Alone Time

So cam across a post on LinkedIn of a bearded man wearing a shirt that read: "Hunt your local pedophiles" and holding up a handwritten a sign with the following:

This is the USA. There is no one Coming to our rescue if things go sideways. No one will be resupplying us. No one will airdrop food, ammunition, medicine. There is no place to escape to for freedom. This is it!

As might be expected, this sparked people to loudly agree or disagree in the comments. But the partisan sniping kind of missed the broader point. While it's common for people in other parts of the world to look at the individualism of Americans and shake their heads, this guy and his sign explains it all. It's a simple matter of the perception that no-one else cares about things that are important.

On the one hand, the United States may well have to go it alone if things "go sideways" enough that the nation is in real danger of being overrun by a hostile foreign power. But that's because it's difficult to imagine that most other nations would realistically be able to stand up to a nation that was able to decisively win against the armed forces of the United States. The air superiority that this hypothetical hostile nation would need to have would render airdropping supplies to beleaguered American citizens a difficult undertaking. Likewise, it's doubtful that Canada or Mexico would be able to protect American refugees if the invaders wanted to pursue them.

But the sentiment of the sign is that there is a peculiarly American understanding of "freedom" that other nations aren't interesting in fighting to maintain, and wouldn't be willing to offer fugitive Americans in the case of an armed conflict on American soil. But even to the extent that it's true, it's more a symptom of the American Right's contempt for other nations than it is anything else. If we understand the sign holder to be referencing the "Culture Wars" in the United States morphing into an actual armed conflict, that the Right were to find itself on the losing end of, it makes sense that foreign powers would be unlikely to mobilize to the rescue Trumpism. They'd likely have their own issues to be concerned with. And big players, especially China and Russia would be too busy stoking the flames of conflict for their own purposes to be bothered with helping either side. And as for, say, Western European nations, why would they be interested in assisting a side that holds them, and their values, in open contempt? Okay, so their may be some nations that hold the American Right to be their natural allies. None of the ones that come immediately to mind strike me as being able to project force across oceans.

The American Right sees itself as assailed on all sides because the sense of threat is useful for binding people together. This isn't anything new or different. To go back to Russia and China, both nations have official narratives that cast the United States as a hostile and evil power that requires everyone in the country to band together to resist. It's a common way of looking at the world.

Nations tend to have one common reason for not concerning themselves with what happens to people in other nations... they don't see paying the costs of intervention as in their interests. That tends to be true in international conflicts, and it's nearly universal in intra-national conflicts. It's even true within nations. Black lives don't seem to matter in the United States because the deaths of people like Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland didn't make a broader difference in the lives of public. Their deaths were individual tragedies, but not national losses. The same could be said of partisan America. While a wholesale killing of one group or another would be a national tragedy, the rest of the world would go on as normal.

The world looks upon the man holding the sign and asks why they should be in any hurry to come to his rescue... what would be in it for them? And sometimes, that's the problem with being "exceptional." It's too easy to put oneself in a position where others don't really need anything from one, or at least not enough to spend resources on one's behalf.

Round and Round

I recently moved to a new home (the reason why posting has been so uneven recently), and yesterday, I spent a few hours in the Zen pursuit of baling sheets of bubble wrap back into large rolls, so that I could more efficiently pack them into empty moving boxes. The original plan had been to offer them as recycling, but it turns out that the city in which I now live considers bubble wrap to be trash. And I'm sure that plenty of people would agree with them in that assessment.

It is possible to have bubble wrap recycled, but that means taking it a good distance to one of the places that will accept it, and then paying for the privilege. And what this tells me is that bubble wrap is, in fact, trash. Or, to be more precise, it lacks economic value as a material with which to make other things. Like, for example, more bubble wrap.

And this, I think, is part of the reason why recycling is not really a worthwhile strategy, from an environmental standpoint. New materials are still cheap enough that it's less expensive to extract them, and use the pristine resource for manufacturing. And so there isn't a workable reverse logistics chain to have items returned for processing. And if people are going to have to pay to return items to be reused, most of them aren't going to bother. Personally, I haven't made up my mind if it's worth it to me to go through the work to offer the materials for recycling. And the main reason I'm considering it isn't the environment; it's that I'm not really in the mood to sit on the stuff until I manage to throw it all away piecemeal. I could get rid of it all at once, by driving it to a dump and paying the facility to take it, but if I'm going to do that, why not have it recycled? Of course, the most likely answer to that question is that it won't be recycled no matter where I take it. The only question is whether anyone pretends that they're going to do something other than drop it into a landfill.

