A decade ago, I helped my mother acquire her first computer. It was a generic laptop PC that we bought on sale, a machine providing a lot more power than what she planned to use it for: exchanging emails, storing family photos, reading news and health sites, playing solitaire. We brought it home and sat down together for her first tutorial. 

She watched as I did a modest amount of configuring, got her to commit to an easily remembered password and started her instruction. Right away, I knew this tutoring was going to take a while. Because when I said, “Watch what happens when I click here,” she asked, “What do you mean, ‘click’?” 

I’ve observed other older people, in and out of my family, struggle with new technology, too. Despite being an expert craftsman and artist in wood, leather and metal who knew the ins and outs of exotic power tools I could barely find the on-switch for, my stepfather wouldn’t touch that computer. “Too complicated,” he said, every time I made the attempt to get him online. He only ever viewed the internet over someone’s shoulder.

Whether it’s electronics or some other new tech, however, you don’t have to be old to be left out. If you walked into a time machine and landed in the year 2066 or 2116, would you be able to turn on a single appliance? Could you figure out how to board whatever replaces Elon Musk’s Hyperloop transport? Could you survive a single day without constant assistance? In science fiction, that never seems to be a problem, or when it is, it’s only for a couple of minutes. Just as is true with most sci-fi social relations, which, even when aliens giga-light-years from Earth are in charge, seem to be an awful lot like what we are all-too-familiar with. 

What got me to rambling around in my brain about this was recently cleaning out my late parents’ mountain house so it could sold. In it were quite a number of items that I recognized but hadn’t seen for decades. There were my grandmother’s pair of flat-irons, which she had heated up alternately on a coal-stove to make a little money pressing clothes for families who lived on the other side of the tracks from us. There were two dial telephones and a two-part stick telephone requiring you to hold the earpiece in one hand and the microphone in the other. Buried in a box was an adding machine as big as a microwave with a pull-down handle on the side like a mini-slot machine. 

Then there were the two obsolete items whose photographs I have included above. 

The first one sparked a family friend to speculate that it was perhaps something that could be found in a turn-of-the-century erotic toy store. The other item generated some some smirks as well. 

See if you can guess what they are.

Got any of your own things packed away somewhere that will puzzle readers? Please post photos of your obsolete objects in the comments. No TRS-80s, please.

You may have missed it in the overwhelming swirl of information in the month leading up to the election, but back in mid-October, I wrote a whole article highlighting a minor detail from one poll’s crosstabs (from Public Religion Research Institute) that I found very compelling. And it’s one that, in retrospect, may have had more explanatory power than any of us thought, at the time.

White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).

Now that we’ve seen the post-election map, those places where people are most likeliest to have stayed in the same place where they were raised, are also the places that seemed to trend the hardest in Trump’s direction: rural areas across the Midwest where the population is slowly falling, populated almost exclusively by white people, most of whom aren't college-educated.

Many pundits have focused on the white working-class aspect of these places. But there’s another dimension that goes beyond the racialized economic concerns of the residents of these places, that instead wonders about the larger mindset of those who grew up in and then left those places, versus the mindset of those who chose to stay. There’s, of course, a chicken-and-egg problem here, in that education plays a key role in mobility; if you seek higher education, you’re likely to need to leave your small town, and then to get a job that takes advantage of your higher education, you’re likely to end up in a metro area.

But as Josh Barro pointed out, there may simply be a big personality difference between those who stay and those who leave, whether it’s optimism vs. pessimism, or openness vs. intolerance, or having some agency over one’s life instead of simply stewing in your resentments—which, if you think about it, is really what the big themes of this year's election were, more so than any specific set of policies.

History buffs! City lovers! Map geeks! Unite! Max Galka at Metrocosm has created a work of wonder and we shall give him the room to explain:

By 2030, 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. Today, about 54 percent of us do. In 1960, only 34 percent of the world lived in cities.

Urbanization didn’t begin in the 1960s. But until recently, tracking its history much further back than that was a challenging task. The most comprehensive collection of urban population data available, U.N. World Urbanization Prospects, goes back only to 1950. But thanks to a report released last week by a Yale-led team of researchers, it’s now possible to analyze the history of cities over a much longer time frame.

The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.

From all this data, Galka created the visualization video below, in which you can watch the world unfold before your eyes.

Madison Amelia (her Facebook name) was in an abusive interracial relationship. She took out her camera to record an escalation of her abusive reality; the Trump effect. Watch the video here.

Madison met Chris while with mutual friends. Madison is a 25-year-old biracial young woman. Chris is a 34-year-old young man with four kids. Madison and Chris moved in together about three years ago. Two of Chris's children, two boys, spent half the time with them and the other half with the kids' mother.

"The kids loved me," Madison said.

Chris became progressively more abusive as the relationship matured, according to Madison. But throughout the relationship she had not heard Chris use any racist remarks. That is a part of him she never knew. Madison said Chris watched Trump on TV but never went to rallies. I asked her if he made any racist comments when he watched.

