The first result they talk about is meh, but overall it's actually an article about AI that isn't completely intolerable
When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 matches against IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. He watched chess videos on YouTube and The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Despite his renewed interest, Zahavy wasn’t looking for ways...
As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.
Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER.
“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year.
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate.”
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”
House Republicans reportedly aim to pass their defense budget later this week. They had planned to vote on an $826 billion proposal last week before the far-right Freedom Caucus blocked the proposal, demanding cuts to non-defense spending.
“The fact that the Pentagon developed an AI program to navigate its own policies should be a stark wake-up call for lawmakers who throw more money at the department than it even asks for nearly every year,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “It’s unsurprising, though: The DOD couldn’t adequately account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets in the most recent audit, and those are physical!”
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Military brass use GAMECHANGER to help them navigate what the Defense Department itself points to as an absurd amount of “tedious” policies. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents governing how the Pentagon operates, according to its GitHub entry.
“Did you know that if you read all the Department of Defense’s policies, it would be the equivalent of reading through ‘War and Peace’ more than 100 times?” a press release about GAMECHANGER from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s spy wing, says. “For most people, policy is a tedious and [elusive] concept, making the idea of understanding and synthesizing tens of thousands of policy requirements a daunting task. But in the midst of the chaos that is the policy world, one DIA officer and a team at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security saw an opportunity.”
The press release went on to decry the Pentagon’s “mountain of policies and requirements.”
As unusual as it is for the military to publicly air its contempt for its own sprawling bureaucracy, members of Congress have been similarly harsh. In its portrayal of U.S. military policy — which it also had a hand in creating — the Senate Armed Services Committee called rules governing the department “byzantine” and “labyrinthine.”
“The committee notes that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center developed an artificial intelligence-enabled tool, GAMECHANGER, to make sense of the byzantine and labyrinthine ecosystem of Department guidance,” the committee said in a report for National Defense Authorization Act — the law that appropriates cash for the Pentagon budget — for fiscal year 2023. (Amid the critique of the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, the NDAA would later become law, authorizing $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget.)
Though announced in February of last year, GAMECHANGER has received scant media attention. The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force created in 2018, developed the program. Upon its completion, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center transferred ownership of it to the office of the Defense Department comptroller, which handles budgetary and fiscal matters for the Pentagon.
Shortly after its release, GAMECHANGER was already used by over 6,000 Defense Department users conducting over 100,000 queries, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Described as a natural language processing application — a broad term in computer science generally referring the use of machine learning to allow computers to interpret human speech and writing — GAMECHANGER is just one of a vast suite of AI programs bankrolled by the Pentagon in recent months.
The Pentagon is currently funding 686 such AI projects, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit that frequently conducts research into the government. The figure does not include the Department of Defense’s classified efforts.
Before it was formally released, GAMECHANGER was granted an award by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency for civil servants.
“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest,” said Hartung, the Quincy Institute defense budget expert. “It’s more a problem of how they make policy and not a problem of how to surf through it.”
An interview with Kristie Coulter, author of Exit Interview.
by Sam Machkovech
Many of Amazon’s worst workplace elements have been chronicled for years, from drivers pissing into bottles when they’re unable to take a bathroom break to flagrant anti-union activity.
But there’s a different, more nuanced story of the megacorp’s chaos and male fragility, now available in Exit Interview, a memoir from a 12-year Amazon vet who got sober, ran screaming, and put together a darkly hilarious tale of her experiences there. We caught up with author and Seattleite Kristi Coulter for an Exit Interview interview.
How did you deal with reliving these incredibly high-pressure stories?
It's almost hard for me still not to think, like, "What are people from Amazon going to think about this book? Am I putting the company in a light that's going to make people angry?" But a lot of that I worked through when I was writing. It took me 18 months to even feel like I had the self-esteem to write the book, because every time I would work on it, I’d think, “Oh, you're a worm. You sucked at your job.” It was Amazon's voice. I worked through so much of that in the writing process that at this point I just think, a-yuuup.
You’re blasé about it?
It’s more like: Early on, I thought of the book as a trauma memoir, and that mindset made the writing pretty unfun, not as strong. At some point I realized, this is more of a coming-of-age story, even though I was 36 when I started at Amazon. This is a hero's journey. I rescued myself. I still, you know, cover a lot of traumatic material—Amazon is a traumatic place to work, and it damaged me. Deeply. But it's very hard to look back on 12 years of your life and say, “Oh, I could have left at any time, and I didn't.” By the time I got to the end, I was like, “You went through the classic journey and came out the other end okay.” I do wish I'd had all those processing skills at the beginning of writing. But I had been gone from Amazon less than two years.
So you wanted to write a memoir while the memory was fresh?
I was still working there, my first book was about to come out, and I was thinking about what I might want to do next. I was like, “I guess I could write about Amazon? I wonder if anybody would be interested?” I was so deep inside Amazon that, even knowing how curious people were about the company, the idea that they'd want to read a memoir about it did not occur to me. I mentioned it to my agent, like, [shrugs shoulders], and she said, “Yes, please write that book.” And I was like, "Really? I don't know if I have anything to say."
Why did you feel that way?
It's funny—I was extremely aware of, like, you can't work at Amazon and not realize that half the world hates you. You personally. Especially living in Seattle, you know, I would dread people saying to me, “Everyone has to earn a living somehow.” Like I was unemployable otherwise. [Laughs] But it was more than that. When you're at Amazon, you're so unimportant. And invisible. Even knowing I’d outlasted all but like 98% of people [as a 12-year veteran] and I'd had all these huge jobs there, by the end, I still mostly thought, “You failed.” Working through the book made me realize: I failed some, I succeeded a lot.
Now that the book is out, how do you feel about Amazon actually reading it?
I’ve gotten so many notes from people I’ve never met who’ve worked at Amazon all over, in like Minneapolis or Munich. People at Amazon, especially women, are dying to read this book. I remember joking with my publisher early on: if we only sell a copy to everyone who works at Amazon, we’d make a profit.
For a lot of Amazon stuff, I wasn’t revealing anything that’s not publicly available already. That was really important to me because I wanted this to be a personal book. I had friends who were like, “I bet there’ll be Congressional hearings after your book.” I don’t see what they’d be about! It’s not that book.
Right, this isn’t a bullet-point collection of world-rollicking allegations. Your stories range from unsurprising to eww. It’s more a detailed chronicling of assholes all the way down.
Yeah, there’s a lot of them. I will say, most of the people that I worked with, I actually like quite a bit. They’re smart, creative, sometimes stoic [laughs]. But Amazon rewards a certain coldness and aggression. It also puts people under such psychotic pressure that it brings out the worst. I have a feeling there are people that I had bad experiences with that, under different circumstances, I would think, “They’re not so bad.”
You make the case that there’s something universal here—that Amazon’s problems are human problems.
Amazon is an unusually brutal place to work, but a lot of it is about people under pressure. Even the guy who at one point directly tells me I’m “stupid” and yells at me, I was like, even he was under pressure. Then I think about the super-senior executives—I see on social media, “fat-cat execs don’t do anything.” At Amazon, at least, those guys work their asses off. It’s heart-attack-at-50 kind of work. I don’t know why, like, they’re all worth $20-30 million, but they kill themselves. So I figured, even this guy above me is getting it from Jeff Bezos, and it’s a fountain, you know. A shit fountain, I guess.
Also, I wanted to write about ambition in women through myself. I’m very ambitious—I always have been. When we hear that women are ambitious, we have certain associations, so I thought, well, let’s look at that. Does it mean I was cutthroat? Probably sometimes. Is there something wrong with it? Maybe. Does it mean I put up with shit I wouldn’t have otherwise? Yeah! I wanted to write about ambition as a human emotion that women have, just like men. Writing the book forced me to get more comfortable with the idea that ambition is... I was gonna say that it’s a fine thing, that it can be a good quality. But also, it doesn’t matter if it’s a good quality or not! I have it! I have the quality of ambition. I always have.
The Amazon you describe doesn’t make space for that kind of ambition, even when you’re told you can’t progress further at the company unless you “change the world.”
That was my lowest moment, at a point when my career was going great. For this VP to sit there and say, “Just change the world”? Promotions at Amazon are chaotic for everyone. The criteria are all over the place, but there’s a specific, tactical, mapped version for a lot of people there. Men all around me had been promoted, and as far as I knew they were all good at their jobs, but there aren’t that many chances to change the world. At Amazon, like any company, you’re doing your TPS reports and your granular things. I asked this man, “Well, what would I do? What results would you want to see?” The most specific he would get was, “wheelbarrows of money.” [Laughs] I was just like, I can’t believe this. I’m at the peak of my career. I am running major businesses. And this person who I’ve known for years and is a fan of mine, he won’t have a serious conversation. That is crazy-making.
