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Javier E

Uber Eats Is Killing the Sociable Restaurant Experience - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...577012

restaurant eating privacy public space

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Like so many in 18th-century Europe, the self-styled inventor of restaurants, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, believed that improving circulation—of food through people’s bodies or of money, goods, and information through society—would bring benefits to all
  • restaurants also promised new levels of personal service. Separate tables, flexible mealtimes, and menus distinguished dinner in a restaurant from the more collective, communitarian experience of an innkeeper’s or caterer’s table d’hôte.
  • By promising to restore circulation and facilitate personal well-being, restaurants offered both pleasure and profit: profit for the restaurateur, to be sure, but also for the individual customer and, by extension, for the public at large. Public benefits could come from private appetites.
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  • In his essay “On Refinement in the Arts,” the philosopher and historian David Hume traced a similar logic, positing that improvements in production (what we today call the Industrial Revolution) and ideas (the Enlightenment) would necessarily spur greater sociability. What was good for one was good for all. “The more these refined arts advance,” Hume wrote, “the more sociable men become … enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation … both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace … Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain.”
  • If brick-and-mortar restaurants become mere storefronts for delivery services, they will cease to be public spaces in any sense of the term. When dinner from a restaurant replaces dinner in a restaurant, we lose track of all the other people who are dining as well
  • this hyper-individualization of consumption may bring a new political revolution as well
  • The way we shop and eat now forms a feedback loop with the general discrediting of the idea of “public good”—and, with it, of public spaces and shared civility.
  • Cell phones, charter schools, the rhetoric of “taxpayer” dollars (as if the money, once paid, still belonged to those who paid it): all make for a political climate and lived reality where very little that is “public,” in the sense of shared and common, remains.
Javier E

Chick-fil-A becomes third largest restaurant chain in U.S. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rd-largest-restaurant-chain-us

restaurant chain fast food eating culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Chick-fil-A has moved up the ranks from the seventh-largest restaurant chain in the United States to become the third.
  • Where total restaurant traffic increased less than 1 percent, Chick-fil-A saw double-digit growth.” Aging boomers are eating out less often, and while millennials rely on restaurants more than any other group (240 restaurant meals per capita per year, compared with 185 in the general population), they are still eating out less than Generation X did at their age.
  • The chicken sandwich giant blew past Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and Subway on its ascent, with $10.46 billion in American store sales, according to Nation’s Restaurant News’ latest countdown. Up 17 percent for the year, Chick-fil-A stands behind only McDonald’s ($38.52 billion in American sales) and Starbucks ($20.49 billion). Average sales for a Chick-fil-A location brought in $4.6 million in 2018, up from $4.2 million in 2017 — more than three times that of major chicken competitor KFC.
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  • “Half of all meals are now eaten in restaurants, half of those as fast food, and half of those are just 10 companies. Chick-fil-A is now one of them,” Allen says.
Javier E

Fast food chains close dining rooms amid protracted labor shortage - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fast-food-labor-shortage

food chains labor shortage policy inflation economics

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.
  • Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.
  • That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.
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  • For the industry to meet customer demand, restaurants would probably have to draw workers from other industries, but there are indications that the opposite is true. An analysis of job seekers’ search history data by the company review site Glassdoor found that people who used to search for “restaurant server” are now more likely to type in “office assistant,” “data entry” or “Amazon,” for example.
  • Fast-food wages historically trail those in other service industry jobs, with the typical U.S. worker collecting about $11.80 per hour or $24,540 a year as of May 2020,
  • broke? Or do I want to be broke working 40 hours a week and working my life away?’”
  • some economists question the accuracy of the term “labor shortage” in this context, saying businesses are simply offering too low a wage for an hour’s work.
  • When I go shopping for an Audi and I can’t afford it, I don’t get to declare an Audi shortage,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist with Cornell University. “At the wage being offered, businesses still aren’t getting as many applicants for work.”
  • “I think the problem is workers are being paid too little working full time. That’s the real scandal,” he said.
  • Of the nearly 10 million job openings in the United States, roughly 1 in 6 are in the leisure and hospitality sector that includes food service workers,
  • Nonsupervisory workers in the accommodations and food service sector made an average of $15.91 per hour as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February 2020, they made an average of $14.46 per hour.
  • “The fact that nominal wages have been increasing so rapidly over the last several months is itself pretty strong evidence that businesses really are doing a lot to attract and retain workers. … The labor market is just really competitive,”
  • McDonald’s announced that it had raised its hourly rate to a range of $11 to $17 for entry-level workers, and $15 to $20 for managers.
  • one of the company’s locations in Hendersonville, N.C., recently increased its starting hourly wage to $19, for example.
  • For many fast-food establishments, the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward online and app-based ordering, and drive-through technology.
  • quarter — momentum that CEO David Gibbs said was underpinned by the Louisville-based company’s digital investments and “ability to serve customers through multiple on- and off-premise channels.”
  • McDonald’s also reported strong-second quarter gains, boosted by growth in its delivery and digital platforms and higher menu prices. U.S. sales were 25.9 percent higher than the same period in 2020 and 14.9 percent above where they were in a pre-pandemic 2019, the company said.
  • The average cost to close a restaurant to improve or add an advanced drive-through ranges from $125,000 to $250,000
  • drive-throughs account for about half of annual sales for all fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, or roughly $169 billion.
  • “One of other things they have done is turn all of us into the cashiers,” he said, pointing to restaurant apps, and touch-screen kiosks that have taken the place of some food service workers. “We did a study on automation and robotics and found that at least half could be replaced with robots or automation.”
Javier E

