best business stories of 2018 (Longreads)

A couple stories caught my eye. Once is about the collapse of Toys ‘R Us, and the other about what it would actually take to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., if we decided we want to do that.

I don’t see why pop-up urban toy stores, similar to the pop-up Halloween stores that set up shop temporarily in underused retail spaces, couldn’t work. You could have a curated collection of the coolest toys of the year set up in a very entertaining way, let kids actually play with them, and have roving salespeople and interactive displays where people can order the toys to be delivered to their homes, say with free 2-day shipping. You could use whatever existing low-cost retailer you want (Amazon, Walmart, whatever) while recreating some of the holiday magic of F.A.O. Schwartz and small town Main Streets of yesteryear.

the north pole

The Week has a fun feature about the North Pole. It reminds us that the fictional St. Nicholas lived in modern day Turkey, and it was an American cartoonist in 1866 who came up with the idea of a fat elf-like Santa (not the Coca-Cola corporation as your know-it-all uncle might tell you) living at the North Pole. Supposedly, nobody saw the North Pole in person until 1908. And on the less fun side, the article covers thawing permafrost, melting ice, and enormous fossil fuel reserves that are believed to exist under the Arctic ice cap, which on addition to their planet-poisoning potential just may be worth fighting for.

New York Times Top 10 Books of 2018

Well, I had a look at their Top 10, and nothing really caught my eye. There are two book-length expansions of magazine articles I remember reading, one a Mother Jones article about private prisons, and Michael Pollan’s article on psychedelics. Both were good, but the articles were long enough and got the point across. I don’t need to read the books.

They also have a list of “books that didn’t make the top 10“. Steven Pinker has a new one on why things are actually not so bad in the United States right now. Incidentally, you can contrast it with this article about how things are really bad in the United States right now, or at least going in a bad direction when most of the rest of the developed world is making progress. I think it depends on who you are – things are okay if you are a middle-class professional or higher on the class ladder (and you pretty much have to be a professional to live a middle class life style these days, which is the problem – being at the median really does not necessarily mean a middle class life style these days.)

Another one that caught my eye – just in time for Christmas! – is called The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I’ve always sort of thought that even in the Christian world of the Middle Ages was less enlightened than what came before, and arguably less enlightened than the Muslim and East Asian worlds of the time, it at least preserved art, music, and literature that was built on later. The title of this one (which I admit is all I have read) seems to cast doubt on that.

UK solid waste framework

The UK is tackling the idea of making companies responsible for the packaging they produce. This makes perfect sense because it will raise revenue in the short term, but hopefully give them the incentive they need to design with “reduce, reuse, recycle” in mind in the longer term.

Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled by the Environment Secretary today (Tuesday 18 December 2018).
The move will overhaul England’s waste system, putting a legal onus on those responsible for producing damaging waste to take greater responsibility and foot the bill.
The announcement forms part of the government’s ambitious new Resources and Waste Strategy, the first comprehensive update in more than a decade. It will eliminate avoidable plastic waste and help leave the environment in a better state than we found it for future generations.

this is your year on drugs

Alternet has a wrap-up of the year in (U.S.) drug policy. To summarize:

  • The opioid overdose situation is still awful even compared to the height of the 1980s-90s crack epidemic, but does not seem to be getting any more awful. Deaths from heroine and prescription drugs have fallen, but fentanyl abuse has increased and kept the overall body count about the same as recent years.
  • Cities including my own are moving forward on safe injection sites under medical supervision, which are the norm in many other developed countries, but the federal government is still against them.
  • Sentencing disparities that used to disproportionately put people of color in prison are being reduced. Even the more blatantly racist of our two major political parties seems to be on board with this.
  • Marijuana legalization at the state level continues to march on, and the federal government continues to look the other way.
  • Industrial hemp became completely legal.
  • Predictably, legalization advocates are moving on to other drugs like pschedelics.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2018 Horizon Scan

Trends in Ecology and Evolution does an annual “horizon scan” of hot topics for the coming year. Below is their list for this year. The article is open access.

