Another Barrier to EV Adoption

Junk-filled garages.

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about electric vehicle adoption here in the US. The current administration has made no secret of its hostility toward EVs and, as promised, has ended as many of the existing EV subsidies and vehicle pollution regulations as it could. After more than a year of month-on-month growth, EV sales started to contract, and brands like Genesis and Volvo have seen their customers reject their electric offerings, forcing portfolio rethinks. But wait, it gets worse.

Time and again, surveys and studies show that fears and concerns about charging are the main barriers standing in the way of someone switching from gas to EV. A new market research study by Telemetry Vice President Sam Abuelsamid confirms this, as it analyzes the charging infrastructure needs over the next decade. And one of the biggest hurdles—one that has gone mostly unmentioned across the decade-plus we've been covering this topic—is all the junk clogging up Americans' garages.

Want an EV? Clean out your garage

That's because, while DC fast-charging garners all the headlines and much of the funding, the overwhelming majority of EV charging is AC charging, usually at home—80 percent of it, in fact. People who own and live in a single family home are overrepresented among EV owners, and data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from a few years ago found that 42 percent of homeowners park near an electrical outlet capable of level 2 (240 V) AC charging.

But that could grow by more than half (to 68 percent of homeowners) if those homeowners changed their parking behavior, "most likely by clearing a space in their garage," the report finds.

"90 percent of all houses can add a 240 V outlet near where cars could be parked," said Abuelsamid. "Parking behavior, namely whether homeowners use a private garage for parking or storage, will likely become a key factor in EV adoption. Today, garage-use intent is potentially a greater factor for in-house charging ability than the house’s capacity to add 240 V outlets."

Creating garage space would increase the number of homes capable of EV charging from 31 million to more than 50 million. And when we include houses where the owner thinks it's feasible to add wiring, that grows to more than 72 million homes. And that's far more than Telemetry's most optimistic estimate of US EV penetration for 2035, which ranges from 33 million to 57 million EVs on the road 10 years from now.

I thought an EV would save me money?

Just because 90 percent of houses could add a 240 V outlet near where they park, it doesn't mean that 90 percent of homes have a 240 V outlet near where they park. According to that same NREL study, almost 34 million of those homes will require extensive electrical work to upgrade their wiring and panels to cope with the added demands of a level 2 charger (at least 30 A), and that can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

All of a sudden, EV cost of ownership becomes much closer to, or possibly even exceeds, that of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine.

Multifamily remains an unsolved problem

Twenty-three percent of Americans live in multifamily dwellings, including apartments, condos, and townhomes. Here, the barriers to charging where you park are much greater. Individual drivers will rarely be able to decide for themselves to add a charger—the management company, landlord, co-op board, or whoever else is in charge of the development has to grant permission.

If the cost of new wiring for a single family home is enough to be a dealbreaker for some, adding EV charging capabilities to a parking lot or parking garage makes those costs pale in comparison. Using my 1960s-era co-op as an example, after getting board approval to add a pair of shared level 2 chargers in 2019, we were told by the power company that nothing could happen until the co-op upgraded its electrical panel—a capital improvement project that runs into seven figures, and work that is still not entirely complete as I type this.

The cost of running wiring from the electrical panel to parking spaces becomes much higher than for a single family home given the distances involved, and multifamily dwellings are rarely eligible for the subsidies offered to homeowners by municipalities and energy companies to install chargers.

by Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Getty

Salmon Farming in Alaska: 'Are You Insane?'

Raising the idea of salmon farms in Alaska, Gov. Dunleavy swims against a tide of skeptics

Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it. Farming salmon and other finfish has been banned since 1990 over concerns about environmental threats to wild stocks and economic competition. But Dunleavy, who has become increasingly interested in Alaska’s food security since the pandemic, is curious about bringing in fish farms.

Last legislative session, his office introduced a bill that would authorize land-based farming of non-salmon species like trout or tilapia. That bill faced an avalanche of opposition in committee. But his recent post went further, signaling a shift feared by fisheries advocates, from a narrow focus on land-based farms to a broader look at farming salmon, the vast majority of which happens in net pens in the ocean. (...)

Dunleavy didn’t have a specific plan for how salmon in Alaska might be farmed, he said. Land-based salmon farming, something some environmental groups support, is being tried in a few markets but can be cost-prohibitive. There are concerns over open-net pens that need to be addressed, he said, as well as concerns about what species of salmon might be raised.

Salmon is the second-most popular seafood in the country, just behind shrimp, and roughly 75% to 80% of the salmon Americans eat is farmed Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon in the wild have almost disappeared due to overfishing and they cannot be fished commercially. Alaska provides the lion’s share of the wild salmon in the country’s fish markets. But in the world, Dunleavy pointed out, Russia provides the largest share of salmon. Farming fish might be a way for Alaska, and the U.S., to occupy a larger position in that marketplace, he said.

“What I’ve said is, basically, is the discussion worthwhile that Alaska has today, in 2025, to visit the idea of Alaska being part of that game of a new sector?” he said.

At-sea fish farming has gotten cleaner in recent decades, thanks to advances in technology and feeding practices that minimize the impacts of effluent, said Caitlyn Czajkowski, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, a Florida-based aquaculture trade association.

“There’s a lot of things about the ocean that we know now that we didn’t know 20 years ago,” she said.

