Author Archives: Dave Max

Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

Mother Jones

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Kaiser has released its monthly tracking poll on Obamacare, and there’s really no way to put lip gloss on this pig. Public perception of the law has been worsening for the past nine months, and it gapped out sharply after the rollout debacle in October. There’s now a 16-point delta between unfavorable and favorable views of the law, 50-34 percent. With the exception of one or two monthly anomolies that are probably polling artifacts, this is by far the worst it’s been since the law was passed.

You can see the effect this has in the chart on the right: 27 percent now say that Obamacare has “negatively affected” someone in their family. That’s crazy. Even if you subtract the baseline of 18-19 percent who have been saying this all along, that’s an increase of nearly ten points over the course of 2013. Unless you take an absurdly expansive view of “affected,” this is all but impossible. Obamacare simply doesn’t have that kind of reach.

But we’ve been though a recent period in which every co-pay increase, every premium increase, and every narrowing of benefits has been blamed on Obamacare. These things have happened every year like clockwork for the past couple of decades, but this year it was convenient to blame them on Obamacare. Combine that with the PR disaster from the website rollout, and a whole lot of people now believe that Obamacare is hurting them.

Unfortunately, this is fertile ground for Republicans. If they really have the discipline to avoid shooting themselves in the foot this year over idiotic confrontations with the president, running their midterm campaign solely on opposition to Obamacare might be a winner.

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Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

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In a Bean, a Boon to Biotech

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Codex: Eldar – Games Workshop

Codex: Eldar is your comprehensive guide to wielding the deadly warhosts of the Craftworld Eldar upon the battlefields of the 41 st Millennium. This volume details the craftworlds of the Eldar, and the different types of army they field. The Eldar embody excellence in the arts of war, from their psychic might to their deadly aircraft, and their ranks co […]

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Codex: Inquisition – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

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Codex: Inquisition (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

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Codex: Space Marines (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Space Marines are the chosen warriors of the Emperor, and the greatest fighting force of the Imperium. Each Space Marine is a genetically enhanced super soldier, easily a match for a dozen lesser men, armed with some of the deadliest weapons in the galaxy and encased in formidable power armour. This codex explores the formations and Chapters of the Space […]

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Duct Tape Your Heart Out! – Leisure Arts & Patti Wallenfang

With today’s colorful duct tape and the fun projects in this book, you can craft to your heart’s content! Dress up school stuff and rain gear, make hip headphones and a purse or wallet, give new life to old shoes, bend covered coax cable into wall art words, and create unique jewelry to share with friends. These ideas are irresistible! Step-by-step photos an […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Codex: Adepta Sororitas – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b […]

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Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 2 – J.D. Lenzen

Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 2 (PFT-V2) is the second installment in the paracord fusion ties book series and another stunning achievement by author J.D. Lenzen. Like Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 1, PFT-V2 reveals innovative and stylish ways of storing paracord for later use. So once again you’ll find crisp, clear, full-color photographs (over 1,000 i […]

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

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Warhammer 40,000: The Rules – Games Workshop

There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR. In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of destruction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravening aliens and threatened from within by Warp-spawned entities and heretical plots. Only the strength of the immortal […]

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In a Bean, a Boon to Biotech

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American company sues Canada over fracking moratorium

American company sues Canada over fracking moratorium

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The St. Lawrence River.

Quebec isn’t entirely sure about this whole fracking thing. Amid reports from across the continent of groundwater pollution, air pollution, deforestation, and other environmental side effects of hydraulic fracturing, the Canadian province has placed a moratorium on the practice beneath the St. Lawrence River.

That doesn’t sit well with Lone Pine Resources, a Delaware-based company that has long eyed the gas and oil that’s locked up in the Utica shale beneath the grand waterway. The company claims it spent millions to get the appropriate permits to drill, and now that the fossil fuels seem out of reach, it says Canadians need to pony up more than $250 million in compensation.

The company last month submitted a claim [PDF] to an international arbitration system seeking damages because of “Quebec’s arbitrary, capricious, and illegal revocation” of its “valuable right to mine for oil and gas under the St. Lawrence River.” The claim is based on Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which allows private companies to sue governments when laws hurt their expected profits.