What Restaurants Need to Reopen: A Flattened Infection Curve and Fresh Air - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...urve-and-fresh-air-11594033202

restaurant pandemic infection

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Public-health authorities in the U.S. have singled out restaurants and bars as a source of coronavirus contagion. Yet in Europe, bistros, pizzerias and cafes bustling with clientele have had no major outbreaks.
  • The difference, health authorities say, stems from Europe’s success in flattening its infection curve before restaurants and bars reopened. And the Continent is also benefiting from something many eateries across the Sunbelt—from Florida to Southern California—currently lack: fresh air.
  • When restaurants close windows, people end up breathing in a lot more air that has been exhaled by others,
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  • “If you’re doing that on top of relaxed restrictions, then you have the recipe for transmission.”
  • states experiencing the hottest weather in recent weeks—Arizona, Florida, Texas and Louisiana—have seen the biggest increase in cases.
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, the Coronavirus Is in the Air - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-aerosols.html

Covid-19 transmission research

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization has now formally recognized that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is airborne and that it can be carried by tiny aerosols.
  • until earlier this month, the W.H.O. — like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Public Health England — had warned mostly about the transmission of the new coronavirus through direct contact and droplets released at close range.
  • After several months of pressure from scientists, on July 9, the W.H.O. changed its position — going from denial to grudging partial acceptance: “Further studies are needed to determine whether it is possible to detect viable SARS-CoV-2 in air samples from settings where no procedures that generate aerosols are performed and what role aerosols might play in transmission.”
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  • A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date.
  • This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer-reviewed) in which Covid-19 patients were found to release SARS-CoV-2 simply by exhaling — without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission “plays a major role” in spreading the virus.
  • Accepting these conclusions wouldn’t much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS-CoV-2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks.
  • Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too.
  • here is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point — at 5 microns or any other size — between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic.
  • Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours.
  • The practical implications are plain:Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people’s respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least — though farther is safer.
  • “The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.”
  • Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.
  • Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn’t been established.
  • But basic physics also says that a 5-micron droplet takes about a half-hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height — and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter.
  • It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols — but they don’t.
  • The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found “a predominance of pathogens in small particles” (under 5 microns). “There is no evidence,” the study also concluded, “that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets.”
  • I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close-range transmission by aerosols is significant — possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray.
  • another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that “aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid-19 transmission” among the ship’s passengers.
  • Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them.
  • When it comes to masks, size does matter.
  • My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin.
  • Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air-conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air.
  • We also found that especially with very small aerosols — smaller than 1 micron — it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps).
  • Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate.
  • One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask’s design).A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air.To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS-CoV-2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure.
  • What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected.
  • Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.Droplets can’t account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person’s: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant — including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner’s airstream — became infected.
carolinehayter

