Ernst Haas, A Cloudy Night Sky over the Western Skies Motor Motel in Colorado, 1978
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Ghost Kitchens: How Taxpayers are Picking Up the Bill for the Destruction of Local Restaurants
This past summer, Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery store chains, received a 15-year, 75 percent sales tax exemption for setting up two new data centers in Ohio. This is the definition of unnecessary. Kroger is not exactly poverty struck – it accrued profits of more than $2 billion last year. Moreover, subsidizing data centers is for suckers. Companies need to build that infrastructure, and they don’t create all that many positions. Municipalities and state governments that subsidize data centers sometimes literally pay upwards of seven figures per job.
Then it got worse: Kroger is using its data to move into what’s known as the “ghost kitchen” business, something that is a terrible development for local independent restaurants. So, Ohio taxpayers are helping a massive supermarket chain put other businesses out of business, including their favorite corner eatery. That Ohio is doing this in a year when small restaurant proprietors are under all but existential threat adds insult to injury.
Ghost kitchens are as spooky as they sound. Big corporations like gig companies, supermarkets, and fast food chains use the data they collect through their various lines of business to create delivery-only food operations. But here’s the catch: They often hide and disguise the fact that they aren’t actual restaurants. They give them homey sounding names, like Seaside or Lorenzo’s, and build out web pages that make them appear to be places you could drop in on. In fact, they are randomly located in warehouses and other industrial spaces, and backed by big investors and corporations whose participation is often hidden by a web of shell companies.
The poster children for this issue are the big delivery app companies — UberEats, GrubHub, and Doordash — which use the data they collect doing deliveries for restaurants, and which they don’t subsequently share with those restaurants, to see what sort of items sell best and when. Then, much like Amazon weaponizes the data it collects from small businesses that sell on its platform to create its own products, the delivery apps use the data to create their own, delivery-only food outlets, with the aim of cutting real restaurants out of the business entirely. (Amazon, of course, won’t miss this opportunity either: It has invested in a delivery and ghost kitchen company called Deliveroo.)
This model of operating a platform and then also competing on it should just be illegal, even though it’s widespread. Whether it’s Amazon using info gained from its third-party sellers to steal products, Google using data gleaned from its advertising technology to outbid publishers, or delivery apps cutting real restaurants out of the restaurant business, the issue is the same: The corporation that runs the infrastructure has an anticompetitive advantage over all of the other participants. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, succinctly puts it, “You can be an umpire, or you can be a player—but you can’t be both.”
But even if authorities woke up and banned Uber from going into the ghost kitchen business, that wouldn’t stop Kroger. It’s got the data too, and it doesn’t need to trick rival businesses into turning it over. It’s the largest grocer in the U.S., and the second-largest in-person retailer after Walmart. It runs stores under its own corporate name, as well as Harris Teeter and 14 other brands. They are using info gained from their own shoppers. Kroger is partnering with an outfit called ClusterTruck that uses algorithms to remove the so-called “pain points” of ordering food, which I suppose means orders showing up cold, or something. (...)
Think of it this way: taxpayers — in this case in Ohio — are subsidizing the destruction of small, local, independent businesses in order to benefit the biggest corporations in the country. (What makes this even more offensive: Kroger is also headquartered in Ohio. It doesn’t need incentives to build new facilities in the state, since the cost of starting from scratch in some other locale would probably be higher, even in the absence of subsidies.)
by Pat Garofalo, Public Seminar | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
Then it got worse: Kroger is using its data to move into what’s known as the “ghost kitchen” business, something that is a terrible development for local independent restaurants. So, Ohio taxpayers are helping a massive supermarket chain put other businesses out of business, including their favorite corner eatery. That Ohio is doing this in a year when small restaurant proprietors are under all but existential threat adds insult to injury.
Ghost kitchens are as spooky as they sound. Big corporations like gig companies, supermarkets, and fast food chains use the data they collect through their various lines of business to create delivery-only food operations. But here’s the catch: They often hide and disguise the fact that they aren’t actual restaurants. They give them homey sounding names, like Seaside or Lorenzo’s, and build out web pages that make them appear to be places you could drop in on. In fact, they are randomly located in warehouses and other industrial spaces, and backed by big investors and corporations whose participation is often hidden by a web of shell companies.
This model of operating a platform and then also competing on it should just be illegal, even though it’s widespread. Whether it’s Amazon using info gained from its third-party sellers to steal products, Google using data gleaned from its advertising technology to outbid publishers, or delivery apps cutting real restaurants out of the restaurant business, the issue is the same: The corporation that runs the infrastructure has an anticompetitive advantage over all of the other participants. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, succinctly puts it, “You can be an umpire, or you can be a player—but you can’t be both.”
But even if authorities woke up and banned Uber from going into the ghost kitchen business, that wouldn’t stop Kroger. It’s got the data too, and it doesn’t need to trick rival businesses into turning it over. It’s the largest grocer in the U.S., and the second-largest in-person retailer after Walmart. It runs stores under its own corporate name, as well as Harris Teeter and 14 other brands. They are using info gained from their own shoppers. Kroger is partnering with an outfit called ClusterTruck that uses algorithms to remove the so-called “pain points” of ordering food, which I suppose means orders showing up cold, or something. (...)
Think of it this way: taxpayers — in this case in Ohio — are subsidizing the destruction of small, local, independent businesses in order to benefit the biggest corporations in the country. (What makes this even more offensive: Kroger is also headquartered in Ohio. It doesn’t need incentives to build new facilities in the state, since the cost of starting from scratch in some other locale would probably be higher, even in the absence of subsidies.)
by Pat Garofalo, Public Seminar | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
A Successful U.S. Missile Intercept Ends the Era of Nuclear Stability
This month, an intercontinental ballistic missile was fired in the general direction of the Hawaiian islands. During its descent a few minutes later, still outside the earth’s atmosphere, it was struck by another missile that destroyed it.
With that detonation, the world’s tenuous nuclear balance suddenly threatened to come out of kilter. The danger of atom bombs being used again was already increasing. Now it’s grown once more.
The ICBM flying over the Pacific was an American dummy designed to test a new kind of interceptor technology. As it flew, satellites spotted it and alerted an Air Force base in Colorado, which in turn communicated with a Navy destroyer positioned northeast of Hawaii. This ship, the USS John Finn, fired its own missile which, in the jargon, hit and killed the incoming one.
At first glimpse, this sort of technological wizardry would seem to be a cause for not only awe but also joy, for it promises to protect the U.S. from missile attacks by North Korea, for example. But in the weird logic of nuclear strategy, a breakthrough intended to make us safer could end up making us less safe.
That’s because the new interception technology cuts the link between offense and defense that underlies all calculations about nuclear scenarios. Since the Cold War, stability — and thus peace — has been preserved through the macabre reality of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. No nation will launch a first strike if it expects immediate retaliation in kind. A different way of describing MAD is mutual vulnerability.
If one player in this game-theory scenario suddenly gets a shield (these American systems are in fact called Aegis), this mutual vulnerability is gone. Adversaries, in this case mainly Russia but increasingly China too, must assume that their own deterrent is no longer effective because they may not be able to successfully strike back.
For this reason defensive escalation has become almost as controversial as the offensive kind. Russia has been railing against land-based American interceptor systems in places like eastern Europe and Alaska. But this month’s test was the first in which a ship did the intercepting. This twist means that before long the U.S. or another nation could protect itself from all sides.
This new uncertainty complicates a situation that was already becoming fiendishly intricate. The U.S. and Russia, which have about 90% of the world’s nukes, have ditched two arms-control treaties in as many decades. The only one remaining, called New START, is due to expire on Feb. 5, a mere 16 days after Joe Biden takes office as president. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has for 50 years tried to keep nations without nukes from acquiring them, is also in deep trouble, and due to be renegotiated next year. Iran’s intentions remain unknown.
At the same time, both the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their arsenals, while China is adding to its own as fast as it can. Among the new weapons are nukes carried by hypersonic missiles, which are so fast that the leaders of the target nation only have minutes to decide what’s incoming and how to respond. They also include so-called tactical nukes, with “smaller” (in a very relative sense) payloads that make them more suitable for conventional wars, thus lowering the threshold for their use.