Some non-salmon operations also now farm fish that are genetically sterile, so that if they escape, they can’t mix with local populations. That technology is still under development for salmon, however. There are a number of places that used to have commercial salmon fisheries in the Atlantic region, including Maine, Canada and a number of European countries that now farm Atlantic salmon. There isn’t another place, like Alaska, where salmon farming is happening in tandem with a robust wild salmon fishery, Czajkowski said.

At Crush Bistro, a high-end restaurant in downtown Anchorage bustling with tourists this week, Rob DeLucia, owner and general manager, said he was dumbfounded by the governor’s post. Guests come into the restaurant every night and say they came to Alaska for two reasons: to see Denali and to eat wild fish, he said.

“It is crystal clear when you get a piece of salmon at a restaurant in Alaska, that thing was swimming around in the last couple of days out in the wild blue ocean, and now we’re going to have guests be like, ‘Well, is this farmed or is this wild?’” he asked.

Atlantic farmed salmon, from a culinary standpoint, is inferior in taste and texture, he said. It made no sense to promote it.

“(Dunleavy) should have his Alaskan card revoked,” DeLucia said.

by Julia O'Malley, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Pens for farmed salmon sit off the shore of Tasmania, Australia in 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Newton)
[ed. Not insane, just a Republican. If he really cared about salmon, gold medal branding, supporting Alaskan communities, he'd be dead set against something like this (and other self-inflicted threats, like a proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay). He isn't. See also: Help wanted. Job opening with good pay, free housing, free parking, 4-year contract:]

***

Help Wanted: Unique opportunity to lead the largest state in the country, with more miles of coastline, taller mountains, more fish and game, more dreams and less reality than those other 49 pipsqueaks.
Dynamic, credible decision maker with strong personality needed to lead the second-youngest state in the nation into the future, albeit without enough money to meet all its needs.

It’s a fixer-upper job; the current employee has let a lot of things go bad, never learned to get along with co-workers, and hasn’t been working all that hard. Which means the next person has loads of opportunity to make a difference. The bar is low, but the need is high.

Applicants have plenty of time to study and do their homework; the job opens up next year.

Job candidates can use that time to think about how they will bring together disagreeable factions, confront decades-old problems, pay attention to the work at home and less attention to national media, all while winning the hearts and minds of the public — and the support of their colleagues in elected office.

Most importantly, job applicants need to tell the truth about realistic plans. The state has suffered too long with leadership that believes in crystal balls, while public services have fallen behind the eight ball.

The job pays $176,000 a year and includes free housing in a historic home in the state capital city, easy walking distance to the office that comes with a remodeled conference room, a full kitchen and reserved parking.

It’s a four-year job, which should be enough time for the right person to make a difference.

Applications are now being accepted for the job of governor of Alaska. The deadline to apply is June 1 next year. The first cut will come in the Aug. 18 primary election, with the final decision in the Nov. 4 general election.

Already, eight Republicans and one Democrat have applied for the job. By the time applications close, the list likely will exceed a baker’s dozen.

Candidates may be judged by the public on how well they can answer questions about state finances, state tax policies, school funding, social services, law enforcement, housing and the other basics of life, like water and sewage services.

The best candidates will be the ones who truly understand why a state with $82 billion in savings can seem so broke; who can explain why nonresidents who come here to work go home every two weeks without paying any taxes; why some corporations doing business in Alaska pay taxes and others don’t; why the state can’t seem to process Medicaid and food stamp applications on time; why the ferry system has shrunk and rusted away; why some cities pay for police services while others sponge off the state troopers; and why child care and children’s services come up short in the budget.

Don’t apply if you don’t want to deal honestly with the problems, and if you don’t have specific positions and proposals to share. This is not a job for vague answers, wishful thinking and fields of dreams. Remote work not allowed.

My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes

My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes.

As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time.

I lobbied my parents for pasta or frozen tater tots or any other side I actually liked. Family dinners were often dichotomous, the same protein supplemented by two different carbs. “You are not my son,” my father would joke as he continued to put away his potato slop. “Maybe you’re not my father,” I’d shoot back when he shunned the rest of the family’s rice pilaf. Our starch preferences seemed irreconcilable.

As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I’d tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try.

Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things:

1) Mashed potatoes are good.

2) Whatever my dad had been eating at home was not mashed potatoes.

3) My world is built on lies.

Mashed Potatoes are Good

Potatoes were domesticated several millennia ago at the dawn of agriculture in the rugged highlands near Lake Titicaca in modern-day Peru. Their origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins. From this paltry stock of nightshades, archaic peoples of the Andes gradually husbanded generous, nutritious, mild tubers that would remain the staple of the region’s foodways through several successive civilizations.

Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties.

To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object.

The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. (...)

Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes

The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.

The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front.

The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer.

This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?

This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.

Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: (...)

My World is Built on Lies

In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten. (...)

At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.

Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:

Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.

Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.

Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.

Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.

Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.

The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime, American cheese product, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs. We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods” are as demonized now as butter and whole milk were when my parents were young.

Expand the pattern to the built environment. Pressboard, particle board, and other reconstituted material composites likely make up a majority of new furniture sold in the US. These are an IMPish imitation of actual wood furniture. Take care while assembling not to ding your brittle sheetrock walls, an IMPish upgrade over lath and plaster. Often these interiors live inside an apartment building clad in a mish-mash of random ornament, anti-massing regulations demanding an IMPish simulation of a varied city block.

Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.

