Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS: China's new electric cars cost $11,000. Really! Or should I say, really? Here's how Bloomberg put it in their editorial: The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, to produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming. And if you're wondering, the answer is yes, BYD passed Tesla in EV car production and sales last year (on a side note, EVs accounted for less than 8% of U.S. overall car sales last year).
BREAKING NEWS: Crime is down, way down. Really! Who would have thought, since the "news" seems to show shootings and accidents and arrests ad nauseum. But statistics show otherwise (other than mass shootings which continue to increase, averaging about 2 per day in the U.S. wrote the BBC). Said an op-ed in The Atlantic: Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St. Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade...FBI data for the third quarter show that every category of crime except for motor-vehicle theft is down, some of them sharply, year over year from 2022...The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years.
BREAKING NEWS: Oil and gas production is up. In fact, the U.S. has never --as in never-- produced as much oil (so much oil that we are now the largest oil producer in the world, surpassing both Saudi Arabia and Russia). And we are now the largest exporter of natural gas. So what's with all the talk of needing to produce even more oil, even as we rant about the switch to green energy? Turns out that not all that simple when trying to get away from fossil fuels; necessary minerals such as lithium (needed for electric car batteries) are growing more and more difficult to mine, while cobalt (another needed mineral) is often mined under controversial practices. All of this while demand for electric vehicles is growing (except for car rental agencies such as Hertz whose CEO was forced to resign; his bet that customers would want to rent such vehicles never materialized, wrote Fortune). But does anyone see shorter lines at gas stations? Still, oil companies continue to apply for more and more permits to drill for both oil and natural gas, even as their drilling and recovery methods of existing wells become more efficient; and credit some of that to AI (what??), wrote Bloomberg.
BREAKING NEWS: Natural gas as an alternative fuel may be worse for the environment than oil. Wait, what? Turns out that 76% of restaurants and countless homes use gas stoves, not to mention gas heaters and dryers, wrote Consumer Reports. So what could go wrong? Turns out that the culprit is methane, and nitrogen dioxide, which some studies link to decreased lung function (if a stove is not vented to the outdoors the NO2 can leak into the home). Wrote a Stanford gradutate study on home cooking with gas stoves: ...more than three-quarters of methane emissions occurred while stoves were off, suggesting that gas fittings and connections to the stove and in-home gas lines are responsible for most emissions, regardless of how much the stove is used. As to methane, an ad by the environmental group Tradewater noted that existing but obsolete oil & gas wells leak the same amount of methane, every minute, as a car being driven 14,000 miles. Wrote another study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a natural gas leak of just 0.2% would be enough to be as big a driver to climate change as coal, but: ...broader analysis and methane-detecting satellite observations have shown that methane leakage rates in various US gas fields and systems range widely from 0.6 percent to 66 percent.
BREAKING NEWS: Artificial Intelligence may be here to help (or scare) you. Truth be told, I threw this in only because it would have been silly for me to pretend my old brain can comprehend all the benefits and pitfalls of AI, even if I've read many pieces on its applications and have talked to a few people well-versed in the field. But me understand it? Uh, no...so a quick summary of what I've spotted and why my attitude is more neutral than most. As the recent issue of Scientific American states, AI can help decode ancient texts, even those burned in Pompeii (human efforts to carefully unroll the carbonized scrolls led to them crumbling into ashes); using x-ray micro-computed tomography (don't ask), AI studied areas voxel by voxel (another thing I don't understand). AI was also challenged to take part in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a pre-university competition that gives entrants 2 days to figure out 6 problems, many of which are too difficult for even experts to accurately solve. AI solved 25 of the 30 problems presented to it, often by veering off the standard and logical path and producing "...a success rate similar to that of gold medalists" wrote the article. One thing AI does exceptionally well, however, is use energy, far more than today's computing centers which already use close to 1.5% of the world's electricity (and that's not counting the enormous electricity usage required by cryptocurrencies); AI is anticipated to need 10x the current amount of power used by today's data centers, more than most countries such as Ireland would use in a year, wrote another piece in Scientific American. And speaking of data, there's the issue of privacy wrote a piece in ACLU magazine. Noted a piece in WIRED: What we yearn for in machines is so often a reflection of what we yearn for in humanity, for good and ill, asking us what we really want. Stories of such yearnings also illustrate a key requirement for sapience: resistance to oppression.
