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Florida dumps hospital standards after gifts to GOP - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html florida hospital standards crisis
shared by zachcutler on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The state of Florida is putting thousands of children with heart defects at risk, a group of cardiac doctors say, because of a change in policy that came after Tenet Healthcare contributed $200,000 to Florida Republicans.
  • Less than two months later, the state decided to get rid of those standards.
  • The whole situation is outrageous. It's just outrageous," said Louis St. Petery
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The standards have been in place and uncontested for 38 years.
  • Pediatric heart experts appointed by the state to look out for children with heart defects took exception.
  • Jacobs recommended the hospital stop performing heart surgery on babies younger than 6 months
  • Those babies had surgery at St. Mary's, but when their health spiraled downward, they were transferred to other hospitals.
  • In 2013 and 2014, Tenet contributed $50,000 each year to Let's Get to Work, Scott's political action committee. The next largest Tenet contribution those years to a state candidate's PAC was $25,000.
  • Doctors outside the state said they were surprised that Florida would move to repeal its own safety standards for children
  • An internationally renowned cardiac expert agreed that the standards are necessary
  • In December, a judge ruled in the state's favor and said the standards for pediatric heart hospitals could be taken off the books.
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Syrians weep as first aid in months reaches Madaya - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by alexdeltufo on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday,
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday
  • It was set to deliver enough aid to sustain 40,000 people for a month, WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa said.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The situation has been so dire that a doctor told CNN that he has nothing to give his patients except sugar or salt water.
  • But the United Nations said last week that it had received credible reports of people dying of starvation and that the Syrian government had agreed to allow aid convoys into Madaya, Foua and Kefraya.
  • On Monday, activists said that 15 people -- including at least 12 children -- had been killed in an aerial bombardment on a school in the town of Enjarah on the western outskirts of Aleppo, the largest Syrian city, which is in the north of the country.
  • He denied the Syrian government is using starvation as a tool of war, which is generally considered a war crime.
  • For example, in Damascus, flour costs 79 cents a kilogram. But in Madaya, a kilo of flour costs $120, and a kilo of rice costs $150.
  • In the capital, milk costs $1.06 a liter. But in Madaya, the price soars to $300 a liter.
  • "The problem is the terrorists are stealing the humanitarian assistance from the Syrian Red Crescent as well as from the United Nations," al-Ja'afari said.
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday
  • Syria's state news agency, 65 trucks loaded with aid supplies entered Madaya and two other besieged towns, Foua and Kefraya.
  • It's heartbreaking to see so many hungry people," said Sajjad Malik, the UNHCR representative in Syria. "
  • "Syrians are suffering and dying across the country because starvation is being used as a weapon of war by both the Syrian government and armed groups."
  • An activist described scenes of chaos at the school as he arrived after the strike, about 8 a.m. local time Monday.
  • "Everyone was trying to find his children."
  • Um Sultan said she hears every day of someone too sick to leave the bed.
  • "My husband is now one of them,
  • "Grass for the old man," she replies.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Nick Paton Walsh - CNN
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Istanbul: Explosion by ISIS bomber kills at least 10 - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html attack bombing istanbul
shared by Megan Flanagan on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The suicide bomber who killed at least 10 foreigners Tuesday in a popular central Istanbul tourist area belonged to ISIS
  • pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while proving willing time and again to lash out elsewhere.
  • at least nine Germans were killed.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world."
  • Syria has been embroiled in a civil war for nearly five years -- a conflict that, according to the United Nations, has cost more than 250,000 lives, spurred more than half the country's 17 million residents to flee and caused humanitarian crises for those left behind, as illustrated by the hundreds starving in the siege of Madaya.
  • ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there
  • including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base
  • ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target
  • ISIS, which has enemies everywhere and has proven willing to strike those who don't subscribe to its twisted, hard-line version of Sharia law.
  • It's seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It's a real melting pot."
  • Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS
  • Tuesday's blast -- if it's confirmed to be the terror group's work -- ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more
  • An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,
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NRA declines to participate in Obama gun town hall - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html politics US gun obama
shared by johnsonma23 on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • NRA declines to participate in Obama gun town hall
  • The nation's largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence
  • The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,"
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  • 48% of Americans support stricter laws, while 51% were opposed,
  • his actions have been called into question about whether they would truly help stem gun violence.
  • Obama on Tuesday presented a renewed push for further gun regulations, including background checks for firearms purchases through the use of executive action
  • The NRA and Obama have been bitter enemies on the issue of new gun regulations -- each accusing the other of engaging in politics instead of working to find solutions to end gun violence.
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Jakarta attack: 12 arrested, police chief says - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Indonesian police have arrested 12 people in connection with Thursday's deadly attack in front of a Starbucks in central Jakarta, including one accused of having received a wire transfer from the alleged ISIS-linked operative suspected of orchestrating the assault, the country's police chief said Saturday.
  • one is suspected to have received a money transfer from the alleged mastermind, Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian militant who authorities believed to have conducted the operation from ISIS' headquarters in Syria, national Police Chief Badrodin Haiti said.