Corporate structures can be IMPish. When I visit a medical office it’s usually a confusing tangle of overlapping practitioners and practices operating out of the same physical address, an IMPish imitation of the archetypal doctor with a shingle in town. Similar quagmires abound when dealing with insurance, or contractors, or financial services.

Once you see the instant mashed potato antipattern it’s hard to stop. The isomorphisms are everywhere.

The gig economy makes IMPish jobs. Swiping apps produce IMPish flirting. Meta-studies are IMPish science. Ted Talks are IMPish symposia. Malls are IMPish shopping districts. Subdivisions are IMPish neighborhoods. Cruises are IMPish international travel, chopped into 14 hour chunks and emulsified with an ocean liner.

The internet scrapes together IMPish communities. We’re not atomized; we’re flaked.

 
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Chuño via

Disruptor 16: Carbon Robotics

Seattle-based Carbon Robotics offers an AI-powered laser weeder that attaches to farmers’ tractors and looks like a space-age combine, except that it weeds instead of harvests.

Supplied with a database of 40 million images, the AI-powered agtech system shoots lasers as it passes over rows of crops, with machine learning enabling it to recognize weeds and kill them at their base using a laser, replacing the need for both manual labor and herbicides. The company says it has destroyed more than 15 billion weeds on more than 100 crops.

Carbon Robotics says its approach to weeding increases yields, quality and consistency, and helps preserve topsoil. The latter is a growing global concern, as experts estimate most of the world’s topsoil has been degraded to the point that its agriculturally usable life is measured in decades. (...)

Cost of agtech upgrades, and unproven technology compared to conventional farming approaches, is an issue. Laser weeder costs can run over $1 million, based on public reports, but farmers that have used the technology have endorsed it.

Recently, Carbon Robotics debuted the LaserWeeder G2, a smaller, less expensive version of its technology, though still a significant investment for many farmers in a business that’s made inherently risky due to weather and the volatility of global commodities markets. (...)

Carbon Robotics is growing its manufacturing in eastern Washington State, with a recent 70% headcount increase to about 200, and it ultimately has plans to grow its tech applications beyond farming. “The real driver is having AI systems doing things in the real world. Will Carbon Robotics always be in the ag industry? We’ll probably do things well outside it,” said Mikesell in an interview with GeekWire.

by Elizabeth MacBride, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Igor Gnedo, Antonina Lepore & Adrianne Paerels
[ed. Weedtech. From CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. Number one is, of course, Anduril (drones, surveillance, other AI-enabled weaponry - defense tech sector). We're screwed.]

My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”

Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.

After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs. (...)

In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.

“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.

My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”

Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.(...)

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”

When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”

Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”

My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account. (...)

This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in. (...)

As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face. (...)

Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”

It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.

Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.

Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.

People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”

by Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic | Read more:

Images: Peyton Fulford, Sydney Morning Herald, Nancy Walecki

90% of Frozen Raspberries Grown in the U.S. Come From This WA Town

LYNDEN, Whatcom County — Even if you’ve never been to Lynden, there’s a good chance you’ve eaten the raspberries grown here. They’re just not the ones you find in the plastic clamshell in the produce section.

Labeled generically as “U.S.-grown raspberries,” you’ll find them all over the grocery store: in the frozen triple berry blend and the raspberry lemon muffins at Costco. In Tillamook’s Washington raspberry yogurt, Smuckers’ raspberry jam and Rubicon’s vegan raspberry cupcakes. Raspberry Uncrustables, raspberry crumbles in the smoothies at Jamba Juice … you get the point.

Farms in Lynden — a town of roughly 16,000 people about 5 miles south of the Canadian border — grow 90% of the frozen red raspberries that are grown and harvested in the United States each year. Since 2015, these berries have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to the Washington Red Raspberry Commission.

From June to early August every summer, across 54 farms, roughly 50 million pounds of red raspberries are mechanically harvested and processed in Lynden. Most berries get flash-frozen whole in tunnels, minutes from where they’re picked, and packaged into familiar foods like the ones above. You’ve probably got a few in your house right now. (...)

The process is fascinating. The only wrinkle? Raspberries — although delicious, and even when they get flash-frozen right away — are a pain to grow.

“They’re finicky,” said Markwell Farms owner Mark Van Mersbergen, running his hands over a deep-green raspberry cane last month, halfway through the picking season. “They have to have it their way, and if they get a curveball thrown at them, it’s tough to adjust.”

by Jackie Varriano, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Nick Wagner/Esri (Mark Nowlin)/The Seattle Times

[ed. 90%!]

A Simpler Life - Too Much to Ask?

via:
[ed. Yep. And don't make me identify bicycles to prove I'm human, restrict repairs to approved corporate vendors and parts, download "critical new updates" that make my software worse, put touchscreens on everything, etc. etc. See also: Slopocalypse Now.]

Scientific Fraud Has Become an Industry

For years, sleuths who study scientific fraud have been sounding the alarm about the sheer size and sophistication of the industry that churns out fake publications. Now, an extensive investigation finds evidence of a range of bad actors profiting from fraud. The study, based on an analysis of thousands of publications and their authors and editors, shows paper mills are just part of a complex, interconnected system that includes publishers, journals, and brokers.

The paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints an alarming picture. Northwestern University metascientist Reese Richardson and his colleagues identify networks of editors and authors colluding to publish shoddy or fraudulent papers, report that large organizations are placing batches of fake papers in journals, suggest brokers may serve as intermediaries between paper mills and intercepted journals, and find that the number of fake papers—though still relatively small—seems to be increasing at a rate far greater than the scientific literature generally.

The paper shows that misconduct “has become an industry,” says Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin, who studies corruption in science and was not involved with the research. Richardson and colleagues hope their sweeping case will attract attention and spur change.

They began their analysis by pinpointing corrupt editors. They focused their investigation on PLOS ONE, because the megajournal allows easy access to bulk metadata and publishes the names of the editors who have handled the thousands of papers it publishes each year, making it possible to detect anomalies without behind-the-scenes information. The researchers identified all the papers from the journal that had been retracted or received comments on PubPeer—a website that allows researchers to critique published work—and then identified each paper’s editors.

All told, 33 editors stood out as more frequently handling work that was later retracted or criticized than would be expected by chance. “Some of these were immense outliers,” Richardson says. For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted. Flagged editors handled 1.3% of papers published in the journal by 2024, but nearly one-third of all retracted papers.

The team also spotted that these editors worked on certain authors’ papers at a suspiciously high rate. These authors were often editors at PLOS ONE themselves, and they often handled each other’s papers. It’s possible that some editors are being paid bribes, Richardson says, but “also possible that these are informal arrangements that are being made among colleagues.” The researchers detected similarly questionable editor behavior in 10 journals published by Hindawi, an open-access publisher that was shuttered because of rampant paper mill activity after Wiley acquired it. A spokesperson for Wiley told Science the publisher has made “significant investments to address research integrity issues.” (...)

Richardson and his colleagues found that the problem goes far beyond networks of unscrupulous editors and authors scratching each other’s backs. They identified what appear to be coordinated efforts to arrange the publication of batches of dubious papers in multiple journals.

The team looked at more than 2000 papers flagged on PubPeer for containing duplicated images and identified clusters of papers that all shared images. Those sets of papers were often published around the same time and in a limited selection of journals. Looking at patterns of duplicated images is an “absolutely innovative” method for investigating these networks, Abalkina says. “No one has done this before.”

In some cases, the authors suggest, a single paper mill that infiltrated multiple journals may be responsible. But they also believe some of these clusters reflect the work of “brokers” who act as go-betweens, taking papers produced by mills and placing them at compromised journals.

The team dug into the workings of the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India, which offers services including “thesis/article writing” as well as “journal publication” in a list of dozens of journals. On a web page listing “high impact journals” on offer, ARDA says it liaises with journals on behalf of researchers and “[ensures] they get published successfully in the High Impact Indexing Database journal of their choice.”

Over several years, ARDA’s list of journals has evolved, the team found, with new publications added to the list and others removed after being delisted by bibliometric databases because of fishy behavior. The journals often publish transparently “problematic” articles, Richardson says, and ARDA charges between $250 and $500 for publication, based on quotes offered to Richardson and his colleagues. The website asks authors to submit their own papers, suggesting ARDA itself is not a paper mill, but rather a go-between, Richardson says.

ARDA did not respond to a request for comment.

Organizations like these operate in broad daylight, under the guise of providing “editorial services,” says Lokman Meho, an information scientist at the American University of Beirut. Although their operations may be unethical—with stark consequences for science and scientists—they don’t care about trying to hide, he says, because “it is actually not illegal to run such businesses.”

The problems Richardson and his colleagues documented are growing fast. The team built a list of papers identified in 55 databases of likely paper mill products, looking at the number of suspicious papers published each year between 2016 and 2020. (They excluded the past few years of data because it takes time for fraudulent papers to be discovered and retracted.) They found that the number of suspected paper mill products doubled every 1.5 years—10 times faster than the rate of growth of the literature as a whole, although still a small proportion of papers overall. The number of retractions and papers flagged on PubPeer had also risen fast, doubling every 3.3 and 3.6 years, respectively, but not keeping pace with the increase in suspected fraudulent papers. “This means that the percentage of fraudulent science is growing,” Abalkina says. That poses particular risks to fields like medical science, where the fake papers sometimes make their way into systematic reviews and meta-analyses, potentially distorting our understanding of drugs and treatments, she says.

One contributor is the rapid growth of science, says Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a science studies scholar at Leiden University. Paper mill products are often buried in low-impact journals and are written to get little attention, he says. In small scientific communities, it is harder to hide products like these, but as some fields get larger and more anonymous, such papers can escape detection more easily. And as the scientific workforce has burgeoned, institutions have increasingly turned to evaluating scientists based on how many publications they produce, leading some researchers to bolster their records with fake papers, he says. “Perverse incentives, inflated metrics, the ‘publish or perish’ culture, and systemic tolerance for weak scholarship” all allow paper mills to flourish, says Li Tang, an expert on Chinese research policy at Fudan University.

Young researchers may feel forced into paying for paper mill publications to compete with peers—a ratcheting effect that is already apparent, Richardson says. The number of papers published by medical residency applicants has soared in recent years, for instance, with some students claiming authorship of dozens of papers. He says it’s no coincidence that the paper mill industry targets residency applicants, especially foreign students on visas.

