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All images courtesy of Murmur Ring/Jackie Trezzo, shared with permission

In Guardians, artists María del Carmen Mendoza Méndez and Jacobo Ángeles Ojeda, of Jacobo and Maria Ángeles Workshop, pay homage to the mythical creatures of their Oaxacan childhoods. The husband-wife duo carves the soft wood of the copal tree into fantastical creatures that reference Mesoamerican spirituality and Mexican folk art, including the sculptures known as alebrijes. They refer to the unearthly characters as Tonas and Nahuales and cloak the birds, butterflies, and beasts in vibrant patterns and Zapotec symbols. The artists describe the protective works:

Guardians are brave creatures who safeguard their tribe. These mythical characters from the tale ‘Nomads’ hold their heads high by accepting the responsibility of caring for, transporting, and defending everyone. (Theirs) is a story of resistance, persecution, and migration into a dystopian future, where science is blended with ancestral cosmovisions.

On view through January 12, 2023, Guardians is the inaugural show at the newly opened Mano Gallery in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. The gallery is devoted to art and design from Mexico and to creating a space for artists interested in preserving mythology and the country’s heritage. Find more from Jacobo and Maria Ángeles Workshop on their site and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Vibrant Patterns Envelop Dozens of Mythical Animal Sculptures That Explore the Folk Art Traditions of Mexico appeared first on Colossal.

All images by Hiroyuki Oki, courtesy of the architects

In an industrial park 50 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, a 30,000-square-meter building demonstrates the possibilities of a more sustainable future for manufacturing. The Jakob Factory is a project between Rollimarchini Architects and G8A Architects, who designed the tropical oasis amid the largely concrete structures within the commercial area.

Plants cloak the porous three-story facade made of steel and mesh. Building vertically was a key factor in the project as it contrasts the conventional sprawling designs typical in manufacturing that require more land and greater disruptions to the local environment. The living features protect the interior from rain and harsh sunlight, offer natural ventilation, regulate the temperature, and help to purify the air from dust and other particles. Trees and grassy mounds also sit in a central courtyard, with the green structure surrounding the open space.

The sustainability-focused project received the bestarchitects 2023 award and was included in Dezeen’s 2022 shortlist.

Image by Severin Jakob

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Tropical Plants Sprout from the Mesh Facade of an Open-Air Factory in Vietnam appeared first on Colossal.

Gage Opdenbrouw. All images courtesy of Sebastian Foster, shared with permission

Austin-based gallery Sebastian Foster is collaborating with author John Seed and a group of well-established artists on a print set that coincides with his new book, Disrupted Realism.

Disrupted Realism is the first book to survey the works of contemporary painters who are challenging and reshaping the tradition of Realism. Helping art lovers, collectors, and artists approach and understand this compelling new phenomenon, the volume includes the works of 38 artists whose paintings respond to the subjectivity and disruptions of modern experience.

Seed, a widely published author and blogger, believes that we are “the most distracted society in the history of the world” and has selected artists he sees as visionaries in this developing movement. The artists’ impulses toward disruption are idiosyncratic, but all include perception and emotion in their processes. Sebastian Foster collaborated with Seed on a print set of nine works from artists featured in the book, each available in small, exclusive numbered editions of 25.

Now online-only, Sebastian Foster focuses on original works and prints, publishing upwards of 1,000 editions since it opened in the 2000s. Whether you’re looking for the next piece to add to your collection or for meaningful holiday gifts, head to the gallery’s site to shop the Disrupted Realism Print Set today.

Daniel Bilodeau

Dorian Vallejo

J Louis

Joshua Meyer

Kirstine Reiner Hansen

Mia Bergeron

Nick Runge

Zack Zdrale

Disrupted Realism, cover

All images © Parth Kothekar, shared with permission

Harnessing the captivating power of pattern and mathematic principles, Parth Kothekar cuts meticulously deceptive works from single sheets of paper. The trippy pieces are inspired by the iconic optical illusions of M.C. Escher and utilize variances in depth and scale to create scenarios that appear three-dimensional. Some of the cuts are more pictorial and evocative of Escher’s “Relativity” stairs, while others rely on repetitive motifs alone to create immersive scenes of geometric shapes and lines.

There are currently 25 works in the Escher series, so keep an eye on Kothekar’s Instagram to see more of those and for news about an upcoming show at Raw Collaborative in early December. The Ahmedabad, India-based artist also sells some of his more nature-based papercuts on Etsy.

All images © Shota Suzuki, shared with permission

Tender stems bear lush blooms and windswept leaves gather around new growth in artist Shota Suzuki’s delicate metal sculptures. Rendered in painstaking detail, the forms are inspired by flora around his home and studio in Kyoto, such as Japanese maple trees and dandelions that have gone to seed. “Recently, I have been adding rain and wind to my work,” he tells Colossal, sharing that he’s inspired by the way nature demonstrates the passing of time. He adds silvery water droplets to ginkgo leaves, ruffles the petals of flowers, or portrays a branch of cherry blossoms as if it has blown from a tree.

An early interest in jewelry led Suzuki to study metalworking, and the exquisite detail of florals and foliage suited his ability to work on a small scale. A wide range of patinas create a life-like appearance, achieved by combining an array of chemicals that produce specific hues and textures, including traditional Japanese copper coloration methods such as niiro. “I don’t want to create works in which time stands still,” he says. “I want to express a moment in time.”

Suzuki’s work is included in Natural Mastery: Lacquer and Silver Works from Japan at Stuart Lochhead Sculpture in London from December 1 to 9. You can find more work on his website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Metal Sculptor Shota Suzuki Crafts Exquisitely Detailed Blooms That Express the Passing of Time appeared first on Colossal.

For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers to predict the weather, design better airplanes, and characterize how blood flows through the circulatory system. These equations are deceptively simple when written in the right mathematical language. However...

Source

“Portrait of Resilience #1″(2021), charcoal and graphite on paper, 47 1/2 x 36 inches. All images © Arinze Stanley, courtesy of Corridor Contemporary, shared with permission

In Deconstruct, Lagos-based artist Arinze Stanley (previously) acknowledges the children and teens who will come to define Nigeria’s politics and culture in the next few years. “I believe the youths are the building blocks of every nation,” he says. “I feel most compelled to project the positive image of our youths through this body of work in my attempt to dismantle the stereotype around the Nigerian youth. I believe our leaders of tomorrow are the biggest assets of today.”

Working in graphite and charcoal on paper, Stanley renders hyperrealistic portraits of earnest figures often with faint lines bisecting their faces. Portions of their torsos reveal a brick backdrop, suggesting that their consciousness and presences in the world are still taking shape. More dense works like “Fruits of Labour” draw on art historical motifs traditionally associated with power and resiliency, portraying figures in glorified poses with weapons and arms raised in protest. The incredibly detailed portraits rail against the turbulent political landscape of Nigeria, the world’s perception of the country, and its issues with police brutality, the latter of which the artist generously speaks to in a 2021 interview with Colossal.