  • They also opened fire at people on the street. One of the injured was also a foreigner.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Naim has formed a Southeast Asian branch of ISIS named Katibah al Nusantara, Indonesia authorities said. His vision is to join, to unite all ISIS supporting elements in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
  • ammunition and was brought to justice. Naim was sentenced to at least 2½ years in prison.
  • He was apprehended in 2010 for illegal possession of
  • In recent weeks, Indonesian police have been on high alert, while military operations focus on hitting the East Indonesian Mujahadeen, helmed by Indonesia's most-wanted terrorist, Santoso, who has pledged support for ISIS.One major worry is that Indonesians fighting in Syria and Iraq will return home, having gained training and combat experience.
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Ben Carson is living in the wrong decade (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Ben Carson, there's prison.Yep, prison. Stay away from crime, kids.Turns ya gay.Read MoreCarson, who, let me reiterate, is a potential presidential candidate from a major American party, and a neurosurgeon to boot, told CNN's Chris Cuomo in an interview that aired Wednesday that "a lot of people ... go into prison straight -- and when they come out, they're gay."
  • People change. But presidential candidates don't get that leeway.Carson should know better. (In fact, he later apologized, regretting his words but saying the science on the issue of sexual orientation isn't clear.)
  • Being gay is not a choice. Don't believe me? Well, ask a gay person. As I mentioned, I'm one of those (despite never having seen "Frozen" in its entirety), and I can tell you that, for me, it wasn't a choice. It's not something I would want to undo, but it also isn't like I woke up one day and was like, huh, you know what would really mix it up this winter? Dating dudes instead of ladies.
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  • But the point remains that saying so both belittles a serious issue of violence -- that of men raping other men in prison, which has nothing to do with turning anyone gay and everything to do with criminal activity. And it's a serious lapse in logic. Being around a bunch of dudes -- or ladies -- in prison doesn't change a person's innate sexual attractions.
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Mark Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Emulate China's WeChat. Can It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-zuckerberg-wechat.html facebook strategy
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • WeChat users only see one or two ads a day in their Moment feeds. That’s because WeChat isn’t dependent on advertising for making money. It has a mobile payments system that has been widely adopted in China, which allows people to shop, play games, pay utility bills and order meal deliveries all from within the app. WeChat gets a commission from many of these services.
  • “WeChat has shown definitively that private messaging, especially the small groups, is the future,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University. “It is the uber utility of business and life. It has shown the path.”
  • WeChat, which has 1.1 billion monthly active users, shows that other models — particularly those based on payments and commerce — can support massive digital businesses. That has implications for Google, Twitter and many others, as well as Facebook
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  • On WeChat, those services are underpinned by its mobile payments system, WeChat Pay. Because payments is already tied into the messaging service, people can easily order meal deliveries, book hotels, hail ride-sharing cars and pay their bills. WeChat Pay itself has 900 million monthly active users.
  • People also use WeChat Pay to transfer money and to buy personal finance products. More than 100 million customers have purchased WeChat’s personal finance products, which managed over 500 billion yuan, or $74 billion, by the end of last September, Tencent has said. Its users can buy everything from bonds and insurance to money market funds through the app.
  • “He is renowned in China’s tech scene as an artist and philosopher, as well as for his fierce mission against anything that degrades user experience,”
  • In a four-hour speech earlier this year, he pondered the question of why there were not more ads on the messaging service, especially the opening-page ads that are the norm in many other Chinese mobile apps.
  • Mr. Zhang’s answer: Many Chinese spent a lot of time — about one third of their online time — on WeChat, he said. “If WeChat were a person, it would have to be your best friend so that you would be willing to spend so much time with it,” he said. “How could I post an ad on the face of your best friend? Every time you see it, you’ll have to watch an ad before you can talk to it.”
  • Tencent makes most of its money from online games so that it does not need to sell ads for revenue.
  • said Ivy Li, a venture capitalist at Seven Seas Partners in Menlo Park, Calif. “How comprehensive the surgery is going to be and whether the implementation will be twisted by all kinds of compromises is a big question.”
  • She added: “Facebook is trying to seek a balance between a public square and a private space in an increasingly polarizing society. The final result could be it will be abandoned by both.”
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More Than 10 Million People Lost Power in Florida - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...539328 Florida Citizens
shared by krystalxu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “This is going to be a very, very lengthy restoration, arguably the longest and most complex in U.S. history,” Gould said.
  • The utility says it has invested over $3 billion in making its grid “stronger, smarter, and more storm-resilient.
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German energy policy is making headlines, but the real news happened in 2007 - Investor... - 0 views

investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/...n-energy-policy-real-news-2007 energy policy renewable germany
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • The Commission’s core recommendations are that 25% of Germany’s remaining coal-fired generation capacity (13GW out of 43GW) be removed from the grid in 2022, with a further 13GW going by 2030 and the remaining 17GW by 2038.
  • there is a much broader lesson that all investors can learn from Germany’s ongoing energy transition towards a zero-carbon future. The lesson is simple but powerful: whereas for policymakers, climate risk is all about system rates of change, for investors climate risk is all about marginal rates of change.