BREAKING NEWS: The majority of illegal fentanyl is seized at our border. Unfortunately, the demand for synthetic opioids such as fentanyl continues to rise in the U.S. (as seen in the chart by UCLA on the right) even though 90% of the illegal drug is seized at U.S. ports of entry; but what IS surprising is that the majority of the fentanyl intercepted is being brought in not by cartels but by U.S. citizens, reported Bloomberg. Deaths in the past year from drug overdoses are nearing 108,000 (Covid killed nearly double that number) wrote NPR. Still, overdose deaths from illegal drugs managed to take over the #3 spot, bumping Covid-caused deaths to #4 (heart disease and cancer remain the top two causes of death in the U.S.). But again, the demand such drugs are there, so one has to ask why efforts to treat drug abuse in the U.S. are so far behind that of most European countries, according to a report in STAT: In an interview, Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, estimated that if methadone and buprenorphine were made universally available nationwide, opioid overdoses would fall by half, if not more...The public’s broad opposition to addiction medications stands in stark contrast to its general acceptance of other common strategies used to improve health. Broadly speaking, Americans do not oppose drinking Diet Coke instead of Coke, cooking with olive oil instead of butter, or chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking cigarettes. But when it comes to using relatively weak, highly regulated, pharmaceutical-grade opioids to help quit deadly synthetic drugs like fentanyl, much of society remains staunchly opposed...Increasingly, public health experts and even government officials cast the country’s singular failure to prevent overdose deaths not as an unavoidable tragedy but as a conscious choice. For one version of Hollywood's take on the fentanyl trade, try viewing the movie Crisis with Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, and Greg Kinnear...BREAKING NEWS: You can use either hand to display sign language. Okay, maybe not breaking news but ages ago my friend, fluent in ASL (American Sign Language), told me that signing with my left hand was backwards and would be like reading words in a mirror; but it turns out that she was wrong. The important thing with ASL signing is to make one hand the "dominant" hand and use that hand consistently, wrote Rochelle Barlow in her book, ASL for Kids (despite its title, her book is an excellent introduction to learning the basics of ASL). And ASL differs from the two other accepted but less-used sign languages in the U.S. and much of Canada: SEE (Signed Exact English) and PSE (Pidgin Sign English). ASL wasn't made an official language until 1965, but is now the 4th most-used language in the U.S. (behind English, Spanish, and Chinese, according to American Language Services). The same site noted that there are currently 6000 sign languages throughout the world (ASL is similar in its beginnings to the French version of sign language so it's possible for one to understand the other; but ASL generally won't be recognized by its British counterpart or those throughout much of the world).
BREAKING NEWS: Two-thirds of today's named stars are Arabic in origin. So said the respected astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in his book Letters From An Astrophysicist. Tyson doesn't tackle the world of elite scientists but rather answers questions from everyday people, and that question about stars came from a soldier stationed in Iraq during the war, a time when he was on guard duty and noticed the night sky through his night-vision goggles. Tyson also noted that in 1800 William Herschel was erroneously credited with naming those fleeting lights in the sky as "star-like," to which he gave the Greek name: aster-oides, which became adopted as the term "asteroids" (although Tyson notes, stars are billions of times larger than asteroids). He also tackles all those topics lacking scientific "proof": psychics, aliens, even Big Foot. Said Tyson, even a poop sample from Big Foot has never been found. And he goes on the add that other than police detective shows, it is well-accepted that "eye-witness" accounts are among the least reliable forms of "evidence." As to his reply to an atheist tired of our "religious" calendar system, Tyson noted that the commenter likely uses the terms "holiday" and "good-bye," which are derived from shortened versions of "holy" day and "God be with ye." Fun, educational, and well worth a read or listen...
