#or just people who just don’t think maxim was justified period

[cto10121]

Finished re-reading Rebecca and I have Observations(tm)

It’s so obvious upon rereading that Beatrice doesn’t like Rebecca, lol. She never says anything positive about her other than objective facts, forgets that Gran liked Rebecca, and has uncharacteristic patience with the narrator.

Maxim keeping cool while Favell brags about being Rebecca’s lover but losing it when Favell merely insinuates the narrator finding a sympathetic “arm” with Frank is so revealing.

Also, the fact that it took Maxim so long (literally years) to confront Rebecca about her infidelities—practically only doing it when she took lovers at the boathouse in Manderley—says a lot. Maxim really did not give two shits about her.

Mrs. Danvers practically raising Rebecca (per Favell) and being with her from when Rebecca was at least 12-years-old really changed my perspective on their relationship. Less of a flying monkey to a narcissist and more of a mother/companion figure. The way she worried about Rebecca not returning home and staying up was especially mother-like. On the other hand, we don’t quite know how old Danvers is compared to Rebecca. It could be a case of younger servant / older madam, but Danvers does read as older by a lot.

Otoh, you could make a case that Danvers/Rebecca is a parallel to The Narrator/Maxim, both with servant/master overtones. The narrator does liken her love for Maxim as that of a schoolboy over an upper form and that Maxim is “father and brother and everything” to her. Du Maurier may be depicting (eroticized?) class dynamics.

Rebecca’s infidelity is made into such a big deal (‘30s after all) but Du Maurier definitely wrote abusive signs: Rebecca flogging a dead horse with a whip, her threatening to send Ben to an asylum, her mocking the servants behind their back chief among them. She reads as a female Iago—an excellent liar and manipulator expert at masking and mirroring people. It makes all the Rebecca defenders look really obstuse

The narrator believes that Colonel Julyan knows the truth, but I don’t see how he would. Rebecca committing suicide after a cancer diagnosis would be in character—Mrs. Danvers said that Rebecca had a horror of sickness and would have wanted to be quick about it. He may have had his suspicions aroused when Maxim punched Favell, but honestly, who wouldn’t? Either way, Julyan opted to protect Maxim. It also makes that awful Beauman sequel about his knowing and liking Rebecca all the more stupid.

Surprise, surprise, but I felt for Mrs. Danvers and even Favell at parts, particularly Mrs. Danvers crying and Favell shaken after learning about Rebecca’s diagnosis. But it’s clear they are awful people and so of course they’d like her, lol. It’s telegraphed that Mrs. Danvers would have been 100% okay with the narrator if the narrator had been another Rebecca clone and/or wasn’t such a pushover. Curiously enough Favell was still hopeful to get Maxim even after the cancer revelation…but we never learn how.

On Maxim’s love for/not love for the narrator: The narrator really is unreliable in the sense that everything is colored by her insecurity and her crippling shyness. She takes everything personally—every slight lands like a blow to a youth and all that. How much is Maxim truly being coldly callous—and how much is he genuinely panicked and triggered by the memories of Rebecca’s abuse?

I think a good example of the above is the narrator feeling slighted that Maxim set her up in the renovated east wing suite with the rose garden (usually for bachelor guests) when the original marital suite (the “best” and most beautiful rooms per Danvers) were in the west wing with the sea…only for Maxim to come in and cheerfully say he always loved the east wing suite with the rose garden and it was a shame that it was wasted as a guest room. Homeboy wanted his new bride to be in the rooms he loved and not the ones he was forced to share with Rebecca…aw

And then there is Maxim easily confessing the truth to the narrator and admitting he almost confessed earlier. Weirdly enough, I do believe him—but what a horrible risk! What if she turned against him, feared him, ceased to love him? Denounce him? Maxim knew her so little before they married, and yet he didn’t seem to fear any of these things. Curiously enough, he doesn’t even ask the narrator to help him, either directly or indirectly, and even seemed resigned to his fate. Was he that entitled, to take it all for granted, that stupid…that in love?

Usually I dislike typically the (typically) Christian theme of innocence/naïveté>>>>wordliness/just not being a clueless idiot. I think it works better here though as a basic but non-abusive>>>>beautiful but abusive type type of thematic messaging. Both the narrator and Maxim struggle to move on past their trauma, for want of a better word (the narrator as an orphan under that awful degrading Mrs. Van Hopper and Maxim with all the shit Rebecca put him through). To a certain extent they’ve internalized these survival instincts as mere habit. The narrator’s crippling insecurities follow her as a wife and Maxim doesn’t even think to change Manderley from Rebecca’s influence, renovating only the east wing suite. It took Rebecca returning, so to speak, for them to face their hang-ups squarely. The narrator realized just how much her insecurities have blinded her to the truth and made her unhappy and Maxim gained a true ally.

[purplesurveys]

1167

surveys by emptyliketheocean

Brand of cigarettes you smoke? I don’t smoke cigarettes, or at least I never buy my own packs.

Should you be trusted with a person's life? Idk, that’s for them to decide.

How's your life in general? I lost two relatives from Covid this week alone. So, not very dandy. Still in shock. Waiting for it to all finally crash down so I can grieve and mourn properly. Scared of more losses and hoping there aren’t any more to come.

Have you ever put lipstick on anything besides lips? I don’t wear makeup, but when my friends have put some on me in the past there were a couple of times they dabbed lipsticks on my cheeks.

Have you ever picked a fight you knew you would lose? Metaphorically speaking, yeah. I don’t get into physical fights.

What's something you think is crazy about the world? The concept of centibillionaires and the fact that there are multiple ones who exist.

What do you think about religion? I think the only upside to it is how it has helped save lives for some and how it serves as a guide for others to spread good in the world. Like if your religion has given you purpose and strength, that’s great. But ultimately, I’m not a fan and I most definitely don’t think religion is necessary to be a kind person. In fact, I think it works the opposite...most of the homophobes, misogynists, pro-lifers, and sexists I know are from the Christian faith. Cringe.

What about when religion causes violence? Well I definitely have a bone to pick with this lol. The only reason the Philippines is predominantly Catholic today is precisely that when the Spanish arrived, they used violence to forcingly convert Filipinos - who were then living in peace with their own culture, government, and religion system - to Christianity. And now we’re ‘celebrating’ 500 years of Christianity in the country this year, which was always so off to me because why are we celebrating colonization lol????????????? But anyway, yeah, that is another issue I have with religion. I want nothing to do with it.

What color is one of your hats? I have an off-white summer hat but I have literally never used it in public because it’s huge and it’s 100% going to draw attention.

How do you feel? My shoulders are sore and I’m feeling slightly irritated because of them. I’m also starting to get a bit hungry.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for laughing? A few times.

Something that makes you smile: Free food.

What do you think about surveys with lyrics as the title? Surveys with random lyrics usually end up being the ones with interesting questions, so I actually am more likely to check it out.

Do you have any clothes with small holes in them? Maybe one or two.

Do you think the way you live is really okay? I think I am already quite fortunate with what I have considering what others don’t, so it’s definitely been a while since I have complained about anything during this whole Covid situation, living-situation-wise. Even though we’ve lost a few things, like having to sell one of our cars and with my mom being retrenched, we still get by and have a roof over our heads with working water and electricity and a stocked pantry; and I make enough money to hand a portion of it to my parents twice a month and still treat myself with things I want. There is nothing to bitch about.

Do you know anyone other than a cop who has ever owned a cop car? No.

Have you ever felt fire? No, but electricity, yes. I’ve been shocked before but that was also my own fault lol.

Have you ever seen a person light themselves on fire? Jesus no.

Have you ever used crutches when you didn't need them? Yes. I used to horse around with Katreen’s crutches when she injured her legs in 3rd grade, when she wasn’t using them.

If you had 15 beers you would be: Dead.

Are you as bored as I am? No, I’m good.

Why are you taking this survey? I feel like it.

What would you say if a person asked you why your face was so messed up? “How do you want me to react?” Easiest way to shut a person up and passive aggressively tell them to watch what they say.

What would you do if your first love asked you back out? Be very confused and ask why the sudden decision.

What's your home life like? It’s very routine, due to having to stay at home. I work a 9–6 on weekdays, follow that up with dinner, and use a few hours to scroll through social media until it’s time to sleep. Then on weekends I use the free time to recharge by taking surveys and watch videos of whoever and whatever I’m interested in at the moment. Just waiting for all of this to blow over so I can finally do the things I’m meant to be doing.

Do you have a talent that you don't do anything with? I don’t write a lot for myself these days. I do write frequently for work, which is great - press releases, event scripts, all your PR essentials - but I don’t get stimulated enough since everything is written in the same tone. I really should pick up a notebook and pen soon...

Do you know anyone that is a lesbian? Yes. Not that she’s in my life anymore.

What do you think about your mom? I think she tries her best. But I wish she were more emotionally in touch. And that she starts being politically correct.

What do you think about your dad? He’s worked hard and continues to, and I appreciate all his efforts; and I can’t wait to be able to buy him all the things he wants.

Which parent do you respect the most? Who do you think? Hahahaha.

Is there anything someone could lie to you about that you couldn't forgive? I suppose, like cheating.

--

Who do you love unconditionally? My two best friends.

Pick an element. Oooookay? Zirconium.

Have you ever wasted a great amount of time and felt horrible about it? It always feels that way on weekends these days because there’s only so much that can be done while stuck at home because of Covid. But I do try to justify it by telling myself I already work too hard during weekdays so it’s ok to bum around at home and do nothing, because using the time to recharge is still productive. 

What is something that's been said about you that isn't true? My mom has said a lot of hurtful things directed towards me that I internalized for a very long time, but I’ve since gained the strength to no longer let those words get to me.

Who do you want with you when you're scared? Anyone who can be calm while I’m not.

Know any bands that not many people have heard of? Many of the punk bands I listen to are virtually unknown on this side of the planet.

Do you have any advice for people in general? Don’t be racist.

What's something you like to do in the summer? Complain about the heat.

What's something you like to do in the winter? We don’t get winter here, but I’ve always thought I would love snow if I ever saw it, and that I would probably make a lot of snow angels and play snowball fights.

What do you think about marijuana? I don’t have a strong opinion on it as it’s still a very taboo topic where I’m from and I’ve also been lacking on research. I do know people who use it for recreational purposes and I’ve never been against that.

Do you wish anyone death? Just politicians.

Have you ever felt like you weren't getting anywhere with a person? Yes, it felt that way for a long time. I just was too afraid of confrontation to do anything about it.

What do you feel for the person you first fell in love with? Resentment and a whole lot of nothing.

Where are you? I’m in my bedroom.

Are you waiting for something? Hmm, not necessarily.

Who is someone you just think has a hole in their brain? People who still think Covid is a hoax.

A candy you like? Gummy anything.

Does any part of your body hurt at the moment? My shoulders and neck, hence the neck pillow I’ve since put on while taking this.

Explain how you got the last bruise you had. I honestly have no clue. I currently have a big black circle on my right thigh that just suddenly showed up, and I can’t recall a time I must’ve hit it somewhere.

Are you tired? A little bit because I got up as soon as I woke up, but I wanted to maximize my free time this Sunday before another work week starts. Last Friday would be our last non-working holiday in a while and we’re not getting another one until August. :(

Explain how you got a scar you have. A distant cousin hurled a glass jar towards me when I was 3, during a family reunion. He initially went for my eye because I guess he wanted to blind me, but he missed and ended up hitting my eyebrow instead. My mom has since banned him from talking to me ever since, and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him since the incident.

Have you ever owned anything illegal? Illegal copies of movies I’ve torrented, sure.

What do you dream about? The most random scenarios. I’ll get the occasional nightmare, but those only happen when I’m going through a period of depression.

Do you ever daydream? Not anymore these days.

How do you feel about vegetarians? I don’t really think anything of them. There are days I’ll particularly feel for them because there aren’t a lot of restaurants with good vegetarian options where I live, though.

A fruit you like: Avocado, in very limited options.

Have you ever seen a person eat a bug? Only bugs that were already prepared a certain way and meant to be eaten; but I’ve never seen a person that just picked up a bug off the ground and went straight to chewing. I imagine I would freak out and gag.

Something you worry about too much: How much is in my bank account.

How do you feel about smoking? I hate how the smell clings to your clothes and all your things when you’ve been smoking or when you’ve been around people who smoke. I also wince when people pose with their cigarettes just to look badass and cool; but as someone who’s since picked up vaping as a habit, my once-intense hatred for smoking and smokers has since changed lol.

If you had to move out of state, where would you go? I would move to a big city. Somewhere noisier and with a lot of lights and foot traffic and general activity.

What is your favorite vampire-related movie? The Twilight Saga hahahahahaha

Is there a person you keep coming back to? My best friends, I guess?

If you're listening to music...Give me a lyric from the song you're listening to. I’m not listening to anything.

[ingek73]

The Simon CASE: Throw Your Brother Under The Bus!

By Kristine Welby June 16, 2020 19 Comments

The Simon Case

Pool/Samir Hussein

The Simon CASE: Simon Says…Throw Your Brother Under The Bus!

“When Someone betrays you, it is a reflection of their character not yours.”

Last summer as Harry and Meghan were being slammed by the press literally for every breath they took, came word that they had flown to France on a private jet. They were dubbed hypocrites for taking a private jet after talking about the environment. Harry never told anyone not to fly, and Meghan never spoke about the environment. But they were both excoriated in the press and on social media. Of course, no fake outrage would be complete without fake pundits on various talk shows lambasting Harry and Meghan for the destruction of the environment.

When it was revealed that Sir Elton John had paid for the flight and paid to offset the carbon footprint, the conversation switched to “debunking the myth” of carbon offsets. Harry and Meghan were declared eco-hypocrites, despite the fact that William, in his efforts to outdo Harry, has spoken of the environment as much as Harry, and had even flown by private jet to Davos climate change forum. His attendance seemed nothing but grandstanding, since all he did was interview Sir David Attenborough. An interview which could have been done remotely, since environmental degradation is such a concern for him. This might sound trivial, but underscores the fundamental unfairness of the media’s attitude towards Harry. There is no shortage of perceived “hypocrisy” if one is determined to find it. But I guess it depends on where said hypocrisy needs to be found.

There was also the fact that William and his family had only just returned from their vacation on an exclusive private island, accessible only by private jet. And if that were not enough, we had the Queen’s favorite son flying hither and yon in private jets, in the midst of renewed outcry about his connection to convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew’s alleged sexual abuse of a trafficked minor. No private jet outrage there. Instead, when they were not attempting to equate Prince Andrew’s amoral actions to Harry and Meghan flying by private jet, they were ignoring Prince Andrew in favor of berating Harry and Meghan.

Then, just as it seemed the squall was reduced to a drizzle, along came pictures of the Cambridge clan boarding a commercial flight to Balmoral. £73 flight they declared, with pictures of the Cambridge family cosplaying ‘regular’ folks, with father and children carrying their own bags. It was a double whammy! William and Kate were not only heralded as frugal but of course environmentally conscious for flying commercial. That of course ignores the fact that Meghan and Harry’s personal travel is always privately funded and Sir Elton had paid for their trip; you can’t get more frugal than free.

Rebecca English tweet

“Stunt, stunt, stunt,” cried the people. “Obvious,” said the blue check.

William and Kate flight stunt

And it was, but wait there’s more. In the fanfare of the tabloids erecting a statue in honor of William the conqueror of duffel bags, came word from a real reporter with the Scotsman – There were two empty jets. The now defunct airline, Flybe had flown two empty planes, 500 hundred miles so they would be sure to have a commercial jet befitting the man waiting for his father and grandmother to pass…on the scepter. If Harry and Meghan’s small private jet was going to destroy the planet, then two empty commercial jets should spell the end of our galaxy. Harry clarified that flying private was for security reasons, which also apply to the rest of the royal family. Remember, this was not long after two men went to prison for plotting to kill Harry, because according to them, he was a “race traitor”, not to talk about the threats to his wife.