The risk thus keeps rising that a nuclear war starts by accident, miscalculation or false alarm, especially when factoring in scenarios that involve terrorism, rogue states or conflicts in outer or cyberspace. In a sort of global protest against this insanity, 84 countries without nukes have signed a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which will take effect next year. But neither the nine nuclear nations nor their closest allies will ever sign it.
by Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: U.S. Navy/Getty Images
With that detonation, the world’s tenuous nuclear balance suddenly threatened to come out of kilter. The danger of atom bombs being used again was already increasing. Now it’s grown once more.
The ICBM flying over the Pacific was an American dummy designed to test a new kind of interceptor technology. As it flew, satellites spotted it and alerted an Air Force base in Colorado, which in turn communicated with a Navy destroyer positioned northeast of Hawaii. This ship, the USS John Finn, fired its own missile which, in the jargon, hit and killed the incoming one.
That’s because the new interception technology cuts the link between offense and defense that underlies all calculations about nuclear scenarios. Since the Cold War, stability — and thus peace — has been preserved through the macabre reality of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. No nation will launch a first strike if it expects immediate retaliation in kind. A different way of describing MAD is mutual vulnerability.
If one player in this game-theory scenario suddenly gets a shield (these American systems are in fact called Aegis), this mutual vulnerability is gone. Adversaries, in this case mainly Russia but increasingly China too, must assume that their own deterrent is no longer effective because they may not be able to successfully strike back.
For this reason defensive escalation has become almost as controversial as the offensive kind. Russia has been railing against land-based American interceptor systems in places like eastern Europe and Alaska. But this month’s test was the first in which a ship did the intercepting. This twist means that before long the U.S. or another nation could protect itself from all sides.
This new uncertainty complicates a situation that was already becoming fiendishly intricate. The U.S. and Russia, which have about 90% of the world’s nukes, have ditched two arms-control treaties in as many decades. The only one remaining, called New START, is due to expire on Feb. 5, a mere 16 days after Joe Biden takes office as president. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has for 50 years tried to keep nations without nukes from acquiring them, is also in deep trouble, and due to be renegotiated next year. Iran’s intentions remain unknown.
At the same time, both the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their arsenals, while China is adding to its own as fast as it can. Among the new weapons are nukes carried by hypersonic missiles, which are so fast that the leaders of the target nation only have minutes to decide what’s incoming and how to respond. They also include so-called tactical nukes, with “smaller” (in a very relative sense) payloads that make them more suitable for conventional wars, thus lowering the threshold for their use.
The risk thus keeps rising that a nuclear war starts by accident, miscalculation or false alarm, especially when factoring in scenarios that involve terrorism, rogue states or conflicts in outer or cyberspace. In a sort of global protest against this insanity, 84 countries without nukes have signed a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which will take effect next year. But neither the nine nuclear nations nor their closest allies will ever sign it.
by Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: U.S. Navy/Getty Images
Monday, November 30, 2020
The Logic of Pandemic Restrictions Is Falling Apart
Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?
Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” the science journalist Roxanne Khamsi recently wrote in Wired. “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.
Since my conversation with Josh, the internal logic of New York’s coronavirus protocols has deteriorated further. As more and more New Yorkers have become sick, officials have urged people to skip Thanksgiving, because of the danger of eating indoors with people you don’t live with. Rather than closing indoor dining, however, Cuomo has ordered all restaurants and bars simply to close by 10 p.m. This curfew also applies to gyms, which are not exactly hotbeds of late-night activity even in normal times. Meanwhile, case counts have risen enough to trigger the closure of New York City public schools, but businesses still have full discretion to require employees to come into work. (Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
It isn’t just New York; in states across the country, local officials have urged caution and fastidiousness. But those words can seem tenuously connected, at best, to the types of safety measures they’ve put in place. In Rhode Island, for example, residents are prohibited from gathering with even one person outside their household, even in the open air of a public park. But inside a restaurant? Well, 25 people is fine. Hire a caterer? You’re legally cleared to have up to 75 outdoors. The governor’s executive order merely notes: “The lower attendance at such events, the lower the risk.” (The Rhode Island governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly. Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed. The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.
But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one. “You’ve got a lot of problems if every state has to develop everything from scratch,” Tara Kirk Sell, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “First of all, it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.
In the worst-case scenarios, that interpretation has privileged politics over the health of the population. Vociferously Trump-allied governors in hard-hit states such as Georgia, Florida, and South Dakota have declined to so much as implement a public mask mandate while local caseloads have soared. Sometimes, they have sparred with municipal leaders trying to do more. In hard-hit El Paso, Texas, for example, a local stay-at-home order was recently overturned by a state court, even as local officials have had to call in refrigerated trucks to serve as makeshift morgues.
Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem. When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago. The pandemic is surging virtually everywhere in America; last week alone, it infected more than 1 million people and killed more than 8,000. And yet indoor dining largely remains open, even as leaders warn of the very real perils of Thanksgiving dinner.
Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” the science journalist Roxanne Khamsi recently wrote in Wired. “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.
It isn’t just New York; in states across the country, local officials have urged caution and fastidiousness. But those words can seem tenuously connected, at best, to the types of safety measures they’ve put in place. In Rhode Island, for example, residents are prohibited from gathering with even one person outside their household, even in the open air of a public park. But inside a restaurant? Well, 25 people is fine. Hire a caterer? You’re legally cleared to have up to 75 outdoors. The governor’s executive order merely notes: “The lower attendance at such events, the lower the risk.” (The Rhode Island governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly. Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed. The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.
But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one. “You’ve got a lot of problems if every state has to develop everything from scratch,” Tara Kirk Sell, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “First of all, it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.
In the worst-case scenarios, that interpretation has privileged politics over the health of the population. Vociferously Trump-allied governors in hard-hit states such as Georgia, Florida, and South Dakota have declined to so much as implement a public mask mandate while local caseloads have soared. Sometimes, they have sparred with municipal leaders trying to do more. In hard-hit El Paso, Texas, for example, a local stay-at-home order was recently overturned by a state court, even as local officials have had to call in refrigerated trucks to serve as makeshift morgues.
Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem. When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago. The pandemic is surging virtually everywhere in America; last week alone, it infected more than 1 million people and killed more than 8,000. And yet indoor dining largely remains open, even as leaders warn of the very real perils of Thanksgiving dinner.
by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Suzanne Kreiter/Boston Globe/Getty
Sunday, November 29, 2020
'It Stretches the Limits of Performance': The Race to Make the World's Fastest Running Shoe
Natasha Cockram never really cared about shoes. When the Welsh runner entered her first marathon in 2017, she wore a pair of two-year-old Nike racing flats that cost her £15 at an outlet store. And she was a talented athlete: a former junior cross country and middle distance champion, she had won an athletics scholarship to the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. She studied psychology and raced hard.
“What I’ve always loved about running is that it was so accessible,” Cockram, who is 27, says when we first speak in early September. “All you needed was a pair of trainers. It didn’t matter what they were – anyone could just do it.”
But “just doing it” didn’t seem enough for the brand that built an empire on that phrase. In the year that Cockram began her marathon journey, Nike revealed a radical new shoe during Breaking2, its unsuccessful attempt to smash the two-hour barrier in the men’s marathon with the Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge. The neon Vaporfly shoes, which had thick foam soles embedded with carbon fibre plates, would shake up distance running with their outlandish looks and claim to save a runner 4% in energy expenditure – equivalent to several minutes in a marathon.
The shoes soon inspired accusations of technological doping, not only challenging the purity of a great Olympic event but causing the biggest ethical schism in sports equipment since Speedo’s shark-inspired suits rocked swimming in 2008. The slippery material, versions of which other brands swiftly produced, enabled swimmers, including Michael Phelps, to glide more quickly through the water, triggering a wave of new world records, before being banned by Fina, the sport’s governing body, in 2009.