Deconstruct is on view now at Corridor Contemporary in Philadelphia. Stanley often shares clips of his works-in-progress, which you can find on Instagram.

“Portrait of Resilience #5” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 65 x 55 inches

“Unwritten Memoir” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 47 5/16 x 41 7/8 inches

“Portrait of Resilience #3” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 46 3/4 x 47 1/16 inches

“Fruits of Labour” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 72 x 54 1/2 inches

Left: “Portrait of Resilience #4” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 49 1/2 x 31 7/8 inches. Right: “Portrait of Resilience #2” (2021), charcoal and graphite on paper, 41 x 29 1/2 inches

“Portrait of Resilience #6” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches

“Portrait of Resilience #7” (2022), charcoal and graphite on paper, 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches

All images © Trevor Traynor, shared with permission

No matter the city, there are certain fixtures that are universal among urban settings: corner stores, infrastructure for public transit, pockets of green space, and of course, newsstands, which are the subject of a compelling series by Los Angeles-based photographer Trevor Traynor.

Traynor began capturing the small kiosks back in 2012, when he snapped his first image with his iPhone 4S. During the next seven years, he visited 20 cities around the globe—the list includes New York, Jersey City, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Barcelona, Lima, Cusco, Punta Arenas, Venice, Milan, Rome, Naples, Pozzuoli, Jerusalem, Dar Es Salaam, Tokyo, Kamakura, Cairo, and Marrakesh—and photographed the ubiquitous stands and their operators. Taken from the same angle, the images highlight both the similarities in construction of each space and the periodicals, advertisements, and snacks that vary by location.

Having wrapped up the series with 100 images, Traynor plans to compile all the works in a book slated for release next year. Until then, view the entire series on his site, and follow him on Instagram for updates. (via Present&Correct)

All images © Avital Avital, shared with permission

The diverse world of plants and flowers is a source of fascination for ceramic artist Avital Avital, who crafts delicately detailed vessels from porcelain. In her studio in Ramat Gan, Israel, the artist sculpts slender petals, fragile spikes, and orbs dabbed with confectionary-like dots. She is interested in the relationship between functionality and decoration, drawing on the rich history of clay as a medium and mingling technical skill with conceptual ideas.

Inspired by nature’s boundless variety of forms and colors, her choice of material complements her subject matter: “I am interested in balancing between the delicacy of the porcelain and its strength and to use its potential transparency by sculpting colorful petals that are skin-like when directed to a source of light.”

You can find more of Avital’s work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Delicate Spikes and Lush Petals Bloom from Avital Avital’s Voluptuous Porcelain Vessels appeared first on Colossal.

All images © Robert Peek, shared with permission

Fresh flowers emerge through a smoke-like substance in the eerie images of Netherlands-based photographer Robert Peek (previously). Arranged in bouquets of a single species, the lifeforms adopt a more mysterious quality, which Peek produces by adding white ink to water and submerging his subject matter. Although veiled in the hazy liquid, the bright petals breach the surface and are enhanced by an additional light source that amplifies their textures and vibrant hues. The photos shown here are a fraction of Peek’s massive collection of blooms, which you can find on Behance and Instagram.

“Old and New” (2022). All images © Stéphanie Kilgast, shared with permission

Fungi sprout from between pages, ivy creeps across a text, and the life cycle of a butterfly unfolds on the cover of a volume in Stéphanie Kilgast’s vibrant sculptures. Known for her intricately detailed works using discarded materials and trash like crushed cans or plastic bottles (previously), her recent pieces explore incredible biodiversity utilizing books as her canvas.

Millions of titles are published each year in the U.S. alone, meaning billions of individual copies—a vast number of which eventually end up in landfills. Kilgast draws attention to these discarded objects by giving vintage editions new life. She constructs delicate mushrooms, blooming flowers, and colorful coral in painstakingly detailed miniature environments as a vivid reminder of the impact humans have on the environment and the tenacity of nature.

The artist has an exhibition opening on November 5 at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, and you can find more of her work on her website and Instagram.

“Ancestral History” (2021)

Left: “Contre Vents et Marees” (2021). Right: Work in progress

“Half Full, Half Empty” (2022)

“Happy or Doomsday Colors” (2022)

Left: “Hungry” (2022). Right: “Beginnings” (2022).

“I Lichen You A Lot” (2022)

Detail of “Contre Vents et Marees” (2021)

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. 

If crops could feel envy, it’d be for legumes. Bean plants have a superpower. Or more accurately, they share one. They’ve developed symbiotic relationships with bacteria that process atmospheric nitrogen into a form that’s usable for those plants — an essential element for building their tissues, photosynthesizing, and generally staying healthy. This is known as nitrogen fixation. If you look at a legume’s roots, you’ll see nodules that provide these nitrogen-fixing microbes with a home and food. 

Other crops — cereals like wheat, rice, and corn — don’t have such a deep symbiotic relationship, so farmers have to use large amounts of fertilizer to get the plants the nitrogen they need. This is very expensive. And fertilizer production is not great for the environment. It’s not easy to turn atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen that plants can absorb on their own. 

“It takes a lot of energy and really high pressures and high temperatures,” says University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plant biologist Angela Kent. “Bacteria do this at ambient temperatures and pressures, so they’re pretty special. While energy has been cheap, it’s been easy for us to overuse nitrogen fertilizers.” 

Even worse, once it’s on fields, fertilizer spews nitrous oxide, which is 300 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Runoff from fields also pollutes water bodies, leading to toxic algal blooms. This is a particularly bad problem in the Midwest, where fertilizer empties into the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico, fueling massive blooms every summer. When those algae die, they suck the oxygen out of the water, killing any sea creatures unfortunate enough to be in the area and creating a notorious aquatic dead zone that can grow to be the size of New Jersey. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem, since warmer waters hold less oxygen to begin with. 

Given all that nastiness, scientists have long been on a quest to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fertilizers by giving cereal crops their own nitrogen-fixing powers. And with the rise of gene-editing technology over the past few decades, that quest has been making progress. Last month, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal, researchers described a breakthrough with rice, engineering the plant to produce more compounds that encourage the growth of biofilms, which provide a cozy home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria, much like legumes provide nodules for their partner microbes.  

“People for the last 30, 40 years have been trying to make cereals behave like legumes,” says Eduardo Blumwald, a plant biologist at the University of California, Davis who coauthored the new paper. “Evolution in that sense is very cruel. You cannot do in the lab what took millions and millions of years.”

So what’s with the evolutionary cruelty? Why can some plants — like, say aquatic ferns — fix nitrogen while others can’t? 

It’s not that other species don’t get nitrogen at all. Cereal grasses use nitrogen that’s already in the soil — it comes from animal manure, as well as all the life churning in the dirt. (Lots of different bacterial groups process atmospheric nitrogen, not just the legumes’ symbionts.)

But the legumes’ bacteria grab abundant nitrogen straight from the air. 

“When you have these nodules and you have this symbiotic relationship, it’s a much more effective way of getting atmospheric nitrogen,” says Joshua Doby, an ecologist at the University of Florida. “Because otherwise you have to wait for the bacteria and for other processes in the soil to turn it into ammonium.” 

