Lindsey

Three possible scenarios for what comes next for Biden’s social agenda.

In recent weeks, President Joe Biden has tried to resurrect the legislation formerly known as Build Back Better, the social spending and climate bill Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) effectively killed in December when he said he wouldn’t support it.

So far, not much has changed. Biden’s efforts include ditching the name and rebranding the policies as measures to curb inflation. Senate Democrats are also holding hearings on issues like prescription drug prices to try to keep talks going. And Democrats, on the whole, have signaled a willingness and political motivation to get something done while they remain in control of Congress.

Few lawmakers, however, seem to have any clue how to actually move it forward. “The answer is I don’t have the foggiest idea,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told Vox.

Because no Republicans support the bill and because Democrats have a very narrow Senate majority, all 50 members of the caucus need to be on board to pass it via a process known as budget reconciliation. And Democrats are still struggling to piece together a bill that could get this degree of support, given longstanding opposition from holdouts like Manchin.

Earlier this month, Manchin indicated that there were provisions he’d potentially be open to — including reducing prescription drug prices, reforming the tax code, and addressing climate policy — but there’s no explicit agreement yet about what a plan could look like.

“I hope that we will do some of the bill and that we’ll get some key investments in,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA). “Look, folks ought to get in the room and figure out what that is.”

Here are three possible routes Democrats could take as they try to salvage the legislation.

Scenario 1: Democrats could agree on a deficit-reducing deal

Much like the previous bill, any potential agreement hinges on Manchin.

In early March, Manchin effectively put a new offer on the table, saying he’d be willing to consider legislation that focuses on prescription drug prices, tax reforms, and climate investments as long as half the revenue it raises is targeted to paying down the deficit.

“Half of that money should be dedicated to fighting inflation and reducing the deficit,” he told reporters. “The other half you can pick for a 10-year program, whatever you think is the highest priority. Right now, it seems to be the environment.”

If Manchin is serious about his proposal, it’s possible that Democrats could come together on a plan that counters the deficit and funds a smaller slate of new policies.

Thus far, however, Manchin has only outlined this plan in broad strokes — stopping short of offering details regarding changes to the tax code that he’d like to see and declining to say whether he’d back the House bill’s approach to reducing prescription drug prices.

In the House bill, the prescription drug and tax provisions would raise $1.5 trillion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Were half this revenue dedicated to deficit reduction and combating inflation, there would still be $750 billion left over to cover new spending. This funding would be sufficient to pay for the $555 billion in clean energy tax credits and job investments that were previously part of BBB.

Already, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has said she’s willing to engage in negotiations on this proposal, though she wants specifics before moving forward.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) echoed this support. “I think we can work with it,” he told Vox regarding Manchin’s plan.

The big question, however, is whether Manchin will stick by this position. Previously, Manchin had offered his own proposal to the White House, only to retract it when negotiations got dicey. Last summer, too, he laid out certain provisions he’d consider — including support for opioid addiction treatment and authority over a clean electricity standard — but found other problems once several of those conditions were met.

And even if Manchin is actually on board with this approach, there are questions about whether Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) would be willing to support it since the provisions she’s previously pushed back on were those addressing prescription drug prices and corporate taxes.

Unlike Manchin, however, Sinema backed both the prescription drug policies in the House bill and the White House’s framework on BBB, which included many of the tax provisions that made it into the final bill.

“We need to get together on the parts we agree on and pass it,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Vox. “We have a lot that we still need to pass before the midterms.”

Scenario 2: Lawmakers turn to bipartisan bills instead

If Democrats aren’t able to reach a deal on a reconciliation bill, it’s possible they turn to bipartisan alternatives on some of the issues they hoped to address, like lowering prescription drug prices.

Previously, Sens. Wyden and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had reached an agreement on legislation that would limit the out-of-pocket prices seniors on Medicare would have to pay for drugs. Warnock is also leading a bill that could cap the monthly price of insulin at $35, a proposal that has gotten positive feedback from some Republicans, according to Kaiser Health News. And Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has expressed an interest in working on the expanded child tax credit and bringing back direct monthly payments for families.

There are major risks, however, to going this route.

For one, the policies that Democrats will be able to pass will likely be much narrower. Wyden and Grassley’s bill did not enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices like the budget bill would, for example. That’s a major reform that could significantly curb drug prices given the body’s negotiating power. Romney’s child tax credit policy would also impose more work requirements for people to receive the benefit, which Democrats’ proposal did not.

Additionally, there’s no guarantee any bipartisan bills would be able to secure the 60 votes they need to advance in the Senate. Even though several of these bills have Republican support, getting 10 GOP members to sign on in the Senate will still be a challenge.

The follow-up to voting rights legislation has underscored these hurdles.

Because Democrats weren’t able to pass a voting rights bill on their own, the focus has shifted toward bipartisan talks to reform the Electoral Count Act. That measure is expected to be far more limited than the bill Democrats proposed, and it has yet to move forward in either the House or the Senate.

Scenario 3: No version of Build Back Better passes

The darkest scenario for Democrats is that no version of Build Back Better, or any of the policies it includes, is able to pass.

This option could be the most likely one given how the party has struggled to agree on a bill since talks began last June. After expressing his opposition to the previous version of the bill, Manchin has yet to support another concrete proposal, meaning any new discussions could have the same outcome as the ones that took place last year.

Democrats also have a packed spring schedule and a limited window to get legislation done before this fall’s elections.

In the coming weeks, the Senate will be focused on the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, so it probably won’t revisit BBB until mid-April at least. Congress also has to work out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the US Innovation and Competition Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at investing in the US supply chain. And lawmakers are still weighing additional action sanctioning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine along with a standalone bill that provides more pandemic relief.

