“Some Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated believe they are living through a very different pandemic — one where the approved Covid-19 vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, and where a long list of “miracle cures,” ivermectin among them, are critical to patients’ health and safety.
From the outside, these positions can seem not just dangerous but incoherent. What would lead a person to say they won’t take a vaccine approved by federal regulators, then take an off-label medication because they read about it online?
Of course, not all Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated have embraced supposed miracle cures: The reasons that people give for not getting a Covid-19 vaccine are varied and complex. But over the past year, among some refusers, a community of intense vaccine denialism has developed and created a sort of psychological scaffolding to support their views. As a group, the most fervent vaccine deniers construct and perpetuate an alternative narrative of the pandemic. And when inconvenient facts — from a news report to a friend’s or relative’s decision to get vaccinated — challenge that narrative, they give them a place to take refuge.
This phenomenon has its origins in America’s political polarization. One of the best predictors of whether someone is resistant to getting the Covid-19 vaccine is whether they identify as a Republican, and we know those partisan bonds are powerful. But they are not sufficient to explain the intransigence. Most Republicans have gotten the vaccine by now, but about 12 percent of Americans say they will never get vaccinated under any circumstances. (Roughly six in 10 of those people are Republicans, but a small minority of Democrats also say they won’t get the vaccine.)”
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““When you really want to believe something — like ‘you can’t trust the vaccines’ — you’ll come up with any number of rationalizations,” Van Bavel said. “It’s like whack-a-mole. You falsify one premise and they just create a new one.”
This is a well-documented social phenomenon. In a new book by Van Bavel and Lehigh psychology professor Dominic Packer, The Power of Us, the authors recount one controversial work of social science in the 1950s. Social psychologists infiltrated a doomsday cult to find out how the members would react when their promised date of salvation — the day that a UFO would come to Earth and take them away — came and went without the prophecy coming true.
The researchers found that when the prophecy failed, most people didn’t quit the cult. They didn’t discard their old beliefs, protest that they had been lied to, and desert the cult’s leader. Instead, the leader offered his followers a brand new narrative, which many of them accepted: Their fervent faith had been so powerful that the apocalypse had been averted.”
High-Deductible Health Plans Reduce Health Care Cost And Utilization, Including Use Of Needed Preventive Services Rajender Agarwal et al. 10 2017. HealthAffairs. https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0610 Does High Cost-Sharing Slow the Long-term Growth Rate of Health Spending? Evidence from the States Molly Frean and Mark
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“A combination of factors are driving (heh) the United Kingdom’s fuel — or petrol, as it’s called — shortage.
There were disruptions in fuel delivery, but Brits’ desperation to get gas appears to be causing the current crisis. People are rushing to fill up their tanks because they are worried there will be a big shortage, and that is straining the available supply. Florian Lücker, a senior lecturer in supply chain management at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London, compared it to the US’s great toilet paper stockpiling at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have potential delays in supplies of fuel, among other things,” said Joanna Clifton-Sprigg, an assistant professor in economics at the University of Bath. “But it wouldn’t have been so bad if we all didn’t suddenly decide to go to a petrol station and fill the tanks to the full in every car we own.”
Why people were panic-buying gas in the first place is a bit more complicated. It’s not because of a national lack of fuel or gas. The UK has enough supply. It’s because there is a shortage of truck drivers able to deliver it.
This dearth of drivers isn’t exclusively a UK problem, it’s a global one, as the commercial trucking industry is struggling to recruit new workers for what is an extremely grueling job — long hours on the road, poor infrastructure to sleep or go to the bathroom.
“Being a truck driver is a really hard job,” said Dmitry Grozoubinski, director of the consultancy ExplainTrade. “It’s not hugely social. It’s not particularly high status. And in a lot of cases, it wasn’t supremely well paid.” The industry skews old, and many drivers are retiring, and though the UK is urging drivers with experience to come back, the often poor conditions and benefits are keeping people away. Add to that Covid-19 pandemic disruptions, which in the UK were particularly acute because the country suspended the testing process for truck drivers during lockdown.
The UK trucking industry is also dealing with something that exists nowhere else: Brexit. The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union has exacerbated the crisis. Or more specifically, the version of Brexit pursued by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has.
There are some signs that the immediate fuel crisis may be waning soon, and the UK government has put soldiers on standby to haul fuel, as needed. Johnson’s government has proposed a plan to bring in 5,000 foreign truck drivers through short-term temporary visas in an attempt to make up the shortfall. But that might not be enough to fill labor gaps the UK is experiencing, and Brexit — and the ideas behind Brexit — may make it harder to find long-term fixes.”