Docampo, Abalkina, and others say there’s little in the new paper that wasn’t already strongly suspected. But the dramatic confirmation that the study offers may shift the needle, they say. “We’re massively behind the curve on making visible and realizing the extent of the problem,” Kaltenbrunner says. “The sheer scale of it is the takeaway message here.”

by Cathleen O’Grady, Science | Read more:
Image: Davide Bonazzi/Salzmanart

Sermon on the 'Mount'

“South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President

There’s a legal strategy known as the small-penis rule, wherein an author who writes a character based on a real person can potentially evade a libel suit by giving said character a small penis—the logic being that, in order to sue, a plaintiff would have to tacitly admit that the description of his manhood is accurate. This rule technically does not apply to the latest episode of “South Park,” in which the series’ creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, make absolutely no effort to anonymize President Donald Trump, but one wonders if the logic of embarrassment still holds. Trump is portrayed as a deeply insecure leader who literally gets into bed with Satan, his apparent lover. (“I’m not in the mood right now,” the Devil tells him. “Another random bitch commented on my Instagram that you’re on the Epstein list.”) Most notably, the Trump of “South Park” is endowed with a penis so small that Satan says he “can’t even see anything.” If the actual Trump were to retaliate, as he so often does, he’d be playing directly into Parker and Stone’s hands.

“South Park,” amazingly, is in its twenty-seventh season. It’s the second-longest-running animated show on U.S. television, behind “The Simpsons,” and easily the most offensive. Since its première, in 1997, the cartoon—which follows a group of profane elementary schoolers in the town of South Park, Colorado—has managed to piss off nearly every political group, pop-culture fandom, and religious denomination... To the extent that the show has any “beliefs,” it’s that all beliefs are asinine, whether they’re held by the left or the right. Environmental groups criticized the series, in 2006, for portraying Al Gore as a delusional figure obsessed with an imagined monster named ManBearPig. The show was banned in China, in 2019, for mocking Chinese censorship, and the creators famously received death threats after depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Although “South Park” has declined both in quality and in popularity over the years, it’s still valuable enough that Paramount recently paid $1.5 billion for exclusive streaming rights to the series, and for Parker and Stone to make another fifty episodes. The studio has long been in the process of merging with Skydance Media—a deal that was in a holding pattern for about a year, until Paramount agreed to pay sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against its subsidiary CBS’s “60 Minutes.” A few days before the F.C.C. finally approved the merger, Stephen Colbert, the host of “The Late Show,” on CBS, called the settlement a “big fat bribe”—and then his show was cancelled, ostensibly for financial reasons. All of these are crucial plot points in the latest “South Park” episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” which is now available on Paramount+.

The town of South Park has its fair share of Trump supporters, albeit increasingly disillusioned ones. (“I voted for him to get rid of all the woke stuff,” one man says, “but now that retarded faggot is just putting money in his own pockets.”) Some parents are especially upset when religion is introduced at the local elementary school—in the form of Jesus Christ himself physically showing up and milling around. When the parents call the President to complain, he says that he’s going to sue the town for five billion dollars, setting up an extended riff on Trump’s status as a serial litigant. (Throughout the episode, he also threatens to sue people who make reference to his unfortunate penis.) But Parker and Stone’s true focus is media cowardice, which becomes clear when a fictionalized “60 Minutes” runs a segment on the showdown between Trump and the town of South Park.

The anchors are visibly anxious. “Oh, shit,” one says, as the news broadcast begins. “The small town of South Park, Colorado, is protesting against the President. The townspeople claim that the President—who, who is a great man, great guy, we know is probably watching—and, uh, we’re just reporting on this town in Colorado that’s being sued by the President.”

His co-anchor cuts in: “To be clear, we don’t agree with them.”

“We think these protesters are total retards,” the first anchor adds.

The demonstration is interrupted by Jesus, who flies onto the scene, Superman-style. He hands everyone bread. “Just eat the bread, and listen,” he says, and so begins his Sermon on the ’Mount: “I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to, because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.” He explains that Trump “can do whatever he wants now that someone has backed down,” adding, “Do you really wanna end up like Colbert?” He tells the people that they need to shut up, or else “South Park is over.”

Donald Trump poses a real conundrum for comedians. He’s an endless wellspring of material, but what he says and does is inevitably more absurd—and often more compelling—than any satire could be. Parker and Stone realized this early on. They initially dealt with Trump by having one of the show’s recurring characters, a former schoolteacher named Mr. Garrison, act as a surrogate; he ascends to the Presidency by promising to build a wall, and gradually turns orange. But the showrunners quickly found that, as Parker put it, “what was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with.” So they pivoted to the other defining issues of our time: Kanye West’s antisemitism, ChatGPT, the COVID-19 pandemic (in this case, caused by a character’s decision to have sex with a bat in China).

The Paramount drama has prompted “South Park” to go after Trump more directly than ever before, but the gags, which all too often come back to his anatomy, or his penchant for memes, aren’t exactly revelatory. The sharpest joke is a meta one: the last time we saw Satan in bed with someone was in the 1999 film “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” which depicted an abusive relationship between Satan and Saddam Hussein. (Hussein was the abuser.) Rather than concoct a new playbook for Trump, Parker and Stone have returned to an old one.

Trump’s existential threat to comedy has another dimension, one that intensified after his reëlection, as figures like Shane Gillis and Tim Dillion gained mainstream appeal: it’s hard to make boundary-pushing statements when there are no longer any boundaries. This problem is especially pressing for Parker and Stone, and they confront it via the angst of South Park’s resident provocateur, Eric Cartman.