The covid recession economically demolished minority and low income workers and barely ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...coronavirus-recession-equality

recession minority politics pandemic us economics policy inequality

shared by carolinehayter on 02 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The economic collapse sparked by the pandemic is triggering the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history, delivering a mild setback for those at or near the top and a depression-like blow for those at the bottom, according to a Washington Post analysis of job losses across the income spectrum.
  • While the nation overall has regained nearly half of the lost jobs, several key demographic groups have recovered more slowly, including mothers of school-age children, Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, Asian Americans, younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) and people without college degrees.
  • White women, for example, have recovered 61 percent of the jobs they lost — the most of any demographic group — while Black women have recovered only 34 percent, according to Labor Department data through August.
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  • The recession’s inequality is a reflection of the coronavirus itself, which has caused more deaths in low-income communities and severely affected jobs in restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues
  • No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 caused similar job losses across the income spectrum, as Wall Street bankers and other white-collar workers were handed pink slips alongside factory and restaurant workers.
  • “The sectors most deeply affected by covid disproportionately employ women, minorities and lower-income workers.
  • At the height of the coronavirus crisis, low-wage jobs were lost at about eight times the rate of high-wage ones, The Post found.
  • The less workers earned at their job, the more likely they were to lose it as businesses across the country closed.
  • By the end of the summer, the downturn was largely over for the wealthy — white-collar jobs had mostly rebounded, along with home values and stock prices. The shift to remote work strongly favored more-educated workers, with as many as 6 in 10 college-educated employees working from home at the outset of the crisis, compared with about 1 in 7 who have only high school diplomas.
  • Americans ages 20 to 24 suffered the greatest job losses, by far, of any age group when many businesses closed in the spring. College-age workers and recent graduates tend to be overrepresented in low-paying retail and restaurant jobs, which allow them to gain a toehold in the workforce and save money for school or training.
  • In the wake of widespread closings of schools and day-care centers, mothers are struggling to return to the workforce. Mothers of children ages 6 to 17 saw employment fall by about a third more than fathers of children the same age, and mothers are returning to work at a much slower rate. This disparity threatens years of progress for women in the labor force.
  • The unemployed are facing new challenges. Despite President Trump’s promises of a short-lived recession, 26 million people are still receiving now-diminished unemployment benefits. The unemployed went from receiving, on average, over $900 a week in April, May, June and July, under the first federal stimulus package, to about $600 for a few weeks in late August and early September under a temporary White House executive action, to about $300 a week now on state benefits.
  • What ties all of the hardest-hit groups together ― low-wage workers, Black workers, Hispanic men, those without college degrees and mothers with school-age children ― is that they are concentrated in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality jobs.
  • Most recessions, including the Great Recession, have affected manufacturing and construction jobs the most, but not this time. Nine of the 10 hardest-hit industries in the coronavirus recession are services.
  • Economists worry that many of these jobs will not return
  • While the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 8.4 percent, double-digit unemployment lingers in cities and states that depend heavily on tourism.
  • over 30,000 restaurant and hospitality workers are unemployed in New Orleans, making it nearly impossible to find a job.
  • Ten percent of renters reported “no confidence” in their ability to pay next month’s rent, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted Sept. 2 to 14.
  • Black women are facing the largest barriers to returning to work, data shows, and have recovered only 34 percent of jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic.
  • It took until 2018 for Black women’s employment to recover from the Great Recession. Now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased.
  • Historically, people of color and Americans with less education have been overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. Economists call it “occupational segregation.”
  • Black and Hispanic men face many of the same challenges as Black women, encountering discrimination in the workforce more often than others, and they struggled to rebound from the Great Recession.
  • Women had logged tremendous job gains in the past decade before the coronavirus hit.
  • But with many schools and child-care centers closed and the migration to online learning, many working parents have had to become part- or full-time teachers, making it difficult to work at the same time. That burden has fallen mainly on mothers, data shows. For example, mothers of children ages 6 to 12 — the elementary school years — have recovered fewer than 45 percent of jobs lost, while employment of fathers of children the same age is 70 percent back.
  • Single parents have faced an especially hard blow.
  • One in eight households with children do not have enough to eat, according to the September survey by the Census Bureau.
  • The Fed predicts unemployment will not near pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2023. For many jobs, it may take even longer — especially those already at high risk of being replaced with software and robots.
  • “Since the 1980s, almost all employment losses in routine occupations, which are relatively easier to be automated, occurred during recessions,”
  • Many economists and business leaders are urging Congress to enact another large relief package, given the unevenness of the recovery and the long road for those who have been left behind.
  • “There are very clear winners and losers here. The losers are just being completely crushed. If the winners fail to help bring the losers along, everyone will lose,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Things feel like they are at a breaking point from a societal perspective.”
Javier E

