Tag Archives: early

The Great Barrier Reef has been brutally bleached for the second year in a row.

by JoannWreford Posted on April 10, 2017

Contrary to what you may have heard, the reef isn’t dead — not yet. But aerial surveys show that 900 miles of the 1,400-mile-long reef have been severely bleached in the past two years.

Bleaching occurs when warm water causes stressed-out corals to expel symbiotic algae from their tissues; corals then lose their color and their chief source of food, making them more likely to die.

Last year’s El Niño–induced bleaching event was devastating, knocking out two-thirds of the corals in the northern section of the reef. We’d hoped that 2017 would bring cooler temperatures, giving the fragile ecosystem some much needed R&R.

Instead, temperatures on Australia’s east coast were still hotter than average in the early months of this year, and on top of that, the reef’s midsection took a hit from a big cyclone in March.

ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

This is the first time the reef has experienced back-to-back annual bleaching events. If this keeps happening, it’ll quash the reef’s chances for recovery and regrowth, a process that can take a decade or longer under normal conditions.

Under the abnormal conditions of climate change, though, there is little reprieve — unless we, y’know, address the root of the problem itself.

Link to article:  

The Great Barrier Reef has been brutally bleached for the second year in a row.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, OXO, Ringer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Great Barrier Reef has been brutally bleached for the second year in a row.

The Best ’60s Band You’ve Never Heard Of

by KFMWilbert Posted on March 27, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Creation
Action Painting
Numero Group

Courtesy of Conqueroo

Possibly the best ’60s band you’ve never heard of, Britain’s The Creation issued a series of terrific 45s that would make them cult faves for decades to come, yet never really caught on at the time. Mixing tough-as-nails rhythm and blues with wild-eyed psychedelic weirdness on sizzling singles like “Biff Bang Pow” and “How Does It Feel to Feel,” the quartet featured exuberant singer Kenny Pickett and influential guitar hero Eddie Phillips, who attacked his instrument with a violin bow long before Jimmy Page did it in Led Zeppelin. This typically excellent Numero Group set collects everything The Creation recorded on two action-packed CDs spanning 1965 to 1968, and highlights the wonderfully dense, punchy production by Shel Talmy (who also worked with the early Who and Kinks). They may have been chart failures, but Eddie and the lads were a raging success creatively.

Original article: 

The Best ’60s Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, Jason, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Best ’60s Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Sanity Break: Society Exists Because of Beer

by MiguelHincks Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When hunter-gatherer tribes began to stay put and focus on growing crops, starting around 13,000 years ago, things didn’t begin promisingly. The fossil record suggests the switch to farming made us shorter and triggered widespread malnutrition and dental problems. And yet, the agricultural revolution ultimately brought forth cities, writing, and what we know as civilization. So what saved the day?

The answer might well be beer, which is really just what happens when you sprout a bunch of grain, thus releasing its sugars, and then grind it into a mush with water, exposing it to those ubiquitous single-cell microbes we call yeasts. Here’s a fascinating National Geographic piece on humanity’s long-standing need for a stiff drink:

Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities—for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi an archeological site in northern Syria, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”

Fermentation—the process by which yeasts consume sugars—doesn’t just generate alcohol and carbon dioxide. It also delivers “all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin,” the author, Andrew Curry, notes. Even the alcohol would have been useful to these early settlements, beyond the gift of a buzz—it’s toxic to many microbes, helping alcohol-tolerant yeasts colonize the resulting brew and pushing out pathogens that make use sick. And that effect “explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water,” Curry writes.

That doesn’t mean you should replace your daily water intake with beer. Most—not all—Americans have access to clean water, and we have a better variety of nutritious foods available to us than those early agricultural societies seemed to. And of course, we now know that tippling excessively courts other problems, including liver disease. And besides, all of these B vitamins “would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties.”

Still, as Curry notes, emerging research suggests that enjoying a bit of alcohol may be part of what makes us human—and it didn’t just help us through the agricultural revolution:

To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three other appealing characteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories. Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one of them developed a taste for fruit that had fallen from the tree. “Our ape ancestors started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor, and that made all the difference,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “We’re preadapted for consuming alcohol.”

So wine (fermented fruit juice) got our evolutionary predecessors down from the trees, and beer (fermented grain mush) got our early farming ancestors through an extremely rough transition. Sounds like something to ponder over a beer—preferably, an unfiltered, unpasteurized one.