Of course, the people who seem to embrace their role as mouthpiece for KP, came out. Fully recovered from directing their fake outrage at Harry and Meghan taking a private jet, they were ready to switch to fake outrage in defense of William and his obvious stunt.

Emily Andrews and Chris Ship flight pr stunt

As with the jet stunt, we saw the denials for what they were, “fake”.

And then nearly a year later, this happened. An article about Simon Case of Kensington Palace who is now off to support the non-elected ruler of Britain – Dominic Cummings.

The Spectator’s tweet of the article about his departure proudly proclaimed:

“Boris’s new man in No. 10 was behind Will and Kate’s budget flight to Balmoral – when Harry and Meghan were criticised for flying by private jet says Camilla Tominey”

Simon behind Will and Kate’s budget flight

What the tweet should have said was: “It was a stunt.”

And a poorly thought out and executed stunt. By any objective measure, it was a failure. People immediately knew it was a stunt, and treated it with the ridicule it deserved. It did not affect change, except with the people desperate for any excuse to think William and Kate worthy of their privileged position. For those of us who think privilege should be earned not gifted, we saw William as a backstabbing, entitled, duplicitous craven bully. In the middle of a propaganda campaign against his brother and (post-partum) sister-in-law, William decided (or agreed) that it would be an excellent idea to do that, to attempt to embiggen himself.

If, as KP’s press minions originally claimed, the flight had been arranged months in advance, why did Flybe have to scramble( moving empty jets hundreds of miles) at the last minute to position a Flybe-branded plane on a route that was operated by their codeshare partner Loganair (eastern airways) in order to “maximize press coverage for the airline”? Was there a prior expectation that their royal passengers will be pictured on the flight and hence the need to “maximize press coverage”? Had the flights been arranged far in advance as the press mouthpieces insisted it was, the airline could have positioned the planes without costing themselves money by way of 2 EMPTY flights. And why is Camilla Tominey now making special mention of Case’s role in that fiasco? Was he in his role, KP’s reservation specialist? If not normally, why did he take interest in that particular flight?

We do know that the flights arrangements were made on the eve of their departure per the Scotsman. A flight that was obviously positioned to portray William and Kate as “better” and more “responsible” than Harry and Meghan. And why are we now receiving confirmation of what we suspected from the beginning? Is it a coincidence, that revised versions of old rumors (tights-gate, private jet, KP leak) are being trotted out now? Revisions we suspect are closer to, (but still not) the truth. All these revisions still manage to position William and Kate as the victims. Apparently, Kate was justified in claiming to have a temper tantrum because the bride got the final say for her own wedding party; or that the backstabbing of Harry and Meghan via media propaganda was engineered by someone else and William and Kate merely went along? I don’t know why they think either proposition makes them look good.

If Simon Case was the ‘mastermind’ behind the media war waged by the future-future King against his brother and sister-in-law, then Mr. Case is an unfeeling, amoral manipulator. After all it was under his watch that the (pregnant) Duchess of Sussex was subjected to a coordinated campaign of harassment by the British Media. It was under his watch, that Tim Shipman of the times wrote in his famous article, excerpts below.

“This sense of embattlement has been entrenched by William’s decision to reach out to senior figures in the media as he prepares for kingship and by the apparent decision of those same newspapers to side with the palace over Meghan and Harry by peddling the most negative coverage of the duchess’s relationship with her father, Thomas Markle. “Harry sees that as part of the headwinds against him,” a friend said.”

It is Case who was credited with encouraging William to attempt to sideline Harry and his popular wife, which led to rumors of exiling them to Africa.

“…the Duke of Cambridge has been encouraged by his private secretary, Simon Case, who says he believed that a period of separation between the two brothers would help them to define themselves better and also improve relations between them.”

“In some ways it would suit William to get his brother out of the country for a few years and Meghan as far away as possible,” said one friend of the brothers.

Sending the couple to Canada was “mooted, then booted” given that Meghan spent seven years living there and for some it was “too close to the US” and the inevitable tabloid magazine coverage that would ensue. Making Harry governor-general of Australia was discussed and dismissed. The problems were obvious. “The trouble is that you effectively set them up as king and queen of a whole separate country,” according to one source. “And 24-hour media means that Australia is not as far away as it used to be.”

Here we are today, Harry and Meghan have stepped down as working royals, and moved to the United States of America, home to the media capital of the world. The public knew the economy plane trip was a stunt. We knew the leaks were coming from inside the Palace. No one but trolls believed the tights (or is it skirt length?) story. William will be remembered as a twat who on a state visit told the world that the media was hyping up COVID-19, even though at the time, hundreds were dying daily. Yet the apparent architect of the clusterf*ck, Simon Case, is credited with turning William into a statesman(yes) and it was his “success” at KP that lead Britain’s bumbling prime minister to invite him back to No. 10 Downing St.

As it were, the latest Spectator article only seeks to confirm what every rational and logically thinking person suspected was a calculated move by William’s court to hurt is brother. One has to wonder when all these facts became known to Camilla Tominey. Also is she the only reporter who is privy to these facts? Why were some in the royal rota adamant that flight arrangements were made far in advance? Did they question the seeming improbable coincidence(ahem) of the Cambridges and their brood being pictured boarding a domestic flight, whose exact price(£73) they seemed to know even after the fact? Or were they just willing to give William & Kate the benefit of the doubt, which they never extend to Harry and Meghan? So many questions still to be answered. If I were a betting woman, I will bet my last penny that there are more Cases to be unveiled. Stay tuned.

[princess-of-france]

i would love to hear abt your rococo lll

Oh my gosh, you lovely human, settle in. This production is my Ultimate Theater Pipe Dream and I apologize in advance for how little chill I’m going to have as I explain it. 

Are you ready? 

I want to start with my standard disclaimer: I am a theater artist, not a literary critic or a historian. When I’m directing a play, I extract fragments of lit crit and historical fact as I need them and leave the rest on the buffet line. This LLL in particular requires me to play fast and loose with history, so be prepared for a truckload of anachronisms. They make the vision work!

So, with that…

The sad Catch-22 of my Rococo LLL is that no theater will ever put it up:  a smaller, indie, risk-taking theater wouldn’t be able to afford the astronomical production costs of casting the 20 actors I need, to say nothing of building opulent sets and period-accurate costumes that imitate the royal courts of the late 18th century; conversely, a large, well-funded, regional theater wouldn’t be able to justify funding a 2.5-hour Shakespeare retelling that turns one of his most sparkling comedies into a dark, violent allegory about the French Revolution and casts young, privileged, light-skinned European elites as the tragic heroes brought low by proletariat Jacobean reform. Even as I type these words, I realize how irresponsible an investment that would be. My Rococo LLL is not the kind of classical theater we need in America right now. It is retrograde in terms of diversity, equity, accessibility, and social justice. It probably says something terrible about me that I even dreamt it up in the first place.

And yet.

I want to direct this production so badly it feels like I’ve swallowed a piece of the sun. If I had all the proper resources (time, money, venue, artists, designers, marketing, etc.), I would do it tomorrow. It’s my baby.

Here’s a blurb that kind of nutshells it all together:

July 1789. King Charles VI of Navarre has died, leaving his son, young Ferdinand III, to take the throne. On a tide of Enlightenment idealism, King Ferdinand commissions his three best friends to join him for a period of ascetic study at the court of Navarre. The rules are simple: no luxuries, no alcohol, and no women. For three long years.

The boys’ oath is immediately put to the test when four young ladies arrive in Navarre on a diplomatic mission from Versailles. Led by the spirited Duchess d’Albret, the Frenchwomen and their mile-high coiffures prove irresistible to the King and his companions. With the help of a motley band of scholars and servants, they set out to woo the Duchess and her friends. But when sober news arrives from Paris, will young love be enough to rewrite history?

Set against the glittering backdrop of the last golden days of the ancien regime, this bold reimagining of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy invites us to look at the most famous revolution in Western history through the eyes of the young elites who learned the truth about privilege just a moment too late.

Of all the radical things I want to do with this production, the thing that would probably cause the most controversy (and earn me a reputation for being a narcissistic, pessimistic, Shakespeare-desecrating hack) is my addition of a prologue set in Paris in June 1793. I could try to sum it up here, but honestly I think it would be a lot more effective and comprehensive just to post the excerpt from my script:

…etc.

So basically, half my audience will vomit due to the unexpected onslaught of blood, gore, and violence…and the other half will vomit from the sheer anti-progressivism of the show’s politics. And I don’t blame anyone who finds fault with this production concept. On a political level, I find fault with it. Arguably the last thing our society needs right now is a Shakespeare production that paints young, pale, overprivileged trust fund babies as the poor, helpless victims of a liberal-led revolution for social equality. 

But at the same time, I can’t help but think that the entire point of Love’s Labour’s Lost is to make us look hard at our own privilege and ego, and weigh those things that seem sooo valuable against the true gifts of love, empathy, friendship, generosity, and kindness. 

“This is not generous, not gentle, not humble!” Holofernes cries as the Crazy Eight—high on adrenaline and their own cruel wit—jeer him off the stage during his performance as Judas Maccabeus in 5.2. More than any other, this moment epitomizes the value of setting LLL in a sex-charged, champagne-fueled, pastry-laden, cream-filled, lace-drenched, satin-covered, feather-topped, Rococo landscape. There’s no way in hell the audience is meant to sympathize with the insult-flinging prep school Kens and Barbies when they humiliate Holofernes to the point of tears. Shakespeare is way too smart for that. In the final whimsical moments before the messenger Marcadé comes onstage, laden with the news that is going to change the entire genre of the play, the Bard turns a critical spotlight on the young people we’ve been rooting for since Act One, Scene One and invites us to view them—for the first time, really—through the lens of the hardworking, lesser-privileged plebs of Navarre. The portrait is revolting. However witty, cultured, and elegant the courtiers might seem, they clearly have a lot more homework to do. Marcadé’s arrival a few short lines later is the final test of their youthful ego. Is being clever worth the price of experiencing love? Is love worth the price of responsibility? Is she brave enough to admit that she’s scared to take up the mantle? Is he brave enough to give up the one person who matters for the sake of the people he once mocked, the people he now must lead?

I don’t believe the Navarre Nerds and Les Filles have survived the centuries because they end the play as sharp-tongued, entitled, and self-absorbed as they behave at the start. We wouldn’t still be making and remaking this play if the protagonists were so static. I think the young people of LLL resonate with us—or, at least, they resonate with me—because in the course of Shakespeare’s plotless little play they grow up right before our eyes. King Ferdinand learns that he can’t bury his head in his books and ignore the responsibility of ruling when he watches the love of his life choose duty to her country over the desires of her own heart. The Princess learns that the cost of being the cleverest person is human connection when she finds herself laughing alongside Ferdinand at the antics of the Nine Worthies and somehow feels happier than she ever did when she was mocking him into the earth. Berowne learns that love wins every argument: against wit, against intellect, against bachelorhood, against willpower itself. Rosaline learns that love is strength, not weakness, and that she is stronger when she allows herself to feel. Dumaine learns that love demands vulnerability. Katherine learns that love is not a game. Longaville learns that love thrives on honesty. Maria learns that love takes courage. When the Crazy Eight say their heartbreaking goodbyes at the end of 5.2, they no longer care about sounding smart or superior; in fact, they speak against their own intelligence. The erudite Ferdinand trips over his words, the cynical Berowne invokes romantic idealism, the boastful Dumaine speaks with humility, the shy Longaville puts all his cards on the table. The women are no less altered. I don’t want to fall into the trap of ascribing an easy, one-size-fits-all moral maxim to LLL, but what else are we supposed to take away from this play if not the fact that we fucking owe it to ourselves as a species to set aside our stupid pride and say, “I love you,” when we feel it because we never know when time is going to run out? What else are we supposed to feel if not pride in these young people for choosing to step up and take responsibility when they hear news that the world outside is ending? That there may be no world left? Les Filles go with their Queen. The Nerds rally around their King. They choose fidelity to their respective kingdoms over the indulgence of love. But they also learn to value love for what it is, and to call it by name…even if that love can only last for a few fleeting seconds:

“If this or more than this I would deny,To flatter up these powers of mine with rest,The sudden hand of death close up mine eye.Hence ever, then, my heart is in thy breast.”

(King Ferdinand, V.ii)

As the Crazy Eight grapple in real time with the consequences of Marcadé’s message and what it means for their role as leaders in society, Rosaline gives Berowne a task to complete in their year apart that practically hums with poetic intelligence. Her lines are so iconic, we still quote them colloquially today:

BEROWNETo move wild laughter in the throat of death?It cannot be, it is impossible.Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

ROSALINEWhy, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,Whose influence is begot of that loose graceWhich shallow laughing hearers give to fools.A jest’s prosperity lies in the earOf him that hears it, never in the tongueOf him that makes it. Then, if sickly ears,Deafed with the clamors of their own dear groans,Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,And I will have you and that fault withal.But if they will not, throw away that spiritAnd I shall find you empty of that fault,Right joyful of your reformation.

(V.ii)

I think this is the moment when I would start crying if I ever watched my Rococo LLL performed live. Because of all les Filles, I think Rosaline is the only one who knows that by choosing to accompany the Duchess back to Versailles at the end of LLL, she is effectively signing her death warrant. The Jacobeans and sans-cullottes are not going to want young, eligible, Catholic Rococo princesses wafting around their new, secular state. The guillotine may not yet exist in the summer of 1789, but the there is a thirst for blood and Rosaline can smell it. And now Bastille has fallen. Paris is on fire. King Louis XVI has months to live. The world will never be the same. Rosaline’s once-ordered, once-gilded country is careening into a bloody nightmare of soured ideals and ruthless social weeding, and even though she can’t see the future, she can read men like books. Even Berowne. Even the charismatic nihilist who earned a bachelor’s degree in bachelorhood and tried to hide his heart under a bushel. She can read him and she can save him. They can’t kill her husband if she doesn’t have one. 

Rococo LLL? I don’t know. It’s a pipe dream. 

But can’t you picture it? 

Tagging my girls @harry-leroy @suits-of-woe @lizbennett2013 @dedraconesilet @exeunt-pursued-by-a-bear @henriadical in case anyone is interested :)

Thanks a million for one of my favorite asks ever! Happy holidays, friend!!

xx Claire

[jenanigans1207]

Bet

Summary:

“The entire team thinks we’re in love with each other,” He blurts and then claps a hand over his mouth. He can feel the redness spreading across his cheeks and down his neck. He thinks flinging himself into a wormhole with no armor would be a preferable option to this.

Keith’s face is equally red but he, at least, has the determination to look Lance in the face. “What?”

“That’s what Allura just told me. They have some ridiculous bet going on about which one of us confesses first.” He’s rambling now, and he’s aware of it, but he doesn’t know how to stop. “I mean, that’s just insane, right?” When Keith doesn’t say anything, he adds, “Right?”

“I didn't want it to come to this,” Pidge is sitting on a barstool in the kitchen surrounded by most of her companions. Hunk is seated directly next to her, looking like the second in command for the meeting, both of their expressions serious. “but I think we need to intervene.”

“With what?” Allura asks, seated across from Pidge. Her hair is down--a rare occasion--and she brushes a stray piece behind her shoulder.

Pidge opens her mouth to respond, but Hunk beats her to it, slamming his fists on the counter. “With Keith and Lance, of course!”

Allura looks around the room at everyone who seems to be nodding in agreement at the mention of the only two people not in the room. “Intervene with…?”

“I'm confident that we can all see what a crush those two have on each other.” Pidge takes back the speaking role, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Allura inclines her head in understanding. “We also know that they're both too stubborn and oblivious to ever say anything to each other.”

“That's why we propose offering them some help.” Hunk places a hand on Pidge's shoulder to show that the idea was the brainchild of both of them.

