Tag Archives: alternative

It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

Mother Jones

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Most people are happier when they have a lot of social contact. But Christopher Ingraham points to a new paper suggesting an exception to this general rule: smart people, true to stereotype, prefer being left alone. But why?

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. “The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it … are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective,” she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

To put this a little less nicely, average folks don’t really have anything very interesting or enthralling to do with themselves, so getting interrupted by friends represents a net improvement in their daily lives. Smart people do have enthralling—even obsessive—intellectual interests, and social activities take them away from that. So this represents a net loss in happiness.

(Important note for smart, argumentative people reading this: we’re talking about averages here. There are plenty of extroverted smart people and introverted dumb people. But on average, smart people tend to dislike socializing because it takes them away from work they find more rewarding.)

But back to the paper. The authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, have a different theory about all this: the measured difference in social preferences is all due to the way we evolved way back on the savanna. Back then, they say, you had a much better chance of surviving if you had lots of friends, so we naturally evolved to value having lots of friends. Things have changed since then—cell phones, computers, cities, houses, etc.—and even though evolution hasn’t yet had a chance to adapt to a world where social contact isn’t as important, “extremely intelligent” people can use their sheer brainpower to adapt anyway:

“More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write….Smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

This odd thing is that this isn’t really an application of evolutionary psychology, even though the authors are evolutionary psychologists. The hypothesis that humans evolved in hierarchical, medium-sized groups that relied on tight social networks for survival is pretty widely accepted. It’s nothing new. What’s new is the suggestion that smart people can overcome the constraints of cognitive evolution more easily than most people. And that’s not really evolutionary psychology. It’s just regular old psychology, or perhaps regular old neuroscience. It’s pretty likely that this has always been true of smart people, but we just don’t know it. Our social science datasets are shockingly inadequate for dates before 20,000 BCE.

Now, I don’t have access to the paper itself, and it’s possible that the authors address this. The abstract doesn’t give any hint of it, though. For the time being, then, I’ll take this as a fairly banal observation: people with intense intellectual interests value them more highly than social contact, and almost by definition, it’s mostly smart people who have intense intellectual interests. As a refugee from the tech world who dealt with a lot of programmers, and as a blogger who gets annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing a post, color me unsurprised.

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

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Anti-Immigrant Right Makes Big Gains in Germany

Mother Jones

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The backlash against refugees reached new heights in Germany on Sunday as voters swept Alternative for Germany, a right-wing anti-immigration party, into three of the country’s state parliaments with a significant share of the vote.

The three-year-old party, usually known by the German acronym AfD, finished in second place in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where it received 24.2 percent of the vote, behind Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Anti-refugee sentiment is highest in former East German states, but AfD also earned big totals in two western states. It won just over 15 percent in Baden-Württemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, both of which border France. The party poached votes from across the political spectrum, taking big chunks from the left-wing Greens and Left Party as well as the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats.

“We have fundamental problems in Germany that led to this outcome,” said AfD chief Frauke Petry after the elections. She blamed immigration, “ethnic violence,” and deference to Muslim social norms for much of the anger that fueled her party’s gains. “We want to be the party of social peace,” she said. (Earlier this year, she called for German border guards to be allowed to shoot people trying to enter the country.)

Germany accepted around 1 million refugees in 2015, by far the most of any European nation. Merkel defended her country’s liberal policy on refugees as both a humanitarian necessity and a historical duty, and even declared an open-door policy for Syrians. But her country’s “summer fairytale” of open arms and moral leadership always competed with anti-foreigner protests, arson attacks on refugee housing, and harsh criticism from high-ranking members of her own governing coalition. Those voices have grown louder as refugee numbers continue to mount, and Merkel has revoked the open door and reduced benefits for asylum seekers. Now AfD’s victory has given the anti-refugee right its first serious political power.

Germany is the latest country where anti-immigrant sentiment has boosted right-wing parties. France’s nativist National Front party nearly won control of several regional governments during French elections in December. It failed to win any of the regions in the second round of voting but still garnered a record number of votes. Right-wing populist parties have also seen major gains in Sweden and Denmark since the number of refugees arriving in Europe exploded last year.