One theory is that the symbiotic nitrogen relationship started out long ago as a bacterial infection, and those ancestor plants derived a benefit that was carried through to future generations. Earlier this year, Doby published a study of plants throughout the United States, finding that there is a greater diversity of nitrogen-fixing species than other kinds in arid regions. That is true even if the soil isn’t nitrogen-poor. He theorizes that millions of years ago, when those areas were wetter, the plants evolved the ability to fix nitrogen, which also allowed them to grow thicker cuticles. This trait protected them against dryness when the region eventually became arid. They were pre-adapted, basically. Non-fixers, by contrast, were weeded out by rising aridity. 

Another theory is that legumes might be consummate nitrogen-fixers because something in their genome predisposes them to building nodules.

But before you start feeling sorry for non-fixers, constructing nodules and hosting bacteria comes at a major cost. “It turns out that it’s very energetically expensive to actually do this,” says Ryan Folk, a biodiversity scientist at Mississippi State University who coauthored the new paper with Doby. First, a legume has to build those nodules on its roots, then it has to provide sugars to the bacteria to keep them happy. 

“It’s something like 20 to 30 percent of the legumes’ photosynthetic output actually goes to the bacteria, so it’s an extraordinary price,” he says. So even though it’s less efficient for plants to get their organic nitrogen from bacteria already in the soil, it’s also less costly because symbiotic bacteria are super needy.

What Blumwald and his colleagues have done with rice is sort of halfway between the strategies of legumes and non-fixing plants. They sifted through compounds that the plant produces, testing which ones induced the formation of a biofilm. 

“When bacteria form biofilms, it’s like a hippie commune — they are cozy, they are all together, they share things,” says Blumwald. 

A complex layer of polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids covers the biofilm, which is not permeable to oxygen. That’s important because oxygen interferes with the bacteria’s fixing of nitrogen from the air — in legumes, the nodules keep the oxygen out.

The team landed on a biofilm-boosting compound called apigenin. They then used Crispr gene editing to silence the plant’s expression of an enzyme that breaks down this apigenin, allowing more of the compound to accumulate in the plant and extrude into the soil to create a biofilm. 

“Then the bacteria started fixing nitrogen from the air to produce ammonium that the plant can uptake,” says Blumwald. “The proportion of nitrogen-fixing versus the rest of the bacteria near the root increased.” Basically, the rice plant now had its own fertilizer factory, giving it the nitrogen-fixing power denied to it by evolution. 

This would seem to skirt a problem with previous attempts to get cereal crops to fix their own nitrogen, says Kent, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plant biologist, who wasn’t involved in the research. People have tried to inoculate soils with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the hope that the plants and microbes would form a partnership. But that’s been difficult, since the soil microbiome is a wildly complex ecosystem of competing bacteria. 

“One thing I really liked about this paper is that it’s looking to modify the plants to make them partner with the soil microbiome better,” says Kent. “It helps to recruit the desired kind of microbes and give them a competitive advantage.”

Interestingly, scientists previously discovered a unique variety of corn in Mexico that fixes nitrogen in a similar way. The corn’s tube-shaped roots grow above ground, sheathing themselves in a bizarre mucilage — a whole lot of dripping goo. Like the biofilm around the rice roots, this mucilage houses nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The corn study authors think it would be possible to breed this trait into commercial varieties of corn.

Another problem with previous attempts with inoculation, Kent says, has been that the introduced bacteria can’t provide all the nitrogen the plants needed. A farmer would still have to apply fertilizer — but the over-application of fertilizer can actually overload natural nitrogen-fixers in the soil, sending them into hibernation. The field goes numb, essentially, as the beneficial microbiome shorts out. 

A company called Pivot Bio is engineering nitrogen-fixing bacteria that don’t shut down in the presence of added nitrogen. “We break the genetic feedback loop that causes them to go into hibernation when fields get fertilized,” says Karsten Temme, the company’s CEO and cofounder.

Today, they’re launching new products in which these microbes are applied directly to seeds of corn, wheat, and other cereals. (With earlier products, they instead sprayed the bacteria as a liquid during seed planting.) Currently, the microbes can’t supply all the nitrogen these cereals need, so farmers may still need to fertilize. But Temme says the company is improving the microbes’ efficiency. 

“What we see is there’s going to be a progression, where today we’re supplying a fraction of that nitrogen,” he says, “and over time, we begin to supply the majority and eventually the entirety of that nitrogen the crop needs.”

An effective biological nitrogen fixation system for rice could be “a game changer in global agriculture,” says Pallavolu Maheswara Reddy, who studies nitrogen fixation in cereals at India’s Energy and Resources Institute. That’s because the human population is growing rapidly, demanding more food and fertilizer to feed it. 

“Since the advent of Green Revolution in the mid-1960s, the application of chemical nitrogen fertilizers boosted rice yields by 100 to 200 percent to match the demands of world population,” Reddy says. “In the next 30 years, we must produce nearly 50 percent more rice than what is currently produced to supplement the food requirements of an increasing human population.”

But even if scientists can just reduce the amount of fertilizer needed for agriculture, the industry would be saving some of the energy it takes to manufacture the stuff while cutting both farmers’ costs and the runoff that makes it into waterways. That’ll be especially important in parts of the world where climate change is making downpours more powerful (a warmer atmosphere in general holds more water), which will wash more fertilizer off of fields. 

And just in case you’re worried about leagues of nitrogen-fixing plants spreading out of control thanks to their new superpower, Kent says there’s nothing to fear. “We don’t see legumes taking over the world,” says Kent. Nitrogen-fixing “is probably not the trait that a plant would need for becoming a super-plant.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The long, leguminous quest to give crops nitrogen superpowers on Sep 3, 2022.

Here’s your good news for the day: so-called “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, cancer-causing pollutants found in everything from drinking water to polar bears, may not be forever. 

A newly released study by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and Northwestern University provided a model of how to destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — PFAS — using fairly low-tech practices. These chemicals are dubbed  “forever chemicals” as they do not break down in the environment. PFAS has been used in a variety of industrial and commercial applications, from kid’s toys to fast food wrappers, for decades, and removing it from the environment has become imperative. Experts believe that PFAS exist in the bloodstreams of people and animals around the world. And research is mounting about the links between the chemicals and such maladies as infertility, high blood pressure in mid-life women, stunted developmental growth, as well as kidney, liver, and testicular cancers.

The study suggests that heating the chemicals to around 176 to 248 degrees Farenheitand adding the commercially used solvent dimethyl sulfoxide and sodium hydroxide, or lye, will “behead” the chemical compound and leave behind non-toxic chemicals fluoride, carbon dioxide, and formic acid.

Researchers have attempted various methods to destroy PFAS in the past, such as using chemicals found in makeup to erode almost the entire compound in as little as four hours. A 2020 study from Philadelphia’s Drexel University was able to blast the compound with plasma and kill upwards of 90 percent of it. The UCLA and Northwestern study was successful in breaking down the chemicals with heat and solvents, but it didn’t work on every strain. 