Shiro is the only one to look unimpressed and unamused. “That's not going to work.”

“Don't you want to see them together, Shiro?” Pidge prods.

“Of course I do,” He responds. “But the only way it'll ever happen is if Keith is the one to confess and he is not about to do that.”

“What?” Hunk slams his fists on the table a second time, “You don't think Lance would confess? He absolutely would.”

“I happen to agree with Hunk,” Allura cuts in. “Lance is one bad pickup line away from confessing his crush.”

“I love Lance, but he would never confess. That requires a lot of courage, which is definitely a Keith thing.” Pidge adds.

“Lance is very courageous!” Hunk yells, turning to look accusingly at Pidge.

“Yeah but Keith is more courageous!” She counters.

Before things can get more out of hand, Coran finally speaks up. “Why don't you guys make a wager?”

“A bet? On the love life of our friends?” Shiro's tone is enough to convey his disapprovement of this idea.

“I like it,” Pidge says. “Shiro and I will try to get Keith to confess first. Hunk, you and Allura work on Lance. Whoever gets their paladin to confess first, wins.”

Pidge looked around the table, weighing the expressions of her teammates as the idea sinks in. Hunk and Allura both have grins on their faces and Pidge can almost see the wheels turning in their heads, coming up with ideas on how to get Lance to finally admit that he has feelings for Keith. Shiro, on the other hand, looks resigned to his fate.

“Deal,” Hunk and Allura say in unison.

Shiro sighs. “Fine, I will help. Only because I want to make sure it's done right and nobody ends up getting hurt.”

“What are the stakes?” Hunk asked, looking determined.

“I think we should wait and see who wins,” Pidge answers, “And then the winning team gets to consult with each other and choose their prize. Everyone okay with that?”

There’s a round of affirming sounds from the rest of the clan and Pidge smiles to herself.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

Keith is sitting on the bridge with Pidge settled a few seats down from him. They aren’t talking, but it’s nicer to have company than to be alone, so he doesn’t say anything. Pidge is absorbed in one of her electronics, as expected, so Keith leans his head back and lets his mind wander. It doesn’t take long for his mind to settle on Lance. It doesn’t ever take his mind long to relate something back to Lance, it’s almost impressive.

He closes his eyes, trying to chase the thoughts out of his head. He tried his best not to think about Lance when he was around other people. It didn’t matter that he could keep a good poker face or that Pidge was distracted. He harbored a fear that somehow, she would see his feelings written all over his face.

The door to the bridge slides open and then closed but Keith doesn’t open his eyes. He would recognize the sound of Lance’s footsteps anywhere. He can tell all of the team’s footsteps apart by now, but he is always acutely in tune with Lance’s. He’s always acutely in tune with Lance. Period.

“Lance,” Pidge says and Keith imagines she must’ve looked up from her gadget. “Is that a new shirt?”

There’s no hiding the joy in Lance’s voice as he replies, “It is!”

“Keith,” Pidge says, an undertone of… something in her voice. He obliges and opens his eyes, looking at her. “Isn’t Lance’s new shirt great?”

He turns his eyes to Lance to observe this new shirt for himself and he must admit that it is great. It’s a little tighter than his normal shirts, but not in a way that seems to cling to him. It just hangs a little closer to Lance’s body and moves a little more fluidly with him. His other shirts were too big and he just looked like small, scrawny boy swimming in them. This shirt showed Lance for what he was; muscular and languid, not lanky. “Yeah,” he replied, swallowing. “Great.”

He averts his eyes quickly, hoping to not seem too obvious and glances back at Pidge. She’s looking at him with an expression he can’t quite place a finger on.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

Lance is sitting on the ground in the training room, ragged breaths filling his chest. Hunk is sitting behind him, leaning his back against Lance and breathing just as heavily. Keith had been here with them but had left to shower. Lance needed to shower, too, but he was too tired to stand.

“Man,” Hunk huffs behind him. “That was a tough session.”

Lance lets out an unstable laugh. “For us, yeah. Keith--” he stops, clutching his bayard tightly in his hand. He turned too many things into conversations about Keith and he knew it. It wasn’t intentional--everything in his life, everything inside of him revolved around Keith--but he knew he needed to stop. He had accepted his feelings a long time ago, but he wasn’t sure how the others would feel about it, or even if it was a good idea.

There was a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Like dating in the workplace, but worse. Dating in a close-knit team that relied solely on trust to function meant that if anything went wrong, they would be doomed. The entire universe would be doomed. He would love nothing more than to call Keith his, but he wasn’t sure he could risk the whole universe for that selfish desire.

“Yeah?” Hunk says, his voice suggesting that he’s waiting for more.

But Lance isn’t sure he should say more. But he can’t say nothing, either. “Keith made it look easy,’ He finishes lamely.

“He is really impressive,” Hunk says quietly. “I mean, he’s so strong. And really brave. He’s gotten us out of a lot of tough situations, you know?”

Lance isn’t sure what to say. He agrees with Hunk--more than agrees, really. He could go on extensively about all the ways Keith benefits the team. He could go on for even longer about all the ways Keith benefits him, personally.

“I’m continually impressed by him.” Hunk adds.

Tentatively, Lance adds some of his own opinions. “Yeah, I agree. He’s very talented and cool. He’s skilled with his bayard, but he’s also skilled hand-to-hand. And he makes a great leader, he’s really able to bring the team together and maximize our strengths.”

A silence stretches between them and Lance fears he has said to much. Before he can worry too much, however, Hunk shifts behind him. He turns so that he is facing Lance and shoves his shoulder kindly.

“You should tell him all of that.”

Lance laughs. “Are you kidding? He doesn’t care what I think.”

“You’d be surprised.” Hunk edges.

“He doesn’t care what anybody thinks,” Lance amends, standing up, “Least of all me.”

He helps Hunk to his feet and stalks out the door without another word, trying to push that ridiculous idea--and the sting associated with it--out of his mind.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

Keith never used to have trouble sleeping. He used to sleep peacefully at night, laid out under his covers, arms jammed under his pillows. It used to be no problem. But now--now sleeping was nothing short of elusive. Most of the time he walked laps around the castle, trying to justify it to himself as keeping a secure perimeter. But the truth was that he was hoping the exercise would wear him out enough that he would just collapse out of sheer exhaustion and sleep that way.

Except, that never worked. Instead of being exhausted, it was like taking a trip down memory lane. He would round a corner and see Lance there, leaning against the wall and throwing his head back in a laugh. He would walk through a doorway and see Lance sitting there, the infamous flirty smile on his lips as he winked at Keith. He couldn’t go anywhere in the castle without a ghost of Lance popping up, reminding him, achingly, of the boy he loved.

The boy spent every day around. The boy whose touch he knew inside and out. The boy who filled his soul with hope.

Keith stopped and ran a hand down his face. This was why he never slept.

“Hey,”

He didn’t jump, he had heard Shiro approaching. “Hey,”

“Can we talk?”

Keith drops the hand from over his eyes and looks at Shiro in surprise. “Now? In the middle of the night?”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, smiling wryly, “Do you have some other pressing plans?”

With a small smile of his own, Keith relents. They walk through the next door and into the control room, taking seats opposite each other. Keith tries not to look to his right where he knows he’ll see a memory of Lance.

“What’s up?”

“Keith,” Shiro begins before sighing. He shifts slightly so he’s more comfortable and more relaxed. Keith’s insides knot. He recognizes Shiro going into space dad mode. “I can only watch you torture yourself for so long, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.” Keith tries, but Shiro shoots him a look and he sighs, dropping his head back onto the top of the chair behind him. “It’s nothing.”

“Mostly I’m just wondering why you wouldn't talk to me about it. Me, of all people? I mean, Keith, you’ve met Adam.”

The words sting but Keith knows he deserves it. Especially since keeping secrets and harboring feelings jeopardizes the entire team. If he can’t talk to Lance about it, the least he could do was talk to Shiro. At the very least, it would stop weighing him down that way.

“It has nothing to do with that,” He says, and it’s true. “It has everything to do with the fact that it doesn’t matter.”

“Love always matters.”

Keith flinches, sitting upright. He knew he had feelings for Lance and he had moved past being able to deny them, but love? That was absurd! Lance had started off his rival and had somehow turned into his right-hand man, but that was as far as it went. Maybe he was mistaking admiration for something more. That could be. What couldn’t be was love.

Shiro’s smile as he keeps speaking is kind and reserved. “I understand. I felt that way when I realized I loved Adam. But I did--do love him. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Loving a boy wasn’t something to be ashamed of, Keith agreed. And he wasn’t ashamed. It was just--Lance? Of all people? That was what he was hung up on, not Lance’s gender.

“I’m not--” Keith fumbles over his words, feeling them stick in his throat. He takes a deep breath, swallows, and tries again. He’s no more successful. “We’re just--” He drops his head into his hands.

“That’s why you haven’t told him, huh? You haven’t admitted it to yourself yet?” Shiro stands up and crosses the space between them, dropping a hand onto his shoulder. “Now I understand.”

“There’s nothing to admit,” Keith tries again but his words are feeble, falling apart before they even pass his lips. He can feel his heart in his chest, beating against his ribcage. He can feel the way it aches as he tries to deny what he knows is true.

“All I’m going to say on it now is that you’ll be surprised, I think, if you do admit it to him. It might go better than you expect.”

Shiro takes his exit then and Keith finds himself alone on the bridge, more wide awake than he’s been in a long time.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

The cargo hold is colder than the rest of the ship. Lance is sure there’s some scientific reason for it that Pidge or Hunk could explain, but he didn’t really care. All he knows is that the cool air gives him a little bit of breathing room. It seemed to clear his head and allow him to focus. Also, it was normally empty.

Normally. Because this time, as he walked through the door, he found Allura standing there in front of Blue. “Allura? What are you doing?”

“Oh, Lance!” She turned to look at him, a smile lighting up her face. “I actually wanted to talk to you!”

Surprised, Lance crossed the room to stand at her side. There was a time when those words would have thrilled him, but that time had passed. He still enjoyed talking to her and he wanted to hear what she had to say, but his heart didn’t take off, gallivanting across the universe, at the prospect of it. Instead it beat steadily away in his chest, unbothered. “What’s up?”

“Well, you see, everyone has been noticing--” She paused, a slight blush tinting her cheeks. “Well, we’ve all noticed your feelings for Keith.”

Immediately Lance goes on the defensive. “Woah!” He cries, taking a step back from her and throwing his hands up in between them. “Woah, woah. No. There’s nothing to notice.”

Allura presses on, “And we’ve noticed Keith’s feelings for you, too.”

Lance opens his mouth to say something back to that, but he honestly isn’t sure what he would say. “Keith’s--what?”

“And honestly, Lance, we just want the both of you to be happy. So I guess I’m just here to say it’s okay. And to tell you that I think you should tell Keith how you feel.”

“There’s nothing to tell!” Lance says automatically, but there’s no real conviction behind the words. “I don’t know where you are getting your ideas from, Allura, but honestly--”

She cuts in smoothly, “Oh, it’s not just me. Everyone thinks so. We have a bet going on it.”

“What!?”

A look of panic crosses Allura’s face when she realizes what she’s said. “That is--” She sighs. “Well, I guess that’s out now. It’s true, we do have a bet going. Hunk and I think you’ll be the first to confess. Pidge and Shiro think Keith will be.”

“This is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of.” Lance drops his head into his hands. “This is insane.”

The cold air of the cargo hold is no longer helping him. Lance feels like his head is spinning in circles and he might tip over at any second. The whole team knows about his feelings? He had thought he had hidden them so well. Did that mean Keith knew, too? He took a deep breath in an attempt to steady himself, but it didn’t do much.

“What about Coran?” He croaked, trying to fill the silence. Trying to get his mind off of things. Trying, just desperately trying, to get a grip. “Who did he vote for?”

“He didn’t vote,” Allura answered, an annoyed expression crossing her features. “He started to tell some story about when he almost lost the castle in a bet…”

She trails off and they find themselves in silence again. The air surrounding Allura feels tense. Like she has more to say but isn’t saying it. Unsure that he can handle it for even another second, Lance turns on his heel and walks out of the cargo hold, ignoring Allura calling his name behind him. There’s only one way to settle this.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

He knocks on Keith’s door before he has a chance to second guess himself. The door slides open automatically and he steps across the threshold, not waiting for Keith to invite him in. Once inside, the door slides shut, Lance looks up and all of his determination slips away. Keith stands in the middle of his room, jacket discarded and hair messy. He’s looking at Lance with a puzzled expression.

“Hi?” He says, running a hand through his messy hair.

Lance’s throat runs dry. He tries to look around the room, to find something to distract him, but he finds nothing. The silence is stretching on and Allura’s words are coming back to him and suddenly Lance feels like he could pass out. He needs to fill the silence. He needs to say something. He needs to leave.

“The entire team thinks we’re in love with each other,” He blurts and then claps a hand over his mouth. He can feel the redness spreading across his cheeks and down his neck. He thinks flinging himself into a wormhole with no armor would be a preferable option to this.

Keith’s face is equally red but he, at least, has the determination to look Lance in the face. “What?”

“That’s what Allura just told me. They have some ridiculous bet going on about which one of us confesses first.” He’s rambling now, and he’s aware of it, but he doesn’t know how to stop. “I mean, that’s just insane, right?” When Keith doesn’t say anything, he adds, “Right?”

Silence.

A silence that seems to never end.

Lance thinks maybe he imagined it all. Maybe he didn’t say anything and he’s just been standing here silently staring at Keith all this time. That would explain why Keith wasn’t saying anything. It wouldn’t explain why Keith wouldn’t look him in the eyes, though.

“Keith?” He says tentatively, “Buddy?”

“Why are you so upset about it?” Keith finally asks and Lance immediately wishes they could go back to the silence. “Am I that bad?”

“No!” Lance paces in a small circle. “No, no. That’s not--”

“Then what is it?” Keith asks. There’s an edge to his voice but not the irritated one he’s used to. It’s a rough edge--fear?

Lance stops and faces Keith. His heart is beating so quickly he can no longer distinguish between beats. it feels like his insides are going to explode. The panic filling his chest is pressing against him, making him feel anxious. He needs to escape it. He needs to do something. He takes a deep breath. Another. One more. And then he launches into some long-winded explanation that he has no plan for and he just hopes for the best.

“Keith--quiznak, Keith, you are brave and--and strong. You are our fearless leader. You are smart and competent at everything you do. I used to be jealous of you but somewhere along the line that turned to admiration. And then I got to know you and instead of being my rival you became my friend.”

Keith isn’t saying anything. He’s staring at Lance with a strange sort of intensity, his mouth twisted halfway into a smile. His face is still red, but he seems less panicked now. It makes Lance feel marginally less panicked, too.

“And then, once you were my friend, there was only one logical step left to take. I would love to deny it--I’ve tried to deny it but clearly it isn’t working. If the entire team is making a bet on it, it’s definitely not working. I always want you there, Keith. You realize that, don’t you? That I always want to be next to you? And that I feel better when I have your support. I--”

“Lance,” Keith cuts him off and Lance is thankful. He takes a deep breath, trying to stop his spinning head and get a grip on what has been happening. If there were ever an out of body moment, this were it. “What are you trying to say? Short version?”

“I’m upset because I do like you, Keith. And I know it’s ridiculous to think you would like me back. I don’t expect that. And I just think we need to set it straight to everyone else so we can--”

It takes Keith no time to close the gap between them, pushing Lance against the door and pressing his lips to Lance’s. Lance responds, automatically, grabbing the front of Keith’s shirt and pulling him closer. It only lasts for a moment before Keith takes a step back. It’s not far enough to make Lance drop his shirt, but he does anyways, feeling suddenly self conscious.

“Keith?”

“You said it yourself. If the entire team is making a bet on it, it must be obvious.”

