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anonymous

White House to Impose Metal Tariffs on Key U.S. Allies, Risking Retaliation - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-aluminum-steel-tariffs.html

US trump politics government

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration said on Thursday that it would impose steep tariffs on metals imported from its closest allies, provoking retaliation against American businesses and consumers and further straining diplomatic ties tested by the president’s combative approach.
  • The tariffs “have already had major, positive effects on steel and aluminum workers and jobs and will continue to do so long into the future,” White House officials said in a statement. “At the same time, the Trump administration’s actions underscore its commitment to good-faith negotiations with our allies to enhance our national security while supporting American workers.”
  • Although the Trump administration signaled a tougher stance with the tariffs, it also left open the possibility for continued negotiations with affected countries.
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  • But the tariffs loomed in the backdrop as the administration continued to negotiate with Mexico and Canada over Nafta and European officials over other trade matters. Neither talks achieved much.
  • Whether American consumers and companies get caught in the crossfire depends on how it all plays out.
  • The Trump administration has argued that imports have weakened the country’s industrial base, and, by extension, its ability to produce tanks, weapons and armored vehicles. “We take the view that without a strong economy, you can’t have strong national security,” the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, said Thursday.
  • Along with fighting the tariffs at the World Trade Organization, European officials have been preparing levies on an estimated $3 billion of imported American products in late June. In a joint statement, ministers from France and Germany said the countries would coordinate their response.
  • he idea has drawn ire from both foreign leaders and business executives, who say it undercuts the surety that trade agreements are meant to create.
  • The Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes about the health of regional economies, contains more than two dozen references to business fears that the administration’s trade policies, and the steel and aluminum tariffs in particular, would hurt sales and profits.
Javier E

Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-food-supply.html

climate change food supply methane

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
  • A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming
  • “People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
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  • Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply
  • food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
  • A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once
  • “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
  • The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior
  • Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
  • “One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
  • activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
  • Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change
  • As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
  • Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
  • will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock
  • In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas
  • Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
  • “You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,”
  • agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.
  • the window to address the threat is closing rapidly
  • Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline
  • And the emissions of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,”
  • (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)
  • cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon
  • each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars
  • The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade
  • They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted
  • But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices. For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation
  • The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights
  • The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land
  • But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.
  • “We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we’re in,
  • “The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”
  • Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels
  • “Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly
  • Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year
  • “Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,”
  • an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.
  • the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”
Javier E

Does a sugar detox work? I'm on it and have had some surprising results. - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html

sugar detox diet

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Health coach Anna Seethaler opened the detox seminar with three questions: How much sugar are you eating? When are you eating it? And why are you eating it?
  • the average American consumes nearly 152 pounds of sugar annually, or 22 teaspoons a day. The typical kid in the United States eats a horrifying 34 teaspoons daily. (The American Heart Association recommends no more than six teaspoons a day for women and children, nine for men.)
  • Hyman advised me to add “a lot of fat, because fat makes you feel full [and] speeds your metabolism,
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  • “Calories in, calories out,” he says, “is a completely disproven hypothesis.”
  • Hyman advocates a cold-turkey approach to his patients. “You want people to experience their hunger, their behavior, their mood, their energy [and] their chronic symptoms if they stop [consuming] sugar and starch for a week or two weeks or three weeks,
  • Our biochemistry, he says, not will power, drives our cravings and hunger patterns. It’s not a “moral failing that we can’t control our diet.”
  • Hyman, who has written “The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet,” says his intent is to “completely obliterate the idea” that all calories are the same, that there’s no difference between 100 calories of Coca-Cola or cauliflower.
  • Fat actually helps you burn fat,” he explained, destroying many of the myths I’d grown up with
  • Fat, he says, “increases muscle mass and decreases inflammation — if it’s the right fat” — by that he includes coconut butter, MCT oil (or medium-chain triglycerides), extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil, and those found in wild fatty fish such as salmon and sardines, nuts and avocados. (See his complete list at thechalkboardmag.com/dr-hyman-good-fat-bad-fat .)
  • here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds.
  • Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks
  • I’m now in my fourth month of a modified detox — I don’t want to live without wine or some sweets (I eat three 1-inch squared pieces of very dark chocolate a day). I know I can’t avoid all added sugars, no matter how vigilant I may be.
Javier E

