“We do not have oligarchs in the U.S. the way countries like Russia do. Our millionaires and billionaires are prevented from pulling political puppet strings both by custom and by campaign finance laws which cap their financial contributions to some degree and require disclosures. Though companies do sometimes successfully lobby for government contracts and subsidies—Musk’s hypocrisy has been widely documented on this front—we don’t have widespread, unchecked corporatism where the government always serves to further companies’ bottom lines, or where companies become exempt from government scrutiny for having curried favor with the right people. And free marketeers tend to believe that the existing patchwork of subsidies and handouts ought to be stopped since they serve as market distortions, artificially propping up companies that wouldn’t succeed or be competitive on their own merits.
If Sanders’ point is not merely that wealthy people exercise undue influence on the political process (as oligarch implies) but rather that wealth accumulation always and everywhere ought to be prevented, as he insinuates when he mentions their superyachts, that’s an even weaker critique. People accumulate extreme wealth in this country most often through inventing a product or founding a company that millions or billions of people end up valuing highly. Consider Jeff Bezos, worth $177 billion, per 2021 numbers; Elon Musk, $151 billion; Bill Gates, $124 billion; Mark Zuckerberg, $97 billion; Warren Buffett, $96 billion; Larry Ellison, $93 billion; Larry Page, $91.5 billion; Sergey Brin, $89 billion. More often than not, that process is iterative, with tons of failures before striking gold. When a company is successful, those who were involved in its founding often scatter, taking their earnings and intellect and founding new companies, starting the whole iterative process over again.”
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“Financial planning firm Ramsey Solutions’ 2021 millionaire study found that 79 percent of the 10,000 U.S. millionaires surveyed did not receive any inheritance from their families. Of those who did receive inheritances, who are in the top 1 percent, Federal Reserve data show those inheritances were to the tune of $719,000 on average. More than half of America’s billion-dollar companies have at least one immigrant founder who came to the U.S. as a kid. Extreme wealth, by and large, isn’t generated by investing inherited money, but by starting companies that bring value to millions of customers.”
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“The ’08 financial crisis almost brought Tesla crashing down, and disastrous Falcon 1 launches around that same time almost left SpaceX in pieces. “That historic fourth flight on September 28, 2008 made the Falcon 1 the first privately built liquid-fueled booster to reach orbit,” writes Pethokoukis. “It saved the company. But would that launch have happened if Musk had left PayPal with $60 million less? Would Tesla have muddled into 2009 and beyond? Kaplan doesn’t think so.”
Nor does Musk, in fact.
Central planners like Biden and Sanders don’t appreciate how fragile many of today’s biggest and boldest companies—SpaceX, Tesla, and Amazon—once were. Serial entrepreneurs, who exit one venture and quickly invest their earnings in another, are oftentimes wealthy enough at exit that they would be hit with wealth taxes if the Biden plan or any of its evil twins become law. But two things must be kept in mind: Their wealth is rarely liquid, and that money often gets quickly invested into other ventures that we would lose out on if it had been taxed away.”
“When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.
Flaming hot, in fact.
No, that’s not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans’ office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.
As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school’s real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school’s zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.
Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school’s closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized “elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market.”
By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks.
Enforcement of the snack-selling ban was robust, with security guards even relying on the use of mounted cameras to identify perpetrators so they could be hauled out of class and reprimanded.”
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“Punishing a student for a victimless crime was apparently more important than whatever he might have learned in class that day.”
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“treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching.”
“the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that it would reinstate its SAT/ACT test requirement for applicants. In a departure from the trends set by other elite universities, MIT rolled back its admissions policy, implemented in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle, which made standardized test scores optional. Administrators cited key issues with “holistic” admissions standards, an increasingly popular method of equitably distributing open spots to students regardless of how well they perform on standardized tests.
In a statement explaining the decision, MIT Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill noted that MIT’s “research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”
Without an objective measure like a standardized test, low-income students—who may not have equal access to other pieces of the holistic pie, such as a plethora of Advanced Placement (A.P.) classes or numerous extracurriculars—have a harder time proving that they are academically prepared for an MIT education. A move that was intended to increase diversity and help low-income students, as it turns out, mostly helps low-scoring wealthy students—and makes it harder to identify talented yet underprivileged applicants.