Your last memoir, Nothing Good Will Come of This, focuses more on your sobriety journey. This one links your drinking more closely to the Amazon pressure cooker.
That book is a prismatic look at my drinking and sobriety through a bunch of different lenses. It does talk about being in tech, but I didn’t want to rewrite the same thing. I’ll just say, I don't think Amazon made me. I already had whatever you needed to become an alcoholic. But Amazon definitely is a place where there's a ton of drinking. Like just a crazy amount.
Trauma-specific therapy, too, from the sound of your book?
Oh yeah, I remember my psychiatrist being like, "Oh, Amazon, They support me. I have people who've been there for six months, they're in my office, and I'm just like, 'Get out.'" [Laughs] I’ve heard a lot of people say “After I left, I had to go into trauma therapy.” It just damages people’s health so much.
I was a drinker for half my career there and sober for the other half. I proved it could be done. But it's funny that when I finally quit drinking, my biggest wish was not, “Will I be happy again,” but “Maybe I'll be better at my job”! [Laughs] I wasn’t especially well-suited for this job, but it was also just a nightmare and I thought, [sobriety] will take care of it. Within six months I realized, yeah, it was not the drinking.
What about your story have you noticed surprises people?
The chaos. There is this belief that Amazon is this well-oiled machine that is coming to take over the planet. But so many parts of Amazon are like kids putting on a show in the barn. I remember when Amazon Publishing started, people in the industry predicted we were going to steamroll them. But there were only 13 of us. Our entire company’s calendar was a literal whiteboard. We were calculating royalties in Excel manually. It was frantic.
There’s lots about duct tape and panic being Amazon’s primary binding agents—but your example also gets to how cheap the company seems.
[Laughs] You hear about tech giants like Google with their own dry cleaners and hairdressers and all that stuff. People think Amazon is like that. Amazon is austere. My monitor died once, and I had to go pick up a new one. They couldn’t bring it to my building. I had to carry it four blocks!
I’m sorry, the company that runs Amazon Prime couldn’t deliver your big, boxed monitor?
Right? In my role, that was expensive time for me to waste. Here I am walking through Belltown with a fucking box, I don’t think it even had a handle, and I hadn’t expected it so I had other stuff with me. And all around, there’s zero amenities. You get a hundred dollars off the website a year, and there’s a code that you have to find and they don’t remind you. You have to remember to go get it every year. After a couple years, I just forgot it existed.
Some of the anecdotes in this book are wild, like your colleague spending days insisting that a store’s “broccoli rabe” dish be renamed “broccoli rape,” despite your outcries.
That kind of thing happened pretty often. In my first book, there’s a part where I was the one woman on a panel hosted by Amazon for interns, and a woman asks us, “What’s it like to be here as a woman?” I gave a very diplomatic perspective, and then all the men on the panel jumped in to say that I was wrong. They were like, “This is a great company for women!” I was like I literally am the only one who could answer that. That was for me.
Is the male fragility in this book representative of the company as a whole?
I think so. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, and many of the men I worked with are perfectly lovely. But especially in leadership, there’s a certain type of man who is very fragile—though this isn’t Amazon specific. These men where what gets to them is the idea that they might not be egalitarian. They can’t see that it’s not about them personally. It’s about systems. There are some guys at Amazon who, If you tell them, “It’s strange that most consumer purchases are controlled by women and yet there are no women in senior [leadership],” they think you’re attacking them personally. They’ll say, it’s important to understand that women often have other priorities in life, or women are too smart to want these jobs. They can’t just sit honestly and ask, what can we do to change it?
Hard to do that at a company where Jeff Bezos promotes internal stories written by men about what it’s like at Amazon to be a woman.
This guy at Amazon had written a blog post on LinkedIn in response to Jodi Kantor’s big New York Times piece about staffers crying at their desks and all that. First, he says, “I’ve been here 18 months, so I know a few things.” I was like, ohhh, I’m looking at him like an old sailor, saying, “Come on, landlubber.” He goes on about what a great company Amazon was for women. It landed on an internal email list, and I decided to reply, gently and diplomatically: “That wasn’t appropriate for you to speak to. You’re not a woman. You don’t—you can’t know what it’s like.”
So when Jeff Bezos emailed the whole company, he included a link to that guy’s post. That’s an endorsement. Jeff fucking Bezos sent that to a million people. We had a chance, while so many articles about gender were coming up, Jeff had a chance to suggest things to look at, at the very least about women, let alone other systems of privilege even I benefit from. Instead, he said, “Look at this glad-handing jackass’s blog post, I love it.” That’s when the concept of loyalty fell away for me fast.
Who at Amazon would you want most to read this book?
[Laughs] I mean, [current CEO] Andy Jassy should read the book. I know at one point when he was running AWS, he bought a copy of Brene Brown's book on shame for much of AWS’s staff, hundreds of copies. And I was like, "What?" That is the healthiest thing I've ever heard of anybody at Amazon doing, actually wanting to have a culture that was shame-free. But I also know AWS was overwhelmingly male, and I know women who had really lousy experiences there. I want him to read it.
Part of me hopes that the guy who called me stupid reads it, but I don't think he'll give a shit. Maybe he’ll think, "I called a hundred people stupid. What's wrong with her?" Do I want Jeff Bezos to read the book? I don't know. That’s kind of terrifying. I hope his ex-wife MacKenzie [Scott] reads it. She seems pretty cool.
Kristi Coulter will discuss Exit Interview with Claire Dederer at Third Place Books, Seward Park, on Monday, September 11 at 7 pm.
Scientists believe that less than 4% percent of the world’s fungi have been documented, which adds up to only 150,000 species described out of an estimated 2.2-3.8 million worldwide. Mycologists Danny Newman and Roo Vandegrift have spent the last 12 years focusing on locations impacted by the climate crisis and increasing human interference, like Ecuador’s Reserva Los Cedros. Newman’s stunning photographs (previously) capture the vibrant hues, delicate gills, and thin stems of a vast range of fungi in the mountainous cloud forest.
In 2016, the Ecuadorian government declared the Los Cedros reserve—one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of the Andes—open for mining, putting countless flora, fauna, and funga at risk. “In a stunning legal upset, the mining concessions which threatened to turn Los Cedros into a toxic, barren wasteland were rescinded by the Ecuadorian supreme court, who specifically cited…our fungal diversity research in their ruling,” Newman says.
Spanning six expeditions, the duo, with a team of scientists from both Ecuador and the USA, recently published an in-depth survey of their findings, cataloguing a wealth of previously unknown species and providing what Newman calls “one of the most comprehensive contributions to Ecuadorian mycology in the country’s history.” Vandegrift is also the producer of a visually stunning upcoming documentary titled Marrow of the Mountain, filmed in part during an expedition in 2018 and 2019.
Images found in two 1980s books, Naoyuki Katoh SF Illustrations I and II (there's also a volume III), which I occasionally have for sale at 50 Watts Books.
Naoyuki Katoh, Voyage of the Space Beagle, c 1980s
But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation.
It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.
“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.”
A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.
Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly.
“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”
The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.
But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities.
The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.
“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.”
A community of mobile homes in Boulder City, Nevada. George Rose / Getty Images
Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning.
“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren.
This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.
Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.
In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home.
A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.
Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach.
“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”
On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly.
This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills.
Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.
Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.
Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.”
Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered.
In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson.
“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”
Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners.
This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change.
“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.”
Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.
“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”
August was another month of relatively good news for the Amazon rainforest: The rate of deforestation has continued to decline significantly.
Earlier this week, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, announced a 66.1 percent decrease in Amazon deforestation compared to last August. That amounted to a loss of about 217 square miles, according to Reuters. These figures come during a time of year when destruction of the rainforest is usually quite high, and follows a similar trend seen in July.
So far this year, the rate of deforestation is 48 percent lower than in 2022 and is at levels not seen since 2018. The numbers are another victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made protecting the Amazon a policy priority.
“These results show the determination of the Lula administration to break the cycle of abandonment and regression seen under the previous government,” Marina Silva said, according to the BBC.
The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covers some two and a half million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that if deforestation continues, the rainforest could reach a point beyond which it cannot recover and would become a grassy savannah.
“This shows the importance of governments acting on climate change,” Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate focused on the Amazon at Oxford University, said of the figures released this week. She is currently doing field work in the rainforest, and says the decreasing rate of deforestation is an important signal for voters.
“Often people vote and feel disempowered,” she said. “This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.”
Some scientists, however, prefer to follow the annual rather than monthly deforestation data. “It’s a hopeful story,” said Alexandra Tyukavina, a geographer at the University of Maryland who focuses on tropical forest loss. But she adds that there could be a lag in capturing deforestation via satellite imagery and “there is quite a bit of deforestation happening in the second half of the year.”