That doesn’t leave much time for Democrats to work out their differences on BBB.

With BBB in flux, Democrats increasingly appear to be pointing to their other achievements like the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill as they try to make their case to voters ahead of the midterms.

“We’ve already passed the huge infrastructure bill and notice that it was not with the support of the majority of Republicans … and, of course, the Rescue bill, which did not get a single Republican,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said.

Dogs have long been known for their incredible sense of smell. As the earliest domesticated animals, they have also developed unique skills for working closely with humans and reading our social cues. Together, these traits allow them to excel at detecting, locating, and alerting humans to volatile compounds–or, in other words, scents. In some fields, dogs are considered the “gold standard” for identifying and distinguishing target scents across a variety of contexts. We encounter these kinds of working dogs all the time, on search and rescue teams, bomb squads, drug enforcement agencies, and even conservation projects. Scent detection dogs in these fields regularly feature as heroes alongside their human counterparts in books, movies, and news articles. As these stories portray, there is likely no greater feeling than the touch of a cold canine nose when one is buried in an avalanche or the rubble of a collapsed building.

Behind the scenes, scent detection dogs have also been able to accurately detect infection, including C. difficile (a bacterial infection often acquired in healthcare settings) and malaria, in both human patients and biological samples. They can also identify many types of cancer, including (but likely not limited to) skin, lung, breast, and bladder cancers. For example, one study tested dogs for the detection of both lung and breast cancer in breath samples collected from patients. Following a 2-3 week training program, the five dogs were able to distinguish positive lung cancer samples from negative samples 99% of the time, and positive breast cancer samples from negative samples 88-98% of the time. Interestingly, each of the dogs included in this study were household dogs with only a basic obedience class and the drive to work in their toolkit. As this example illustrates, trained animals have similar–or in some cases, higher–success rates than medical devices and laboratory procedures.

Dogs can work through many samples quickly, at a low cost, with minimal or no interaction with patients. For example, healthcare workers can collect breath, sweat, urine, or blood samples for dogs to process, rather than having the dog examine patients directly. This allows the dogs to work with minimal environmental distraction, and bypasses the necessity to work directly with patients who may be uncomfortable around dogs. Despite these advantages, the chances are low that your routine blood draw or breast biopsy is being examined by a dog in the laboratory. For now, the only dogs you’ll meet in the hospital hallway are mood-boosting therapy dogs, and service dogs aiding their handlers (also both worthy canine causes).

As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with no clear or simple end in sight, biomedical scent detection dogs in the healthcare industry seem to have a lot to offer. Surges in the virus overwhelm COVID testing sites and strain hospitals, with rapid spread and cases of severe illness. In addition to the direct effects of the pandemic, intense demands on healthcare systems around the world have reduced our ability to maintain control of the spread of other viruses such as malaria and HIV, disrupt preventative or routine care, and delay surgeries for chronic conditions. Countries will likely face backlogs on healthcare demands for years to come, even when the pandemic is under control. Utilizing dogs in healthcare settings has the potential to help us get caught up with these delayed procedures such as cancer screenings.

In addition, and more to the point, there is evidence that dogs can quickly and accurately detect COVID-19 infection. “Scientists […] suggest that canines could help to control the pandemic because they can screen hundreds of people an hour in busy places such as airports or sports stadiums, and are cheaper to run than conventional testing methods […]” notes science journalist Holly Else in Nature NEWS. While PCR tests take 1-2 days to deliver results to a patient, and rapid antigen tests have limited availability, these dogs could be a valuable asset in preventing further spread of the virus. No more waiting with bated breath for results or wondering whether someone on the same flight caught the virus since their test. This raises the question: if K9s are a common fixture on police forces, why aren’t they working regularly with our medical teams?

As with all preliminary scientific findings, there is still a need for large-scale, reproducible studies before researchers make broad claims regarding the usefulness of dogs in diagnostics work. The concerns around deploying biomedical detection dogs for COVID-19 testing indicate that dogs may be working with too few samples, or that there is a lot of variability in the success between individual trained dogs. In many previous studies for the detection and diagnosis of infection or disease, the goal was to provide a “proof of principle”, or show that dogs can identify positive samples, rather than run numerous trials with a variety of dogs and patients. While it’s promising that a beagle named Cliff can identify samples contaminated with a bacterial infection at nearly 100% accuracy, does this mean that every trained dog can do the same? Spoiler alert: sadly, no. Scientists are working hard to increase their sample sizes and understand causes of variability in their studies, which could stem from the handlers, patients, or environment.

However, most of the obstacles to establishing a reliable canine workforce in laboratories and hospitals stem from regulatory challenges–specifically, gaining Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of dogs as “medical devices”. Although animals have shown promise in the medical diagnostics field since the early 2000s, the process for getting regulatory approval to deploy them in healthcare settings has been unclear. In their paper in Food and Law Drug Journal, Lawyers Matthew Avery and Makenzi Galvan note that:

because FDA’s regulatory purview covers the manufacture and use of diagnostic devices, animals that perform analogous diagnostic functions should also fall within the scope of FDA’s regulatory authority. Development and commercialization of animal-based diagnostics is likely to be stymied by the uncertainty over how the current regulatory regime for diagnostic tests will be applied to animals.

How is a protocol meant for standard medical equipment such as a defibrillator or blood pressure cuff applied to live animals?

