Coruscation

Diane Garnick from TIAA; Chicago Booth

Date Written: February 27, 2017

Abstract
Mental Accounting is an important tool enabling us to make countless decisions each day. We code, categorize and evaluate our expenses using a system that we typically develop with our first paycheck. We routinely allocate some portion of our money to many buckets, and often over commit ourselves. 25% to housing, 25% to food, 25% to loans, and of course, another 50% to entertainment. We don't necessarily make the best decisions, but if we make a mistake we have time on our side.

Mental Accounting in Retirement involves a key change in mindset. Time is no longer on our side and (hopefully) our level of wealth is higher. Rather than allocate some funds to many buckets we propose fully funding one bucket before moving on to the next. This framework offers transparency into the age old question of how much guaranteed lifetime income each household needs while simultaneously offering savers insight into which goals they are on track to meet.

Keywords: Behavioral Finance, Mental Accounting, Mental Accounting in Retirement, Emotional Accounting, Lifetime Income, Psychological Biases, Behavioural Finance

JEL Classification: A10, D03, D10, D91

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The algorithms that Facebook's censors use to differentiate between hate speech and legitimate political expression.

Julia Angwin, ProPublica, and Hannes Grassegger, special to ProPublica, June 28, 2017,
deconstruct their own clickbait:

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook's censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins' incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims -- those that are "radicalized" -- while Delgado's post was deleted for attacking whites in general.

Hoffman said the team also relied on the principle of harm articulated by John Stuart Mill, a 19th-century English political philosopher. It states "that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." That led to the development of Facebook's "credible threat" standard, which bans posts that describe specific actions that could threaten others, but allows threats that are not likely to be carried out.

Eventually, however, Hoffman said "we found that limiting it to physical harm wasn't sufficient, so we started exploring how free expression societies deal with this."

While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 "Arab Spring" with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company's hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.

The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at "protected categories"--based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about "subsets" of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.

Behind this seemingly arcane distinction lies a broader philosophy. Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook's algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.

"Sadly," the rules are "incorporating this color-blindness idea which is not in the spirit of why we have equal protection," said Danielle Citron, a law professor and expert on information privacy at the University of Maryland. This approach, she added, will "protect the people who least need it and take it away from those who really need it."

But Facebook says its goal is different -- to apply consistent standards worldwide. "The policies do not always lead to perfect outcomes," said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook. "That is the reality of having policies that apply to a global community where people around the world are going to have very different ideas about what is OK to share."

In 2004, attorney Nicole Wong joined Google and persuaded the company to hire its first-ever team of reviewers, who responded to complaints and reported to the legal department. Google needed "a rational set of policies and people who were trained to handle requests," for its online forum called Groups, she said.

Google's purchase of YouTube in 2006 made deciding what content was appropriate even more urgent. "Because it was visual, it was universal," Wong said.

While Google wanted to be as permissive as possible, she said, it soon had to contend with controversies such as a video mocking the King of Thailand, which violated Thailand's laws against insulting the king. Wong visited Thailand and was impressed by the nation's reverence for its monarch, so she reluctantly agreed to block the video -- but only for computers located in Thailand.

After the wave of Syrian immigrants began arriving in Europe, Facebook added a special "quasi-protected" category for migrants, according to the documents. They are only protected against calls for violence and dehumanizing generalizations, but not against calls for exclusion and degrading generalizations that are not dehumanizing. So, according to one document, migrants can be referred to as "filthy" but not called "filth." They cannot be likened to filth or disease "when the comparison is in the noun form," the document explains.

Facebook also added an exception to its ban against advocating for anyone to be sent to a concentration camp. "Nazis should be sent to a concentration camp," is allowed, the documents state, because Nazis themselves are a hate group.

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CEO of LaGuardia Gateway Partners Stewart Steeves ' 80-person staff works out of offices above Terminal B. "There's a lot of focus on infrastructure," said Steeves. "We're doing $100 million a month in construction, and we have a whole team of people and spend a lot of time on that, for sure. But it's also the little things."

