guaranteed to receive assistance. As a result, the program is a lifeline for millions of Americans who might otherwise struggle to put food on the table.
But because of Walmart’s dominance of the grocery sector, a very large portion of SNAP dollars now run through the company’s cash registers. In 2013, the company received $13 billion in sales from shoppers using SNAP. By comparison, farmers markets took in only $17.4 million of all SNAP spending that same year. The amount of SNAP money received by the company surged with the expansion of SNAP benefits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With some back-of-the-envelope math, I came up with a rough estimate that Walmart now receives somewhere around $26.8 billion each year from SNAP.
Unfortunately, more concrete numbers are not available because the US Supreme Court has ruled that the amount of taxpayer money that the company receives from SNAP can be kept secret. In 2019, the Court heard a case involving the USDA’s decision to deny a request by a South Dakota newspaper for this information. “Most of the time, the government tells the public which companies benefit from federal dollars earmarked for taxpayer-funded public assistance programs,” agriculture and food reporter Claire Brown noted. “We know which insurance companies make the highest profits from Medicare and Medicaid, for example, and those figures have been used to pressure them to offer better options to their clients.” But in this instance, the Court rejected this level of transparency, with Justice Elena Kagan joining the Republican-appointed members of the Court to uphold the USDA decision under the notion that it was “confidential” business information.
The program is important enough that it factors into Walmart’s operational decision-making. Many Americans enrolled in SNAP schedule their trips to the grocery store around the days when their funds get deposited. In fact, the company factors this bump into its ordering system…
Expensive food is only one of the prices we pay to “Food Barons“– @AustinFrerick in @ProMarket_org.
* “This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part “the free world” seems to be regarding it as merely normal.” – Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
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As we ponder the point at which profit becomes predation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Hormel registered the name and trademark “Spam” for its canned meat product. It is also interesting to note that the company had marketed the product since 1937, and only felt the need to protect the name 13 years later.
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret”*…
A graphic– and painful– reminder that the latter two are under constant attack…
Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected…
Every time we ask Google, we give it answers about ourselves: “Search TM.”
* Gabriel García Márquez
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As we Duck (Duck Go), we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific islands.
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are”*…
… and then I’ll sell you something.
D. Graham Burnett on how an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention…
Our eyes are worth money. We know that, now. It has become a commonplace that our “attention economy” is functionally an eyeball economy. But how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs? Let’s dig into what we might think of as the original Faustian Bargain by which the sciences of human perception (with their sophisticated technologies of precision monitoring and measurement) cut a deal with those who move the money around…
An illuminating account of the history of a powerful– and profitable– alliance: “Fracking Eyeballs,” from @asterisk_mag_.
* Jose Ortega y Gasset
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As we analyze attentiveness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Laurence Cantor unleashed the “Green Card” spam (advertising the law firm that he operated with his wife, Martha Siegel, and its immigration law services) on the Usenet. While it wasn’t the very first instance of spam, it was the first commercial Usenet spam; and its unapologetic authors are seen as having pioneered the modern global practice of spamming.
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”*…
As Robert Cottrell explains, a growing group of online thinkers couldn’t agree more…
Much of the best new writing online originates from activities in the real world — music, fine art, politics, law…
But there is also writing which belongs primarily to the world of the Internet, by virtue of its subject-matter and of its sensibility. In this category I would place the genre that calls itself Rationalism, the raw materials of which are cognitive science and mathematical logic.
I will capitalise Rationalism and Rationalists when referring to the writers and thinkers who are connected in one way or another with the Less Wrong forum (discussed below). I will do this to avoid confusion with the much broader mass of small-r “rational” thinkers — most of us, in fact — who believe their thinking to be founded on reasoning of some sort; and with “rationalistic” thinkers, a term used in the social sciences for people who favour the generalised application of scientific methods.
Capital-R Rationalism contends that there are specific techniques, drawn mainly from probability theory, by means of which people can teach themselves to think better and to act better — where “better” is intended not as a moral judgement but as a measure of efficiency. Capital-R Rationalism contends that, by recognising and eliminating biases common in human judgement, one can arrive at a more accurate view of the world and a more accurate view of one’s actions within it. When thus equipped with a more exact view of the world and of ourselves, we are far more likely to know what we want and to know how to get it.
Rationalism does not try to substitute for morality. It stops short of morality. It does not tell you how to feel about the truth once you think you have found it. By stopping short of morality it has the best of both worlds: It provides a rich framework for thought and action from which, in principle, one might advance, better equipped, into metaphysics. But the richness and complexity of deciding how to act Rationally in the world is such that nobody, having seriously committed to Rationalism, is ever likely to emerge on the far side of it.
The influence of Rationalism today is, I would say, comparable with that of existentialism in the mid-20th century. It offers a way of thinking and a guide to action with particular attractions for the intelligent, the dissident, the secular and the alienated. In Rationalism it is perfectly reasonable to contend that you are right while the World is wrong.
Rationalism is more of an applied than a pure discipline, so its effects are felt mainly in fields where its adepts tend to be concentrated. By far the highest concentration of Rationalists would appear to cohabit in the study and development of artificial intelligence; so it hardly surprising that main fruit of Rationalism to date has been the birth of a new academic field, existential risk studies, born of a convergence between Rationalism and AI, with science fiction playing catalytic role. Leading figures in existential risk studies include Nicholas Bostrom at Oxford University and Jaan Tallinn at Cambridge University.
Another relatively new field, effective altruism, has emerged from a convergence of Rationalism and Utilitarianism, with the philosopher Peter Singer as catalyst. The leading figures in effective altruism, besides Singer, are Toby Ord, author of The Precipice; William MacAskill, author of Doing Good Better; and Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and blogger at Cold Takes.
A third new field, progress studies, has emerged very recently from the convergence of Rationalism and economics, with Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison as its founding fathers. Progress studies seeks to identify, primarily from the study of history, the preconditions and factors which underpin economic growth and technological innovation, and to apply these insights in concrete ways to the promotion of future prosperity. The key text of progress studies is Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments…
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I doubt there is any wholly original scientific content to Rationalism: It is a taker of facts from other fields, not a contributor to them. But by selecting and prioritising ideas which play well together, by dramatising them in the form of thought experiments, and by pursuing their applications to the limits of possibility (which far exceed the limits of common sense), Rationalism has become a contributor to the philosophical fields of logic and metaphysics and to conceptual aspects of artificial intelligence.
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Tyler Cowen is beloved of Rationalists but would hesitate (I think) to identify with them. His attitude towards cognitive biases is more like that of Chesterton towards fences: Before seeking to remove them you should be sure that you understand why they were put there in the first place…
From hands-down the best guide I’ve found to the increasingly-impactful ideas at work in Rationalism and its related fields, and to the thinkers behind them: “Do the Right Thing,” from @robertcottrell in @TheBrowser. Eminently worth reading in full.
[Image above: source]
* Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
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As we ponder precepts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel went public with its own exercise in recombination when it introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effects of U.S. influence in the Pacific islands.
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