Category Archives: Melt

Melt, Writing

President Barack Obama Opens Up

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Two of my worlds collide, smashing President Barack Obama out of his egg, which detached him from the mystic narratives built in many American’s minds – “He’s a level-headed academic”. President Barack Obama sat down with legendary stand-up comic Marc Maron, who also happens to be one of the greatest interviewers of all-time, and gave incredibly honest and thoughtful answers.

President Barack Obama and Marc Maron could not be any different in temperament. President Obama comes off as somewhat emotionally disengaged and optimistic, whereas Marc is an anxious narcissist with anger issues. Barack Obama has a wife and two daughters, Marc has never completely settled down and is a proud owner of too many cats. The interview takes place in Marc Maron’s garage, which just so happens to be down the street where President Obama inhabited during his early adulthood.

The interview takes off immediately which highlights Marc Marons uncanny ability to put a guest at ease despite his hyperactive demeanor. They dive deep into macro political issues like healthcare, terrorism, and racism. The interview takes place shortly after the horrific massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. This adds extraordinary context to the interview. The Charleston shooting is the most significant hate crime in the last 50 years. President Obama doesn’t draw the race-card, he doesn’t say that America is broken. He believes that the issue boils down to insecurity and lack of identity rather than an inherent bad nature of human beings. You can really tell he takes a Lockean view of human nature rather than a Hobbesian view of human nature (even though he doesn’t go as far as a lot of Americans; as in he doesn’t fully buy Locke’s theory of property, which in the Earth was put here for humans to use to any benefit).  The President actually repeatedly says that race relations are much better than they were 50 years ago.

However, President Obama does not hold back on his frustration over the uniqueness of the mass-shooting problem in the United States. He cites Australia was able to act quickly because the public was so outraged over the one and only mass shooting in their country 25 years ago. President Obama explains how the most disturbed he has been was Congress’s inability to act after the Sandy Hook Massacre. While being firm on what he calls “common-sense gun control reforms”, he understands that hunting is a key part of life for many Americans and often symbolizes or evokes feelings of nostalgia and tradition.

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Melt, Slack, Writing

Is Chattanooga The South’s Silicon Valley?

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As I sit inside a café built into a once abandoned warehouse perusing a craft beer menu, I have to remind myself that I’m south of the Mason-Dixon. The warehouse district in Chattanooga, Tennessee, known as Warehouse Row, is filled with modern cafés, Pilates and yoga studios, and artisanal boutiques. It’s something you might not expect to come from a small city bordering deep red states Alabama and Georgia.

The bartender sets my draft on a refrigerated strip of bar top, a neat little innovation. The menu is full of southern comfort food, biscuits, mac ‘n’ cheese, and fried chicken; but it’s the ‘goat cheese’ grits that have caught my attention. Long story short, delicious; and it all adds up to this curious juxtaposition of slightly snobby southern comfort.

That weekend I spent in Chattanooga a comic-con, known as Chatta-con was being held in the convention center downtown. After indulging in some people-watching in the lobby of my hotel, I met a photographer who told me the best way to get around downtown is the “free electric shuttle system.” What is this the Google campus? The shuttles, which look just like your everyday city bus, run on electricity and use easy-to-replace battery packs. In addition, some “smart buses” offer free wifi. Oh, and it’s FREE to ride.

Now, I’m just a good ole northern boy and this kind of techno-stuff can leave me a tad befuddled. So when the FCC passed its net neutrality bill last week, we decided to take a closer look.

Chattanooga, Tennessee is faster than you. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data as instant pulses of light rather than signals over a metal cable. These fiber-optic cables send data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country.

Wow this is great, which private corporation made this possible? Don’t tell me, don’t tell me…..Enron is making a comeback?! No, actually it’s Chattanooga itself. The City of Chattanooga owns a public utility company, Electric Power Board (EPB). Only about 2,000 cities in the U.S. have community owned electric utilities, and only a handful of those include public internet as a utility. Chattanooga is the first to install a fiber-optic network for its public internet services. This began when they received an $111 million federal stimulus grant, which gave them the ability to expedite construction of a fiber-optic network.

YOU MEAN OBAMA HAS MADE MY BELOVED TENNESSEE SOCIALIST???

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Melt, Writing

Too York?

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Why the Southern Tier of New York wants to secede Pennsylvania

Wow, this part of New York looks like Pennsylvania. Wow, this part of New York may become Pennsylvania. Not really. But, the idea is out there. Fifteen towns in the Southern tier of New York announced that they would consider seceding from the Empire State to join their more conservative and depressed citizens of Pennsylvania. I am from Upstate New York and yes, I am sick of meeting people from other states and being asked “how many other families lived in my apartment growing up” or “how many times I have been mugged” but secession would be very foolish for these communities.

There is no question about it Upstate New Yorkers and Downstate New Yorkers are different. They are different culturally, ideologically, and financially. Upstate still holds onto late 19th century neo-liberal ideology of private institutions such as the family, and church to govern and administer community issues. Downstate takes a more modern utilitarian systems approach to solving problems. The city has made a huge comeback since the 1970’s. Upstate continues to struggle, even though Buffalo is on a serious rebound. There is also a representative issue. Most NYS legislators are from Downstate districts.

ARC-Map-

Upstate feels ripped off. First the city uses us for the Erie Canal then hangs us out to dry. Now they won’t let us poison our water with hydro-fracking OR poison our communities with casinos. On top of all that I have to pay ridiculously high taxes that are probably going to welfare recipients Downstate who are too lazy to work and are just cheating the system. Right.

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Melt, Writing

Do You Even Act Rationally Bro?

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Do You Even Act Rationally Bro?

If you have taken an introductory economics class, you learn that the world is made up of rational human beings trying to allocate scarce resources. In essence, people demand goods that have a limited supply. Where demand meets price is where we get the equilibrium quantity and price. What this classic model fails to notice is that people are fucked. It also fails to recognize that people are sometimes irrationally good. In the three sections of this article, I will discuss the areas where the classic view of economics is not sufficient. In essence, this article is a quick overview of some basic concepts in behavioral economics.

That’s Not Ethical, Man

If you solely accept the simple principle of supply and demand as your over-arching market compass, you may be a giant dick. Under this view, you would be okay with a hardware store increasing the price of snow shovels the morning after a large snowstorm. In that, the snowstorm increased demand and due to that increase, price should shift upward. Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetch, and Richard Thaler proposed this scenario in a survey to individuals asking if it was fair. 82% of respondents answered that the price hike was unfair. So although theoretically the storm increased demand for snow it did not increase peoples willingness to pay because they see the price increase as unjustified and therefore unfair.

So, if it isn’t just simple supply and demand that dictates price and profit, then what does? The answer involves a little sociology my friends, in that social norms dictate community standards of fairness. Ernst Fehr believes a social norm has three parts:

  • It is a behavioral regularity; that is
  • Based on a socially shared belief of how one ought to behave; which triggers
  • The enforcement of the prescribed behavior by informal social sanctions.

So what have us wealth thirsty capitalists defined as fairness in the application to price, rent and wage setting? “A relevant precedent that is characterized by reference price or wage.” Da Fuq?!?!? No, it really is quite simple and is known as the principle of dual entitlement. The basic idea is that, transactors have an entitlement to the terms of the reference transaction and firms are entitled to their reference profit. This means a firm is not allowed to increase its profits by arbitrarily violating the entitlement of its transactors to the reference price, rent, or wage. So raising the price of snow shovels after a storm is arbitrary, but raising the price of snow shovels because of an increase in cost for the firm would be fair. What are the possible sources of reference transactions? Price, posted price, and previous transactions between a firm and a transactor.

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