That includes restrooms, which are the biggest determinant of passenger satisfaction, he said. "Are the stalls large enough so you can wheel in your suitcase and still close the door? How do you manage the sink and such so you don't get a big splash zone--or do you even need a counter when no one puts anything down on it anyway because its soaking wet? How do you design it so it can be cleaned more easily? Mirrors, more hooks, paper towels versus blow dryers..." reeled off Steeves. "We spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that."

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1. With tougher high-school requirements and greater pressure to go to college, summer classes are the new summer job. The percent of 16-to-19-year-olds enrolled in summer school has tripled in the last 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rise may be directly related to the fact that parents and high schools are encouraging students to take on more classwork, according to Ben Steverman, a Bloomberg reporter who covers teen employment. He finds that the percentage of high-school grads completing at least four years of English, three years of science, math, and social science, and two years of foreign language has sextupled since the early 1980s.

2. The second reason why teens work less today is that employers are more reluctant to hire them. First, the rise of low-skill immigration in the last few decades has created more competition for exactly the sort of jobs that teenagers used to do, like grocery-store cashiers, restaurant servers, and retail salespeople. Second, older Americans stay in the workforce longer than ever, and many of them wind down their careers in office secretary and retail jobs, which used to be the province of 16-year-olds in the summer.

3. Third, the number of federally funded summer jobs, where students work temporarily with their local government, has declined. At the same time, the minimum wage has grown, which may have discouraged bosses from taking on young inexperienced workers who are only "worth" hiring at a salary that's become illegal.

4. Fourth, training. Companies have caught on to the fact that if they want to hire teenagers, they don't have to pay them at all: There has been an extraordinary rise in unpaid internships over the last decade.

-- Derek Thompson

Another big-picture explanation for the demise of teen summer jobs is cultural. Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to the social norms of their peers. If they see cool older teenagers scooping ice cream during their freshman summer, they'll really look forward to a job scooping ice cream during their sophomore summer. But any social feedback loop can spin both ways.

Recently, the cultural norm is shifting toward summer classes and unpaid internships rather than summer jobs. Since the mid-1990s, the share of teenagers who say they wish they were working has fallen by about 50 percent, according to the BLS. That suggests--although it cannot prove--that summer jobs have lost cultural cachet,

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Some of the residents of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville in Quebec appealed to their city councilors on Monday to stop what they consider an unreasonable influx of cyclists into their quiet neighbourhood.

The residents who showed up consider the club riders who come to train on the roads of their neighbourhood more than just a nuisance but an invasion of their quiet streets. They think cyclists using the neighbourhood to train are disregarding the street laws and there needs to be a greater police presence.

Nicole Kirouac, who lives on Rue du Sommet-Trinité near the corner of Chemin des Hirondelles and Rue Mésange, told La Radio Allumée she feels like a hostage because of the cyclists who chose the roads of her neighbourhood to train on for hours.

A popular Strava segment that goes by this intersection, a 500 m stretch of road that rises at an average gradient of 3.7 per cent, has 11,912 attempts by 1,335 users. Many of the roads in this corner of Saint-Bruno rise gently as they sit on the slopes of the Mont-Sainte-Bruno and are dead ends so they don't see very much vehicle traffic.

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Every Citibike trip mapped, in N
YC.

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Jack Baruth handed you the truth, how did you handle it ?

The truth about cars's theres-no-pill-for-contextual-dysfunction.

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The McGill study found the Plateau-Mont-Royal and Ville-Marie boroughs are the most popular locations for rentals in Montreal. This photo shows one of the San Francisco-based Sonder property management company's listings in the Plateau neighbourhood.

David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University.

He found that Airbnb listings are taking up available housing stock and inflating rents in Canada's three biggest cities.