While the progress so far has been critical, Berenguer calls it “low-hanging fruit” that largely revolved around getting back to where the country was before Bolsarano. “Then you have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees and it’s much more difficult,” she said. “The question becomes what we do to reduce rates even more from what they were pre-Bolsonaro.”
The Lula administration has set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. But whether Lula meets that goal, or how close he comes, remains an open question, and there is at least some cause for skepticism. A meeting of Amazon nations early this year, for example, failed to reach an agreement on important barriers to progress, such as deforestation targets and the future of oil and gas development in the rainforest.
“We cannot just give ourselves a pat on the shoulder and be happy about it,” said Berenguer. “We cannot get too comfy.”
At the time of its construction, the Panama Canal was (and still is) a marvel of modern engineering. But it is also a single point of failure in a global mesh of tightly coupled supply chains.
"Texas-based RealPage is accused of acting as an information-sharing middleman for real estate rental giants. The lawsuits contend that that the property managers agreed to set prices through RealPage’s software, which also allowed the companies to share data on vacancy rates and prices in many of the US’ most expensive markets.... the company’s software said that it was often more profitable for mega landlords to have higher vacancy rates and keep rents elevated..."
College students are still unable to find housing despite enrollment dropping since the start of the pandemic, and a major price-fixing lawsuit against corporate landlords sheds light on why.
Learn how to make a Spanish-style gin and tonic, also known as one of the best hot-weather cocktails ever. Chefs from the Basque region of Spain invented this great variation, and it tastes like it. Enjoy!
It's Labor Day in the US, which means we're taking a break from the usual grind. Enjoy this classic story about the challenges of providing users with the authentication system they desire- one with no passwords or usernames. Original -- Remy
“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”
“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”
“But we don’t need to change it for everyone,” Craig jumped in, “just one client. Surely, you can do that!”
The situation at hand was not an uncommon one. Craig, one of the company’s top producing sales reps, had once again sold a client on a feature they did not have. He certainly didn’t lie about having the feature, but instead proposed an offer the client couldn’t refuse: if you buy it, we’ll build it.
Management, not being the type to turn down booked sales, couldn’t refuse the offer either. And thus, they sided with Craig on what ‘impossible’ actually meant. They also assigned Gerald and team to develop the much-needed feature: an IP-based authentication system that would allow users of their Software-as-a-Service product to access the system without ever needing to log in.
Gerald’s main objection with IP authentication was that the majority of users – and in fact, all of the users at the client site – were behind a router. Though they’d certainly each have an internal IP address assigned, they would all share the same public IP, making one computer indistinguishable from the next.
To make matters even more tricky, their application was used by hospitals to track certain kinds of patient data, which meant that HIPAA – the regulatory framework that defines how patient data must be stored and accessed – needed to be followed. And not just followed, but followed, tested, certified, re-certified, and double-tested. Any change to the HIPAA-related functions – authorization included – would need to go through a painful internal and external QA process.
Given the impossibility of getting the end-users internal IP address from the outside, Gerald figured that using cookies would be the next best thing. Have the user log-in once, and then store an authentication cookie on the computer for as long as possible. Sure, that meant clearing cookies would trigger a new login, but it seemed to be a fair and easy work-around. Well, not so much: the client vehemently rejected the idea, saying that their employees couldn’t be bothered with having to remember yet another login, even if only temporarily.
After going back to the drawing board, Gerald came up with another idea: configure the firewall proxy server on the client’s side to add a custom HTTP header (X-Forwarded-For) that included the original IP address. That idea went over just about as well: HTTP headers could be forged, and a malicious employee inside of the company could hack in too easily.
Gerald’s third proposal to the client involved a site-to-site VPN connection. The application server would be exposed access via the client’s internal network, which would not only allow them to use IP authentication, but Windows-integrated authentication as well. It was his best idea yet, and made things that much easier, as the client would be able to configure which username has access instead of which IP address. Unfortunately, the IT folks at the client weren’t a big fan of the approach, as “a VPN connection is inherently insecure.”
At wits end, Gerald came up with yet another idea: a “Single Sign On” approach of sorts. When the end-user would access their application, the system would look for an “authentication ticket” cookie. When not present, the user would be redirected to another server – which lived inside the network – whose sole purpose was to generate a secure authentication ticket that included the private IP address. The ticketing server would then redirect to hosted application, which would then verify the authenticity of the ticket and give the user access.
The client absolutely loved the idea. “This is exactly what we’re looking for,” the client’s project manager said, “no need to remember logins, plus solid security.” The sales contract was signed, and the project was officially a go.
And finally, three months later, the new feature was finished. It took three solid weeks of development time, two weeks of QA testing, several thousand dollars in new hardware, and tens of thousands of dollars for an external HIPAA assessment, but the sales rep and the client’s project manager said it’d be worth it: no more remembering logins. Now, all that was needed for implementation was a list of IP addresses that were allowed to use the computer.
“Hi Gerald,” the client’s project manager wrote in an email, “please provide the following IP with access to the system: 10.1.23.97.”
Gerald confirmed, and reconfirmed: only one user needed access to the system. And apparently, she really hated remembering logins.
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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Americans love to stuff their faces with cow meat. There may be nothing more stereotypically American than grilling burgers on the Fourth of July. Meatloaf is a home-cooking classic. And few dishes in the country’s cookbook have the same cachet as steak or match the succulence of a barbecued brisket. In 2021, Americans ate 20 billion pounds of beef. That’s roughly 60 pounds per person, or a Big Mac every other day, plus a Whopper every three or four days. So it’s no wonder that the United States is the world’s top producer of veal and beef.
But this picture of the country’s beef consumption — a major factor in greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. agriculture, which accounts for about one-tenth of the country’s total — is more skewed than the raw numbers might lead you to believe. New research indicates that not all beef eaters are created equal. A small percentage of the country’s population — just 12 percent — accounts for half of the country’s beef consumption on any given day, according to a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nutrients.
“It’s startling that it’s concentrated among a small minority,” said Diego Rose, a professor at Tulane University and a co-author of the paper.
From a climate standpoint, these beef guzzlers are not all that different from gasoline superusers — the 10 percent of drivers who account for one-third of the country’s gas use. A single cow can belch up to 264 pounds of methane in a year, the equivalent of burning almost 4,000 pounds of coal or driving a gas-powered car about 9,000 miles. That’s why climate advocates say people should eat less beef if they want to help ease climate change. “Beef is kind of like an environmentally extravagant source of protein,” Rose said. “It’s like the Hummer of the protein world.”
According to previous research by Rose and researchers at the University of Michigan, getting Americans to cut their beef consumption by 90 percent – and other animal products by 50 percent – would reduce emissions by the same amount as taking every single car off the road in the U.S., and another 200 million cars off the roads in other countries, for a year. The good news, in other words, is that the entire population of the United States doesn’t need to be convinced; a focus on changing the eating habits of the small group of beef eaters could go a long way.
Who, exactly, comprises that group? “There’s some of everybody,” Rose said, but men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 are most likely to be big beef eaters, the study found. The study doesn’t explain the gender gap, but other research has linked similar findings to a perception that meat is more masculine and to a conclusion that men’s spending habits are worse for the climate than women’s.
The meat-eating gap doesn’t end with gender. College graduates, young people, old people, and people familiar with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines all tend to eat less beef, the study found. Past surveys have indicated that Republicans are more likely to eat meat (not just beef) than Democrats. And people with higher incomes tend to eat more meat at first but less meat over time compared to people in the low-income bracket.
It’s not clear whether telling people who eat a lot of beef that their eating habits are contributing to global warming would actually make them change their ways. Some research suggests it might. But many people who feel wrong about eating meat still eat a lot of it. Psychologists call this the “meat paradox.” That term originally denoted the cognitive dissonance associated with consuming animal flesh while feeling morally wrong about animal suffering. But the same mental gymnastics appear to be associated with beef consumption and climate change, too.
Still, that doesn’t mean that ethical arguments are ineffective, according to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher and animal rights advocate who has spent much of his life trying to convince people not to eat meat. In a recent article in the Atlantic, he wrote that meat eaters can be convinced that eating meat is wrong, but the effect of that persuasion “is felt most powerfully at the level of the policy changes that voters will support, rather than in people’s choice of what to buy at the supermarket.” Getting money and lobbyists out of politics would be a start, Singer wrote. While his article focused on animal welfare, it might as well have been about climate change. Top U.S. meat and dairy companies have spent millions of dollars trying to kill climate legislation.