Despite AfD’s success at the polls—and renewed criticism from the powerful Bavarian wing of her party—Merkel pledged to keep Germany largely open to refugees. Germany has tried since last year to get the European Union to create a binding, continent-wide system to distribute refugees, and Merkel said on Monday that she will keep at it rather than close Germany’s borders. “I am firmly convinced, and that wasn’t questioned today, that we need a European solution and that this solution needs time,” she said.

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Anti-Immigrant Right Makes Big Gains in Germany

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7 Alternatives to Holiday Gift Exchanges

If the holiday season can feel a bit too materialistic for your liking, rest assured that youre not alone. Dont feel pressured to head to the nearest mall just because other people expect you to. There are many other meaningful ways you can share with others that dont involve directly exchanging material gifts.

1. Volunteer

This is great to do in groups. Spending quality time together can be a precious opportunity, especially in the busyness of the holiday season.

Try volunteering for a few hours with your family or friends at a favorite local charity. You can prepare meals at a soup kitchen, help out at an animal shelter or teach a fun class at a school or retirement home.

Another option is to create your own project. Check if anyone you know needs a shed built, some painting done or help organizing their basement. Set up a time and invite your loved ones over to take part.

And dont forget your workplace. Volunteering as a group can also make a great holiday office party. Try checking out VolunteerMatch.org for options available near you.

2. Donate

Many organizations that are working to improve our world need our support. Giving money to charities can make a much greater difference in the world compared to buying another short-lived stocking stuffer.

You can donate to an organization that you know a person on your list would support, then give them a card to let them know you were thinking of them.

Check if any charities where you live have adopt a family programs where you can sponsor a family in need for the holidays. A local Salvation Army will typically have programs like this.

3. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

Suggest to family and friends that you all agree to give away items you no longer want rather than acquiring more this year.

It can also be helpful to organize a group swap in order to do something with all that extra stuff. Ask each person to bring a number of items they no longer want to the swap. Lay out all the items in the middle of a room and invite everyone to take something new home with them. If theres anything left at the end, simply box it up and take it to a local charity.

4. Travel

A group trip with family and/or friends can be a great way to enjoy each others company for the holidays without the material burden.

You can all decide to go on a long, international trip together if thats the consensus. But a small-scale trip, such as a day out to a neighboring town, can be just as fun.

And if youd prefer not to travel at all, you can always host a potluck at your place. Ask people not to bring any gifts, just their favorite dish and their wonderful company.

5. Host a Cookie Swap

Try hosting an old-fashioned cookie exchange, where each person brings a few dozen of their best cookies or other holiday baking.

It can be stepped up a notch by making it a packing party. Everyone can bring tins, plastic boxes or other containers, as well as packing materials. Once youve all swapped goodies, you can pack them up to send to out-of-town family and friends.

6. Book Exchange

Let friends and family know youd like to trade books this year. Ask them to share a book they really enjoyed with you and youll do the same.

You can also get together and start a Little Free Library project. This is an organization that helps people around the world to build their own little libraries, which are usually small wooden structures near peoples homes filled with books. Their slogan is take a book, leave a book, and everyone in the community is welcome to participate. Their website has lots of details on getting started.

7. Share Yourself

Instead of a material gift, you can share something personal. Sing your family a song at the dinner table, write a poem for a friend or offer to give a relaxing massage.

If you have a particular skill youd like to share, consider offering a lesson or a class for the people in your life.

Do you and your loved ones have any alternative traditions for holiday giving? Feel free to post any of your ideas in the comments!

Related
5 Eco-Friendly Holiday Gift Wrap Ideas
16 DIY Holiday Gifts for Everyone on Your List
7 Ways to Fend Off Holiday Stress (& Stay Grateful!)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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7 Alternatives to Holiday Gift Exchanges

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Some Startups Actually Do Make the World a Better Place

Mother Jones

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When Gabriel Metcalf co-founded City CarShare at the age of 26, the first technology platform to give urbanites easily access a car when they needed one—even for an hour—he wasn’t looking to cash in. Metcalf, an environmentally minded urban planner, had loftier goals. He envisioned a nonprofit car-sharing collective that would go mainstream, freeing Americans from the burdens of private car ownership and removing countless carbon-spewing vehicles from the road in the process.