Animals inherently have a level of unpredictability beyond that of electrochemical devices and laboratory assays. Scientists running these studies may be in the dark about effects of the handler’s presence on the dogs, and even the identity of the compound that the animals are detecting and signaling for. This may be part of what makes the dogs so good at their job–they can pick up on volatile compounds that scientists haven’t identified or developed an assay for, and they can do it in real time in many different locations and circumstances. However, it also introduces the possibility that animals may introduce false positives or negatives based on factors that scientists or handlers aren’t aware of, such as a secondary odor based on coexisting conditions, diet, or perfume.

Current regulatory guidelines are unable to handle this variability in test outcomes. Although the current evidence suggests that the use of biomedical scent detection dogs may result in efficient, non-invasive, and cost-effective diagnoses for patients, there are no standardized methods for determining the potential risks of misdiagnoses, which could result in additional unneeded testing or a lack of necessary treatment. Avery and Galvan argue that until this type of method for assessing the efficacy of animal-based diagnostics exists, “there are no guarantees that animal-based diagnostics will increase patient outcomes […].” In other words, because the guidelines for developing and evaluating these types of tests haven’t been written, the FDA is unable to approve them for use. Animals will very rarely, if ever, meet the standards designed to approve medical equipment.

The establishment of a new set of guidelines for the approval of biomedical scent detection dogs requires the FDA to write a document that addresses training methods, evaluation of dogs once trained, and the procedures to submit the animal-based diagnostic test for approval. For example, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS/FEMA) has issued guidelines for the use of dogs in Search and Rescue, and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA/APHIS) has issued a risk assessment for the use of dogs in conservation work. In particular, Search and Rescue dogs must undergo rigorous testing with their handlers, which includes obedience, independent search, alert behavior, and agility. These dogs must be able to quickly and systematically search an area, take directions when searching an area that the handler cannot access, and reliably alert such that handlers can hear the signal when out of sight. Notably, Search and Rescue dogs originated in the 1800s with the well-known and beloved St. Bernard in the Alps, responsible for rescuing over 2,000 people in the treacherous winter conditions of an alpine pass. Although St. Bernards are no longer used for this purpose, the guidelines for this canine profession have continued to improve and expanded to include familiar working breeds such as the labrador retriever, golden retriever, German shepherd, Belgian malinois, and border collie. In comparison to Search and Rescue, biomedical scent detection is still in its infancy.

Biomedical scent detection dogs would require this type of specific training regimen and evaluation for approval to work as part of a medical team. Even without an FDA guidance document, scientists continue to work toward developing their own set of standardized approaches to researching and deploying biomedical scent detection dogs for routine screenings and future pandemics. In Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, lead author Cynthia M. Otto and colleagues point out the particular advantages to using scent detection dogs for diagnostic testing in the first stages of a pandemic, when a “flexible and rapidly deployable disease screening and testing response” is a necessity for preventing uncontrolled spread. The authors have compiled a list of best practices for biomedical scent detection training, such as the use of “samples obtained from a diversity of people with varying ethnicity, age, gender, concurrent illness that represent the population”, “negative samples from individuals with symptomology similar to the disease in question” such as the common cold or flu, and positive samples from mild and asymptomatic cases.

The authors also outline action items for the future of the biomedical scent detection field, including research support, establishment of standard training procedures and locations, and evidence of beneficial outcomes for the use of dogs in healthcare settings. They conclude that “more research is needed as well as government and community investment into the infrastructure to implement and monitor the effectiveness of this approach.” This final claim gets at the heart of the regulatory issue that scientists face when trying to gain approval for the use of dogs as medical devices–the government and community must buy in and support the use of working dogs in this context. To achieve an FDA guidance document, community members can submit topics for guidance development or pre-written drafts of a suggested guidance. The FDA centers will then determine whether a guidance will be further developed, at which point a selected guidance will be drafted by a special working group, finalized, and issued. In this way, invested community members may work together with the necessary government agencies to progress the establishment of animal-based diagnostic tools such as biomedical scent detection dogs by scientists and healthcare workers.

Scientists are already at the forefront of scent training and animal-based diagnostics–with an FDA guidance document in hand, dogs would be free to enter the healthcare workforce. It may require many more years in the making, but the odds of encountering a working biomedical scent detection dog in a laboratory, hospital, or airport are creeping up. Although we’re all eager to believe that there will be no “next pandemic”, it looks like we’ll be more prepared with canine companions by the sides of healthcare professionals in the future. As the first animals to join the ranks of human society, dogs just keep finding new ways to go above and beyond keeping their end of the deal. As the popular saying goes, “we don’t deserve dogs,” but we sure are lucky to have such good dogs keeping us company.

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There are lots of reasons to have fallen in love with Wordle. The simple nature of the game. The ability to post spoiler-friendly brags for how you did on any given puzzle. The clean design. But here at Techdirt, we obviously became smitten with how Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, professed no interest in the ongoing monetization combined with zero interest in wrapping any IP around the game. In fact, the couple of times that other folks out there attempted to build Wordle clones or apps that had similar names and monetize them, Josh handled it all as kindly as possible.

But then Josh sold Wordle to the New York Times. When that happened, we wondered aloud:

It will be interesting to see if suddenly “IP issues” start becoming a bigger deal to the NY Times than they were to the original developer…

Which brings us to the present, a few weeks later, with the New York Times getting ‘Wordle Archive,’ a site to go and play past Wordle puzzles, to “voluntarily” shut down.

Wordle Archive was a service dedicated to the preservation of previous Wordle answers, allowing fans to dip into the backlog and play older puzzles, dating all the way back to the first one. However, the service has since been shut down at the request of the New York Times, as announced by an update on the application’s webpage.