Runners said Nike’s Vaporflys offered a similar advantage; they felt as if they contained springs, and experts lined up to cry foul. Ross Tucker, a leading South African sport scientist, called them “the shoe that broke running”. Nevertheless, they rapidly sold out, contributing to a near tripling of Nike’s share price and triggering an industry arms race that is still playing out among its rivals. (...)
Only 10 years earlier, distance running had been locked in a very different arms race. As part of a “barefoot” running craze, brands had focused on featherlight shoes with barely-there soles. Nike had looked into minimalist shoes in its early research for what became Breaking2. But runners complained that they were too unforgiving; fatigue trumped any weight advantage.
Nike’s own scientists, led by Matthew Nurse, a biomechanics researcher at the brand’s Oregon HQ, had begun to look for a solution in much thicker foam. But it needed to be lighter. The breakthrough lay in Pebax, a plastic that has been used for years in dozens of applications, including catheter pipes. Produced in raw granules by Arkema, a French company, its chemical structure is a chain of alternating soft and rigid blocks, the ratio of which can be tweaked precisely. Together, the blocks offer toughness and flexibility at a very low weight, as well as a strong energy return, or bounce. “The nature of the chain is not a big secret,” says François Tanguy, a scientist and European manager for Arkema. “How we make it is a very well-kept secret.”
By turning Pebax granules into a foam, Nike got what it needed: a Boost-killer that it would market as ZoomX; an unusually soft, light sole that would return rather than absorb energy, while also reducing fatigue in the brutal last miles of a marathon. A carbon plate – a feature that Reebok and Adidas had experimented with in the 1990s – added structure and support, reducing energy-wasting flex in the toes.
“What I’ve always loved about running is that it was so accessible,” Cockram, who is 27, says when we first speak in early September. “All you needed was a pair of trainers. It didn’t matter what they were – anyone could just do it.”
But “just doing it” didn’t seem enough for the brand that built an empire on that phrase. In the year that Cockram began her marathon journey, Nike revealed a radical new shoe during Breaking2, its unsuccessful attempt to smash the two-hour barrier in the men’s marathon with the Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge. The neon Vaporfly shoes, which had thick foam soles embedded with carbon fibre plates, would shake up distance running with their outlandish looks and claim to save a runner 4% in energy expenditure – equivalent to several minutes in a marathon.
Runners said Nike’s Vaporflys offered a similar advantage; they felt as if they contained springs, and experts lined up to cry foul. Ross Tucker, a leading South African sport scientist, called them “the shoe that broke running”. Nevertheless, they rapidly sold out, contributing to a near tripling of Nike’s share price and triggering an industry arms race that is still playing out among its rivals. (...)
Only 10 years earlier, distance running had been locked in a very different arms race. As part of a “barefoot” running craze, brands had focused on featherlight shoes with barely-there soles. Nike had looked into minimalist shoes in its early research for what became Breaking2. But runners complained that they were too unforgiving; fatigue trumped any weight advantage.
Nike’s own scientists, led by Matthew Nurse, a biomechanics researcher at the brand’s Oregon HQ, had begun to look for a solution in much thicker foam. But it needed to be lighter. The breakthrough lay in Pebax, a plastic that has been used for years in dozens of applications, including catheter pipes. Produced in raw granules by Arkema, a French company, its chemical structure is a chain of alternating soft and rigid blocks, the ratio of which can be tweaked precisely. Together, the blocks offer toughness and flexibility at a very low weight, as well as a strong energy return, or bounce. “The nature of the chain is not a big secret,” says François Tanguy, a scientist and European manager for Arkema. “How we make it is a very well-kept secret.”
By turning Pebax granules into a foam, Nike got what it needed: a Boost-killer that it would market as ZoomX; an unusually soft, light sole that would return rather than absorb energy, while also reducing fatigue in the brutal last miles of a marathon. A carbon plate – a feature that Reebok and Adidas had experimented with in the 1990s – added structure and support, reducing energy-wasting flex in the toes.
by Simon Usborne, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: EPA
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Banality of Evil, McKinsey Edition
When Purdue Pharma agreed last month to plead guilty to criminal charges involving OxyContin, the Justice Department noted the role an unidentified consulting company had played in driving sales of the addictive painkiller even as public outrage grew over widespread overdoses.
Documents released last week in a federal bankruptcy court in New York show that the adviser was McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious consulting firm. The 160 pages include emails and slides revealing new details about McKinsey’s advice to the Sackler family, Purdue’s billionaire owners, and the firm’s now notorious plan to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales at a time when opioid abuse had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.
The presentation estimated how many customers of companies including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of $14,810 per “event” meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8 million that year. (...)
McKinsey’s involvement in the opioid crisis came to light early last year, with the release of documents from Massachusetts, which is among the states suing Purdue. Those records show that McKinsey was helping Purdue find a way “to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” from OxyContin.
On Tuesday, Purdue pleaded guilty to criminal charges, including defrauding federal health agencies and paying illegal kickbacks to doctors. The company also faces roughly $8.3 billion in penalties. As part of the settlement, members of the Sackler family will pay $225 million in civil penalties.
In a statement issued after the announcement of the settlement in October, Purdue said it “deeply regrets and accepts responsibility” for misconduct involving its marketing of OxyContin.
The federal settlement with Purdue comes as states and municipalities seek compensation from opioid makers for helping fuel a health crisis that has killed more than 450,000 Americans since 1999. Purdue is now seeking bankruptcy protection, as are other manufacturers.
“This is the banality of evil, M.B.A. edition,” Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant who reviewed the documents, said of the firm’s work with Purdue. “They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”
Mr. Giridharadas is a New York Times contributor who wrote a 2018 book that examined the power of elites, including those at McKinsey, for how they evade responsibility for social harm.
In recent years, McKinsey has attracted criticism and unwanted attention for its dealings around the world, including in authoritarian countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Its business in South Africa was decimated after McKinsey worked with companies tied to a corruption scandal that led to the ouster of the country’s president. In the United States, McKinsey worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump, proposing ways to cut spending on food and housing for detainees.
The documents released last week detail McKinsey’s work with Purdue going back to 2008, the year after the drugmaker pleaded guilty to misleading regulators. The Food and Drug Administration had previously told Purdue that OxyContin would face sales restrictions and that doctors prescribing it would require specialized training.
The Sackler family saw those rules as a threat and, joining with McKinsey, made a plan to “band together” with other opioid makers to push back, according to one email. McKinsey prepped Purdue executives for a vital meeting before an F.D.A. advisory committee reviewing its proposed reformulation of OxyContin to make it less prone to abuse. The reformulation went on the market in 2010.
McKinsey put together briefing materials that anticipated questions Purdue would receive. One possible question: “Who at Purdue takes personal responsibility for these deaths?”
The proposed answer: “We all feel responsible.”
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, NY Times | Read more:
Documents released last week in a federal bankruptcy court in New York show that the adviser was McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious consulting firm. The 160 pages include emails and slides revealing new details about McKinsey’s advice to the Sackler family, Purdue’s billionaire owners, and the firm’s now notorious plan to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales at a time when opioid abuse had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.
The presentation estimated how many customers of companies including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of $14,810 per “event” meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8 million that year. (...)
On Tuesday, Purdue pleaded guilty to criminal charges, including defrauding federal health agencies and paying illegal kickbacks to doctors. The company also faces roughly $8.3 billion in penalties. As part of the settlement, members of the Sackler family will pay $225 million in civil penalties.
In a statement issued after the announcement of the settlement in October, Purdue said it “deeply regrets and accepts responsibility” for misconduct involving its marketing of OxyContin.
The federal settlement with Purdue comes as states and municipalities seek compensation from opioid makers for helping fuel a health crisis that has killed more than 450,000 Americans since 1999. Purdue is now seeking bankruptcy protection, as are other manufacturers.
“This is the banality of evil, M.B.A. edition,” Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant who reviewed the documents, said of the firm’s work with Purdue. “They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”
Mr. Giridharadas is a New York Times contributor who wrote a 2018 book that examined the power of elites, including those at McKinsey, for how they evade responsibility for social harm.
