The Fact That This Is 80 Fucking Years Ago But Still Just As Relevant Is Terrifying.

Is Billionaire Philanthropy a Sham?

Remember when Jeff Bezos was showered with praise for donating $100 million to food banks last year? That may seem like a lot, and it is. But once you consider all that Bezos has raked in during the pandemic – including making $13 billion in a single day in 2020 – it’s a few hours of his earnings.  It’s not just Bezos. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet also receive lots of praise for their “generous” charitable giving. The truth about billionaire philanthropy is it isn’t charity. Its public relations, often used to cover up their exploitative business practices, shield their wealth, and deflect attention from all they money they pour into lobbying and campaign contributions to assure that their taxes remain historically low. 

These so-called “charitable contributions” are also tax-deductible, meaning you and I are subsidizing them. I don’t know about you, but I believe taxpayers should be deciding where their tax dollars ultimately go.

America doesn’t need their charity. We need them to pay their fair share in taxes 

2020 is almost over and all I gotta say is what the fuck was that

MAJOR MATT MASON - MAN IN SPACE

Major Matt Mason, Mattel’s Man in Space.  This is an original 1966 release, as the straps on his space suit are blue.  All subsequent versions of the figures had black straps.

Mattel took full advantage of young Americans’ fascination with the space program by releasing the Major Matt Mason line of astronaut action figures in 1966.

Sgt. Storm on the Space Sled, a flying jet ski-like personal transport.

There were initially three color-coded 6-inch astronaut figures in the line: Major Matt Mason was in a white space suit, Sgt. Storm was in a red space suit, and Mason’s civilian scientist buddy, Doug Davis, wore a yellow suit.  In 1968 a fourth astronaut, African-American Jeff Long, made the scene in a blue spacesuit.

Long’s addition to the line was a bold move on Mattel’s part, as the astronaut program at NASA during that time was lily white.

Astronaut Jeff Long, who appeared nearly 20 years before Guion Bluford became the first black American to orbit Earth.

The figures were a rubber-like body over a thin wire armature - similar to the Gumby and Pokey toys - with molded plastic heads.  The wire armatures and pliable bodies made the figures extremely posable.

All four astronauts lived and worked on the Moon, which was pretty darn cool.  The coolest thing about the Major and his crew, though, was that - initially, at least - all their equipment was based on actual designs and prototypes developed for the space program.

Doug Davis, first civilian on the Moon.

And boy, was there a LOT of equipment and accessories: a flying Space Sled, a Cat Trac one-man tractor, a moon suit, a Space Crawler that used rotating “legs” instead of wheels, and a whole bunch more up to and included a  multi-storey Space Station play set (although it really was a Moon Base).

The Space Station play set in all its glory.

The Space Station was modular, and you could make it taller or shorter by adding or subtracting pieces of the red pylons.  The idea was for kids to have several Space Stations of varying heights, because Major Matt Mason had a ziipline accessory that enabled him to travel between them.

The Moon Crew in their color-coded spacesuits.

In fact, there were so many gadgets and accessories that, even with mid-1960s prices, I’m sure many parents would have had to take out a second mortgage in order to afford them all.

Doug Davis wearing a specialized back pack while riding his Space Sled.

Unfortunately for me, the only accessory I ever received was the rather prosaic Cat Trac.  It wasn’t as exciting as the Space Sled, or as zippy as the Jet Pack (there were a few different versions), or battery-powered like the Space Crawler.  Nevertheless, I used my imagination to make the most of it.

The Cat Trac: looked cool at first glance, but it was only a hollow piece of molded plastic.  Would’ve scored much higher on the coolness scale if the tracks at least moved.

The Moon Suit, based on an actual prototype developed by Grumman.

The Space Bubble was essentially a rickshaw on the Moon: One man did all the work while another just relaxed in the back.

The Space Crawler, the creme de la creme of the Major Matt Mason transport toys.  This guy crawled along at a pretty decent clip, and due to its “legs” it could cover some rugged terrain.

It wasn’t long, however, before someone at Mattel became bored with the relatively realistic theme of the Major Matt Mason line.  Their solution: introduce science fiction elements to make things more exciting.

Captain Lazer, mysterious alien friend to Major Matt Mason and crew.

The first was the introduction in 1967 of Captain Lazer, who was so different from the rest of the line that there is speculation that he was intended for another line of figures entirely, or acquired from a Japanese company (his helmet reminds me of the Toei tokusatsu hero Captain Ultra, which was airing in Japan at the time).

