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Nightly News Takes a Dive on Issues This Year

Mother Jones

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Andrew Tyndall notes that the nightly news no longer seems to care about policy debates:

This year’s absence of issues is an accurate portrayal of the turf on which the election is being played out….If the candidates are not talking about the issues, the news media would be misrepresenting the contest to do so.

With just two weeks to go, issues coverage this year has been virtually non-existent…. No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.

I disagree with this on two levels. First, Hillary Clinton has talked plenty about issues in the conventional sense that Tyndall means it: speeches that cover specific policy proposals, with detail to back them up. Only Donald Trump has declined to do this.

More broadly, both candidates have talked about issues. Trump talks all the time about trade, immigration, ISIS, and guns. Clinton talks about childcare, ISIS, health care, guns, and so forth. There are lots of character attacks too, but then, that’s usually the case. But just because issues are talked about in broad strokes doesn’t mean they’re not talked about. They are. The network news broadcasts just don’t want to risk losing their audiences by forcing them to pay attention to such boring stuff.

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Nightly News Takes a Dive on Issues This Year

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Sneakerheads’ souls crumble as their soles crumble

Sneakerheads’ souls crumble as their soles crumble

By on 18 May 2015commentsShare

Sneakerheads are in the midst of a crisis, as they watch their prized possessions — those sick kicks they’ve been coveting for years — literally fall apart in their hands.

Turns out, those old-school Nikes are so out-of-this-world, they actually can’t survive Earth’s atmosphere. Wired has the scoop, and it’s truly heartbreaking. Take the story of Nagomo Oji, a Japanese sneakerhead who decided to whip out his DS/OG Air Max 95s with midsole BWs (DS = dead stock; OG = original; DS/OG = $$; BW = big window) after 20 years:

As soon as he planted his feet, Oji sensed something was terribly wrong. The midsoles flattened, and his footing became strangely unstable. He didn’t realize it at the time, but the polyurethane (PU), that squishy, shock-absorbing material sandwiched between the upper and the outer sole, was more than ten years past its projected lifespan.

After just one step, the hardened PU foam fractured and collapsed, like arid soil crumbling beneath the boots of a Dust Bowl Okie. Oji looked down in disbelief. With the inner soles completely detached from the uppers, his feet were actually touching the ground. His beloved Air Maxes had just morphed into Fred Flintstone shoes.

Or this tearjerker about a “geriatric hoarder” in Buenos Aires who has a whole showroom full of DS/OGs:

All of these shoes were found in various states of decay in one of the biggest known cases of PU mass destruction. Seven minutes into the video, collector Robert Brooks pulls a forgotten artifact labeled Silver Wind from the stacks. He’s elated. It’s an obscure Adidas runner that’s eluded him for “a long, long time.” But as he lifts the shoe, the sole peels off and falls into the box. Recounting the story later, he sighs and whimpers “No!” stretching out the syllable for a few seconds, like a Loony Tunes character plunging from a high cliff into the abyss.

The polyurethane-injected foam soles common in a lot of sneakers tend to spontaneously fall apart after a while. Who knew? Certainly not the executive director of the Polyurethane Foam Association, who spoke with Wired about the problem and seemed shockingly out-of-the-loop: “I’ve never seen a technical paper on polyurethane shoes falling apart. But now that you mention it, I’ve owned several pairs of shoes that started cracking inside and outside. I didn’t know if they were just poorly made or if I stepped into something.”

Come on, man! Try reading this 2011 study on the aging performance of polyurethanes, which says that plastics like the one used in these sneakers are susceptible to hydrolysis and oxidation. Here’s a translation from Wired:

That’s right, the two things that make human life possible — water and air — are killing our shoes. Their role in degrading polyurethane can be attributed to the chemical processes of hydrolysis (in the presence of moisture) and oxidation (in the presence of oxygen). Simply put, the humidity in the air, and, yes, even the air itself, seeps into the PU and, slowly but surely, breaks it into itty-bitty sticky pieces. Delve deeper into the subject, and the news only gets worse. Bottom line: Pricy collectables shouldn’t be made out of PU.

But there’s good news! SonBinh T. Nguyen, a chemistry professor at Northwester University, (jokingly) told Wired that sneakerheads can preserve their treasures if they just keep them in an “airtight steel vessel filled with argon.”

Zing! But seriously, isn’t this disintegrating sneaker fiasco really just one big metaphor for the impending demise of our species? We built a society that’s cheap, fast, and flashy. Sustainable? Not so much. And now, climate change is the water and oxygen to our DS/OG Air Max 95s. But good news! If all else fails, we could all just go live in steel bunkers.

Source:
The Sneakerheads Racing to Save Their Kicks From Decay

, Wired.

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Sneakerheads’ souls crumble as their soles crumble

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Don’t Be Fooled – Your Computer Really Isn’t Sleeping. 7 Ways to Green Your Computer Usage

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Don’t Be Fooled – Your Computer Really Isn’t Sleeping. 7 Ways to Green Your Computer Usage

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