In recent years, McKinsey has attracted criticism and unwanted attention for its dealings around the world, including in authoritarian countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Its business in South Africa was decimated after McKinsey worked with companies tied to a corruption scandal that led to the ouster of the country’s president. In the United States, McKinsey worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump, proposing ways to cut spending on food and housing for detainees.
The documents released last week detail McKinsey’s work with Purdue going back to 2008, the year after the drugmaker pleaded guilty to misleading regulators. The Food and Drug Administration had previously told Purdue that OxyContin would face sales restrictions and that doctors prescribing it would require specialized training.
The Sackler family saw those rules as a threat and, joining with McKinsey, made a plan to “band together” with other opioid makers to push back, according to one email. McKinsey prepped Purdue executives for a vital meeting before an F.D.A. advisory committee reviewing its proposed reformulation of OxyContin to make it less prone to abuse. The reformulation went on the market in 2010.
McKinsey put together briefing materials that anticipated questions Purdue would receive. One possible question: “Who at Purdue takes personal responsibility for these deaths?”
The proposed answer: “We all feel responsible.”
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
How to Build a Guitar
For hundreds of years, the craftspeople who built guitars, called luthiers, worked entirely by hand. Now, robots, computer programs and big machines help make each instrument as perfect as it can be (though people still do a lot of the work). At Martin, it can take between three and six weeks to build each instrument; more complex guitars can take up to six months. And during peak production, the factory can put out more than 250 guitars each day. But there’s still a bit of uncertainty — trees are living things, so each piece of wood is different. Here’s how it all comes together at the Martin factory.
How to Build a (Martin) Guitar (NYT)
Image: Christopher Payne
Friday, November 27, 2020
Smart Money Is Staying Away From Arctic Drilling
The Trump administration is racing against legal deadlines and a merciless regulatory calendar in its last-ditch effort to sell drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in at noon on Jan. 20.
Even if the White House succeeds in clearing those hurdles, it’ll still face the cold reality of the market: funding for Arctic drilling is becoming harder and harder to find. Both oil companies and banks have decided they can no longer tolerate the risk of drilling in one of the fastest-warming places on the globe. Ben Cushing, who leads the nonprofit Sierra Club’s financial advocacy campaign, put the problem simply: “Smart money is staying away from this kind of development in the Arctic.”
Buying the leases—which could go for as little as $5 an acre—is the cheap part of the oil exploration process. Every other step—from enlisting consultants to conduct required environmental studies to mounting industrial operations in a remote wilderness without existing infrastructure—is hugely expensive. The break-even price for the oil that companies would extract could be as high as $80 per barrel, according to Rystad Energy, a level the market hasn’t seen since October 2018.
Most of today’s likely bidders would need outside financing to actually get anything out of their Arctic leases. But banks are increasingly worried about damage to their public image from backing drilling in the reserve, which 70% of American voters oppose, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Underscoring that perceived risk: Institutions associated with Energy Transfer LP’s controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline lost $4.4 billion in account closures and divestments in 2017, research from the University of Colorado Boulder shows.
Activists, Native Alaskans, and more recently large shareholders have worked to persuade lenders they were jeopardizing the climate, their investments, and their reputation by underwriting Arctic drilling. Five major U.S. banks—Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—have already ruled out financing oil and gas projects in the Arctic refuge, leaving Bank of America Corp. the only major holdout. Last week, many of the same activists who worked on the banks issued a similar warning to the world’s top insurers.
“The options are dwindling as banks shy away from the Arctic,” said Kathy Hipple, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Not only because of ESG reasons,” she added, referring to environmental, social, and governance standards for investing, “but because it’s a high-cost, high-risk business.” (...)
The administration’s ability to mount a sale at all—much less formally issue the leases—before Trump leaves office is also in considerable doubt. Because of various requirements and mandatory waiting periods, the earliest auction date is likely Jan. 19, the day before Biden will be inaugurated. That would leave the Interior Department just one day to vet the high bidders and issue the leases, a process that typically takes two months.
Given the current economic environment, the regulatory uncertainty, and the steep public opposition to Arctic drilling, it’s not clear which oil companies would even show up for an auction. Those once viewed as potential bidders for Arctic acreage have slashed spending this year as the coronavirus pandemic eroded crude demand and prices. And any investment in Arctic oil rights could become a stranded asset, untouchable in a warming world shifting away from fossil fuels.
Any buyers would still need to apply for and receive a slew of additional government licenses to begin searching for crude, from drilling approvals to animal harassment authorizations, rights of way, and pollution permits. There’s no reason to believe Biden’s Interior Department would OK any of them. “If leases are sold and issued before a new administration comes in, then every permit becomes a barrier,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, a former deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department under President Barack Obama.
by Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty
Even if the White House succeeds in clearing those hurdles, it’ll still face the cold reality of the market: funding for Arctic drilling is becoming harder and harder to find. Both oil companies and banks have decided they can no longer tolerate the risk of drilling in one of the fastest-warming places on the globe. Ben Cushing, who leads the nonprofit Sierra Club’s financial advocacy campaign, put the problem simply: “Smart money is staying away from this kind of development in the Arctic.”
Most of today’s likely bidders would need outside financing to actually get anything out of their Arctic leases. But banks are increasingly worried about damage to their public image from backing drilling in the reserve, which 70% of American voters oppose, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Underscoring that perceived risk: Institutions associated with Energy Transfer LP’s controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline lost $4.4 billion in account closures and divestments in 2017, research from the University of Colorado Boulder shows.
Activists, Native Alaskans, and more recently large shareholders have worked to persuade lenders they were jeopardizing the climate, their investments, and their reputation by underwriting Arctic drilling. Five major U.S. banks—Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—have already ruled out financing oil and gas projects in the Arctic refuge, leaving Bank of America Corp. the only major holdout. Last week, many of the same activists who worked on the banks issued a similar warning to the world’s top insurers.
“The options are dwindling as banks shy away from the Arctic,” said Kathy Hipple, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Not only because of ESG reasons,” she added, referring to environmental, social, and governance standards for investing, “but because it’s a high-cost, high-risk business.” (...)
The administration’s ability to mount a sale at all—much less formally issue the leases—before Trump leaves office is also in considerable doubt. Because of various requirements and mandatory waiting periods, the earliest auction date is likely Jan. 19, the day before Biden will be inaugurated. That would leave the Interior Department just one day to vet the high bidders and issue the leases, a process that typically takes two months.
Given the current economic environment, the regulatory uncertainty, and the steep public opposition to Arctic drilling, it’s not clear which oil companies would even show up for an auction. Those once viewed as potential bidders for Arctic acreage have slashed spending this year as the coronavirus pandemic eroded crude demand and prices. And any investment in Arctic oil rights could become a stranded asset, untouchable in a warming world shifting away from fossil fuels.
Any buyers would still need to apply for and receive a slew of additional government licenses to begin searching for crude, from drilling approvals to animal harassment authorizations, rights of way, and pollution permits. There’s no reason to believe Biden’s Interior Department would OK any of them. “If leases are sold and issued before a new administration comes in, then every permit becomes a barrier,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, a former deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department under President Barack Obama.
by Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Or smart money could be placing articles like this one.]
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Torturing Geniuses
Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The Queen’s Gambit, is not someone you’d want as a friend. She takes money from her childhood mentor—the old janitor who taught her chess—and never pays him back, visits him or thanks him for launching her career. She treats the young men who help her improve—a group that eventually coalesces into a supportive entourage—in a similarly instrumental way. She is so focused on winning tournaments that she can barely spare a word of caution when her adoptive mother is falling into a fatal alcoholic spiral. When she loses, she is petulant and childish, unlike her opponents, who are graceful and kind. She is cruel and manipulative when—as an adult—she plays against a talented Russian child, softening to him only after she has beaten him.
Beth doesn’t seem to love anyone, but viewers love her anyways, admiring the sheer force of her genius. It doesn’t matter that most viewers don’t play chess. The chess scenes focus our attention on her striking, wide-set eyes, her perfect figure and her manicured fingernails, as though gawking at her body were a symbolic way of appreciating some mysterious power in her brain. We are clued in to her genius by other people saying she is “astonishing,” and by their willingness to put themselves at her service.