The episode opens with Cartman turning on a radio station, where he’s met with the sound of static. “Mom, something’s wrong with my favorite show,” he complains. “National Public Radio, where all the liberals bitch and whine about stuff.” His mother informs him that Trump has cancelled NPR. Cartman is devastated: “That was, like, the funniest shit ever.”

Later, Cartman confides in his friend Butters, who’s more of a snowflake type. “Woke is dead,” Cartman says, sadly. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares. Everyone hates the Jews. Everyone’s fine with using gay slurs.”

“That’s not good,” Butters replies.

“No, it’s terrible!” Cartman says. “ ’Cause now I don’t know . . . what I’m supposed to do.”

At first, it didn’t seem like “South Park” had an answer to this question; Cartman, unconvinced by Butters’s assurances that “woke” is “still out there, somewhere,” forces him into a suicide pact. The two of them sit inside a car, parked in a garage, with the engine running. The scene is foreboding—until it’s revealed that the car is electric. [ed. Lol!]

The townspeople, meanwhile, negotiate a settlement with the President, who agrees to a sum of $3.5 million. (“We’ll just have to cut some funding for our schools and hospitals and roads and that should be that,” one woman says.) But there’s one condition: as part of the settlement, the town also has to engage in “pro-Trump messaging”—an apparent reference to recent reports that Trump has demanded the same from CBS. What follows is genuine shock comedy, and a treatment of Trump that feels original. The town’s first P.S.A. is an A.I.-generated video of Trump—a live-action one, not a cartoon—trudging through a desert. He proceeds to take off his clothes, though he leaves his dress shoes and sock garters on. “When things heat up, who will deliver us from temptation?” a voice-over says. “No matter how hot it gets, he’s not afraid to fight for America.” Trump lies down in the sand, and his micropenis, which has googly eyes and a mouth, slowly becomes erect, before announcing, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.” The P.S.A. is labelled one of fifty, leaving open the possibility that, in the course of the forty-nine “South Park” episodes still to come, we’ll get forty-nine more.

Is this too much? Probably. Yet there’s an age-old tradition of political vulgarity, of which Trump himself is a practitioner—it’s the crux of his appeal.

by Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:South Park Studios/YouTube

[ed. Classic.]

From Babylon to Wall Street – How Bankers Make You Poor

Michael Hudson has been expanding his historical window, from the ancient history of abolition of debt jubilees, which had prevented the rise of oligarchs, to the increased power over times of creditors, or in lay parlance, bankers. He’s added in the re-establishment of the influence of lenders in medieval times, thanks to the role of the Catholic Church in the Crusades and the accompanying rise of banking to provide war finance. This interview with Jonathan Brown reviews this trajectory, focusing on the way that debt burdens rise over time and amount to destructive rentierism.

Jonathan: You’ve often spoken about your aha [00:01:00] moments when delving into ancient economic history. I just wonder what have been some of your profound or unexpected discoveries about studying ancient civilizations like Sumer or Babylonia?

Michael Hudson: My, entire life, ever since I became an economist in, the 1960s was to realize that debt was the major problem that was going to be growing exponentially and stifling society. And it was clear that debt grew at compound interest faster than the economy was able to grow and pay the debts.

I spent, quite a few, decades warning about the fact that the global south could not pay the Dollarized debts, as indeed it didn’t in the 1970s. There was such a reaction to what I was saying, such a refusal by the economics profession to look at debt as being important, that I decided [00:02:00] to look at the whole history of how different societies had coped with debts.

And I began to write a history of debt, after I left the United Nations in 1979 after warning that there was going to be a, third world, Latin American debt crash in a few years, as indeed there was in 1982. I got all the way back to Greece and Rome, and then into the biblical, and came across the jubilee year. (...)

So I began to write up my ideas, shared them with a friend of mine, Alex Marshak, a professor at Harvard. He introduced me to the head of Harvard’s anthropology and archeology department. I was made a research fellow at the Peabody Museum by Carl Lambert Klowski. I realized that there was this wealth of Babylonian, Sumerian, and near [00:04:00] Eastern, academic records that economists had completely ignored.

And the reasons that our economists ignored it was that the way that society created its economic relationships were completely different from those that they ended up with after Greece and Rome. And so I realized that I can’t simply write this all up myself because I’m an economist, not an Assyriaologist.

So at Harvard we decided to organize a group of scholars who were specialists in Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Judaic and other Middle Eastern records and we decided to do three volumes.

by Jonathan Brown and Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed.  See also: The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It’s an Ominous Sign for the Economy (NYT). Thinkng of commissioning some new t-shirts: Cognitive Dissonance is Killing Me ©]

***

"For decades, earning a Ph.D. in economics has been a nearly foolproof path to a lucrative career. Even as bearers of advanced degrees in history, English or anthropology struggled to find gainful employment, the popularity of economics as an undergraduate major created plenty of tenure-track teaching positions, while government agencies snatched up Ph.D. economists in bulk. Those looking for even larger paychecks could turn to tech companies, Wall Street and consulting firms, which bid up the price of economists as if they were a bespoke cryptocurrency.

Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer pay were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100 percent, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85 percent.

Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones. (...)

Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.

“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”

Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy.

The drop in government payrolls and federal funding for universities and nonprofits alone is a major problem, since they support two to three times as many jobs for college graduates as for those without degrees. In some cases, workers with Ph.D.s are displacing others with master’s or bachelor’s degrees.