  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – Thiamine is a form of vitamin B. Pollution and subtle changes in algae eaten by fish and birds may be causing its depletion. This is not fatal in and of itself but may be weakening animals so that they succumb to other things.
  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – It’s affecting deer, moose, and elk in North America, and now reindeer in northern Europe.
  • “Breaks in the Dormancy of Pathogenic Bacteria and Viruses in Thawing Permafrost” – Some viruses and bacteria may be able to lie dormant in permafrost for thousands of years, long enough for populations of animals and humans to lose their immunity. Permafrost is melting.
  • “RNA-Based, Gene-Silencing Pesticides” – Messing with RNA can control pests such as the mites affecting honey bee colonies. The good thing about this form of genetic engineering is that it is not passed down from one generation to the next.
  • “Genetic Control of Mammal Populations” – Islands such as New Zealand are trying to use gene drives to wipe out pests such as rats. Not control them, but completely eliminate them once and for all. There are some obvious benefits, but this is also a little terrifying when you think that we now have the ability to engineer the complete extermination of a particular species in short order.
  • “Use of Lasers in Commercial Deep Water Fishing” – Sounds a little scary, but it’s an alternative to dragging heavy nets that destroy the bottom. 
  • “Use of Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for Harvesting Atmospheric Water” – This is literally sucking humidity out of the air. Of course, we can all do this with our air conditioners and dehumidifiers, but that takes a lot of energy and this process apparently does not.
  • “Aquaporins Engineered to Increase Plant Salt Tolerance” – This is messing with plants so they can grow in saltier soil. Seems like a good idea, except there is potentially moral hazard here because good farming practices should stop good soil from becoming salty in the first place.
  • “Effect of Culturomics on Conservation Science, Policy, and Action” – This is just processing and analyzing large amounts of text.
  • “Changes in the Global Iron Cycle” – Iron can actually be a limiting nutrient in some ecosystems, particularly in the oceans. Melting glaciers and ice bergs have an effect on this – I won’t pretend to fully understand it.
  • “Underestimation of Soil Carbon Emissions” – Soils contain a lot of carbon, the decay of organic soils may give off more carbon than thought, and there could be an accelerating feedback loop as warmer temperatures accelerate the decay, which in turn cause warmer temperatures.
  • “Rapid Climatic Changes on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau” – This affects the Southeast Asian and Indian monsoons, among other things.
  • “International Collaborations to Encourage Marine Protected Area Expansion in the High Seas” – Okay, I guess they had to throw in something positive.
  • “Belt and Road Initiative in China” – Basically, China talks a good game on sustainability and the potential is there, but the on-the-ground reality is not very sustainable so far.
  • “Potential Effects on Wildlife of Increases in Electromagnetic Radiation” – This is about cell signals causing cancer. In wildlife, because this journal is about wildlife. But it’s a little concerning for us humans too.

best science and technology stories of 2018 (Longreads)

The first of the “best of” articles for 2018 are starting to come out. Here is the best of science and technology writing from Longreads. A couple topics caught my eye:

  • a review of a book on how computer algorithms are increasingly taking over our lives, called The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab
  • what’s new with transhumanism, also known as really rich people starting to hope against the odds that death may be optional (hey, they have already figured out how to stop paying taxes, so isn’t cheating death the next logical step?)
  • an article on farming practices specifically focused on maximizing carbon sequestration by building soil

solarpunk

What is solar punk exactly? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in Longreads describes it like this:

A new type of science fiction, solarpunk takes as its premise the idea that climate change is unavoidable and probably will be severe, but demands optimism of its writers. A 2015 essay on the genre’s political ideals and inspirations by Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk as a “speculative movement, a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” In practice, so far this has meant a bunch of short fiction and visual art, numerous explanatory essays, and a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media and in online communities. But those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

The article mentions a couple short story anthologies:

Bridging the Gap Between National and Ecosystem Accounting

This study estimated the value of a forest in Spain at more than five times what is estimated using standard national accounting methods (GDP, I assume). If this is the case, it suggests to me that the idea of just tweaking GDP to include ecosystem services isn’t going to work. The article is open access.

National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assetsof a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extended accounts incorporate nine farmer activities (timber, cork, firewood, nuts, livestock grazing, conservation forestry, hunting, residential services and private amenity) and seven government activities (fire services, free access recreation, free access mushroom, carbon, landscape conservation, threatened biodiversity and water yield). To make sure the valuation remains consistent with standard accounts, we simulate exchange values for non-market final forest product consumption in order to measure individual ecosystem services and environmental income indicators. Manufactured capital and environmental assets are also integrated. When comparing extended to standard accounts, our results are 3.6 times higher for gross value added. These differences are explained primarily by the omission in the standard accounts of carbon activities and undervaluation of private amenity, free access recreation, landscape and threatened biodiversity ecosystem services. Extended accounts measure a value of Andalusian forest ecosystem services 5.4 times higher than that measured using the valuation criteria of standard accounts.