Captain Lazer was 12 - almost 13 - inches tall, towering over Mason and the other astronauts.  His body was made of hard plastic  The head rotated at the neck, the arms rotated at the shoulders, and the legs rotated at the hips, but that was the extent of his articulation.  He had battery powered glowing red eyes and chest plate, as well as the laser pistol that was attached permanently to his hand.  There were attachments that connected to the pistol to change its appearance.  All in all, he looks like a pulp magazine or Golden Age comic book version of a space hero.

Good guy alien Callisto.

Evil alien Scorpio.

Then there were the aliens Callisto and Scorpio.  These were both in scale with the astronaut figures, and came with various gimmicks and accessories.  Callisto, listed as Mason’s friend from Jupiter, had a rubber and wire armature body.   Scorpio was an evil alien had battery-powered glowing eyes.

A first edition version of the good Major.

The astronauts’ equipment became typical science fiction props, like the Firebolt Space Cannon, assorted hand-held weapons, the Super Power Set (think Ripley’s exosuit cargo loader from Aliens), and the Gamma Ray-Gard (a projectile firing toy).

Major Matt Mason even got his own Big Little Book.  This is the only surviving piece of my MMM collection.

I had a lot of fun with the few Major Matt Mason toys I had, as did everyone I knew who had some.  There were, unfortunately, two major problems with the figures that reduced their enjoyment and playability factors.

First, the wire armatures were extremely thin and broke within a matter of days. The wire would then stick out through the rubber body, poking you in the hand every time you picked the figure up.  Meanwhile, the limb the wire was attached to would flop around uselessly.

Second, the paint on the rubber bodies began to flake off almost immediately, exposing the black base.  I remember finding paint flecks all over my hands and clothes each time I played with the figures.  At a price in 1966 of around $2.37 (approximately $22.00 today), the figures weren’t inexpensive, and I know my folks couldn’t afford to replace them.

Sadly, just as America lost its interest in the space program due to severe problems at home (the Vietnam War, Watergate, the oil crisis, rampant inflation), so did kids lose interest in Major Matt Mason.  Mattel cancelled the line abruptly in 1972 and never looked back.

Nevertheless, the Major and his crew have remained favorites of that generation.  Tom Hanks has been trying to get a Major Matt Mason film made for years.

And the Major was a big hit with NASA.  He reportedly been to space as a crew member on several missions of the space shuttle, including Senator John Glenn’s shuttle mission in 1998.  Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found him somewhere on the International Space Station.

The housing crisis considered as an income crisis

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

A paradox: in 1970, everyday Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average American house cost 5.9x the average American income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs…5.9x the average American income.

Feels like a puzzler, right? Can it really be true that the average American house is as affordable to the average American earner as it was in 1970? It is true, as you can see from Blair Fix's latest open access research report, "The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage":

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/10/23/the-american-housing-crisis-a-theft-not-a-shortage/

Fix also points out that is even more true of rents than it is of house prices. The ratio of rent to average income has actually fallen slightly since 1970. Rents are also, in some mathematical sense, "affordable."

Now, those of you who are well-versed in statistical card-palming will likely have a pretty good idea of the statistical artifact at the root of this paradox: the word "average." If you remember your seventh grade math, you'll recall that "average" has more than one meaning. Sure, there's the most common one: add several values together, then divide the total by the number of values you added. For example, a nonzero number of people have one or zero arms, so the average human has slightly fewer than two arms.

That average is called the "mean." The mean US wage is pretty robust: $73,242/year:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A792RC0Q052SBEA/1000

But the majority of Americans are not earning anything like $73k/year. Since the Reagan years, the number of Americans living in poverty and extreme poverty has climbed and climbed. And while their declining income sure drags down that average, it's dragged way, way, way up by another group of Americans – the ultra-rich.

You see, as Fix writes, back in the Reagan years, America initiated an experiment in redistribution. Reagan enacted policies that moved most of the nation's wealth from the great majority of working people to a tiny minority of people who ended up owning pretty much everything. Throw their income into the mix, and the average American's income is sufficient to finance the average American home, with plenty to spare.

In other words, this isn't an "average human has fewer than two arms" situation, it's more like a "Spiders Georg" situation. Spiders Georg is a Tumblr meme about a guy who eats 10,000 spiders every day and is thus single-handedly responsible for the (false) statistic that the average human eats two spiders a week:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg

The American rich – Reagan's progeny – are the Spiders Georg of house prices. By hoarding the great mass of American national wealth, they create a statistical mirage of affordable housing.

Now, that's interesting, but where Fix goes next with this is even more fascinating. If the average price of housing (relative to average income) has stayed fixed since 1970, then it follows that the price of housing isn't being driven up by a problem with supply. Rather, these numbers suggest that America has enough housing, it's just that (most) Americans don't have enough money.