And this has always been the problem with recycling broadly. Certain resources are valuable enough and/or easy enough to work with that reclaimed materials will result in a clear cost saving. For everything else, it takes some sort of intervention to make the numbers work out, and those interventions pretty much always result in an increase in prices that otherwise brings no immediate value to anyone. Without a way to change those economics, it seems unlikely that recycling will ever be as ubiquitous as some people would like.

Over-the-Counter

I find conspiracies fascinating for what they tell us about people. But it turns out, the reactions are also pretty telling. I was listening to the radio a while ago, and one of the presenters really hit on something; conspiracy thinking as a form of self-medication for a pathological world. And so I was kind of surprised when the discussion turned to solutions, and there was no mention of addressing that pathology.

I get that it's difficult when the remedy that people are flocking to seems dangerous, especially to people who aren't taking it. And that's perhaps why so little progress is being made, because it's easy to become caught up in policing people's reactions to their fears and anxieties. But if we want people to stop self-medicating for their feelings of disenfranchisement, powerlessness and social mistrust, the alternatives either have to do a better job of helping people feel better and/or actually ease the underlying causes of their anxiety.

It's sort of like being sick. Let's say that I'm taking a naturopathic remedy, which makes me feel better, but there are some side effects. And then I meet someone who tells me that the remedy is bunk, and I should be taking 50 milligrams of Dystopamine HCL twice a day. When I ask "Oh, does that work?" they say, "No, but it's FDA approved." It's attempting to counter unsafe, but effective, with safe, but ineffective.

The degree to which people sympathize with the plight of the self-medicating depends, I think, on whether they see the diagnosis as genuine, a misdiagnosis, hypochondria or deliberate malingering. And that assessment, as I understand it, is often driven by partisanship or other affinities. Many people in the Black community, for example, are put out by the fact that War on Drugs tended to focus on those drugs that Black people took, while the high levels of opioid abuse were seen as having causes other than weak wills on the part of the White people that became addicted. And while this is likely as much (if not more) a function of the societal distance between White and Black people in the United States as it is overt racism, the difference is still noteworthy.

And while with conspiracy theories, the medications are metaphorical, rather than literal, a similar dynamic is as work, as people give passes to those they identify with, at the expense of those they don't.

Show Trial

Due to the nature of congressional partisanship, a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States will only proceed to having a hearing if the votes are already there to confirm them. This creates a process in which the nominee is effectively little more than a prop in what is supposed to be their own job interview, but is actually simply an opportunity for members of the Senate to signal their virtue to the activist voters they rely upon to remain in office.

And there is nothing wrong with activist voters. The problem, to the degree that one considers it a problem, lies with the indifferent voters whose interest in the election goes little farther than the partisan identity of a given candidate. Activist voters can be relied upon to vote for the policies, or at least the attitudes, they want to see from government, and will withhold votes from a candidate who is too moderate for their tastes. But less engaged voters will sit out the primary contests, and if a general election candidate is more extreme than they might like, well, they're still better than whomever is running on other parties' tickets.

For several years now it's been more or less clear that the Supreme Court of the United States is not there to interpret the Constitution. Rather, it's there to go along with whatever interpretation that members of Congress have decided is accurate. Such is the prestige of the role that many judges are willing to overlook that (and perhaps they even believe that they aren't intended to be partisan hacks), but I wonder if that will hold up indefinitely.

But the pull to the extremes that activist voters have induced in members of Congress has come to mean that voting for a candidate advanced the other party is quickly becoming a messy form of political suicide, thus rendering the process of hearings moot. Why bother to debate when the votes are already graven in stone before the first words are spoken?

Winning

While I'm on the topic of investing, I find it interesting that people who are fully aware of the idea that not all financial investments will pay off may not see social or personal investments in the same way. I've written before about the idea that what many people see as grit or perseverance may be more accurately be described as trust. And so this raises the question of whether or not people who have turned to crime or other disapproved means of supporting themselves are wrong to distrust the system.