The announcement thanks fans for their interest in the Wordle Archive and thanks them for their feedback throughout its life. It goes on to explain the situation and tell fans that its own original game, Word Grid, is still available for those that are interested in playing something similar. However, it is no longer possible to access that version of Wordle Archive, which many fans have used.

And so it has begun. An app created for others to have some simple and innocent fun by a man who very clearly had no interest in bullying others over intellectual property concerns is now in the hands of a media company that has decided to take the exact opposite route. And this will likely be the first move in a larger conflict, so long as the public backlash doesn’t get the Times to reverse course. There are plenty of other related apps and sites harkening back to Wordle. Will the Times be going after those as well? Probably, yes.

The shutdown does raise questions about similar games and services. In the time since Wordle saw its own explosive popularity, other games with similar mechanics have emerged. One clear example of this is Lewdle, which is essentially Wordle using strictly lewd words. Other similar games have also popped up, using similar restrictions or some other sort of twist on the formula.

And so the legacy of Wordle moves from one of pure enjoyment and care-free fun into the realm of intellectual property enforcement and corporatization.

Yay.

The case against changing clocks is less about extending sunsets later all year and more about staying consistent.

It’s happened: On Tuesday, the US Senate voted unanimously to make daylight saving time permanent beginning in 2023. Perhaps the unambiguous results were influenced by the fact that most of us just turned clocks forward on Sunday, and the disruptiveness of it is still on the lawmakers’ minds.

While in recent years various states have passed pieces of legislation that would extend daylight saving time hours, this vote by the US Senate is the biggest move yet. If the legislation proceeds to the House and then the president, Americans will no longer have to change their clocks twice a year. (It’s not currently clear that the House will take on the legislation at all.)

The benefits of extending daylight saving time all year — or just keeping standard time all year — are more widespread than avoiding the hassle of resetting the clocks (even if many timepieces these days do this automatically).

At most, it could potentially also improve our collective health, and possibly prevent some automobile accidents. It would at least prevent some groaning and hassle as people lose an hour of sleep when daylight saving time starts in the spring. And who wouldn’t want that?

Daylight saving time started to conserve energy. It didn’t work.

Daylight saving time in the US started as an energy conservation trick during World War I and became a national standard in the 1960s. The idea is that in the summer months, we shift the number of daylight hours we get into the evening. So if the sun sets at 8 pm instead of 7 pm, we’d presumably spend less time with the lights on in our homes at night, saving electricity.

It also means that you’re less likely to sleep through daylight hours in the morning since those are shifted an hour later too. Hence “saving” daylight hours for the most productive time of the day.

But this premise never seemed to pan out. The presumed electricity savings of taking advantage of more daylight in the evening turns out to be unclear or nonexistent.

What’s more, not only is daylight saving time ineffective, the name is just confusing.

Daylight saving time — and yes, it’s “saving time” and not “savings time”— begins in the spring, just as the increase in daylight hours starts to be noticeably longer. What’s more, the number of daylight hours that fall upon our vast, beautiful country isn’t affected by the practice. Those are determined by the tilt of Earth’s axis and our planet’s position in its orbit around the sun. And those, we are quite powerless to change.

Extending daylight saving time year-round would mean later sunsets year-round

So if the House and the president actually go through with this, what will change?

Blogger and cartographer Andy Woodruff decided to visualize this with a great series of maps. The goal of these maps is to show how abolishing daylight saving time, extending it all year, or going with the status quo changes the number of days we have “reasonable” sunrise and sunset times.

Reasonable, as defined by Woodruff, is the sun rising at 7 am or earlier or setting after 5 pm (so one could, conceivably, spend some time in the sun before or after work).

This is what the map looks like under the status quo of twice-yearly clock shifts. A lot of people have unreasonable sunrise times (the dark spots) for much of the year:

Andy Woodruff

Here’s how things would change if daylight saving were abolished (that is, if we just stuck to the time set in the winter all year). It’s better, particularly on the sunrise end:

Andy Woodruff

And here’s what would happen if daylight saving were always in effect. The sunrise situation would actually be worse for most people. But many more people would enjoy after-work light.

Andy Woodruff

The case for consistency

Individuals might differ on which of the above maps they prefer. But it matters less whether we keep daylight saving time year-round or abolish it completely; the real benefits come from not flip-flopping back and forth twice a year.

It’s more this: Sleep scientists continually advocate that, for optimal health, people should stick to the same sleep schedule every night, going to bed and waking at the same hours each day. When we shift clocks forward one hour in the spring, many of us will lose that hour of sleep. In the days after daylight saving time starts, our biological clocks are a little bit off. It’s like the whole country has been given an hour of jet lag.

One hour of lost sleep sounds like a small change, but we humans are fragile, sensitive animals. Jet lag can mess with our metabolism; extreme versions of it can contribute to diabetes or obesity. But in the short term, jet lag dulls our mental edge.

And when our biological clocks are off, everything about us is out of sync. Our bodies run this tight schedule to try to keep up with our actions. Since we usually eat a meal after waking up, we produce the most insulin in the morning. We’re primed to metabolize breakfast before even taking a bite. It’s more efficient that way.

Being an hour off schedule means our bodies are not prepared for our actions at any time of the day.

One example: driving.

In 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities wanted to find out what happens on the road when millions of drivers have their sleep disrupted.

Analyzing 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, they found a very small but significant increase in road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring: The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the “spring forward” Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.

And it seems it’s not just car accidents. Evidence has also mounted of an increase in incidences of workplace injuries and heart attacks in the days after we spring forward.