Throwing a billion news consumers behind coverage of the climate crisis - Columbia Jour... - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...ing_climate_now_newsletter.php

climate change journalism coverage

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • These are among the stories published as part of Covering Climate Now, a major new initiative from CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, that aims to increase the visibility of the climate crisis in our media
  • more than 250 outlets from around the world signed on, throwing a combined audience of more than 1 billion people behind the project.
  • the global response has been “amazing, and gratifying.” It is heartening, they write, “that the press may at last be waking up to the defining story of our time…
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  • oadblocks remain. Some outlets hesitated before signing on to Covering Climate Now, or decided not to take part. Some said they were already pulling their weight, and declined to collaborate beyond their existing output.
  • Some news organizations have no idea how or where to make a start on it. Others have taken a defeatist posture—it’s too late for the press to make any difference, they say, and in any case, news consumers find climate stories depressing, and click away.
  • Another common concern among reporters and editors holds that climate coverage smacks of activism. But this logic, too, is flawed: it’s journalists’ job to shine an undimmed light on unvarnished truths,
  • “News organizations that have embraced climate coverage find that audiences—particularly younger viewers, listeners, and readers—are, in fact, enormously engaged in the coverage. They may get angry or energized or organized by climate stories, but they don’t tune them out.”
  • Covering Climate Now will try to overcome these doubts, while working with partners to identify the challenges they face in their climate coverage—a lack of expertise, for example, or a lack of reporting resources
  • What we’re hoping to get out of this week is some great coverage, we’re hoping to sort of connect people. But we’re really hoping to get people to start thinking about what they have to do different.”
  • The Guardian, our lead media partner on Covering Climate Now, has an interview with Klein about her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. “I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face,” Klein says.
Javier E

Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables - MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...ainst-the-limits-of-renewables

germany energy renewable carbon

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • At one point this month renewable energy sources briefly supplied close to 90 percent of the power on Germany’s electric grid
  • Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.
  • Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs.
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  • even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.
  • Now the government is about to reboot its energy strategy, known as the Energiewende. It was launched in 2010 in hopes of dramatically increasing the share of the country’s electricity that comes from renewable energy and slashing the country’s overall carbon emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 (see “The Great German Energy Experiment”
  • Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants.
  • Some aspects of the Energiewende have been successful: renewable sources accounted for nearly one-third of the electricity consumed in Germany in 2015. The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels.
  • Instead of subsidizing any electricity produced by solar or wind power, the government will set up an auction system. Power producers will bid to build renewable energy projects up to a capacity level set by the government, and the resulting prices paid for power from those plants will be set by the market, rather than government fiat.
  • It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down.
  • Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negative—in other words, operators of large plants, most of which run on coal or natural gas, must pay commercial customers to consume electricity
  • Putting a steep price on carbon emissions would hasten the shutdown of German coal plants. But Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme, designed to establish a continentwide market for trading permits for carbon emissions, has been a bust. Prices for the permits are so low that there is little incentive for power producers to shut down dirty plants.
  • Also helpful would be a Europewide “supergrid” that would enable renewable power to be easily transported across borders, reducing the need for reliable, always-on fossil fuel plants to supplement intermittent electricity from solar and wind.
delgadool

Is fast fashion giving way to the sustainable wardrobe? | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iving-way-sustainable-wardrobe

fashion clothing environment apparel climate change

shared by delgadool on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Fashion shoppers spent about £3.5bn on Christmas party clothing this year – but 8 million of those sparkly items will be on their way to landfill after just one wear.
  • Now, however, some fashion experts believe the party could be coming to an end for such disposable clothing and a backlash could be brewing, just as it has against takeaway coffee cups, plastic packaging and meat. Overall, the fashion industry as a whole is contributing more to climate change than the aeronautical and shipping industries combined. If trends continue, the industry could account for a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
  • In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production globally totalled 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, according to a report by the industry-led Circular Fibres Initiative. This is more than the emissions of all international flights and maritime shipping combined.
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  • Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: “The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.
  • The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.
  • “We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change,” she says. “We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world’s richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it.”
  • Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost – with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. “We are not saying to people on a low income you can’t buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don’t think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”
  • Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.
  • Sumner says: “The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. “Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality.”
  • "America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher. As that choice nears, the Guardian, as it has done for 200 years, and with your continued support, will continue to argue for the values we hold dear – facts, science, diversity, equality and fairness." – US editor, John Mulholland
Javier E

Half of Us Face Obesity, Dire Projections Show - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ity-dire-projections-show.html