  • Climate change has already elicited a global policy response to promote renewable energies, thereby prompting a virtuous feedback loop that is driving down the cost of renewables and making them ever more competitive with fossil fuels. If the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets are to be met then policymakers will need to do all they can to accelerate the momentum of this feedback loop, and where necessary complement it with other measures (the announcement on 26/01/19 that Germany is set to phase out all its coal-fired power stations by 2038 is a good example of such complementary measures).
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  • what matters for equity valuations is which energy sources dominate the growth in demand, not which sources dominate the overall level of demand.
  • It is the marginal change in the composition of the German power market every year over the last decade rather than the annual system change in the composition of demand that explains why the German utilities E.ON and RWE have lost ~80% of their market capitalization since 2008.
  • In a mature market with a fast-growing, low-cost new entrant (renewables) the equity market will price in the decline of fossil-fuels far quicker than their market share will actually fall
  • the oil & gas (O&G) and Automotive sectors are increasingly exposed to the same kind of disruptive change that the German utilities have faced over the last decade.
  • Equities are priced on expected discounted cash-flows, and for energy companies expected future cash-flows depend on market expectations of future volumes sold and prices achieved. In the German power market up until 2008, the largest incumbent power generators, E.ON and RWE, had a diversified mix of conventional power plants consisting mainly of fossil-fuel (i.e. coal and gas) and nuclear capacity, but these incumbents were not investing in renewable energy at all over 2002-2008.
  • nearly all of the demand growth over 2002-08 has been captured by renewable energy sources. Indeed, and as can be seen in Figure 1, of the total 50TWh increase in demand over these six years, 47TWh was captured by renewables, and only 3TWh by conventional power sources. It also means that since 2008, as renewables have continued to grow relentlessly, the market share of conventional generation, including fossil fuels, has inexorably declined.
  • even after the last 15 years of spectacular growth in renewables, conventional generation – nuclear and fossil-fuel based capacity combined – still accounts for the lion’s share of generation, with 325TWh of total output in 2018 (60% of the market) versus 219TWh for renewables (40%). This is precisely why the German government is having to accelerate the phase-out of coal to help it achieve its longer-term emissions targets – the current rate of system change is simply not fast enough to meet those targets.
  • the equity market started to price in the end of conventional power generation in Germany as soon as it peaked 10 years ago, even though at that time it still accounted for over 80% of the market.
  • it would be of little consolation to shareholders in the oil majors if the share of oil and gas in the global energy mix in 2030 were still above 50% but demand had peaked before that and prices had started falling owing to the continuing rapid growth of low-cost renewables.
  • it is worth contemplating that in 2017, while fossil fuels still accounted for 85% of total system demand and renewables for only 3.6%, renewables already accounted for 30% of the growth in energy demand
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World's Dumbest Energy Policy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...best-energy-policy-11548807424 germany energy policy
shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • The energiewende, or energy transformation, championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel heavily subsidizes unreliable wind and solar power, making it uneconomical for utilities to invest in cleaner natural gas. Meanwhile, Mrs. Merkel pledged to shutter German nuclear plants in the wake
  • of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster. Utilities have fallen back on cheaper but dirtier coal to fill the supply gaps when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun isn’t shining.
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What has gone wrong with Germany's energy policy - The Economist explains - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ng-with-germanys-energy-policy energy policy germany
shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • The Energiewende has two main policy tools: generous support for renewable sources of energy, and an exit from nuclear power by 2022
  • The government supports renewables by promising those who install solar panels or finance windmills a fixed, above-market price for each kilowatt-hour of energy they feed into the grid. Those renewable sources have grid priority, meaning they must by law be drawn upon before other energy sources, like electricity from coal, gas or nuclear plants.
  • At the same time, the prices paid by consumers have been rising. This is because of the above-market prices guaranteed for renewable energy. On a sunny, windy day, a flood of renewable energy surges into the system; it must be, by law, bought by grid operators first, with the producers paid those above-market rates. Those rates are subsidised by a surcharge on customers, and the surcharge must go up when more renewable kilowatt-hours are poured into the system.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the renewables rush began as utilities also invested heavily in new fossil-fuel generation, especially modern gas-fired power plants. The simultaneous dash to renewables and new fossil-fuel power plants resulted in overcapacity and caused wholesale prices to tumble, which has battered the utilities’ profits
  • What has gone wrong with Germany's energy policyThe Economist explain
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'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.
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Senate Confirms Biden's Pick to Lead E.P.A. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-bidens-pick-to-lead-epa.html senate biden new york times Politics Culture policy
shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Michael S. Regan, the former top environmental regulator for North Carolina, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and drive some of the Biden administration’s biggest climate and regulatory policies.
  • Political appointees under Donald J. Trump spent the past four years unwinding dozens of clean air and water protections, while rolling back all of the Obama administration’s major climate rules.
  • Several proposed regulations are already being prepared, administration officials have said.
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  • Those potentially overlapping authorities have already provoked criticism from Republicans, some of whom voted against Mr. Regan’s confirmation because they said they did not know who is truly in charge of the administration’s climate and environment policy.
  • But most of the opposition centered on Democratic policy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called Mr. Biden’s agenda a “left-wing war on American energy.”
  • Mr. Regan has a reputation as a consensus-builder who works well with lawmakers from both parties. North Carolina’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr voted to support his nomination. Even Senate Republicans who voted against him had kind words.