Needless to say, activists who want to protect the St. Lawrence River from reckless frackers are appalled by the legal action. From a Sierra Club press release:

“This egregious lawsuit — which Lone Pine Resources must drop — highlights just how vulnerable public interest policies are as a result of trade and investment pacts,” said Ilana Solomon, Sierra Club Responsible Trade Program Director. “Governments should learn from this and other similar cases and stop writing investment rules that empower corporations to attack environmental laws and policies.”

Meanwhile, Lone Pine Resources has been missing its loan repayments and desperately trying to work with its creditors in a bid to clamor out of a looming financial abyss. Coincidence much?


Source
Notice of arbitration under the arbitration rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade law and Chapter Eleven of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Investment Treaty Arbitration
Lone Pine Resources files outrageous NAFTA lawsuit against fracking ban, The Sierra Club

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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More Good News on Health Care: Medicare Costs Are Down, Down, Down

Mother Jones

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I’ve written before about my belief that health care costs in the United States have been trending downward for a long time. Not just during the aughts (which everyone seems to agree about), but since the early ’80s. Click here for a refresher.

Last week brought some confirmation of this from the Congressional Budget Office. Michael Levine and Melinda Buntin took a look at Medicare spending per beneficiary over the past three decades and came to a very similar conclusion: “Growth in spending per beneficiary in the fee-for-service portion of Medicare has slowed substantially in recent years. The slowdown has been widespread, extending across all of the major service categories, groups of beneficiaries that receive very different amounts of medical care, and all major regions.”

Their basic chart is below. It starts in 1980, but I think it’s better to omit 1980-82. Inflation was very high in those years, which makes Medicare spending growth look artificially high and the subsequent decline artificially steep. However, consumer inflation has been pretty low and steady since then (at around 2 to 3 percent), so inflation doesn’t muddy the picture much after 1983. I’ve drawn an eyeball regression line starting then and it still tells much the same story:

This is good news, but in fact, it’s even better news than it seems at first glance. There are two reasons for this. First, Medicare plays a big role in setting rates and spending priorities for the entire health care industry. So the fact that Medicare spending growth is slowing down suggests that spending growth in the broad health care industry should slow down too.

The second reason is more intriguing. Levine and Buntin note that there have been two previous major declines in Medicare spending, and in both cases they were driven by legislative changes. But over the past decade, we’ve seen another steady decline with nothing to explain it:

The current slowdown cannot be so easily ascribed to a set of changes in payment policy or program structure. As described above, legislation governing payment rates probably did slightly less to restrain growth in the second part of the decade than it did earlier on.

The financial crisis and economic downturn … do not appear to explain much of the slowdown. First…from 2000 to 2005, the growth in the average payment rate programwide was similar to growth in the CPI-U. Second, we did not find evidence to suggest that beneficiaries’ considerable loss of wealth and reduced income growth significantly affected their collective demand for care. Third, it is not clear whether the recession played a role in reducing the rate at which providers purchased new, cost-increasing technologies. Finally, and in contrast, some evidence suggests that high unemployment during the recession boosted providers’ incentives to deliver services to Medicare beneficiaries by reducing the demand for care in the private sector, though we could not empirically confirm the mechanisms by which unemployment might have had such an effect.

The lack of a single big legislative explanation suggests that there’s something more organic going on. And with Obamacare’s cost controls set to kick in over the next decade, we could be entering a virtuous circle of reined-in health care spending for years to come.

Levine and Buntin acknowledge that there’s considerable uncertainty in their analysis. There are a lot of moving parts here, and the truth is that a decade isn’t really a very long time frame to hang your hat on. (Remember all those economic models that assumed housing prices could never fall because they were based on the previous decade’s worth of data?) And it’s worth keeping in mind that even if spending per beneficiary stabilizes, Medicare is still going to have a lot more beneficiaries over the next half century as baby boomers retire and our population ages.

Nonetheless, evidence is mounting all over the place that the spiraling growth of health care costs, which has been a serious bogeyman for the past few decades, might finally be receding. Since health care costs are by far the biggest component of future concerns over federal spending and federal deficits, this suggests that our future may be brighter than we think.