“Keith?” Lance says again.

Keith shoots him a smile, all confidence and security. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“I would really appreciate that.” Lance replies.

“I like you too, Lance.” Keith says and then he drops his voice. “How could I not? You’re selfless, kind and caring. You are everything I’m not. You complete me. God,” he groans, “How cheesy is that? But it’s true.”

Lance crushes him in a hug. He wraps his arms around Keith’s torso and pulls their chests flush together, nuzzling his head into the crook of Keith’s shoulder. Keith responds, wrapping his arms back around Lance and securing their connection. Lance considers the possibility of staying like this forever, but he knows it can’t last.

As they part, Keith meets his eyes. “Stay,” he says and it’s not exactly a demand but not exactly a request, either. More like an offer.

“Are you sure?” Lance asks. Keith nods. “I’m not going to wake up tomorrow with your knife pressed to my throat?”

Keith rolls his eyes but chuckles a little anyways. “No death threats to start the day, I promise.”

“Keith?” Keith looks up at him, his expression clear. Lance notices the way his shoulders look less tense. He notices the way his own shoulders feel less tense. Maybe getting the truth off your chest did that for you. “I like you.” He repeats. “Really like you. More than like you.”

“I love you too, Lance.” Keith says.

---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.---.

Pidge happens to be walking by Keith’s door at the exact right time the next morning. She happens to be the one standing in the hallway when the door opens to reveal Keith and Lance, together, exiting the room. Lance is in one of Keith’s shirts, although it fits him well, and they’re both sporting a bad case of bed head.

“Good morning, you two.” She says, trying to keep her voice innocent.

“Good morning,” Keith replies, entirely unruffled by her roving eyes.

“Mornin’,” Lance mumbles, eyes elsewhere and cheeks slightly pink.

“Did you two… have a good night?” She asks.

Instead of responding, Keith grabs Lance’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The cheesy smile that lights up Lance’s face in response is all she needs.

“Finally,” She breathes. “Who confessed first?”

“Sorry, Pidge, we’re busy. We have lots to attend to.” Keith says as the two of them set off together.

“Wait! Just tell me how it happened!” She yells at their retreating back.

“See you later for training!” Is the only response she gets.

[playeroneplayertwo]

The Ten: 5.19

It seems a good icebreaker, or as good an icebreaker as any, to lay bare my top 10 of all time. Clear the air, so to speak. Get to know each other. It’s fair to say that this may be a make or break moment for us. Hopefully, I won’t lose you. Let’s see.

This is a list I imagine I’ll update periodically (which is why it’s dated), as my wife Kathleen (Player Two) and I play a lot of games, and a lot of new games. I’m a notoriously curious and searching type, and I love trying new games, sometimes to my wife’s chagrin. More often than not, my spare change goes to new games for the house. New games that make a splash tend to spike pretty high and then slowly fade. It’s not a great trait to have, especially in someone who tries to speak or write critically about quality (ie write reviews). But being that I’m aware of this, I hope that tempers it at least somewhat.

Anyway, where’s the list, you say? Here we go:

1. Brass: Birmingham (2018)

Oh boy, it’s a new one. Cult of the new? To be fair, Kathleen and I have played this game fairly regularly for the last eight months. By our third play or so, I knew it had locked itself into my top spot. I’d done a fair bit of research on the OG Brass (now Brass: Lancashire) prior to purchasing Brass: Birmingham, and by the time I eventually took the dive and purchased Birmingham, I was as excited to try it as I was unsure we’d actually enjoy it. At the time, it was the heaviest game we’d played, and it also relies heavily on route building–it’s in fact one of the most important parts of the game. I mention this because tactical spacial elements are not Kathleen’s forte. In fact, it’s one of her least favorite mechanics.

This is a good time to tell you that Kathleen and I think (and play games) very differently. Kathleen is a strategic player, relying on long term planning and execution to maximize scoring/performance. I, on the other hand, do not make long term plans. I find it not only remarkably difficult, but also unenjoyable. I’m a short term/tactical player. On my turn, I’m more likely to look over the board, get a lay of the land, and make the best, most advantageous play available to me at that moment.

Brass: Birmingham remarkably manages to cater to both of our play styles, which is one reason it ranks so high. Birmingham presents a myriad options for players to pursue. You’ve got a whole pile of different factory tiles you can build, a whole mess of locations or regions to move into, and about as many different strategies to pursue on your way to the end game. I don’t think I’ve ever played the same game of Brass: Birmingham twice, nor have I ever pursued the same options. The card play means, for me, that I will go where the cards lead, and I find using these cards as a guide to build my engine incredibly satisfying.

2. Covert (2016)

Dice placement. For some reason, this mechanic sounds incredibly unappealing to me, and I think it’s because it’s literally a portmanteau mechanic consisting of the worker placement mechanic using dice, two individual mechanisms that I seem to enjoy less and less. Dice I tend to avoid for their randomness (yes, I know that’s the point), and Worker Placement, in it’s most stereotypical application, I find frustrating. Why can’t I just put my worker wherever I want and just run my engine? Being stymied in a worker placement game just annoys the hell out of me.

So why do I love Covert?

It’s a pretty straightforward points race built around mission cards that have specific requirements. And using the dice as workers seems a fairly typical euro mechanism, but what I like about Covert is how puzzly it is. When you place your dice workers, they’ll be placed on round tracks with spaces numbered 1-6, and you won’t be able to place a die unless it’s adjacent to another die. In this case, you can do anything you want, but only if you plan correctly and work well with the other players. It becomes an order of operations puzzle, which may frustrate some, but I love it.

Also, I can’t get enough of that spy theme. And the production is fantastic.

3. Eldritch Horror (2013)

Ah, Cthulhu. For being the spawn of such a troubled person (HP Lovecraft), I find Cthulhu’s mythos and surrounding universe positively enthralling. 

But dice! Ugh yes, this is a huge, sprawling, long, and [sorta] bloated game that is built all around a very simple dice rolling resolution system. I have no way of justifying why this doesn’t bug me, but it just doesn’t.

Maybe I’m just a sap for the theme (Indiana Jones + Cthulhu = Win). Or maybe it’s nostalgia, considering this is the game on my top ten that I’ve played the most and had the longest. But, if I try to dig into the real reasoning here, it’s probably because this game manages to give you a big, rich, story-based experience that feels like an event when it’s over. Yes, it’s the biggest, longest play session on this list. But I love every minute of it. Even those maddening bad dice rolls.

4. Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (2011)

A long time ago, Kathleen and I came to this hobby via Magic: The Gathering, the deep, long standing king of the collectible card game. Magic is a great game, but it brings out the worst in me as a gamer. Playing Magic makes me both a bad winner and bad loser. Frankly, that’s a terrible combination. Why would you want to play with me at all?

This obvious problem led us to cooperative board games. If I’m gonna lose, why don’t I just lose with you. That’s a refreshing change of pace!

And speaking of losing, hey let’s talk about Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. The word used most frequently when talking about this game–by me and pretty much anybody who’s ever played it–is PUNISHING. And yes, it’s punishing. Kathleen and I have played a few punishing euros at this point (feed those people), but this is something else. Get a few bad card flips from the encounter deck and you’re suddenly up to your eyeballs in LOTR baddies. Orcs and goblins? Oh hai. But your dwarves or hobbits or whatever are never really out of it. Smart deck building (and luck) definitely has carried us out of the tall grass on more than one occasion. And there’s something to be said for a game as well balanced as Lord of the Rings. More than once, a game has concluded on a turn where we either win or lose based on that single turn’s outcome.

The theme doesn’t really do much for me, but I took the dive on this game because it looked like a well-designed and well-supported cooperative card game (of which there really aren’t too many). It’s stood tall over the years, and I hope it continues for a while. When I first played Arkham Horror: The Card Game, I figured it would knock this down a peg or two. But the designers’ ingenuity in the LOTR quests and encounter deck designs has been (for me, at least) a much more rewarding experience.

And I appreciate a cooperative game where you actually lose more often than you win. It seems a rarity in the co-ops we have.

5. Great Western Trail (2016)

I’d heard and read so much about this game prior to purchasing it that I almost didn’t even want to get it (which is exactly how I feel about Concordia and Trajan, subsequently). I dig the cowboy theme, but beyond that, I’d pretty much phased out all the actual details on this game’s gameplay.

But yeah, it really is good. Ya’ll were right. I love games that are heavy but are built around simple gameplay, and Great Western Trail epitomizes that. One your turn you move your cowboy on the (effectively) huge rondel board and then take an action on the space where you stop. That’s it. 

The beauty of the game comes from the remarkable breadth of options you can pursue. Using cowboys to buy cows, hiring engineers to move your train and build stations, hiring carpenters to build buildings and busy up the board, and completing objectives are some of the main tasks you’ll be focusing on, and what really clicks for me with Great Western Trail is that it’s a tactical player’s dream. The board is constantly changing, and as it changes, so must your plans. The objective cards steer you somewhat, but you’ve really gotta cut your own path across the wilderness here.

Oh, and I love deckbuilding as a sort of side dish mechanic. It isn’t always enough to sustain a whole game, but it’s great as a single piece of a pie.

6. Gloomhaven (2017)

All right, so this big beast has moved all over my ranking in the year+ since my first game. I won’t lie, it sat at #1 for a while. Then it slid a little, then a little more. I mean, it’s still at #6, so it’s not exactly plummeting. It’s the Board Game Geek #1 game of all time (as of this writing), and it’s hard to say if it’s deserving of this (and if not, what deserves the spot instead). Again, this is so subjective, and games like this or Scythe tend to be lightning rods for people who want to take a shot at the new hotness.

But yes, it’s good. It’s very good. I’m not as enamored by the sprawling nature of it as I was, nor the campaign, but being a person who loves variety, it’s scope is certainly a nice bonus. But after you haven’t played it in a while, it becomes a HUGE box that takes up a whole shelf and is a bear to set back up. And even though the box is 20lbs and takes up a whole shelf and the game takes 20+ minutes just to set up, the card play in Gloomhaven is just stellar. I love that this is essentially a tactical minis game with a euro engine. Tactical minis games rank incredibly low on my chart o’ interest, but this game takes that standard tactical minis expectation and smashes the shit out of it. 

Despite its niggling flaws, it’s an excellent game.

7. The Exit Series (2017-?)

This is the last co-op game on my list, and I just looked back and saw that there are four on here. I was just talking to Kathleen about how much I’d rather play competitive games instead of co-ops, and apparently I said that in a moment completely lacking self-awareness. Also, this is a cheaty kind of entry considering we’ve played at least eight Exit games.

Remember when I said that I liked Eldritch Horror because it was an event game that provided a big, rich experience? Well, the Exit games give you a meaty, brainier experience in a slightly shorter time period. There’s not much story–despite the designers really trying to cram one in there–but I’ll always love Exit because it’s become our Date Night game. Kathleen and I will get some nice booze, take out food, and sit down with a new Exit after we put our son to bed. The experience can be frustrating–remember we think very differently, but each experience has always been something to remember (except the Secret Lab; what happened in that one?). Special props to Exit: Dead Man on the Orient Express, in particular.

The puzzles are really satisfying when you crack them, especially after working on them for a while. We take longer than average to do these because we resist those hint cards as much as possible, so our games can stretch. But Exit should be an event, and when savored like one, it doesn’t let you down.

Also, if you have concerns about the value of an Exit game, if you look at it as an event (like going to the movies or *cough cough* playing T.I.M.E. Stories), it’s actually a very good value. Recycle it!

And finally, yes, Exit trumps Unlock any day of the week.

8. Glory to Rome (2005)

That Glory to Rome is out of print is a cryin’ shame. Our copy isn’t even a real copy, I printed a crappy DIY version at Staples and then cut and sleeved them with old Magic commons. Our copy looks bad, is cut unevenly, and has eery MTG watermarks shining through the thin weight paper, and I couldn’t care less. This game is awesome. It’s got about a million different combos that are all seemingly game-breaking, but the fact that everything is so powerful is really what makes this game so exciting.

Multi-use cards are one of my favorite mechanic, and this game is completely built around them. And like any well-designed game that is build all around cards, the design of this never leaves you feeling hamstrung by bad card draw. If you’re doing badly at Glory to Rome, it’s your fault. Sorry. You haven’t found the combo that will win the game for you. I can say this because I’m terrible at Glory to Rome, and I know it. That’s not saying I’ve not won before. I have, but more likely than not it was because I accidentally stumbled onto something good. 

Like Brass: Birmingham, no two games of Glory to Rome are the same. There are so many cards in the box, and the subtle sense of humor that permeates some of the cards just tickles me (please see: latrine).

It’s fast and exciting, and giving you options on other players’ turns is also one of my favorite mechanics.  I’ll happily play and lose Glory to Rome anytime.

9. Nippon (2015)

Full disclosure, this is the newest edition to this list, and Kathleen and I have only played this a few times, but there’s something about this game that really fascinates me. 

At first blush, it feels like Brass, but it’s not. Like Brass, this is an economic engine, but it doesn’t allow the multi-turn build up to The Big Turn like Brass. Then I thought it was a little like Great Western Trail, but it’s not really like that either. Great Western Trail presents a ton of options, but by the end of the game, you really need to work on all of them, at least a little bit, or else your score will suffer. Nippon, however, doesn’t make you do a little bit of everything. There are a number of elements in Nippon (like trains), that can be all but ignored except for certain circumstances. It’s a game built around area control via slow burn engine building. A number of other elements to the game are very specific tools you can use to hone that engine, but could just as easily prove useless under the wrong conditions.

This may be misdirected musings by someone who hasn’t played the game enough, but it feels right to me. The last time we played, I came to the realization that the game felt so fraught because I was trying to do too much. The game presents you with a large amount of avenues to pursue because you don’t actually have to pursue them all; you can’t, there’s not enough time in the game (or money!). You need to choose your actions and build the best engine as quickly as possible.

Nippon is a cutthroat fight that feels both wickedly fast and frustratingly slow at the same time. Special bonuses for completely subverting the worker placement mechanic with its own implementation that runs the whole game. It’s a puzzle that I have relished greatly.

10. Star Wars: The Card Game (2012)

Two Fantasy Flight LCGs on the list? Sweet Christmas!

But yes, this is a great game. I’m not sure it ever got much love, and it saddens me that it’s now dead, but it’s such an interesting design. That it does a fine job of simplifying deck construction is just a bonus.

I appreciate that Star Wars feels like a game of high stakes gambling. The first few turns are slow and quiet as you work through your deck and build your forces, but once conflict erupts, everything tends to break wide open. Each decision you make has massive repercussions, as single large mistakes will lose you the game. Add in some actual bluffing and a ticking clock, and this is the simplified and streamlined (if safer and less wild) version of Doomtown: Reloaded, another card game that I absolutely love. 

But where I think Doomtown ultimately fails, Star Wars succeeds. The game doesn’t get bogged down in complexity, and instead feels relatively streamlined considering its medium weight. Every time I play this game, I’m impressed by how smart Eric Lang’s design is. I feel like he played a ton of Magic: The Gathering, and then he removed all the things that bothered him (and bothered me, too).

I think this game is overlooked and underplayed, and dare I say forgotten, but for my money, it’s absolutely worth revisiting. And played over and over again.

Please remember, this list will change. Check back occasionally to see how. If you have any questions or opinions of your own, let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Eric (Player One)

[evstenroos]

EVStenroos voted Best Wedding Jewellery!

From the archive: January 19th, 2021

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2021

What a year to be leaving behind! This past year has been a challenging one for everyone - us included. Thank you again to everyone who so patiently waited for delayed orders and shipments that ran behind due to circumstances beyond our control, and 2020!

But just because it’s a new year, doesn’t mean that the challenges we’ve faced have been left behind; theoretically, logistically and mentally. If you’re struggling to feel inspired, know that you’re not alone. Remember to be patient with yourself and unwind when you need to, we've certainly taken some much needed time to rest and recharge this January, so far.