MIT now distinguishes itself from other elite universities, a spate of which have removed their SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, primarily citing COVID-19 and diversity-related justifications for the policy change.
The original logic of such policies is based on the idea that SAT and ACT scores correlate strongly with income, which suggests that students from poorer households are denied admission to competitive schools solely because they can’t afford to ace the SATs.
However, omitting standardized test scores makes all applicants reliant on application materials that correlate even more highly with income, such as admissions essays. A 2021 Stanford study found that essays are actually more strongly correlated with household income than SAT scores. Thus, by omitting one income-correlated metric, one that is even more closely related to income takes prominence.
While wealthy parents can pay for test prep, they can’t take a standardized test for their children (well, almost never). However, with essay coaches and college counselors at their disposal, many wealthy students’ college essays can be manicured to fit exactly what schools are looking for.”
“Under the Public Health Services Act of 1944, codified in Title 42 of the U.S. Code, federal health officials may issue orders intended to curb the cross-border spread of diseases. Rarely invoked before the pandemic, Trump administration officials looked to Title 42 in late March 2020 as a way to stop migrants from crossing U.S. land borders. Would-be migrants could no longer cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico after the CDC’s Title 42 order, ostensibly because they posed contagion risks. The order has been used almost exclusively to expel migrants at the southern border, and CBP officials have carried out 1.7 million expulsions under its authority.
Its implementation has proven to be largely counterproductive and harmful to migrants. Those expelled under Title 42 faced nearly 10,000 incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape, and other violence after being sent to dangerous border towns in Mexico, according to Human Rights First. What’s more, because Title 42 does not penalize repeat crossings, the recidivism rate rose and the total number of CBP apprehensions spiked. This led to inflated reports of chaos and unprecedented migration at the U.S.-Mexico boundary, which only helped fuel the false argument that President Joe Biden is overseeing an open southern border.
Immigration advocates have long criticized the public health order for the barriers it poses to asylum seekers. Under U.S. immigration law, migrants are legally permitted to seek asylum—a process they must begin either on American soil or at a port of entry. An immediate expulsion under Title 42 means that migrants can’t present their cases for asylum, risking a return to the dangerous conditions many of them have fled.
From the very beginning, public health officials have questioned the efficacy of Title 42 in curbing the spread of COVID-19, noting that the virus was already spreading in American communities and that migrants posed a comparatively minor risk. The CDC’s director of Global Migration and Quarantine, Martin Cetron, refused to support the Trump administration’s initial order. Lawyers at the Department of Health and Human Services and CBP pressured the CDC to issue the order, but the agency refused until former Vice President Mike Pence ordered the borders closed. Since that initial scuffle, more than three-quarters of Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, making the health order’s stated justification even more tenuous.”
“”One of the many pernicious things about civil forfeiture nationwide is that the government has the power to seize your cash, and your cars, and your home, but unlike in a criminal case, you don’t have a right to appoint counsel,” says Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice and a lawyer for Abbott. “So if you want to defend your cash, or your car, or your homes in a civil forfeiture action, you typically just have to pay for a lawyer yourself, and that’s not surprisingly economically infeasible for lots of people who are targeted in civil forfeiture actions.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that the state or the federal government can try to take you for nearly all you’re worth in the process. People in Indiana may know that quite well. The state was the setting for one of the most high-profile forfeiture showdowns after Indiana took possession of Tyson Timbs’ new Land Rover in 2013 following his arrest for a drug crime, setting in motion an almost decade-long legal circus between Timbs and the government. State officials were eventually required to return the vehicle in 2020. But prosecutors continued to fight, arguing before the Indiana Supreme Court in 2021 that there should be no proportionality—no limit—on what the government can seize in cases like Timbs’. (The state’s highest court rejected that winning argument last summer.)