Voters, consumers, and political and corporate leaders still seem far from convinced enough to take collective action to lower beef consumption. Arby’s has shunned plant-based meat and even teased critics with its “Marrot” — a carrot look-alike made from turkey meat. One of the main Republican talking points in opposition to the ambitious climate proposal known as the Green New Deal, which aimed to tackle agricultural emissions without mentioning cows, was: “They want to take away your hamburgers.” Two years ago, a fake story made the rounds alleging that President Joe Biden would limit Americans to one hamburger a month. In response, Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, told the president to “stay out of my kitchen.”
Knowing that a small portion of Americans eat much of the country’s beef won’t make the political climate any less hostile. But it might help hone arguments about the benefits of eating less beef and the dangers of guzzling it.
RAND Corporation experts, panelists, and other guests attend the ribbon-cutting of the new RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., on April 14, 2005.
Photo: Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images
The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.
In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.
Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?
If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.
This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.
This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the streets?
The answer can be found in the new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”
As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous book. While writing “Merchants of Doubt,” they discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.”
In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.
This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are rationales for other government regulations too.)
There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.
Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism.
Markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along.
This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”
The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both American elites and regular people.
You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased in real terms since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction.
The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the “free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities.
The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of them.
Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to their cause, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.
“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions.”
And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”
Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot of money.
Update: August 7, 2023
A previous version of this article stated that the federal minimum wage has not increased since 1968. It been updated to make clear that this refers to the fact it has not increased in real terms since 1968; it has been adjusted upwards on several occasions in nominal terms.
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It was a multibillion-dollar strike, so stealthy and precise that the only visible sign was a notice that suddenly vanished from a government website.
In August 2017, a federal agency with sweeping powers over the health care industry posted a notice informing insurance companies that they weren’t allowed to charge physicians a fee when the companies paid the doctors for their work. Six months later, that statement disappeared without explanation.
The vanishing notice was the result of a behind-the-scenes campaign by the insurance industry and its middlemen that has largely escaped public notice — but that has had massive financial consequences that have rippled through the health care universe. The insurers’ invisible victory has tightened the financial vise on doctors and hospitals, nurtured a thriving industry of middlemen and allowed health insurers to do something no other industry does: Take one last cut even as it pays its bills.
Insurers now routinely require doctors to kick back as much as 5% if they want to be paid electronically. Even when physicians ask to be paid by check, doctors say, insurers often resume the electronic payments — and the fees — against their wishes. Despite protests from doctors and hospitals, the insurers and their middlemen refuse to back down.
There are plenty of reasons doctors are furious with the insurance industry. Insurers have slashed their reimbursement rates, cost them patients by excluding them from their provider networks, and forced them to spend extra time seeking pre-authorizations for ever more procedures and battling denials of coverage.
Paying fees to get paid is the final blow for some. “All these additional fees are the reason why you see small practices folding up on a regular basis, or at least contributing to it,” said Dr. Terence Gray, an anesthesiologist in Scarborough, Maine. Some medical clinics told ProPublica they are seeking ways to raise their rates in response to the fees, which would pass the costs on to patients.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Karen Jackson, who until her retirement in March was a veteran senior official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that posted, then unposted, the fee notice. Doctors, she said, shouldn’t have to pay fees to get paid.
But that’s precisely what’s happening. Almost 60% of medical practices said they were compelled to pay fees for electronic payment at least some of the time, according to a 2021 survey. And the frequency has increased since then, according to medical clinics. With more than $2 trillion in medical claims being paid electronically each year, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars annually.
Huge sums that could be spent on care are instead being siphoned off to insurers and middlemen. The fees can cost larger medical practices $1 million a year, according to an April poll by the Medical Group Management Association, which represents private medical practices. The figure sometimes runs even higher, according to a 2020 complaint to CMS from a senior executive of AdventHealth, which has 53 hospitals in nine states: “I have to pay $1.8M in expenses that I could use on PPE for our employees, or setting up testing sites, or providing charity care, or covering other community benefits.” Most clinics are smaller, and they estimated annual losses of $100,000 or less. Even that figure is more than enough to cover the salary of a registered nurse.
The shift from paper to electronic processing, which began in the early 2000s and accelerated after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, was intended to increase efficiency and save money. The story of how a cost-saving initiative ended up benefiting private insurers reveals a lot about what ails the U.S. medical system and why Americans pay more for health care than people in other developed countries. In this case, it took less than a decade for a new industry of middlemen, owned by private equity funds and giant conglomerates like UnitedHealth Group, to cash in.
How these players managed to create this lucrative niche has never previously been reported. And the story is coming to light in part because one doctor, initially incensed by the fees, and then baffled by CMS’ unexplained zigzags, decided to try to figure out what was going on. Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger, a urologist who runs his own clinic in New York City, made it his mission to take on both the insurers and the federal bureaucracy. He began filing voluminous public records requests with CMS.
Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger is on a crusade against payment processors’ fees, which he says threaten his practice.
(DeSean McClinton-Holland for ProPublica)
What he discovered in internal emails and government documents, which he shared with ProPublica, was a picture sharply at odds with the image of CMS as a hugely powerful force in health care. The records showed, again and again, federal officials deferring not only to a single company, but to a single executive.
Over the past five years, CMS adopted that company’s positions on fees. Shteynshlyuger discovered that, when it comes to the issue he cares about, the most powerful decision-maker wasn’t a CMS official. It was the chief lobbyist for a middleman company called Zelis. And that man just happened to be a former CMS staffer who had authored a key federal rule on electronic payments.
For Shteynshlyuger, the intersection of medicine and money has a particular resonance. He was born in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine, and his brother nearly died of pneumonia as an infant because doctors refused to administer an antibiotic. The doctors wanted his family to pay a “bribe,” according to Shteynshlyuger. His grandmother ended up finding a different doctor to pay off and his brother got the medicine. Shtenynshlyuger’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, when he was an adolescent, and they settled in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area.
Today, Shteynshlyuger sees the fees for electronic payment through a similar lens. He’s a gadfly, but one with a wry, sometimes humorous disposition and an intellectual bent. He studied biology and economics in college and is capable of both rage at perceived unfairness and dispassionate observations about health policy. The unjust fees, as he sees them, threaten his medical practice, which he designed to serve middle-class patients. He prices his services at a discount. “Low cost is what keeps me in the business,” he said.
As a result, administrative combat has become a big part of his life. Unmarried, Shteynshlyuger, 45, stays up into the wee hours, writing lengthy memos to regulators. One recent missive spanned 155 pages, including appendices.
This New Year’s, he joined his family for a week off at his parents’ condo near Miami. Shteynshlyuger arrived with a desktop computer, which he set up in one of the bedrooms alongside two monitors that he keeps at the condo. While his nieces and brother enjoyed the beach, Shteynshlyuger sat indoors, drafting a 38-page memo to aid in one of two lawsuits he has filed in an effort to pry documents out of CMS.
Shteynshlyuger’s accent, with its distinctive Brooklyn-Russian mix, is unmistakable in calls with customer service representatives at insurance companies and payment processors. (He recorded many of the calls and shared them with ProPublica.) The calls follow a similar pattern: Posing questions in the manner of a genial but persistent litigator, Shteynshlyuger asks why he’s being charged a fee.
Ultimately, he’s informed that there’s no way to have an electronic funds transfer, or EFT, sent straight to his bank account without paying a fee. When the calls get escalated, representatives sometimes offer to shave a tiny amount off the fees — charging, say, 2.1% rather than 2.5%, a proposal made on one recent call with Zelis — but rarely is he offered a free transfer.
Shteynshlyuger spends hours on the phone with payment processors like Zelis, fighting their attempts to impose fees on electronic payments.
(DeSean McClinton-Holland for ProPublica)
A spokesperson for Zelis, the payment-processing company that Shteynshlyuger has tangled with most often, said the company refers requests for free electronic payments to the insurers, but recordings and transcripts of recent calls show that did not happen when Shteynshlyuger called.
Shteynshlyuger and other doctors say payment processors routinely sign them up for high-fee payment methods without their consent. A brochure for one payment company, Change Healthcare, boasted of automatically enrolling 100,000 doctors and hospitals in a plan to receive virtual credit cards and sharing some $8 million a year in revenues with the large insurer it was working for. (Virtual credit cards are a form of electronic payment in which a payer sends a string of numbers that are typed into a credit card reader to generate a one-time payment. Fees for VCCs run as high as 5% versus a typical 2.5% for other kinds of electronic payments.)
Payment processors often boost insurers’ revenues by sharing the fees from virtual credit cards. One processor, VPay, says in its marketing materials that insurers can “make money on every virtual card transaction.” In response to questions from ProPublica, UnitedHealth, which owns Change and VPay, asserted that its services help medical clinics streamline recordkeeping, reduce administrative burdens and accelerate payments.