In my own field there are also geniuses. Once a Genius asked me a question in the Q&A after my talk, and then walked out before hearing my answer. At a conference, a Genius didn’t bother to move from his seat—next to the speaker—when he would answer his phone. At a dinner after a different conference, a Genius was arguing with me and became frustrated with my unwillingness to accept his point. He started touching me—not in a sexual way, and not in a violent way, but something halfway in between—putting his hand on my hand, my arm, eventually my neck to emphasize his points. He did this in full view of everyone. No one stopped him, including me. Once I invited a Genius over to my house for dinner. He came an hour late, with an entourage, and handed me a half-empty bag of popcorn he had been eating as a hostess gift. As the conversation turned philosophical, he quieted his entourage, signaling that this part of the evening did not involve them. Like so many of the people in Beth’s life, they welcomed being of use to the Genius in whatever way the Genius saw fit. These are not four stories about the same person; these were four different Geniuses.
Probably you are ready to denounce the behavior of these Geniuses and of the communities that accommodate them, but keep in mind that I haven’t done anything to make their genius sparkle for you; I haven’t sexed up their talents, the way The Queen’s Gambit did Beth’s.
by Agnes Callard, The Point | Read more:
Beth doesn’t seem to love anyone, but viewers love her anyways, admiring the sheer force of her genius. It doesn’t matter that most viewers don’t play chess. The chess scenes focus our attention on her striking, wide-set eyes, her perfect figure and her manicured fingernails, as though gawking at her body were a symbolic way of appreciating some mysterious power in her brain. We are clued in to her genius by other people saying she is “astonishing,” and by their willingness to put themselves at her service.
Probably you are ready to denounce the behavior of these Geniuses and of the communities that accommodate them, but keep in mind that I haven’t done anything to make their genius sparkle for you; I haven’t sexed up their talents, the way The Queen’s Gambit did Beth’s.
by Agnes Callard, The Point | Read more:
Image: Phil Bray/Netflix
[ed. See also: How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year (The Guardian)]
[ed. See also: How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year (The Guardian)]
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Why Some Say Janet Yellen Is Not the Worst Pick for Treasury Secretary
Yesterday, President-elect Joe Biden picked Janet Yellen to run the Department of the Treasury. The hope among progressives was that Biden would pick Elizabeth Warren, a politician Wall Street bankers see as nothing less than the embodiment of Satan. Nevertheless, Yellen, who served as Federal Reserve chair under Obama, is not on the right. Nor is she one of those Wall Street-to-Washington-and-back revolving door types, such as Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. Nor is she a charlatan like Steven Mnuchin. (Not one economic thought exists in the head of that "investor.") Yellen is an academic economist and, more significantly, a neo-Keynesian.
The reason why Biden picked her is because the bankers saw her manage the Fed in an apolitical manner from 2010 to 2017, when Trump replaced her with a white man, Jerome Powell, for no good reason. Yellen was, to the market's liking, predictable and very cautious. She ran the nation's bank-of-last-resort with a steady hand: raised interest rates gradually during the recovery, and, in 2014, began chipping away at the $4 trillion debt dumped on the Fed's books by quantitive easing. But why should the left not feel so bad about her appointment? Why did the DSA card-carrying heterodox economist Doug Henwood tweet that "Joe could have done a lot worse than Yellen"? Because she is a neo-Keynesian, which is not the best type of Keynesian, but it is far better than a neoclassical economist. Let me explain why this is so.
Here is what happened to capitalism between the crucial years of 1870 and 1945. This period saw the growing strength of unions and the expansion of democracy in advanced capitalist nations of the West. A world war and massive market crash put capitalism in the ICU. It really was about to die. The doctor who saved post-classical capitalism (also called monopoly capitalism) from communism and fascism was John Maynard Keynes. His prescriptions would transform post-classical capitalism into state-managed capitalism. This meant the expansion of social welfare, the normalization of union demands, and massive public investments. This was the order of things after the Second World War. There was the New Deal in the US, the Beveridge Report in the UK, and the social market in Germany.
All of this had the appearance of working until the 1970s. At this point, the "old gang" (austerity, small government, market orthodoxy) regained political power and began an assault on labor that continues to this day. The reorganization of the post-war economy was legitimized by a whole branch of economic thinking that at every opportunity claimed the government was the problem and the market the solution. To make such an assertion at all plausible, the revived economic orthodoxy replaced history and class-based common sense with models and mathematics. Markets and their distributive mechanisms became a matter of number and algebra. By the end of the 1980s, Keynes, and his form of historically informed social democracy, was no longer taught in economic programs in the US and UK.
The way his ideas survived in the academic world was as the neo-Keynesian school initiated by John Hicks's formulization of Keynes's non-mathematical General Theory (the IS-LM model) and Paul Samuelson's massively influential introductory textbook Economics. This is how the mainstream left survived the coldest winter ever (1978 to 2008). They went along with the math and models of the neoclassical school (which is called economics in our day) and made their arguments in those exact terms. No more talking about Karl Marx or even David Ricardo, who in 1817 made the fatal error of attributing value creation solely to labor, to work, rather than capital.
This is where Yellen comes from, the neo-Keynesians, who are considered to be center-left on the political spectrum. But there are also post-Keynesians (I side with this group, by the way). But no one ever hears about them because for the most part they push Keynes's ideas to a final conclusion: socialism. Post-Keynesians emerged from Cambridge University in the 1930s. Neo-Keynesians from MIT around the same time. The former eventually came to hate the later, and they accused them of bastardizing Keynes. These bitter feelings were expressed during the Cambridge capital controversy. Basically, the neo-Keynesians were accused of "faking the funk."
The reason why Biden picked her is because the bankers saw her manage the Fed in an apolitical manner from 2010 to 2017, when Trump replaced her with a white man, Jerome Powell, for no good reason. Yellen was, to the market's liking, predictable and very cautious. She ran the nation's bank-of-last-resort with a steady hand: raised interest rates gradually during the recovery, and, in 2014, began chipping away at the $4 trillion debt dumped on the Fed's books by quantitive easing. But why should the left not feel so bad about her appointment? Why did the DSA card-carrying heterodox economist Doug Henwood tweet that "Joe could have done a lot worse than Yellen"? Because she is a neo-Keynesian, which is not the best type of Keynesian, but it is far better than a neoclassical economist. Let me explain why this is so.
All of this had the appearance of working until the 1970s. At this point, the "old gang" (austerity, small government, market orthodoxy) regained political power and began an assault on labor that continues to this day. The reorganization of the post-war economy was legitimized by a whole branch of economic thinking that at every opportunity claimed the government was the problem and the market the solution. To make such an assertion at all plausible, the revived economic orthodoxy replaced history and class-based common sense with models and mathematics. Markets and their distributive mechanisms became a matter of number and algebra. By the end of the 1980s, Keynes, and his form of historically informed social democracy, was no longer taught in economic programs in the US and UK.
The way his ideas survived in the academic world was as the neo-Keynesian school initiated by John Hicks's formulization of Keynes's non-mathematical General Theory (the IS-LM model) and Paul Samuelson's massively influential introductory textbook Economics. This is how the mainstream left survived the coldest winter ever (1978 to 2008). They went along with the math and models of the neoclassical school (which is called economics in our day) and made their arguments in those exact terms. No more talking about Karl Marx or even David Ricardo, who in 1817 made the fatal error of attributing value creation solely to labor, to work, rather than capital.
This is where Yellen comes from, the neo-Keynesians, who are considered to be center-left on the political spectrum. But there are also post-Keynesians (I side with this group, by the way). But no one ever hears about them because for the most part they push Keynes's ideas to a final conclusion: socialism. Post-Keynesians emerged from Cambridge University in the 1930s. Neo-Keynesians from MIT around the same time. The former eventually came to hate the later, and they accused them of bastardizing Keynes. These bitter feelings were expressed during the Cambridge capital controversy. Basically, the neo-Keynesians were accused of "faking the funk."
by Charles Mudede, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Zack Gibbon/Getty
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
On Recycling
I have a spare TV. None of my friends want it, what do I do with it? My recycling bin takes E-Waste, but I have heard that there was no longer any countries that processes plastic or E-Waste anymore! What do I do? How did we get to this place? (...)