Personally, I tend to see a certain level of distrust in society, and the promise that "working hard and playing by the rules will lead to success" to be justified. While I don't deny that it's worked out (reasonably) well for me, that's not a sign that it's going to work for everyone. After all, everyone isn't me. But I think that some of what drives a certain understanding that the system will work for everyone who engages with it in good faith is that it allows for a level of cost-shifting. If grit and hard work are seen as guarantors of success in life, then there is no reason to pay costs associated with creating a better society; society must be just fine as it is.

For me, the idea that society needs no improvements for more people to have better outcomes flies in the face of reality as I understand it. But I don't really fear the costs of making it better. After all, it's a "pay me now, or pay me later" sort of situation; the bill is going to come due at some point or another, so why not pay it now? But I also understand that my own position in life, despite the work that I've put in, has an element of good fortune in it. Rather than having simply created opportunities for myself where none otherwise existed, I've been able to find and take advantage of opportunities in the world around me; which necessitated someone else not being able to do so.

With some further good fortune, I may be able to create opportunities for others. But I don't begrudge them not waiting around for me to manage it.

Getting Short

The gears in the system are too often turned by short-term profiteers and people who seek to manipulate us for their own ends. They need to own the responsibility for their selfishness and not blame us for it.
Seth Godin "Getting What We Asked For"

Not all "short-term profiteers" are selfish. Some of them are simply older. It's something of conventional wisdom that if someone has invested properly over the years that no gyrations in the market will touch them. That no matter what happens, there will always be time to undo whatever damage has been done. But time marches on; it's not always the first quarter. Sure, the advice is to lower one's exposure to risk as one gets older, but unless someone is managing their portfolio themselves, they're left with needing to follow the advice of someone who has their own agenda. It's unrealistic to presume that everyone has managed their money (or had someone else manage it) in such a way that they don't find themselves needing to raise a significant amount of money quickly. Or to presume that they are at fault for that situation coming to pass.

I once invested for a vacation. I didn't need spectacular returns; I was simply looking for a slightly better return than I could get from a bog-standard savings account. I told the investment company that I was interested in very low risk. When the bottom fell out of my portfolio during the 2008 financial crisis, I found out that their definition of very low risk was quite different from mine. (Actually what happened was that the counselor I'd drawn when I set up the account had decided that I'd be better off in a higher-risk strategy that had underperformed in the good times, and then tanked.) In the end, I would have been better off if I kept the money under my mattress in cash.

Had I wanted to make up my losses in any reasonable timeframe, I would have been interested in short-term profits; something that I could have invested in, and then dumped once it had risen to a certain point. And I think that there are more people in this category than are sometimes allowed for. Not that there aren't people willing to allow the markets to do damage to others in order to advance their own investments. But sometimes, the people who have been damaged are also looking for big returns.

Play On

I was in a store this evening, when the sound of accordion music filled the place. While it seemed unlikely that an instrument was being demonstrated for sale, it wasn't impossible; but my first guess was that someone was loudly testing some or another sound system with the most annoying music they could find on their phone before store staff stepped in to stop them.

What I found was a youngish man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, although I have no real way of being certain of this, contentedly playing the accordion while his mother pushed her cart full of items through the line to check out. It didn't take long to realize that the man was mentally disabled in some or another fashion. He didn't have the distinctive facial characteristics that I've come to understand are markers of Down Syndrome; perhaps it was a form of autism, instead. In any event, when the line would advance, the mother would push the cart forward to the new place in line, then come back and take the young man by the arm, and bring him along. He played the accordion the whole time. When the mother would release his arm, the young man would turn around to face the people further back in line (and, by extension, the rest of the store) and keep playing, without a thought to anything going on around him.

I felt for the mother, who was likely at some point in her fifties, to guess from looking at her. This was her life. It had been for at least a couple of decades up to this point, and it seemed likely that unless something happened to one or both of them, that it would continue to be so.

But while I considered the mother unfortunate in what had happened to the child she loved, I realized that as a society, the young man and his accordion were signs of wealth. As a nation, we are long past the point where a person who was unable to meaningfully contribute to their community would be considered a serious liability to the collective. Sure, he may have been a disaster to his mother's prospects for a comfortable retirement (in a few different ways) but for the rest of us, he was simply something between a curiosity and an inconvenience. Of course, this has likely been true for some time. Perhaps in the middle ages, he would have been a village idiot, cared for by the rest of the community out of obligation, pity or some mixture of them.