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“Pay for truck drivers isn’t always commensurate with the demanding nature of the work. The job became less appealing to Brits, and so like a lot of industries, companies sought to fill their ranks with workers from elsewhere. Wealthier countries in the EU have often relied on workers from poorer EU member states, and those workers could drive a truck in the UK or Germany and take home way more money than they’d be able to earn in, say, Poland.”
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“the Brexit deal negotiated with the EU created more friction between the two partners. That, too, was a deliberate choice, and has added a layer of red tape to the trading relationship. It may make it less attractive to be a trucker in the UK than in the EU and more difficult for EU truckers to make up some of the shortfall the UK is experiencing. “What Brexit has meant is that the UK no longer enjoys the way that the EU pooled resources and moved stuff around in order to take the edge off those problems,” Grozoubinski said.”
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“It has also been difficult to untangle the current rules from the anti-immigration sentiment that accompanied Brexit. People may not want to come to work in the UK where there is a sense they aren’t as welcome or won’t be able to settle in the UK. That unease may have prompted some truck drivers to leave.
But, according to Elizabeth de Jong, the policy director at Logistics UK, the pandemic just made everything worse, as people may have just gone back to their home countries during the lockdowns. “The thing that has changed because of the EU exit is that we would normally be able to just bring them back, and you can’t just bring them back or recruit more from the EU,” de Jong said. “We haven’t got that option anymore.””
“Neil Gorsuch was ready to blow up the US housing market over a minor legal violation.
The case in front of the Supreme Court was Collins v. Yellen (2021), which had at its center the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), an obscure body that oversaw hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions intended to stabilize the housing market after the 2008 recession. The FHFA is led by a single director whom only the president can fire “for cause.” The plaintiffs in Collins v. Yellen argued the president must have unlimited power to fire the agency’s head, citing the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
But under the Collins plaintiffs’ arguments, it also followed that if the FHFA head was fired, every action the agency had taken since its creation in 2008 should be declared void — a truly radical prospect. That argument won very little favor from the justices. In June, the Court handed down a relatively modest opinion that gave President Joe Biden (and all future presidents) the power to fire the FHFA director without reversing the agency’s past work.
But Gorsuch would have none of it.
In a partial dissent, Gorsuch complained that his colleagues were too spooked by the prospect of “unwinding or disgorging hundreds of millions of dollars that have already changed hands” (an underestimate of the amount of money at stake by several orders of magnitude). The proper approach, Gorsuch opined in Collins, was to declare the FHFA’s actions “void.”
If Gorsuch had gotten his way, 13 years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions would have been unraveled, possibly delivering a shock to the mortgage-lending industry similar to that of the 2008 crisis — or even sending the world economy into a tailspin.
And yet, for Gorsuch, the potential consequences were irrelevant to how the Court should rule.
It wasn’t the only case this term where Gorsuch brushed aside worries about widespread disruption that could have done tremendous harm to millions of people.”
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“The lodestar of Gorsuch’s rhetoric about how judges should interpret the law is “textualism,” which he described in a 2020 book as the idea that judges’ sole task when interpreting legal texts is to determine “what an ordinary English speaker familiar with the law’s usages would have understood the statutory text to mean at the time of its enactment.””
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“In reality, this method rarely lives up to such lofty promises. Many legal texts (including much of the Constitution) are ambiguous and can be fairly read in many ways. And what should a court do if it concludes that a century-old decision — one that millions of individuals and businesses may have relied on for decades — misread the text of a statute? Should 100 years of settled law be upended?
Setting aside textualism’s flaws, Gorsuch’s record on the Supreme Court exposes just how spotty his application of the methodology is. Though his own opinions frequently preach the gospel of textualism, he’s shown no compunction about joining other justices’ opinions that treat the text of a statute as merely optional.”
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“Gorsuch is also perfectly willing to follow anti-textualist precedents that yield conservative results.”
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“Gorsuch’s commitment to textualism can be little more than hot air. He is a selective textualist, who frequently evangelizes in favor of this method of interpretation but often abandons it in cases that reach a conservative result.”
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“When Gorsuch has the chance to write a majority opinion, in other words, he typically shoots for the moon. His jurisprudence shows utter disregard for the norms of an institution he now belongs to, and for the work of generations to come up with a system of law that can manage a pluralistic society. It’s a revolutionary project, breathtaking in its audacity and nihilistic at its core.”
“A civil war between Ethiopia’s federal government and the country’s northern Tigray region, which began late last year, has led to widespread atrocities and created famine conditions in parts of the country. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s decision to expel UN officials from the country comes after they raised concerns about the worsening humanitarian situation.
UN officials have repeatedly warned that Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of critical supplies — like medicine, food, and fuel — into the Tigray region, with as little as 10 percent of the needed humanitarian supplies being allowed in. Those accusations were echoed this week by the head of the UN’s humanitarian aid arm, as well as by a UN report finding the region on the brink of famine.”