PFAS is a group of over 9,000 synthetic chemicals and are everywhere. They have been discovered in every single state, with a heavy concentration of water contamination in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, and California. Military bases and airports are recurring contamination sites as PFAS has been found in firefighting foam, which is commonly used in these facilities. The compounds have been found in beef from Michigan, a byproduct of the state’s contaminated waterways and agricultural fields. Even rainwater isn’t safe from PFAS.

Getting a grip on the chemicals has proven difficult, even with new drinking water guidance released by the Environmental Protection Agency this year. States have taken battles to the courthouse and statehouse to tackle their contaminated water and soil. This summer, Colorado released what some called the nation’s “most comprehensive” state law to address the forever chemicals. Wisconsin’s governor and attorney general filed a lawsuit in July against chemical producers to “ensure that the companies that are responsible — and not Wisconsin taxpayers — will pay to clean it up.” Vermont’s governor followed a similar path and recently signed legislation that would allow the state to sue PFAS manufacturers and let impacted residents place financial responsibility on the companies responsible. Addressing the contamination is both a complex legal and scientific problem, but new emerging methods give a glimmer of hope in tackling pollutants that have seeped into every corner of the country. 

 “Anyone working on PFASs degradation can look at this and maybe have a better understanding of what might be going on,” study co-author William Dichtel told Scientific American.“Even though I don’t pretend that this is the final solution, it really is why I do science — so that I can have a positive impact on the world.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new low-tech technique can take the ‘forever’ out of forever chemicals on Aug 24, 2022.

A Bank of America executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

The memo comes amid a push by the Federal Reserve to “cool down” the economy, informed by much of the same rationale — that high wages are driving inflation. This year, the Fed has increased interest rates for the first time since 2018. Historically, this has often caused recessions, and that is exactly what appears to be happening now: The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product has fallen for the second quarter in a row, indicating that a recession may have already begun.

Parts of the mid-year review, in particular its emphasis on a looming recession, received press coverage at the time of the memo’s release to clients. This is the first publication of the document.

What the memo calls “the ratio of job openings to unemployed” is generally calculated the other way around — i.e., the ratio of unemployed people to job openings. The more widely used ratio offers one measurement of the balance of power between workers and employers. The lower this number, the more options unemployed people have when searching for work and the greater opportunities employed people have to switch to jobs with better pay and conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this ratio stood at 0.5 as of May, meaning that there were then two job openings per unemployed person.

In 2009 — at the worst moments of the economic calamity that followed the collapse of the housing bubble during the end of the George W. Bush administration — the ratio climbed as high as 6.5, so there were more than six unemployed workers for each open job. It then slowly declined over the next decade, reaching 0.8 in February 2020 before Covid-19 lockdowns began.

This recent, unusual moment of worker leverage made Bank of America quite anxious. The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to virtually every industry, income and skill level.”

The memo recalls a previous Bank of America memo in 2021, which it says warned of “very strong momentum in the labor market, suggesting the economy would not just hit but blow through full employment. Fast forward to today, and these trends have been worse than expected.”

The memo is an uncanny demonstration that the economist Adam Smith was right when he described the politics of inflation in his famed 1776 work, “The Wealth of Nations.”

“High profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages,” Smith argued. “Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price. … They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

Thus, exactly as Smith would have predicted, Bank of America complains loudly about the bad effects of high wages in raising prices, but appears to be silent about the pernicious effects of high profits.

This is especially remarkable given the role that corporate profits have played in the recent increase in inflation. After-tax corporate profits stood at 8.1 percent of the economy at the beginning of 2020 but have since shot up to as high as 11.8 percent of the GDP. In an economy the size of the U.S., that equals an increase of more than $700 billion in profits per year. These higher corporate profits have been the cause of over 50 percent of recent price increases.

Instead, the memo is focused on the enticing prospect of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, slowing the economy, and bludgeoning workers back into line.

The perspective of working Americans would, generally, be exactly the opposite. For most of us, it’s fantastic to have lots of jobs available, with employers competing for you. A tight labor market is wonderful. Wage pressures are great. From this viewpoint, the key issue right now would be how to lower inflation while keeping employment and worker power high. Such a tack would include full-bore attempts to lessen supply chain issues and reduce the pricing power of big corporations.

Most interesting of all is that in Bank of America’s enthusiasm for the Fed going on the attack against working people, it gets the basic facts wrong: Wage pressures have turned out not to be, as its memo claims, “hard to reverse.”

“If you did see continually accelerating wage-growth, it would be a problem,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, told The Intercept in an email. “That would almost certainly mean a wage-price spiral with ever higher inflation. However, [nominal] wage growth has slowed sharply from around a 6.0 percent annual rate to just over 4.0 percent in recent months. … So, [Bank of America wants] the Fed to raise rates (and unemployment) to attack a problem (accelerating wage growth) that doesn’t exist in the world.”

The memo therefore tells us what we suspected all along: The most powerful economic actors in the U.S. — entities like Bank of America and its clients — do not like working people to have power. But it’s nice to have it in their own words. Harris, the author, was not available for comment.

Update: July 29, 2022, 4:20 p.m.
This article has been updated to reflect that portions of the memo had been written about previously.

The post Bank of America Memo, Revealed: “We Hope” Conditions for American Workers Will Get Worse appeared first on The Intercept.

In the exclusive corridors of Congress, a small army of lobbyists representing the nation’s Ivy League and the wealthiest private universities are calling on lawmakers to cut taxes on multibillion-dollar endowments.

Earlier this year, Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow personally met with lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and members of the Massachusetts delegation, to lobby against the excise tax.

Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University have also pushed lawmakers to roll back the 1.4 percent excise tax on private college endowment investment returns passed by Congress in 2017. The excise tax, enacted as part of President Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, applies to investment returns on endowment assets of $500,000 per full time equivalent student at private colleges. The formula impacts over 40 private universities around the country.

Last year, thanks to outsized investment returns, large endowments around the country grew in size. Harvard University reported a 33.6 percent return as its endowment swelled to $53.2 billion. In 2021, Stanford University announced a 40.1 percent return, with its endowment growing to $41.9 billion.

Despite the vast holdings and a student base that represents the children of the wealthiest Americans, university endowments, before the passage of this excise tax on investment returns, were otherwise largely tax-free, with donations to endowments shielded from federal and state taxes.

The mass accumulation of wealth by these elite colleges has not prevented the schools from pressing on with a demand for a special tax cut. A review of lobbying records show that private colleges have mobilized over two dozen lobbyists to pressure policymakers on repealing the tax. Harvard University, for example, has a team of staff lobbyists, along with two additional lobbyists on retainer from the law firm O’Neill, Athy & Casey, to work on the issue.

“Repealing the endowment tax would be an indirect gift to the private equity and hedge fund billionaires that already exploit too many tax breaks,” said Charlie Eaton, a sociology professor at the University of California, Merced.