Somewhere, wrapped in the above topics, right between "quicksand" and "killer bees" is the big topic of today: "Our landfills will fill up and overflow!" followed by education on the consequences of consumerism and waste management, and why recycling will save the world.
The issue of waste and recycling is not a small issue in education. From fifth graders doing soda can drives or pop tab drives for charity, to high school freshmen adopting a highway, to high school student body presidents running campaigns on adding multi-sort recycling to their schools.
Throughout the whole process, there are a few constants that are taught until we completely internalize them. Trash is bad, and recycling is good. Plastic is bad, paper is less bad. Glass is good! Landfills are bad, and leach toxic waste into our drinking water. Straws are bad - they choke turtles. We need to recycle, because otherwise, our waste will end up in the ocean and cause the giant garbage swirls and kill wildlife.
These issues don't end in school - we all take (some) of our schooling with us, and it ends up in public policy. In my city, Minneapolis, all residents pay through taxes for recycling bins, with high public support. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, residents pay per trash pickup, but recycling is every week for free, to encourage residents to recycle a larger proportion of their trash. Offices have recycling bins and rubbish bins side by side - one for the plastic wrapper and bowl of your salad, one for the cardboard label around the salad.
When we decide to recycle things - these ethos hold us to follow an easy guideline - put everything allowed into that recycling bin. Oh, it takes E-Waste? I'll dump in my old laptop and my old monitor. Easy! And this is life as we see it today.
What happens between the bin and the landfill?
While we often like to joke about Trash and Recycling being in the same bin this is not terribly far from the truth. Either the garbage truck has two separate compartments for trash and recycling, or two trucks come by. Garbage trucks aren't very good at long-haul trucking, so they usually have a route that ends at the Waste Transfer Station. A Waste Transfer station looks like a giant swimming pool full of waste. Your garbageman backs up their truck to a special conveyor belt. That conveyor belt goes over some fancy magnets and fans to blow/suck away anything raw and valuable. No matter the station, usually at least one person vaguely scans the waste for valuables before it gets dumped into the giant swimming pool.
Often attached to these stations is a Materials Recovery Facility, called a MRF, pronounced "Murph". (I can't type MRF without thinking of the movie, so I'll be adding an explanation mark) A MRF! is how your recycling bin gets processed. A set of conveyor belts with a series of well-tuned magnets, fans, and human components set to taking certain plastics one way, e-waste another way, and anything wet or non-recyclable dumping straight into the swimming pool with the other waste.
At one end of the giant swimming pool is a huge compressor. The trash that makes it to the compressor is compressed into a a bale the size of a big refrigerator, loaded onto special dump trucks, that take it to the landfill. At the landfill, there is a small crack that is open to the air, where they load in that bale in a neatly organized, structurally sound layer.
The landfill has a special liner underneath, that directs all liquids coming off of it into a barrel, which is brought to a treatment plant. It has a special liner overhead, which directs any gasses coming off of the trash to gas recovery valves. There is a "correct" depth to a landfill, and once that is met, it is often covered with top soil and grass, able to be used for other purposes.
Mrs. D, my Elementary teacher, was wrong about running out of space from landfills. I dislike showing how much space in Arizona we could fit 1,000 years of trash in. How would we get it there? But the fact remains - in the USA, concentrated around population centers, we have 2,000,000 acres of golf courses. The estimated size of all landfills over 100 years, for the USA population, is 80,000 acres. If we placed all of it under golf courses, only 4% or one-in-25 golf courses would have trash under them. Or, we can (like we currently do) just locate the landfills a bit further from population centers and then the 4% of golf courses are safe.
When you need a tree "gone" from your property, (assuming your HOA allows it, thanks again Mrs. D.) you often don't need to pay. Depending on the type of tree, companies will offer to pay you, sometimes upwards of 3 figures, to remove a tree from your land, so that they can convert the wood into valuable furniture or materials.
That is not the case with recycling. Recycling is the opposite of a good that you pay for - along each step of the process, people pay to get rid of the recycling, with one exception. Aluminum, which is stripped from both trash and recycling through specialized electro-magnets (even though aluminum isn't magnetic) at the MRF!, is immediately sold to a local refinery, where they sell it as raw recycling aluminum.
All other recycling costs money to dispose of:
Paper in the USA is about 50% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship off paper to a paper recycling center, who shreds it and liquifies it into a slurry. The slurry is heated and cooled through several processes, and then made into new paper. Sources disagree on if this process is more resource intensive or less than making pulp from raw materials.
Plastic in the USA is about 20% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship off plastic to an industrial shredder to be shredded, washed, and baled. The shredder pays a company to store and distribute that shredded plastic to whoever wants it. Sometimes, manufacturers will pay for some shredded plastic to be put into a bottle to make the bottle "Made from recycled material", but most of the recycled plastic sits in bales, in giant piles and warehouses. When the cost of warehousing the plastic becomes greater than the value, the warehouses can (and often do) pay waste management to put it into a landfill, which is totally legal. Often, the cheapest way to landfill a large amount of materials is to ship it on a barge overseas to other countries, where they can be burned or landfilled with less regulations.
Glass in the USA is about 5% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship glass to a processing plant, that, through a many step process, turns the glass back into sand. They do sell the recycled sand, but for a lower price than raw sand, and often this is a small offset to the many step process that it took to create (vs just digging for some sand).
E waste in the USA is a small part of recycled materials, less than 5% and the most expensive for the MRF! to pay someone to take. The MRF! puts all electronics in a special bin. The employees there are used to seeing things that might actually be valuable - they are usually allowed to keep anything they see here. After all, less for the MRF to pay a company to take. So, most MRF employees have at home 10-15 old iphones, laptops, etc, unless an enterprising employee among them offers them a few bucks for all of the iphones to try to part out.
E-Waste is usually old TVs. The MRF! pays a E-Waste specialist company (E-Waste reclaimer) to take the bin full of TVs, where they do a quick double check for valuables. These companies are notoriously sketchy. Their key job is to take thousands of pounds of old TVs and desktop computers and cell phones on 1g and make them disappear. They charge a pretty penny. While they often have "free computer" programs and sometimes supply free monitors for libraries, most of the E-Waste ends up being shipped to Hong Kong, where the company pays a warehouse owner to store it. Then that warehouse owner runs out of space, and pays a small town in china to take 30,000 dump trucks full of old TVs. Those small towns burn the TVs, releasing old TV mercury and lead into the air. The water and air in these towns are terrible, and Asian governments are constantly trying to crack down on the movement of the e-waste into their countries. Each time, until a new loophole can be found or agreement made, warehouses pack full of e-waste waiting for a country that will allow burning it.
Somewhere, wrapped in the above topics, right between "quicksand" and "killer bees" is the big topic of today: "Our landfills will fill up and overflow!" followed by education on the consequences of consumerism and waste management, and why recycling will save the world.
The issue of waste and recycling is not a small issue in education. From fifth graders doing soda can drives or pop tab drives for charity, to high school freshmen adopting a highway, to high school student body presidents running campaigns on adding multi-sort recycling to their schools.
These issues don't end in school - we all take (some) of our schooling with us, and it ends up in public policy. In my city, Minneapolis, all residents pay through taxes for recycling bins, with high public support. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, residents pay per trash pickup, but recycling is every week for free, to encourage residents to recycle a larger proportion of their trash. Offices have recycling bins and rubbish bins side by side - one for the plastic wrapper and bowl of your salad, one for the cardboard label around the salad.
When we decide to recycle things - these ethos hold us to follow an easy guideline - put everything allowed into that recycling bin. Oh, it takes E-Waste? I'll dump in my old laptop and my old monitor. Easy! And this is life as we see it today.
What happens between the bin and the landfill?