BREAKING NEWS: The term "natural" on food labels means...nothing. Wrote Modern Farmer: There is no standard definition of “all-natural.”...Seeing this phrase on a food label does not inherently convey meaning or guarantee anything. As to the term "local," the article added: The USDA defines local as within the state of provenance or within 400 miles of its production point. But this is a widely interpreted term and different producers/companies may have varying definitions of what this means. This issue of food labels came to my attention because of a piece in The New Yorker on the quest to have food labels accurately and truthfully define their ingredients. Said part of the article: ...all wheat-flour products, including white, can legally be called "wheat" and are often dressed up to seem healthier than they are...adding caramel color; adding oats to the outside to the outside of bread; giving bread a heartier, richer, or mottled appearance...Nutrition labels weren't required until 1990, per-cent juice labeling wasn't widely introduced until 1994, and trans-fat labeling began in 2006. That article noted that Congress recently introduced a bill that would mandate "clarified guidelines to determine misleading claims." If enacted, the bill could be a boon for consumers and disrupt the processed-food industry. For that reason and others, it has little chance of becoming law. And as one industry analyst added about the new "plant-based" butters now on grocery shelves, "I think that's margarine. But that has revitalized some brands -- becoming 'plant butter,' or talking about being 'plant-based,' because plant plant-based is the hot cool thing." On a side note, margarine (originally made with beef fat) is now made with some form of vegetable oil. And could those Beyond and Impossible burgers being "bad" for you just be a misinformation campaign led by...the beef industry? Fast Company asked a similar question citing: ...an email that Impossible founder Pat Brown obtained in 2016. In it, the Cattlemen’s Association asked Berman [the 80-year head of a lobbying and advertising firm] what it would take to bury Impossible, which had yet to launch its burger, if the war chest was “unlimited.” (The Cattlemen’s Association did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
BREAKING NEWS: Over a million people will die from starvation in Gaza, according to The Conversation. Said a report in the NY Times: According to the report on hunger in Gaza, nearly two-thirds of households in the north had nothing to eat for at least 10 days and nights over the past month...The report, released Monday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, projected that famine is “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, where such conditions will develop by the end of May. And by mid-July, as many as 1.1 million people in Gaza could face what the group characterized as the worst stage of hunger: an “extreme lack of food,” and severe levels of starvation, death, destitution and acute malnutrition. All of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are in at least the third, or crisis, level of food insecurity, meaning that they are not eating enough and are malnourished. Nearly 40 percent are in the fourth, or emergency, phase, facing extreme food shortages and bearing an increased risk of hunger-related death. And 30 percent are in the most severe stage, indicating they have almost no food and are facing critical levels of starvation and death. To watch what videos are available from some of the bombed-out areas is heart-breaking: families of 5 living on a single pot of soup made from cattle feed; rice now nearly $12 per pound, and flour nearly $9 (it was $0.38 lb. pre-war). So why is the U.S. and the world allowing this to happen, as we did in Rwanda, Somalia, and other "war" zones? At this point, the death toll is 1,500 Palestinian children, women, and men being killed for each Israeli hostage that was taken* (over 200 hostages have been released or rescued). Said another piece in the paper: Over the past four weeks, an average of about 140 trucks carrying food and other aid have arrived in Gaza each day, according to a database maintained by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that supports Palestinians. But the World Food Program estimates that 300 trucks of food are needed daily to begin to meet people’s basic food needs...U.N. and British officials have said that critical goods, such as water filters and scissors included in medical kits for treating children, are being rejected because they could be used for military purposes...Gaza has long been reliant on humanitarian aid, as the territory has been under a years-long blockade by Israel and Egypt. Before the war began in October, two-thirds of Gazans were supported by food assistance. Now, nearly the entire population is dependent on aid to eat.
And in today's news, blah, blah, blah. Today's weather, blah, blah, blah. And in sports, blah, blah, blah. BREAKING NEWS: Well, not really but after reading that mish-mash piling up on my desk, where else to put these remaining tidbits? Did you know that India drinks 50% of the world's whiskey, wrote Forbes (keep on mind that India passed China as having the highest population in the world, a population over 4x that of the U.S.). Equally surprising is that the U.S. is actually one of the smallest sources of income for foreign workers who send money back to their families, wrote the same magazine (for India the largest income comes from Saudi Arabia, which is also the highest income source for workers from both the Philippines and Pakistan; for Mexico the largest income source is Spain & Canada. And who knew that Denmark had more pounds of trash per person in 2022 than the U.S., reported Sensoneo (but Denmark's recycling rate is nearly 60% better than ours). And finally, if you had to guess which fast-food chain takes in the highest revenue per store, would you have guessed McDonald's? It only ranked at number 5. The chain that takes in nearly twice what McDonald's does, per store, is Chick-fil-A reported QSR. (Raising Cane's was #2...what???).