"I never sat with him to watch them," Madison said. "I'm too intelligent to want to watch that kind of nonsense."

I then asked her if she believed the Trump effect had anything to do with the recent racist abuse. "I'm not sure," she replied. "I'm a Republican, but I wouldn't vote for Trump, and he hated that. But looking back I'm not sure he ever saw me as black since I'm mixed."

I was a bit taken aback by the answer, and she clarified by saying that because she grew up privileged, she just did not think about it. It was not at all hard to infer the Trump effect, and I think she ultimately agreed.

Madison has a college degree and works in marketing. She grew up privileged. She was the primary breadwinner in the home as she made substantially more than her partner. Chris had to drop out of college and work in sales. He was “saddled” with four kids.

"Now that I left he tells people that I never had a job and lived off him," Madison said. "Even though I was the breadwinner in the situation. It's odd."

An unidentified Muslim woman was accosted on Wednesday at a Smith’s grocery store in Albuquerque. The woman was in the checkout line when another unidentified woman, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, began shouting at her to leave the country and that she was a terrorist. That’s when employees of the store and some shoppers came to the Muslim woman’s defense.

One employee placed himself in the screaming woman’s path blocking her; a shopper embraced the woman. Local station KRQE reported on the story. You can view the video of their broadcast below. The screaming idiot was escorted out of the store where she stood in the parking lot, waiting on the shopper she harassed to come outside. Employees of Smith’s escorted her to her car, loading her groceries for her. Police were called to the scene, but by the time they arrived the screamer had left the premises.

The Muslim woman returned to the store later in the day to thank the employees for their actions.

Incidents such as this have been steadily increasing since the (s)election of Donald Trump as president—more than 700 at last count. The actions of the staff of Smith’s should not only be applauded, but emulated. There is hope after all.

At first glance, a big asteroid or comet strike is bad. It creates heat that cooks anything within hundreds of miles and the blast wave carried by air, water, and rock to all corners of the globe does the rest. It even kicks up huge amounts of material so high that the world endures a rain of molten rock for days afterward, clouds of steam and dust block out the sun for years. But somehow, in the hellish days of the late Hadean or early Archean, when monster strikes happened a lot, life or something like it first arose and managed to hang on. How might that happen?

Scientists don’t fully understand how organisms survived Earth’s early and violent history, when asteroids and comets regularly pummeled the planet’s surface. Chicxulub’s peak rings show that the impact deformed the peak ring rocks and made them more porous and less dense than expected, creating a nutrient-rich home for simple organisms.

A big strike would certainly fracture the underlying bedrock for miles around, incandescent gas cooking out of the congealing magma left behind might further riddle it with frothy air pockets. All those things would make that rock way more porous to water while still providing some protection from the violence outside the rocky walls, and where water goes, we believe life often follows.

Whatever the reason, the hit marking the demise of most dinosaurs much later, at the end of the Cretaceous, certainly did hairy mammals like us a big favor. We sure wouldn’t be dining on stuffed and roasted dinosaur this holiday season had it missed. In fact, some Jurassic turkey’s feathered progeny would probably be eating small primate-like mammals to this day, without the big one that struck 66 million years ago.

Jill Stein and the Green Party have been able to fundraise more than twice as much money as they originally asked for in their pursuit of an election day audit of votes in “swing” states.

Her campaign team said it would formally file in Wisconsin before the 5 pm ET deadline to do so; the recount motion deadlines for the other two states are next week. Less than half an hour before the deadline, the Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received the recount petition.

There has been a lot of discussion concerning all of this. Everything from the merits of a recount to the merits of Jill Stein’s motivations in all of this. I like the idea of Donald Trump getting sweaty and annoyed, so i’m all for a recount. Considering that Hillary Clinton is on track to have at least two and half million more popular votes than the Donald, it makes sense to recount and analyze the results in the hopes of making our election process more democratic.

Judd Legum at Think Progress writes

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Eisen explained that “the founders did not want any foreign payments to the president. Period.” This principle is enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars office holders from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”

This provision was specifically created to prevent the President, most of all, from being corrupted by foreign influences. 

Eisen said that the Electors should insist that Trump set up a blind trust for all his enterprises as a condition for getting their votes. 

The only other solution is one Legum takes note of from the debate over the Constitution while it was still be ratified by the states. Virginia Governor Edmund Jennings Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate said:

There is another provision against the danger mentioned by the honorable member, of the president receiving emoluments from foreign powers. If discovered he may be impeached. If he be not impeached he may be displaced at the end of the four years. By the ninth section, of the first article, “No person holding an office of profit or trust, shall accept of any present or emolument whatever, from any foreign power, without the consent of the representatives of the people” … I consider, therefore, that he is restrained from receiving any present or emoluments whatever. It is impossible to guard better against corruption.”