The Curse of Econ 101 - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513155

economics policy minimum wage

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because many working people simply don’t make very much money. This is possible because the minimum wage that businesses must pay is low: only $7.25 per hour in the United States in 2016 (although it is higher in some states and cities). At that rate, a person working full-time for a whole year, with no vacations or holidays, earns about $15,000—which is below the poverty line for a family of two, let alone a family of four.
  • A minimum-wage employee is poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, in most states, Medicaid. Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum is roughly the same as in the 1960s and 1970s, despite significant increases in average living standards over that period.
  • At first glance, it seems that raising the minimum wage would be a good way to combat poverty.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,
  • The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.
  • The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins
  • Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.
  • In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate
  • The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.
  • In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”
  • Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.
  • economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.
  • On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.
  • The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.
  • The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101
  • there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.
  • Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost
  • At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers
  • In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.
  • In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.
  • why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things
  • If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output
  • Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth
  • Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.
  • In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop
  • Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics
  • This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action
  • one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.
  • A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.
  • The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism
  • Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.
  • With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.
mattrenz16

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
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  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
Javier E

Don't Count on Calorie Counts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-count-on-calorie-counts.html

calorie food diet research

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • we Americans are waddling toward the moment when calorie counts like the ones at Lenny’s are posted in every chain restaurant across the nation.
  • As part of the Affordable Care Act, any restaurant in America with at least 20 locations must follow
  • the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the roughly 90 million Americans who are formally considered obese — that’s about 30 percent of the population — aren’t just in imperfect health. They’re downright ill, and we need to heal them.
  • Brian Elbel, a population-health expert at New York University’s school of medicine, examined fast-food receipts from four chains in New York both before the city law went into effect and after, to see if customers were altering their orders to reduce the calories they consumed per visit to the restaurants. He found no meaningful difference, and his subsequent research in Philadelphia, which in 2010 implemented a mandate like New York’s, echoes and bolsters that conclusion. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that nothing big is happening for a large group of people,”
  • New York City commissioned a broader survey than Elbel’s, looking at thousands of receipts from 11 chains. At three of them — Au Bon Pain, KFC and McDonald’s — there was proof of calorie reductions after the law. But at seven there wasn’t, and at Subway, which was promoting footlong sandwiches for $5 during the post-law survey period, calorie consumption per visit actually increased.
  • the principal reasons for the remarkable decrease in smoking in New York City and elsewhere over the last few decades weren’t ominous commercials and warning labels. They were taxes and the bans on indoor smoking. People kicked the habit when it became onerous, in cost and convenience, not to
  • . “The people who tend to be most responsive to information may be those we least aim to target.”
  • Starbucks customers ordering sugary, creamy coffee beverages kept on doing so, seemingly because they had already figured that the drinks were fattening and had made a flabby peace with that. But customers indeed adjusted their food orders upon realizing that a pastry could easily exceed 400 calories. They hadn’t bargained on, or planned for, that. “What really matters is what your prior beliefs are,”
  • education and information could be effective in influencing a discrete, relatively easy behavior, like persuading someone to get vaccinated. “But when it’s habitual and even addictive behavior, you’re in a whole new ballgame,
  • “Calorie reductions were highest in high-income, high-education neighborhoods (where we believe obesity rates to be lower),
  • that — not any itch to play nanny — is why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg support such measures as new taxes on sodas, which may never happen, and a ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces
  • We’re not as plump as we are because we’ve never had our eyes opened to the wages of a Whopper. We’re this way because it’s all too easy, in a pang of hunger and collapse of resolve, to turn a blind eye to the toll
Emilio Ergueta

Hitler's secret cognac and champagne stash found beneath German restaurant - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...beneath-German-restaurant.html

hitler german history

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Hitler's secret cognac and champagne stash found beneath German restaurant
  • A well-known German restaurateur claims to have found a secret store of cognac and champagne that once belonged to Adolf Hitler.
  • He said he had also found ledgers which showed Hitler's staff had moved the valuable bottles there to protect them from Allied air raids on Berlin. Hitler rarely drank, and it is likely the brandy and champagne would have been used for entertaining.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "At the end of 1944 Adolf Hitler had his household food and drink stores moved to my cellar by his steward Kannegiesser, as they were not safe because of air raids on Berlin," Mr Stelzer told Bild newspaper. "Nothing remained of the food and consumables. After May 8, 1945, Russian troops looted everything," he said.
  • Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15
     