Hold onto memories and things that inspire you, and daydream about days ahead when we can celebrate and gather. With time, we can turn this year around!

EVSTENROOS WINS AVENUE MAGAZINE’S ‘BEST WEDDING JEWELLERY’

We are beyond thrilled to announce that EVStenroos has been voted ‘Best Wedding Jewellery’ in Avenue’s ballot on ‘Best Wedding Services in Calgary’! A huge thank you goes out to everyone who took time out to vote and made this happen, and for your undying support over the years.

We would also like to send a big congratulations to our fellow nominees and winners for your incredible work in the Calgary wedding industry; knowing the past year has been challenging and devastating for so many. We look forward to big celebrations of love, commitment and family. Together we will soon celebrate again!

WORK WE LOVE: DESIGNING AN ALL-IN-ONE ENGAGEMENT RING + ELLINOR’S TIPS FOR RING PLANNING

If you’re not in the business of jewellery design, you may be surprised to learn just how many variations of an engagement ring there can be. And for one of EVStenroos latest custom designs, this meant combining the engagement ring and wedding band into one ring, rather than separating the two as you may envision for a typical ring. But as Ellinor explains, there was a reason behind this design choice.

“Rather than waiting to 'complete' the ring design, we designed the ring with a visual 'wedding band element', but it was introduced into the ring design from the beginning. And when you are creating a wider band it is important to know what physical space you have on the finger to comfortably work with, so that an additional wedding ring doesn't make the set too wide".

The ring was designed with an offset yellow-gold rim on one side to balance out the design and the result is beautifully unique. Another reason for this design choice? The ring shank was maximized widthwise and proportionately fit her ring finger; it was designed and made to be complete from the beginning. But of course, everyone has their own plans and preferences for the future of their ring. Whatever your vision, here are some things to keep in mind when planning an engagement ring and wedding band, according to Ellinor. If you opt for separate rings, consider what each ring will look like on its own:

"A lot of the time when you see commercially-made engagement rings they have that big mounting that sticks out further than the ring shank does, which means that if people want a wedding band that sits flush with it they need to get something that has a cutout in it - which then makes it tricky to wear that wedding band on its own. 

And I know that every girl who has recently been proposed to probably thinks they’re always going to wear the engagement ring and the wedding band, but very often when women have kids they take the engagement ring off because they’re worried a tall setting or big stone is going to scratch the baby or something like that. And when you’re doing tasks around the house it certainly keeps the engagement ring more intact, safer and cleaner if you take it off. 

So it is nice to have a wedding band that can work on its own. And also a lot of women will just wear the wedding band when they travel and leave the engagement ring at home, in case that is the higher valued piece, which it often is. I like to make sure that the customer has as many options as possible.

You may want to reconsider joining your engagement ring and wedding band together:

“I don’t necessarily recommend joining bands together. Lots of people ask about joining the engagement ring and wedding band, just because that prevents them spinning, for instance. Let’s say you only did diamonds half way around on the wedding band, if you fix it then the diamonds are always facing upwards. But the problem is that it’s a lot easier to put a skinnier band on your finger, one at a time, rather than one wider band. So as people's fingers and knuckles change, it becomes trickier with a wider ring to accommodate wearing it. Plus it means that if you lose it, you lose both. There is no option of only taking the wedding band when travelling - it’s all or nothing at that point. It also sometimes can become trickier to size them and make them fit comfortably for a longer period of time.”

Think ahead:

Overall, Ellinor says that the most important thing is to know what you'll want in the coming years.

“I think the important thing for people to think about is whether they’re planning on doing only two rings, or if in the future you perhaps add an anniversary ring to the other side of the engagement ring to balance things out. Is there space on your finger for the 'look' that you are hoping to achieve?” Do what's right for you!

"A lot of people ask if it’s normal that someone just does one ring (rather than a separate engagement ring and wedding band). You can do exactly what you want. There isn’t a rule about it. And lots of cultures and countries have their own take on it, so you can find a tradition to suit your preference if you'd like to justify a ring on each ring finger, just one ring, two or three.”

[andrewdburton]

Two Years Without Health Insurance (and What I’m Doing Now)

Two years ago, I was unsatisfied with my options for health insurance. The premiums were rising even as the quality dropped in the form of an ever-increasing deductible. I am guessing that you might feel the same way these days – most of us Americans are in the same boat.

I felt like I was being squeezed from both ends and it was starting to piss me off. So I decided to take some action, by doing the math for myself using a spreadsheet. I needed to answer the question, “Is this insurance really as bad a deal as I think it is?”

Sure enough, the risks and rewards of the coverage did not justify the premiums, so I decided to try an experiment and simply drop out of the market and insure myself. In other words, just rolling the dice and going through life with no form of health insurance at all.

Doubling down on the bikes, barbells and salads, I did my best to eliminate any risk factors that are in my control, while accepting that there are still much less likely but more random factors that are not.

Figure 1 – DIY Health Care

Almost two years and $10,000 in premium savings later, I have found the experiment to be a success: I have slept well and not worried about the fact that I could be on the hook for a big bill if I did ever need major care. And as luck would have it, I also enjoyed the same good health as always over this time period – probably the best in my life so far because the extra healthy living has been working its magic.

But.

This situation has not been quite ideal, because my life is not a very useful model for everyone to follow. Most people don’t have the luck of perfect health, many have a larger family than I do, and very few people are in a financial position to self-insure for all possible medical bills.

Also, I found myself wishing I had a doctor that actually knew me, who I could call or visit on short notice if I ever did need help.

Finally, I wanted to switch back to having some form of insurance so that I could learn about it and write about it as time goes on. But was I really willing to be part of that unsatisfying and broken insurance model?

Then something magical happened: I learned about the new and vastly improved world of Direct Primary Care physicians.

What is DPC?

DPC is a fairly new trend in the US, but it is also a return to a very old tradition: a direct relationship between you and your doctor, with no insurance company in the way. 

As a customer, you pay for a monthly subscription (somewhere around $100), and in exchange you get unlimited access to super elite, personalized medicine for the vast majority of your medical needs. Diagnoses, prescriptions, skin conditions, stitches, even fixing a broken bone if you don’t need surgery. All covered, with no co-pay and in an environment that feels to me like Presidential-level health care, in striking contrast to some of my past experiences where I felt like an anonymous numbered ticket in a sloshing sea of bureaucratic institutional medicine.

Oh, and direct email, phone and text message contact with your doctor, prescriptions over phone or video call, and in some cases even house calls depending on the practice and the situation.

Through some sort of magic, the Direct Primary Care model offers much better medical care and much lower prices, at the same time.

How could it be? It’s because of the incentives.

Figure 2: The Insurance Model for Health Care

In our famously broken US healthcare model, an insurance company is wedged in between you and your doctors, and it has different objectives than you do.

You just want the best overall health for yourself, and when the shit does hit the fan and you need medical care, you want it to be quick, effective, and at minimum cost. And you don’t want to be hounded with years of stressful stray bills after an expensive medical procedure.

Your Doctor wants to help as many people as possible and make a good living, without having to wade through a sea of paperwork or stress or lawsuits. Your Insurance company wants to make as much profit as possible, which means maximizing the amount they collect from you, and minimizing the amount they pay to your doctor. In theory, they benefit from helping you to stay healthy. But they have also developed elaborate contracts (putting in as many loopholes as possible to allow them to drop your coverage or deny claims), become masters of delaying payments, limiting which procedures and tests they will authorize doctors to do, and just generally throwing the biggest monkey wrench into the system that they can.

Over the decades, there has been a complex battle of lawmaking, lobbying, compromise and complexity to try to regulate away some of these problems. Sometimes the new laws help, sometimes they don’t, but the end result will never be optimal simply because there are a lot of people involved, and big crowds of humans make for slow and shitty decision making.

The Direct Primary Care Model

Figure 3: The Direct Primary Care Model

With DPC, it’s just you and your doctor. You both have the same incentives, but now the model works much better because there is no chaotic and expensive force in the middle to mess things up.

And because you operate on a subscription, the doctor gets paid whether you come into the office or not. At the same time, you are free to come in whenever you do need something, at no additional cost. So she has an incentive to keep you healthy, so that you have no need to come into the office in the first place. 

On top of this, you get to decide together what is the best course of healthy prevention and treatment, without the overhead and complexity of constantly fighting with insurance companies. This drastically cuts the costs by eliminating the large staff of paper-pushers and attorneys that you normally need to operate a medical office, and frees up the doctor to spend more time with each patient during each visit.

How could the doctor possibly make a living with such low fees?

As it turns out, a small practice with a full-time doctor and 2-3 credentialed medical assistants can handle over 1000 subscribers while still giving each person much more time than they get under the old model. At $100 per month, this is $1.2 million in annual gross subscriber income, which is enough to pay everybody well, and rent a suitable clinic space. And as you scale up the operation, some economies of scale on things like space and equipment make it even better.

Just as importantly, running a practice like this tends to make a dramatic improvement in a doctor’s quality of life. It’s better medicine, with more flexibility and less hassle and stress. No wonder this model is growing rapidly and has become a favorite of physicians who happen to be MMM readers, as I hear from more of them every month.

Direct Primary Care is now a nationwide movement, with many hundreds of practices spanning the country and many more opening each year. Today’s screenshot of https://mapper.dpcfrontier.com/ shows the current state of the market. 

Direct care locations everywhere

In fact, it turns out this whole trend might even be a Mustachian-originated phenomenon, as I joined my own local practice called Cloud Medical, met the founder Dr. David Tusek, and he revealed halfway through our introductory visit that he was both a founder of DPC pioneer Nextera Healthcare in 2009, and a lurking reader of this blog for several years before I discovered him right here in my own town.  A note for locals: if you are considering joining Cloud, mention that you would like the MMM discount to save a further $12/month! (we have no affiliation, they are just looking to expand the practice and I’ll remove this notice if they fill up)

My experience (so far) with Cloud Medical

Cloud Medical’s Longmont office – definitely a step up over past medical office experiences! (although they do need to add a proper bike rack)

I signed up with Cloud this past summer, about five months ago. Although I have been feeling great, I figured it was time to put myself through an extensive battery of “middle-aged man” tests just to make sure I am not missing any hidden problems. 

With the doctor’s guidance, I did a very thorough blood test, plus an electrocardiogram scan of my heart performance and ultrasound Carotid artery scan which involves a practitioner lubing up your neck and sliding a Star-Trek-style probe around on it while recording images of your body’s most critical plumbing to check for signs of clogging. Plus the usual checks of an annual physical exam. All clear.

I also finally got around to a long-awaited diagnosis and prescription for my Adult Attention Deficit Disorder condition, something which took me seven years to get organized enough to achieve, paradoxically one of the crippling effects of ADD. Although this is a very personal health detail, I mention it here because there are many friends and readers who also suffer from this condition, and I encourage you to learn more about it and seek help if appropriate. It can be life-changing.  I found this process was much easier in a DPC environment, because of the more personal nature of the doctor-patient connection. 

This DPC model addresses perhaps 90% of typical medical needs in-house, and a “menu” of optional specialists knocks out another 5%. 

Cloud and other DPC practices have a “menu” of standardized prices, typically much lower than traditional offices. Full PDF here.

But there is still a chance you will need the more rare (and expensive) services of a hospital or specialist. In this case, your DPC physician can provide referrals and guidance to allow you to get the right help at a discounted, direct-pay price, or even handle your needs with a conventional insurance company.

Part Two: But What About Bigger Expenses?

Health share options, with the one I chose (Sedera) in the center.

At this point, you can add another layer of protection: High deductible conventional insurance, or a health share plan which offers a similar end-result while being careful not to be classified as insurance. 

These plans started out catering only to members of certain religions. Then a provider called Liberty Health Share opened up the market slightly while still requiring some fairly specific spiritual affirmations.

The latest incarnation is a company called Sedera* , which has addressed some of the shortcomings of earlier companies, has no religious basis, and now seems to be the place that most of my more analytical friends and their families are ending up. Even my DPC physician Dr. Tusek is now recommending Sedera.

Sedera is worth a whole separate article in itself, and in fact I am starting a dedicated page for questions and answers and discussion on the experience. But for now, we’ll take a shortcut and just say that I was convinced and willing to give it a try, so I signed myself up as a Sedera customer.

A quick comparison of the closest standard insurance plan I could find on the standard Colorado health insurance exchange, versus what I got from Sedera (click for larger version):

For me, Sedera cuts my monthly cost in half, even while delivering better coverage.

Another thing I like about all this is that there is no concept of “in network” and “out of network” doctors or hospitals. You can even use hospitals in other countries while traveling, and get reimbursed in US dollars after you return home. It’s simpler, cheaper and more flexible.

So in the end, by combining DPC with a health share plan, I am hopefully ending up with the best of all worlds:

The best personalized, advanced medicine and quick response time, possibly anywhere in the world through my DPC subscription, with unlimited “free” (zero co-pay) doctor visits.

Flexible coverage for any additional needs and support for decision-making and billing, even when traveling internationally

A financial backstop just in case things get really expensive

At a total monthly cost that is still lower than the most basic ho-hum plan on standard insurance

A further bonus – Sedera incentivizes you to be a member of a DPC, with a solid discount if you are, because they know their costs to cover you will be lower if you are healthier and have hassle-free access to a doctor.

This all sounds good to me, but it is important to state that this is an experiment. I still don’t have much experience with the US healthcare system – it helped deliver my son in 2006, and then repair that same boy’s broken arm in 2016. Conventional insurance offered some halfhearted support for both of those expenses, but aside from that I don’t have many stories to tell. 

By collecting more information from readers and from my new helpers at Cloud Medical and Sedera, we should be able to make more sense of all this. And hopefully continue to expand and improve this new, better form of health care so it is accessible to more US residents.

If it gets big enough, we might end up solving this whole problem together – better, cheaper health care for everyone.

My past articles and experiences have shown that for many of us, a big hurdle when considering early retirement or self-employment is “what about health insurance”? Hopefully the is DPC + Healthshare method will put that question to rest for many of us. After all, shouldn’t our career and life choices be separate from our healthcare?

—–

Interested in Learning More? A long-time friend of mine (and fellow early-retiree, and co-owner of the HQ coworking space) Bill and his family have been Sedera customers and enthusiasts for about two years. So much that he even took it upon himself to meet the company’s management, sign himself up as a representative to streamline some of the inefficiencies he perceived when joining, and then teach me about the whole thing.

Because of that, I am sharing Bill’s Sedera signup link in this article. His is unique among the Sedera affiliates in that he charges zero administrative fee, typical brokers charge $25 per month and up.

https:/sedera.community/thefireguild1

*note: Sedera does pay its affiliates a small referral fee for new customers, which does not affect your monthly bill – in fact, this link offers a lower price than subscribing directly through the company’s website. Thus, we believe this is the lowest cost way on the Internet to get this coverage.

As mentioned above, I’m giving Bill his own page to maintain on this site, where he can share his ongoing research and updates and answer questions: mrmoneymustache.com/sedera

Further Reading:

I was quite moved by this piece that Cloud Medical’s Dr. David Tusek wrote about “the ten heartbreaks” that led him to work since 2009 towards accelerating this better way to do healthcare.

An interesting story from Bill’s hometown, from a doctor who took this path way back in 2013:

South Portland Doctor Stops Accepting Insurance, Posts Prices Online (from the Bangor Daily News)

from Finance https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2020/11/09/direct-primary-care/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[lawrencedienerthings]

Opinion: William Pendley has no regard for the people or lands he is illegally serving

#thebureau👩‍💼 💬 🌊 ⛏ 🤥

get headlines https://thecherrycreeknews.com

Don’t dig for water under the outhouse.

William Perry Pendley, the embattled appointed director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has recently emerged from a period of lying low with a message to the public.

