No more clowning around: living costs in major cities too high

all out of love: Silver dollars: donations aggravate Nate

Washington glows unlike any other on the right day when the sun reflects off the gold-lined pockets of America’s politicians and lobbyists. One can’t help but feel blinded by the sheer capitalistic nature of the situation. The politicians—kings of fame and faithfully exorbitant donations—can stride confidently through what has become their playground, unafraid of public opinion, any expectation of passing productive legislation, or holding themselves to a moral code.
This attitude permeates the entire city, and with good reason: campaign donations endorse it. Few can escape its alluring grasp, and fewer still challenge it. Yet one man can make even the hardiest Washingtonian shake in his Gucci slippers and inspire Congressmen to tremble beneath their oily campaign war chests. Mitch McConnell wakes up in the middle of the night screaming his name and Ezra Klein studied the ancient Haitian art of Voodoo to give himself a competitive advantage.
I’m talking about Nate Silver, the Jewish man from Eastern Michigan who everyone in Washington wants on their team. He first burst onto the scene in 2003, writing for Baseball Prospectus and revolutionizing the fantasy baseball industry. Silver then branched out in 2008, creating a political modeling website named FiveThirtyEight.com (a reference to the number of electors in the Electoral college) with the idea of reaching a wider audience than just fantasy baseball players. The website predicted the outcomes of nationwide elections using a weighted poll aggregator designed by Silver himself. His methodology first predicted a big win for the Democrats in 2008, which the Republicans conveniently ignored. But when he correctly predicted every senate race being held that year as well, he was impossible to ignore.
Republicans’ anger with Silver dissipated by 2010, when Silver correctly predicted a Republican takeover of the house. Then, the Democrats weren’t too fond of him. He later became a national celebrity over the 2012 cycle, with Republicans viciously attacking his pro-Democratic predictions. The Democrats, in turn, labeled him the second coming of the Oracle at Delphi. Most readers should know the story from here: Silver was right and everyone was awed. He went from loved to hated and hated to loved faster than Bill Clinton. And, just as Bill Clinton never seems to step out of the spotlight, Nate Silver has returned for the 2014 midterm election cycle. On March 23, he offered a decisive prediction: the Republicans would take the Senate 51 seats to 49.
But instead of offering the typical irate denouncement, Democrats responded differently this time. While maintaining that Silver’s predictions left room for error, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began sending out emails saying that because Silver predicted big losses, the Democrats needed to raise huge amounts of money to remedy the situation. At first glance, this may look ridiculous. It probably even looks ridiculous after the second and third looks as well. That’s mostly because it is.
Silver’s methodology relies on candidate quality, state partisanship, incumbency, and head to head polls. Both state partisanship and incumbency pay virtually no attention to fundraising capabilities; candidate quality and head to head polls both rely on a variety of factors, fundraising being just one aspect of them.
But their strategy could work. The Democrats have been known for huge fundraising capabilities in the past and this jolt from Silver’s dismal prediction may lead them to raise enough money to prove it wrong. Silver mostly confirmed what many political minds in D.C. have been thinking for months, but he also gave much needed publicity to a major problem for the Democrats—relying on donors funds to change their fate.
Regardless of whether one roots for the Republicans or the Democrats, money shouldn’t greatly alter the outcome of a campaign like this. Donors spent $7 billion on the most recent Presidential election and $4 billion on the 2010 midterm elections. This money sometimes goes to worthy advertising—like Mitch McConnell’s recent video that Jon Stewart turned into the national phenomenon of #McConnelling—but much of it goes to attack ads in places like rural West Virginia.
The clear answer here should be to return to the McCain-Feingold reform act of 2002—which didn’t even take all the money out of politics, but just put something vaguely similar to a cap on donations. Sometimes, however, the clear answer isn’t the popular one in Washington. And until something gets done, Silver may have to deal with the possibility of enormous donations skewing his models.

