Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“about 900 Americans died in 2020 from complications related to childbirth. Another 50,000 or more women experienced severe pregnancy-related complications. Four of five of those deaths were from preventable causes. In terms of scale and rate, America’s maternal mortality dwarfs the issues of other wealthy countries, and these gaps in maternity care shoulder much of the blame.”
“Gross’s take is straightforward: Arab states are simply pursuing their self-interest in keeping oil prices high. She cautioned against seeing the OPEC+ decision as a choice by the group between the US and Russia. Today is not like the Cold War, when many Middle Eastern states balanced between Washington and Moscow, seeking to extract maximum benefits from both superpowers and hedging in case either bloc won.
Besides, although the cut might boost oil prices, Gross says the prospects for Russia’s future oil revenues are potentially quite dim, as the G7 and the European Union prepare to implement new measures that could substantially reduce Putin’s proceeds from oil. Moreover, the actual production cut is likely to be around 1 million barrels per day — not 2 million — because many OPEC+ members weren’t meeting their quotas anyway, according to Gross.”
“what happens inside doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Furnaces and water heaters have to vent their emissions directly outdoors, for example (stoves and ovens face no such requirements), and that pollution doesn’t just disappear. The consequences are exacerbated in communities of color, where homes tend to run on less efficient appliances and communities already bear the burden of greater outdoor particulate matter. One analysis by RMI found that Black Americans are 55 percent more likely to die prematurely from the impacts of fossil fuel appliance pollution compared to white Americans. Another study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, found residential gas combustion and commercial cooking to be the largest drivers of the racial disparity in pollution exposure for people of color compared to white people.”
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“As the grid is getting cleaner, buildings hooked up to electricity will also have a dwindling footprint and, hopefully, use less energy overall with more energy-efficient machines. But a building that runs on gas will always burn a fossil fuel for its heat. And today that footprint is considerably large: 13 percent of the nation’s climate pollution comes directly from these gas-burning machines.”
“Petroleum shipments are still relatively stable for Russia, as nations like China and India have picked up some slack from EU countries weaning themselves off oil, and Russia still has LNG, coal, and nuclear energy to help the economy float, too.
In order to make petroleum products more appealing to customers like India and Indonesia, Russia has offered fairly steep discounts — an average of $30 per barrel — against Brent crude oil, which has also been a benefit for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Cuba, all emerging economies struggling with inflation, as Business Insider reported. Although according to S&P the discounts on Russian crude oil are decreasing, some analysts believe they’ll persist, making Russian crude oil imports highly palatable for poorer countries.”
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“Countries like China, India, and Turkey are proving eager partners for the Russian fuel industry, with Turkey doubling Russian oil imports this year and vying to become a hub for Russian LNG transfers into Europe after damage to the Nord Stream pipelines.”
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“Even with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline out of commission — and setting aside the transfers to China, now Russia’s biggest natural gas buyer — European countries are importing record amounts of Russian LNG at market prices, according to Bloomberg. France has purchased about 6 percent more Russian LNG between January and September of this year than it did all of last year; Spain has already broken its record for Russian LNG imports this year, and Belgium is on track to do the same.
The stakes for natural gas imports are somewhat different than they are for Russian petroleum, in a number of different ways; for one, the EU hasn’t imposed sanctions against it as it has against petroleum products, though the bloc does intend to eliminate its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027. Second, Russia has already used Europe‘s reliance on its natural gas as a weapon; Russia cut access to many European countries which refused to pay for LNG in rubles, and cut total output to Europe by 60 percent in June and by 80 percent in July, Reuters reported last month.”
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“Russia continues to invest heavily in its nuclear technology, and nuclear facilities in many nations are dependent on Russian technology and cooperation to function, even if they’re not directly importing Russian nuclear fuel, according to a report by Robert Ichord for the Atlantic Council.”
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“Russia has several illicit strategies to evade western sanctions on its energy products and financial system. Because these transactions are, by their nature, often difficult to track, it’s hard to know how effective and how widespread they are — not to mention how much the Russian economy is benefiting from them.”
“In 2016..China formally banned K-pop…The ban, ironically, turned many former K-pop stars back into Chinese celebrities whose K-pop influence is still being felt.”