Zelis and other payment processors say they offer value in return for their fees: Doctors can sign up to receive reimbursements from hundreds of insurers through a single payment processor, and they can also get services that help match up electronic payments and receipts. Zelis asserted in a statement that its services remove “many of the obstacles that keep providers from efficiently initiating, receiving, and benefitting from electronic payments.” Zelis and other companies insist that it’s easy to opt out of their services, but Shteynshlyuger and other doctors say otherwise.
Virtual credit cards come with fees as high as 5%.
(Courtesy of Dr. Terence Gray. Redacted by ProPublica)
When Shtyenshlyuger embarked on his mission of fighting the fees in 2017, his first step was research. He quickly came across an article from the American Medical Association that said the law was on his side.
Shteynshlyuger then approached the companies. He emailed senior executives of Zelis and VPay, asserting that the fees violated CMS rules. The companies denied breaking any rules and wouldn’t budge on the fees.
So Shteynshlyuger started filing complaints with CMS. The responses he received struck him as curious. CMS itself usually didn’t offer an opinion. Instead, it forwarded letters from a Zelis executive named Matthew Albright, who answered Shteynshlyuger’s complaints on at least five occasions. (The agency said this passive approach is part of its “informal” complaint resolution process.)
When Shteynshlyuger pressed a CMS official to articulate the agency’s position after it passed along Albright’s answer, the official wrote that the agency receives the “identical legal response” from Zelis to all such complaints. She added: “They believe that, according to their interpretation of the regulation, they are compliant.”
Shteynshlyuger was flummoxed. Who was Matthew Albright? A quick Google search revealed that Albright had once worked for CMS. That only piqued Shteynshlyuger’s interest. Had Albright been involved in the removal of the CMS notice prohibiting fees?
To Albright, the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act was a historic event of a magnitude akin to the moon landing. Then a policymaker with Washington state’s Health Care Authority, Albright was awed by the importance of the looming rewrite of U.S. health care rules. He felt he had to be part of it. “This is the Apollo 11 for regulators,” he recalled thinking, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’ve got to get to D.C. and write regulations.”
Matthew Albright, now chief legislative affairs officer at Zelis, made a series of explanatory videos in his days at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
(Screenshot via YouTube)
Now 55, Albright had unusual training for his new role. Instead of following the typical path through law school, he had studied sacred texts, first at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and later at Harvard University, where he earned a master’s degree in divinity. Those studies, Albright said, fostered what he called a “scholastic fascination with words and how they’re used to tell people what to do,” whether those words are in the Ten Commandments or the Code of Federal Regulations.
Articulate and cheerful, today Albright can still sound more like a divinity professor than a lobbyist when he describes his current job as studying laws and rules. “Hermeneutics,” he said, “it’s just like Bible study, right? Breaking it down into its understandable parts. And then, frankly, turning around and teaching it or turning around and explaining it in the vernacular, if you will. So I think that most of my job is looking at regulations and reading them and then explaining them to internal and external audiences.”
At CMS, Albright drafted a rule, published in 2012, that laid out standards for paying doctors via electronic funds transfers. The Affordable Care Act required all insurers to offer EFTs and encouraged doctors to accept them, and electronic payments quickly became the go-to method for handling medical claims. A CMS analysis predicted that eliminating the labor of manually processing paper checks and receipts would lead to savings of $3 billion to $4.5 billion over 10 years.
Albright became the agency’s point man on the issue. He looked every bit the government bureaucrat in a gray shirt and dark suit as he extolled the virtues of “administrative simplification” in earnest-but-stiff video segments that emulated a talk show. (Albright also created a personal YouTube channel when he taught a philosophy course. It had bite-sized explanations of, among other things, Kantian ethics — “do not use people” — and Ayn Rand’s philosophy — “selfishness is good.”)
Albright’s work at CMS, by his description, became a “turning point” for health care payments. The shift to electronic funds transfers facilitated the growth of an industry of payment processors. It also made Albright’s skill set very valuable. In 2014, he was recruited to the industry he previously regulated. Two years later, he landed at Zelis. The company had just been created via a merger of four businesses owned by Parthenon Capital, a private equity firm. Zelis is now co-owned by private equity giant Bain Capital and headed by a former Bain partner. (Parthenon declined to comment; Bain referred a request for comment to Zelis.)
Zelis, which once described itself as having a “regulatory-based business model,” touted Albright’s government resume when it hired him as vice president of legislative affairs. Albright said at the time he would “advocate for rational regulatory approaches.”
Rational regulatory approaches, from Zelis’ perspective, included the right to charge doctors for electronic payments. That was a crucial revenue stream for the company, but it could dry up if CMS enforced a rule prohibiting such fees. Who better than Albright, the man who had drafted rules on electronic payments, to help the company navigate the situation?
When Shteynshlyuger began to receive documents from CMS in response to his Freedom of Information Act requests, he was first struck by how deferential CMS officials seemed to be to Albright. In July 2019, for example, as Shteynshlyuger continued to complain about Zelis, a CMS official named Gladys Wheeler contacted Albright. “You may be familiar with Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger,” Wheeler wrote. “To assist with resolution of the complaints, I have a few questions. Can I send the questions to you, or can you redirect me?” She added, “Just let me know the best approach. Thanks, and take care, Gladys.” (Wheeler did not respond to requests for comment.)
The tone of the conversations between Albright and CMS could be downright chummy. “Should we respond to it as per usual?” Albright asked in another July 2019 email about a new complaint filed by a doctor in Washington state. “Send the Zelis response for documentation purposes,” Wheeler responded in between banter that she and Albright exchanged about Chicago’s winter weather (bad) and architecture (great).
Shteynshlyuger was growing more frustrated. He didn’t understand why CMS had yanked the notice about the prohibition on fees from its website. If his months of effort couldn’t extract clear answers, how could other doctors with less inclination for bureaucratic battle figure out what to do?
What Shteynshlyuger didn’t know was that, less than two years earlier, a lobbying campaign had begun behind the scenes at CMS. The documents that he eventually obtained would provide a rare, nearly day-by-day glimpse into how one lobbyist — Albright — managed to bend the agency to his will with an artful combination of cajoling, argument and legal threats.
On Aug. 11, 2017, CMS’ website had posted the notice that EFT fees were prohibited. Such notices, presented in the form of answers to frequently asked questions, are meant to explain the agency’s complex rules in plain language. CMS based the notice on a rule from 2000 that banned fees in excess of normal telecommunication costs (such as, say, the tiny fractions of a penny to cover the cost of an email) that a doctor would incur if they were receiving the bill “directly” from an insurer.
The notice triggered an immediate protest from Zelis, according to emails and an internal CMS memo. Albright had “multiple conversations” with CMS staff and demanded that the agency revise the notice.
The nub of Albright’s argument was that CMS’ 2000 rule prohibited insurers from charging excessive fees for “direct” transactions. But, he argued, the rule was meant to apply to insurers dealing with doctors. Albright represented payment processors who work for insurers; those weren’t direct transactions between insurers and doctors. Thus, he argued, the fee prohibition couldn’t apply to EFT payments.
CMS, which took months or longer to respond to Shteynshlyuger, quickly complied with Albright’s request and removed the fee notice on Aug. 14, 2017, only three days after it was posted.
CMS published an updated notice in late September 2017. But the agency stood firm on the key point: The new document stated that insurers and payment processors “should not charge providers communications fees” for EFTs.
Shortly after the revised notice went up, Albright emailed the director of the CMS division that issued it. “Hope the kids have settled into the school year okay,” he began. He then asked for “our day in court to educate” the agency. He suggested that Zelis was preparing to escalate its complaints but offered to “work through this without causing too much noise.”
Two days before Thanksgiving, Albright confronted Christine Gerhardt, then deputy director of the CMS division that issued the fee notice. In a phone call, Albright demanded that CMS revise the document again, according to Gerhardt’s summary of the call. Gerhardt refused. Albright began debating her on the legal differences between the explainer and the regulation that it summarized.
The following week, Albright pressed harder, asking Gerhardt whether the prohibition on fees was enforceable. He told Gerhardt that if she did not answer, that itself would be an answer. It would, Albright said, “give me a sense of what steps need to be taken next” to challenge the agency’s notice. Gerhardt, who is now retired, said she assured him that the agency wasn’t implementing a new rule; only clarifying existing rules. Albright was pushing hard, but at that point, Gerhardt hadn’t bent.
Then, in January 2018, Zelis brought in the lawyers. A firm called Nixon Peabody wrote to CMS, demanding that the agency “withdraw or correct the offending language” in its notice. Nixon Peabody argued that the fee prohibition wasn’t a restatement of existing rules but that it amounted to a new rule that should have been issued via the formal rulemaking process. Nixon Peabody threatened to sue if CMS didn’t comply with Zelis’ demand. (Nixon Peabody did not reply to a request for comment.)
