Midrange Weekly March 8

Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention

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Welcome back to Midrange Weekly and we hope you are digging the Spring vibes. Conversely we hope any unrelenting allergy induced symptoms isn’t leading your pandemic traumatized neighbours to jumping to any conclusions, as it no doubt did for many of us last year. March seems to be going at a slightly quicker pace than the decade the last one was which I’m sure we all appreciate, but it’s less enthusing to learn that we here in Canada are getting vaccinated at a slower rate than America -formerly known as the Florida of the world- is. Looking back on the week, Jamie is still lost down the NFT rabbit hole, Mickey’s music curation gets more explicitly weird in tandem with the duration of his freshly hermetic life, and surprise surprise Tristan is mad at politicians again. Stick around for the Tik Toks at the end.

 

NFT’s, NFT’s, NFT’s And…Jack Dorsey?

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Non-fungible tokens are everywhere these days. I’m sure you’ve noticed or heard some of the news of the big sales.

Grimes digital art for $6 million anyone?

And if you’re feeling the same way Mickey and Tristan are when it comes to this stuff (ie. clueless)…well, don’t worry, you’re in luck. Vox and the CBC both dumped explainers of the new virtual sensation this past week for your learning pleasure. Dig in. 

In the meantime, this market is just starting and it’s already insane. The sky is the limit on where this will go…which leads me to Jack Dorsey, the brightest and most inept CEO of our time. Just this week he the lit the internet on fire with news that his payments company, Square, was purchasing controlling interest in Tidal, Jay-Z’s music platform. 

From Recode:

Here is the straight news headline: Square, the financial services company run by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, is buying Tidal, the streaming music service founded by Jay-Z.

And here is the question you, a normal person, may have about this deal: WTF?

The answer, depending on how you’re inclined to look at deals between billionaires, could be intriguing, silly, or stupid. Maybe all of the above.

Square is paying $297 million in cash and stock for a “significant majority” of Tidal. Dorsey’s Twitter thread announcing the deal (of course) is vague about what Square intends to do with Tidal, but mentions things like “entirely new listening experiences” and “new complementary revenue streams.”

The second sentence says everything. WTF? 

Why Square and not Twitter? Twitter buying into Tidal makes complete sense, almost as much as Twitter finally toying with the idea of subscriptions. But Square buying in is a complete reach, that is until you read the last quote from the Recode piece above. 

New complementary revenue streams = NFT’s.

Dorsey is a big proponent of cryptocurrencies. Square has leveraged a large stake in them these past few months. 

From CNBC:

Square bought $170 million worth of bitcoin, the company revealed in its fiscal fourth-quarter financial report Tuesday.

The company said it purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins, expanding on its October 2020 buy of 4,709. Square said it represents about 5% of the company’s total assets as of the end of 2020.

This all leads to what Jack unveiled on Friday. 

From CNBC: 

Jack Dorsey appears to be offering to sell the very first tweet as a non-fungible token, or NFT.

The Twitter CEO shared a link Friday afternoon to a platform called “Valuables,” where his March 21, 2006 tweet “just setting up my twttr” was up for bidding. The highest offer is from Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle, for $2.5 million as of Saturday afternoon, according to the website.

This is real. A CEO might be buying another CEO’s tweet from 15 years ago for that sum. Again, wtf?

Jack Dorsey has no idea how to run Twitter but he may be onto something here with NFT’s.

My two cents. 

You might be kicking yourself about not buying Bitcoin five years ago when your weird uncle told you so. Now here’s your chance to get in on some of this action. Either learn about the crypto market and other currencies or learn about non-fungible tokens. You’ll be happy you did.  - Jamie

 

Stockton’s Basic-Income Experiment Shows Promise

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I promise, I’m not actively trying to write about poverty each week, even though I’m in the process of starting a publication on said subject. More on that in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, great news this week from the city of Stockton, California. 

From Vox:

The city of Stockton, California, embarked on a bold experiment two years ago: It decided to distribute $500 a month to 125 people for 24 months — with no strings attached and no work requirements. The people were randomly chosen from neighborhoods at or below the city’s median household income, and they were free to spend the money any way they liked. Meanwhile, researchers studied what impact the cash had on their lives.

The results from the first year of the experiment, which spanned from February 2019 to February 2020, are now in. And they’re extremely encouraging for its participants, and for advocates who see unconditional cash transfers as an effective way to help people escape poverty.

The most eye-popping finding is that the people who received the cash managed to secure full-time jobs at more than twice the rate of people in a control group, who did not receive cash. Within a year, the proportion of cash recipients who had full-time jobs jumped from 28 percent to 40 percent. The control group saw only a 5 percent jump over the same period.

The researchers wrote in their report that the money gave recipients the stability they needed to set goals, take risks, and find new jobs. One man in his 30s had been eligible for a real estate license for over a year but hadn’t gotten it because he just couldn’t afford to take time off work. Thanks to the freedom offered by the extra $500 per month, he said, his life was “converted 360 degrees … because I have more time and net worth to study … to achieve my goals.”