However, Pendley’s recent commentary to The Denver Post titled, “America’s largest land manager now amidst public lands,” was little more than a rerun of self-congratulatory rhetoric and a rosy narrative of his work relocating the BLM headquarters out West. 

Pendley begins by quoting President Trump’s justification for the relocation: “We’re taking the Bureau of Land Management out of D.C. … so land managers can actually live in the West.”

Cody Perry

Never mind that Pendley himself kept his office in D.C. and forced the majority of career experts out of the job. Never mind that state and field office managers have lived and worked in the West for decades, and it’s notable (albeit, not surprising) Pendley so closely aligns with a president who just two weeks ago withdrew his nomination to formally lead the agency. This is all just a game to them.

The White House has yet to offer any explanation for the withdrawal, but many suspect the move to be political shielding for vulnerable candidates like Sen. Cory Gardner during an election year.

A Senate confirmation process would have fully revealed how absurd he is as a candidate for leadership at the BLM. The elephant in the room remains — if Pendley is unfit for congressional approval for the role, then why does he still remain at the helm of BLM?

Sidestepping guidelines, it’s been exposed that Pendley signed succession orders that, in the absence of a Senate confirmed director, reinstated himself! The situation is irresponsibly circular, corrupt and may have negative impacts lasting for decades. 

READ: Colorado Sun opinion columnists.

When Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed the order on Aug. 10, formally establishing Grand Junction as the national headquarters, I thought it was time for a visit. Pendley declared the doors open to the new headquarters office months ago in January, welcoming visitation.

It’s an exciting opportunity to visit with people that administer 245 million acres of public land with 10,000 dedicated employees, some of whom I’m privileged to know and deeply respect. 

It was Aug. 11, the day after Secretary Bernhardt declared the headquarters relocation complete, and I walked into the empty building lobby to see a lone security guard staring out at me from behind a locked glass door with the lights off.

Friendly and professional, he came to the door, seemingly surprised to see me, and I asked if any staff was available to talk with. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he said in a hushed voice, “no one’s here.” 

As I walked out in the parking lot, I was less astonished by the abundant flakes of ash falling from the nearby Pine Gulch fire than I was by a brazen culture of dishonesty this administration consistently employs — the entire scenario, an ironic metaphor of the administration’s actions in the relocation effort.

Pendley said, “The move was designed to delegate more responsibility to the field, maximize services to the American people, and increase the BLM’s presence closest to the resources it manages.”

You’d think if that were the case there’d be at least a mention of gratitude for BLM and other wildland firefighters working the largest wildfire in Colorado history.

Pendley has repeatedly justified the relocation on the exorbitantly priced D.C. office space, that the relocation would save the BLM money by a reduced rate in rent.

But on Tuesday, the Interior’s Office of Inspector General issued a report that found that Pendley had overplayed the cost of BLM’s M Street lease, and that the agency already had plans to return to office space owned by the government. 

Pendley further made claims he acted “compassionately regarding long-serving, dedicated employees” — a statement resembling a smiling slap in the face of truth. In March, the Government Accountability Office found that Pendley had failed to establish a strategic reorganization plan, performance measures or even consult with affected staff at BLM. 

In the midst of this chaos, Sen. Gardner, the “chief architect” of the BLM’s relocation, is attempting to get a pass. He made the announcement of the headquarters relocation publicly before a single BLM employee was notified — a shameful move, more reminiscent of the pop tabloid TMZ than a government representative.

Imagine seeing that news release, hardly comprehending your lifelong career in public service and life-as-you-know-it is compromised by a flaky political move. In hindsight, people were forced out of lifelong jobs before COVID-19 would arrive and change our lives even further. 

OUR UNDERWRITERS SUPPORT JOURNALISM.   BECOME ONE.

By the end of his commentary, it’s hard to conclude what exactly Pendley wants us to believe. That the BLM is ready now, but actually will be soon? That he is kind and thoughtful toward his not-yet-congressionally-approved employees?

But coming from a guy who has mocked Native American spiritual beliefs, prefers the slur “Wuhan virus” over COVID-19 and considers the Black Lives Matter movement to be based on a lie; it is clear as day that Pendley has no regard for the people or lands he is illegally serving.  

Cody M. Perry is co-founder of Rig To Flip, a media company specializing in stories about the Colorado River Basin’s land, water and people that inspire stewardship, awareness and engagement. He lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. 

The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy and submit columns, suggested writers and more to opinion@coloradosun.com.

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[junker-town]

‘It’s just business’

How MLB became a microcosm of capitalism’s failure.

“It’s just business.” You hear it whenever some marginalized community loses a necessary service, or when a sick person is denied sorely needed coverage for their health, or when a laborer’s basic humanity is impugned, all in the name of the almighty dollar.

It’s a phrase spring-loaded with the connotation that “businesses” are in the business of doing anything and everything to make money, and that their mere existence justifies the collateral damage they cause. On some level, it’s difficult to blame people if they default to “it’s just business” when they encounter a wrong being done by a company that manufactures their steel cut oats or designer toothbrushes — if only because, hell, we all need to get on with our day.

We’ve been told “it’s just business” so often in our lives that we accept it as easily as air. It has become a state of existence, perpetuated by economic titans such as Milton Friedman, who declared “there is one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Plenty of people disagree with this worldview, but there’s no denying the rules of the game are ill-defined, malleable, unenforced and yet somehow ubiquitous. What they are not is equitable or ethical.

Major League Baseball is a prime example, having emphasized its bottom line at the expense of both players and fans by constantly changing the rules of the game. It has done so despite having already bilked cities, counties and states for tax breaks and public dollars for stadiums, despite an antitrust exemption upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and despite the foundational importance of fans as stakeholders in its individual organizations and the league.

There isn’t (yet) a salary cap, but front offices — likely due to pressure from ownership — have begun to treat the aptly named Competitive Balance Tax as a line in the sand. In 2012, MLB placed a heavy tax on spending more than five percent of one’s draft allotment that no team has yet to breach. Once the ability to spend freely in the draft was eliminated, teams used the international free agent market to build teams cheaply relative to the free agent market, proper. The most recent CBA tried to put a stop to that by implementing a hard cap on international spending, but regular free agency spending never bounced back. And despite these supposed great competitive balance measures, MLB has experienced record talent disparity over the last two offseasons.

The words “competitive balance” and “parity” often get used in sports, the idea being that leagues should strive for an environment where some combination of talent, intelligence, stamina and plain old luck decides champions, and not budgetary advantages. To that end, leagues and owners pursued options like salary caps, the draft, the reserve clause, international spending caps, luxury taxes, draft pick compensation, restricted free agency … the list goes on.

And conveniently, all of these measures come at the expense of labor. It’s not just salary caps, which are a transfer of wealth from players (labor) to owners, but the draft, too, which eliminates the ability of draftees to leverage teams against each other. Competitive balancing is always about limiting the top spenders rather than prodding the cheapskates.

As consumers, we’ve gotten used to rationalizing upcharges or degraded service, like the collective action of major American airlines which started offering a “basic economy” class that is helpful only to people who are traveling long distances on airplanes without bags (as we all love to do). We come to believe our inconvenience is helping a company stay afloat and continue to provide a service we otherwise wouldn’t have. Too often, though, we are being underserved and oversold in the pursuit of a temporarily attractive bottom line that will boost a stock price just long enough for that company to sell itself to another corporation, leaving them, and us, to hold the bag.

It doesn’t have to work this way though, mostly because this way isn’t working out for the vast majority. As Anu Aga, ex-chairperson of the giant engineering firm Thermax Limited, said “we survive by breathing but we can’t say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist.”

Baseball isn’t a vital industry to humanity, but it is a good study in how capitalism corrupts itself. In theory, a baseball team’s goals are simple: win games and entertain fans. By pursuing profit, it can also aim higher, building community spirit in the process. But in practice, baseball has become cheap and callous. After decades of spiritual degradation, MLB has come to epitomize the clash between society and late capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism is winning.

It’s strange that shareholder-first ideology has become so prevalent in sports. Efficiency uber-alles, especially in baseball, is orthodoxy these days, but that certainly wasn’t always the case. The late-era George Steinbrenner Yankees were built upon the Core Four, and supplemented by mercenary free agents who helped bring World Series titles to the Bronx.

And yet, after a pair of frosty offseasons, MLB now presides over organizations that routinely pass over premium talent at prices that are more than justifiable by public advanced metrics.

For a long time, $/WAR was the default framework by which free agent signings or trades were evaluated. This inevitably led to teams to lean on quality, young talent that was — and this is crucial — under team control for long periods of time. That control, which gives teams unilateral ability to decide salary for the first three years of any player’s career, became an end unto itself. It wasn’t rare to read something along the lines of “yes, Team A dealt away Superstar X to Team B for a smattering of players you haven’t heard of, but Team B will receive 15 controllable seasons in return, while Team A will receive only a year.”

Efficiency was, and is, the name of the game. It’s not enough to win, but you also have to appear smart while doing so. This is, in part, why teams don’t simply promote their prospects to the majors when they’re ready. Instead, they wait until after they’ve manipulated those players’ service time to gain an additional year of control.

As on-field optimization became de rigeur, baseball teams began using the same heartlessly efficient principles in other decision-making areas of their organizations. It isn’t enough to sell out a crowd, teams must maximize dollars per customer. That means ceding traditional fan seating to luxury boxes, raising ticket and concession prices, and generally just making it more difficult to attend a baseball game. This shift was aptly summed up by Robert Alvarado, the Los Angeles Angels’ then-VP of marketing and ticket sales, to Pedro Moura in this 2015 OC Register piece:

“We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,” Alvarado said. “In doing so, the ticket price that we’re offering those people, it’s not like I can segregate them, because I’m offering it up to the public, and I’m basically downselling everybody else in order to accommodate them.”

How one perceives that statement depends a lot on their views of why a business, and why a baseball team, exists. If the goal is to make money, then optimizing “per-cap” conversions is a reasonable place to start (even if one could also argue quite convincingly that it’s short-sighted). If one happens to think a baseball team exists to serve its community, as a municipal staple and entertainment option, then the statement is outrageous. Choosing empty seats — to intentionally not serve a significant portion of the fan base, to ensure upper-class patrons don’t see their perceived value impacted — is blasphemy.

Owning a sports franchise means shepherding a sacred member of the community that has existed for generations. It means benefitting from decades of handed-down fandom. To be unwilling to invest in a team should be considered sacrilege.

If, according to Aga, money alone cannot be the reason for a business to exist, then what is? There may not be one reason, exactly, but if there were, serving the community, be it locally, nationally or globally, seems as good a place to start as any. To look at the people and environments that compose those communities and think first of them, to think of returns on objectives rather than returns on investments. The rules of the game work a lot better when they’re geared towards the consumers they purport to serve rather than the bottom line.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of people decided prioritizing shareholders above success and fan experience was just the way things ought to be. That making an extra buck at everyone else’s expense was the cost of doing business. That because a company or a corporation was incentivized to do something — or more accurately, was not incentivized not to do something — they bore no responsibility for their actions. None of this holds objective truth. We have agency and responsibility that extends beyond our incentives, or else they would be called mandates. We can hold people responsible for the communities they leave in ruins in the reckless pursuit of the bottom line. We can choose differently.

For sports franchises, that entails a commitment to winning more than efficiency. No matter what people implore you to believe, sports franchises aren’t like other businesses. They inspire fierce allegiance like few brands can, sworn lifelong fealty merely by virtue of being born in their general vicinity. They trade in cultural value, and thus have an obligation to provide for that culture.

Other brands sometimes create those loyalties, sure, but that’s often thanks to a period of time when the product was best in class, before marketing took over. When it comes to other businesses we tend to, eventually, update our priors based on quality, price, convenience or some other service standard. Yet, when’s the last time someone changed their favorite baseball team due to ticket prices? They might show up less often, but their allegiances — who they root for — tend to be entrenched. This means the only way for a team to adequately serve its “customers” is through good-faith competition. Rebuilds are acceptable when they’re not also (read: actually) an effort to line ownership’s pockets, and they’re even more acceptable when the team later spends to win.

That puts sports teams in a unique relationship with their customers. They are highly incentivized to do right by their fans, and yet they can also easily abuse that relationship if they want. Essentially, they are free to choose either Friedman’s or Aga’s view of capitalism.

Sports franchises are an obvious, and potentially powerful, tool to build community, and yet so often, and seemingly increasingly, they take the path of least resistance. My argument, my plea, extends to businesses of all stripes: Focus first on serving your customers and employees, and allow profit to serve as a guideline within that endeavor. Justify your existence. If as a company you’re already profitable, but can further increase profits by slashing essential services or making them worse, do you do it? A commitment to profit maximization provides an easy answer. But so does a commitment to your community.

Sadly, this time of global crisis has dampened hope that teams can put others first. We’ve seen athletes come to the fore, offering to cover the salaries of stadium workers who are suffering in the absence of sports, and deepen their bonds to the people and places they represent. And while many organizations have pledged to do the same, too often they’ve led from behind, waiting until they’ve been shamed to support employees rather than lay them off.

Rarely have corporations been forced to so distinctly choose between rededicating themselves to communities or continuing to plunder as they see fit. The pandemic gave baseball a test in this regard. They’ve clearly flunked it.

[jccamus]

Lord of the Rings, 2020 and Stuffed Oreos: Read the Andrew Bosworth Memo

Lord of the Rings, 2020 and Stuffed Oreos: Read the Andrew Bosworth Memo https://ift.tt/2FpDoEm

On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive and confidant of Mark Zuckerberg, wrote a long memo on the company’s internal network.

In the post, titled “Thoughts for 2020,” Mr. Bosworth — who oversaw Facebook’s advertising efforts during the 2016 election and is now in charge of the company’s virtual and augmented reality division — admitted that President Trump’s savvy use of Facebook’s advertising tools “very well may lead to” his re-election. But he maintained that the company should not change its policies on political advertising, saying that doing so in order to avert a victory by Mr. Trump would be a misuse of power, comparing it to a scene from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Mr. Bosworth, who is seen by some inside Facebook as a proxy of sorts for Mr. Zuckerberg, also weighed in on a variety of issues that have vexed Facebook for the past few years, including data privacy scandals, Russian interference, political polarization and the debate over whether Facebook is healthy for society.

Here is the full post as written:

Thoughts for 2020

The election of Donald Trump immediately put a spotlight on Facebook. While the intensity and focus of that spotlight may be unfair I believe it isn’t unjust. Scrutiny is warranted given our position in society as the most prominent of a new medium. I think most of the criticisms that have come to light have been valid and represent real areas for us to serve our community better. I don’t enjoy having our flaws exposed, but I consider it far better than the alternative where we remain ignorant of our shortcomings.

One trap I sometimes see people falling into is to dismiss all feedback when they can invalidate one part of it. I see that with personal feedback and I see it happening with media coverage. The press often gets so many details wrong it can be hard to trust the veracity of their conclusions. Dismissing the whole because of flaws in parts is a mistake. The media has limited information to work with (by our own design!) and they sometimes get it entirely wrong but there is almost always some critical issue that motivated them to write which we need to understand.

It is worth looking at the 2016 Election which set this chain of events in motion. I was running our ads organization at the time of the election and had been for the four years prior (and for one year after). It is worth reminding everyone that Russian Interference was real but it was mostly not done through advertising. $100,000 in ads on Facebook can be a powerful tool but it can’t buy you an American election, especially when the candidates themselves are putting up several orders of magnitude more money on the same platform (not to mention other platforms).

Instead, the Russians worked to exploit existing divisions in the American public for example by hosting Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter protest events in the same city on the same day. The people who shows up to those events were real even if the event coordinator was not. Likewise the groups of Americans being fed partisan content was real even if those feeding them were not. The organic reach they managed sounds very big in absolute terms and unfortunately humans are bad at contextualizing big numbers. Whatever reach they managed represents an infinitesimal fraction of the overall content people saw in the same period of time and certainly over the course of an election across all media.