obesity food diet fat sugar culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A prestigious team of medical scientists has projected that by 2030, nearly one in two adults will be obese, and nearly one in four will be severely obese.
  • In as many as 29 states, the prevalence of obesity will exceed 50 percent, with no state having less than 35 percent of residents who are obese,
  • in 25 states the prevalence of severe obesity will be higher than one adult in four, and severe obesity will become the most common weight category among women, non-Hispanic black adults and low-income adults nationally.
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  • as with climate change, the powers that be in this country are doing very little to head off the potentially disastrous results of expanding obesity, obesity specialists say.
  • Well-intentioned efforts like limiting access to huge portions of sugar-sweetened soda, the scientists note, are effectively thwarted by well-heeled industrie
  • With rare exceptions, the sugar and beverage industries have blocked nearly every attempt to add an excise tax to sugar-sweetened beverages.
  • Claims that such a tax is regressive and unfairly targets low-income people is shortsighted
  • “What people would save in health care costs would dwarf the extra money paid as taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said in an interview.
  • in a city like Philadelphia, where a soda tax of 1.5 cents an ounce took effect three years ago, total purchases declined by 38 percent even after accounting for beverages people bought outside the city
  • piecemeal changes like this are not enough to make a significant difference in the obesity forecast for the country
  • nationwide changes are needed in the ubiquitous food environment that has fostered a steady climb toward a weight-and-health disaster.
  • Americans weren’t always this fat; since 1990, the prevalence of obesity in this country has doubled.
  • Our genetics haven’t changed in the last 30 years. Rather, what has changed is the environment in which our genes now function.
  • “Food is very cheap in the United States, and super easy to access,”
  • We eat out more, consuming more foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, and our portion sizes are bigger.
  • “You don’t even have to leave home to eat restaurant-prepared food — just call and it will be delivered.
  • As a society, we also snack more, a habit that starts as soon as toddlers can feed themselves.
  • “People are snacking throughout the day,” Mr. Ward said. “Snacking is the normal thing to do in the United States. In France, you never see anyone eating on a bus.”
  • We also eat more highly processed foods, which have been shown to foster weight gain, thanks to their usually high levels of calories, sugar and fat.
  • even when controlling for weight, consuming lots of processed foods raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
  • “Through marketing, we’re constantly being sold on foods we didn’t even know we wanted. We’re all about immediate rewards. We’re not thinking about the future, which is why we’re going to see more than half the population obese in 10 years.”
  • Unless something is done to reverse this trend, Mr. Ward said, “Obesity will be the new normal in this country. We’re living in an obesogenic environment.”
  • “if I could wave a magic wand, I’d make a tax on beverages a federal mandate because they’re the largest source of added sugar in the diet and are strongly linked to weight gain and health problems.
  • the link between beverage consumption and greater intake of calories may also apply to drinks flavored with no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners.
  • prompting restaurants to gradually, surreptitiously reduce the amount of fat, sugar and calories in the meals they serve could help put the brakes on societal weight gain. “Menus could make healthier, lower-calorie meals the default option,
  • Controlling portion sizes is another critically important step. “Big portions are especially motivating for low-income people who reasonably want to get more calories for their dollar,”
  • Another policy-based approach that could reverse rising obesity projections might be to partner with climate control advocates, Dr. Bleich suggested. “If we pull more meat out of the American diet, it would help both the environment and weight loss,
  • “prevention is the way to go. Children aren’t born obese, but we can already see excessive weight gain as early as age 2. Changes in the food environment are needed at every level — local, state and federal. It’s hard for individuals to voluntarily change their behavior.”
  • health-promoting changes in the food packages provided to low-income women, infants and children since 2009 have helped to reverse or stabilize obesity in the preschool children who receive them.
brickol

The World Is Running Out of Places to Store Its Oil - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oil-storage.html

crisis COVID-19

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The world is awash in crude oil, and is slowly running out of places to put it.Massive, round storage tanks in places like Trieste, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates are filling up. Over 80 huge tankers, each holding up to 80 million gallons, are anchored off Texas, Scotland and elsewhere, with no particular place to go.
  • The world doesn’t need all this oil. The coronavirus pandemic has strangled the world’s economies, silenced factories and grounded airlines, cutting the need for fuel. But Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer, is locked in a price war with rival Russia and is determined to keep raising production.Prices have plummeted.
  • This chaotic mismatch in supply and demand has benefited consumers, who have watched gasoline prices slide lower.And it has been a field day for anyone eager to snap up cheap oil, put it someplace and wait for a day when it’ll be worth more.
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  • “We usually do about two storage deals a day,” said Mr. Barsamian, who runs a company in Princeton, N.J., called the Tank Tiger, a nod to the local university’s mascot. “We have done about 120 in the last couple of weeks.”
  • People in the energy industry say they have never seen changes happening at the speed and magnitude that are occurring because of the coronavirus.
  • The first major downturn in demand occurred in February when China, the world’s largest energy consumer, shut down much of its economy in an effort to stabilize the spread of the coronavirus. Now, the slowdown is rolling across the world, with much of Europe and major parts of the United States in lockdown.
  • The price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia has exacerbated the situation. The Saudis are slashing prices and threatening to ramp up oil output by about 25 percent to 12 million barrels a day, beginning in April. The surplus, IHS Markit forecasts, could add up to a tank-busting one billion barrels or more.
  • Not only does oil need a place to go, but the state of the oil market has provided traders with an opportunity to make money. They are taking advantage of a market where prices in the future are much higher than current levels. For instance, a barrel of light, sweet U.S. crude is priced at about $25 a barrel for May, about $6 lower than August. So a trader or an oil company can make easy money by buying oil at today’s depressed prices, selling it on the futures market and pocketing the difference minus storage and other costs — a situation known as contango.
  • Knowing how much oil is stored around the world is a key metric to “understanding the health of the oil market,” said Hillary Stevenson, an analyst at Genscape, a market intelligence firm. But, she warned, “capacity is finite; the safety net is only so big.”
  • One sign of a glut: The volume of oil placed on ships to wait for better days has grown by about 25 percent in March. According to Mr. Booth, about 81 loaded tankers — an unusually high number — are loitering off coasts around the globe.
  • The fact that oil is being put on ships, a more costly proposition than storage on land, implies that the world is running out of room, at least in some places, Mr. Booth said. Chinese buyers, perhaps seeing current prices as a bargain, continue to import at high levels, he said. Mr. Booth estimated that three-quarters of a billion barrels of usable storage capacity remained around the world — not enough room for the buildup in supplies some forecasters are predicting.
  • In the wake of price-cutting by Saudi Arabia and other countries, oil companies in the United States are being paid less. On Tuesday, Enterprise Products, an Oklahoma company, posted prices for various grades of crude that ranged as low as $7.61 a barrel.
  • Space is running out in western Canada, whose 40 million barrels of storage is now more than three-quarters full, according to Rystad Energy, which estimates that producers will need to slash production by 11 percent
brickol