The University of British Columbia worked on a similar project recently in which they gave a small sampling of homeless individuals a one lump sum payment of $7500. The study was called the New Leaf Project. 

The results of that study are as follows. 

From Vox:

The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports.

“Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.

Two independent studies trying to assess how individuals react when given money with no strings attached. The results, as you can see, are promising. With little to go by, those with meagre means showcase a strong aptitude for wanting to make the correct choices for their livelihoods and future. 

No matter the situation, we as humans all crave the basic necessities of life. Food, shelter, water, clothing. Meeting those requirements will most certainly take precedent over doing drugs or buying alcohol, which sadly is what many with privelidge and means stereotypically believe is going to happen if money were to be handed out with no questions asked. These two studies run counter to this idea and their success should only prove more vital to the reality and need for an across the board universal basic income. 

I touched on this a bit last week in that giving someone a true helping hand requires a bit of empathy. Poverty for most isn’t something they choose or want. A myriad of factors are at play and they are often out of the hands of those who suffer from their fate. Children born into poverty have no say in their surroundings. Letting them suffer and struggle should never happen. 

With that, I’m often reminded of something Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government said early on in the pandemic with regards to how they disposed and allocated CERB. I’m paraphrasing, but the reality was that they knew if they delayed rolling out CERB so as to make sure every detail was ironed out, that many would suffer in spite of a few. So often this isn’t how policy works with regards to the poor. So many conditions. So much red tape. Not enough support or cash. The Liberals understood that making sure the majority were taken care of was in theirs and our best interest versus worrying about what a small percentage might take advantage of. 

Ending poverty means giving a real hand as well as empathy from those who don’t need one. 

From The Atlantic:

Give people money, and they stop working. They become dependent on welfare. They never sort out the problems in their life. The best route out of poverty is a hand up, not a handout.

Stockton has now proved this false. An exclusive new analysis of data from the demonstration project shows that a lack of resources is its own miserable trap. The best way to get people out of poverty is just to get them out of poverty; the best way to offer families more resources is just to offer them more resources.

The findings from this Stockton study are promising. Hopefully good things will emerge from it moving forward. - Jamie

 

Republican Attempts At Making You Angry Are Getting Pathetic

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If you thought- as President Biden erroneously did- that in a post Trump world the republican caucus would begin its inevitable migration back to sanity, this week should disabuse us all of such notions forever. The republican decent into an insolent cult of culture war trolls and agitators has reached what I pray is its deepest nadir, but probably won’t be. In what are marginal, barely noteworthy shifts towards a more modern and progressive society, a couple of child hood toys and totems from yesteryear have made some changes. The publisher behind Dr Seuss has announced that due to the racist depiction of some of its caricatures from books dating back generations, it will no longer distribute six specific Dr Seuss stories. Notably this does not include Cat In The Hat or Green Eggs And Ham, likely the only two Dr Seuss books most of us remember. The majority of its catalogue will still remain in publication and circulation as well. Furthermore the maker and owner of the rights behind Mr Potato Head has updated the name of the toy to a more gender neutral Potato Head. Considering this was already a sentient vegetable that stored their facial components up their ass, this is not the kind of thing should send adherents of out-dated, gendered dogma into a tizzy.

And yet, republicans are having an absolute meltdown over this. Many national representatives or leaders of the current right wing cultural movement have been thrust into paroxysms of dismay and righteous anger over- again, Dr Seuss books and the potato head toy. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and supremely consequential legislation is being passed to address it yet Fox News can’t stop moaning about children’s books. While every representative’s focus should have been on the COVID relief bill (not one republican senator voted for it), they devoted their time to bad faith virtue signalling in insipid attempts to ‘own the libs’, or worse, contrive the agitated vitriol amongst their base that keeps their voting enthusiasm so animated. Here’s a sampling of some of the leaders of conservative orthodoxy both in and out of office signalling to their base what they think are the most urgent matters facing America: 

 

Here’s Megan Kelly bemoaning that WAP receives accolades while certain Dr Seuss Books are now considered inappropriate. 