  • “I really liked meeting and getting to know Michael Regan,” Senator Capito said. “He is a dedicated public servant and an honest man.”
  • The Obama administration tried to curb carbon pollution from the electricity sector with a regulation called the Clean Power Plan, which would have pushed utilities to move away from coal and toward cleaner-burning fuels or renewable energy. The Trump administration repealed that and replaced it with a far weaker rule that only required utilities to make efficiency upgrades at individual power plants.
  • Ms. McCarthy has already been in talks with automakers around new vehicle emissions standards, but the proposed new rule itself will also come from E.P.A.
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Natural Gas, America's No. 1 Power Source, Already Has a New Challenger: Batteries - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...c-power-generation-11620236583 natural power source battery technology cost
shared by Javier E on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology.
  • A decade ago, natural gas displaced coal as America’s top electric-power source, as fracking unlocked cheap quantities of the fuel. Now, in quick succession, natural gas finds itself threatened with the same kind of disruption, only this time from cost-effective batteries charged with wind and solar energy.
  • Natural-gas-fired electricity represented 38% of U.S. generation in 2019
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Wind and solar generators have gained substantial market share, and as battery costs fall, batteries paired with that green power are beginning to step into those roles by storing inexpensive green energy and discharging it after the sun falls or the wind dies.
  • President Biden is proposing to extend renewable-energy tax credits to stand-alone battery projects—installations that aren’t part of a generating facility—as part of his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, which could add fuel to an already booming market for energy storage.
  • renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.
  • the specter of more state and federal regulations to address climate change is accelerating the trend.
  • the combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves.
  • as batteries help wind and solar displace traditional power sources, some investors view the projects with caution, noting that they, too, could become victims of disruption in coming years, if still-other technological advances yield better ways to store energy.
  • most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages.
  • Duke Energy Corp. , a utility company based in Charlotte, N.C., that supplies electricity and natural gas in parts of seven states, is still looking to build additional gas-fired power plants. But it has started to rethink its financial calculus to reflect that the plants might need to pay for themselves sooner, because they might not be able to operate for as long.
  • To remedy that, Duke in public filings said it is considering shortening the plants’ expected lifespan from about 40 years to 25 years and recouping costs using accelerated depreciation, an accounting measure that would let the company write off more expenses earlier in the plants’ lives
  • It may also consider eventually converting the plants to run on hydrogen, which doesn’t result in carbon emissions when burned.
  • Much of the nation’s gas fleet, on the other hand, is relatively young, increasing the potential for stranded costs if widespread closures occur within the next two decades.
  • Gas plants that supply power throughout the day face the biggest risk of displacement. Such “baseload” plants typically need to run at 60% to 80% capacity to be economically viable, making them vulnerable as batteries help fill gaps in power supplied by solar and wind farms.
  • Today, such plants average 60% capacity in the U.S., according to IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. By the end of the decade, the firm expects that average to fall to 50%, raising the prospect of bankruptcy and restructuring for the lowest performers.
  • “It’s just coal repeating itself.”
  • It took only a few years for inexpensive fracked gas to begin displacing coal used in power generation. Between 2011, shortly after the start of the fracking boom, and 2020, more than 100 coal plants with 95,000 megawatts of capacity were closed or converted to run on gas, according to the EIA. An additional 25,000 megawatts are slated to close by 2025.
  • Batteries are most often paired with solar farms, rather than wind farms, because of their power’s predictability and because it is easier to secure federal tax credits for that pairing.
  • Already, the cost of discharging a 100-megawatt battery with a two-hour power supply is roughly on par with the cost of generating electricity from the special power plants that operate during peak hours. Such batteries can discharge for as little as $140 a megawatt-hour, while the lowest-cost “peaker” plants—which fire up on demand when supplies are scarce—generate at $151 a megawatt-hour, according to investment bank Lazard.
  • Solar farms paired with batteries, meanwhile, are becoming competitive with gas plants that run all the time. Those types of projects can produce power for as little as $81 a megawatt-hour, according to Lazard, while the priciest of gas plants average $73 a megawatt-hour
  • Even in Texas, a state with a fiercely competitive power market and no emissions mandates, scarcely any gas plants are under construction, while solar farms and batteries are growing fast. Companies are considering nearly 88,900 megawatts of solar, 23,860 megawatts of wind and 30,300 megawatts of battery storage capacity in the state, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. By comparison, only 7,900 megawatts of new gas-fired capacity is under consideration.
  • California last summer experienced the consequences of quickly reducing its reliance on gas plants. In August, during an intense heat wave that swept the West, the California grid operator resorted to rolling blackouts to ease a supply crunch when demand skyrocketed. In a postmortem published jointly with the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission, the operator identified the rapid shift to solar and wind power as one of several contributing factors.
  • Mr. Morgan, who has closed a number of Vistra’s coal-fired and gas-fired plants since becoming CEO in 2016, said he anticipates most of the company’s remaining gas plants to operate for the next 20 years.
  • Quantum Energy Partners, a Houston-based private-equity firm, in the last several years sold a portfolio of six gas plants in Texas and three other states upon seeing just how competitive renewable energy was becoming. It is now working to develop more than 8,000 megawatts of wind, solar and battery projects in 10 states.
