Chocolate Might Never Be the Same - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”
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The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,
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Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.
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Stop climate change: Move to the city, start walking - Salon.com - 0 views
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electric cars are currently a bit greener than gasoline cars — per mile. Driving one hundred miles in a Nissan Altima results in the emission of 90.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Driving the same distance in an all-electric Nissan Leaf emits 63.6 pounds of greenhouse gases — a significant improvement. But while the Altima driver pays 14 cents a mile for fuel, the Leaf driver pays less than 3 cents per mile, and this difference, thanks to the law of supply and demand, causes the Leaf driver to drive more.
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What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.
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The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging … The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.
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Data Mining, Without Big Brother - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Americans need to decide what this balance should look like. How do we devise a program that can allow the intelligence community to use big data and the latest technology to prevent terrorist attacks while ensuring we have not created a Big Brother state? In other words, how can we trust but verify?
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The use of the data was legal, limited, targeted, overseen and audited. The program set a gold standard for how to protect the confidential data provided to the government. Treasury legally gained access to large amounts of Swift’s financial-messaging data (which is the banking equivalent of telephone metadata) and eventually explained it to the public at home and abroad.
What if We're Looking at Inequality the Wrong Way? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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By defining income as “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits,” Burkhauser and his co-authors achieved two things: a diminished degree of inequality and, perhaps more important, a conclusion that the condition of the poor and middle class was improving
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Burkhauser has come up with statistical findings that not only wipe out inequality trends altogether but also purport to show that over the past 18 years, the poor and middle classes have done better, on a percentage basis, than the rich.
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You get different answers depending on whether you measure income before or after taxes and transfers, whether you count fringe benefits (mainly health insurance), and whether you look at families or households, and whether you count the big hitters as the top 20% or the top 1 percent. Counting health care mutes the increase in inequality, but that really means that most of the increase in working class incomes has been siphoned off to medical providers. Looking at households has the same effect.
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Billionaires Going Rogue - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The virtually unanimous view throughout the course of four decades of revised regulation was that the Republican Party and its candidates would be the major beneficiaries, and, so far, that has been true.
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in 2010 — in the aftermath of deregulation — the balance skewed decisively to the right. In the current 2011-12 election cycle, it shifted overwhelmingly to the right:
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The movement rightwards of almost half a billion dollars in this cycle alone — signified by the red bar on the graph representing Republican donations — is not, however, the pure gold that analysts on both sides expected.
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ERP for OCD Works, But It's Expensive and Hard to Find - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
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She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.
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Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.
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Of the People - 1 views
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Times reporters are interviewing people at campaign events across the country to explore what makes them passionate about politics. The interviews have been condensed. by Nick Corasaniti, Matt Flegenheimer and Yamiche Alcindor by Jessica Dimson by Danny DeBelius, Tiff Fehr, Grant Gold, Ben Koski and Dagny Salas
My beef over Hillary Clinton's loss is with liberal feminists, young and old | Opinion ... - 0 views
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Here’s my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary’s demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump’s gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
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These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump’s unmitigated coarseness
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they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill’s.
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How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers - The New York Times - 0 views
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The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.
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It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.
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offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.
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Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought -... - 0 views
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At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
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an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies.
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Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.
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Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? : The New Yorker - 0 views
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Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy
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If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley
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Stanford’s public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.”
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Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.
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For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.
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Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.
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Niall Ferguson: Great Britain Saves Itself by Rejecting the EU - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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This, in sum, is the founding charter of the United States of Europe. Notice two problems however. First, it is not clear how the European Commission, Council, and Court can act in this way, policing a 23-member fiscal union that is not covered by any treaty. Second, the balanced-budget rule is nuts. As it stands, it’s a recipe for excessive rigidity in fiscal policy
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In the past few months, incompetent leadership has brought the euro-zone economy, and with it the world economy, to the edge of a precipice strongly reminiscent of 1931. Then, as now, it proved impossible to arrive at sane debt restructurings for overburdened sovereigns. Then, as now, bank failures threatened to bring about a complete economic collapse. Then, as now, an excessively rigid monetary system (then the gold standard, now the euro) served to worsen the situation.
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For some time it has been quite obvious that the only way to save the monetary union is to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. That means, first, massive quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the European Central Bank to bring down the interest rates (yields) currently being paid by the Mediterranean governments; second, restructuring to reduce the absolute debt burdens of these governments; third, the creation of a new fiscal mechanism that transfers resources on a regular basis from the core to the periphery; and finally the recapitalization of the ailing banks of the euro zone.
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In a Bean, a Boon to Biotech - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, have manipulated the genes of the soybean to radically alter the composition of its oil to make it longer-lasting, potentially healthier and free of trans fats.
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“It almost mirrors olive oil in terms of the composition of fatty acids.”
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“We have been told if we have a product that is beneficial to consumers it will be much more acceptable,”
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The Kurtz Republicans - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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His baldness bathed in gold, his body pooled in shadow, Kurtz murmurs: “Are my methods unsound?” And Willard — filthy, hollow-eyed, stunned by what he’s seen — replies: “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”
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This is basically how reasonable people should feel about the recent conduct of the House Republicans.
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there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever.
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Chinese General Charged in Graft Inquiry - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The charges against General Gu, reported by the official Xinhua news agency, came two years after he was quietly dismissed as deputy chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Logistics Department, a position that had afforded him enormous influence over contracts and procurement for the world’s largest army.
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An internal inquiry accused him of presiding over a vast land development racket that hoarded kickbacks, bought promotions and enabled him and his family to amass dozens of expensive residences, including places where investigators found stockpiles of high-end liquor, gold bullion and cash, according to people briefed on the investigation.
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Even as President Xi presses a sweeping campaign against graft within the Communist Party, he has seized on the case against General Gu to pursue a parallel drive to clean up the 2.3 million-member armed forces. In internal speeches, he has railed against a wider “Gu Junshan phenomenon” of military corruption, demanded action to “dredge the soil that produced Gu Junshan,” and threatened to bring down both “large and small Gu Junshans,” said a retired official and associate of Mr. Xi’s.
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Middle East Peace Talks Go On, Under the Radar - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Mr. Kerry was shown saying, “I’m upping the tempo a bit more.”
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Nearly three months into the latest round of Washington-brokered peace talks in what has been the Middle East’s most intractable conflict,
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process had “intensified” over 13 negotiating sessions, including three in the past week. Another is scheduled for Monday.
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A Reason for Hope in Congo's Perpetual War - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Still, the battle was a dramatic turnaround from barely a year ago, when the rebels had the upper hand. Ill-disciplined, corrupt and often drunk, the Congolese soldiers were only somewhat more popular than the mutineer rebels who had taken up arms against them.
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Last fall, after the rebels briefly overran Goma, the regional capital and a city of one million people, the United Nations peacekeeping forces here were exposed as little more than blue-helmeted mannequins.
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Last week, the negotiations broke down and fighting resumed. A spokesman for M23 said the Congolese military had started the latest round of fighting, but General Bahuma said they were only responding to a rebel attack.
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Spanish colonization of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores
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The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.
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The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.
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