If that's true – and I have a couple of quibbles, which I'll get to in a sec – then the most common prescription for solving American housing (building more of it) is somewhat beside the point. For Fix, using public funds to subsidize cheaper housing is like using public funds to pay for food stamps for working people whose wages are too low to keep them from starving. Sure, we should do that: no one should be without a home and no one should be hungry. But if working people can't afford shelter and food, then we have a wage problem, not a supply problem.

Fix – as ever – has a well-thought through, painstakingly documented "sources and methods" page to back up his conclusions:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/10/23/the-american-housing-crisis-a-theft-not-a-shortage/#sources-and-methods

And while Fix acknowledges that reversing the mass transfer of wealth from working people to their bosses (and their bosses' idle offspring) is a big lift, he rightly wants to keep the question of wages (rather than housing supply) front and center in our debate about why so many of us are finding it hard to keep a a roof over our heads. We need progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, protection from medical and education debt, and hell, why not a job guarantee?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#tcherneva

I love Fix's work, and this report is no exception. He does it all in his spare time. Some nice progressive think tank should give him a grant so he can do (a lot) more of it.

That all said, I do have a quibble with his conclusion about the adequacy of the American housing supply. In California, we have a shortage of 3-4 million homes, a number arrived at through the relatively robust method of adding up the number of California families that would like to have their own homes and subtracting the number of homes available near those families:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

How to explain the discrepancy? One possibility is that the price of housing is artificially low, because more than 181,000 people are homeless here. Hundreds of thousands of more people are living in overcrowded housing, with multiple families inhabiting spaces intended for just one (or even a single person). If all of those people were competing for housing, the price might rise even higher.

Think of the people who have given up looking for work – because they're not in the workforce, wages go up. If they were competing in the labor market, wages would fall. Maybe all those people would prefer to have a job, but they're missing from the statistics.

That's one theory. Another is that we're getting tripped up on averages again here. California does have some towns with many vacancies, extra supply that is pushing down prices; it's also got many places with far more people who want to live there than there are homes for. It's possible that there's enough supply on average across the states, but – as we've seen – averages are deceptive.

Ultimately, I think both things can be true: we have a wage problem and we have (many, localized) supply problems. Both of these problems deserve our attention, and neither is acceptable in a civilized society.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median

ouch

president deathtoll not gonna like this summary of how he fucked us all up by destroying anything President Obama created. 

If you watch one thing today, please make it this from

@Lawrence. I implore you. Absolute fire.🔥🔥🔥

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iwWecq8W6To?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque

For Those Who Missed It – Great LOST 70s Sci-Fi Film About 21st Century…

At fifty you can no longer bear the constraints. You can't stand the too-tight bra, the forced dinners with the sister-in-law who checks your dust in the corners, high heels and circumcising smiles.

At fifty you have no desire to prove anything. You are what you are: the things you've done and the things you still want to do. If others like it, fine, otherwise, it's the same.

At fifty it doesn't matter if you had children or not. You will be the mother anyway: of your mother, of your father, of an aunt left alone, of your dog or of a stray cat that you picked up from the street. And if all this is not there, you will be your own mother.

Because over the years you will be taught to take care of a body that you finally love, becoming more and more imperfect only in the eyes of others. Who cares if half the closet is the wrong size? The important thing is that your back does not creak too much when you stand up.

At fifty you want freedom. Free to say no, free to stay in your pajamas all Sunday, free to feel beautiful for yourself and not for others. Free to go it alone: those who love you will stay at your pace, those who don't care about others, at theirs. You are free to sing loudly in the car even if people glare at you at traffic lights.

You will have dreams like when you were in your twenties and you will ask every god for time to make them come true again. And now, just when you have eaten half of your life, in the hustle and bustle, you will find the desire to slowly taste the sugar and salt of the days that await you.

-Irene Renei

They warned me your childhood would whizz by in a flash

They warned me and I laughed,

because then,

each day felt like a lifetime.

Each sleepless night was a year, each hour of the day was an age.

All my energy was consumed, with keeping you alive, happy, thriving.

Your smiles became my goal, your laughter my reward, your tears my every waking concern.

And here we are my love, you have grown.

I remember all the firsts, but I have no idea when the ‘lasts’ happened...

Where was I?

The last time you snuggled into my lap to read.

The last time I lifted your warm little body to mould into mine, that fit, just right.

The last time you crawled into my safe space, in the dark of the night.

They warned me your childhood would whizz by in a flash,

And I laughed.

But it did, my love,

It did.

And now I watch you grow evermore strong and I vow to drink in every tiny detail,

lest that go by in an instant also.

I may not remember all the ‘lasts’ my little one,

But I am watching for every ‘new’.

Yes,

I am watching.

Donna Ashworth

Image by KM Bergerren