Unlike your average tech startup, City CarShare was (and still is) an “alternative institution”—one that sets out to change the status quo by offering a new model for doing things. More examples? Worker-owned cooperatives. Community land trusts. And even good old representative democracy, which began in the colonies as a parallel system to British rule and provided the structural underpinnings for self-governance in the wake of the American Revolution.

Now 45, Metcalf no longer runs the car-sharing service. He’s president of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit that helps solve regional problems related to things like transit infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change adaptation. But he’s still spreading his gospel via a new book, Democratic by Design, which explores the historical track record of alternative institutions, looks at what makes them succeed and fail, and calls on activists to incorporate AIs in their arsenal of solutions to society’s most intractable problems.

Mother Jones: With City CarShare, you hoped to out-compete the private automobile in the cities where you operated. Do you look back and think, “Boy, was I naïve?”

Gabriel Metcalf: No. Since we launched, car ownership has actually been declining quite a bit—for people who live in cities and for young people. I think we were tapping into something in the zeitgeist about Americans being sick of spending time sitting in traffic and not wanting to deal with the hassles of car ownership.

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Some Startups Actually Do Make the World a Better Place

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What the Broadband Industry Really Needs Isn’t Net Neutrality. It Needs Competition.

Mother Jones

Will strong net neutrality rules reduce the incentive for cable companies to invest in high-speed network infrastructure? Maybe, though similar rules certainly haven’t had that effect in the cell phone market. Of course, the cell phone market is intensely competitive, and that’s probably the real difference between the two. As Tim Lee notes today, Comcast’s cable division is immensely profitable—certainly profitable enough to fund plenty of new high-speed infrastructure. But why should they bother?

Comcast’s high profits are evidence of high barriers to entry in the broadband industry. Ordinarily, a company that consistently made billions of dollars in profits would attract new competitors seeking to capture a piece of the market.

But with a few exceptions — such as Google’s projects in Kansas City and elsewhere — this hasn’t really happened. In most parts of Comcast’s service territory, consumers’ only alternative for broadband service is the local phone company.

Conversely, Comcast doesn’t seem interested in trying to steal market share from rivals. Comcast could expand into the service territory of neighboring cable companies or it could spend money building a next-generation fiber optic network the way Verizon and Google have done. Instead, they’ve chosen to spend more money rewarding shareholders than investing in their networks.

Given current political realities, strong net neutrality rules are a good idea. But an even better idea would be to forget about net neutrality and open up local markets to real competition. I think we’d find out pretty quickly that broadband suppliers have plenty of money for infrastructure upgrades if the alternative is a steadily shrinking market share as competitors start eating their lunch.

Competition is good. Big companies don’t like it, and our approach to antitrust enforcement has unfortunately lost sight of competition as a sufficient raison d’être. That’s too bad. It’s the cure for a lot of ills and a way to keep the rest of the regulatory state relatively light. It’s well past time for us to rediscover this.

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What the Broadband Industry Really Needs Isn’t Net Neutrality. It Needs Competition.

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The Looming Olive Oil Apocalypse

Mother Jones

The world’s most celebrated olive oil comes from sun-drenched groves of Italy. But Italy is also a hotbed of olive oil subterfuge, counterfeit, and adulteration—and has been since Roman times, as Tom Muellar showed in an eye-opening 2007 New Yorker piece (which grew into a book called Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.) Next year, getting real olive oil from Italy is going to be even harder than usual. Here’s the LA Times’ Russ Parsons:

As a result of what the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is calling “The Black Year of Italian Olive Oil,” the olive harvest through much of Italy has been devastated—down 35% from last year.

The reason is a kind of perfect storm (so to speak) of rotten weather through the nation:

When the trees were turning flowers to fruit in the spring, freezing weather suddenly turned scorching, causing the trees to drop olives. Summer was hot and humid, leading to all sorts of problems. Then in mid-September, there was a major hail storm, knocking much of the fruit that remained onto the ground.

Other major olive oil-producing nations suffered similar calamities; Parsons reports that in Spain and Mediterranean neighbors, production is also “forecast to be far below last year’s.” And California, that big chunk of Mediterranean-like climate on our west coast, where excellent olive oil is produced? Parsons says the epochal drought is pinching production, and he quotes Muellar to the effect that “frankly, I hear about a lot of games being played there too, with labels and quality alike.” Sigh.