“In 1985, atmospheric scientists in Antarctica noticed something troubling. For decades, they’d been measuring the thickness of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, the layer of gas that deflects much of the sun’s radiation. Starting in the 1970s, it had started plummeting. By the mid-1980s, they observed that it was on track to be wiped out in the next few decades.
Their discovery was cause for worldwide alarm and unprecedented action. In short order, the international community marshaled its resources — scientific, economic, diplomatic — to mount a campaign to ban the chemical that caused the damage, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and to restore the ozone layer.
Fast-forward to today: The ozone is on the path to recovery, if not fully restored. That progress hasn’t been without setbacks. The ozone hole is shrinking on average, but some years are bad ones — the hole was notably larger in 2020, following a 2019 when it was unusually small. Researchers have also raised suspicions that the rate at which atmospheric CFCs are falling suggests not all signatories to a treaty banning new production of CFCs are abiding by the agreement. And there have been unintended consequences in phasing out CFCs with a different chemical that has hurt our fight against climate change (more on this below).
But the damage we wrought last century has been reversed. Even with the complications and caveats, the world’s response to the ozone crisis should be seen as an instructive, even inspiring, success story — one that can perhaps inform our response to the climate crisis.”
“The United States Postal Service started slowing its mail delivery on Friday, part of an effort by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to cut costs over the next 10 years.
The most widespread and significant change will affect first-class mail — things like letters, small packages, bills, and tax documents. Prior to the changes, customers throughout the US could expect first-class mail to reach its destination in one to three days; now, that timeframe will extend to between one and five days.
That “means mail delivery will be slower than in the 1970s,” for an estimated 40 percent of first-class mail, Paul Steidler, an expert on the postal service and supply chains at the Lexington Institute, told CBS.
That’s because the USPS is set to reduce its reliance on planes to transport mail as part of a broader cost-saving effort, instead shifting some deliveries within the continental US to ground transportation. According to the Washington Post, the Postal Service will reduce the amount of mail transported via plane from 20 percent to 12 percent.
According to an August notice from USPS in the Federal Register, using cargo planes and passenger aircraft to transport mail is more expensive and less reliable because of “weather delays, network congestion, and air traffic control ground stops.””
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“Right now, distribution networks across the world are massively congested.
“Los Angeles — which is a major port of entry for the United States — New York, and New Jersey are all pretty full up,” says O’Leary. “We’re hearing reports of delays of weeks for getting things cleared.”
“Containers are not moving out of ports and onto trains quickly enough,” explains Chris Tang, a UCLA business professor specializing in global supply chain management. “And on top of that, all of the warehouses in the Midwest are full. So everything is stuck.”
An increase in online shipping in part of what’s driving the congestion. Meanwhile, the complications of Brexit and the internet’s beloved container ship Ever Given — both of which dramatically disrupted global supply chains — certainly aren’t helping ports empty themselves out faster.
Even more pressing, however, is a shortage of truck drivers. There just aren’t enough trucks on the road to pick up as much stuff as we’re currently shipping around the world. “We’re talking tens of thousands fewer truck drivers than we need,” says O’Leary.
And as stuff sits in warehouses, waiting to be picked up by increasingly scarce truck drivers, the price of storage goes up, adding to overall shipping costs. “It used to be around $3,000 per container,” Tang says. “Now the price is closer to $20,000.” The skyrocketing costs mean that companies selling luxury goods will take more warehouse slots, since they can afford them, while lower-priced goods, like books, compete for what’s left.
Barnes & Noble CEO Daunt notes that books do have one big advantage over other goods when it comes to shipping: They’re durable. “The reality is that books are fantastic because they don’t really perish, so you’re able to print lots of them in advance,” he says. “They’re incredibly robust, so you can send them through the most basic of supply chain routes. They’re not strawberries or peaches or delicate things.”
But right now, even the most basic of supply chain routes are finding themselves overwhelmed.”
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“One of the big underlying problems when it comes to printing and shipping books is the same labor shortage that’s currently roiling the rest of the country. There aren’t enough press operators to get books printed, and then there aren’t enough truck drivers to get them to bookstores. Wages have gone up, but there still aren’t enough people working.
“In the whole national workforce, you’ve got 8.4 million unemployed but 10.9 million open jobs,” says Baehr. “That’s a two and a half million-person shortage, period, and that’s across all buckets. The book industry is getting hit with that just as much as the paper industry is getting hit with that just as much as the transportation industry is getting hit with that. It all just compounds on itself. It’s just a rough spot right now for the book business.”
“Simply put, the working-age population in the US has stopped growing,” says Gad Levanon, founder of the Labor Market Institute. “And the working-age population without a BA is shrinking quite rapidly.” That’s a major issue for the industries we’re discussing here because in general, people with college degrees prefer not to work in warehouses, as truck drivers, or in printing presses.”