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More Good News on Health Care: Medicare Costs Are Down, Down, Down

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John McCain Gets Some Military Advice He Probably Didn’t Want to Hear

Mother Jones

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John McCain, who never met a war he didn’t like, got into a heated exchange last week with Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McCain, who was unhappy because Dempsey declined to tell him what private advice he had given President Obama about intervention in Syria, subsequently threatened to put a hold on Dempsey’s nomination for a second term.

Today McCain got his answer in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee. After laying out five options for military intervention in Syria, Dempsey made his feelings clear:

All of these options would likely further the narrow military objective of helping the opposition and placing more pressure on the regime. We have learned from the past 10 years; however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state. We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action. Should the regime’ s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.

I know that the decision to use force is not one that any of us takes lightly. It is no less than an act of war. As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that the use of force will move us toward the intended outcome….Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.

Translation: You guys thought Afghanistan and Iraq were both brilliant ideas, didn’t you? Cakewalk city. Maybe this time you should think a little harder. Something tells me this wasn’t the private advice McCain was hoping to hear.

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John McCain Gets Some Military Advice He Probably Didn’t Want to Hear

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A Plea for an End to Crappy Social Science Research

Mother Jones

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A new academic journal, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, says that it “embraces all of the different types of experiments carried out as part of political science research, including survey experiments, laboratory experiments, field experiments, lab experiments in the field, natural and neurological experiments.” Andrew Gelman applauds, but with a caveat:

This looks good to me. There’s only one thing I’m worried about. Regular readers of the sister blog will be aware that there’s been a big problem in psychology, with the top journals publishing weak papers generalizing to the population based on Mechanical Turk samples and college students, lots of researcher degrees of freedom ensuring there will be no problem finding statistical significance, and with the sort of small sample sizes that ensure that any statistically significant finding will be noise, thus no particular reason to expect that patterns in the data will generalize to the larger population.

….Just to be clear: I’m not saying that the scientific claims being made in these papers are necessarily wrong, it’s just that these claims are not supported by the data. The papers are essentially exercises in speculation, “p=0.05” notwithstanding.

And I’m not saying that the authors of these papers are bad guys. I expect that they mostly just don’t know any better. They’ve been trained that “statistically significant” = real, and they go with that.

Call me naive, but WTF? I have no training at all, and I’m keenly aware of the problems Gelman is talking about. How is it possible to complete a PhD program and not have this kind of thing drilled into your consciousness for all time? Can there really be people out there who are being trained that “statistically significant” = real, and nothing more? It’s mind boggling. Are there any PhD programs out there that would would fess up to this?

Of course, there are journals who publish some of these papers, so apparently it goes beyond just PhD programs.

In any case, my view is that if you see the phrase “Mechanical Turk” anywhere in a paper, your BS radar should instantly go into high alert. It’s possible that there’s a reasonable justification for using MT, but not often. I’d be pretty happy to see it banned entirely from allegedly scholarly research.

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A Plea for an End to Crappy Social Science Research

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National Briefing | West: California: Board Restricts Fire Rings

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Kids Puzzle Fun #1 – Lovatts Crosswords & Puzzles

Junior puzzlers will enjoy hours of quality entertainment with the first issue of Kids Puzzle Fun! This interactive book features ‘Magic Touch’ drawing tools, allowing kids to solve the puzzles by using their finger as a pen. Magic Touch unites the tactile feel of a printed book with a superior digital format, resulting in a more natural, intuitive experienc […]

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Apocalypse (Digital Collection) – Games Workshop

The greatest heroes of the age lead battalions of troops and tanks against the foe. Super-heavy war machines dominate the conflict like gods of battle as bombardments rain from the skies. This is war on a whole new level. Apocalypse is a new way of playing games of Warhammer 40,000. Allowing you to field as many miniatures as you like, in any combinati […]

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Apocalypse – Games Workshop

The greatest heroes of the age lead battalions of troops and tanks against the foe. Super-heavy war machines dominate the conflict like gods of battle as bombardments rain from the skies. This is war on a whole new level. Apocalypse is a new way of playing games of Warhammer 40,000. Allowing you to field as many miniatures as you like, in any combinati […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Farsight Enclaves – A Codex: Tau Empire Supplement – Games Workshop