The study, titled Short-term Cities: Airbnb's Impact on Canadian Housing Markets, looked at three years of data provided by the analytics firm AirDNA, which offers data to users looking to increase their Airbnb success. The firm collected information on all public transactions, gathering about 80 million data points

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Rapha may not be a household name, in the tribal cycling community it is seen as a "Marmite" brand, at the centre of fierce forum debates where detractors see it as the fiefdom of wealthy metrosexuals or the "Raphia".

Its sells everything from £20 embrocation cream - which redirects blood back into your lower extremities by stimulating blood vessels - to bespoke holidays in the Alps. It even has its own riding club with 9,000 members paying £135 a year for perks including free coffee in its clubhouses.

"We are totally in love with the sport," Mottram said in a recent Guardian interview. "We love the product and think the product should be as good as the sport. I care about how I look and perhaps that makes me a shallow person but why on a bike should you not?"

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a daycare for hyperactive young adults. I was told to wait on a nearby bench, a bench with no back I might add. As I surveyed my surroundings, I noted, there was not one inch of private space. There were Ping-Pong tables, candy stations, a variety of snacks, organic coffees and green smoothies in mason jars. Young staffers whipped by, paddle in hand, ready for a quick game before their next meeting. Was it just me or were they actually wearing roller blades? I couldn't help but wonder when the workplace transitioned into a playground.

-- Vickie Fagan

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Much online advertising capitalizes on the lure of the so-called long tail of the internet -- sites that draw relatively small but attractive audiences, like blogs for new parents or forums for truck enthusiasts. Advertising on those sites costs a fraction of what it does on more prominent online destinations, which typically deal directly with advertisers.

Teenagers overseas and entrepreneurs in the United States discovered this year that they could earn thousands of dollars a month by writing wholly fictionalized or wildly exaggerated partisan political news intended to be spread on Facebook. They then reaped money from Google Ads and other networks after credulous readers in the United States clicked through to their sites.

"A lot of ad buying systems are trying to show the right ad to the right person at the right time, and you see that mantra of those three variables across the industry," said Michael Tiffany, the chief executive and a founder of White Ops, an ad fraud detection company. "Note how 'on the right site' doesn't make the list."

Money is funneled to smaller sites through a complex system of agencies and third-party networks, which can resemble a stock exchange. This system, known as programmatic advertising, allows brands to collect many millions of impressions -- an industry term that generally indicates that an ad has been displayed and can be viewed.

But the lack of human oversight in this nascent industry has also led to confusion and mistakes. Technology has emerged to protect brands from showing up on sites that traffic in, say, pornography or spam, but those measures have been found wanting when it comes to disinformation. That kind of content is more difficult for security firms to detect than "open hate speech or nudity or violence or any of the normal stuff that you would stay away from," said John Montgomery, executive vice president for brand safety at GroupM, part of the advertising giant WPP.

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The mortgage crisis that ravaged the economy eight years ago was especially damaging to African-American communities, where homeowners who qualified for affordable mortgages were often steered into high-priced loans that paid rich returns to mortgage brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to default.

The ensuing glut of vacant homes drove down property values almost everywhere. But minority communities suffered disproportionately, widening the already considerable wealth gap between white and minority households.

One big reason for these disparities, according to a federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of fair housing groups, was that companies like the mortgage giant Fannie Mae took better care of foreclosed homes in working- and middle-class white areas than of equivalent homes in black and Latino communities. The plaintiffs, led by the National Fair Housing Alliance, say they reported this problem as early as 2009 and that they filed suit against Fannie Mae only after it continued to neglect foreclosed properties it owned in African-American and Latino neighborhoods.

Fannie Mae disputes the allegations and says that its maintenance standards are designed to ensure that all of its properties are treated equally. This might be true. But the copious evidence in this lawsuit suggests that those standards are being applied unequally.

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Before you start deciding what sparks joy in your life, you must first get a true sense of the problems you face. For example, when organizing clothes, I ask that you take out all the clothes you own and gather them in one spot, so that you can visually comprehend how much you have.