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“The K-pop ban both is and isn’t about Korea. It began as a response to a US-Korea missile deal, but really embodied disapproval of three things the Chinese government perceived as tied to K-pop culture: the encroaching influence of US individualism, over-zealous fanbases, and effeminate men.
That last one is a major part of the K-pop ban, which forbids men from wearing earrings and excessive makeup on live TV.”
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“Dan Chen researches authoritarian politics at the University of Richmond. She told Vox that the CCP’s fixation on masculinity is a recent byproduct of Xi’s growing nationalism — because “nationalism is a very masculine ideology.” Framing foreign influences like K-pop as anti-masculine plays right into Xi’s narrative of an idealized China that’s strong physically as well as economically and politically. Toward this end, the government has worked to eradicate effeminacy in schoolchildren and promoted images of strong, muscular soldiers as the masculine ideal.”
https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/alerts/tax/2022/legislative-updates/president-biden-signs-major-reconciliation-tax-bill
“The American Rescue Plan, intended to stimulate the economy from the effects of the pandemic, was a massive spending package that passed in March 2021. The legislation included $1,400 checks for individuals, expansions to unemployment insurance and child tax credit benefits, and hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments.
For months, economists have debated the American Rescue Plan’s impact on inflation. While many economists agree that the stimulus law did worsen inflation by giving people more money to spend, they continue to disagree about the extent. The debate is, in part, about what else might be to blame in the United States and globally. Inflation started shooting up in early 2021 after the package passed and has remained stubbornly high since. But even without the stimulus, inflation would have increased. The coronavirus led to factory shutdowns around the world, shipping backlogs, and labor shortages, all of which have strained supply chains and pushed prices higher.
The disagreement essentially boils down to economists’ views on how pandemic-related factors independent of the stimulus, such as a shift to working from home, have contributed to inflation and how unique inflation has been in the United States compared to other countries.”
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“Increased housing costs have been a big driver of inflation — shelter is the largest component of the Consumer Price Index and makes up about 30 percent of overall inflation as measured by the index. Dean Baker, a senior economist and co-founder of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that new research on housing inflation helped support the idea that price gains were mostly driven by a mass shift to remote work and not the stimulus package. As people shifted to remote work, housing prices went up, and those prices in turn pushed overall inflation higher.
An analysis published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on September 26 examined the rapid rise in housing prices and whether remote work, or other factors like fiscal stimulus, led to the increase. The authors — Augustus Kmetz, John Mondragon, and Johannes Wieland — wrote that as more people started working remotely, they sought out additional space at home. That resulted in a spike in housing demand and helped lead to a surge in prices.
The researchers estimated that remote work resulted in house prices rising by about 15 percent from November 2019 to November 2021, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the overall increase in house prices.
“It means we can’t blame the stimulus. Clearly that added to it,” Baker said. “But the main story there is this big switch to working from home.””
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“Holtz-Eakin said it was clear that the package significantly drove up inflation and pointed to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which published an analysis in March that found that “fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect” could have “contributed to about 3 percentage points of the rise in U.S. inflation through the end of 2021.”
The analysis — which was written by Òscar Jordà, Celeste Liu, Fernanda Nechio, and Fabián Rivera-Reyes — found that the United States’ “core” inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose more quickly in 2021 compared to the average rate of core inflation of other wealthy countries. Compared to the other countries — Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — the United States injected more fiscal stimulus into its economy.
“The difference is really the stimulus in the US,” Holtz-Eakin said.
But Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that inflation has been ubiquitous “across every advanced economy” since the pandemic began and he didn’t believe the American Rescue Plan was a major contributor to inflation. An analysis published in August by Bivens, Asha Banerjee, and Mariia Dzholos examined the United States’ core inflation from December 2020 to May 2022 and compared it to core inflation in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. To calculate the rate of acceleration in each country, the researchers took the difference between the “post-pandemic” core inflation and the “pre-pandemic” core inflation using data from 2018 and 2019.
The researchers found that the acceleration in the United States’ core inflation was “on the higher side” but was “far from the top” and not that far above the average for all other OECD countries. All but one OECD country saw an acceleration in core inflation, the researchers found. For example, Canada’s core inflation grew at a slightly slower rate compared to the United States, but Portugal’s sped up faster, according to the analysis.”