    Hitler's secrest food stash found!
Javier E

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-junk-food-really-cheaper.html

food health cost economics culture policy environment industry

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • “Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,
  • “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
  • The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
  • The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
  • overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
  • This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t ru
  • Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again
  • HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And
  • we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
  • Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco.
  • Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.
Javier E

Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages - Uri Friedman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373676

cities urbanism village community trust

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • trust, mediated by technology, is making a comeback, along with the paradigm of the village. It's what's motivating millions of people in tens of thousands of cities around the world to book lodging with semi-screened strangers through his service. Choose your buzzword: the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the trust economy. Whatever you call it, it's what's propelled not just Airbnb, but also new car services like Uber and Lyft and labor services like TaskRabbit.
  • the Internet moving into your neighborhood," Chesky said. "And what it really means is that people, for the first time, can become micro-entrepreneurs. They can actually build a reputation, and they can offer goods and services."
  • "At the most macro level, I think we're going to go back to the village, and cities will become communities again," he added. "I'm not saying they're not communities now, but I think that we'll have this real sensibility and everything will be small. You're not going to have big chain restaurants. We're starting to see farmers' markets, and small restaurants, and food trucks. But pretty soon, restaurants will be in people's living rooms."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the United Nations predicts that two-thirds of the global population will be urban-dwellers by 2050.
  • In 2011, there were 23 "megacities" of at least 10 million people around the world. By 2050, there will be 37.
ethanshilling

Connecticut Eases Coronavirus Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-coronavirus-restrictions.html

US pandemic connecticut

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Connecticut will later this month end capacity limits in restaurants, offices and several other businesses, Ned Lamont, the state’s governor, said on Thursday, following moves by other states that have eased some virus-related restrictions.
  • “This is not Texas, this is not Mississippi — this is Connecticut,” Mr. Lamont said at a news conference.
  • Starting on March 19, restaurants, retail stores, libraries, personal care services, gyms, offices and houses of worship will no longer have their capacity restricted.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Several other limits will remain in place, including safety and cleaning protocols at gyms and personal care services like salons and spas.
  • Mr. Lamont’s announcement — made nearly a year after Connecticut’s first confirmed case of the virus — is a significant step forward for the state’s reopening.
  • As of Thursday, the state had 433 people hospitalized with the virus. Its average positive test rate over the past seven days is at 2.3 percent, which Mr. Lamont said was the lowest rate in nearly four months.
  • Still, over the past week, Connecticut has reported an average of 22 new virus cases a day per 100,000 people, a rate that is the 10th highest per capita among all states.
  • Throughout the pandemic, officials have had to adjust restrictions, finding a balance between safety, economic concerns and political pressure.
  • The governors of New York and New Jersey, both also Democrats, with whom Mr. Lamont has collaborated significantly on the pandemic response, have raised capacity limits in businesses, including restaurants, in the past month.
hannahcarter11

President Biden blasts Republicans for touting Covid relief funds they voted against: '... - 0 views

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

biden republicans relief funds

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden on Thursday criticized Republican lawmakers who have touted parts of the Covid-19 economic relief law that benefit their constituents despite having voted against the law, saying: "Some people have no shame."
  • No Republican in Congress voted for the American Rescue Plan when it passed earlier this year, but Biden noted several are now touting portions of the $1.9 trillion package that have gone toward their home districts.
  • Without saying any names out loud, the President said several Republicans have been taking credit for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which was recently established to help struggling restaurants and other businesses keep their doors open during the pandemic, and grants to community health care centers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Covid-19 relief law also included direct payments to Americans worth up to $1,400 per person; a $300 federal boost to weekly jobless payments; $350 billion to states, local governments, territories and tribes; roughly $20 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent; rent assistance and utility bills; beefed up tax credits for families and certain low-income workers for 2021; $125 billion to public K-12 schools to help students return to the classroom' made federal premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies more generous; and $14 billion for researching, developing, distributing, administering and strengthening confidence in vaccines.
  • Democrats were able to pass the legislation without Republican support using the budget reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to bypass the 60-vote threshold typically required for ending debate on the Senate floor and moving legislation forward. Instead only a simple majority is needed to end debate.
  • The White House is now turning to Biden's next legislative priorities: the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. Negotiations between the White House and Republican lawmakers have been intensifying in recent weeks over the infrastructure proposal, and Republicans on Thursday offered another counterproposal.
anonymous