What we don't often realize is that the furniture and closets in which we store our clothing have a remarkable way of concealing truths we would rather not see (a pilled sweater, for instance, that does not bring any joy). It's perfectly fine to take advantage of this masking effect on a small scale, but when the amount of things that you don't need continuously increases -- along with the time and space that you devote to accumulating those things -- you will find that it becomes harder to lie to yourself.

We also work in much the same way. We often hide our problems inside the closet of our hearts as if they never existed. Whenever my mind clouds over and I feel overwhelmed, I immediately take out a sketchbook. I write down all the emotions that I feel and the possible reasons behind them across a blank white page.

Understanding and appreciating the concept of tokimeku in the midst of a confusing and disorderly world will allow us to clarify our ideals, and help us gain confidence in our ability to lead productive lives and develop a sense of responsibility to those around us. From there, we can act with focus and certainty while improving our lives and our beautiful -- if still very messy -- world.

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The Republican Party's fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.

Until 2010, some Republicans ran ads in House and Senate races showing their support for green energy.

Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Ebell, the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow who had worked for years to undermine the legitimacy of established climate science, to head the transition team at E.P.A. Mr. Ebell immediately began pushing for an agenda of gutting the Obama climate regulations and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

When it came time to translate Mr. Trump's campaign promises to coal country into policy, Mr. Murray and others helped choose the perfect candidate: Mr. Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general.

Most public opinion polls find that voters rank the environment last or nearly last among the issues that they vote on. And views are divided based on party affiliation. In 2001, 46 percent of Democrats said they worried "a great deal" about climate change, compared with 29 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup tracking poll on the issue. This year, concern among Democrats has reached 66 percent. Among Republicans, it has fallen, to 18 percent.

After the House of Representatives passed what is known as cap-and-trade legislation, a concept invented by conservative Reagan-era economists.

The idea was to create a statutory limit, or cap, on the overall amount of a certain type of pollution that could be emitted. Businesses could then buy and sell permits to pollute, choosing whether to invest more in pollution permits, or in cleaner technology that would then save them money and allow them to sell their allotted permits. The administration of the first President George Bush successfully deployed the first national cap-and-trade system in 1990 to lower emissions of the pollutants that cause acid rain. Mr. McCain pushed a cap-and-trade proposal to fight climate change.

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, worked behind the scenes to make sure Republican offices in Congress knew about Mr. Horner's work -- although at the time, many viewed Mr. Ebell skeptically, as an extremist pushing out-of-touch views.

In 2009, hackers broke into a climate research program at the University of East Anglia in England, then released the emails that conservatives said raised doubts about the validity of the research. In one email, a scientist talked of using a statistical "trick" in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. The research was ultimately validated, but damage was done.

As Congress moved toward actually passing climate change legislation, a fringe issue had become a part of the political mainstream.

"That was the turning point," Mr. Horner said.

The House passed the cap-and-trade bill by seven votes, but it went nowhere in the Senate -- Mr. Obama's first major legislative defeat.

Unshackled by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and other related rulings, which ended corporate campaign finance restrictions, Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations.

Outside of Congress, a small number of establishment conservatives, including a handful of leaders from the Reagan administration, have begun pushing Washington to act on climate change. Earlier this year, James A. Baker III, one of the Republican Party's more eminent senior figures, met with senior White House officials to urge them to consider incorporating a carbon tax as part of a broader tax overhaul package -- a way to both pay for proposed cuts to corporate tax rates and help save the planet. A Reagan White House senior economist, Art Laffer; a former secretary of state, George P. Shultz; and Henry M. Paulson Jr., George W. Bush's final Treasury secretary, have also pushed the idea.

"There are members from deep-red districts who have approached me about figuring out how to become part of this effort," Mr. Curbelo said. "I know we have the truth on our side. So I'm confident that we'll win -- eventually."