Many Americans might not welcome extending daylight saving all year. There was a year in the 1970s when daylight saving time lasted for 16 months, and not everyone was pleased. Polling at the time found that just 30 percent of Americans approved of the change after it began. According to the Washington Post, “parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end,” which drove the negative sentiment.

But for those thinking “I don’t want later sunset times all year long!” or “I don’t want to start my day in the winter amid darkness!” know that it’s always been possible for our society to just ... gradually change school or work start times depending on the season.

NameGrapher is an interactive chart that lets you explore historical trends for baby names in the United States. Search for a name, and the chart updates as you enter more letters.

The chart is from Martin and Laura Wattenberg, and if it looks familiar to you, it’s because it’s an updated version of the now defunct NameVoyager they made in 2005. The new version, which also uses a stacked area chart to show name totals for boys and girls over time, also provides a few more search options and lets you compare multiple time series at once.

I’m glad it’s back. The NameVoyager was one of the first visualizations I ever saw, and it felt like something special was lost when the site shut down.

Tags: baby names, Laura Wattenberg, Martin Wattenberg

The sun rose at 8:27 AM on January 7, 1974. Children in the Washington area had left for school in the dark that morning, thanks to a new national experiment during a wrenching energy crisis: most of the US went to year-round daylight saving time beginning on January 6. “It was jet black” outside when […]

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A convoy of truckers and others who oppose President Biden, vaccine mandates, and lots of other stuff got off the Capital Beltway Monday and drove up I-395 toward downtown DC, where police say they’ve closed roads and exits into downtown. They're here. Truck convoy on I-395N just before the 14th Street Bridge. Quite loud. Police […]

Cops love military gear. For years, they’ve cultivated a mindset that pits them against the public in a war against crime — a “war” that justifies any collateral damage to the public and its trust in its protectors. The federal government has embraced this combative stance, handing out excess military gear to law enforcement agencies, provided they’re willing to say things about “terrorism” or “war on drugs.”

This transfer of military power costs nearly nothing (if you don’t count the public’s trust… and really, nobody in law enforcement thinks that’s worth tabulating). If you’ve got a self-proclaimed war on your hands, the only solution is war gear. And it’s all free — “free” as in “taxpayers’ lunches” and “from accountability.” US war machines march on, overly-outfitted by US military surplus efforts that give small town agencies a chance to play God of War on their home turf.

Now that the Russian government has turned seemingly the entire world against it, US police agencies are pitching in to help war efforts that don’t involve raiding the wrong address to recover minimal amounts of marijuana. Ukraine’s government has been asking for help and cops are stepping up to contribute. If you’ve already obtained it for free and found it’s far more than is actually needed to engage in local law enforcement efforts, why not give it to an entity far more deserving of US military largesse?

Law enforcement agencies in several states have all announced in recent days that they’re donating dozens of pieces of body armor, such as ballistic helmets and vests. Some of the departments and their respective local partners—one of which is a top defense contractor with U.S. and Ukrainian government contracts—say the donations will be distributed to Ukrainian citizens under siege by the Russian military. 

Please hold your applause. Forever.

These aren’t agencies sacrificing gear needed by their own officers for the greater good. These are agencies giving away excess military gear they don’t actually need but were able to acquire because oversight of this Defense Department program is almost nonexistent. And, in some cases, what’s being given away might be useless, if not actually dangerous.

The Vice report quotes the Colorado Department of Safety, which states the 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets being sent to Ukraine are “beyond life cycle.” Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, donations include bulletproof vests that are “no longer under warranty.” It’s the law enforcement equivalent of asking the poor to get by on donated cans of pumpkin pie filling and lima beans. Sure, the bags weigh a lot, but what purpose do the donations serve?

In other cases, agencies are donating military uniforms, which are slightly more useful in combat situations (and have no expiration date) but raise questions as to why law enforcement agencies have them in the first place. They’re not members of the US military. So why are they able — with the DoD’s blessing — to dress like they are?

While it’s true this military surplus will probably be both appreciated and somewhat useful, the donations raise even more questions about the Defense Department’s 1033 program and the seemingly-excessive amount of military gear police departments can acquire with little to no effort or justification.

And there’s no oversight of this transfer of military equipment, despite the fact it’s being handled by a federal contractor. No one appears to know whether this is legal or not and the Defense Department has flatly stated it has neither asked nor encouraged law enforcement agencies to redistribute goods acquired through its 1033 program.

That vendor is a Sarasota-based Global Ordnance, a defense contractor and commercial arms and equipment distributor, whose sales reached nearly $200 million in 2020.  Along with its subsidiary Global Military Products (GMP), the company has won at least a half-billion dollars in Defense Department contracts over the past decade, according to USAspending.gov, the Treasury Department’s government spending tracker. The company also signed a “cooperation agreement” with Ukrainian state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom last September worth up to $500 million. 

Global Ordnance vice president for human resources Carrie Morales told VICE News that the equipment wasn’t requested by the Pentagon, but that the company has “a lot of people in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe” and that the donation is part of the company’s “humanitarian efforts.”

While it’s admirable US law enforcement agencies are pitching in to help stop an authoritarian from erecting USSR v. 2.0, these charitable contributions are highlighting questions that demand answers from the Defense Department and its downstream beneficiaries. Why are cops getting so much gear that they have no problem giving it away? And why are they still in possession of so much outdated gear — something that could prove fatal for officers who think they’re protected by the best the US military has to offer? And if these contributions fail to protect Ukraine recipients, who is at fault? If Congress isn’t willing to take a closer look at this, expect “caveat emptor” to usurp accountability for these well-meaning, but possibly harmful, donations.