So most of the information floating around that is widely believed isn’t accurate. But who cares? It is certainly true that we should have been more mindful of the role both paid and organic content played in democracy and been more protective of it. On foreign interference, Facebook has made material progress and while we may never be able to fully eliminate it I don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.

Misinformation was also real and related but not the same as Russian interference. The Russians may have used misinformation alongside real partisan messaging in their campaigns, but the primary source of misinformation was economically motivated. People with no political interest whatsoever realized they could drive traffic to ad-laden websites by creating fake headlines and did so to make money. These might be more adequately described as hoaxes that play on confirmation bias or conspiracy theory. In my opinion this is another area where the criticism is merited. This is also an area where we have made dramatic progress and don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.

It is worth noting, as it is relevant at the current moment, that misinformation from the candidates themselves was not considered a major shortcoming of political advertising on FB in 2016 even though our policy then was the same as it is now. These policies are often covered by the press in the context of a profit motive. That’s one area I can confidently assure you the critics are wrong. Having run our ads business for some time it just isn’t a factor when we discuss the right thing to do. However, given that those conversations are private I think we can all agree the press can be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Perhaps we could do a better job exposing the real cost of these mistakes to make it clear that revenue maximization would have called for a different strategy entirely.

Cambridge Analytica is one of the more acute cases I can think of where the details are almost all wrong but I think the scrutiny is broadly right. Facebook very publicly launched our developer platform in 2012 in an environment primarily scrutinizing us for keeping data to ourselves. Everyone who added an application got a prompt explaining what information it would have access to and at the time it included information from friends. This may sound crazy in a 2020 context but it received widespread praise at the time. However the only mechanism we had for keeping data secure once it was shared was legal threats which ultimately didn’t amount to much for companies which had very little to lose. The platform didn’t build the value we had hoped for our consumers and we shut this form of it down in 2014.

The company Cambridge Analytica started by running surveys on Facebook to get information about people. It later pivoted to be an advertising company, part of our Facebook Marketing Partner program, who other companies could hire to run their ads. Their claim to fame was psychographic targeting. This was pure snake oil and we knew it; their ads performed no better than any other marketing partner (and in many cases performed worse). I personally regret letting them stay on the FMP program for that reason alone. However at the time we thought they were just another company trying to find an angle to promote themselves and assumed poor performance would eventually lose them their clients. We had no idea they were shopping an old Facebook dataset that they were supposed to have deleted (and certified to us in writing that they had).

When Trump won, Cambridge Analytica tried to take credit so they were back on our radar but just for making [expletive] claims about their own importance. I was glad when the Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale called them out for it. Later on, we found out from journalists that they had never deleted the database and had instead made elaborate promises about its power for advertising. Our comms team decided it would be best to get ahead of the journalists and pull them from the platform. This was a huge mistake. It was not only bad form (justifiably angering the journalists) but we were also fighting the wrong battle. We wanted to be clear this had not been a data breach (which, to be fair to us, it absolutely was not) but the real concern was the existence of the dataset no matter how it happened. We also sent the journalists legal letters advising them not to use the term “breech” which was received normally by the NYT (who agreed) and aggressively by The Guardian (who forged ahead with the wrong terminology, furious about the letter) in spite of it being a relatively common practice I am told.

In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to being with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months. In fact the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) seized all the equipment at Cambridge Analytica and found that there was zero data from any UK citizens! So surely, this is one where we can ignore the press, right? Nope. The platform was such a poor move that the risks associated were bound to come to light. That we shut it down in 2014 and never paid the piper on how bad it was makes this scrutiny justified in my opinion, even if it is narrowly misguided.

So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after).

But Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion.

That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies. It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand?

I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.

The philosopher John Rawls reasoned that the only moral way to decide something is to remove yourself entirely from the specifics of any one person involved, behind a so called “Veil of Ignorance.” That is the tool that leads me to believe in liberal government programs like universal healthcare, expanding housing programs, and promoting civil rights. It is also the tool that prevents me from limiting the reach of publications who have earned their audience, as distasteful as their content may be to me and even to the moral philosophy I hold so dear.

That doesn’t mean there is no line. Things like incitement of violence, voter suppression, and more are things that same moral philosophy would safely allow me to rule out. But I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal when it comes to calling people Nazi’s.

If we don’t want hate mongering politicians then we must not elect them. If they are getting elected then we have to win hearts and minds. If we change the outcomes without winning the minds of the people who will be ruled then we have a democracy in name only. If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all.

This conversation often raises the alarm around filter bubbles, but that is a myth that is easy to dispel. Ask yourself how many newspapers and news programs people read/watched before the internet. If you guessed “one and one” on average you are right, and if you guessed those were ideologically aligned with them you are right again. The internet exposes them to far more content from other sources (26% more on Facebook, according to our research). This is one that everyone just gets wrong.

The focus on filter bubbles causes people to miss the real disaster which is polarization. What happens when you see 26% more content from people you don’t agree with? Does it help you empathize with them as everyone has been suggesting? Nope. It makes you dislike them even more. This is also easy to prove with a thought experiment: whatever your political leaning, think of a publication from the other side that you despise. When you read an article from that outlet, perhaps shared by an uncle or nephew, does it make you rethink your values? Or does it make you retreat further into the conviction of your own correctness? If you answered the former, congratulations you are a better person than I am. Every time I read something from Breitbart I get 10% more liberal.

What does all of this say about the nature of the algorithmic rewards? Everyone points to top 0.1% content as being acutely polarized but how steep are the curves? What does the top 1% or 5% look like? And what is the real reach across those curves when compared to other content? I think the call for algorithmic transparency can sometimes be overblown but being more transparent about this type of data would likely be healthy.

What I expect people will find is that the algorithms are primarily exposing the desires of humanity itself, for better or worse. This is a Sugar, Salt, Fat problem. The book of that name tells a story ostensibly about food but in reality about the limited effectiveness of corporate paternalism. A while ago Kraft foods had a leader who tried to reduce the sugar they sold in the interest of consumer health. But customers wanted sugar. So instead he just ended up reducing Kraft market share. Health outcomes didn’t improve. That CEO lost his job. The new CEO introduced quadruple stuffed Oreos and the company returned to grace. Giving people tools to make their own decisions is good but trying to force decisions upon them rarely works (for them or for you).

In these moments people like to suggest that our consumers don’t really have free will. People compare social media to nicotine. I find that wildly offensive, not to me but to addicts. I have seen family members struggle with alcoholism and classmates struggle with opioids. I know there is a battle for the terminology of addiction but I side firmly with the neuroscientists. Still, while Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.

At the end of the day we are forced to ask what responsibility individuals have for themselves. Set aside substances that directly alter our neurochemistry unnaturally. Make costs and trade-offs as transparent as possible. But beyond that each of us must take responsibility for ourselves. If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position. My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.

To bring this uncharacteristically long and winding essay full circle, I wanted to start a discussion about what lessons people are taking away from the press coverage. My takeaway is that we were late on data security, misinformation, and foreign interference. We need to get ahead of polarization and algorithmic transparency. What are the other big topics people are seeing and where are we on those?

https://ift.tt/39Qff7S via The New York Times January 8, 2020 at 08:54AM

[qualitymanagement565421345]

Quality Management

The company is also able to become new client opportunities and meet them. When business processes are more effective, quality is higher and more customers may be satisfied.Good direction ends in an organization's success. Fantastic leadership determines unity and purpose among the shareholders and workforce. Developing a Quality Management company culture supplies an internal environment that enables workers to fully use their potential and get actively involved in achieving its objectives. The leaders must involve the workers in establishing clear organization goals and objectives. It motivates employees, who can significantly boost their productivity and loyalty.Staff participation is another basic principle. The management engages staff in creating and delivering value whether they are full time, part-time, outsourced or in-house. An organization should encourage the workers to constantly improve their skills and preserve consistency. This principle also entails empowering the workers, involving them in decision making and recognizing their achievements. When people are appreciated, they work to their very best potential since it boosts their confidence and their Quality Management . The approach emphasizes on achieving efficiency and efficacy in the organizational processes. The strategy involves an understanding that good procedures result in improved consistency, quicker actions, reduced prices, waste elimination and continuous improvement. An organization is improved when leaders can handle and control the inputs and the outputs of a company, in addition to the procedures used to produce the outputs.Every organization should think of a goal to be actively engaged in continuous improvement. 

Businesses that improve always experience improved performance, organizational flexibility and increased ability to embrace new opportunities. Businesses should be able to make new procedures continually and adapt to new market situations.Businesses should embrace a factual approach to conclusion. Businesses which make decisions based on verified and analyzed data have an improved understanding of this marketplace. They can perform tasks that produce desired results and also justify their previous decisions. Factual decision making is vital to help Quality Management the cause-and-effect connections of different things and also clarify potential unintended outcome and consequences.Relationship management is all about creating mutually beneficial relations with supplier and retailers. Different interested parties may impact the organization's performance. The organization should handle the supply chain process well and market the relationship between the company and its providers to maximize their impact on the organization's performance. As soon as an organization manages its relationship with interested parties well, it's more likely to attain sustained business collaboration.Quality is not a program or a subject. It will not end when you've achieved a specific goal. Quality needs to dwell at the business as the Culture of Quality in which every individual experiences and understands the requirement for dedication to its own values. Quality is a constant race to improvement with no finish line.At a more general degree, Quality is all about doing the right thing for your clients, your employees, your stakeholders, your business, and the environment in which most of us operate. By the degree of the individual employee all the way up into the degree of our world, Quality is about optimizing productivity and Quality Management clients while protecting our people and our sources from the harm that results from poor processes and careless oversight. Quality is a strategy that should be the objective of every company from business and manufacturing to healthcare, government, and not-for-profits. 

Once an organization adopts a Culture of Quality, the achievement of its implementation can depend on whether core principles and inherent assumptions already reflect Quality or can be effectively modified to adopt Quality through dedicated change direction. The farther away a company's culture is by adhering to the fundamentals of a Culture of Quality, the more difficult and failure-prone the Quality Management is likely to be, particularly if a commitment to core values clashes with underlying assumptions.Implementing Quality Management and investing in a requires the initiative of executive sponsorship in almost any organization. Given the reality that the advantages of Quality Management are difficult to quantify in direct terms and also have longer payback periods, executives with no expertise in Quality Management often don't see the value of investing in it compared to investments in sales and engineering, where the immediate benefits are easier to calculate.The reality is that the normal catalyst for garnering executive payoff for Quality is often a negative compelling event, like a recall or significant reduction of market share.xi While negative compelling events may indeed be powerful catalysts for change and assist concentrate executive focus on Quality Management, it might also come at enormous cost: lives may be lost, ecosystems might be ruined, and the company may endure significant brand and fiscal damage since these external failures increase prices by an order of magnitude. This short introduction to Quality has provided some history into its history, principles, and value to many organizations. Obviously, it's not just an origin story, but likewise the preparation for a plan of action to get leadership on board and address the startling figures relating to Cost of Quality Management . Start looking at your own processes with Quality fundamentals in mind and think about all the ways Total Quality Management can bring positive change to your organization.Implementing Quality Management and investment in a QMS requires the initiative of executive sponsorship in any organization.

[creditmonkey]

How many credit cards should you have – really?

How many credit cards is too many, and how many aren’t enough? How many credit cards should you have if you want an excellent credit score? I wish I could offer you a magic number of credit card accounts to have, but the ideal amount is different for each person.  Some people can get the most out of their cards by having over a dozen, while others shouldn’t have any. But there’s always been an effort by some to designate a certain number of cards as the ideal number for having excellent credit.

How many credit cards do most Americans have?

According to data from the American Bankers Association, there are about 370 million open credit card accounts in the United States. Considering there are approximately 253 million adults, this works out to an average of nearly one and a half credit cards per adult.  But at the same time, surveys have shown different results. Americans report having 2.6 credit cards per person, including the 29% who don’t have credit cards. Among those who have a credit credit card, they report holding an average of 3.7 cards per person.  It’s unclear why there’s such a discrepancy, but it could be due to survey respondents reporting cards that they hold as authorized users, or confusion between credit and debit cards. 

What’s the right number of credit cards for you?

Credit cards are incredibly powerful financial tools. Their advantages include convenience and security as well as rewards and benefits. And of course, a credit card can be used to finance purchases as well. But they aren’t without their drawbacks.  Credit cards can be used to incur debt, and when not managed responsibly, can damage or ruin your credit if you don’t pay. And beyond the cost of interest payments, credit cards can also come with expensive annual fees and late fees. The right number of credit cards for you will be enough to leverage all of the benefits of credit cards, while minimizing their drawbacks. If you're someone who can't remember (or afford) to pay on time, and you don't take advantage of features like payment reminders or autopay, then having a credit card might not be the right choice for you. In fact, irresponsible credit card use could hurt your credit score, rather than help it. 

How credit card accounts can affect your credit score

There are several factors that affect your credit score. The two most important factors in your credit score are your payment history and your amounts owed, comprising 35% and 30% of your score.  Payment history matters For some credit card users, having more credit card accounts will increase the chances of making late payments, which will hurt their credit history. These cardholders will want to limit the number of credit cards they have to an amount that they can comfortably manage every month. If opening an additional credit card account will make you more likely to miss a payment, then that’s too many. And if you already have more accounts than you can responsibly manage, then it would make sense to cancel some or all of them.  The impact of debt-to-credit ratio The “amounts owed” portion of your credit score can also be affected by the number of credit cards you have. This criteria looks at your debt-to-credit ratio, which is the total amount of debt you have across all accounts, divided by the total amount of credit you’ve been extended.  With each new credit card account you open, you’ll increase your total credit extended. This will reduce your debt-to-credit ratio, for a given amount of debt. Likewise, when you close a credit account, you’ll increase your debt-to-credit ratio so long as your debt level remains unchanged.  Opening new credit card accounts 15% of your credit score is determined by the length of your credit history. This is the average length of all accounts that appear on your credit report. With each new account you open, you’ll initially reduce your average age of accounts.  While closed accounts will continue to appear on your credit report, the length of time they’ve been open will no longer increase. Therefore, it’s good to keep your credit card accounts open for a long time, although it’s not nearly as important to your credit score as your payment history or your amounts owed. The number of new accounts you’ve opened represents 10% of your credit score, and your mix of credit makes up the final 10%. When you open several new accounts in a short period of time, the credit scoring formulas can interpret that as a sign of possible financial distress, which will hurt your score. But opening just one or two accounts in a year won’t have any effect on this factor.  Your credit mix is just the different types of credit you have, such as credit cards, car loans, student loans, personal loans and home mortgages. The wider the mix you have, the better it will reflect on your credit score.  The number of credit cards you have won’t have any effect on this aspect of your credit. At the same time, no one recommends unnecessarily taking out different types of loans just for the purpose of improving your credit score.  As far as just your credit score is concerned, there’s no way to have too many credit cards – as long as they are managed responsibly. There are credit card rewards enthusiasts who have dozens of accounts open and in good standing, and they continue to enjoy excellent credit scores.  As long as all the payments are made on-time, and they don’t carry much, if any debt, each new account adds positive credit history and adds to the total amount of credit extended, helping your score. 