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"SOLOPRENEURS" NEED NOT APPLY

Ruettimann believes an economic downturn is overdue, which will flood the job market with legions of contract workers, freelancers, and so-called "solopreneurs" applying for corporate jobs with full-time benefits. Whether or not that proves true, Ruettimann says that in the recruitment world, "nobody really believes in the gig economy."

The prevailing attitude, she says, is that "if you're self-employed, it's because you can't get full-time work." So job seekers looking for traditional roles after years supporting themselves--particularly older ones--she says, "are facing serious ageism and bias in the workforce." Ruettimann's advice is twofold: "If you've been in this gig economy, get your references in order and make sure you're working for really awesome clients who can vouch for you, then think about turning those clients from customers into employers--like now."

Second, "downplay how much you took on in terms of risk or innovation or ability"--that experience won't matter nearly as much as a job description may lead you to believe; in fact, risk-takers are seen as unpredictable liabilities. Instead, Ruettimann suggests, "highlight the fact you can work in a team, that you can take orders, that you're looking to learn, you're looking to collaborate."

No matter what they claim, she says, recruiters are "looking for someone who will come in and assimilate with the team, not necessarily challenge it."

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Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression, is a structural principle based on the use of isolated components in compression inside a net of continuous tension, in such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other and the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially.

Tensegrity structures are structures based on the combination of a few simple design patterns:

l

• Loading members only in pure compression or pure tension, meaning the structure will only fail if the cables yield or the rods buckle
• Preload or tensional prestress, which allows cables to be rigid in tension


• Mechanical stability, which allows the members to remain in tension/compression as stress on the structure increases.

Because of these patterns, no structural member experiences a bending moment. This can produce exceptionally rigid structures for their mass and for the cross section of the components.

The term tensegrity was coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s as a portmanteau of "tensional integrity".[2] The other denomination of tensegrity, floating compression, was used mainly by Kenneth Snelson.

For application in kinesiology and physical therapy, see Scott Sonnon's flow.

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ormsby/crystal-aqua

haskell/crystal-silver

haskell/crystal-electric-blue

topper-16/crystal

More in eyes.

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"The ambiguity inherent in diagnosing back pain makes it possible for surgeons to do practically anything they want."

-- Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, author of a new book, Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.

Crooked weaves together her compelling personal story and those of compatriots in back pain of all ages. It also follows the money, revealing the hidden motivations of many industry players: workers compensation insurance companies, pain management specialists, the drug companies that make narcotic painkillers, personal injury lawyers, spinal device makers, and spinal surgeons, especially the ones who advertise late at night, often touting their laser surgery. All appear to make a living by exploiting the "fix me" pleadings from people in pain.

This is not to suggest that all spine surgeons or specialists are villains, of course. Sometimes surgery is necessary, though many top spine specialists interviewed for Crooked agreed that surgery is overused. A spinal surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Hyun Bae, explained why this might be, saying, "It's not only a financial conflict. It's an emotional conflict. We get paid to do the work. We want to make the patient better. So we concentrate on the good results and we dismiss the bad results."

Subluxations are said to be spinal joints that have slipped out of alignment, and some chiropractors will explain that they lead to back pain, digestive issues, mood disorders, and more. Ramin reports that they are impossible to point at on an x-ray, because they don't exist; a dislocated joint in your spine would be the result of a horrendous injury that sends you to the hospital, she explains, not to a massage table.

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Halifax: Top-5-biking-trails- Halifax/.

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Trek suspension engineer, Ted Alsop, puts it this way, "27.5+, ideally, has the diameter of a 29×2.3 tire, but to get there, you have to give it a really tall sidewall. The bead-to-bead measurement-that's the actual width of the tire if you pressed it flat and measured from one bead to the other-is about 15 millimeters wider than a 29+ tire. Relative to the rim, the 27.5+ tire is actually taller than the 29+ tire, which is why we've found that the 27.5+ tires that we've ridden have a lot more of an un-damped, fatbike tire bounce to them and don't corner as well at lower pressures. The 29+ tire, which is actually a lower profile, shorter sidewall tire, has less of that uncontrolled bounce to it."