As Eaton notes in his book “Bankers in the Ivory Tower,” which investigates the role of finance in higher education, elite university endowment money is pooled into investment vehicles managed by hedge funds and private equity. The arrangement means a generally tax-advantaged stream of cash for Wall Street’s leading figures, whose children are then educated at colleges and universities subsidized by these endowments.

Universities have argued that endowments are essential for funding student aid programs, and that any tax on endowment returns negatively impacts their ability to provide support for low-income students.

In May, Bacow, in conversation with David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group and now the chair of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. — a private, members-only venue, in which dues run at least $2,500 per year — the Harvard University chief complained bitterly about the unfairness of the tax.

“I think this is bad public policy. We’re a charitable institution,” said Bacow, who noted the tax meant Harvard University will pay more in federal taxes than many large corporations pay in income taxes. The tax, he also argued, was designed by Republicans to punish Democratic-leaning institutions.

“The tax was constructed disproportionately to tax institutions in liberal states,” he said.

But the comments belie a push for tax justice that is growing across the country. Massachusetts politicians have repeatedly called for a tax on private university endowments, including a proposal from former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jay Gonzalez, who called for a 1.6 percent tax to raise $1 billion for K-12 education, public transit, and public higher education.

In Rhode Island this year, state legislators have proposed taxes on Brown University’s endowment in order to fund public K-12 education. The money is designed as an offset over the fact that university-held land is exempt from local property taxes, starving the adjacent communities, many of which are working class, from adequate local school budget money.

State lobbying records show that Brown University has retained at least three lobbyists to oppose the endowment tax proposals.

Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported on emails from Suzanne Day, an in-house lobbyist at Harvard, encouraging colleagues to press Democratic lawmakers on the issue. The lobbyists had hoped to include a provision in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package last year that offset the tax via payments made in institutional aid.

“I write to urge you to engage with Democratic Senators and allies to press for action on this in the pending FY22 reconciliation bill. We believe this is one of our best chances for improvement in this policy,” Day wrote in the email.

An initial draft of the bill contained the Harvard-backed provision, but the reconciliation package was sidelined after objections were raised by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.

Though the path through Build Back Better remains uncertain, members of Congress have other routes through which to hand elite universities a tax cut. Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., a member of the influential Ways and Means Committee that oversees tax policy, has a separate bill to repeal the tax.

Harvard University’s lobbyists did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Ivy League Universities Push for Special Tax Cut appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., departs from a vote at the Capitol on July 20, 2022.

Photo: Francis Chung/AP

You, having become a bit cynical lately, may have looked at the $1 million the West Virginia Democrat and his wife rake in annually from their coal business and the sadistic delight he takes in killing the hopes and dreams of Democrats, then bringing them back to life only to kill them again. You may have seen all of that and lost faith. But not me.

I’m kidding, of course. On Wednesday evening, seemingly out of thin air, Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., put out a joint statement announcing that they had come to terms on a deal — an entire bill — that they called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. I can’t recall a major deal ever being announced without the Capitol Hill press corps knowing that negotiations were taking place.

The outline of the deal, as announced by the pair, looks like this:

Top-line numbers from the draft text of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Climate Money

The $369 billion for “energy security and climate change,” if it becomes law, will change the world. It represents the biggest climate investment made by any country ever, and it will unlock potentially trillions in private capital, which is waiting on the sidelines for the types of subsidies, credits, and guarantees that this bill will include. It’ll also spur other countries to make their own investments, not wanting to fall behind in the industry that will dominate the next century. It’s projected to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 2030 by 40 percent. That’s huge.

“An initial review of the agreement indicates that this will mark a historic direct investment in renewable energy and will unleash hundreds of billions of private investment for moonshot projects,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told me Wednesday evening after the deal was announced. Khanna has spent months working with Manchin to keep him in talks, and it looks like that finally paid off.

“Activists who have been insisting on getting something done on climate should feel proud that we’ve gotten to this point,” he added. Even if the bill doesn’t do everything it ought to, it at least gives humanity a shot.

Climate hawks will criticize the bill for its “energy neutral” approach. The kinds of subsidies made available for clean energy are supposed to be available to projects that clean up dirty energy too, and cleaning coal is seen by many as a ruse actively deployed to stall the transition to clean, renewable energy.

However, looking at the reality of our energy infrastructure, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a very long time. Reducing and/or sequestering their carbon emissions during the transition is essential. It’s the unfortunate reality we’ve been dealt. If this money can spark some exponential technological development in that direction, we’ll all be better off.

Secondly, if all that fails and the carbon tech stuff is all fluff, subsidizing it was still worth the payoff to Manchin to get the clean energy money, because there was no other way at this point. If Republicans take Congress next term, there’s no telling when the window might open again.

And third, it seems like Manchin extracted concessions that could make permitting future fossil fuel projects easier. That’s bad. But those are fights to be had in the future, against a win today.

The Rest of the Bill

I obviously haven’t read the full bill yet, which is more than 700 pages long, but based on what’s known from previous talks, a few things are clear:

The 15 percent corporate minimum tax only hits companies with profits of more than $1 billion a year and operates as a business version of an alternative minimum tax, which, if you’re one of my more well-off readers, you’re familiar with. This is payback from Manchin to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for cutting him out of negotiations over the Trump tax cuts. He said so explicitly in a private meeting with the big-money group No Labels last year, which The Intercept obtained audio of.

The drug pricing piece allows Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to lower rates on some drugs. The devil is in the details, but it should lead to some real savings and is opposed with a frothing-at-the-mouth fury by Big Pharma.

On IRS tax enforcement, they propose to spend $80 billion over 10 years to beef up enforcement. The end goal is to have better software that can use basic artificial intelligence to check tax returns for anomalies. Just the knowledge of that could reduce cheating by the rich, and once it’s in place, a lot of the cheating that goes on will become much more difficult.

The “carried interest” loophole allows hedge fund and private equity bros to pay a 20 percent tax rate on their income, while normal rich people are supposed to pay 37 percent. This legislation requires such partnerships to consider that income to be short-term capital gains, which are taxed at the same rate as income. It would fundamentally upend the private equity and hedge fund industry, a good thing all around. That’s the piece that’s most vulnerable to being stripped out, but it has real potential to level the playing field in an important way.

The expansion of the Affordable Care Act subsidies will keep premiums from spiking just before the midterm elections.

And the climate and energy piece you can read here. But it spends billions to boost clean energy manufacturing and provides 10 years of certainty for tax credits, which is essential. It also restores much of the revolutionary agriculture title from Build Back Better.

The Timing

I’m not saying that we need to assign Robert Caro a new edition of “Master of the Senate,” but let’s pause to admire the way Schumer and Manchin navigated this. Bear in mind that these are two people roundly and frequently derided for their hapless inability to negotiate. But McConnell, who the press loves to talk about as a Senate master, recently threatened to stop a bipartisan bill to subsidize the American semiconductor industry if Democrats didn’t stop talking about passing a climate reconciliation bill. Manchin flipped out, saying McConnell was just as bad as the lefties who wanted to hold up the infrastructure bill to get the climate bill done. Days later, Manchin announced that he was concerned about inflation and walking away from the climate bill, and it looked to most of us — including, apparently, McConnell — like it was completely dead.