While we often like to joke about Trash and Recycling being in the same bin this is not terribly far from the truth. Either the garbage truck has two separate compartments for trash and recycling, or two trucks come by. Garbage trucks aren't very good at long-haul trucking, so they usually have a route that ends at the Waste Transfer Station. A Waste Transfer station looks like a giant swimming pool full of waste. Your garbageman backs up their truck to a special conveyor belt. That conveyor belt goes over some fancy magnets and fans to blow/suck away anything raw and valuable. No matter the station, usually at least one person vaguely scans the waste for valuables before it gets dumped into the giant swimming pool.
Often attached to these stations is a Materials Recovery Facility, called a MRF, pronounced "Murph". (I can't type MRF without thinking of the movie, so I'll be adding an explanation mark) A MRF! is how your recycling bin gets processed. A set of conveyor belts with a series of well-tuned magnets, fans, and human components set to taking certain plastics one way, e-waste another way, and anything wet or non-recyclable dumping straight into the swimming pool with the other waste.
At one end of the giant swimming pool is a huge compressor. The trash that makes it to the compressor is compressed into a a bale the size of a big refrigerator, loaded onto special dump trucks, that take it to the landfill. At the landfill, there is a small crack that is open to the air, where they load in that bale in a neatly organized, structurally sound layer.
The landfill has a special liner underneath, that directs all liquids coming off of it into a barrel, which is brought to a treatment plant. It has a special liner overhead, which directs any gasses coming off of the trash to gas recovery valves. There is a "correct" depth to a landfill, and once that is met, it is often covered with top soil and grass, able to be used for other purposes.
Mrs. D, my Elementary teacher, was wrong about running out of space from landfills. I dislike showing how much space in Arizona we could fit 1,000 years of trash in. How would we get it there? But the fact remains - in the USA, concentrated around population centers, we have 2,000,000 acres of golf courses. The estimated size of all landfills over 100 years, for the USA population, is 80,000 acres. If we placed all of it under golf courses, only 4% or one-in-25 golf courses would have trash under them. Or, we can (like we currently do) just locate the landfills a bit further from population centers and then the 4% of golf courses are safe.
When you need a tree "gone" from your property, (assuming your HOA allows it, thanks again Mrs. D.) you often don't need to pay. Depending on the type of tree, companies will offer to pay you, sometimes upwards of 3 figures, to remove a tree from your land, so that they can convert the wood into valuable furniture or materials.
That is not the case with recycling. Recycling is the opposite of a good that you pay for - along each step of the process, people pay to get rid of the recycling, with one exception. Aluminum, which is stripped from both trash and recycling through specialized electro-magnets (even though aluminum isn't magnetic) at the MRF!, is immediately sold to a local refinery, where they sell it as raw recycling aluminum.
All other recycling costs money to dispose of:
Paper in the USA is about 50% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship off paper to a paper recycling center, who shreds it and liquifies it into a slurry. The slurry is heated and cooled through several processes, and then made into new paper. Sources disagree on if this process is more resource intensive or less than making pulp from raw materials.
Plastic in the USA is about 20% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship off plastic to an industrial shredder to be shredded, washed, and baled. The shredder pays a company to store and distribute that shredded plastic to whoever wants it. Sometimes, manufacturers will pay for some shredded plastic to be put into a bottle to make the bottle "Made from recycled material", but most of the recycled plastic sits in bales, in giant piles and warehouses. When the cost of warehousing the plastic becomes greater than the value, the warehouses can (and often do) pay waste management to put it into a landfill, which is totally legal. Often, the cheapest way to landfill a large amount of materials is to ship it on a barge overseas to other countries, where they can be burned or landfilled with less regulations.
Glass in the USA is about 5% of recycled materials. The MRF! pays to ship glass to a processing plant, that, through a many step process, turns the glass back into sand. They do sell the recycled sand, but for a lower price than raw sand, and often this is a small offset to the many step process that it took to create (vs just digging for some sand).
E waste in the USA is a small part of recycled materials, less than 5% and the most expensive for the MRF! to pay someone to take. The MRF! puts all electronics in a special bin. The employees there are used to seeing things that might actually be valuable - they are usually allowed to keep anything they see here. After all, less for the MRF to pay a company to take. So, most MRF employees have at home 10-15 old iphones, laptops, etc, unless an enterprising employee among them offers them a few bucks for all of the iphones to try to part out.
E-Waste is usually old TVs. The MRF! pays a E-Waste specialist company (E-Waste reclaimer) to take the bin full of TVs, where they do a quick double check for valuables. These companies are notoriously sketchy. Their key job is to take thousands of pounds of old TVs and desktop computers and cell phones on 1g and make them disappear. They charge a pretty penny. While they often have "free computer" programs and sometimes supply free monitors for libraries, most of the E-Waste ends up being shipped to Hong Kong, where the company pays a warehouse owner to store it. Then that warehouse owner runs out of space, and pays a small town in china to take 30,000 dump trucks full of old TVs. Those small towns burn the TVs, releasing old TV mercury and lead into the air. The water and air in these towns are terrible, and Asian governments are constantly trying to crack down on the movement of the e-waste into their countries. Each time, until a new loophole can be found or agreement made, warehouses pack full of e-waste waiting for a country that will allow burning it.
Monday, November 23, 2020
The Code That Controls Your Money
COBOL programs — some written so long ago that color TV wasn’t even a thing yet — are everywhere in our daily lives.
Consider: Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background. The Bank of New York Mellon in 2012 found it had 112,500 individual COBOL programs, constituting almost 350 million lines; that is probably typical for most big financial institutions. When your boss hands you your paycheck, odds are it was calculated using COBOL. If you invest, your stock trades run on it too. So does health care: Insurance companies in the U.S. use “adjudication engines'”— software that figures out what a doctor or drug company will get paid for a service — which were written in COBOL. Wonder why, when you’re shopping at a retailer you will see a clerk typing into an old-style terminal, with green text on a black background? It's because the inventory system is using COBOL. Or why you see airline booking agents use that same black screen with green type to change your flight? “Oh, that’s COBOL — that’s definitely COBOL,” laughs Craig Bailey, a senior engineer at Faircom, a firm that makes software to help firms manage those old systems.
No one quite knows how much COBOL is out there, but estimates suggest there are as many as 240 billion lines of the code quietly powering many of the most crucial parts of our everyday lives. “The second most valuable asset in the United States — after oil — is the 240 billion lines of COBOL,” says Philip Teplitzky, who’s slung COBOL for decades for banks across the U.S.
by Clive Thompson, Wealthsimple Magazine | Read more:
Image: Keith Haring - Pop Shop Quad III [1989]
Covid-19 Update: November 23, 2020
More people are hospitalised with Covid-19 in the US than ever before, as cases continue to rise steeply amid the countdown to a Thanksgiving holiday many fear will have disastrous effect, given mass travel and indoor family gatherings.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the US recorded 142,732 new cases on Sunday, down from the record high of Friday, when more than 196,000 cases were recorded. But 83,870 people were hospitalised, a record, while 921 people died. The death toll was 256,589.
On Friday, 1,448 people died – the equivalent of one death every minute.
In Washington, Donald Trump has faced criticism for a lack of action. The lame duck president played golf on Sunday. On Monday he had no events on his public schedule.
In Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe Biden continues to plan for the transition of power, the president-elect was due to hold a virtual meeting with the US Conference of Mayors. Biden spoke to governors last week.
Despite news of impending vaccines, states across the US are feeling the strain. In just one example, Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s front page headline on Monday was: “No beds anywhere: hospitals strained to limit by virus.” The paper reported 7,219 new cases and 41 deaths and said demand for testing was surging.
Resources are also strained in states which saw early peaks and are now experiencing a resurgence. In New York, where schools are closed again, the Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of bodies from the spring surge were still in refrigerated morgues on the Brooklyn waterfront. (...)
Millions bought tickets to fly for Thanksgiving before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top US public health agency, advised against holiday travel. Many are still crowding airports and boarding planes, despite relatively lenient cancellation policies among major airlines.
“Consumers should feel comfortable changing their plans and canceling their flights if they need to for health reasons,” John Breyault of the National Consumers League told the Associated Press.