The legal threat set off a scramble within CMS. “Let’s just take it down,” Gerhardt wrote in a Feb. 9, 2018, email to colleagues. Her division not only removed the notice saying that fees were prohibited but also went so far as to institute a moratorium on any new notices. CMS was essentially depriving all medical providers of guidance on these issues because one company had complained.
The response puzzled even some within CMS. “What was the basis for withdrawal if the request was from a single entity and potentially harms providers?” Jackson, then CMS deputy chief of operations, wrote in an email.
Albright, his goal accomplished, sought to soothe Gerhardt and two of her colleagues. “I know I butted heads with all three of you,” he wrote a few weeks later. Albright offered to meet to explain why Zelis is not “one of the bad guys in this area.” (Zelis did not address detailed questions about Albright’s interactions with CMS.)
In March 2018, after Zelis complained and CMS removed a notice saying that payments to doctors couldn’t carry fees, Albright emailed three key agency staffers to patch things up.
(Email exchange provided by Alex Shteynshlyuger)
CMS told ProPublica in a statement that it reversed its position because it concluded that it had no legal authority to “flat-out prohibit fees.” The agency declined to comment on Shteynshlyuger’s complaints, but said it takes seriously any allegations of noncompliance with its rules. As for Zelis’ lobbying, CMS said it “receives feedback from a wide range of stakeholders on an ongoing basis. The information received helps the agency understand where guidance and clarification of existing policy may be needed.”
The American Medical Association and over 90 other physician groups have urged the Biden administration to reinstate guidance protecting doctors’ right to receive EFTs without fees. For its part, the massive Veterans Health Administration system has been refusing to pay the fees, which it has described as illegal in letters to Zelis and insurers.
So far the protests have had no visible effect. In fact, when CMS finally issued a new explainer that addressed fees in July 2022, more than four years after erasing the previous one, the agency made explicit what had previously been implicit: EFT fees are allowed.
Shteynshlyuger is continuing his lonely campaign. Two months after CMS stated that fees are OK, a Zelis customer service representative contacted him. Shteynshlyuger had just submitted his 80th complaint to CMS. Emails show the rep offered to help him get signed up for no-fee EFTs — but the offer only applied to payments from one of the more than 700 insurers and other payers that Zelis represents. Shteynshlyuger demurred, saying he did not want the issue resolved without CMS’ intervention because then other doctors could not get the same assistance. As often as not, Shteynshlyuger and other doctors are left with little recourse; many insist on being paid by paper check rather than allowing Zelis to take a cut.
In mid-December, Shteynshlyuger finally got the long-awaited replies to eight other complaints he had filed over the years. CMS dismissed all eight because Shteynshlyuger didn’t file them against insurers but instead against companies like Zelis, which CMS referred to as “business associates” of the insurers. CMS said it now believes its oversight extends only to insurers, not to their business associates. The phrasing may have been bureaucratic, but the news was dramatic: CMS had fully surrendered, giving up on regulating payment processors entirely.
Shteynshlyuger hasn’t filed a new document request yet to uncover whether Zelis or perhaps another company influenced that decision. He has his suspicions.
Photographer Barry Webb (previously) continues his hunt for the speckled, glimmering, and ice-crested organisms that pop up near his home in South Buckinghamshire, U.K. Armed with a 90-millimeter macro lens, Webb ventures into woodlands and other natural areas where slime molds and fungi thrive. There, he zeroes in on their microscopic features, documenting their wildly diverse characteristics that often last for just a brief moment in time. Recent shots include a tuft of Muppet-like fuzz topping Metatrichia floriformis, a water droplet suspended between two cup-like Craterium minutum, and a cluster of Pink stemonitis filaments propped on spindly black legs.
Webb has won several awards in recent months, including from the Royal Photographic Society and Close-Up Photographer of the Year. Four of his photos will be featured at the Vienna Mushroom Festival next month, prints are available on his site, and you can find more of his work on Instagram.
Recently found this channel, lots of dam building, somehow mesmerizing and super cool
#MiniConstruction #ScienceProject #construction #dam #Mini #Hydroelectric Great, thank you all for watching my video. Please click subscribe to the channel . Thanks
In April of this year, the End Child Poverty Act (ECPA) was reintroduced in Congress. The ECPA is a child allowance proposal that would replace the current intricate system of family tax credits with a simple, universal child benefit. The ECPA has the potential to help millions of families and significantly reduce child poverty. However, the ECPA has yet to receive a detailed analysis that estimates its cost and impact. That is until now. Recently, I collaborated with Max Ghenis, Founder of PolicyEngine, to create an in-depth analysis of the ECPA for 2023. Using PolicyEngine, Max and I were able to determine the program’s cost and effects on household income, poverty and inequality. This comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the true potential of the ECPA.
Cost
In the analysis, all the components of the ECPA were considered. The ECPA simplifies the existing tax system by abolishing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). It establishes a credit of $600 for single filers and $1,200 for joint filers, phasing out gradually at $20,000 and $40,000, respectively. The ECPA also includes a $600 credit for adult dependents. When these policies are combined, the net budgetary effect is $111.8 billion in increased tax revenue.
The primary component of the ECPA is the universal child benefit. For 2023, every child from 0 to 18 will receive $5,140 a year ($428 a month). This alone would cost $382.1 billion. Therefore, the overall cost of the ECPA for 2023 is $270.3 billion. While this may seem like a steep cost, it only represents about 1% of annual GDP. For context, the U.S. spends more than 3% of its annual GDP on the military. For a relatively modest cost, the ECPA has some astounding distributional effects.
Household Impact
The ECPA would increase household incomes across every decile, with most families seeing a 5% or more increase in their net incomes. Families with little or no income would benefit significantly compared to the existing system. Since EITC and CTC benefits currently phase in based on earnings, a single parent with one child and no earnings receives no assistance from either credit. But under the ECPA, they would receive $5,140 from the universal child benefit and an additional $600 from the single filer credit (assuming they file their taxes). As a result, their income would soar by $5,740 compared to the status quo. This aid towards families with no income helps explain the staggering reduction in poverty that would occur under the ECPA.
Poverty Reduction
While the primary goal of the proposal is to alleviate child poverty, it also does a great job of lowering poverty in general. The ECPA would reduce poverty by 26.2% and deep poverty by 32%. The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) would see its lowest rates on record. Black and Hispanic poverty would also decrease by 30.3% and 32.6%, respectively. However, the decline in child poverty is obviously where this proposal shines the brightest. The ECPA would reduce child poverty by 60.7%, lowering the SPM child poverty rate from 8.2% to 3.2%. This exceeds the 46% reduction in child poverty that occurred in 2021, which was mainly attributed to the enhanced CTC. Furthermore, deep child poverty would decrease by a whopping 93.2%. The ECPA cuts the SPM deep child poverty rate to just 0.1%! The ECPA would lift tens of millions of people out of poverty.
Inequality
Finally, the ECPA reduces income inequality. Under the ECPA, the Gini index would fall by 3.6%, dropping from 40.6 to 39.2. While this seems like a minimal dip, it’s important to note that the Gini index would reach its lowest level since 1992 under the ECPA. If the ECPA is paired with progressive taxation, income inequality would fall even more. The ECPA would also lower the percent of total income held by individuals in the top 10% and 1% of households.
Conclusion
The End Child Poverty Act was already a good proposal. It is elegantly designed and would provide benefits to the poorest families, unlike the current system. However, after conducting the analysis, it is evident that the ECPA would substantially benefit millions of families, cut poverty to unprecedented levels and reduce income inequality to a 30-year low. It is undoubtedly the best child allowance proposal currently introduced in Congress, and now, it has the numbers to back it up. If the ECPA were signed into law, it would go up with Social Security as one of America’s best poverty reducers. I urge Democrats to coalesce around the ECPA. The enhanced CTC in 2021 was good, but the ECPA is better. But don’t take my word for it; just look at the numbers.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
When Donna Crawford didn’t hear back from her brother Lyle, she began to fear the worst. It was Monday, June 28, 2021, at the tail end of a blistering heat dome that had settled over the Pacific Northwest. Two days prior, daytime temperatures had soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Gresham, Oregon, where Lyle lived alone in the small yellow house the siblings had grown up in. “I hope you’re doing OK in the heat,” she had said into his answering machine that day.
By the time Donna contacted the police, Lyle had already died alone in his house; a box fan was found swirling oven-hot air nearby. He was 62 years old.