How you can benefit from having multiple credit cards

Each credit card offers a unique set of rewards and benefits, and some credit card users try to obtain the maximum advantage from their cards by having numerous accounts. When it comes to maximizing the rewards that you can earn, one credit card might offer exceptional cash back rewards for grocery purchases, while other rewards cards have the best returns for dining or travel. A reward credit card maximizer would likely have both of those cards, as well as a separate one for all the charges that don’t qualify for a bonus.  The same is true when it comes to receiving the most benefits. For instance, most airline credit cards will offer benefits like a free checked bag and priority boarding. Hotel rewards credit cards can offer perks such as room upgrades, late checkouts and even free breakfasts. Other premium reward credit cards can offer airline fee credits, and memberships in airport business lounge clubs.  For frequent travelers, it can be worth paying the annual fees for several of these cards, so long as they are able to obtain enough value from each of them to justify the cost of the annual fee. In fact, frequent travelers might keep some cards just for their benefits, while rarely using them to make purchases.  But even if you’re not interested in rewards or benefits, having multiple credit cards can also offer redundant forms of payment. For example, if one of your credit cards is lost, stolen or damaged, then you can continue to use another card until it’s replaced. And if your American Express card is not accepted at a particular merchant, then you’ll want to have a Visa or Mastercard to complete the transaction.  As a result, it makes sense for most responsible credit card users to hold at least two or three credit cards. This offers them a way to build an excellent credit history while having a backup in case they are unable to use one or two of their cards for any reason. But if credit cards are not used responsibly, then some people are better off not having a single one. 

How will opening a new credit card impact your credit?

When you open up a new credit card account, it will have several direct and indirect impacts on your credit. First, you’ll add a new account, which by itself will have little, if any, effect. But if you’ve already opened several new credit accounts within the last year, then it could have a small, but significant negative effect on your credit.  At the same time, opening up a new account will increase the total amount of credit that you’ve been extended, which will reduce your debt to credit ratio if your amount of debt remains the same. This can have a positive effect on your credit score. And as you make on-time payments to your account, you’ll increase the positive information in your credit history, further increasing your score.  The negative effects of opening up a new credit card account are all indirect. If opening up a new account causes you to make unnecessary purchases or incur debt, then this will be very costly. And if an additional credit card account is too challenging to manage, and causes you to miss payments, then your credit score will suffer. 

Other factors to consider when deciding how many credit cards to have

Some people think that it’s bad to have a zero balance on your credit cards. Actually, there’s no harm in having an unused card with a zero balance. However, most credit card issuers will close accounts of cards that haven’t been used at least once in the last 12 months. So if you want to ensure that your account remains open, remember to make at least one charge to it every year.  Others could be under the impression that it’s bad to have two or more accounts from the same issuer. Actually, it makes no difference to your credit score. Another concern some have is for the practice of opening up multiple credit card accounts to earn rewards. As previously stated, opening up several new accounts in a short time period can hurt your score, but the effect is both minor and temporary. The fact that your motivation was to earn rewards has no effect on your credit score.  Another issue that worries some people is the effect of small business credit cards. Holding business credit cards may or may not affect your credit, depending on whether the card issuer reports your business accounts to the major consumer credit bureaus. Some do and some don’t, and the only way to find out is by reading about the experiences of others, or finding out for yourself. 

Bottom line

There’s no right number of credit cards for everyone, and those who worry about it too much might be missing the point. If you manage your cards responsibly, then there’s no harm in having as many cards as you’d like. But if you miss payments and incur debt with your cards, then you may have too many, even if you only have one. Read the full article

[cyberparse]

A lesson from network outages: Redundancy matters

http://cyberparse.co.uk/2017/01/02/a-lesson-from-network-outages-redundancy-matters/ https://i0.wp.com/cyberparse.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/security-binary-pd-898757.jpg?fit=3888%2C2592

Online outages are serious.Vendors lose money for every minute their users can’t reach their web services, and business productivity tanks when employees can’t access the web applications they rely on to get their jobs done. People can be convinced to forgive the occasional blip, but full-blown outages reinforce the impression that nothing truly critical should be entrusted to the internet. A look at some of the outages over the past year reveals a disturbing pattern. While the move to cloud-based architecture and applications has reduced complexity in IT infrastructure, that has come at the cost of resiliency.IT has to regularly balance redundancy — which improves resiliency — with complexity, and recent outages show that redundancy keeps getting left behind.Taking the time to assess potential “what if” scenarios and plan for the worst-case scenario could have, if not prevented, at least minimized the effects of these outages. “IT needs to plan for redundancy on critical services,” said Nick Kephart, a senior director at network infrastructure monitoring company ThousandEyes. Department of Redundancy Department Redundancy is a basic IT tenet. Whether it’s multiple backend servers running the same web applications or setting up disk drives in RAID arrays, IT regularly ensures availability even in the case of a failure. Yet the massive DDoS attack against DNS (Domain Name System) service provider Dyn showed that many organizations failed to think about redundancy on their critical infrastructure. The attack overwhelmed Dyn’s servers with enough junk traffic that legitimate DNS requests were no longer being answered. Web properties that had relied on Dyn to direct traffic to their servers realized too late that not having a backup DNS provider meant they were, for all intents and purposes, cut off from the rest of the internet during that period.  Those who load-balanced their DNS name servers across multiple providers — such as Amazon, who used both Ultra DNS and Dyn — were able to switch during the outage and remain unaffected. The internet usually hums along without any major issues, but the growing intensity and frequency of DDoS attacks proves that DNS needs to be treated as critical Internet infrastructure and protected as such.The attack against DNS wasn’t an aberration — cloud-based DNS provider NS1 was hit earlier in the year, and there was also the June attack that targeted all 13 of the DNS root servers. “It was a large-scale attack on the most critical part of the internet infrastructure and resulted in roughly three hours of performance issues,” said Archana Kesavan, a manager at network infrastructure monitoring company ThousandEyes. For many enterprises, Dyn seemed like the logical way to address redundancy for DNS services because Dyn already provides a distributed architecture.IT teams don’t want to have multiple DNS providers because it increases complexity to the network infrastructure, but DNS outages can and do happen, so IT teams need to double or even triple up on their DNS providers.IT should also lower the time-to-life settings on their DNS servers so that traffic can be redirected faster to the backup provider in case of an outage at the primary one. Popularity can hurt, too Outages aren’t just the result of malicious activity or equipment failure. Popularity can be just as damaging in the absence of proper network and capacity planning.There is no such thing as too many visitors, and a hit application everyone is clamoring for is fantastic. Or at least, until the increased traffic melts down the servers and the network collapses under the load, then everyone loses.  Lack of a CDN (content delivery network) front end can be costly if traffic bursts aren’t factored into the network architecture, Kephart said. January had one of the largest lottery jackpots in recent history, but Powerball couldn’t keep up with the frenzy surrounding the mega-million payout. Neither the application nor the network could handle the uptick in traffic, leading to increased packet loss and extended page load times. Powerball avoided complete meltdown by distributing traffic across Verizon’s Edgecast CDN network, Microsoft’s data center, and the Multi-State Lottery Association data center just before the drawing. “The damage was already done, and user experience to the website was sub-standard,” Kesavan said. PokemonGo’s servers experienced similar outages when the combination of network architecture and overloaded target servers prevented users from playing the game.Apple’s servers struggled to handle the much-anticipated launch of Nintendo’s Super Mario Run, with sporadic outages affecting all its online stores, including the iOS App Store, Mac App Store, Apple TV, and Apple Music. Benchmarking and capacity planning is critical, especially before software updates and large-scale events. No matter how well the network architecture is designed, CDNs and anycast servers can support the network and maximize user experience. Did we say redundancy yet? Don’t forget about Infrastructure redundancy, either.It’s tempting for IT teams to think, “My ISP can handle this, I don’t need to do anything else,” but even upstream providers can have outages, whether because of a mistaken configuration, hardware failure, or a security incident, Kephsart said. Networks by nature will have outages and face security threats, so IT needs to design into the network architecture the flexibility to react when something fails.Enterprises generally do a good job of building redundancy within their own data centers, but they overlook doing the same for third-party infrastructure providers.  Don’t rely on a single provider, because that becomes a single point of failure.Distribute dependencies across ISPs, DNS providers, and hosting companies. It is hard to justify security decisions when the only way to tell if it worked is to be able to say, “Hey, we didn’t get hacked,” or, “We didn’t have an outage,” at the end of the year.Those are great goals, but when there are competing demands, it’s hard to justify the extra expenses or added complexity on the possibility that bad things won’t happen.But that’s the kind of calculus IT needs to be doing every day.

Source Cisco Security Advisory

[costazachary1994]

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Can You Get Back With An Ex

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How To Get Your Pisces Ex Girlfriend Back

[damonbation]

Introducing Coverage Critic: Time to Kill the $80 Mobile Phone Bill Forever

A Quick Foreword: Although the world is still in Pandemic mode, we are shifting gears back to personal finance mode here at MMM. Partly because we could all use a distraction right now, and even more important because forced time off like this is the ideal time to re-invest in optimizing parts of your life such as your fitness, food and finances.

—

Every now and then, I learn to my horror that some people are still paying preposterous amounts for mobile phone service, so I write another article about it.

If we are lucky, a solid number of people make the switch and enjoy increased prosperity, but everyone who didn’t happen to read that article goes on paying and paying, and I see it in the case studies that people email me when looking for advice. Lines like this in their budget:

mobile phone service (2 people): $160

“NO!!!!” … is all I can say, when I see such unnecessary expenditure. These days, a great nationwide phone service plan costs between and $10-40 per month, depending on how many frills you need.

Why is this a big deal? Just because of this simple fact:

Cutting $100 per month from your budget becomes a $17,000 boost to your wealth every ten years.

And today’s $10-40 phone plans are just great. Anything more than that is just a plain old ripoff, end of story. Just as any phone more expensive than $200* (yes, that includes all new iPhones), is probably a waste of money too.

So today, we are going to take the next step: assigning a permanent inner-circle Mustachian expert to monitor the ever-improving cell phone market, and dispense the latest advice as appropriate. And I happen to know just the guy:

Christian Smith, along with colleagues at GiveWell in San Francisco, circa 2016

My first contact with Chris was in 2016 when he was working with GiveWell, a super-efficient charitable organization that often tops the list for people looking to maximize the impact of their giving.

But much to my surprise, he showed up in my own HQ coworking space in 2018, and I noticed he was a bit of a mobile phone research addict. He had started an intriguing website called Coverage Critic, and started methodically reviewing every phone plan (and even many handsets) he could get his hands on, and I liked the thorough and open way in which he did it.

This was ideal for me, because frankly I don’t have time to keep pace with ongoing changes in the marketplace. I may be an expert on construction and energy consumption, but I defer to my friend Ben when I have questions about fixing cars, Brandon when I need advice on credit cards, HQ member Dr. D for insider perspectives on the life of a doctor and the medical industry, and now Chris can take on the mobile phone world.

So we decided to team up: Chris will maintain his own list of the best cheap mobile phone plans on a new Coverage Critic page here on MMM. He gets the benefit of more people enjoying his work, and I get the benefit of more useful information on my site. And if it goes well, it will generate savings for you and eventual referral income for us (more on that at the bottom of this article).

So to complete this introduction, I will hand the keyboard over to the man himself.

Meet The Coverage Critic

Chris, engaged in some recent Coverage Criticicism at MMM-HQ

I started my professional life working on cost-effectiveness models for the charity evaluator GiveWell. (The organization is awesome; see MMM’s earlier post.) When I was ready for a career change, I figured I’d like to combine my analytical nature with my knack for cutting through bullshit. That quickly led me to the cell phone industry.

So about a year ago, I created a site called Coverage Critic in the hopes of meeting a need that was being overlooked: detailed mobile phone service reviews, without the common problem of bias due to undisclosed financial arrangements between the phone company and the reviewer.

What’s the Problem with the Cell Phone Industry?

Somehow, every mobile phone network in the U.S. claims to offer the best service. And each network can back up its claims by referencing third-party evaluations. 

How is that possible? Bad financial incentives.

Each network wants to claim it is great. Network operators are willing to pay to license reviewers’ “awards”. Consequently, money-hungry reviewers give awards to undeserving, mediocre networks.

On top of this, many phone companies have whipped up combinations of confusing plans, convoluted prices, and misleading claims. Just a few examples:

Coverage maps continue to be wildly inaccurate.

Many carriers offer “unlimited” plans that have limits.

All of the major U.S. network operators are overhyping next-generation, 5G technologies. AT&T has even started tricking its subscribers by renaming some of its 4G service “5GE.”

However, with enough research and shoveling, I believe it becomes clear which phone companies and plans offer the best bang for the buck.  So going forward, MMM and I will be collaborating to share recommended phone plans right here on his website, and adding an automated plan finder tool soon afterwards. I think you’ll find that there are a lot of great, budget-friendly options on the market.

A Few Quick Examples:

T-Mobile Connect: unlimited minutes and texts with 2GB of data for $15 per month

Total Wireless: 4 lines in a combined family plan with unlimited calling, texting, and 100GB of shared data(!) for $100 per month. (runs on Verizon’s extensive network)

Xfinity Mobile: 5 lines with unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, and 10GB of shared data over Verizon’s network for about $12 per line each month (heads up: only Xfinity Internet customers are eligible, and the bring-your-own-device program is fairly restrictive).

Ting: Limited use family plans for under $15 per line each month.

Tello: 100 minutes, unlimited texts, and 1GB of data for $7 per month (on Sprint’s somewhat lousy network).

[MMM note – even as a frequent traveler, serious techie and a “professional blogger”, I rarely use more than 1GB each month on my own Google Fi plan ($20 base cost plus data, then $15 for each additional family member). So some of these are indeed generous plans]

Okay, What About Phones?

With the above carriers, you may be able to bring your existing phone. But if you need a new one, there are some damn good, low-cost options these days. The Moto G7 Play is only $130 and offers outstanding performance despite the low price point. I use it as my personal phone and love it.

If you really want something fancy, consider the Google Pixel 3a or the recently released, second-generation iPhone SE. Both of these are amazing phones and about half as expensive as an iPhone 11.

——————————————-

Mobile Phone Service 101

If you’re looking to save on cell phone service, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of the industry. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to skip over a lot of nuances in the rest of this post. If you’re a nerd like me and want more technical details, check out my longer, drier article that goes into more depth.

The Wireless Market

There are only four nationwide networks in the U.S. (soon to be three thanks to a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint). They vary in the extent of their coverage:

Verizon (most coverage)

AT&T (2nd best coverage)

T-Mobile (3rd best coverage)

Sprint (worst coverage)

Not everyone needs the most  coverage. All four nationwide networks typically offer solid coverage in densely populated areas. Coverage should be a bigger concern for people who regularly find themselves deep in the mountains or cornfields.

While there are only four nationwide networks, there are dozens of carriers offering cell phone service to consumers – offering vastly different pricing and customer service experiences.

Expensive services running over a given network will tend to offer better customer service, more roaming coverage, and better priority during periods of congestion than low-cost carriers using the same network. That said, many people won’t even notice a difference between low-cost and high-cost carriers using the same network.

 For most people, the easiest way to figure out whether a low-cost carrier will provide a good experience is to just try one. You can typically sign up for these services without a long-term commitment. If you have a good initial experience with a budget-friendly carrier, you can stick with it and save substantially month after month.

With a good carrier, a budget-friendly phone, and a bit of effort to limit data use, most people can have a great cellular experience while saving a bunch of money.

MMM’s Conclusion

From now on, you can check in on the Coverage Critic’s recommendations at mrmoneymustache.com/coveragecritic, and he will also be issuing occasional clever or wry commentary on Twitter at @Coverage_Critic.

Thanks for joining the team, Chris!

*okay, special exception if you use it for work in video or photography. I paid $299 a year ago for my stupendously fancy Google Pixel 3a phone.. but only because I run this blog and the extra spending is justified by the better camera.

The Full Disclosure: whenever possible, we have signed this blog up for referral programs with any recommended companies that offer them, so we may receive a commission if you sign up for a plan using our research. We aim to avoid letting income (or lack thereof) affect our recommendations, but we still want to be upfront about everything so you can judge for yourself. Specific details about these referral programs is shared on the CC transparency page. MMM explains more about how he handles affiliate arrangements here.

from Money 101 https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2020/05/03/mobile-phone-plans/ via http://www.rssmix.com/