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When you’re a natural telecom monopoly in America you get away with a lot.

Take for example broadband ISP Frontier Communications, which has spent the last few years stumbling in and out of bankruptcy while dodging no shortage of scandals, including allegations of subsidy fraud. A few years back, Frontier got a light wrist slap for fraudulently charging its customers a “rental” fee for modems they already owned (something ISPs like Comcast also have a long history with).

The company also paid a tiny $900,000 fine in 2020 to Washington State AG Bob Ferguson for using other completely bogus fees to rip off the company’s captive subscriber base. The problem was bad enough that Congress even passed a law (the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA)) specifically banning companies from charging you rental fees for things you already own.

Two years later, and Consumer Reports has found that most ISPs are just tap dancing around the law’s restrictions. In some cases by simply renaming the surcharge… something else:

“Frontier FiOS used to charge me a router fee, although I have my own router. Now they don’t have that explicit fee, but they do charge an ‘Internet Infrastructure Surcharge’ ($6.99) and a ‘Frontier Secure Personal Security Bundle’ ($5.99 after ‘discount’),” a customer in Torrance, California, wrote.

So while Frontier did remove one predatory fee, they simply replaced it with another, bullshit, predatory fee they’d already been fined for by State AGs:

“After the router fee was made illegal by the act of Congress, I quickly called up Frontier to have the fee removed, which they did going forward,” wrote a customer in Flower Mound, Texas. “However, a few months later, Frontier increased their infrastructure charge (another bogus fee) about $3 or $4 if I recall correctly. So in my mind, Frontier did a bait and switch and is just trying to play the bogus fee game but not calling it a router fee any longer.”

The 2020 bill banning the practice had to be hidden in a broader legislative package to make it past a corrupt Congress and be signed by Trump (who I’d guarantee had no idea it existed). And now that it’s formally a law, the FCC under Democratic control is dithering and engaging in a drawn out public comment period before acting on what’s very obvious billing fraud and false advertising.

When the agency does act, it will culminate in a fee that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the money Frontier made off of predatory fees. A fee that, if history serves, may be reduced or eliminated entirely with some clever lawyering. And this is just one subset of fees. Studies have shown up to 45% of cable and broadband bills are comprised of bullshit, sneaky fees with completely made up names.

This has been a problem in the industry for decades, with ISPs like Centurylink (now Lumen) and at one point charging users a completely made-up “Internet Cost Recovery Surcharge” just to fatten their wallet. Other ISPs charge “regulatory recovery fees” that are just nonsensical ways to fatten revenue dressed up with a name to trick users into falsely blaming government.

The fees serve several functions: one, they allow ISPs and cable companies to advertise one price, then charge consumers a much higher rate. They also allow ISPs to pretend that broadband prices aren’t increasing, because they can point to their static advertised rate. They’re used to help feed Wall Street an insatiable need for quarter over quarter improvements, while doing nothing to better service.

The underlying problem is that, with the occasional exception, U.S. regulators and politicians generally approve of using bullshit fees to rip off consumers. They’re rampant in everything from telecom and banking to the airline and hotel industries. When the occasional policymaker with a backbone does act, it’s always years late and several billion dollars short of having any meaningful impact.

This is, of course, a feature and not a bug.

Circuit City v. Adams is one of the most indefensible decisions of the modern era. Its shadow hangs over the Court this month.

Laws mean nothing if they cannot be enforced against people who violate them, which is why there is an entire branch of government — the judiciary — whose job is supposed to be applying the law to individual cases. But at least when it comes to employment law, the Supreme Court has spent the last two decades permitting most employers to immunize themselves from lawsuits through a practice known as “forced arbitration.”

Forced arbitration allows an employer to order its workers to sign away their right to sue the company, or lose their jobs. Instead, any disputes must be resolved in a private arbitration process that gives extraordinary advantages to corporate parties over individuals. (Forced arbitration is also very common in ordinary consumer transactions, but your bank or cellphone company can only refuse to do business with you if you refuse arbitration. Your boss can most likely fire you.)

In the final two weeks of March, the Supreme Court will hear three cases asking just how much power companies have to force their workers into arbitration.

The first two, Morgan v. Sundance and Viking River Cruises v. Moriana, are fairly narrow. But the third case, Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, involves one of the original sins of the Court’s forced arbitration jurisprudence. The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925, the statute the Court relies on in forced arbitration cases, explicitly exempts “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” But, in Circuit City v. Adams (2001), a 5-4 Court held that most workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce can be forced into arbitration.

The issue now before the Court in Saxon is whether workers who load and unload cargo from airplanes count among the rare workers who are not vulnerable to forced arbitration under Circuit City. Under existing law, answering this question is needlessly complicated — although it is worth noting that a Trump-appointed judge wrote the lower court’s opinion holding that these workers are not subject to forced arbitration.

But if the Court actually followed the text of the Arbitration Act, then this wouldn’t be a difficult case at all. Indeed, if the Court cared about what the Arbitration Act actually says, none of its decisions enabling forced arbitration would apply to workers.

Forced arbitration hurts workers

Congress enacted the Arbitration Act to, in the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, permit “merchants with relatively equal bargaining power” to resolve disputes through private arbitration. And, when used by parties with relatively equal power, arbitration is benign and can even be beneficial. Resolving a dispute through arbitration can be quicker and less expensive, and merchants within a particular industry can select an arbitrator who is more familiar with that industry than most judges.