Lyle lived for most of his life in Gresham, a suburb outside Portland, spending his time hiking through the mountains and rivers of Oregon and caring for his mother before her death. Although he was friendly and enjoyed chatting with his barber and other acquaintances, he had few friends later in life and grew even more isolated during the pandemic. Donna, his only remaining family, lived 3,000 miles away in Richmond, Virginia.
“He would have answered the door if someone knocked, and that might have done it. An actual human being,” Donna told county health officials. “But how can there be enough human beings to go to the door of every older person?” Lyle was one of at least 48 people living alone who died in Multnomah County, which includes Gresham and Portland, during the heat wave.
In May, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning that Americans are experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” The report lays out a worrying array of statistics showing that people are less socially connected than ever before. In 2021, almost half of Americans reported having fewer than four close friends, while only a quarter said the same in 1990. U.S. residents spent 24 more hours per month alone in 2020 than they did in 2003. Only 3 in 10 Americans know most of their neighbors. And people living alone now make up 29 percent of U.S. households, compared to 13 percent in 1960.
The isolation crisis is compounding the dangers of deadly heat waves fueled by climate change. In the U.S. and many othercountries, social isolation is a major risk factor for dying during a heat wave. Experts say that isolation is made worse by a shortage of social infrastructure like libraries, local businesses, green spaces, and public transit, leaving people who are older and live in disinvested neighborhoods most at risk from extreme heat. As heat waves become more frequent, cities are exploring strategies to build social connections and reach isolated individuals before it’s too late.
“We talk a lot about the emerging climate crisis, but far less about the social infrastructure crisis,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, told Grist.
A fan blowing inside a home in Houston, Texas, during a July 2022 heat wave.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
In the U.S., up to 20,000 people died of heat-related causes between 2008 and 2017. At scorching temperatures, people can experience heat exhaustion, a condition that causes heavy sweating, nausea, and fainting. If left untreated, it can lead to heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness that causes delirium, a rapid heart rate, and eventually organ damage and shutdown. Many heat deaths are also caused by heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues made far more likely by exposure to extreme heat.
Klinenberg and other experts stress that all heat-related deaths are preventable, including those that happen when a person is alone. During a heatwave, it’s possible to check in on neighbors and bring people air conditioning units or help move them to cooling centers. Analogous life-saving measures aren’t always possible during other extreme weather events, like hurricanes or floods.
“There’s been a long understanding of how heat affects your body and a long understanding of a range of interventions to get your core body temperature back down,” Kristie Ebi, a global health professor studying the impacts of climate change at the University of Washington, told Grist. “People don’t have to die.”
But without adequate outreach, it can be easy for isolated individuals “to get into trouble with the heat,” Ebi said. That’s because heat accumulates in the body gradually, so even a healthy person may not realize that their core temperature is reaching dangerous levels until it’s too late.
For older adults, the risks of heat and isolation are especially acute. Older people are more likely to experience risk factors that can cause or exacerbate isolation, including living alone, chronic illness, and loss of family and friends. At least a quarter of Americans age 65 and older are considered socially isolated. At the same time, older adults are also more at risk during heat waves because they do not adjust as well as younger people to sudden changes in temperature. They are also more likely to have a chronic illness or take medication that affects their body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Ebi notes that not only does isolation increase the risk of heat — heat can, in turn, increase isolation. Heat exhausts the body’s energy supply and can impact cognitive function, causing symptoms like confusion. Many people already not feeling up for socializing on a typical day due to chronic medical conditions may feel even less able to reach out during a heat wave.
Research has shown that due to sheer proximity, neighbors are among the most effective first responders during a natural disaster. In a well connected neighborhood, where residents trust their neighbors and participate in local activities and groups, people are more likely to share resources and help one another prepare for and recover from disaster events. As a result, communities with robust social networks tend to fare much better during extreme weather like heat waves.
A billboard displays a temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit during this summer’s heat wave in Phoenix, Arizona.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Klinenberg first observed this pattern while studying the social and economic disparities that shaped a devastating 1995 heat wave in Chicago. Over the course of five days, more than 700 people died as temperatures climbed up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Residents who were poor, Black, and older died at disproportionately high rates. When comparing neighborhoods with similar levels of income and people living alone, he found that far fewer deaths happened in communities that were better connected than in more isolated areas.
One aspect those neighborhoods had in common was an abundance of social infrastructure, or the physical places that enable interaction, Klinenberg found. It can be something as simple as a stoop or a park bench to pause on. At a larger scale, social infrastructure can look like a bustling sidewalk, a community garden, the subway, or a local library — anything that “gives people a place to gather and draws people out of their homes into contact with neighbors,” Klinenberg said.
“The people who lived in depleted neighborhoods, places that had lost their social infrastructure, were far more likely to die alone than people who lived in neighborhoods with a rich social infrastructure,” he said — “for the simple reason that you’re more likely to wind up home alone.”
In Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S., access to those public spaces is highly unequal, owing to decades of disinvestment in historically redlined neighborhoods and other low-income communities. As a result of racist housing, lending, and transportation policies, predominantly Black communities and communities of color disproportionately live in neighborhoods that lack adequate housing, schools, transportation, parks, and other essential infrastructure. Previously redlined neighborhoods also tend to experience hotter temperatures due to the urban heat island effect, where a lack of green spaces and more paved roads and buildings lock in heat and raise temperatures up to 12.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than non-redlined areas.
These inequalities have fatal consequences. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indigenous people and Black people had the highest rates of heat-related deaths in the U.S. between 2004 and 2018. In New York City, local officials reported that the heat-related death rate among Black people from 2011 to 2020 was more than twice as high as that of their white counterparts.
Bharat Venkat, a professor of society and genetics at UCLA and director of the UCLA Heat Lab, said the issue of infrastructure is just one way in which extreme heat lays bare the dangers of existing inequities.
“Those vulnerabilities are ones that are produced socially and politically,” he said. “And that’s what makes the heatwave so deadly and dangerous.”
An aerial view of a section of the ‘The Zone,’ Phoenix’s largest homeless encampment, during this July’s heat wave. Mario Tama / Getty Images
Recognizing the risks of isolation, many cities have ramped up community outreach during heat waves. As part of early warning systems, cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia send out text alerts, connect with community and faith-based organizations, and conduct on-the-ground outreach to at-risk populations. Phoenix, Miami, and Los Angeles have gone a step further by appointing chief heat officers to coordinate citywide responses to heat emergencies. Those plans include measures like distributing maps to cooling centers and water bottles, calling residents directly, and raising awareness of heat risks through broadcasting on television, radio, social media, and billboard ads.
In Philadelphia, 6,000 volunteer “block captains” serve as neighborhood leaders for residential blocks ranging from as few as four households to as many as 99 households. The initiative, which was created primarily to lead street clean-up efforts, has also proven an effective way of reaching residents during heat emergencies, according to Dawn Woods, administrator of the program. Block captains receive information on city services and resources from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and help share knowledge by hosting block meetings and connecting with folks one-on-one.
“For neighbors who are sick or can’t leave their home, we ask block captains to just constantly check in on them and make sure that they have phone numbers on hand, so that they can reach out to somebody in the event of an emergency,” Woods told Grist.
Klinenberg and Venkat said that although community outreach is important, cities should also work to address the broader issues that deepen isolation and heat risk. That includes addressing a national shortage of affordable housing that leaves more people unsheltered, less able to access cooling and community resources, and at greater risk of dying during a heat wave. It also means investing in neighborhoods to build and maintain the local businesses and public facilities that give people the chance to connect with their neighbors.
Venkat pointed to other pressing needs, such as making energy costs more affordable so that people don’t have to choose between putting food on the table and running air conditioning. Another is ensuring rights to cooling for renters and people living in public housing. In Phoenix, for example, a city ordinance requires landlords to provide air conditioning or other cooling systems for rental units. Venkat said cities should also step up efforts to plant trees in neighborhoods that lack green spaces, which provide vital shade and cooling in places where asphalt and concrete trap heat.
“It’s not that people die from heat waves,” Venkat said. “What they die from are social and political decisions about how we govern and take care of people.”
It’s been nearly two years to the day since a freak heat wave obliterated temperature records across the Pacific Northwest. Portland reached a blistering 116 degrees on June 28, 2021, with the heat melting streetcar power cables, buckling pavement, and killing an estimated 69 people in Multnomah County. About 800 people died across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
Now, that heat dome — which scientists deemed “virtually impossible” without global warming — is the subject of a new lawsuit. Multnomah County sued ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies on Thursday, seeking to put them on trial for the role their products played in fueling the heat wave.
The lawsuit alleges that these companies, along with the American Petroleum Institute, committed negligence and fraud — and created a public nuisance — by concealing what they knew about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. It demands they pay $50 million for past damages, along with $1.5 billion for future damages. On top of that, Multnomah is seeking $50 billion for a fund to upgrade its public health services and “weatherproof” its infrastructure to withstand extreme weather.