I find all of this distressing. I came of age as a cook in an era of olive oil hegemony. I treat it like the oil that powers my car, as something to be relied on casually, as if it appeared by magic from nowhere. (Nearly all my Tom’s Kitchen columns feature it.)

Once a staple of Mediterranean polyculture—farms and households would feature olive trees in mixed groves along with a multitude of other crops—olive oil production has long since industrialized. Here is The Ecologist from 2008:

Industrial olive farms grow their olive trees, planted at high densities, in massive irrigated orchards on lowland plains. The olives are harvested by machines that clamp around the tree’s trunk and shake it until the olives fall to the ground. Oil is then extracted by industrial-scale centrifuge, often at high temperatures. In contrast, small, traditional farms are often ancient, their trees typically planted on upland terraces. The farmers manage their groves with few or no agrochemicals, less water and less machinery. Olives are picked off the ground by hand and the oil extracted by grinding the olives in a millstone and press. Demand for cheap, mass-produced oil is making it a struggle for the smaller, traditional farms to be economically viable, however.

….

Intensive olive farming is a major cause of one of the biggest environmental problems affecting the EU: widespread soil erosion and desertification in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal. In 2001, the European Commission ordered an independent study into the environmental impact of olive farming across the EU. The report concluded: ‘Soil erosion is probably the most serious environmental problem associated with olive farming.

I fear that next year’s olive oil crunch is a harbinger of things to come. I am officially in search of alternative cooking fats. One I’ve come to appreciate: lard from pasture-raised hogs. Lard’s rotten nutritional reputation is the result of outdated and discredited science. And it makes food taste really good, too.

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The Looming Olive Oil Apocalypse

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Should We Regulate Poop As a Drug?

Mother Jones

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In 2011, Mark Smith was working on a Ph.D. in microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when his friend’s cousin—we’ll call him Steve—was diagnosed with C. difficile. Known by the shorthand C. diff, it is now the most common hospital-acquired bacterial infection, and, as the name implies, it’s difficult to treat. Patients have near-constant severe diarrhea and bleeding from the bowels that can last for months, or even years. Many sufferers can’t hold a job because they’re housebound.

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Should We Regulate Poop As a Drug?

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A Day With the Ever-So-Cautious Mr. Obama

Mother Jones

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David Remnick has a profile of President Obama in the New Yorker this week. It’s about a million words long and you will learn virtually nothing new about Obama from it. But this is not really Remnick’s fault, I think, so much as it is Obama’s. He’s a guy who’s preternaturally cautious and careful in his public speaking, as he is here when asked a question about marijuana:

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Having a president who stops to think a bit before he answers a question is no bad thing. It’s better than the alternative, anyway. But there’s not much question that it’s also a boring thing. Remnick seems to have had several hours of access to Obama, and yet the only part of his piece that’s gotten any attention is Obama’s suggestion—after leaning back and letting a moment go by—that although he thinks pot smoking is a bad habit, a bad idea, a waste of time, and not very healthy, “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

I scoured the rest of the piece for something even remotely new, or even just a telling detail, but I didn’t find anything. This is perhaps the closest I could come up with:

“Politics was a strange career choice for Obama,” David Frum, a conservative columnist, told me. “Most politicians are not the kind of people you would choose to have as friends…..But Obama is exactly like all my friends. He would rather read a book than spend time with people he doesn’t know or like.”

….“There have been times where I’ve been constrained by the fact that I had two young daughters who I wanted to spend time with—and that I wasn’t in a position to work the social scene in Washington,” Obama told me. But, as Malia and Sasha have grown older, the Obamas have taken to hosting occasional off-the-record dinners in the residence upstairs at the White House. The guests ordinarily include a friendly political figure, a business leader, a journalist. Obama drinks a Martini or two (Rove was right about that), and he and the First Lady are welcoming, funny, and warm. The dinners start at six. At around ten-thirty at one dinner last spring, the guests assumed the evening was winding down. But when Obama was asked whether they should leave, he laughed and said, “Hey, don’t go! I’m a night owl! Have another drink.” The party went on past 1 A.M.

Obama is loosening up a little! These are still “occasional” dinners, mind you, and include only friendly figures. Still, the guy enjoys them so much that at least one of them didn’t break up until the wee hours.