What are plus-size bikes supposed to offer? At this point, it all depends on whom you ask. For Alex Cogger, director of product for Rocky Mountain Bicycles, plus-size bikes, like the new 27.5+ Sherpa, have a very definite, limited skill set. "What they do really well," says Cogger, "is monster truck over stuff. They really shine in loose, rubbly, crappy conditions. It's great for that. It's also incredibly stable and grippy, so for someone who's less technically skilled and is looking for some added confidence, absolutely."

"Where it begins to falls short," adds Cogger, "is for someone who is trying to push really hard in the corners and get really aggressive-that's when you get some tire roll. You'd have to make such a burly and heavy tire for it to not fold over like that, that you'd just be bolting extra weight onto your bike."

Accordingly, Rocky Mountain has positioned the Sherpa as an overland adventure bike.

Other companies, however, have a decidedly different take. The most obvious of which is Trek Bicycles. A few days ago, Trek unveiled its new Stache plus-size hardtail. The bike wears 29+ tires and has an entirely different mission statement than the Sherpa.

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Help stop procrastination psychology.

We know from psychological research by Andrew Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being.

Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues for years have shown us that implementation intentions make a huge difference to even deal with things like distractions.

Robert Pozen, who's written a book on extreme productivity, has the OHIO rule: only handle it once.

Pychyl's book from 2013: Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change

"Why wait? The science behind procrastination," a review of the contemporary research by Eric Jaffe

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Taking ibuprofen and related over-the-counter painkillers could have unintended and worrisome consequences for people who vigorously exercise. These popular medicines, known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, work by suppressing inflammation.

But according to two new studies, in the process they potentially may also overtax the kidneys during prolonged exercise and reduce muscles' ability to recover afterward.

NSAIDs work, in part, by blunting the body's production of a particular group of biochemicals, called prostaglandins, that otherwise flood the site of injuries in the body. There, they jump-start processes contributing to pain and inflammation. Prostaglandins also prompt blood vessels to dilate, or widen, increasing blood flow to the affected area.

Taking NSAIDs results in fewer prostaglandins and consequently less inflammation and less dilation of blood vessels.

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WNYC: Do biking commuters breath pollutionin NYC.

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The for-profit Art Institutes programs that failed the federal test trained students in fields including commercial photography, video production, radio broadcasting, culinary arts, interior decorating and video game design. Other programs that crop up frequently on the failing list include cosmetology and barbering, acupuncture and massage therapy, criminal justice studies and low-level jobs in health care fields.

What these programs have in common is a combination of marketing appeal to young people -- design video games for a living! -- and little or no outside pressure to ensure that the education is both of high quality and leads to jobs that pay enough to finance the cost of student loans. Sure, there are good programs in all of these fields, including some offered by for-profit schools. But it can be very hard for the average consumer to know the difference beforehand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/upshot/harvard-too-obamas-final-push-to-catch-predatory-colleges-is-revealing.html

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Lefteris Jason Anastasopoulos, a lecturer and data science fellow at Berkeley's School of Information, provides one answer: Support for immigration "may be greatly overestimated."

In an email, Anastasopoulos writes that

polls conducted by large survey organizations never ask about immigration in geographic context. Instead they ask questions about whether respondents support increasing immigration or granting amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the "United States" overall rather than, say, Dayton, Ohio, or Wilmington, North Carolina, places where immigration has been rapidly increasing over the past few years. This kind of abstract framing tends to push respondents toward giving more "politically correct" answers to standard poll questions about immigration.

The result is

a significant underestimation of the backlash against newly arriving immigrants and an overestimation of the support for immigration among the public.

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Green groups regularly parachute into her community, Gordon says -- West Oakland abuts a busy port and is rife with respiratory illnesses thanks to fumes from shipping, trucks servicing the area, and highway traffic -- but the partnerships aren't always fruitful. The outside organizations seem to have different goals.

