FiveThirtyEight: Bloomberg Lost, But He May Still Get What He Wanted

But I don’t think Bloomberg’s candidacy was a mistake or unwise. He’s worth more than $50 billion — so it’s not clear the $400 million he spent on television commercials or the other money he poured into his campaign matters much to him. He got to go on stage in the debates and attack Sanders and Warren. We don’t know if that boosted Biden, but it likely didn’t hurt him. With Biden now in a much stronger position than when Bloomberg entered the race, you could argue that Bloomberg provided what he and other more center-left figures wanted — to steer the race towards a more moderate nominee. The more extreme back-up plan — nominate Bloomberg — ended up not being needed. My guess is that Bloomberg would have preferred to be the candidate instead of Biden but knew that was a fairly unlikely outcome, since he is a one-time Republican who entered the race in late November. [...]

Now go back to his previous political role: pumping his billions into a variety of liberal causes. He hired people in numerous states for his presidential campaign, and his employees were reportedly told that they would have jobs through November. It’s not clear if Bloomberg will end up retaining these staffers for some kind of operation to boost Biden against Sanders and Warren in the primary, have his team start focusing now on the general election against Trump or simply wind down his apparatus. But I expect him to stay out of the primary and focus on Trump.

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Associated Press: Lawmakers pass bill allowing Confederate monument removals

The Democratic-led House and Senate passed measures that would undo an existing state law that protects the monuments and instead let local governments decide their fate. The passage marks the latest turn in Virginia’s long-running debate over how its history should be told in public spaces. [...]

After white supremacists descended on Charlottesville in 2017, in part to protest the city’s attempt to move a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, many places across the country quickly started taking Confederate monuments down. But Virginia localities that wanted to remove monuments were hamstrung by the existing law. [...]

The compromise measure says a locality must hold a public hearing before voting to remove or otherwise alter a monument. If it decides to remove one, it must be offered to “any museum, historical society, government or military battlefield,” although the governing body ultimately gets the say on the “final disposition.” [...]

In addition to the monuments bill, lawmakers also have advanced bills removing old racist laws that were technically still on the books, substituting the state’s holiday honoring Lee and Jackson for one on Election Day and creating a commission to recommend a replacement for a Lee statue Virginia contributed to the U.S. Capitol. They have also passed legislation that provides protections and funding for historic African American cemeteries.

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Vox: Here’s what happens to delegates after their candidates drop out

The short answer is that some of these delegates will be reallocated to other candidates while others will be able to serve as “free agents” during the Democratic National Convention later this year. [...]

Statewide pledged delegates: These delegates will be reallocated to candidates who are still in the race when the states elect their delegates — a process that typically takes place after the primary and before the convention in July. Candidates who have hit the necessary 15 percent threshold statewide, and whose campaigns are still active, will be eligible to pick up these statewide delegates. That means, depending on the state, they’ll be given to Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders, or split between the two. [...]

District-level pledged delegates: These delegates would become “free agents” at the convention and can vote for whichever candidate they are interested in supporting in the first round at the time. District-level delegates that have already been won are not reallocated for the time being and will proceed to the convention. [...]

A candidate needs 1,991 delegates, a majority, in order to win the Democratic nomination outright. In total, the four candidates who have suspended their campaigns have 130 delegates so far.

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The Guardian: First Lenin statue in western Germany to be erected after heated battle

A statue of Vladimir Lenin is soon to be erected in the German city of Gelsenkirchen following a longstanding battle between a leftist party and city authorities.

Gelsenkirchen, in the centre of the Ruhr valley, once Germany’s industrial heartland, will be the first western German city with a statue of the founder of the Russian communist party. [...]

A court has now given permission for the Marxist-Leninist party of Germany, the MLPD, to place the metal statue outside its headquarters. The city authorities had tried to stop the statue, ordering a halt to the building of a concrete pedestal on which it is due to stand. It argues that the statue will “disturb the view” of a neighbouring listed building, a 1930s building society branch. The statue’s presence, it said, would also contravene historical monument preservation rules. It would, the city argued, “mean that the view of the observer of the historic building would no longer be unrestricted”

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The Guardian: Tampon wars: the battle to overthrow the Tampax empire

The tampon, a late chapter in the story of menstruation, is a significant upgrade after centuries of women making do with homemade efforts – old rags, sheepskin, cheesecloth sacks stuffed with cotton, pieces of fabric pinned into pants. In parts of the world, including the UK, where many women can’t afford menstrual products, makeshift options are still used. Bespoke period products came into existence shortly after the first world war, when nurses realised that the cellulose-based bandages they were using to dress wounds were better than cotton at absorbing blood. Kotex introduced the first mass-market sanitary pad in 1921; it had to be held in place by a belt. Ten years later, Earle Haas, a Colorado-based doctor, invented and patented the first cardboard applicator tampon. (For those unfamiliar with the form, an applicator is the telescopic-tube mechanism that inserts the tampon into the vagina. Non-applicator tampons, or “digital tampons”, are pushed in by hand. Oddly, depending on which brand reached a territory first, most countries have an in-built preference for one or another – so the vast majority of US consumers use applicators, while most German users don’t.) [...]

Over the decades, Tampax’s promotion of the discretion of its products seemed to give corporate endorsement to the idea that a period was best kept secret. “You’ll love the Quiet Easy Reseal Wrapper,” goes the current marketing blurb for Tampax Radiant. As a narrative, it seems increasingly at odds with the times. Why should we hide tampons up our sleeves on the way to the bathroom, or worry that someone might hear us unwrap one once we’re there? (In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Phoebe Waller Bridge riffed on all the possible items – a copy of Mein Kampf, a neatly folded Confederate flag, a dog shit – within which you could more acceptably conceal a tampon and its associated deep shame.) For years, major period brands, including P&G’s sanitary towel Always, have advertised absorbency by using a bright blue liquid, as if to deflect us from what would actually be soaking a pad. Blood, it seemed, could openly seep from grazed knees and shaving cuts, but not from a woman’s bits. [...]

What the new tampon startups also have in common, but don’t talk about quite so openly, is the fact that beneath the reusable applicator or CBD coating, their fundamental products – the tampons themselves – are extremely similar. While Tampax has its own tampon factories and machinery, the vast majority of Europe’s new-brand tampons are made in one of a handful of factories. (The two leading ones, I was told in hushed tones, are in Slovenia and Spain.) The secrecy is not unusual – all companies protect manufacturing information. But many of the brands didn’t seem to realise that within these factories, their tampons were most likely being made on the same machines. A Swiss manufacturing firm called Ruggli has a near-monopoly on tampon-making machines, so almost every new-brand tampon, whatever its particular design or added feature, is a Ruggli tampon. “We all try and make it sound like there’s something proprietary,” Parvizi-Waynethe of Freda told me. “But ultimately, it’s like a white T-shirt. It’s the same product. We can’t fool ourselves that this is something different.” [...]

If you see the world as a set of addressed or yet-to-be-addressed markets, it changes things a little. I started to wonder what was left to address. Death? No, that’s been done: there are a host of nifty death startups, offering cheaper funeral services and probate advice. Your mind? Done, too – and I’m paying for it already (along with more than 1 million other subscribers, I have the Headspace app on my phone). Disconnection – our only hope – has long been monetised, and again, I’m shelling out for the privilege (the Freedom app, which disables the internet, is probably my most-used software). It makes sense that the only markets left are the ones we’ve been historically reluctant to talk about. “Let’s face it,” an investor once told Parvizi-Wayne at a meeting, “taboos have become sexy.” A taboo, seen another way, is just a market still invitingly unsaturated.

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