Then the Senate passed the semiconductor bill shortly after noon on Wednesday. About four hours later, Manchin and Schumer announced that, actually, they had a deal on a climate bill. And a 700-page bill drafted.

Was the entire walking-away theatrical? At minimum, it seems like they held the news of this deal until they’d safely passed the semiconductor bill. Republicans were so mad last night that they voted down a veterans’ bill they had previously supported in overwhelming numbers. Just out of pique.

This is how Big Mad senate Republicans are at Manchin agreeing to a deal. https://t.co/ZPlR6RdL1T

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 27, 2022

I’m not used to Democrats playing their cards this well.

OK, so will it pass?

Don’t ask me about Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., because who knows. Will she blow this up by herself to stave off some corporate and Wall Street tax hikes? I genuinely don’t know.

A spokeswoman for Kyrsten Sinema said the senator hasn't determined yet whether she could support the Schumer-Manchin deal on climate change, tax and other provisions.

"Senator Sinema will need to review the text. We don’t have comment at this time."

— Laura Litvan (@LauraLitvan) July 27, 2022

The second question is the House, specifically Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and his crew of folks who’ve been demanding an expansion of the SALT — state and local tax — deduction. Gottheimer has been saying “no SALT, no deal” from the very beginning, and this includes no SALT. But I spoke with a Democrat very close to Gottheimer Wednesday evening, and he said that because the bill doesn’t raise individual tax rates and doesn’t really touch that portion of the tax code for anybody making less than $400,000, he believes that folks like Gottheimer and his ally in this fight, Rep. Tom Suozzi, will get behind the deal.

And as another Democrat put it to me Wednesday evening, “Gottheimer has blown a lot of gas on his holding up the assault weapons bill to insist that his police funding bill be packaged with it. It’s going to be really hard for him to insist on both that and SALT.”

That leaves Sinema as the only hope for the financial industry in stopping this. Will she stand up to the entire party? I just don’t know.

The post A Manchin Miracle Brings Biden’s Climate Agenda Back From the Dead appeared first on The Intercept.

by Stefanie Dodt, ARD German TV

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with ARD German TV.

In the year since the United States blocked Mexicans from entering the country to sell their blood, the two global pharmaceutical companies that operate the largest number of plasma clinics along the border say they have seen a sharp drop in supply.

In a suit challenging the ban, the companies acknowledged for the first time the extent to which Mexicans visiting the U.S. on short-term visas contribute to the world’s supply of blood plasma. In court filings, the companies revealed that up to 10% of the blood plasma collected in the U.S. — millions of liters a year — came from Mexicans who crossed the border with visas that allow brief visits for business and tourism.

The legal challenge by Spain-based Grifols and CSL of Australia relates to an announcement last June that U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn’t permit Mexican citizens to cross into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma. The suit was initially dismissed by a federal judge but reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The drug companies’ lawyers have said in court filings that the sharp reduction in Mexicans selling blood to the border clinics is contributing to a worldwide shortage of plasma and is “precipitating a worldwide public-health crisis that is costing patients dearly.”

ProPublica, ARD German TV and Searchlight New Mexico reported in 2019 that thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border to donate blood as often as twice a week, earning as much as $400 per month. Selling blood has been illegal in Mexico since 1987.

Many countries place strict limits on blood donations — Germany, for example, allows a maximum of 60 donations per year with intensive checkups before every fifth donation. But the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require comparable donor checkups and allows people visiting American clinics to sell their blood twice a week, or up to 104 times a year.

The limits that other countries set on blood donations have made the U.S. one of the world’s leading exporters of blood. In 2020, U.S. facilities collected 38.2 million liters of plasma for the production of medicine, accounting for approximately 60% of such blood plasma collected worldwide.

Until now, it has been unclear how much of the U.S. blood plasma supply came from Mexican citizens, and pharmaceutical companies had downplayed border clinics’ role in meeting demand for plasma. Grifols noted in 2019 that “more than 93% of the centers [are] at a far distance from the border between the U.S. and Mexico.”

But in its recent court filings, Grifols stressed the importance of the border clinics. A statement from a company executive disclosed that at the company’s Texas centers alone, there were “approximately 30,000 Mexican nationals donating and supplying over 600,000 liters of plasma [a year].” He describes Mexican donors as “loyal and selfless in their commitment to donating plasma.”

According to a filing by Grifols and CSL, the 24 border centers run by Grifols alone account for an “annual economic impact of well over $150 million” and represent approximately 1,000 jobs.

The trade organization for the pharmaceutical companies, the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, has similarly reframed its arguments on the issue. In a 2019 statement, the association urged reporters not to attach any significance to “donation centers that happen to fall within areas states define as border zones.” It said then that it had no estimate of how much blood was being bought at the border or whether the amount was disproportionate when compared to the rest of the country.

But a recent court filing by the association said there are 52 plasma centers in the border zone, and “the average center along the border collects higher than average (31% more) plasma than the average center nationwide.”

Some of those donation centers were set up just steps away from the U.S.-Mexico border. Their location, court papers make clear, was part of a strategic effort to bring in Mexican donors: A memorandum written by the companies’ lawyers acknowledged that the centers were located to “facilitate” donations made by Mexican nationals, and that Grifols and CSL “have also spent ‘several million dollars in the last several years’ on advertising to encourage Mexican citizens to donate plasma in exchange for payment at the centers located along the border.” The memorandum did not specify if the ads were published in Mexico, but advertising for paid plasma donations is illegal in Mexico.

The Mexican nationals selling their blood previously entered the U.S. on what are known as B-1 or B-2 visas, documents that allow visitors to shop, do business or visit tourist sites. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had long viewed the practice of selling blood as a “gray area,” with some officials allowing short-term visitors to go to the centers while others did not. In 2021, about a year and a half after we published our 2019 story, the Border Patrol issued internal guidance that barred short-term visa holders from selling blood.

CSL and Grifols challenged that action, asserting that for 30 years, CBP had “largely allowed B-1/B-2 visa holders from Mexico to enter this country for the purpose of donating their plasma at collection centers that provide a payment to donors.” The CPB disagreed. Matthew Davies, a supervisory border security officer, told the court that selling plasma for compensation had never been a permissible activity.

On June 14, 2021, CBP sent out “clarifying guidance” that selling plasma on a visitor visa was not allowed. The announcement created chaos at the border centers. Two days later, Grifols wrote — and later deleted — a post on its Spanish-language Facebook page that said, “We are replying to the hundreds of messages asking when people with a visa can come back to donate. For the moment, the response is, you can’t.” An angry reply stated “Now, we’re no longer heroes who are saving lives. They just used us.”

Since then, donations at border centers have dropped dramatically. The pharmaceutical companies told the court that a survey of 12 centers in Texas found a 20% to 90% decline. “One particularly large center, which normally collects 5000+ donations per week, has decreased to a level closer to 200,” said the plasma association president, Amy Efantis.