Commander Farsight was once hailed by every Tau caste as a genius warrior-leader without compare. As his career blazed a bloody path across the Damocles Gulf and back again, O’Shovah split away from the Tau Empire, doggedly pursuing the Orks that had killed so many of his Fire caste comrades. It was the first overt sign of a rebellion that was to change the […]

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Apocalypse: Strategic Asset Cards – Games Workshop

Apocalypse: Strategic Asset Cards A cunning commander always has a trick or two up his sleeve, and now you can too with this collection of Strategic Asset Cards for games of Apocalypse. Incorporating all of the Strategic Asset Cards from the Warhammer 40,000: Apocalypse rulebook into digital form these can be referenced easily and quickly on your digital dev […]

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Following Atticus – Tom Ryan

After a close friend died of cancer, middle-aged, overweight, acrophobic newspaperman Tom Ryan decided to pay tribute to her in a most unorthodox manner. Ryan and his friend, miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch, would attempt to climb all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four thousand- foot peaks twice in one winter while raising money for charity. It wa […]

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Warlords of the Dark Millennium: Ezekiel – Games Workshop

Ezekiel is the chief Librarian of the Dark Angels Space Marines; keeper of their most closely guarded secrets and ancient lore. As bearer of the Book of Salvation Ezekiel is an inspiration to his battle-brothers in combat, the powerful Librarian and sacred relic steadying them before the foe. About this Series: The galaxy burns with the fires of countless wa […]

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Warhammer 40,000: The Rules – Games Workshop

There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR. In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of destruction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravening aliens and threatened from within by Warp-spawned entities and heretical plots. Only the strength of the immortal […]

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Index Astartes: Librarians – Games Workshop

Librarians are the lore keepers and psykers of the Adeptus Astartes, recording the Chapters long and glorious histories. Each Librarian is a formidable foe, able to call upon the power of Warp to smite the enemies of the Imperium with righteous fire and furious anger. About this Series: The Adeptus Astartes are genetically engineered warriors, created by the […]

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National Briefing | West: California: Board Restricts Fire Rings

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Explosion at West Virginia fracking site seriously injures four

Explosion at West Virginia fracking site seriously injures four

Federal investigators are trying to figure out what caused an explosion at a West Virginia fracking site over the weekend. The blast injured at least seven people, including four workers who were sent to a hospital with life-threatening burns.

Residents and activists have long complained about safety practices by frackers operating in the state, where they draw natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation. Traffic accidents involving trucks traveling to and from frack sites in the state are common, and explosions can be deadly.

Hydraulic fracturing was not underway at the time of Sunday’s blast in Doddridge County. The explosion occurred 50 yards away from the work crew and it did not involve the drilling rig. From Reuters:

Two storage tanks containing brine and fracking fluid from the well exploded at 4 a.m. EDT on Sunday Antero spokesman Alvyn Schopp said. Five workers were taken to hospital with burns, he said.

“We do not know the ignition source, but we suspect it was a methane explosion,” said Schopp, vice president at Antero, an oil and natural gas company controlled by Warburg Pincus LLC.

The cause of the explosion remains a mystery, but it could not have come as a huge surprise to fed-up residents of the state.

In April, two workers were killed and two others were injured by an explosion at a frack site in Tyler County, W.Va., though the story was quickly buried amid news of the Boston marathon bombings.

Also in April, AlterNet published a feature article that catalogued frackers’ shoddy safety records in West Virginia, and described the pollution that they cause. The piece includes a series of photographs of accidents, including this photo below, of a fire that burned for more than a week at a well site in September 2010:

Wetzel County Action GroupFire at a West Virginia frack site in 2010.

“It burned for something like nine days,” Ed Wade, the resident who shot the photograph, told AlterNet. “But the [West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection] said there were no cases of air pollution. You believe that?”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Explosion at West Virginia fracking site seriously injures four

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Deadly fire at Chinese poultry plant highlights industrial-ag safety concerns

Deadly fire at Chinese poultry plant highlights industrial-ag safety concerns

Brian Yap

We don’t know yet how much fire-safety equipment the factory had.