 

Here’s House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy taking time out of his day to defiantly read Green Eggs And Ham

 

Here’s Don Jr being Don Jr

In regards to Kelly’s frustration with the normalization of WAP but Dr Seuss ret-conning problematic aspects of its past, let me clarify: Sex is fine, racism is not. To McCarthy, I would like to reiterate that the book he is brandishing in protest of cancel culture is in fact still in publication. It also seems lost on him that it is the publisher itself that took this action. This distinction also seems to elude Jim Jordan, one of the most hysterical detractors in congress of all things cancel culture. I would remind him that Dr Seuss’ publisher is doing this of their own volition in hopes of situating themselves along the more tolerant fault lines of such debates. No one is forcing them to do this or threatening to ‘cancel’ them. It would be like if Representative Jordan, ashamed of his own role in covering up years of sexual assault at the universty sports program of which he was a coach, elected of his own accord to resign in shame. But he’s not doing that. As for Don Jr- someone should remind him his dad is no longer on Twitter to see his performative pleas for love and acknowledgment. It’s also striking to look at the cognitive dissonance of the conservative movement as a whole whenever it comes to the frustratingly amorphous term cancel culture. When it is something or someone they don’t like, they will demand it be boycotted into oblivion. Don’t see that person’s movies, pour your coke down the drain, cancel your subscriptions. Trump himself is a specifically malignant individual in this regard, calling for innumerable boycotts of various individuals or organizations that have crossed him. Apparently that’s not cancel culture? But when progressives in positions to apply consequences to problematic individuals or corporations in an industry or medium do so it is automatically decried as cancelling. This is the logic of republicans.

This is not a serious group of people. The Republican Party is not a serious party. Political parties- politicians of any kind, function through governance and legislation. They observe the world’s problems and based on their ideological inclinations and institutional mandates draft policy and legislation to address them. The republicans today are not interested in legislation or policy, nor are they interested in directing what power they have towards coherent administrative goals. This is the party whose last meaningful bill was a multi trillion-dollar tax cut for the richest Americans. Beyond further enriching their donor class they only care about incensing grievances, drumming up culture war and victimized narratives to keep people pissed off. They are not actively trying to improve anything; instead they are actively trying to tell you how bad things are. Business is good for them when their voters feel angry and victimized. This is not a party that has the material or mental well being of anyone, not even their most passionate voters in mind. They can’t pass laws that dictate which cultural norms or trends prevail so they simply threaten that the stability of a way of life that never really existed for most people is perpetually at stake. They have no role in government, not because they lack the electoral jurisdiction, but becasue they have no interest in its institution. It’s performative fury for the sake of keeping people upset. The only page left in their book of childish tricks.  -Tristan

 

FLUX FIVE

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This Week:

Squirrel Nut Zippers “It All Depends On You” 2000 Bedlam Ballroom

Grain“Naked” 1998 Two Zeros

Coco Rosie “Trinity’s Crying” 2008 Grey Oceans

Youth Lagoon“Seventeen” 2011 The Year Of Hibernation

The Voices Of East Harlem“Wanted Dead Or Alive” 1973 Good Times 5

Enjoy! - Mick

From the elusive album two zeros, released in 1998, support artist here: https://grain.bandcamp.com/album/tw0-zer0s

Provided to YouTube by Pias UK LimitedTrinity's Crying · CocoRosieGrey Oceans℗ 2010 CocoRosie Productions LLC. Released by [PIAS] Recordings under exclusive ...

Youth Lagoon's 17 off of their new album, Year of Hibernationhttp://skipperradio.weebly.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SkipperRadioTwitter: http://www...

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

CNBC Explainer On Bitcoin And Why Big Banks Are Jumping In

This explainer from CNBC covers a lot of questions on what Bitcoin and blockchain based central currencies might look like and who’s pushing this market.

 

This Mini Tik Tok Documentary About A Secret Apartment In Manhattan Is Insane

Of all the things you should expect to encounter renting an apartment in Manhattan- sleazy land lords, shoddy utilities, rats of varying sizes and affability- no one would ever expect what Tik Tok user Samantha Hartsoe discovered. She documents via several Tik Tok clips what started as a draft behind her washroom mirror culminating in a secret, mysterious, derelict, otherwise inaccessible, possibly from another dimension apartment hiding within her own. While the origins or architecture of such a thing remain unknown, one thing that is certain is that Hartsoe is absolutely braver than any of us. Check out part three of four here and head to her page for the wild conclusion.

@samanthartsoe

TRULY a new meaning to a “hole in the wall” #mystery #nyc #apartment #secret #storytime #fyp #foryou

♬ Oh No - Kreepa
 

Caleb Hearon Is Every Speaker At CPAC All At Once

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is essentially the holy land for aspiring right wing politicians. At the gathering of true believers and sycophants the most prominent of the flock give speeches to profess their conservative bonafides, which usually consists of some pretty well worn talking points. Twitter comedian Caleb Hearon basically tied everyone of them together in some delightfully scathing satire. He’s got our vote.

 

The Best Twitter Takes On The Prince Harry And Megan Interview

Having recently abdicated their royal tenure in what is being gossiped over as an extremely contentious split, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle just gave an exclusive interview to Oprah where they addressed all manner of salacious rumours and accusations against them and their former kin. Word is the potential inner workings or sordid history the two could reveal of the Royal Family has the Crown absolutely losing it. This is some real time modern palace intrigue. This is some high tea shit. Twitter is loving it- here’s some of the best hot takes.

MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuetteNFT, Dr Seuss, Tik Tok, Twitter, Prince HarryComment