Starting in the 1980s, however, the Court started to read the Arbitration Act to permit companies to require ordinary consumers and employees to agree to arbitration as a condition of doing business with that company. Under Circuit City and Epic Systems v. Lewis (2018), an employer can order an employee to agree to forced arbitration or else immediately be fired.

Employers, moreover, have powerful incentives to do so. A 2015 study of forced arbitration in the workplace, for example, found that workers are a little more than half as likely to prevail before an arbiter as they are to prevail in litigation against their employer.

And when workers do prevail in arbitration, they are typically awarded about a fifth as much money as a worker who prevails before a judge.

There may be some instances where workers would prefer arbitration to litigation. Arbitration is common in unionized workplaces, for example, in part because the union can help ensure that a fair and impartial arbitrator will be selected to hear a dispute. And opponents of forced arbitration typically do not object to agreements to arbitrate a dispute after that dispute arises — a new federal law prohibiting forced arbitration in sexual misconduct cases, for example, targets “predispute” arbitration provisions where workers are often forced to sign away their right to sue before they are even contemplating legal action against their employer.

But there’s a reason many employers try to force workers into arbitration before a dispute arises. When workers are forced into arbitration, their employers are far less likely to suffer meaningful consequences if they break the law.

Circuit City is egregiously wrong

To understand why the Court’s decisions allowing workers to be exploited in this way are wrong, it helps to be familiar with two provisions of the Arbitration Act and a small amount of constitutional history — and specifically how the Supreme Court has changed its interpretation of the word “commerce” over time.

The first relevant provision says that an agreement to arbitrate disputes typically shall be “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable.” Importantly, this provision only applies to contracts pertaining to a “transaction involving commerce.”

The second relevant provision is the one exempting workers from the Arbitration Act. It provides that “nothing herein contained shall apply to contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Notice that this language also uses the word “commerce.”

The word “commerce” also appears in one of the most important provisions of the Constitution — a provision that permits Congress to “regulate commerce ... among the several states.” This is the constitutional provision that gives Congress much of its authority to regulate private businesses.

But the scope of Congress’s power over interstate commerce, and the proper meaning of the word “commerce” itself, has historically been one of the most contentious questions in American law.

Beginning in the late 1800s, conservative Supreme Court justices started reading the word “commerce” very narrowly. Under this now-discredited reading of the Constitution, the power to regulate interstate “commerce” included the power to regulate the transportation of goods across state lines, but it did not include the power to regulate manufacturing, agriculture, or other methods of producing these goods.

The Court abandoned this narrow reading of the word “commerce” in 1937, however. Under the modern reading of the Constitution, Congress’s authority to regulate commerce extends broadly to all “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.”

Recall, however, that the Arbitration Act was enacted in 1925, when the antiquated reading of the Commerce Clause was still ascendant. Thus, as the Arbitration Act was originally understood, it did not apply at all to employment contracts involving workers engaged in manufacturing, agriculture, or anything else other than the transit of goods (and people) across state lines.

Again, the Arbitration Act only extends to contracts “involving commerce.” And in 1925, that word was understood quite narrowly.

This historical understanding of the word “commerce” also explains why the Arbitration Act exempts “seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” This provision broadly exempts all workers who were understood to be subject to congressional regulation in 1925.

Indeed, this is the best way to read the Arbitration Act. The Congress that enacted the law in 1925 couldn’t possibly have known that the Supreme Court would shift its understanding of the word “commerce” a dozen years later. And the lawmakers who voted for the Arbitration Act most definitely could not have anticipated that, 76 years after the Act became law, the Supreme Court would abruptly decide to apply it to all workers.

Even if the Arbitration Act is read anachronistically — giving the word “commerce” its modern definition and not the definition that prevailed in 1925 — the law still should be read to exempt all workers.

Under this anachronistic reading, the reference to contracts “involving commerce” must be read quite broadly — broad enough to encompass nearly every workplace in the United States. But, under the modern reading of the word “commerce,” the exemption for “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” must also be read just as broadly to encompass every employee of these workplaces.

The point is that, in either reading of the word “commerce,” the Arbitration Act must be read to exempt all employment contracts. If the Act is broad enough to encompass nearly all workplaces, then so is the provision exempting “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.”

Circuit City’s error is that it did not apply a consistent reading of the word “commerce” to the entire Arbitration Act. It read the provision stating that the Arbitration Act applies to any contract “involving commerce” using the modern understanding of the word “commerce,” extending the scope of the law to nearly every workplace in the nation.

But Circuit City also read the provision exempting “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” using the antiquated meaning of the word, ensuring that only workers engaged in the transit of goods would be exempted.

By changing the definition of the word “commerce” midway through the statute, the Court’s conservative majority effectively rewrote a narrow federal statute with a broad exemption for all workers, and turned it into a broad federal statute with a narrow exemption for only some workers.

Circuit City makes an easy case needlessly difficult

The particular question in Saxon, the case currently pending before the Supreme Court, involves Latrice Saxon, a supervisor for Southwest Airlines who manages workers who load and unload cargo onto airplanes that travel across state lines. Her job also sometimes requires her to load and unload that cargo herself.

Saxon, in other words, does not actually transport goods across state lines. But she does do work that makes it possible for her employer to transport goods across state lines. So, under Circuit City’s mangled understanding of the Arbitration Act, Saxon is an edge case. It is not immediately clear if Saxon qualifies as a worker “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” under the extremely narrow definition of those words embraced by five justices in Circuit City.

A federal appeals court determined that Saxon does qualify as a worker engaged in interstate commerce under Circuit City — though, notably, the lower court placed great significance on the fact that Saxon herself spends a considerable amount of time loading and unloading cargo. The lower court concluded that this would be a much harder case if Saxon merely supervised other workers who perform the physical act of placing cargo on airplanes and removing other cargo.