Yet civil forfeiture continues apace and is a source of police funding, with local and state departments able to keep the vast majority of the funds they take. Just last year, the Indiana Senate passed a bill to allow cops to seize assets from people suspected of committing “unlawful assembly,” a charge so vague that whether or not someone committed it is somewhat in the eye of the beholder—who, in this case, would be an arresting officer.
Civil forfeiture is also used at the federal level, and it presents many of the same problems. In May 2020, the FBI seized almost $1 million from Carl Nelson after informing him he was under investigation for allegedly committing fraud. Two years later, no criminal charges have been filed, and the government returned some of the cash. Not unlike Abbott, however, the government’s action made it a Herculean task for Nelson to push back, as he had been temporarily bankrupted. “If you can’t afford to defend yourself, let alone feed yourself, it becomes complicated,” Amy Nelson, his wife, told me in February.
As for the Hoosier state? “The ball is very much in the Indiana Legislature’s court,” says Gedge.”
“Genocide is not merely a word for mass killing in general. In international law, per the 1948 Genocide Convention, it refers to any of the following five acts if they are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Under this definition, not every act of violence against civilians qualifies as an act of genocide — nor does every such act motivated by racial, national, or religious hatred. Instead, it is an act of genocide when it is part of a plan to “destroy” the target group — that is, to annihilate not just individual members but the group as a collective.
In the Russian case, establishing that Russian soldiers intentionally killed Ukrainian civilians is not enough to prove genocide. It wouldn’t even be enough if the soldiers said they did it because they hated Ukrainians. Instead, you would need to show that the killings were part of an intentional effort to wipe out the Ukrainian people.”
“The medical science priesthood has a long history of treating outside-the-box thinkers harshly. Toward the end of the 18th century, Britain’s Royal Society refused to publish Edward Jenner’s discovery that inoculating people with material from cowpox pustules—a technique he called “vaccination,” from the Latin word for cow, vacca—prevented them from getting the corresponding human disease, smallpox. Jenner’s medical colleagues considered this idea dangerous; one member of the Royal College of Physicians even suggested that the technique could make people resemble cows.
At the time, many physicians were making a good living by performing variolation, which aimed to prevent smallpox by infecting patients with pus from people with mild cases. Some saw vaccination as a threat to their income. Thankfully, members of Parliament liked Jenner’s idea and appropriated money for him to open a vaccination clinic in London. By the early 1800s, American doctors had adopted the technique. In 1805, Napoleon ordered smallpox vaccination for all of his troops.
Half a century later, the prestigious Vienna General Hospital fired Ignaz Semmelweis from its faculty because he required his medical students and junior physicians to wash their hands before examining obstetrical patients. Semmelweis connected puerperal sepsis—a.k.a. “childbed fever,” then a common cause of postnatal death—to unclean hands. Ten years after Semmelweis returned to his native Budapest, he published The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. The medical establishment rained so much vitriol on him that it drove him insane. (Or so the story goes: Some think, in retrospect, that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder.) He died in an asylum in 1865 at the age of 47.
The “germ theory” anticipated by Semmelweis did not take hold until the late 1880s. That helps explain why, in 1854, the public health establishment rebuffed the physician John Snow after he traced a London cholera epidemic to a water pump on Broad Street. Snow correctly suspected that water from the pump carried a pathogen that caused cholera.
Public health officials clung instead to the theory that the disease was carried by a miasma, or “bad air.” The British medical journal The Lancet published a brutal critique of Snow’s theory, and the General Board of Health determined that his idea was “scientifically unsound.” But after another outbreak of cholera in 1866, the public health establishment acknowledged the truth of Snow’s explanation. The incident validated the 19th century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer’s warning that the public health establishment had come to represent entrenched political interests, distorting science and prolonging the cholera problem. “There is an evident inclination on the part of the medical profession to get itself organized after the fashion of the clericy,” he wrote in 1851’s Social Statics. “Surgeons and physicians are vigorously striving to erect a medical establishment akin to our religious one. Little do the public at large know how actively professional publications are agitating for state-appointed overseers of the public health.””