In the modern United States, however, it seems less true than perhaps it should. People begrudge the disabled any number of minor accommodations. Personally, I didn't have to listen to the young man play the accordion long enough for my patience to wear thin. Still, I'm happy that I'm not a neighbor.

A Word From Our Sponsors...

Is advertising coming to Netflix? It's been a point of speculation over the past few days, it seems. The streaming service didn't add as many new subscribers as Wall Street analysts estimated it would, and this has people debating what, if anything, Netflix should be doing in the name of "growth." (Otherwise known as taking in more money to pass along to investors.)

While I certainly understand the business case for creating an advertising-supported service tier, in order to give people an entry point into the service that doesn't cost as much as a subscription-only model, there is another wrinkle, which while I'm sure that Netflix' executives are mulling over, hasn't really made it into the media articles: Who would be advertising?

For all that advertising receives a bad rap, it's not that advertising is bad, per se. But a lot of it is low-quality. What prompted me to finally install an ad blocker on Firefox were advertisements that were in some cases nonsensical, and in others, actively bothersome. A couple of weeks ago, I was out having dinner with friends, and there were televisions going in the restaurant. I learned that competitive Tag was a thing, and that while there is apparently enough of a market to televise it, it doesn't command particularly high advertising rates. So there were a lot of commercials for cheap products and featuring former celebrities that I hadn't heard anything from in decades. And while one can make the case that these aren't the sort of outfits that would be able to afford to advertise on an upper-tier platform like Netflix, there are a couple of counter arguments: If the point behind creating a less (comparatively) expensive tier is to entice people to sign up for the service without needing to pony up as much money, is there an expectation that advertisers are always going to roll out expensive, high-quality advertising to reach them? Also, the more places there are to advertise, the less money any one of them is going to be able to command. While the understanding is currently that advertisers are chasing Netflix, will there be advertising-supported service tiers that wind up chasing advertisers? The web is already full of poor-quality, misleading and oddly sexualized advertising, tacked on to the bottoms of webpages, because these are the outfits that are willing to pay to be presented there. And on some platforms, advertising rates are low enough that fraudsters can afford to troll for marks. As advertising proliferates, and prices drop, the quality and relevance of advertising declines with it.

And I suspect that Netflix is considering that, if only because once advertising is a part of the picture, it often becomes seen as part of the offering. Bad advertising can lower perceptions of the service as a whole. And while that's unlikely to be a near-term phenomenon (so Wall Street is unlikely to care), for people who need to take a longer-term view, it's worth thinking about.

Running Dry

You let the rest of your life demand your attention for a time, and the next thing you know, it's been a week since the last posting. This is how blogs die, I suppose. But not this one; at least, not just yet, anyway.

Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn has seen a large number of posts that concern themselves with the war between Russia and Ukraine. The one that caught my attention, however was from a Palestinian, who accused "the West" of having a double standard in their attention to the plight of the Ukrainians, while they ignored the situation on the ground in Gaza. Perhaps the poster was referring to the governments of the collection of nations generally known as "the West," or perhaps given the general tenor of public opinion, he was speaking of people more broadly. But in any event, it wasn't a new criticism. Once refugees started fleeing to nations to the west, writers started pointing out that the warm welcomes and open expressions of concern for their well-being were in stark contrast to the cold shoulders that many refuge-seekers from the Middle East, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were receiving.

And it's valid to point that out. It's perfectly reasonable to say that Palestinians are worthy of the same concern for their well-being as Ukrainians. There's nothing wrong with stating that African migrants deserve the same warm welcome as Slavic migrants. The question becomes whether there is something wrong with the preferences that result in the differences in outcomes. While part of the delta is, quite likely, the belief that once things settle down in Ukraine, one way or another, most of refugees will likely return to their homes, or close to them, I suspect that European attitudes towards Russia, and President Putin personally, also have a lot do to with it.