“This lawsuit is about accountability and fairness, and I believe the people of Multnomah County deserve both. These businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it,” said Jessica Vega Pederson, Multnomah County chair, in a statement. “They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough.”
Multnomah’s lawsuit is the latest addition to a growing group of lawsuits that cities and states have filed against oil companies for deceiving the public about the risks of oil, gas, and coal. They were set in motion by revelations that ExxonMobil had known that fossil fuels would heat up the planet, with catastrophic consequences, since 1977, but publicly cast doubt on the science and worked to block legislation that would limit carbon emissions. For about half a decade, these cases have been held up in legal limbo, with companies deploying maneuvers to move them from state courts they were filed in to more industry-friendly federal courts. In April, the Supreme Court rejected oil companies’ petitions to relocate the cases to a federal venue, clearing the way for these cases to progress — potentially to jury trials.
In response to the Multnomah lawsuit, an Exxon spokesperson said, “Suits like these continue to waste time, resources and do nothing to address climate change.”
Multnomah’s suit is one of the first to seek damages related to a specific weather event. A statement from the county calls the heat dome “one of the most deadly and destructive human-made weather disasters in American history.” Last year, a group of cities in Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for the damages they suffered by hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017, using the racketeering law that brought down mobsters, RICO, and seeking billions of dollars.
“While other communities are seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for the costs of hurricanes, rising seas, and wildfires, Multnomah County is the first to demand that oil companies stand trial for fueling the devastating 2021 heat dome,” said Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement. “Communities should not be forced to pay the price for these catastrophic climate damages while the companies that caused the crisis perpetuate their lies and rake in record profits.”
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but this mathematician quote is priceless:
“At first, they did not believe that you can do it,” Domokos said. “They were doing artificial intelligence, supercomputing and all this kind of jazz. And now they are just looking at formulas. And this is very relaxing.”
On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and the Natural Geometry of Fragmentation.” It wasn’t the unusual title that caught his eye, but the pictures on the third page — geological patterns at every scale from cracked permafrost to Earth’s...
Through exquisite cut-paper motifs, Pippa Dyrlaga (previously) evinces the principles of biophilia, the theory that humans are predisposed to connect with nature and other life forms. This hypothesis grounds the Yorkshire-based artist’s first solo show in the U.S., which opens this week at Heron Arts in San Francisco.
Encompassing a range of Dyrlaga’s works from recent years, the exhibition is named after the theory and features meticulously carved compositions that meld flora and fauna. Patterned mesh backdrops surround entire ecosystems with avian and aquatic life, as in “Summer” and “River,” while smaller pieces focus on single creatures like a bluebird or swan as they take flight. Layered with acrylic paint, the works are nostalgic and full of reverence, evoking the immense, insatiable wonder of childhood and the joy of discovering the beauty of the natural world for the first time.
Biophilia runs from June 22 to July 21. Find more of Dyrlaga’s pieces on her site and Instagram.
“A Strange and Beautiful Place,” hand-cut 36gsm washi paper and acrylic
“Kingfisher,” hand-cut 36gsm washi paper and acrylic, 20 x 22 centimeters
Left: “Foxglove,” hand-cut paper, approximately 55 x 28 centimeters. Right: “Moss,” hand-cut paper and acrylic, approximately 120 x 45 centimeters
“Swan,” hand-cut paper, 40 x 30 centimeters
“Summer,” hand-cut 36gsm washi paper and acrylic, 90 x 70 centimeters
Top left: “Dandelion,” printed image, hand-cut 36gsm washi paper, and acrylic. Top right: “Gaia” printed image, hand-cut 36gsm washi paper, and acrylic. Bottom left: “Memory Fruit,” printed image, hand-cut 36gsm washi paper, and acrylic. Bottom right: “Tera Mater” printed image, hand-cut 36gsm washi paper, and acrylic
“Seeds,” hand-cut 36gsm washi paper and acrylic
“River,” hand-cut 36gsm washi paper, 40 x 40 centimeters
This story was originally published by Next City and is reproduced here with permission.
On a dead-end street in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood, on 18 acres of land that previously served as an illegal dumping ground, an entire food ecosystem has emerged and thrived under the leadership of local residents.
Rid-All Green Partnership started with a single hoop house erected in February of 2011; now acres of farmland support a community kitchen and farmer’s market. All food waste is turned into compost, which supports the farm and is sold across Cleveland. A training program and paid apprenticeships bring community members in, while an aquaponics and hydroponics system generates local jobs. Specialized programs emerged to serve veterans and youth.
“We’ve created a circular economy,” says Keymah Durden, a Rid-All co-founder who grew up in the neighborhood. “Piece by piece, we’ve built this business with things that complement each other.”
Durden is one of three co-founders, all childhood friends who grew up on Cleveland’s east side. Rid-All’s name comes from late co-founder Damien Forshe’s company, Rid-All Exterminating Corporation, which he operated for 15 years before transitioning to agriculture. He was inspired by a research report written by co-founder Randy McShepard that advocated for building urban farms in vacant land following the 2009 foreclosure crisis. (Cleveland had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, with many of the vacated homes demolished.)
The trio secured 1.3 vacant acres in Kinsman, a neighborhood struggling with disinvestment and entrenched poverty. They prompted the county and others to clean the illegal dumping ground; more than 2,000 tires, burned out cars and abandoned refrigerators were removed. They participated in a five-month training program at the Milwaukee urban farm Growing Power and were inspired by two things: creating their own soil to replace the contaminated soil in their lot, and investing in fish farming, which could become an income generator to support a larger urban farm.
Courtesy of Rid-All Green Partnership
In addition to building a hoop house to begin growing plants and vegetables, they collected food waste from local businesses around Cleveland, creating compost for their farm and selling it. They built a self-sustaining hydroponics system to grow fish in tanks and vegetables on a connected top tier, with the fish waste fortifying the plants and the plants supporting clean water for the fish. In the first three years, they grew and sold 10,000 tilapia fish out of one greenhouse.
It was enough success to secure an investment to build a 7,200-square-foot urban fish farm, which now grows 70,000 tilapia that Rid-All sells to local restaurants. “These two critical pieces of our business — the fish farm and the compost — came from our early learnings and realizing there was a market for both,” explains McShepard.
As Rid-All grew, the nonprofit secured adjacent land. It is now an 18-acre campus with two greenhouses, six hoop houses, a commercial composting station, and a rain catchment pond. The nonprofit was also named the official tree nursery site of the Cleveland Tree Coalition and will be growing and selling at least 5,000 trees over the next few years as part of a larger effort to reforest the city.
“We’ve looked at ways to stay current and evolve over time,” says Marc White, a founding partner who serves as operations manager. “We didn’t want to be stuck just growing vegetables, we wanted to grow community.”
To that end, Rid-All introduced workshops, trainings and apprenticeship programs, including specific programming for youth and veterans. The farm now employs 18 people, many of whom are from the neighborhood, and offers summer employment for young people.
Its two latest developments cemented Rid-All’s circular economy model. In the summer of 2020, Rid-All began operating a farmer’s market in Maple Heights, a suburb bordering Cleveland that’s considered a food desert. This was Rid-All’s first opportunity to sell produce at scale. “Whatever we grow at the farm we can sell at the market and any produce that doesn’t sell we bring back and it becomes compost,” says McShepard. A chef sets up in the market once a month to share meals and recipes using the produce currently for sale.
A view of Rid-All’s Cleveland operation. Rid-All Green Partnership
In the spring of 2021, Rid-All opened a new building on its campus to serve as a community kitchen, market and restaurant facility. Similarly to the market, anything grown by Rid-All is cooked up and sold in the community kitchen, any food waste becomes compost. “This is a full, closed-loop ecosystem now,” McSheperd says.
Durden oversees the community kitchen. “The building is styled like a log cabin, which is such a unique feature to inner-core Cleveland, that it’s almost become a showpiece,” he says. On Tuesdays and Fridays they sell meals cooked by rotating guest chefs; Kinsman residents often eat alongside local government officials and professional athletes.
Rid-All hosts cooking and nutrition classes here and rents the space out for meetings and special events. They also plan to use the kitchen as an incubator for emerging food businesses and staging facility for food products that require processing and packaging.
Durden calls the farmer’s market and community kitchen “game changers” in that “everything we grow here at the farm, we can translate to our market and our kitchen.”
“This is a real Cleveland story,” he says. “It’s as local as it gets — three kids who grew up on the east side who now represent this good-faith and hopeful messaging around agriculture that shows what can be possible.”
![And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/space_typography.png "And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.")
Naoyuki Katoh, Voyage of the Space Beagle, c 1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s
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