  • “We pivoted,” said Sean O’Donnell, a partner in the firm who helps oversee the firm’s power investments. “Everything that we had on the conventional power side, we decided to sell, given our outlook of increasing competition and diminishing returns.”
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Stimulus package: Here's what's in Biden's $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan - CNNPoli... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html biden
shared by katherineharron on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Bigger stimulus checks. More aid for the unemployed, the hungry and those facing eviction. Additional support for small businesses, states and local governments. Increased funding for vaccinations and testing.
  • The new payments would go to adult dependents that were left out of the earlier rounds, like some children over the age of 17.
  • Billed as the American Rescue Plan, the package augments many of the measures in Congress' historic $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill from March and in the $900 billion legislation from December,
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  • Biden is pushing for the big steps he says are needed to address immediate needs and control the coronavirus pandemic. He also plans to lay out an economic recovery plan in coming weeks that aims to create jobs and combat the climate crisis, among other measures.
  • The plan calls for sending another $1,400 per person to eligible recipients. This money would be in addition to the $600 payments that were approved by Congress in December and sent out earlier this month -- for a total of $2,000
  • nother $5 billion would be set aside to help struggling renters to pay their utility bills.
  • Biden would increase the federal boost the jobless receive to $400 a week, from the $300 weekly enhancement contained in Congress' relief package from December.
  • He would also extend the payments, along with two key pandemic unemployment programs, through September. This applies to those in the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program who have exhausted their regular state jobless payments and in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits to the self-employed, independent contractors, gig workers and certain people affected by the pandemic.
  • These are key parts of a $1.9 trillion proposal that President-elect Joe Biden unveiled Thursday evening.
  • The plan would provide $25 billion in rental assistance for low- and moderate-income households who have lost jobs during the pandemic. That's in addition to the $25 billion lawmakers provided in December.
  • Biden would extend the 15% increase in food stamp benefits through September, instead of having it expire in June.
  • The plan calls on Congress to create a $25 billion emergency fund and add $15 billion to an existing grant program to help child care providers, including family child care homes, to pay for rent, utilities, and payroll, and increased costs associated with the pandemic like personal protective equipment.
  • Biden wants to boost the Child Tax Credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for those between ages 6 and 17 for a year.
  • Also, he wants Congress to provide $4 billion for mental health and substance use disorder services and $20 billion to meet the health care needs of veterans.
  • It also proposes making a $35 billion investment in some state, local, tribal, and non-profit financing programs that make low-interest loans and provide venture capital to entrepreneurs
  • Under Biden's proposal, people who are sick or quarantining, or caring for a child whose school is closed, will receive 14 weeks of paid leave. The government will reimburse employers with fewer than 500 workers for the full cost of providing the leave.
  • he plan calls for providing $15 billion to create a new grant program for small business owners, separate from the existing Paycheck Protection Program.
  • He wants to increase and expand the Affordable Care Act's premium subsidies so that enrollees don't have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for coverage -- which is also one of his campaign promises. (The law is facing a challenge from Republican-led states that is currently before the Supreme Court.)
  • Biden wants to send $350 billion to state, local and territorial governments to keep their frontline workers employed, distribute the vaccine, increase testing, reopen schools and maintain vital services.
  • Additional assistance to states has been among the most controversial elements of the congressional rescue packages, with Democrats looking to add to the $150 billion in the March legislation and Republicans resisting such efforts. The December package ultimately dropped an initial call to include $160 billion.
  • Biden's plan would also give $20 billion to the hardest-hit public transit agencies to help avert layoffs and the cutting of routes.
  • The plan would provide an additional $170 billion to K-12 schools, colleges and universities to help them reopen and operate safely or to facilitate remote learning.
  • It would also fund the hiring of 100,000 public health workers, nearly tripling the community health workforce.
  • The proposal would also invest $50 billion in testing, providing funds to purchase rapid tests, expand lab capacity and help schools implement regular testing to support reopening.
  • The plan calls for investing $20 billion in a national vaccination program, including launching community vaccination centers around the country and mobile units in hard-to-reach areas
  • Biden is calling on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and to end the tipped minimum wage and the sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities.
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Covid Took a Bite From U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html greenhouse gas US crisis climate pandemic
shared by zoegainer on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • America’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy and industry plummeted more than 10 percent in 2020, reaching their lowest levels in at least three decades as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on the nation’s economy, according to an estimate published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.
  • In the years ahead, United States emissions are widely expected to bounce back once the pandemic recedes and the economy rumbles back to life — unless policymakers take stronger action to clean up the country’s power plants, factories, cars and trucks.
  • Before the pandemic hit, America’s emissions had been slowly but steadily declining since 2005, in large part because utilities that generate electricity have been shifting away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in favor of cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power.
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  • In the electricity sector, emissions plunged by 10.3 percent in 2020, driven by a sharp decline in coal burning. As electricity demand sagged nationwide, utilities ran their coal plants far less often because coal has become the most expensive fuel in many parts of the country. Instead, they used more natural gas — which produces less carbon dioxide than coal, but still generates significant heat-trapping methane — and drew more heavily on emissions-free wind and solar power.