The question becomes, then, should those factors have anything to do with it? Actually, though, that really isn't the question. The real question is: How does anyone stop those factors, or any others, from having anything, or everything, to do with it? Even when compassion has no visible costs, it's almost never available in unlimited amounts. By this point, that much is more or less a given. So people dole it out in measures based on who they want to have it. As as much as this leaves those who don't receive as much of the world's compassion and care as they need (or any at all, for that matter) out in the cold, this is a general fact of human nature. The problem to be solved here is not the distribution of attention. It's the amount of attention. How humanity actually gets to a post-scarcity attention economy is beyond me. But it's something worth looking into.

Evaluated

I've never read any of Brandon Sanderson's novels. But, from the handful of people I've met who have read his work, they're pretty good. Which may explain why, when the author launched a Kickstarter campaign to release four new books a little over a week ago, it took off. As I write this, the campaign has raised more than $26,000,000. It's goal was to reach just $1,000,000.

As is the case with such things, there is always someone who begrudges another their good fortune. Consider the following passage from a Slate article about the response to the campaign:

Since Sanderson’s Kickstarter made headlines, there’s been, unsurprisingly, some grousing on social media about whether such an already commercially successful author needs that kind of money. “Today is a really good day to support your favorite author who hasn’t made $18M in the last few days,” tweeted the fantasy novelist Natania Barron. Others have been frustrated that it’s a straight white Mormon man benefitting from this largesse: “There is so much excellent diverse SFF out there,” tweeted the critic Alex Brown, “and y’all are intent on giving that man millions of dollars.”

How Angry Should Other Writers Be About Brandon Sanderson’s $22 Million Kickstarter?

(I'll come back to that title later.)

Complaining about other people being successful is never a good look. But complaining about how people choose to spend their own money is a particularly poor look. And it's part of a problem that has dogged the Black community in the United States.

It's not very far off base to say that for a number of Black people in the United States, the valuation given to them by the broader culture is unsatisfactory. And, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with that understanding. But it's a primarily personal judgment, just as value is. That a person feels undervalued can be an absolutely true statement. But that a person is not being given the value that they deserve is a completely different matter, because as with any number of other human ideas, personal value is not objective.

In this sense, complaining about the degree to which people value the work of others is to say that their preferences are incorrect. And that's a really hard sell, especially when dealing with something like Science Fiction and Fantasy, given how personal preference can be. It's one thing to berate a group of people over having pledged millions of dollars for a Kickstarter campaign, but that group of people is made up of individuals who each like Mr. Sanderson's work for their own reasons. Those reasons may not be particularly well thought out, but such is the way of things. "This makes me feel good," is as valid a reason as any other.

Being angry about Mr. Sanderson's success is about as useful as being angry at a storm for the inconsistency of it its effects. Even if it could be definitively shown to be due to the pernicious effects of racism in the United States, that alone won't change the game into one that's less winner (or first mover) takes all. And won't make valuations into an inherently mathematical calculation that only works on the factors that cultural critics think it should.

Vote Yellow

In a time of negative partisanship, to be a Liberal American is to never lend any credence to the words of Conservatives. Likewise, to be Conservative American is to never believe that Liberals have anything approaching good intent.

So is the fact that my attitude towards partisanship may be charitably described as "a pox on both your houses" what lands me in the "Independent" camp? Although I suppose that the "Independent" label doesn't really apply to me, given my voting behavior. While the expanding scale of political space means that I perceive both parties as moving steadily away from me, the apparent motion of the Republicans has been farther and faster than that of the Democrats. And as someone who is committed to voting in pretty much every election for which I am eligible, that means that I tend to vote for Democratic candidates.

I would prefer to vote for "third" parties, and I do, when the opportunity presents itself, but I do have standards; this rules out votes for people like "Mike the Mover" and "Goodspaceguy." (And yes, these are real people.) Although Goodspaceguy, even with his mercurial partisan alignment, has done fairly well for himself from time to time (once breaking 15% of the overall vote for County Executive), I tend to regard him as a bit too, well... out there, for my tastes. In any event, given the generally hopeless nature of running outside of the Democratic/Republican Party duopoly, candidates that come across as both serious and mentally balanced can occasionally be hard to come by; they aren't present in all races. And while I don't have anything against Republicans broadly, Donald Trump is one of the few politicians that I've anything approaching an active dislike for; accordingly, an endorsement from him is a hard "no" in my book. So at this point, it's impossible for me to describe myself as a "swing voter;" the chasm between the parties is too broad for me to Tarzan my way from one side of it to the other.