'I have no money': debt collection continues despite pandemic | Money | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-wage-garnishment-coronavirus

COVID-19 us economics

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • One out of every six Americans has an unpaid medical bill on their credit report, amounting to $81bn in debt nationwide. Every year, about 530,000 Americans who file bankruptcy cite medical debt as a contributing factor.
  • In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, several legal groups across the US are calling on federal and state governments to halt private and public debt collection, including wage garnishment, and preventing any federal stimulus checks to Americans from being garnished by debt collectors. For now the debt collection continues unabated.
  • Millions of US workers have wages garnished from their paychecks for consumer debts every year, and those with low incomes are disproportionately affected.
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  • “The garnishment came with no warning. You don’t know until your bank account is locked and your money is gone,” said Walker, who didn’t receive the order of garnishment in the mail until 24 March, after money was taken from his account, and he has already started to fall behind in paying bills.
  • “Unlike the rest of my bills that I can see, the debt collection agency doesn’t send you one. You can’t arrange to auto-pay and they don’t send anything showing what you paid. It’s like they are set up to make you fail. With the coronavirus they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and garnish bank accounts while Americans are in this crisis.”
  • “Garnishment is a really important issue, especially for low-income, economically vulnerable families, the exact workers being laid off in the US right now,”
  • He noted it is still unclear if any federal stimulus checks will be subjected to wage garnishment, but warned courts can freeze bank accounts over debt, making these funds inaccessible if they are deposited.
  • “It’s $350 to $400 a month. I don’t deny I owe this money because they saved my life, but it is detrimental to my health now because I don’t have the money for what I need. I have no money for groceries – I’m only paying my rent and utilities, there’s no money left over,” Johnson said.
  • Among the Americans still experiencing wage garnishment through the coronavirus pandemic are those who have defaulted on their federal student loans. About 45 million Americans owe more than $1.7tn in student loan debt. According to an analysis by Student Loan Hero, between July 2015 to September 2018, 18 private student debt collection agencies contracted by the US Department of Education added $171bn to their debt inventory, and collected $2.3bn during the same period through wage garnishments.
  • “The Department of Education has not decided to do anything, as far as I know, to ease the burden from the coronavirus,” said McKinnon. “They took my tax return also, in the middle of this epidemic. It’s heartless.”
  • She noted the federal stimulus relief package for the coronavirus pandemic is supposed to increase social security income by $200, but that she will still be receiving less than she would before the garnishment. “Even though I paid for years and I’ve tried to utilize their system to take care of my student loans they still decided to garnish my already-below-poverty-line social security income,” Tavares added.
Javier E

Opinion | Warren, Bloomberg and What Really Matters - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...warren-bloomberg-debate.html

finance us economy 2020 candidates politics

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • During the U.S. economy’s greatest generation — the era of rapid, broadly shared growth that followed World War II — Wall Street was a fairly peripheral part of the picture. When people thought about business leaders, they thought about people running companies that actually made things, not people who got rich through wheeling and dealing.
  • But that all changed in the 1980s, largely thanks to financial deregulation. Suddenly the big bucks came from buying and selling companies as opposed to running them
  • And the financial sector itself doubled as a share of the economy, which meant that it was pulling lots of capital and many smart people away from productive activities.
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  • there is no evidence that Wall Street’s mega-expansion made the rest of the economy more efficient. On the contrary, growth in family incomes slowed down as finance rose — although a few people became immensely rich
  • the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real-time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive — a subscription costs around $24,000 a year. But it’s a must-have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without.It’s an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No
  • Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started.
  • Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess.It wasn’t just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren’s brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it.
  • I have no idea how or if Wednesday’s debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues — especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters.
Javier E