all out of love: Timeflies when you’re abusing Adderall

Timeflies, what a rush. I expected great music from the duo at the Ivies concert—songs like the one whose chorus repeated “motherfucker what up” 15 times never fail—but I didn’t expect such natural flow from a YouTube superstar. I originally thought a freestyle seemed ambitious, but boy did he deliver.
Opening with a list of 150 random Bowdoin related things took some pretty serious skill, but his emphatic endorsement of Bowdoin’s drug habits really put his whole performance on another level. It takes guts to shout “man, every school has Adderall!” before a group of 1,500 college students, guts that clearly only Timeflies had.
Timeflies’ claim was relatively typical: musicians everywhere love to talk about their drug habits. It’s almost strangely fitting that Timeflies, which comes from Tufts University, would brag about how normal Adderall is. Yet, sarcasm aside, it should be painfully clear how inappropriate his comment was.
For now, let’s forget about the fact that Bowdoin’s recent Adderall bust forced two students to resign from the school and 10 others to face disciplinary action. Despite the very real ramifications of “resigning” from a college mid-year, the argument must be wider than the fate of a few students.
The relaxed attitude that Timeflies and many Bowdoin students take toward Adderall is scary and needs rethinking before the problem becomes serious. While certainly not as dangerous as other frequently abused opiates like OxyContin, Adderall is still an amphetamine.
Amphetamines, called “speed” on the street, are addictive stimulants. Adderall typically comes in much lower doses than street amphetamines, but the effects are similar. Users develop an intense focus, lose their appetites and feel more awake.
These effects have a wide appeal and with the number of prescriptions skyrocketing—sales have quintupled since 2002 according to a Huffington Post article—the pills are becoming more and more available. A University of Southern California study recently showed that 95 percent of students could obtain a false diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (the disorder for which Adderall is prescribed) by faking the symptoms most commonly associated with it. Doctors are handing out hard drugs and people are developing serious, debilitating addictions.
The pills pose a serious threat for anyone who abuses them. Even in academic situations, the pills put serious stress on the heart and cause erratic behavior. Over time, users begin to act similarly to meth addicts. But given that government studies have shown 30 percent of student users report taking Adderall and other prescription stimulants to stay awake and party, the implications of the abuse become far more serious.
When combined with alcohol, Adderall suppresses many of the body’s cues to stop drinking. On the drug, people can drink more and stay up longer. The heart takes even heavier abuse as Adderall counteracts the depressive quality of alcohol. According to a 2013 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, visits to the hospital related to prescription stimulants nearly quadrupled among young adults between 2006 and 2010, with nearly half of the 15,000 visits due to mixing alcohol with stimulants. Still, people refuse to see Adderall as a dangerous drug. Only 2 percent of students reported seeing the drug as “very dangerous” in a 2007 study by the National Institute of Health. Eighty-one percent viewed the drug as “not dangerous at all” or only “slightly dangerous.”
Even here at Bowdoin, kids seem to take the drug rather lightly. According to a 2013 Orient article, 15 percent of students on campus reported having used the drug in 2012 and a whopping 42 percent overestimated that number. In other words, kids see it as a relatively normal thing.Timeflies’ assertion fits in with the Bowdoin ethos that way. The drug is no big deal, or so the thinking goes. The recent spike in media coverage surrounding OxyContin and the road to heroin addiction should strike fear in the students who view Adderall as safe. Prescription drugs certainly aren’t safe just because a doctor hands them out, but few seem to recognize the danger. Adderall is an incredibly dangerous drug when abused and Bowdoin students need to view it that way. Until the campus has a change of heart though, we’re just asking for a disaster.

all out of love

No more clowning around: living costs in major cities too high

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Drew Van Kuiken

Columnist

April 17, 2014

Ernest Hemingway once famously said that “courage is grace under pressure.”

When a group of warriors clad in skin-tight clown suits bravely stood in front of the Google Buses in San Francisco, protesting the Silicon Valley-led spike in living cost, I couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of Hemingway’s phrase. Books may well cover Kent State, Tiananmen Square and the San Francisco clown protest in future editions.

But in case they don’t, the clown protest deserves attention in the present. I’m a proud resident of suburban New Jersey, but I can only withstand so many jokes—I have to find a real city one day, or else my sense of self-worth may be crushed. It’s a struggle many Bowdoin students face, as seniors ship out to a huge number of jobs covering every corner of the globe and underclassmen search for internships right alongside them.

But some of Bowdoin graduates’ top destinations relegate all but the richest citizens to the outskirts of the city. Data compiled by the real estate service Zillow show a trend in five of America’s biggest cities. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York City, middle class families almost universally struggle to rent even the cheapest housing near city centers.

While many Bowdoin students might make enough money to live within any city’s most expensive area codes, there is a reason we don’t rank first on Payscale.com’s return-on-investment list: not everyone here is motivated by money. Yet, to claim that some ulterior motive should relegate them to the city limits hurts both the student and the city itself.

Cities began as the American dream in its most accessible form, but Zillow’s data shows the dream may be dying. City centers first began gentrifying in the early 1960s as decaying housing projects and booming business districts brought affluent families into newly built homes. The gentrification made sense from an economic standpoint; people wanted to live in the most desirable places and paid accordingly. But the gentrification failed to take into account the impact of a diverse society on a city’s welfare—reinforcing America’s difficulty with social mobility and the income inequality gap. Given that cities support an entire spectrum of jobs, it makes little sense to exclude the less lucrative from contributing an equally important service.

The clowns acted as part of a bigger movement to lower San Francisco’s costs, one that’s gotten more desperate with time. Recent highlights include the set of angry protesters who handed out pamphlets in front of Google Executive Kevin Rose’s house that called him a destructive parasite.
To San Francisco’s credit, the city has put considerable resources into fixing the situation. Mayor Ed Lee ’74 recently announced that he planned to build or rehabilitate 30,000 new homes by 2020 and designate a third of those homes as permanently affordable to lower income residents. His office has also proposed several other policies designed to keep residents currently in rent-controlled housing from moving out and incentivize the construction of low income apartment building.

Mayor Lee’s reforms should be commended as a step in the right direction, but only that. San Francisco and many similar business hubs throughout America will continue to face serious challenges to their economic diversity in the coming years. The moneyed interests in each hub will make most reform difficult, but often the most powerful decision comes from standing in the face of what looked invincible, sort of like the clowns did.

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