[ed. See also: U.S. hits 12 million COVID-19 cases as many Americans defy Thanksgiving travel guidance (Reuters); and Hospitals Know What's Coming (The Atlantic).]
According to Johns Hopkins University, the US recorded 142,732 new cases on Sunday, down from the record high of Friday, when more than 196,000 cases were recorded. But 83,870 people were hospitalised, a record, while 921 people died. The death toll was 256,589.
In Washington, Donald Trump has faced criticism for a lack of action. The lame duck president played golf on Sunday. On Monday he had no events on his public schedule.
In Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe Biden continues to plan for the transition of power, the president-elect was due to hold a virtual meeting with the US Conference of Mayors. Biden spoke to governors last week.
Despite news of impending vaccines, states across the US are feeling the strain. In just one example, Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s front page headline on Monday was: “No beds anywhere: hospitals strained to limit by virus.” The paper reported 7,219 new cases and 41 deaths and said demand for testing was surging.
Resources are also strained in states which saw early peaks and are now experiencing a resurgence. In New York, where schools are closed again, the Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of bodies from the spring surge were still in refrigerated morgues on the Brooklyn waterfront. (...)
Millions bought tickets to fly for Thanksgiving before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top US public health agency, advised against holiday travel. Many are still crowding airports and boarding planes, despite relatively lenient cancellation policies among major airlines.
“Consumers should feel comfortable changing their plans and canceling their flights if they need to for health reasons,” John Breyault of the National Consumers League told the Associated Press.
More than 2 million people were screened at US airports on Friday and Saturday, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). That was far lower than during the same period in 2019 but Friday was only the second time since mid-March that daily airport screenings passed 1 million.
On Monday, the TSA said it screened 1.047 million passengers on Sunday, the highest number since mid-March.
On Monday, the TSA said it screened 1.047 million passengers on Sunday, the highest number since mid-March.
by Martin Pengelly, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images
No Time Like The Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality
Michael J Fox: ‘Every step now is a frigging math problem, so I take it slow’
The last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. The former I expected; the latter was a shock. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public characteristic, because of, rather than despite, his illness. He called his 2002 memoir Lucky Man, and he told interviewers that Parkinson’s is a gift, “albeit one that keeps on taking”.
During our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. To be honest, I didn’t entirely buy his tidy silver linings, but who was I to cast doubt on whatever perspective Fox had developed to make a monstrously unjust situation more bearable? So the sudden dose of pragmatism astonished me. Finding a cure for Parkinson’s, he said, “is not something that I view will happen in my lifetime”. Previously, he had talked about finding “a cure within a decade”. No more. “That’s just the way it goes,” he said quietly. It was like a dark cloud had partly obscured the sun.
Well, seven years is a long time, especially when you have a degenerative disease, and since then, that little cloud turned into a full thunderstorm. In 2018, Fox had surgery to remove a tumour on his spine, unrelated to the Parkinson’s. The aftermath was arduous and dangerous, as tremors and a lack of balance caused by the Parkinson’s threatened the recovery of his fragile spinal cord. One day, at home on his own, after assuring his family he’d be fine without them, he fell over and smashed his upper arm so badly it required 19 screws. Thankfully, he didn’t damage his spine, but the injury plunged him into previously unplumbed despair. “There is no way to put a shine on my circumstance,” he writes in his new memoir, No Time Like The Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality. “Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? In telling other patients, ‘Chin up! It will be OK’, did I look to them to validate my optimism? Is it because I needed to validate it myself? Things don’t always turn out. Sometimes things turn shitty. My optimism is suddenly finite.”
Things being as they currently are, this time Fox and I are meeting by video chat, me in my home in London, him in his office in New York, which looks just as I remember it. “We were here last time, right? I remember,” Fox says, pointing with his chin towards the sofa. Behind him is a photo of him and his wife of 32 years, the actor Tracy Pollan, both of them looking so young, beautiful and in love. There is also a painting of his dog, Gus, who is in his usual place, sleeping at Fox’s feet. Fox himself, still as boyishly handsome as ever, looks much better than I’d feared. He is 59 now, close to the average age for a Parkinson’s diagnosis – except that Fox has already had it for 30 years and is in the advanced stages. As he says, “You don’t die from Parkinson’s, but you do die with it,” and typically the longer you have it, the harder it becomes to carry out basic functions. He can no longer play his beloved guitar, and can’t write or type; this latest book was dictated to Fox’s assistant. He has increasing difficulty in forming words, and occasionally needs a wheelchair. I worried beforehand that talking to me for an hour would be too much, and – less professionally – that I might cry at seeing the physical degeneration of the actor who meant so much to me as a kid.
It soon becomes apparent that both these concerns hugely underestimate Fox. He talks for not just one hour but almost two, and while the tremors, stiffness and occasional word stumbles are more pronounced than when I last saw him, he is very much the funny, thoughtful and engaged man I remember – so much so that within minutes I stop noticing the effects of the Parkinson’s. Here’s a typical exchange: at the time of our interview, the US election is still three weeks away, so we talk about that. “Every worst instinct in mankind has been played on [by Trump], and for me that’s just anathema. Biff is president!” he says, with justified exasperation, given that Back To The Future’s evil bully Biff Tannen was modelled on Trump.
I ask how he felt during the 2016 campaign when Trump mocked the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability. “When you see your particular group mocked, it’s such a gut punch. It’s so senseless and cheap. There’s no way I get up in the morning and mock orange people,” he says, and then makes the grin that, for those of us who grew up watching him in the 1980s and 90s, is our Proustian madeleine.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jeff Lipsky/CPi Syndication
During our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. To be honest, I didn’t entirely buy his tidy silver linings, but who was I to cast doubt on whatever perspective Fox had developed to make a monstrously unjust situation more bearable? So the sudden dose of pragmatism astonished me. Finding a cure for Parkinson’s, he said, “is not something that I view will happen in my lifetime”. Previously, he had talked about finding “a cure within a decade”. No more. “That’s just the way it goes,” he said quietly. It was like a dark cloud had partly obscured the sun.
Things being as they currently are, this time Fox and I are meeting by video chat, me in my home in London, him in his office in New York, which looks just as I remember it. “We were here last time, right? I remember,” Fox says, pointing with his chin towards the sofa. Behind him is a photo of him and his wife of 32 years, the actor Tracy Pollan, both of them looking so young, beautiful and in love. There is also a painting of his dog, Gus, who is in his usual place, sleeping at Fox’s feet. Fox himself, still as boyishly handsome as ever, looks much better than I’d feared. He is 59 now, close to the average age for a Parkinson’s diagnosis – except that Fox has already had it for 30 years and is in the advanced stages. As he says, “You don’t die from Parkinson’s, but you do die with it,” and typically the longer you have it, the harder it becomes to carry out basic functions. He can no longer play his beloved guitar, and can’t write or type; this latest book was dictated to Fox’s assistant. He has increasing difficulty in forming words, and occasionally needs a wheelchair. I worried beforehand that talking to me for an hour would be too much, and – less professionally – that I might cry at seeing the physical degeneration of the actor who meant so much to me as a kid.
It soon becomes apparent that both these concerns hugely underestimate Fox. He talks for not just one hour but almost two, and while the tremors, stiffness and occasional word stumbles are more pronounced than when I last saw him, he is very much the funny, thoughtful and engaged man I remember – so much so that within minutes I stop noticing the effects of the Parkinson’s. Here’s a typical exchange: at the time of our interview, the US election is still three weeks away, so we talk about that. “Every worst instinct in mankind has been played on [by Trump], and for me that’s just anathema. Biff is president!” he says, with justified exasperation, given that Back To The Future’s evil bully Biff Tannen was modelled on Trump.
I ask how he felt during the 2016 campaign when Trump mocked the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability. “When you see your particular group mocked, it’s such a gut punch. It’s so senseless and cheap. There’s no way I get up in the morning and mock orange people,” he says, and then makes the grin that, for those of us who grew up watching him in the 1980s and 90s, is our Proustian madeleine.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jeff Lipsky/CPi Syndication
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