Will We Forgive Amazon When This Is Over? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-when-this-is-over-11586577604

amazon crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • all is far from well in the kingdom of Bezos. At a defining moment for the company, it is letting customers down.
  • the promise to ship anything to our doorstep in a day or two that has gained it the trust of an astonishing 112 million Prime members in the U.S. (a nation of 129 million households) has evaporated nearly overnight.
  • it feels like Amazon is little better than any other retailer at getting us what we need, when we need it.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The fact that Amazon’s retail operations are functioning at all is a testament to the flexibility of the company’s infrastructure during a health crisis that few if any companies were prepared for.
  • But the crisis is laying bare the cracks in Amazon’s ability
  • Those cracks include times when up to half the workers in some of the company’s facilities haven’t shown up, with some saying it was due to their fear they wouldn’t be adequately protected from coronavirus.
  • It’s also due to Amazon’s just-in-time supply chain, reliance on third-party sellers and largely automated systems of buying and selling that were never designed to handle such a crisis.
  • Amazon shoppers are unable to get many of the essential products the company says it’s prioritizing now.
  • everything considered nonessential takes more time than the two days Amazon conditioned us to expect.
  • as of March, 55% of Americans polled had ordered groceries online, compared with 36% two years ago.
  • One-third of respondents said the first time they had ever ordered groceries online was in the past 30 days, and 60% of respondents used Amazon to order groceries.
  • The infrastructure Amazon built pushed the entire e-commerce industry toward ever broader selection delivered ever faster.
  • In the mid-2010s, Amazon initiated a program called “hands off the wheel,” which replaced many of the functions of Amazon’s white-collar retail workers—those responsible for managing inventory and negotiating with sellers—with AI and automated systems
  • Amazon’s systems respond more quickly to increases in demand than humans could, but it also leads to breakdowns when they encounter unexpected shocks—e.g., a global pandemic
  • In the week ending March 28, Americans spent 47% more on consumer packaged goods purchased online when compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen and Rakuten Intelligence.
  • Amazon has hired 80,000 additional workers in just the past few weeks, as part of its pledge to hire 100,000 new permanent workers. It has also raised its base wage from $15 an hour to $17, through April.
  • with more workers pouring into Amazon’s facilities, and more forced to stay by the lack of alternatives, there could be more protests by employees and more concessions from historically union-averse management
  • Already, the company has instituted double pay for overtime, paid leave for associates with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19, a tripling of its janitorial staff and audits of its own facilities to comply with these measures.
  • Consumers felt, in good times anyway, that “I can trust the item, I know it’s a good price, I have transparency on when I’m going to receive it, and if I have issues Amazon will work on my behalf,” he adds.
  • A big edge Amazon holds over competitors is that it can cover losses or scant retail margins with a combination of good will from investors and a cross-subsidy from its booming cloud business, Amazon Web Services.
  • Of all cloud providers, Amazon is the best positioned to benefit both in the long and short term from surging demand, Eric Sheridan, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a Monday note surveying the industry.
  • All this increased usage means more revenue for AWS and more profit for its parent company. In turn, that means more opportunity for Amazon to, as Mr. Bezos famously put it, turn its retail competitors’ margins into Amazon’s opportunity.
  • for Amazon, a company that may already be too big for its own good, it could lead to more of the regulatory scrutiny that its success was drawing even before coronavirus.
  • An ever greater variety of customers will view Amazon as a basic utility but, wary of overreliance, will explore alternatives, too. The bill for Mr. Bezos’ possibly Faustian bargain with the universe—that everyone loves an innovative and ruthless competitor, even when it becomes dominant—may finally come due.
Javier E

Taiwan Is Beating the Coronavirus. Can the US Do the Same? | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...navirus-can-the-us-do-the-same