Some previous donors interviewed by ProPublica said they would welcome a court ruling that set clear rules for people crossing the border to sell their blood. Genesis, a 23-year-old student from Ciudad Juárez, said she had worried about losing her visa when she entered the United States for her regular visits to the border clinics.

A current manager of a plasma collection center at the border, who asked not to be named because of the ongoing court case, said that he had to lay off about two-thirds of his employees and cut the center’s hours. “It would be good if they allowed [Mexicans] to donate again,” he said. “People are depending on this, on both sides.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

July 14, 2022: This story originally misidentified one of the news organizations involved in the 2019 investigation. It was Searchlight New Mexico, not Searchlight Mexico.

“Grand Jardin” detail (2016-2022). Image © Lisa Nilsson. All images courtesy of the artist, shared with permission

Lisa Nilsson (previously) has spent years perfecting a technique known as quilling in which thin strips of paper are rolled into coils and then pinched and nudged into shape in a process she likens to completing a puzzle. With a history thought to extend back to Ancient Egypt, the practice rose to more recent popularity in 18th century Europe. Narrow edges of gilt book pages were a popular material, creating metallic surfaces when rolled into place. In her most recent work, “Grand Jardin,” Nilsson has expanded upon this traditional method by building up more dense applications of the medium and assembling on a much bigger scale. Combining shimmering gold pieces with vivid hues of Japanese mulberry paper across the surface, the ubiquitous material transforms into a remarkable topography.

Taking several years to complete, she paid painstaking attention to the complexities and details of the design, balancing intricate organic shapes with precise geometric patterns, all while preserving the composition’s overall symmetry. “The phases of my creative process—as it progressed from the initial spark of inspiration to settling in to work, to decision-making and problem solving, to finding flow, losing flow and finding it again, to commitment and renewal of commitment—were repeated many times over the six years and within the context of widely varying moods,” she tells Colossal.

Brimming with floral motifs and butterflies and contained within an ornate border, the lush details of “Grand Jardin” emerge in the textures of each group of coils and in the intricate shapes of the flowers and foliage. Inspired by the patterns and process of making Persian rugs, Nilsson sees parallels between weaving and quilling, and is amused by the nature of improvisation in a process that is so slow-moving and meticulous. “Having a working relationship with one piece for such a long period of time brought novel thoughts and emotions and required new things of me as an artist and as a person,” she says.

You can find more information on Nilsson’s website.

“Grand Jardin” (2016-2022), quilled Japanese mulberry paper and gilt-edged paper, 38″ x 50″ x 1/4″. Image © Matthew Hamilton

Image © Lisa Nilsson

Image © Lisa Nilsson

Image © Lisa Nilsson

Image © Matthew Hamilton

Image © Matthew Hamilton

“The Wakening”. All images © Bill Mayer, shared with permission

Royal frogs, masquerading lemurs, and florals with human faces are just some of the eccentric characters in acclaimed illustrator Bill Mayer’s (previously) gouache paintings. The traditional aesthetic of European still-life, aristocratic portraiture, and romantic landscape paintings set the scene for uncanny, chimerical subjects who engage in dreamlike encounters or gaze haughtily at the viewer. Gouache, which is water-soluble and more vividly opaque than watercolor, allows the artist to mimic the incredible detail of oil paint.

Mayer continues to work on commissioned projects for recognizable publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, and Scientific American. He often shares his varied assignments on his blog, including a collaboration earlier this year with the producers of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to submit a painting to the Federal Duck Stamp Contest. “Duck Judges”—although disqualified from winning the stamp design for technical reasons—raised $25,000 in funds to support the conservation efforts of the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Mayer is currently working toward some group shows, and you can keep up with updates on his website, where you can also find prints available for sale in his shop. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

“Le Dauphin de Rana”

“Mr. Moostache”

“The Offering”

“Duck Judges”

“Le Magistrat”

“Le Visiteur”

“Mother Opossum”

“Kinky Ducks No. 02”

"Don't concatenate long strings," is generally solid advice in most languages. Due to internal representations, strings are frequently immutable and of a fixed length, so a block like this:

    string s = getSomeString();
    s = s + "some suffix";

creates three strings- the original, the suffix, and the third, concatenated string. Keep spamming instances, especially long ones, if you want to stress test your garbage collector.

While languages will do their best to optimize those kinds of operations, the general advice is to use string builders which can minimize those allocations and boost performance.

Or, you can do what Richard B's predecessor did, and abuse the heck out of string interpolation in C#.

    StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(filename);

    #region Export file header
    string header = "";
    header = "Title";
    header = $"{header},\"First Name\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Middle Name\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Last Name\"";
    header = $"{header},Suffix";
    header = $"{header},Company";
    header = $"{header},Department";
    header = $"{header},\"Job Title\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Street\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Street 2\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Street 3\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business City\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business State\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Postal Code\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Country/ Region\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Street\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Street 2\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Street 3\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home City\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home State\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Postal Code\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Country/ Region\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Street\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Street 2\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Street 3\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other City\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other State\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Postal Code\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Country/ Region\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Assistant's Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Fax\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Phone 2\"";
    header = $"{header},Callback";
    header = $"{header},\"Car Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Company Main Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Fax\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Phone 2\"";
    header = $"{header},ISDN";
    header = $"{header},\"Mobile Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Fax\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},Pager";
    header = $"{header},\"Primary Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Radio Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},\"TTY/TDD Phone\"";
    header = $"{header},Telex";
    header = $"{header},Account";
    header = $"{header},Anniversary";
    header = $"{header},\"Assistant's Name\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Billing Information\"";
    header = $"{header},Birthday";
    header = $"{header},\"Business Address PO Box\"";
    header = $"{header},Categories";
    header = $"{header},Children";
    header = $"{header},\"Directory Server\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail Address\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail Type\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail Display Name\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E-mail 2 Address\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail 2 Type\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail 2 Display Name\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E-mail 3 Address\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail 3 Type\"";
    header = $"{header},\"E - mail 3 Display Name\"";
    header = $"{header},Gender";
    header = $"{header},\"Government ID Number\"";
    header = $"{header},Hobby";
    header = $"{header},\"Home Address PO Box\"";
    header = $"{header},Initials";
    header = $"{header},\"Internet Free Busy\"";
    header = $"{header},Keywords";
    header = $"{header},Language";
    header = $"{header},Location";
    header = $"{header},\"Manager's Name\"";
    header = $"{header},Mileage";
    header = $"{header},Notes";
    header = $"{header},\"Office Location\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Organizational ID Number\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Other Address PO Box\"";
    header = $"{header},Priority";
    header = $"{header},Private";
    header = $"{header},Profession";
    header = $"{header},\"Referred By\"";
    header = $"{header},Sensitivity";
    header = $"{header},Spouse";
    header = $"{header},\"User 1\"";
    header = $"{header},\"User 2\"";
    header = $"{header},\"User 3\"";
    header = $"{header},\"User 4\"";
    header = $"{header},\"Web Page\"";
    #endregion Export file header

    sw.WriteLine(header);

The real killer to this is that there's no need for string concatenation at all. There's no reason one needs to WriteLine the entire header at once. sw.Write("Title,"); Also, string interpolation is almost always more expensive than straight concatenation, and harder for compilers to optimize. I'm not about to benchmark this disaster to prove it, but I suspect this is going to be pretty much the most expensive option.