  • Emissions from heavy industry, such as steel and cement, dropped 7 percent in 2020 as automakers and other manufacturers churned out fewer goods amid the economic slump. America’s buildings, which produce carbon dioxide when they burn oil or natural gas for heat, saw emissions fall 6.2 percent, driven by both lockdowns and warmer-than-average weather.
  • Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights. While travel started picking up again in the latter half of the year as states relaxed their lockdowns, Americans drove 15 percent fewer miles over all last year than they did in 2019 and the demand for jet fuel fell by more than one-third.
  • Renewable energy surged in 2020, as energy companies overcame disruptions from the pandemic to build a record number of new wind turbines and solar panels ahead of a key deadline to claim a federal tax credit. The United States produced roughly as much electricity from renewable sources last year as it did from coal, a milestone that has never been reached before.
  • The other caveat is that America’s emissions could tick back up again once vaccines are widely distributed and the economy recovers. The Rhodium Group report noted that a similar rebound occurred after the financial crisis of 2008-9 caused emissions to fall sharply. And it noted that many sectors, like air travel and steel making, have already been rebounding in recent months.
  • “The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”
  • Scientists warn that even a big one-year drop in emissions is not enough to stop global warming. Until humanity’s emissions are essentially zeroed out and nations are no longer adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the planet will continue to heat up. As if to underscore that warning, European researchers announced last week that 2020 was quite likely tied with 2016 as the hottest year on record.
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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
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Schumpeter - Big Oil has a do-or-die decade ahead because of climate change | Business ... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...head-because-of-climate-change oil climate change economist industry
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  • Without the oil industry’s balance-sheets and project-management skills, it is hard to imagine the world building anything like enough wind farms, solar parks and other forms of clean energy to stop catastrophic global warming.
  • The question is no longer “whether” Big Oil has a big role to play in averting the climate crisis. It is “when”.
  • To cynics, all the climate-friendly noises amount to little in practice, since few people are ready to make carbon-cutting sacrifices that would force oil firms’ hand. But noises are sometimes followed by action. Should they be this time, the 2020s may be do-or-die for the oil industry.
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  • In Europe renewable energy prompted something almost as wrenching for a different sort of energy firm—utilities. Faced with an existential threat from wind and solar, fossil-fuel power producers such as Germany’s E.ON and RWE tore themselves apart, redesigned their businesses, and emerged cleaner and stronger.
  • Southern European firms like Spain’s Iberdrola and Italy’s Enel took renewables worldwide. Last year total shareholder returns from the reinvigorated European utilities left the oil-and-gas industry in the dust.
  • Some giants, like ExxonMobil and Chevron in America, continue to bet most heavily on oil
  • Others, among them Europe’s supermajors, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and BP, increasingly favour natural gas, and see low-carbon (though not necessarily zero-carbon) power generation as a way to prop up their business model as more cars and other things begin to run on electricity.
  • of a whopping $80bn or so of capital expenditure by Europe’s seven biggest listed energy firms last year, only 7.4%—less than $1bn each on average—went to clean energy.
  • capital spending on renewable energy, power grids and batteries will need to rise globally to $1.2trn a year on average from now until 2050, more than double the $500bn spent each year on oil and gas.
  • To help fund that, it reckons that oil-and-gas companies will need to divert $10trn of investments away from fossil fuels over the same period.
  • For now, oil executives show no appetite for such a radical change of direction. If anything, they are working their oil-and-gas assets harder, to skim the profits and hand them to shareholders while they still can. Oil, they say, generates double-digit returns on capital employed. Clean energy, mere single digits.
  • Big Oil has ways to make other high-risk, high-reward bets on clean energy. One is through venture capital. The OIES calculates that of 200 recent investments by the oil majors, 70 have been in clean-energy ventures, such as electric-vehicle charging networks. They have generally been small for now. But BP reportedly plans to build five $1bn-plus “unicorns” over the next five years with an aim of providing more energy with lower emissions
  • Another way is to back research and development in potentially groundbreaking technologies such as high-altitude wind energy, whose generating efficiency promises equally lofty profits.
  • As national climate commitments grow more stringent, governments may go on the warpath. UBS argues that it may be necessary for governments to “ban” the $10trn of oil-and-gas investments to reach net zero emissions by 2050
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The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hilosopher-redefining-equality philosophy equality political theory culture
shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
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He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19. - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...raoult-hydroxychloroquine.html science research france star scientist Covid-19
shared by Javier E on 25 May 20 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, in an early repurposing experiment, he tested the effect of hydroxychloroquine on a frequently fatal condition known as Q fever, which is caused by an intracellular bacterium. Like viruses, intracellular bacteria multiply within the cells of their hosts; Raoult found that hydroxychloroquine, by reducing acidity within the host cells, slowed bacterial growth
  • He began treating Q fever with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and doxycycline and later used the same drugs for Whipple’s disease, another fatal condition caused by an intracellular bacterium. The combination is now considered to be a standard treatment for both diseases.