taiwan pandemic response strategies

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?
  • we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.
  • The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • we see the classic “Confucian values” (or “Asian values”) argument that has historically been deployed to explain everything from the economic success of East Asian nations to the prevalence of authoritarian single-party rule in Asia, and even, most recently, China’s supposed edge in AI research.
  • So, yeah, kudos to Taiwan for keeping its people safe, but here in America we’re going to do what we always do in a crisis—line up at a gun store and accuse the opposing political party of acting in bad faith. Not for us, those Asian values.
  • But the truth is that Taiwan, one of Asia’s most vibrant and boisterous democracies, is a terrible example to cite as a cultural other populated by submissive peons
  • Taiwan’s self-confidence and collective solidarity trace back to its triumphal self-liberation from its own authoritarian past, its ability to thrive in the shadow of a massive, hostile neighbor that refuses to recognize its right to chart its own path, and its track record of learning from existential threats.
  • There is no doubt that in January it would have been difficult for the US to duplicate Taiwan’s containment strategy, but that’s not because Americans are inherently more ornery than Taiwanese
  • It’s because the United States has a miserable record when it comes to learning from its own mistakes and suffers from a debilitating lack of faith in the notion that the government can solve problems—something that dates at least as far back as the moment in 1986 when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
  • The Taiwan-US comparison is the opposite of a clash of civilizations; instead, it’s a deathly showdown between competence and incompetence.
  • To be fair, there are some cultural aspects of East Asian societies that may work in Taiwan’s favor
  • There is undeniably a long tradition in East Asia of elevating scholars and experts to the highest levels of government,
  • The country’s president Tsai Ingwen, boasts a PhD from the London School of Economics, and the vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is a highly regarded epidemiologist
  • The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions.
  • First, and most important was Taiwan’s experience battling the SARS outbreak in 2003, followed by the swine flu in 2009
  • “Taiwan actually has a functioning democratic government, run by sensible, well-educated people—the USA? Not so much.”)
  • Taiwan’s commitment to transparency has also been critical
  • In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material.
  • In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak, including daily press conferences and an active presence on social media
  • “Do not forget that Taiwan has been under China’s threat constantly,” wrote Wang Cheng-hua, a professor of art history at Princeton, “which has raised social consciousness about collective action. When the collective will supports government, then all of the strict measures implemented by the government make sense.”
  • Over the past quarter-century, Taiwan’s government has nurtured public trust by its actions and its transparency.
  • The democracy activists who risked their lives and careers during the island nation’s martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony
  • some of the current willingness to trust what the government is telling the people is the direct “result of having experienced the transition from an authoritarian government that lied all the time, to a democratic government and robust political dialogue that forced people to be able to evaluate information.”
  • Because of the opposition of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations or the World Health Organization
  • “The reality of being isolated from global organizations,” wrote Tung, “also makes Taiwanese very aware of the publicity of its success in handling a crisis like this. The more coverage from foreign media, the more people feel confident in government policy and social mobilization.”
  • Given what we know about Taiwan’s hard-won historical experience, could the US have implemented a similar model?
  • The answer, sadly, seems to be no
  • it would be impossible for the US to successfully integrate a health care database with customs and travel records because there is no national health care database in the United States. “The US health care system is fragmented, making it difficult to organize, integrate, and assess data coming in from its various government and private-sector parts,”
  • more tellingly, continued Fidler, “the manner in which the United States has responded to Covid-19 demonstrates that the United States did not learn the lessons from past outbreaks and is struggling to cobble together a semblance of a strategy. ”
  • There’s where the contrast between the United States and Taiwan becomes most salient. The US is not only bad at the act of government but has actively been getting worse.
  • But Taiwan’s own success at building a functional democracy is probably the most potent rebuke to the Asian values thesis.
  • But over that same period, powerful political and economic interests in the US have dedicated themselves to undermining faith in government action, in favor of deregulated markets that have no capacity to react intelligently or proactively to existential threats.
  • And instead of learning from history, US leaders actively ignore it, a truth for which there could be no better symbolic proof than the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Security Council pandemic office created by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ebola outbreak
  • Finally, instead of seeking to keep the public informed to the best of our ability, some of our political leaders and media institutions have gone out of their way to muddy the waters.
  • In Taiwan, one early government response to the Covid-19 outbreak was to institute a fine of $100,000 for the act of spreading fake news about the epidemic.
  • In the US the most popular television news network in the country routinely downplayed or misrepresented the threat of the coronavirus, until the severity of the outbreak became too large to ignore.
  • If there is any silver lining here, it’s that the disaster now upon us is of such immense scope that it could finally expose the folly of the structural forces that have been wreaking sustained havoc on American governmental institutions
  • So maybe we are finally about to learn that competence matters, that educated leaders are a virtue, and that telling the truth is a responsibility
  • Americans might have to learn this the hard way, like we did in Hong Kong and Singapore.”
  • We’re about to find out how hard it’s going to be. But will we learn?
Javier E