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“Bivens also pointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s research on housing inflation and said that price gains in the United States were mostly driven by pandemic-related events that would have occurred without the stimulus — like supply chain disruptions and increased demand for housing. And although he said he believed the American Rescue Plan had inflationary impacts, the trade-off was necessary to stave off higher unemployment numbers.”
“year after year, satellites that monitor changes in forest cover find the same thing: The Amazon is shrinking. Between August 1, 2018, and July 31, 2021, more than 34,000 square km (8.4 million acres) disappeared from the Brazilian Amazon. That’s an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium, and a 52 percent increase compared to the previous three years.”
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“In a cattle laundering scheme, ranchers move cattle from “dirty” ranches, which contribute to deforestation, to ranches that are “clean,” with no recent forest loss. By the time those cattle arrive at slaughterhouses, the path they’ve taken is obscured, as is the damage they’ve caused.”
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“Most major meatpackers and slaughterhouses — which influence the entire beef supply chain — screen the cattle they buy for deforestation. Ranchers that sell to them, known as direct suppliers, provide the location of their farms. And the meatpacking companies hire consultants to check those locations for any recent forest loss, using data collected by satellites.
But this screening process misses a lot — perhaps even the majority of deforestation in the beef supply chain — undermining the integrity of their zero-deforestation pledges.”
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“according to decade-old agreements, major meatpackers in Brazil can only buy clean cattle: cows that come from land without any recent deforestation. The problem is, there are several ways to make cattle look clean, even when they’re not.
The most common way is pretty simple and takes advantage of the complex beef supply chain. A single cow could travel through as many as 10 farms before it’s ultimately killed; it might be born on one, reared on another, and fattened on a third, all before reaching a slaughterhouse.”
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“slaughterhouses only tend to assess their direct suppliers, the last stop on the cow’s journey.”
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“If small teams of outside researchers can pinpoint the source of forest loss along supply chains, it seems as though giant corporations should be able to as well. Remember, it has been more than 10 years since they committed to source clean cattle.
While some experts fault meatpackers for not doing more, rooting out forest loss among indirect suppliers is actually quite challenging. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, who first figured out how to do this, spent years developing computer programs to download records stored in clunky government systems. They then have to clean them up, link key bits of data together, and run the analysis.
These records are not designed to make cattle supply chains traceable, they just happen to serve that function if you know what you’re doing. “It requires a lot of computational expertise,” Brandão said. It’s not like meatpacking companies are just ignoring deforestation right in front of their eyes.”
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“there isn’t a huge incentive for meatpacking companies to solve this problem in the first place, some experts say. If they choose not to buy from any ranches linked to deforestation, they’ll have a much smaller supply”
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“Ultimately, to put an end to cattle laundering, meat companies would need to monitor the movement of individual cows, Gibbs said. “If we wanted to end laundering, we would need animal-level traceability,” Gibbs said. “Until we keep track of the individual animals, some level of laundering will keep happening.””
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/19/23412562/covid-omircron-gain-of-function-research-engineered-pandemic-biosafety
“Headlines bemoaning shortages of everything from PlayStations and Care Bears to medical devices are no longer a daily occurrence. Just six vessels were waiting to dock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Tuesday — a tiny fraction of the 109 that were stuck outside the San Pedro Bay back in January. Meanwhile, the cost of sending a 40-foot shipping container from Asia to the West Coast is now under $3,000, far below last year’s high of more than $20,000.
Still, the structural problems that enabled many of the delays, price hikes, and shortages over the past few years haven’t gone away. Shipping prices have not quite returned to their pre-pandemic levels, truck drivers are still in short supply, and some in the logistics industry are already predicting that there will be problems during the upcoming holiday season. More broadly, the capitalist system responsible for manufacturing and delivering goods throughout the world has not been “fixed.” In fact, it remains as vulnerable to disruption as ever. Consumers are still seeing widespread inflation, not only for energy and food but also for products that often depend on Pacific shipping routes, including apparel and new vehicles, according to the consumer price index summary published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week.
“If the supply chain is a patient coming into the ER, then it’s not bleeding to death anymore,” said Daniel Maffei, the chair of the Federal Maritime Commission. “But there are still a lot of issues with the supply chain. Some of them and maybe even the bulk of them predate Covid.””