And don't worry, the same basic process follows for each individual row they're outputting:

            string contactRow = "";
            HtmlToText htmlToText = new HtmlToText();

            bool extendedPropRetrieved = false;

            #region Extract properties for export file
            if (contact.CompleteName != null)
                contactRow = $"\"{contact.CompleteName.Title}\"";                   // Title
            else
                contactRow = $"";

            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.GivenName}\"";               // First name
            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.MiddleName}\"";              // Middle name
            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.Surname}\"";                 // Last name

            if (contact.CompleteName != null)
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.CompleteName.Suffix}\""; //Suffix
            else
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";

            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.CompanyName}\"";             // Company
            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.Department}\"";              // Department
            contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.JobTitle}\"";                // Job title

            if (contact.PhysicalAddresses.Contains(PhysicalAddressKey.Business))
            {
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].Street}\"";           // Business street
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";                                                                          // Business street 2
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";                                                                          // Business street 3
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].City}\"";             // Business city
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].State}\"";            // Business state
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].PostalCode}\"";       // Business postalcode
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].CountryOrRegion}\"";  // Business country/region
            }
            else
            {
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
                contactRow = $"{contactRow},";
            }
// ... this goes on for about 600 lines

The physical address else block is something really special, here.

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Managing true and false values is historically challenging. In the world of C, there's even a history to those challenges. Prior to the C99 standard, there wasn't a standardized version of boolean values, but there was a convention which most applications followed, based on how C conditionals and boolean logic works.

In C, anything non-zero is considered "true". So, if(0) { … } won't execute the branch, but if(99) { … } will. As a result, when people wanted to make boolean equivalents, they'd use the C preprocessors to specify something like:

#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 0

This is, with some caveats, essentially what stdbool.h added in C99. There's no reason why TRUE needs to specifically be 1, as long as it's anything but zero. That's basically the only goal, as long as TRUE is anything but zero, if(TRUE) will behave as expected. I cannot stress enough that the only way to mess this up is to make TRUE zero. If there's one rule about defining your own boolean constants in C/C++ don't make TRUE zero.

Anyway, let me turn this over to Charles C:

I worked at a small-medium company that did a lot of subcontracted development work for a wide variety of clients. Every C or C++ project had to include the company's "standard" header field, which was to be included in every code file.
Buried halfway down this 300+-line file was this:

#define TRUE 0
#define FALSE 1

So, if (TRUE) {…} in this would not execute the branch. If you were using these constants, you'd need patterns like if (variable==TRUE) which is definitely an anti-pattern that hurts readability and frankly just annoys me. But at its core, this is just a hidden landmine in the code base, which is going to confuse anyone who isn't deeply entrenched in this code, and create huge piles of unnecessary errors.

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This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A senior safety consultant has quit working with Shell after 11 years, accusing the fossil fuel producer in a bombshell public video of causing “extreme harms” to the environment.

Caroline Dennett claimed Shell had a “disregard for climate change risks” and urged others in the oil and gas industry to “walk away while there’s still time.”

The executive, who works for the independent agency Clout, ended her working relationship with Shell in an open letter to its executives and 1,400 employees. In an accompanying video, posted on LinkedIn, she said she had quit because of Shell’s “double-talk on climate.”

Dennett accused the oil and gas firm of “operating beyond the design limits of our planetary systems” and “not putting environmental safety before production.”

She said: “Shell’s stated safety ambition is to ‘do no harm’ – ‘Goal Zero’, they call it – and it sounds honorable but they are completely failing on it.

“They know that continued oil and gas extraction causes extreme harms, to our climate, to our environment, and to people. And whatever they say, Shell is simply not winding down on fossil fuels.”

Dennett told the Guardian she “could not marry these conflicts with my conscience,” adding: “I could not carry that any longer, and I’m ready to deal with the consequences.”

Shell was a “major client” of Dennett’s business, which specializes in evaluating safety procedures in high-risk industries including oil and gas production. She began working with Shell in the aftermath of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which rocked the industry.

“I can no longer work for a company that ignores all the alarms and dismisses the risks of climate change and ecological collapse,” she said. “Because, contrary to Shell’s public expressions around net zero, they are not winding down on oil and gas, but planning to explore and extract much more.”

Dennett – a criminal justice graduate who has spent her career in research and consultancy – was inspired to stop working with Shell after watching news footage of Extinction Rebellion climate protesters urging the company’s employees to leave. The movement’s TruthTeller whistleblowing project encourages oil and gas employees to walk away from the industry.

The consultant, who runs internal safety surveys and is based in Weymouth, Dorset, acknowledged she was “privileged” to be able to walk away and “many people working in fossil fuel companies just aren’t so lucky.”

She urged Shell’s executives to “look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really believe their vision for more oil and gas extraction secures a safe future for humanity.”

In late 2020, several Shell executives in its clean energy sector left amid reports they were frustrated at the pace of Shell’s shift towards greener fuels.

Her announcement comes on the eve of Shell’s annual general meeting of shareholders in London on Tuesday. Its plans to reduce emissions will be discussed at the meeting where the Dutch activist group Follow This will push for the company’s policies to be more consistent with the Paris climate accord. Shell’s board has told investors to reject the group’s resolution that asks it to set more stringent climate goals.

The Shell investor Royal London has said it intends to abstain on a vote on the firm’s climate transition proposals.

The Shell chief executive, Ben van Beurden, could experience an investor rebellion against his £13.5 million pay packet at the annual general meeting after the investment adviser Pirc urged a vote against it.

A Shell spokesperson said: “Be in no doubt, we are determined to deliver on our global strategy to be a net zero company by 2050 and thousands of our people are working hard to achieve this. We have set targets for the short, medium, and long term, and have every intention of hitting them.

“We’re already investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy, although the world will still need oil and gas for decades to come in sectors that can’t be easily decarbonized.”

Shell also faces the prospect of a potential windfall tax to fund cuts to household bills after the energy industry reported bumper profits fueled by the increase in market prices, prompting opposition parties to call on the government to bring in a one-off levy.

On Monday, the biggest oil and gas producer in the North Sea spoke out against a one-off levy, arguing it would lead to the industry approving fewer projects.

Harbour Energy’s chief executive, Linda Cook, told the Financial Times: “A higher tax burden will make it more challenging for new oil and gas projects to meet investment hurdle rates, meaning fewer projects will be sanctioned.

“This is at a time when industry is being encouraged to increase domestic UK oil and gas production and support an orderly energy transition.” Harbour has told the government it plans to invest $6 billion in the North Sea over three years as industry makes its case against the tax. The Guardian revealed this month that Cook had received a £4.6 million “golden hello” from the firm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Shell consultant quits, accusing firm of ‘extreme harms’ to environment on May 30, 2022.