The Fake Freedom of American Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...m-of-american-health-care.html

health-care finland government

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Republican leaders seem unfazed by this, perhaps because, in their minds, deciding not to have health care because it’s too expensive is an exercise of individual free will.
  • The idea is that buying health care is like buying anything else. The United States is home to some of the world’s best medical schools, doctors, research institutes and hospitals, and if you have the money for the coverage and procedures you want, you absolutely can get top-notch care.
  • This approach might result in extreme inequalities and it might be expensive, but it definitely buys you the best medical treatment anywhere. Such is the cost of freedom.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In practice, though, this Republican notion is an awfully peculiar kind of freedom. It requires most Americans to spend not just money, but also time and energy agonizing over the bewildering logistics of coverage and treatment — confusing plans, exorbitant premiums and deductibles, exclusive networks, mysterious tests, outrageous drug prices.
  • I never had to worry whether I was covered. All Finns are covered for all essential medical care automatically, regardless of employment or income.
  • If you can’t afford it, not buying it is hardly a choice.
  • in Finland I never worried about where my medical care came from or whether I could afford it. I paid my income taxes — which, again despite the stereotypes, were about the same as what I pay in federal, state and local income taxes in New York City — and if I needed to see a doctor, I had several options.
  • And more often than not, individual choices are severely restricted by decisions made by employers, insurers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other private players. Those interest groups, not the consumer, decide which plans are available, what those plans cover, which doctors patients can see and how much it will cost.
  • Meanwhile, life expectancy at age 65 is higher in 24 other developed nations, including Canada, Britain and most European nations.
  • According to the latest report of the O.E.C.D. — an organization of mostly wealthy nations — the United States as a whole does not actually outshine other countries in the quality of care.
  • In fact, the United States has shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality and fewer doctors per capita than most other developed countries.
  • When it comes to outcomes in some illnesses, including cancer, the United States does have some of the best survival rates in the world — but that’s barely ahead of, or even slightly behind, the equivalent survival rates in other developed countries.
  • the United States are South Korea, Israel, Australia, Sweden and Finland, all with some form of government-managed universal health care.
  • And when it comes to cervical cancer, American women are at a significant disadvantage: The United States comes in only 22nd
  • According to the Republican orthodoxy, government always takes away not only people’s freedom to choose their doctor, but also their doctor’s ability to choose the correct care for patients. People are at the mercy of bureaucrats. Waiting times are long. Quality of care is dismal.
  • Americans might still assume that long waits for care are inevitable in a health care system run by the government. But that’s not necessarily the case either.
  • A report in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation specializing in health care research, ranked the United States third in the world in access to specialists. That’s a great achievement. But the Netherlands and Switzerland did better
  • When it comes to nonemergency and elective surgery, patients in several countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, all of which have universal, government-guided health care systems, have faster access than the United States.
  • in fact Americans who are getting a raw deal. Americans pay much more than people in other countries but do not get significantly better results.
  • The trouble with a free-market approach is that health care is an immensely complicated and expensive industry, in which the individual rarely has much actual market power
  • It is not like buying a consumer product, where choosing not to buy will not endanger one’s life. It’s also not like buying some other service tailored to individual demands, because for the most part we can’t predict our future health care needs.
  • The point of universal coverage is to pool risk, for the maximum benefit of the individual when he or she needs care
  • And the point of having the government manage this complicated service is not to take freedom away from the individual
  • The point is the opposite: to give people more freedom. Arranging health care is an overwhelming task, and having a specialized entity do the negotiating, regulating and perhaps even much of the providing is just vastly more efficient than forcing everyone to go it alone
  • What passes for an American health care system today certainly has not made me feel freer. Having to arrange so many aspects of care myself, while also having to navigate the ever-changing maze of plans, prices and the scarcity of appointments available with good doctors in my network, has thrown me, along with huge numbers of Americans, into a state of constant stress. And I haven’t even been seriously sick or injured yet.
  • As a United States citizen now, I wish Americans could experience the freedom of knowing that the health care system will always be there for us regardless of our employment status. I wish we were free to assume that our doctors get paid a salary to look after our best interests, not to profit by generating billable tests and procedures. I want the freedom to know that the system will automatically take me and my family in, without my having to battle for care in my moment of weakness and need. That is real freedom.
  • So is the freedom of knowing that none of it will bankrupt us. That is the freedom I had back in Finland.
  • It’s true that in countries with universal health care the cost of hiring a new employee can be significant, especially for a small employer. Yet these countries still have plenty of thriving businesses, with lower administrative burdens. It can be done.
  • in a nation that purports to champion freedom, the outdated disaster that is the United States health care system is taking that freedom away.
Javier E