Miscommunications often arise because green groups and their associates want to come in, collect data, and move on, she said, while her community members are looking for meaningful change. She points to a recent project where an environmental group, a major tech firm, and a research university mapped her neighborhood's air pollution block by block. The scientists got the data they wanted and released a highly publicized paper earlier this month. But the people of West Oakland didn't get what Gordon calls "liberation" from the pollution problems.

"After the community went through all the trials and tribulations with you, you should be supporting me to make local changes," she says. "You can't keep doing documentation without actualization."

Among the big greens, Earthjustice is often considered a leader in addressing diversity. Over the past six years, its staff went from 20 percent people of color to nearly 40 percent. Chas Lopez is determined to keep that percentage climbing; he joined the organization in September 2015 as its first vice president of diversity and inclusion.

Speaking one-on-one with his colleagues during a listening tour of Earthjustice outposts across the country, several themes emerged, Lopez says. Some of those went into the development of a three-pronged rubric for identifying future Earthjustice hires: All of them would need to have functional skill, emotional intelligence, and cultural competency.

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So while there was the illusion of fair exchange, there really was no exchange at all: Eriksson and Freer got diehard loyalty and free labor in exchange for Gizmondo stock, while their underlings were allowed to drive outrageous automobiles that they nonetheless didn't own. Models, supercars, diamond watches, paper stocks, parties: these were the currencies in Gizmondo nation, and everyone thought of themselves as fucking rich.

In 2006, a Ferrari Enzo was destroyed in a mysterious accident in the Malibu hills. The ensuing investigation revealed the involvement of Bo Stefan Eriksson and Carl Freer, whose startup gaming company, Gizmondo, would lose over $380 million in an unprecedented scam that burned investors from London to Los Angeles.

What made Eriksson successful was his ultimate undoing; the larger-than-life persona and Sybaritic ebullience that brought him his riches, notoriety and nimiety were the flipside to the arrogance and excess that brought his world crashing down. For if Stefan had only crashed a Porsche GT2, or even a run-of-the-mill Lamborghini Gallardo, instead of a seven figure Ferrari, he would not have attracted the global attention that eventually tipped off that bank in Scotland and launched an international investigation. Had he been driving 100 mph, instead of 190, it's unlikely the accident would have even blipped the LA local news radar. No, it was his grandiose personality that delivered, and then mortgaged, his volcanic success. Taken to such absurd levels, it had to implode.

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The husband of cyclist Olga Cook, who was killed by a drunk driver last June at the intersection of West and Chambers Streets, is suing the City of New York, the State of New York, the Hudson River Park Trust, and the Battery Park City Authority over her death.

Ms. Cook was run over at approximately 8:00 pm on the evening of June 11, 2016 when a white Ford truck, driven by a 26-year-old Samuel Silva, traveling southbound on West Street, made an abrupt right turn onto westbound Chambers Street, and struck Ms. Cook, who was riding north along the Hudson River Park Greenway.

Olga Cook,the 30-year-old newlywed and triathlete who was killed by a drunk driver while cycling in Battery Park City on June 11, 2016.

"There were 17 prior crashes at just this location, in the years preceding Olga's death," says attorney Daniel Flanzig, who is representing Ms. Cook's husband, Travis Maclean. "And five of those incidents also resulted in serious injuries. And there have been multiple deaths of cyclists at other locations in the Hudson River Park's bike path."

Mr. Maclean, "has slowly begun to put his life back together," Mr. Flanzig notes, "in part by starting a charity, Olga's Path, which is dedicated to making New York City safer for bicyclists." While the suit seeks, "unspecified monetary damages,"

Mr. Flanzig says, it is also about, "making sure there are no more deaths like Olga's. The changes that the City has made to the turn signal and lanes at that intersection are valuable, but we need similar changes for the entire length of the Greenway in Hudson River Park. This suit is a way of making that happen, because it creates a record that puts government agencies on notice, and increases their liability for similar tragedies in the future."

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