And that’s that. Maybe this isn’t so unusual. Most presidents, especially by their sixth year, have pretty settled policies and pretty settled views. They know the danger of speaking out of turn, and it’s unlikely they’re going to have much trouble sticking to their script during an interview. Obama sure doesn’t. His answer to nearly every question is to pause; acknowledge that it’s a thorny issue; allow that his opponents have some good points; and then provide a careful, nuanced version of his own views.

Nothing wrong with that, I guess, and I’m hardly in a position to complain. Interviewing me would be every bit as dull. Still, it’s too bad Obama won’t grant access of the kind Remnick got to a different kind of journalist. Not a fan and not a foe, but someone who’s both smart and skeptical. Frum might actually be a decent example of that: someone who could seriously challenge him from the other side without obviously being there to do a hatchet job. Who knows? We might actually learn something new about our 44th president from an interview like that.

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A Day With the Ever-So-Cautious Mr. Obama

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Vladimir Putin and the Limits of Thuggishness

Mother Jones

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A lot of American hawks have displayed a barely disguised admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin this year. Oh, he’s a thug and a bully all right, but at least he fights for his country’s interests—and wins. The appeaser-in-chief could learn a thing or two from him.

Not so fast, says Dan Drezner. Exhibit A in Putin’s 2013 display of statecraft was negotiating a deal for Syria to give up its chemical weapons, and Exhibit B was his strong-arming of Ukraine to reject membership in the EU’s Eastern Partnership and instead join Russia’s planned Eurasian Union. Victory goes to the thuggish! Except, not so much:

It turns out that a lot of Ukrainians were not happy about this turn of events, and have engaged in eleven days of massive protests. Even Yanukovich’s allies are now talking about reconciling with the domestic political opposition….The New York Times reports that “the anger over Russia’s role has made it all but impossible for Mr. Yanukovich to take the alternative offered by the Kremlin — joining a customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan”….Furthermore, as the Economist points out, the way Russia has lost is even more damning. Rather than EU pressure, it is domestic discontent that has stayed Yanukovich’s hand: “It is far better for the EU that the backlash against Mr Yanukovych comes from the streets of Kiev rather than from Brussels.”

As for that Syrian chemical weapons deal, it turns out that (a) Obama and John Kerry had a lot more to do with that than we knew at first, and (b) regardless of the opposition of hardliners in Israel and Saudi Arabia, it’s worked out pretty well for the United States. The truth is that Putin hasn’t gotten a lot out of that deal, but we have.

Bottom line: Maximum belligerence isn’t the answer to every foreign policy problem. Obama’s approach might be messy, but over time it doesn’t look so bad after all.

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Vladimir Putin and the Limits of Thuggishness

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What’s the alternative?

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What’s the alternative?

Posted 26 August 2013 in

National

Today, the Washington Post editorialized against the Renewable Fuel Standard, relying on tired, oil industry arguments against the only policy that’s reducing our nation’s reliance on fossil fuel.

But since we’ve already published several posts fact-checking these sort of editorials, we’re not going to dive into the particulars of this column. Instead, we wanted to respond specifically to the Post’s policy recommendation:

The Post editorial board admits that their own preferred policy alternative, a carbon tax, would be difficult (if not impossible) to get through Congress. We wholeheartedly agree. In fact, without the low-carbon alternative fuels supported by the RFS, such as cellulosic ethanol, a carbon tax would be completely unworkable (both politically and economically).

So what’s the Post’s solution? Lawmakers should “choose another policy that encourages conservation and innovation without absurd central planning.” Conveniently enough, they do not offer a second alternative. While it’s easier to simply wish away the complex politics that surround our energy policy, we’re happy to remind lawmakers that the Renewable Fuel Standard already encourages conservation and innovation by helping reduce GHG emissions, making ethanol cheaper than gasoline and spurring the creation of the cellulosic ethanol industry. And while some would like to pretend that the pre-RFS status quo represented a nostalgic time of perfect market competition, we recognize that without the century of subisidies and preferential treatment enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry, alternative fuels face a much steeper uphill climb. The Renewable Fuel Standard is not “absurd central planning.” It’s a market-based solution to a long-standing economic challenge.

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What’s the alternative?

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