But all of this random reporting had to end somewhere so why not on a good note? A fun read for me was the story of ice by Amy Brady (appropriately titled: Ice). Imagine the days before refrigeration and freezers, days when ice was unheard of if you lived in southern parts of the world. But in the north, ice came from frozen lakes and ponds, with men, and the horses used to haul the blocks away, often falling into the cold water to their deaths when the ice would crack beneath them. But ice soon captured the world and went way beyond just cooling our foods, drinks, and medicines. Here's one quick tidbit from her book when P.T. Barnum (yes, that "greatest show on Earth" Barnum) purchased an abandoned train depot in New York on 26th Street and Madison Avenue, named it the Roman Hippodrome, and later took his show on the road. While gone, he leased the Hippodrome to Patrick Gilmore, an Irish composer known for writing the lyrics to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." But after years of giving concerts in the venue, Gilmore gathered engineers together and ran a mile of pipes filled with liquid ammonia in the arena, and created the first large ice rink. Wrote Brady in her book: The skating thrilled the public, but the real draw was the ice rink itself. The evening's MC, Robert Gibson, one of the most popular ice skaters in the world, stopped the show midway to praise the engineers for their ingenuity: "We who have enjoyed the privilege of skating upon the first artificial ice rink ever produced in America and of standing upon the largest cake of ice ever made by man...extend to you our heartiest congratulations on the magnificent success you have achieved." Gilmore renamed his event space Gilmore's Garden, and its rink inspired other mechanically made ice rinks to open across the country in Detroit and Pittsburgh, and eventually in Europe. A few years later, he sold the Garden to another developer, who named the space for its address: Madison Square Garden.
 |
| Breaking News: Winter tells spring to hold off for another week... |
*I used the 32,000 recorded Palestinian deaths, plus the anticipated U.N. figure of 1.1 million additional deaths, and divided that by the remaining 1,000 Israeli hostages, arriving at a rounded figure of 1,500 to 1...As with many publications, the NY Times often features introductory prices to try and get you to subscribe: I am on such a trial at a cost of just $1 per week for a year...their videos from the war-torn areas are shocking and horrific and makes one feel guilty for living in such comfort here in the U.S., especially as we continue to supply armaments to aid such destruction (and basically for free, no less). On the other hand, it would appear that such feelings of disgust are prevalent in Israel as well. Said a piece in The New Yorker: Netanyahu usually works out of a surprisingly shabby office complex in central Jerusalem, but these days he is mostly holed up in the Kirya, a defense compound in Tel Aviv, where he leads a five-member war council. Three of the other four members have little love for Netanyahu and would be happy to see him replaced: the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, whom he temporarily fired last year; Benny Gantz, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and a potential challenger, who is running ahead of Netanyahu in the polls by almost two to one; and Gadi Eisenkot, another former I.D.F. chief of staff and potential challenger, whose connection with the Israeli public deepened when his son died in the fighting in Gaza recently. Then, there’s Ron Dermer, an American-born political adviser and loyalist whose father and brother were both mayors of Miami Beach. Netanyahu and Dermer are comfortable in the folkways of American Republicanism. Dermer is sometimes known as “Netanyahu’s brain” and, like his patron, believes that American Presidents (Barack Obama perhaps most of all) tend to be mistily deluded about the intentions of Palestinians, Hezbollah, and, crucially, the Iranians. Biden, like so many of his predecessors, has a tortured history with Netanyahu, whom he has sometimes found to be self-righteous, condescending, and deceptive. [wrote the Times of Israel, Dermer said this about Israel attacking the crossing point at Rafah, where more than 50% of Palestinian refugees are trapped, 600,000 of whom are children: “It will happen even if Israel is forced to fight alone. Even if the entire world turns on Israel, including the United States...” ] Another view from the magazine showed the difficulty a Palestinian educated in the U.S. (his son has a U.S. passport) is pulled out of the checkpoint line, despite holding all the proper travel papers: I make the sudden decision to try to show the soldiers our passports. Maram keeps my phone and her passport. “I will tell them about us, that we are going to the Rafah border crossing and that our son is an American citizen,” I say. But I have taken only a few steps when a soldier orders me to freeze...We are led, two by two, to a clearing near a wall. A soldier with a megaphone tells us to undress; two others point guns at us. I strip down to my boxer shorts, and so does the young man next to me. The soldier orders us to continue. We look at each other, shocked. I think I see movement from one of the armed soldiers, and fear for my life. We take off our boxer shorts. “Turn around!” This is the first time in my life that strangers have looked at me naked. They speak in Hebrew and seem cheerful...The soldiers blindfold me and attach a numbered bracelet to one wrist. I wonder how Israelis would feel if they were known by a number. Then someone grabs the back of my neck and shoves me forward, as though we are sheep on our way to be slaughtered. I keep asking for someone to talk to, but no one responds. The earth is muddy and cold and strewn with rubble. The author is hauled away to a detention facility where his treatment gets worse...as with so much of what is going on in Gaza, the story is horrific, but so similar to other stories of wars past and present. The New Yorker is often available at an introductory rate, or free from your library's digital services such as Hoopla or Libby.
Comments
Post a Comment
What do YOU think? Good, bad or indifferent, this blog is happy to hear your thoughts...criticisms, corrections and suggestions always welcome.