And it would be; one of the many reasons the Court abandoned the antiquated definition of the word “commerce” in the 1930s is because it’s really not possible to draw a clear line between workers who transport goods and workers who do other forms of labor.

What about a human resources manager who hires and fires workers who load cargo onto planes, but who never actually loads cargo themselves? How about a dispatcher who assigns truck drivers to transport goods across state lines, but who never actually drives a truck themselves? How about a factory worker who loads goods into crates, so that those crates can then be loaded onto airplanes? What about a corporate executive who oversees a company that earns 2 percent of its profits from transporting goods across state lines? Or an insurance salesperson who sells policies to airlines which insure cargo that travels across state lines?

There aren’t really clear answers to any of these questions under the fabricated legal rule the Court invented in Circuit City. So long as Circuit City remains good law, judges will necessarily have to draw arbitrary lines between workers deemed to be close enough to the transit of goods to keep all their legal rights intact, and workers deemed so far removed from such transit that they are vulnerable to forced arbitration.

This is a bad way to do law. The better approach is to overrule Circuit City, and to interpret the Arbitration Act as it was written.

Saxon offers the Court a chance to do so, although Republican justices have historically been great fans of forced arbitration, so that outcome is unlikely.

There still is a good chance that even this Court will hold that Saxon is not subject to forced arbitration. But if the Court rules narrowly, future judges will undoubtedly be forced to make arbitrary decisions about who is exempt from the Arbitration Act.

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Not only have corporate efforts to monopolize repair resulted in a flood of proposed state and federal laws, the idea was also included in the Biden Administration’s recent executive order on monopoly power and competition. Said order urged the FTC to tighten up its rules on repair monopolization efforts, whether it’s ham-fisted DRM, or making repair manuals, parts, and diagnostics hard to come by.

At the receiving end of much of the movement’s ire has been John Deere, whose draconian repair restrictions on agricultural equipment often result in customers having to pay an arm and a leg to get their tractors repaired. Promises by the company to improve things haven’t materialized, resulting in the company getting hit with numerous, simultaneous lawsuits.

Last week, a coalition of right to repair advocates, hand in hand with several farmers unions, filed their first formal complaint with the FTC, putting the agency’s recent promises to the test:

“While historically Deere has outcompeted rivals to win farmers’ and ranchers’ business, in recent years it has resorted to leveraging its monopoly power in the market for large agricultural equipment to dominate the repair market for its equipment,” the complaint says. “

A farmer who purchases Deere equipment today may not realize that Deere, under the guise of technological advancement, has made it impossible for farmers to make important repairs themselves or to go to an independent repair shop. Even where purchasers of Deere equipment are aware that Deere requires important repairs to be performed only by Deere-authorized technicians, Deere’s market dominance leaves these purchasers little to no choice but to submit to Deere’s terms.”

The repair asks the FTC to formally acknowledge that John Deere has attempted to monopolize repair through the combination of restrictive, unnecessary DRM and its exclusive repair network, which often forces rural tractor owners to travel hundreds of miles simply to repair their own equipment.

A recent report by US PIRG found that mass consolidation in dealerships has resulted in one dealership chain for every 12,018 farms and every 5.3 million acres of American farmland. That consolidation is clearly by design, and part of the company’s attempts to force Americans to pay significantly more money to repair essential equipment.

Recognizing that this movement isn’t going anywhere and hoping to avoid legislation forcing their hand, several companies like Apple have slowly backed away some of their harsher repair restrictions. Companies that continue to force the issue simply find they’ve driven additional support to a movement that quickly shifted from niche nerd fare to the mainstream.

Russian bombing destroyed a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Families across the country have been split apart, as more than 2 million refugees flee.

Mariupol is in crisis. Russia has bombarded the city of 400,000 for a week, and efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor — a safe passage out for civilians — have so far failed. Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of shelling the evacuation route, effectively trapping people inside Mariupol who have already been cut off from water and electricity and cellphone service for days. Food and medicine are running out, adding to a situation the United Nations has described as “dire.”

The crisis is still unfolding, but images and videos from the city show the harm already wrought in the two weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Associated Press photojournalists Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka captured images of a man rushing a wounded toddler into a Mariupol hospital Friday, and they captured the hospital workers trying, and failing, to save 18-month-old Kirill. They captured the grief of Kirill’s mother, and his mother’s boyfriend, and the hospital workers who now must prepare for triage. “Show this to Putin,” a doctor said, according to Maloletka and Mstysalv.

On Wednesday, five days later, a Russian strike destroyed a maternity hospital in Mariupol.

These scenes are repeated across Ukraine. In Kyiv, thousands are still trying to flee, as skirmishes and shelling continue on the outskirts of the city, in places like Irpin. In Kharkiv, heavy shelling has destroyed homes, and forced residents underground, into subways.

The full toll of the war so far is difficult to know, but the United Nations has estimated more than 1,300 civilian casualties, as of March 8. More than 470 civilians have died, the UN said, though the actual figure is likely much higher. Almost 2 million civilians have escaped to Poland, Moldova, and Romania in two weeks, making this Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. Most are women and children, as the men stay in Ukraine to fight.

Becky Bakr Abdulla, an adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council who is currently based in Poland, said that most refugees she has contacted told her they fled Ukraine without a plan. And yet, she added, “there was no sign of them thinking that they would be able to return anytime soon.” —Jen Kirby

Vadim Ghirda/AP

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