A Trust Buster for the New 'Knowledge Monopoly' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ithout-mind-franklin-foer.html

monopoly tech media disruption crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • We, the consuming public, have failed to properly understand the new tech superpowers, he suggests, leaving little hope for stodgy and reluctant American regulators. The scope of their influence is obscured by the sheer number of things they do and sell, or problems they purport to be solving, and by our outdated sense of what constitutes a monopoly. To that end, Foer promotes the concept of the “knowledge monopoly,” which he qualifies with a mischievous grin. “My hope is that we revive ‘monopoly’ as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers,” he says, rather than as a “technical” term referring to one company cornerning a market. (His new monopolists, after all, aren’t raising prices. They’re giving things away free).
  • His best assessment of what has happened to media in general in the last decade is tucked in an aside about what Facebook, Google and Amazon all offer, or threaten: They are the “primary bundlers” of commercial media, whether it’s books, articles or video. “They are the ones that create a usable, coherent product from its disparate parts. Their business model is infinitely better than the one it displaced.”
  • More broadly, truly ambitious tech companies are in the business of creating markets, not competing in them; of wrapping themselves around industries, not merely disrupting them.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He reminds us that the issue of monopoly dominated our politics for generations, even as the companies in the crosshairs changed in form and ambition. Though he makes no radical or provocative case to, say, nationalize Facebook, or to break up Google, he does suggest creating a Data Protection Authority, in the mold of Elizabeth Warren’s post-financial-crisis Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and calling for government to protect privacy as it (in theory) protects the environment.
  • Is this idealistic, plain crazy, or just impotent
  • What does it mean that it could be all three?
krystalxu

The Departing CFPB Director Issues a Challenge to Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546734

finance trump Crisis US economic

shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration had signaled its intent to replace Cordray with an acting director, using the Federal Vacancies Act
  • By formally naming a deputy director on Friday, he strengthened the CFPB’s hand in any ensuing legal battle for control of the agency.
  • Though Mulvaney wouldn’t have run day-to-day operations of the agency, his appointment as acting director would allow him to hire someone to oversee daily work and to set the agency’s broader agenda.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The agency has also fined many financial industry companies, including Wells Fargo and Equifax, for actions that hurt customers and created new opportunities for consumers to air grievances with financial institutions and learn about consumer products.
  • “serve as acting Director in the absence or unavailability of the Director.”
aleija

It's the Sugar, Folks - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...its-the-sugar-folks

health US Politics

shared by aleija on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
  • after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.
  • obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s.
  • “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”
  • The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).
  • for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country’s food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent. (The study found no significant difference in results between those countries that rely more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup and those that rely primarily on cane sugar.)
  • the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see.
  • just as tobacco companies fought, ignored, lied and obfuscated in the ’60s (and, indeed, through the ’90s), the pushers of sugar will do the same now.
  • The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list,
  • Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.
  • it’s become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it’s metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of “normal” weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars
  • it isn’t simply overeating that can make you sick; it’s overeating sugar.
  • A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade
  • In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to diabetes.
  • But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”
  • The study found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher rates of diabetes — independent of obesity rates — but stopped short of stating that sugar caused diabetes.
  • This explains why there’s little argument from scientific quarters about the “obesity won’t kill you” studies; technically, they’re correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.
  • Obesity is, in fact, a major risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, as the study noted.
yehbru

Consuming Right-Wing Media Is Linked To Q'Anon Beliefs, A Study Finds : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...shape-conspiracy-theory-belief

US Politics Q'Anon Media

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Religion, education, race and media consumption are strong predictors of conspiracy theory acceptance among Americans, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute.
  • About 1 in 4 respondents from those religious groups said they believed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation," a statement associated with the false QAnon conspiracy theory.
  • Americans who said they consume far-right news sources reported the highest rates of conspiracy theory acceptance; close to half said they believe in the tenets of QAnon
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • That's notably higher than the 15% of Black Protestants, as well as 15% of Americans overall, who agreed with that statement. At 8%, Jewish Americans were the religious group least likely to say they agree.
  • People without college degrees who responded to the survey were three times more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than Americans who had completed college.
mattrenz16

What the JBS cyberattack means for your meat supply - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • JBS USA, the country's top beef producer and its second largest producer of pork, suffered a cyberattack this weekend, prompting reported shutdowns at company plants in the United States and globally.
  • Does fallout from the attack mean a tighter meat supply ahead, and as a result, higher prices? That depends on how quickly the issue is resolved, according to experts.
  • "Retailers and beef processors are coming from a long weekend and need to catch up with orders and make sure to fill the meat case. If they suddenly get a call saying that product may not deliver tomorrow or this week, it will create very significant challenges," Steiner explained.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Steve Meyer, an economist with commodity firm Kerns and Associates, agreed that a one or two day disruption could cause wholesale meat prices to jump. But if the problem is resolved within a few days, he said, restaurants and grocery stores are unlikely to pass those costs onto consumers.
  • "Then you're probably going to have some buyers, whoever depends on JBS for their supplies, that probably could be short product," he said. In that case, for consumers, it would depend on where their local grocery store sources its meat. "If they buy it from JBS then you might see some shortages. If they don't buy it from JBS, you might not see anything at all."
rerobinson03

Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
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