US could be on the cusp of Covid-19 infection surge officials have been dreading, exper... - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he US may be on the cusp of another Covid-19 case surge, one expert says -- a surge that health officials have repeatedly warned about as state leaders eased restrictions and several lifted mask mandates.
  • "I think we are going to see a surge in the number of infections,"
  • "I think what helps this time though is that the most vulnerable -- particularly nursing home residents, people who are older -- are now vaccinated. And so we may prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths."
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.
  • But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.
  • Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.
  • Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.
  • The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.
  • Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,
  • We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."
  • Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,
  • All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,
  • There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,
  • Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.
  • In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly
  • Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.
  • During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.
  • what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials
  • "I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."
  • Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.
  • More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -
  • On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.
  • For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,
  • Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."
  • Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,
  • The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.
  • By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.
  • Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.
  • Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"
delgadool

27 Places Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nimum-wage-15-dollar-hour.html

economics

shared by delgadool on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It started in 2012 with a group of protesters outside a McDonald’s demanding a $15 minimum wage — an idea that even many liberal lawmakers considered outlandish. In the years since, their fight has gained traction across the country, including in conservative states with low union membership and generally weak labor laws.
  • In 27 of these places, the pay floor will reach or exceed $15 an hour, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Employment Law Project, which supports minimum-wage increases.
  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has endorsed $15 an hour at the federal level and other changes sought by labor groups, like ending the practice of a lower minimum wage for workers like restaurant workers who receive tips.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “The Covid crisis has really exacerbated inequalities across society,” said Greg Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics. “This has given more strength to these movements that try to ensure that everyone benefits from a strong labor market in the form a sustainable salary.”
  • “The coronavirus pandemic has pushed a lot of working families into deep poverty,” said Anthony Advincula, director of communications for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit focused on improving wages and working conditions. “So this minimum wage increase will be a huge welcome boost for low-wage workers, especially in the restaurant industry.”
  • “There’s a ton of research that says increasing minimum wages can cause some job loss,” he said. “Plenty workers are helped, but some are hurt.”
  • Economic research has found that recent minimum-wage increases have not had caused huge job losses.
  • In many cases, higher minimum wages are rolled out over several years to give businesses time to adapt.
  • “At a basic level, people think that this is an issue of fairness,” Mr. Dube said. “There’s broad-based support for the idea that people who are working should get a living wage.”
Javier E

Why You Can Dine Indoors but Can't Have Thanksgiving - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617204

pandemic response us politics crisis culture Policy economics gop transparency

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe.
  • They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.
  • Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly.
  • In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,”
  • “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.
  • Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it.
  • Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed.
  • The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.
  • But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one
  • When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago
  • Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem.
  • it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.
  • beneath this contradiction lies a fundamental conflict that state and local leaders have been forced to navigate for the better part of a year. Amid the pandemic, the people they govern would generally be better served if they got to stay home, stay safe, and not worry about their bills. To govern, though, leaders also need to placate the other centers of power in American communities: local business associations, real-estate developers, and industry interest groups
  • The best way to resolve this conflict would probably be to bail out workers and business owners. But to do that at a state level, governors need cash on hand; currently, most of them don’t have much. The federal government, which could help states in numerous ways, has done little to fill state coffers, and has let many of its most effective direct-aid programs expire without renewal.
  • If you make people safe and comfortable at home, it might be harder to make them risk their lives for minimum wage at McDonald’s during a pandemic.
  • However effective these kinds of robust monetary programs may be at keeping people fed, housed, and safe, they are generally not in line with the larger project of the American political establishment, which favors bolstering “job creators” instead of directly helping those who might end up working those jobs
  • Why can’t a governor or mayor just be honest? There’s no help coming from the Trump administration, the local coffers are bare, and as a result, concessions are being made to business owners who want workers in restaurants and employees in offices in order to white-knuckle it for as long as possible and with as many jobs intact as possible, even if hospitals start to fill up again. Saying so wouldn’t change the truth, but it would better equip people to evaluate their own safety in their daily life, and make better choices because of it.
  • Kirk Sell stopped me short. “Do you think it might be the end of their career, though?” she asked. “Probably.”
  • With people out of work and small businesses set up to fail en masse, America has landed on its current contradiction: Tell people it’s safe to return to bars and restaurants and spend money inside while following some often useless restrictions, but also tell them it’s unsafe to gather in their home, where nothing is for sale.
  • Transparency, Kirk Sell told me, would go a long way toward helping people evaluate new restrictions and the quality and intentions of their local leadership. “People aren’t sheep,” she said. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”
Javier E

Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...weden-economy-coronavirus.html

sweden pandemic

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
  • Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people as it largely avoided imposing government prohibitions. The government allowed restaurants, gyms, shops, playgrounds and most schools to remain open. By contrast, Denmark and Norway opted for strict quarantines, banning large groups and locking down shops and restaurants.
  • More than three months later, the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Here is one takeaway with potentially universal import: It is simplistic to portray government actions such as quarantines as the cause of economic damage. The real culprit is the virus itself. From Asia to Europe to the Americas, the risks of the pandemic have disrupted businesses while prompting people to avoid shopping malls and restaurants, regardless of official policy.
  • Sweden is exposed to the vagaries of global trade. Once the pandemic was unleashed, it was certain to suffer the economic consequences
  • “The Swedish manufacturing sector shut down when everyone else shut down because of the supply chain situation,” he said. “This was entirely predictable.”
  • “There is just no questioning and no willingness from the Swedish government to really change tack, until it’s too late,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. “Which is astonishing, given that it’s been clear for quite some time that the economic gains that they claim to have gotten from this are just nonexistent.”
cartergramiak

Opinion | No One Expects Civility From Republicans - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...publicans-civility-benson.html

history US politics trump crisis gop

shared by cartergramiak on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
  • More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election.
  • Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
  • After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
  • Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
  • One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
  • The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.
Javier E

'The virus is moving in': why California is losing the fight against Covid | US news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-covid-19-coronavirus-surging

california virus pandemic history crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • By early summer, however, the pressure to open back up rose. Officials discovered the state wasn’t immune to the national fatigue with social distancing and mask-wearing. Amid a patchwork of haphazard rules and guidelines, cases crept up.
  • Today, most of California is back under lockdown amid a dramatic surge in infections. The state has tallied more than 1.3m cases, and broke a record last week with more than 25,000 infections recorded in a single day.
  • LA officials said that one person is now dying of Covid every 20 minutes, and the county’s public health director, Barbara Ferrer, broke down crying at a briefing while talking about the “incalculable loss” of more than 8,000 deaths.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Staff on the frontlines say they are increasingly battling burnout after months of devastation and with a dark winter ahead. “I’ve seen younger people come in through the door, and be admitted right away to the ICU,”
  • It was frustrating that the public no longer seemed to be taking Covid protocols seriously, Santini said. “Every day we go to work, we’re putting our lives and our family’s lives on the line.”
  • “Even lower-risk activities now carry substantial risk because there is more virus out there than ever before. Simply put and bluntly put, we can’t get away with things that we’ve been able to get away with so far.”
  • Some restaurants have invested thousands in outdoor dining infrastructure they hoped would last them through the pandemic, only to see those facilities ordered to close.
  • the organization’s research has shown that 43% of restaurant owners are unsure whether their business will survive the next six months. “People who started out frustrated – today they are feeling just outright desperate.”
  • the latest Covid surge continues to shine a harsh light on inequality. California has seen record levels of unemployment and countless businesses have been shuttered for good, yet some sectors – notably the tech industry – have continued to rake in revenue.
  • post-pandemic, California could see a so-called “K-shaped recovery”, where the incomes of the highest earners continue to rise just as quickly as they plummet for those who are struggling.
  • Latinos in LA county, many of whom are working essential jobs, are also contracting the virus at more than double the rate of white residents. The toll in working-class neighborhoods has been especially devastating for undocumented people, who have been unable to access aid.
  • “We have the confluence of factors where people are facing financial instability, and feel like they have no choice but to work even if they get sick,” she said. “And particularly in California, we have a large population of undocumented people who have been demonized by the federal government and are especially vulnerable.”
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