And, to be honest, it's made me rethink my commitment to voting in every election on more than one occasion. Which is a shame, really. The most basic act of participating in participatory government shouldn't feel like that much of a chore.

Left Turn Only

While [the Tyler Perry, Madea cinematic universe] does serve an audience, I don't know if it's taking that audience or pushing that audience in the direction that I need that audience to go in as a means of like, you know, affirming and supporting my humanity.
[...]
But again, Tyler Perry's not interested, I would hate to say, in Tre'vell Anderson's humanity...
Tre'vell Anderson
'A Madea Homecoming' isn't complicated, but our feelings about Tyler Perry are
Pop Culture Happy Hour

And this raises an interesting question. Why should Tyler Perry's Madea movies take or push an audience in a direction that suits Tre'vell Anderson's needs? Why should Tyler Perry be interested in Tre'vell Anderson's "humanity?"

To a degree, it was a shame that the podcast was intended to address both Tyler Perry, and his new movie, "A Madea Homecoming," because the three panelists could have spent the entire runtime talking about Mr. Perry, and maybe that would have given them room to discuss more openly an undercurrent that ran through their dialog.

In addition to Tre'vell Anderson indicting Mr. Perry for a perceived lack of interest in "Tre'vell Anderson's humanity," there was also criticism of Mr. Perry for being the sole writer of his scripts. And there were two aspects to this. Tre'vell Anderson initially criticized Mr. Perry for the fact that his one-man script-writing leads to impoverished writing. And this makes sense. As Anderson concedes, Mr. Perry is "writing what he knows," one of the common pieces of advice given to writers. And the Black community in the United States (to the degree that it can even be characterized as a single community) is large enough and diverse enough that no one person can know all of it well enough to speak to it in writing. Postcast host Aisha Harris, on the other hand, is critical of Mr. Perry writing his movies by himself because it doesn't give other Black writers the chance to write his movies. She accuses him of "cutting a lot of Black people, Black writers out of a writer's room they could be in."

Despite Tre'vell Anderson basically saying that Tyler Perry should be free to do what he wants to do since other people can take on the things that Mr. Perry doesn't want to do, and the understanding that there is an audience for his movies, which they serve quite well, the podcast comes across as a complaint that Mr. Perry isn't doing more to bring the socially-conservative elements of the Black community that enjoy his work into the more liberal, or even progressive, space occupied by the average National Public Radio listener or staffer.

But it never addresses why that should be. It's simply taken for granted that Mr. Perry has these responsibilities, to the "queer, nonbinary trans" segment of the Black community or to Black comedy writers that he's not fulfilling, and that's bad, because now that he's built a media brand and quite a bit of influence for himself, he has a responsibility to use those things to make certain other people's lives better. And while I understand the impulse, I don't think that it should be taken for granted. But, of course, that's because I'm not really in the National Public Radio demographic. So the assumptions that underlie it don't automatically strike me as obvious.

One of the assumptions that I think is out there is the idea that people are really quite flexible, when it comes to media; both in producing it and in experiencing it. So it should be easy for someone like Tyler Perry, who has always been the writer of his work, to bring on a writers' room of diverse people and cede some level of control over the presentation of his vision to them. Likewise, the audience for Mr. Perry's "faith-adjacent, Southern, old-school Black culture" are really an audience for Mr. Perry himself, and as such, he can lead them in a different direction, one more cosmopolitan, secular and diverse, and they will simply follow, learning to enjoy whatever he places in front of them without defecting to find something that is more to their initial tastes. I don't know that I buy into that assumption, and so maybe it's worth breaking it down, to see what it's made of.

Discounted

In other words, given that it's generally understood that news media is biased towards reporting conflict because the high emotional content and salience is likely to result in higher sales/advertising revenue, why has the general public not "priced this in" (as they say in finance) to their understanding.

The BBC recently ran a short video piece from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida. The description opens with "US conservatives are unsurprisingly united in their criticism of Joe Biden's foreign policy." Well, if it's so unsurprising, doesn't that mean that it isn't news?

But more to the point of this post, this constant reporting of partisan criticisms of one side or the other is one of the things that contributes to a sense that the nation is more divided than many experts believe that it genuinely is. But given that news outlets are constantly looking for conflicts to cover, I'm curious as to why the understanding that conflicts are overreported appears to be so rare.