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“It may be true that, as American science fiction and fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “90 percent of everything is crap.” But the remaining 10 percent can be important. Health care professionals who see only the costs of their patients’ self-guided journeys through the medical literature tend to view this phenomenon as a threat to the scientific order, fueling a backlash. Their reaction risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
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“Openness to unconventional ideas has its limits. We don’t take flat-earthers seriously. Nor should we lend credence to outlandish claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility, implant people with microchips, or change their DNA. There are not enough hours in the day to fully address every question or hypothesis. But a little tolerance and respect for outsiders can go a long way. If those habits become the new norm, people will be more likely to see rejection of challenges to the conventional wisdom as the objective assessment of specialists rather than the defensive reaction of self-interested elites. Science should be a profession, not a priesthood.”
“Under Stutts’ proposal (S.B. 324), medical marijuana dispensaries would “require a negative pregnancy test for women of childbearing age before allowing them to purchase medical cannabis,” per a legislative summary of the bill. Pregnant women on the marijuana patient registry would also be required to report pregnancies to the physician who approved their patient status.
Having to go to a doctor or medical lab and pay for a pregnancy test before every medical cannabis purchase would be not only invasive but inconvenient. In effect, it’s an added tax on young(ish) female patients.
The bill would also ban new moms who are breastfeeding from purchasing medical marijuana for themselves. It does not say how this ban would be enforced.
Alabama only recently legalized medical marijuana (and with a lot of caveats). Gov. Kay Ivey signed a medical marijuana legalization measure into law in May 2021, and the state has yet to license any dispensaries. The Alabama Cannabis Commission has until this upcoming September to creating a system for dispensary licensing, a patient registry system, and rules for cannabis packaging, labeling, and advertising.
The state already limits the number of dispensary licenses that can be issued to a mere four, and it bans dispensaries from being located within 1,000 feet of any “school, day care, or child care facility.” Stutts’ bill would further restrict where dispensaries could operate by stipulating that this rule includes home-based child care operations and colleges.
All these restrictions will probably discourage even many people who could qualify as patients from registering and purchasing through the state’s legal system. If Stutts’ bill passes, it will become yet another incentive for patients to bypass state dispensaries and keep buying on the black market.”
“Sewage surveillance is becoming more valuable right now as conventional testing is becoming less transparent. More people have been using rapid at-home tests and might not report results to a public health agency. That means the number of positive cases being reported by official sources might not actually provide a full picture of what’s happening with the pandemic.
But no matter how or if they’re testing, infected people — whether they have symptoms or not — flush out the virus when they go to the bathroom, leaving viral RNA that can be detected in wastewater samples. It requires careful collection and testing, but sewage can provide a less biased look at the viral trends in a given community.
Science has not yet reached the point where we can say that X amount of viral load in a community’s sewage means Y number of people are infected in that community. But still, knowing which way viral loads are trending is useful. If they are going up, even before the number of positive tests starts increasing, it could in theory allow public health authorities and the local health system to start preparing for a surge. If they are going down, public health officials (and the general public) can be confident that any waning in official case numbers is real and not the byproduct of, say, less testing.”
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“Surveillance programs could watch for other pathogens, too, such as influenza, hepatitis, and norovirus for early warnings of emerging outbreaks. Julianne Nassif, an expert on wastewater surveillance with the Association of Public Health Labs, said we could also monitor for bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that are resistant to current treatments. Public health officials could try to get ahead of an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a nursing home, for example, with the information gleaned from downstream sewage.
Johnson envisioned communities monitoring for narcotics, to better tailor their public health campaigns. Wastewater could be tested to determine whether cocaine or opioid use is rising in a given sewage shed. It could even determine what kind of opioids are being used, which could be helpful to health departments. Widespread heroin use might require a different intervention than diverted prescription opioids or black-market fentanyl.
The possibilities sound almost endless, extending to research that could help us better understand human health. Dennehy described to me one hypothetical experiment that could be run with sewage monitoring, looking for the viral markers associated with colon cancer. By comparing the results from one community with, say, a nearby nuclear power plant and another community somewhere else, we could get a better understanding of how the surrounding environment affects people’s health.