  • Chinese reports, however, appeared to confirm Raoult’s longstanding hopes for chloroquine. A deadly virus for which no treatment existed could evidently be stopped by an inexpensive, widely studied, pre-existing molecule, and one that Raoult knew well. A more heedful scientist might have surveyed the Chinese data and begun preparations for tests of his own. Raoult did this, but he also posted a brief, jubilant video on YouTube, under the title “Coronavirus: Game Over!”
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  • Chloroquine had produced what he called “spectacular improvements” in the Chinese patients. “It’s excellent news — this is probably the easiest respiratory infection to treat of all,” Raoult said. “The only thing I’ll tell you is, be careful: Soon the pharmacies won’t have any chloroquine left!”
  • Raoult wrote his first research paper, in 1979, on a tick-borne infection sometimes known as Marseille fever. The disease was also called “benign summer fever,” and more than 50 years of science said it was nonlethal. And yet one of the 41 patients in his data set had died.
  • Before submitting the paper, Raoult, who was then a young resident, gave it to a supervising professor for review. “And he takes it,” Raoult told me, “he doesn’t show it to me again, and he publishes it — and he’d taken out the death. Because he didn’t know how to make sense of the death.”
  • Raoult was disgusted, and the incident shaped his philosophy of scientific inquiry. “I learned that the people who wanted to follow the familiar path were prepared to cheat in order to do it,” he said.
  • In Raoult’s view, French science was a duchy of appearances, connections and self-reverence. “It was people saying” — he mimed the drone of an aristocrat — “ ‘Oh, him, yes, he’s very good.’ And this reputation, you don’t know what it’s based on, but it’s not the truth.”
  • “He was a ‘follower,’” Raoult said of the professor. “And these ‘followers’ are all cheaters. That’s what I thought. And it’s still what I think.”
  • He is, fundamentally, a contrarian. In Raoult’s view, little of consequence has been accomplished by researchers who endorse the habitual tools and theories of their age.
  • “I’ve spent my life being ‘against,’” he told me. “I tell young scientists: ‘You know, you don’t need a brain to agree. All you need is a spinal cord.’” He is thrilled by conflict. It is a matter both of philosophy — the influence, no doubt, of the thinker he refers to admiringly as “master Nietzsche” — and of temperament.
  • His peers shake their heads at this behavior but grant him a grudging respect. “You can’t knock him down,” said Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia. “In terms of his place in the canon, the sainthood of science, he’s pretty secure there.”
  • In 1985 and 1986, Raoult worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he discovered the Science Citation Index. The index, a tool that can be used to measure a scientist’s influence on the basis of his or her publication history, was relatively unknown in France. Raoult looked up the researchers reputed to be the best in Marseille. “It was really the emperor wears no clothes,” he said. “These people didn’t publish. There was one who hadn’t written a paper in 10 years.”
  • In subsequent work, he demonstrated that Marseille fever was indeed fatal in almost precisely one in every 41 cases.
  • Raoult’s name sits atop several thousand; in each of the past eight years, he has produced more than 100. In 2020, he has already published at least 54.
  • Like many doctors, Molina viewed Raoult’s study with skepticism, but he was also curious to see if his proposed treatment regimen might in fact work. He tested hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in 11 of his own patients. “We had severe patients, and we wanted to try something,” Molina told me. Within five days, one had died, and two others had been transferred out of his service to intensive care. In another patient, the treatment was suspended after the onset of cardiac issues, a known side effect of the drugs. Eight of the 10 surviving patients still tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at the conclusion of the study period
  • Raoult is reputed to be an indefatigable worker, but he also achieves his extreme rate of publication by attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute.
  • In recent years, Raoult has amused himself, it seems, by staking out tendentious scientific claims, sometimes in territories that are well beyond the scope of his expertise.
  • He is skeptical, for instance, of the utility of mathematical modeling in the realm of epidemiology.
  • The same logic has led him to conclude that climate modelers are no more than “soothsayers” for our “scientistic era” and that their dire predictions are mostly just an attempt to expiate our intense but irrational feelings of guilt.
  • Raoult’s most recent book, “Epidemics: Real Dangers and False Alerts,” was published in late March, by which time the W.H.O. had reported more than 330,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide and more than 14,500 deaths. “This anguish over epidemics,” he writes, “is completely untethered from the reality of deaths from infectious diseases.”
  • Testing had been scheduled to run for two weeks per patient, but after only six days, the results were so favorable that Raoult decided to end the trial and publish
  • Others might have proceeded with more caution or perhaps waited to confirm these results with a larger, more rigorous trial. Raoult likes to think of himself as a doctor first, however, with a moral obligation to treat his patients that supersedes any desire to produce reliable data.
  • For decades, Raoult has boasted of his prodigious rates of publication and citation, which, as objective statistics, he considers to be the best measure of his worth as a researcher.
  • This observation has come to be known as the parachute paradigm: We tend to accept the claim that parachutes reduce injury among people who leap from airplanes, but this effect has never been proved in a randomized study that compares an experimental parachute group to an unlucky parachuteless control.
  • “If you don’t have something that’s visible in 10 patients, or 30, it’s useless. It’s not of any consequence.” An effective treatment for a potentially lethal infectious disease will be visible to the naked eye.