But Trump is already pushing for those emoluments—by “urging” representatives of foreign governments to stay at his D.C. hotel. And he has made clear he has zero intentions of separating his private businesses from the public office into which he will soon step. Rather the contrary. As grifter in chief he’ll be able to put heavy pressure on foreign governments even though his children will actually be in charge of the operations he continues to own. 

Eisen says that if the majority of Electors choose to put Trump into the Oval Office without getting a commitment from him on setting up a blind trust before he takes office, the nation will get a “wholesale oligarchic kleptocracy of a kind that we have never seen before in our history.” 

Ten years ago, Stephen Colbert made his stamp on political discourse. He coined the term "truthiness," and made it Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

Fast forward a decade and we've reached the point Colbert was hinting at back then. We're now living in "post-truth," if Oxford Dictionaries choice of it as word of the year is indication.

Oxford defines "post-truth" as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Often used in a political context, it is easy to see why post-truth became a defining word of the year, with emotional appeals fueling a surge of right-wing movements across the world. In England, where Oxford Dictionaries is based, appeals to emotion made Brexit the law of the land. In the United States, President-elect Donald Trump's upset victory was driven by emotional appeals, even as critics of the candidate pointed to various objective inconsistencies, factual errors, and outright falsehoods made by Mr. Trump as a way to disqualify him from the presidency.

When you think about the ten years that we've all lived through together, it almost seems inevitable that truthiness would eventually devolve to this, post-truth. Truthiness was absurd and, because it came from Colbert, funny. We could point and laugh and believe that we were living in an aberration, that the George W. Bush years would be the worse we would have to endure. And we could believe that through eight years of an Obama administration in which good things got done, in spite of an opposition party spiraling deeper into the abyss of racism, know-nothingism, and hatred.

So we end up at post-truth. Where we'll look fondly back at the unprecedented overreach of executive powers by the Bush/Cheney regime because it still had the ability to shock and dismay.

The names being floated by the Trump transition are like horrible human Whack-A-Mole. I still can’t believe that I’ll be staring at these faces and drawing their atrocities for the next four years. Or until free speech is canceled, whichever comes first.

At Daily Kos Elections, one of our foremost concerns is gerrymandering. Yes, it’s true that both sides try to draw maps in their favor, but following the 2010 census and the GOP wave election that same year, Republican map-makers gained control of the process in an overwhelming number of states. That advantage allowed Republicans to create some true monstrosities, cementing their hold on Congress and in legislatures nationwide. But there’s nothing that brings gerrymandering home quite like showing the hideous creations that emerge from the obscure process of redistricting, so we’re embarking on a tour of some of the very worst Republican gerrymanders in the nation.

We start in in the Philadelphia suburbs with the beast you see above: Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, which just might take the prize for the most gerrymandered district of all 435 in the House of Representatives. Republican Rep. Pat Meehan first won this seat in 2010 when it leaned slightly in the Democratic direction (and didn’t look so surrealist), but Republicans swiftly redrew it to their advantage during redistricting. Mitt Romney carried the district by 50-49, and even though Hillary Clinton did better than Barack Obama in this well-educated district and likely won it, Meehan easily prevailed 60-40 over an underfunded Democratic nominee in 2016.

The 7th is part of an overall Republican gerrymander of the Keystone State that’s allowed them to hold 13 of the state’s 18 seats since 2012, even though Barack Obama won Pennsylvania by 5 points four years ago and Donald Trump just barely carried the state this year. And what makes the 7th so gerrymandered isn’t just its crazy shape, but its impact too. We proposed a set of nonpartisan congressional maps for every state, and without gerrymandering, a reasonable version of Pennsylvania’s 7th District could have voted for Obama by a 61-38 landslide. That means Republicans took what should have been a safely Democratic seat and squeezed in every available Republican voter they could to make it successfully lean red.

Tell us what you think the district looks like in the comments!

There are only two states where the median monthly student debt payment is less than $200: Alaska and Wyoming. Just two other states join Alaska and Wyoming in having median student debt under $20,000.

Those numbers come to us courtesy of a new report from the People’s Action Institute. And if you have to pay a couple hundred dollars a month toward your student loans, it has an impact on how much you have to earn to support yourself. Without student debt, the national living wage for a single adult is $17.28 an hour.

When student debt payments are added to the traditional living wage, the national student debt living wage for a single adult climbs to $18.67 per hour. Across the country, adding in median monthly student debt payments would increase single adult living wages to more than $16 per hour in every state and more than $17 per hour in most states.

That’s not an equal opportunity burden:

Due to some of the same factors blocking many people of color from high-wage employment, student debt especially impacts students of color and their families. A 2013 study found that while 65 percent of white households borrowed money for college, 67 percent of Latinos and 80 percent of black households borrowed. Additionally, black and Latino students are more likely to attend for-profit institutions, which notoriously require students to take out significant student loan debt, and are less likely to complete their degree, leaving them with student loan debt but less access to high-wage employment.

Student debt isn’t just a burden on individuals. It’s weighing our economy down. And the answer is clear: free public higher education.