“By compiling and analyzing a huge amount of government data, environmental economist Eyal Frank, the study’s sole author, discovered that in regions with outbreaks of white nose syndrome, a wildlife disease that kills bats, the rate of infant mortality increased by nearly 8 percent relative to areas without the disease.
There’s a clear reason for this, according to the paper. Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.”
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/370002/bats-link-babies-death-study-white-nose-syndrome
“a software company called RealPage is being sued by the Department of Justice for using an algorithm that suggests rent prices to corporate landlords. The DOJ argues that its algorithm has driven rents higher, and constitutes an illegal information sharing scheme. That is, competitors (the landlords) who would otherwise be acting independently, have exchanged “nonpublic, competitively sensitive data” to the detriment of renters who don’t have access to such knowledge.”
https://www.vox.com/money/370351/realpage-doj-lawsuit-rent-algorithm-pricing
https://www.vox.com/politics/370004/mass-shooting-prevention-behavioral-threat-assessment
How Chinese Industry Got Too Good, Too Fast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdlKQ6sSb_o
“I like to think of the circular economy as a jacked-up “reduce, reuse, recycle” system. The hope is to keep materials in use for as long as possible with minimal waste, and to do so on a much wider scale.
Right now, there are two main reasons why a lot of what we recycle doesn’t ever actually get made into new things: It’s either prohibitively expensive to do, or we just don’t know how to recycle that material yet (like most plastics). A circular economy also would aim to prevent waste from happening in the first place by designing products made to be recycled.”
…
“The most obvious approach to see — but the most difficult for governments to implement — is to pass regulations that ensure compliance for labor and the environment. Every company that produces would have to adhere to some kind of law that outlines how the waste and the extraction of new materials should be handled. Governments would also have to invest in infrastructure to make it possible to meet those tougher rules, whether that’s scaling up recycling facilities or providing subsidies for innovators to solve a complex recycling problem.
One public policy idea that’s gaining traction is extended producer responsibility (EPR), which shifts the end-of-life management of products away from consumers and governments back to the corporations that sell those products.
Right now, you and I likely pay taxes to our municipal and state governments to handle trash and recycling. EPR laws would require companies to front money for the products they sell into a responsible entity — like a nonprofit organization or government agency — that helps pay for recycling infrastructure, collection, sorting, processing, and sale of recovered materials. (EPR can also look like voluntary take-back programs, where consumers can return their used stuff to the company to recycle into other things.)”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370626/consumerism-circular-economy-single-use-recycling-landfill-garbage
“In the US, basic science research, studying how the world works for the sake of expanding knowledge, is mostly funded by the federal government. The NIH funds the vast majority of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds other sciences, like astrophysics, geology, and genetics. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) also funds some biomedical research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds technology development for the military, some of which finds uses in the civilian world, like the internet.
The grant application system worked well a few decades ago, when over half of submitted grants were funded. But today, we have more scientists — especially young ones — and less money, once inflation is taken into account. Getting a grant is harder than ever, scientists I spoke with said. What ends up happening is that principal investigators are forced to spend more of their time writing grant applications — which often take dozens of hours each — than actually doing the science they were trained for. Because funding is so competitive, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how cells communicate with each other, for example, may spin it as a study of cancer, heart disease, or depression to convince the NIH that its project is worth funding.
Federal agencies generally fund specific projects, and require scientists to provide regular progress updates. Some of the best science happens when experiments lead researchers in unexpected directions, but grantees generally need to stick with the specific aims listed in their application or risk having their funding taken away — even if the first few days of an experiment suggest things won’t go as planned.
This system leaves principal investigators constantly scrambling to plug holes in their patchwork of funding. In her first year as a tenure-track professor, Jennifer Garrison, now a reproductive longevity researcher at the Buck Institute, applied for 45 grants to get her lab off the ground. “I’m so highly trained and specialized,” she told me. “The fact that I spend the majority of my time on administrative paperwork is ridiculous.””
…
“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has a funding model worth replicating. It is driven by a “people, not projects” philosophy, granting scientists many years worth of money, without tying them down to specific projects. Grantees continue working at their home institution, but they — along with their postdocs — become employees of HHMI, which pays their salary and benefits.
HHMI reportedly provides enough funding to operate a small- to medium-sized lab without requiring any extra grants. The idea is that if investigators are simply given enough money to do their jobs, they can redirect all their wasted grant application time toward actually doing science. It’s no coincidence that over 30 HHMI-funded scientists have won Nobel Prizes in the past 50 years.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/370681/science-research-grants-scientific-progress-academia-slow-funding
“this doesn’t necessarily mean the parties are back to being Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “There are some strengths and some weaknesses,” she said. For example, the formal rules and structures of the parties are still weak; Democrats had to rely on informal levers of power to oust Biden from the race. All the coordination in the world couldn’t have forced Biden to withdraw without his acquiescence.
And those informal levers only work when elites are united behind a singular goal.”
https://abcnews.go.com/538/democratic-party-strong-party/story?id=113359935
The 2024 voting landscape is a recipe for confusion
https://abcnews.go.com/538/2024-voting-landscape-recipe-confusion/story?id=113460108
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtsYfmQgYpM
https://reason.com/2024/07/29/j-d-vance-says-childless-americans-should-pay-higher-taxes-they-already-do/