We’re still reeling from April’s garment-factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 1,100 people, making the 112 fatalities of a clothing-factory fire in the same country five months earlier seem tragically routine in comparison. Today’s news, then, of at least 119 deaths in a fire at a poultry plant in northeast China, not only adds another unwanted entry to this history of horror, but also shows that mortally unsafe working conditions are not limited to the apparel industry.

According to Chinese news reports cited by The New York Times, when a fire broke out inside the Baoyuanfeng Poultry Plant, “a major domestic poultry supplier,” workers rushed to the factory’s few exits only to find some of them blocked — the same safety hazard that made November’s fire in a Bangladesh factory so lethal, and that killed workers in the U.S.’s notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire a century ago (which spurred important safety reforms in this country).

Industrial-scale ag is taking off in China thanks to a growing middle class with an appetite for meat. The Baoyuanfeng plant began operations just four years ago in Jilin Province, whose administrative city, Dehui, “has promoted itself as a base for commercial agriculture,” and claims it can produce 250 million broiler chickens a year. Last week’s announcement that Chinese meat company Shuanghui hopes to buy U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield demonstrated the global implications of a rapidly expanding Chinese meat market. This week’s tragedy shows the human consequences.

The New York Times reports:

China’s food-processing industry has grown rapidly to feed an increasingly prosperous population in the nation’s cities, and the poultry plant appeared to be one beneficiary of that growth. …

Chinese factories and mines have been troubled by work hazards during the country’s rapid economic expansion. The frequent industrial accidents have drawn criticism that officials are putting economic growth before safety.

Ironically, one of the goals — or at least one of the hoped-for side effects — of the Shuanghui-Smithfield deal is better food safety on both sides of the Pacific. Bloomberg News notes that buying Smithfield “would give Shuanghui access to more advanced production technology,” while Tom Philpott at Mother Jones points out that China’s ban on the growth additive ractopamine could be behind Smithfield’s recent decision to phase out its use of the drug.

Could the deal also lead to higher safety standards in meat-processing plants? We sure hope so.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Deadly fire at Chinese poultry plant highlights industrial-ag safety concerns

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If A Good Solar Panel Contractor Is What You Need You Must Follow These!

The search for a good solar panel installation contractor can feel like an exhausting game of hide and seek through a massive list of potential candidates. To help you stay motivated during the search to find the perfect contractor for you job needs, we’ve put together a set of steps designed to help you out.

When you’re conducting online research, don’t take just anyone’s word on a solar panel installation contractor’s reputation, references or professional standing. Only consult sites that are considered “reputable” – you can find these by using the Google Rank feature, which will organize web pages for you based on their reputability.

See to it that the solar panel installation contractor you pick has a personality that complements you. Be aware that the contractor and his workers will be practically living in your house for quite a long time. You wouldn’t want to sign a contract with a contractor and then find that you really don’t like him or his workers.

Reputable solar panel installation contractors will be happy to offer you financial as well as professional references. Gather as much information as you can about a potential contractor’s relationships with suppliers, lenders and banks. If the contractor has good financial references, you know that they manage money well and are professional and honest in their dealings with others.

The bids presented to you from the solar panel installation contractors should last for at least 30 days. If a contractor tries to convince that their bid is only good for a shorter amount of time, they are simply trying to pressure you in to choosing them. If this happens, it might be best to choose someone else for your project.

You can take a drive with your solar panel installation contractors to other projects that resemble what which you want to accomplish. If the contractor understands the look and feel you want to obtain, they will be able to pick the correct materials’ big difference in the final project can be made by small details.

Asking around at kitchen and bath shops or lumber yards may help you gain the name of several good solar panel installation contractors. However, be careful as many shops will refer only to their top customers as this brings more business. Visit several specialty shops to get a true picture.

You should be aware of what your job entails in respect to solar panel installation contractor requirements. A workers compensation policy is compulsory if your contractor employs workers on your project. Of course, if a contractor is an owner-contractor and does not employ any workers, then he is not required to have a workers’ compensation policy.

A solar panel installation contractor’s demeanor is just as important as their reviews and references. If you get a good feeling about them and they present themselves well, you can be confident your professional relationship will be positive and this can help stop conflicts later on.

Searching for ways to improve your knowledge related to the helpful tips presented above? Just type in solar heating solutions when searching online. You can find some great helpful suggestions about solar options.

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