But for all of this potential to be realized, these efforts would require sustained support. The CDC bet on the wastewater boom, launching a national Covid-19 surveillance system in the fall of 2020. But dedicated investments in infrastructure and a workforce would be necessary if the country were to begin conducting wastewater surveillance on a more permanent basis.
In general, the US has not appeared willing to make big investments in public health. Scientists working on these programs hope that the same may not be true of wastewater surveillance, given the opportunities it presents.
“We learned a lot of hard-won lessons with the Covid pandemic. We got caught with our pants down at the beginning. A lot of things that we did were too late,” Dennehy told me. “The hope is we can remember these lessons for the next time this comes around, which may not be that long.””
“While some gas stations have taken the leap and installed charging ports alongside their pumps, people tend to do the lion’s share of their EV charging at home. And since EV chargers can be installed in almost any location that’s connected to the power grid — they’re now available in office garages and rest stops, and will soon be in some Starbucks parking lots — the gas station is increasingly unnecessary for some Americans.”
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“To adjust this business model for the EV era, some gas stations are now installing Level 3 chargers, which can deliver as much as 20 miles of range per minute, alongside their old pumps and convenience stores. Some of these fast chargers make EV charging almost as speedy as filling up a gas tank the old-fashioned way, and they’re much faster than what people typically use at home. Several gas station owners who have or are installing Level 3 chargers told Recode that their goal is to become “fuel agnostic” and appeal to EV drivers as well as those with gas-powered cars.
But for many gas stations, the cost of an EV charger outweighs the benefits. The charger itself can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is a tough expense for a small business. The overall cost can be much more, since installation often involves drilling through asphalt and laying electrical wiring, and sometimes gas stations also need to buy transformers to boost the overall electrical capacity of their sites. Chris Bambury, who operates several gas stations in California, told Recode that setting up just four EV chargers at one of his locations would have cost about half a million dollars if government and utility programs hadn’t covered about 90 percent of the bill.
An even bigger challenge is that gas stations already face intense competition from other public EV chargers. Data collected by the Department of Energy shows that, of the public charger locations the agency fully tracks, there are currently more public chargers located at hotels and inns, shopping centers, and government buildings than there are at gas stations and convenience stores. This is a limited picture of the nation’s charging network, and it doesn’t include the large number of chargers built by private companies like Blink, Electrify America, and Chargepoint. These companies also seem to prefer installing these chargers in places with parking spots connected to the grid, where EV drivers can find something to do while charging, like go to a grocery store or a restaurant.”
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“But perhaps the biggest obstacle facing gas stations: Charging an electric vehicle is often as simple as parking it. Many EV owners buy chargers that plug into a standard home wall outlet just like their laptop or phone, and that virtually eliminates the need for frequent refueling trips. These are typically less expensive Level 1 chargers that take a few hours to fully recharge a battery, which is perfectly acceptable for charging a vehicle overnight. And since the average EV can travel 260 miles on a single charge, most people only need to plug their cars in once a day.”
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“even if gas stations do install fast chargers, people who are traveling long distances may be their main customers. This situation is already playing out in Norway, where about 90 percent of new cars sold are now electric or hybrid. While gas stations have moved quickly to install charging ports, many EV drivers in Norway are only visiting them on a monthly basis.
The rise of EVs could actually lead to a new generation of pit stops. Some private companies, for instance, are opening their own luxurious destinations with multiple charging stations. Electrify America plans to open a series of flagship, EV-focused travel lounges with solar canopies and event spaces that could possibly offer valet services and curbside deliveries in California and New York later this year. Automakers are also experimenting with the idea of premium charging stations. In California, Tesla has already opened a charging hub for its vehicles that incorporates a lounge, an espresso bar, and free wifi. Porsche and Audi are developing similar plans for stations of their own.
None of this is necessarily surprising. New innovations often make old technology obsolete. After all, the phasing out of travel by horse also meant the demise of the horse-drawn carriage industry and the repurposing of stables. Now, after a century spent building complex infrastructure around gas-powered vehicles, another transition seems inevitable. This means that EVs aren’t just transforming the kind of cars people drive, but also where they take them.”