Category Archives: Web Article Review

Hasbro phasing out plastic packaging

Hasbro has announced they are phasing out plastic packaging. Now, they are not phasing out all the stuff they make out of plastic, which is most of what they make and sell. But I think it is a good sign that the companies that produce all the packaging might be willing to think of the role they play in waste/pollution/litter/climate crisis, rather than just trying to pin all the blame on consumers. Governments can get involved by either taxing plastic packaging or banning it outright.

the end of “shareholder primacy”

From Project Syndicate:

The Business Roundtable, an association of the most powerful chief executive officers in the United States, announced this month that the era of shareholder primacy is over.

Does this signal a new era where companies consider a broader range of values and stakeholders than just the latest stock value? Stakeholders could include employees, customers, and maybe even present and future generations of the public at large, for example. Let’s not get too crazy and include plants, animals, and rocks just yet. Not so fast – according to this article, this is just a reaction to the growing power of institutional investors such as pension funds. Rich and powerful managers and board members are trying to protect their own jobs and fortunes like they always do.

yes, media bias exists

I didn’t really believe in media bias until the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was just so blatantly obvious it couldn’t be ignored. But this article explains how Bernie Sanders can be right that subtler but still insidious forms of bias and censorship exist. I recently listened to a podcast (which I can’t find again…) on how relevant Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent remains today, and I am as sold now as when I originally read it. Here’s a summary of his “five filters” along with my personal take.

The five points are a direct quote by the way. Shame on this awful version of WordPress that I can’t figure out how to make a block quote.

1. Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”

  • My take: this is what Bernie Sanders is talking about. Employees of any orgnanization are unlikely to challenge the interests of their owners and managers. They have to feed their families and pay their bills. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

2. Advertising—Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”

  • A business does not want to lose its advertisers. No mystery here. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

3. Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

  • I believe part of this is laziness and penny pinching. Publishing government and corporate press releases with minimal editing is just easy and cheap. But government and corporations can lean on the press when they want to, as we saw most clearly during the Iraq invasion.

4. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”

  • Trump has made this more obvious and ugly, but it was there before.

5. The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

  • Don’t forget Muslims and Mexicans.

the Mekong

Similar to the situation in India, the Mekong depends on a mix of snow/glacial melt from the Himalayas, and on seasonal monsoon rains. Both are becoming less reliable, and countries in the headwaters, including China and Laos, are going on massive dam-building binges. (Disclaimer: This website looks like a reputable source of journalism, but I am not familiar with it.)

The crisis began when critical monsoon rains, which usually start in late May in the Mekong region, failed to arrive. Dry conditions, driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon and exacerbated by climate change, persisted well into July. At that time, observers say, the situation was made worse by hydropower dam operators upstream, in China and Laos,withholding water for their own purposes...

Originating in the Tibetan highlands, the Mekong River flows through six Asian countries, including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before emptying into the South China Sea. The river basin is home to the largest inland fishery in the world and more than 60 million people depend on it for their livelihoods.

the role of drought in migration from Central America

The Guardian has an article on the role that drought and climate change play in migration of people from Central American countries such as Guatemala to the U.S.

Central America remains one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee their homes and head north in search of security.

But amid a deepening global climate crisis, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.

hydrogen as a jet fuel

I was curious if aircraft could be fueled feasibly by hydrogen in the future. Okay, I know this has been tried in the past – “Oh, the humanity!” – but, there must be advances in technology since then. 10 minutes of research reveals that battery-powered aircraft are now a going concern, although they tend to be unmanned or at least small. Current fuel cell technology sounds like it has pretty similar limits to batteries. On a larger scale, there is serious research on the potential of liquid hydrogen as a commercial aviation fuel. It sounds feasible but would require major changes in long-lived infrastructure systems around the world. But let’s say you happened to have lots of electricity and water in abundance. Maybe you are in a coastal location and have invested in nuclear power, or you just happen to have lots of geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever kind of power. You have also invested in desalination and you have created a major transportation hub. You might then be in a position to create liquid hydrogen and/or fuel cells at a cost-effective price. This could be climate friendly as burning hydrogen, in theory at least, creates only water vapor as a product, and fusing hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen creates the same – liquid water or water vapor. Hydrogen is dangerous, but so is jet fuel and so are the materials in modern batteries, so hopefully technology will eventually come to our aid and get the risk and environmental impact down to a similar or lower level than these other options.

automatic fiscal stabilizers

This doesn’t sound like an exciting topic, but I have been thinking, if the federal government decided to match metro-scale infrastructure projects say, between 25 cents and 75 cents on the dollar, and vary that amount based on economic conditions, what kind of trigger would you use for the economic conditions. My initial thought is to base it on unemployment – maybe 25 cents on the dollar if unemployment is below 5%, 50 cents if it is 5-7%, and 75 cents if it goes over 7%. But I just made that up based on no data other than a vaguely remembered undergraduate economics class in the 1990s. Here is a serious idea called the Sahm indicator:

The “Sahm indicator” measures the difference between the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate and its minimum over the prior 12 months (see chart). The use of the unemployment rate avoids the long lags (and frequent large revisions) associated with other indicators (like GDP). Since 1970, whenever the Sahm indicator crossed the threshold of 0.5%, a recession was underway―there were essentially no false signals. Moreover, the trigger occurred early in these downturns (on average within 4 months of the start). Sahm also proposes using an unemployment rate test to turn the stabilizers off. To avoid a premature return to fiscal austerity, she suggests deactivating programs when the unemployment rate falls to a level that is less than 2 percentage points above the initial trigger.

The infrastructure projects have to be ready to go, and part of plans, not just projects. Maybe you could set aside some of the money in a maintenance trust fund, which gets released to local metropolitan area governments to give them some relief in tough times. Maybe federal or state workers could be trained to do basic maintenance tasks. This is really the issue we saw after the 2007-2008 recession – how do you get people hired and trained and contracts and construction plans all in place fast enough to make a difference economically. It’s hard to do that and still build smart, thoughtful, future-ready infrastructure. But catching up on unglamourous deferred maintenance – think fixing potholes, lining leaky pipes, etc. could make sense.

UAE and AI

A couple interesting facts I learned in this article: (1) The United Arab Emirates has a “Minister of AI” and (2) 89% of workers in the country are foreign-born. The author makes a case that the citizens of the country value their leisure time more than westerners and are willing to embrace state ownership of the means of production with as much automation as possible.