Then there is the potential impact on the country’s future. Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist who is president of the National Academy of Sciences, said a sharp drop in the number of research jobs in the hard sciences and social sciences would send Ph.D.s abroad. Their flight will deprive the government of the brainpower it needs to perform basic functions and leave U.S. firms less innovative and competitive.

“U.S. industry is incredibly dependent on the training that is done in colleges and universities,” Dr. McNutt said. “When the top people go elsewhere, we’ll be left with the B team in America.”

~ The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It’s an Ominous Sign for the Economy. Norm Scheiber

Silence on SNAP

Poverty and hunger will rise as a result of the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to the US federal “food stamps” program, according to experts. Low-income workers who rely on the aid are braced for dire consequences.

Katie Giede, a single mother and waitress in Conyers, Georgia, is one of the 42 million Americans who use the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap). Even with the maximum benefit permitted, she struggles to afford food for her and her child.

She makes $3 an hour plus tips at the fast-food chain Waffle House, where she has worked for 11 years. The company deducts meals from workers’ pay check per shift, regardless of whether they eat one or not.

“Our pay is already so little that we’re struggling with everything,” Giede told the Guardian. “Single mothers like myself are reliant upon the benefits like Snap and Medicaid. So when you go and you cut that as well, now you have mothers out here that are not only worried at night because they already can’t afford housing or a vehicle, but we’re also worried what is our kid is going to eat? Because we no longer have help.”

Giede said she received $450 a month for her and her child. She said working too many hours or receiving too much income was a constant concern, due to eligibility cut-offs.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, at the end of 2024, even the maximum Snap benefit would not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99% of all counties in the US.

“I dread that trip to the grocery store every week, because you have to sit down and you really have to budget,” said Giede. “Every time you go, you’re having to make the choice between something that’s healthy or something that’s cheaper, just so you can get enough to last all week.

“There are so many people in this country that rely on these benefits, and with these cuts, half of the people that are surviving right now off of this are going to lose their benefits. That’s not even just people not eating a little bit. They’re already not eating enough, so we’re going to lose lives over this. It’s those of us at the bottom that are really feeling it.”

Waffle House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set the stage for significant cuts to Snap by shifting higher administrative costs to each state, expanding work reporting requirements and imposing restrictions on non-citizen eligibility.

Many lower-wage workers have grown more reliant on Snap in recent years. US food prices rose by 23.6% between 2020 and 2024, according to official data. While inflation has since moderated, grocery costs remain high.

As a result of the latest Snap changes, states will be responsible for 75% of administrative costs of handling the program from 2027, up from 50% cost-sharing with the federal government, which is likely to strain state budgets.

From 2028, for the first time states will be forced to pick up some of the multibillion-dollar bill for Snap benefits. The state of New York, for example, faces a budget impact of about $1.2bn, according to the Food Research and Action Center (Frac), a non-profit advocacy group.

While such shifting costs have raised fears that states will cut back Snap support, expanded work requirements have sparked concern that few people will be eligible. Analysis by the Urban Institute found about 22.3 million US families are set to lose some or all of their Snap benefits.

“This is a very targeted, well-thought-out plan of dismantling the Snap program that federal policy makers won’t take responsibility for, because it is the states, it is the governors who will have to cut resources for Snap, who will have to cut the program in order to say we can’t operate this because of what’s happening at the federal level,” said Gina Plata-Nino, Snap deputy director at the Frac.

“Snap is a very important ecosystem at the local level, at the state level and the federal level, because billions of dollars go into states, and this federal money supports local economies,” she added. “All of these proposals threaten this very delicate balance.”

The White House deferred comment to the office of management and budget, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

States across the US are braced for stark consequences. “We’re going to have worse hunger and ultimately, worse poverty,” said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “There are entire regions of West Virginia where there aren’t 20 hours a week [expanded Snap work requirement] of anything to apply for. What do you tell those families?

“We’re talking families with kids now that are going to be subjected to these harsh work reporting requirements. We’re talking folks in their 60s, literally in communities where there are no jobs, none, and ripping away the one outlet to their basic needs that’s available to them.”

Among the employers with the most workers reliant on Snap is Walmart, the largest private employer in the US, as much of its workforce receives only part-time hours.

Christina Gahagan, 66, has worked at Walmart for a decade in western New York at several stores. She is currently based at a store in Geneseo, New York.

“I would say at least 50% of the people in my store rely on food stamps to make ends meet for their families,” said Gahagan. “They’re always trying to figure out where the best deals are, coupon clipping at lunch and reading circulars to see who’s got the best deal on whatever, just to make their money stretch.” (...)

“Walmart is the largest employer in the US. We rival Amazon almost dollar for dollar in what we do. You would think a company like that could shell out a little bit more money per hour for associates in the store across the board, so that there aren’t people who are having to depend so heavily on public assistance.”

Walmart did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

by Michael Sainato, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Richard Levine/Alamy
[ed. No one wants to comment on a new bureaucracy to process and administer oversight requirements? Jobs! Remember who did this the next time you vote.]

Design Your Own Rug!

For my wedding anniversary, I designed and had hand-woven in Afghanistan a rug for my microbiologist wife. The rug mixes traditional Afghanistan designs with some scientific elements including Bunsen burners, test tubes, bacterial petri dishes and other elements.