  • There is much about Raoult that might make him, and by extension his proposed treatment, appealing to a man like Trump. He is an iconoclast with funny hair; he thinks almost everyone else is stupid, especially those who are typically regarded as smart; he is beloved by the angry and conspiracy-minded; his self-congratulation is more or less unceasing.
  • Raoult classified Trump’s psychology as that of an “entrepreneur,” by way of contrast with that of a “politician.” “Entrepreneurs are people who know how to decide, who know how to take risks,” he said. “And at a certain point, to decide is to take a risk. Every decision is a risk.”
  • The French waited far too long, in his estimation, to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 patients. The authorization came only after Raoult announced in the press that he would continue, “in accordance with the Hippocratic oath” and effectively in defiance of the government, to treat patients with his combination therapy. “I’m convinced that in the end, everyone will be using this treatment,” Raoult told Le Parisien. “It’s just a matter of time before people agree to eat their hats.”
  • Raoult had already begun assembling data for a larger study, but he dismissed the need for anything particularly vast or lengthy. Like other critics of the R.C.T., he likes to point out that a number of self-evidently useful developments in the realm of human health have never been validated by such rigorous tests.
  • Raoult’s study had measured only viral load. It offered no data on clinical outcomes, and it was not clear if the patients’ actual symptoms had improved or indeed whether the patients lived or died. At the outset, 26 patients were assigned to receive hydroxychloroquine, six more than the 20 who appeared in the final results.
  • The six additional patients had been “lost in follow-up,” the authors wrote, “because of early cessation of treatment.” The reasons given were concerning. One patient stopped taking the drug after developing nausea. Three patients had to be transferred out of the institute to intensive care. One patient died. (Another patient elected to leave the hospital before the end of the treatment cycle.)
  • “So four of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all,” noted Elisabeth Bik, a scientific consultant who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Raoult’s study. She paraphrased the sarcasm circulating on Twitter: “My results always look amazing if I leave out the patients who died.”
  • The report was also riddled with discrepancies and apparent errors.
  • This apparent sloppiness was unsurprising to many of those who have tracked Raoult’s work in the past. A prominent French microbiologist told me that, in terms of publication, Raoult’s reputation among scientists has been “long gone” for some time.
  • Beyond its apparent errors and omissions, the study’s design — its small size, its flawed control, the unrandomized assignment of patients to the treatment and control groups — was widely viewed to render its results meaningless. Fauci repeatedly called its results “anecdotal”;
  • Large, well-controlled randomized trials are by no means the only way to arrive at useful scientific insights. Their utility is that they enhance statistical signals such that, amid the noise of human variability and random chance, even the faint effect of some new treatment can be detected.
  • The results of his initial trial have yet to be replicated. “I think what he secretly hopes is that no one will ever be able to show anything,”
  • The prime statistical hurdle that any proposed treatment for Covid-19 will have to overcome — one that is delicate for even Raoult’s critics to make note of, amid the sorrow and fear of this pandemic — is that the signal is likely to be very faint, because the disease is, in the end, rarely fatal. Nearly everyone survives; an effective treatment will save the life of the one or so patients in every hundred who would not have lived without it.
  • “Alzheimer’s drugs, obesity drugs, cardiovascular drugs, osteoporosis drugs: Over and over, there have been what looked like positive results that evaporated on closer inspection. After you’ve experienced this a few times, you take the lesson to heart that the only way to be sure about these things is to run sufficiently powered controlled trials. No shortcuts, no gut feelings — just data.”
  • “I’ve invented 10 or so treatments in my life,” Raoult told me. “Half of them are prescribed all over the world. I’ve never done a double-blind study in my life, never. Never! Never done anything randomized, either.”
  • “When you tell the story, it’s extremely straightforward, no? It’s subject, verb, complement: You detect a disease; there’s a drug that’s cheap, whose safety we know all about because there’s two billion people who take it; we prescribe it, and it changes what it changes. It might not be a miracle product, but it’s better than doing nothing, no?”
  • Raoult had by then begun to lose his composure. He accused Lacombe of being a shill for the pharmaceutical industry; his fans sent her death threats. On Twitter, he called Bik, the consultant who wrote critically about the first study, a “witch hunter” and called a study that she tweeted — one of several published in April and May that seemed to suggest that Raoult’s treatment regimen was ineffectual or even harmful — “fake news.” The authors of another such study were accused of “scientific fraud.” “My detractors are children!” Raoult told an interviewer.
  • It is possible that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are an effective treatment for Covid-19. But Raoult’s study showed, at best, that 20 people who would almost certainly have survived without any treatment at all also survived for six days while taking the drugs Raoult prescribed.
  • In recent weeks, Raoult has in fact tempered his claims about the virtues of his treatment regimen. The published, peer-reviewed version of the final study noted that another two patients had died, bringing the total to 10. Where the earlier version called the drugs “safe and efficient,” they were now described merely as “safe.”
  • He has shown flickers of what appears to be doubt.
  • “I don’t trust popularity,” he told the interviewer. “When too many people think you’re wonderful, you should start to wonder.” His initial YouTube video, “Coronavirus: Game Over!” has also been renamed. The new language is more measured, and in place of the exclamation point there now stands a question mark.
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