I started with several AI designs, such as that shown below, to give the weavers an idea of what I was looking for. Some of the AI elements were muddled and very complex and so we developed a blueprint over a few iterations. The blueprint was very accurate to the actual rug.

I am very pleased with the final product. The wool is of high quality, deep and luxurious, and the design is exactly what I intended. My wife loves the rug and will hang it at her office. The price was very reasonable, under $1000. I also like that I employed weavers in a small village in Northern Afghanistan. The whole process took about 6 months.

You can develop your own custom rug from Afghanu Rugs. Tell them Alex sent you. Of course, they also have many beautiful traditional designs. You can even order my design should you so desire!

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:
Images: the author

‘Quishing’ Scams Dupe Millions

QR codes were once a quirky novelty that prompted a fun scan with the phone. Early on, you might have seen a QR code on a museum exhibit and scanned it to learn more about the eating habits of the woolly mammoth or military strategies of Genghis Khan. During the pandemic, QR codes became the default restaurant menu. However, as QR codes became a mainstay in more urgent aspects of American life, from boarding passes to parking payments, hackers have exploited their ubiquity.

“As with many technological advances that start with good intentions, QR codes have increasingly become targets for malicious use. Because they are everywhere — from gas pumps and yard signs to television commercials — they’re simultaneously useful and dangerous,” said Dustin Brewer, senior director of proactive cybersecurity services at BlueVoyant.

Brewer says that attackers exploit these seemingly harmless symbols to trick people into visiting malicious websites or unknowingly share private information, a scam that has become known as “quishing.”

The increasing prevalence of QR code scams prompted a warning from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year about unwanted or unexpected packages showing up with a QR code that when scanned “could take you to a phishing website that steals your personal information, like credit card numbers or usernames and passwords. It could also download malware onto your phone and give hackers access to your device.”

State and local advisories this summer have reached across the U.S., with the New York Department of Transportation and Hawaii Electric warning customers about avoiding QR code scams.

The appeal to cybercriminals lies in the relative ease with which the scam operates: slap a fake QR code sticker on a parking meter or a utility bill payment warning and rely on urgency to do the rest.

“The crooks are relying on you being in a hurry and you needing to do something,” said Gaurav Sharma, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

On the rise as traditional phishing fails

Sharma expects QR scams to increase as the use of QR codes spreads. Another reason QR codes have increased in popularity with scammers is that more safeguards have been put into place to tamp down on traditional email phishing campaigns. A study this year from cybersecurity platform KeepNet Labs found that 26 percent of all malicious links are now sent via QR code. According to cybersecurity company, NordVPN, 73% of Americans scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites.

“The cat and mouse game of security will continue and that people will figure out solutions and the crooks will either figure out a way around or look at other places where the grass is greener,” Sharma said.

Sharma is working to develop a “smart” QR code called a SDMQR (Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR) that has built-in security to prevent scams. But first, he needs buy-in from Google and Microsoft, the companies that build the cameras and control the camera infrastructure. Companies putting their logos into QR codes isn’t a fix because it can cause a false sense of security, and that criminals can usually simply copy the logos, he said.

Some Americans are wary of the increasing reliance on QR codes. [ed. Me!]

“I’m in my 60s and don’t like using QR codes,” said Denise Joyal of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I definitely worry about security issues. I really don’t like it when one is forced to use a QR code to participate in a promotion with no other way to connect. I don’t use them for entertainment-type information.”

Institutions are also trying to fortify their QR codes against intrusion.

Natalie Piggush, spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which welcomes over one million visitors a year, said their IT staff began upgrading their QR codes a couple of years ago to protect against what has become an increasingly significant threat.

“At the museum, we use stylized QR codes with our logo and colors as opposed to the standard monochrome codes. We also detail what users can expect to see when scanning one of our QR codes, and we regularly inspect our existing QR codes for tampering or for out-of-place codes,” Piggush said.

Museums are usually less vulnerable than places like train stations or parking lots because scammers are looking to collect cash from people expecting to pay for something. A patron at a museum is less likely to expect to pay, although Sharma said even in those settings, fake QR codes can be deployed to install malware on someone’s phone. (...)

Low investment, high return hacking tactic

A QR code is more dangerous than a traditional phishing email because users typically can’t read or verify the encoded web address. Even though QR codes normally include human-readable text, attackers can modify this text to deceive users into trusting the link and the website it directs to. The best defense against them is to not scan unwanted or unexpected QR codes and look for ones that display the URL address when you scan it.

Brewer says cybercriminals have also been leveraging QR codes to infiltrate critical networks.

“There are also credible reports that nation-state intelligence agencies have used QR codes to compromise messaging accounts of military personnel, sometimes using software like Signal that is also open to consumers,” Brewer said. Nation-state attackers have even used QR codes to distribute remote access trojans (RATs) — a type of malware designed to operate without a device owner’s consent or knowledge — enabling hackers to gain full access to targeted devices and networks.

Still, one of the most dangerous aspects of QR codes is how they are part of the fabric of everyday life, a cyberthreat hiding in plain sight.

“What’s especially concerning is that legitimate flyers, posters, billboards, or official documents can be easily compromised. Attackers can simply print their own QR code and paste it physically or digitally over a genuine one, making it nearly impossible for the average user to detect the deception,” Brewer said.

by Kevin Williams, CNBC |  Read more:
Image: Fongfong2 | Istock | Getty Images
[ed. Not surprised at all. I've avoided using them from the start.]