Visit source:  

Sanity Break: Society Exists Because of Beer

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Sprout, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sanity Break: Society Exists Because of Beer

Republicans Are Afraid to Let Americans See Their Health Care Plan

by SharynW08am Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Aside from whatever Donald Trump happens to be tweeting about, the biggest topic in DC right now is this:

Republicans finally have the power to repeal Obamacare, but they’re still not sure how

That’s Noam Levey at the Los Angeles Times:

In Washington, Republicans are also struggling to figure out what to do with Obamacare insurance marketplaces that Republicans worked for years to dismantle. In a reversal, GOP leaders now are trying to figure out how to prevent their collapse, which would jeopardize coverage for millions more Americans.

Insurance experts, including leading industry officials, have repeatedly warned Republicans over the past several months that repealing the health law without a replacement risks destabilizing insurance markets and will push many insurers to simply stop selling health plans.

J.B. Silvers, a former health insurance CEO, explains the danger of “repeal and delay” in more detail:

Some in Congress seem to think that passing the “repeal” part immediately but delaying its implementation for two or three years will somehow leave everything as it is now. But this naive notion misses the fact that the riskiness of the Obamacare individual insurance exchange markets will have been ramped up to such a level that continuing makes no sense.

Even if a company reaches break-even in the “delay” years, it will lose when the repeal is effective. If the premium subsidies now available to lower-income enrollees go away immediately and the mandate to sign up for an insurance plan disappears, then the number of people purchasing individual policies on the exchanges will drop like a rock. In fact, it is clear that even debating this scenario is likely to be self-fulfilling, since insurers must decide on their participation for 2018 by the late spring of 2017. Look for many to leave then.

Insurers are participating in the exchanges because they hope to make steady profits once the early problems are worked out. But if there’s no future for the exchanges, why bother? They’re taking losses for nothing. They might as well jump ship now.

Donald Trump is obviously worried about this, tweeting that Republicans need to make sure they don’t get any of the blame if Obamacare collapses. “Be careful!” he tweets. Newt Gingrich said much the same, and Greg Sargent decodes what this means:

Note that Gingrich’s primary concern is that Republicans will be put in the optical position of taking the blame for millions losing coverage — which, of course, would actually happen if Republicans do repeal the law without replacing it. So Republicans must create a way to make those who would lose coverage believe they won’t lose it later, with some sort of “bridge” that will keep them covered until that long-promised GOP replacement finally materializes.

The truth is that the Obamacare exchanges are in pretty good shape. There are problems here and there, and some people really have gotten hit with big premium increases. Overall, though, more than 10 million people are getting affordable health coverage from the exchanges and millions more are getting it from the Medicaid expansion. Premiums are now about where they should have been all along, and will probably increase at normal rates in the future. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it’s in pretty good shape.

If it collapses, it will be due solely to appalling recklessness from the Republican caucus, which is afraid to put forward a plan of its own. That fear is well founded: It would take no more than a few days for everyone to figure out just how stingy it is and how many people would lose coverage under it.

If Republicans insist on hiding their plan from the American public, there’s only one possible reason for that: it’s terrible and they know it. Right now we have a working program that helps millions of low-income afford health insurance. If it collapses, that’s on Republicans. And they know it.

See original:

Republicans Are Afraid to Let Americans See Their Health Care Plan

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Are Afraid to Let Americans See Their Health Care Plan

ERP Blogstorm Part 4: Miscellaneous

by GloriaSocha0239 Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The fourth and final part of our series of charts from the Economic Report of the President has no theme. It’s just three unrelated charts that I felt like posting. First up, here is the IMF’s forecast of global growth over the six years since the end of the Great Recession:

Every year they think the decline in growth is over and the global economy will pick up again. And every year they’re wrong. Now they’re forecasting the same thing in 2016. Next year we’ll find out if they’re finally right.

Next up is a chart that shows how oil prices affect national economies in the Middle East:

Kuwait can balance its budget with an oil price of $50 per barrel. Saudi Arabia needs about $70. Bahrain needs $90. And Libya needs to start spending less.

Finally, here’s a chart I’ve put up in various forms several times over the years:

We’ve grown used to thinking of health care costs as spiraling out of control, but that wasn’t a regular fact of life until the early 80s. Then, for the next 20 years, health care inflation ran way higher than overall inflation. However, the gap started narrowing as early as the mid-90s. Here’s a chart of my own that shows the gap directly:

Using a 10-year rolling average helps smooth out the spikes so we can focus on the trend instead. Medical inflation was fairly moderate in the late 50s and then declined fairly steadily to even lower levels until the early 80s. Then it skyrocketed, and this is the era we’re most familiar with. But by the early aughts it had fallen back to its previous level in the 60s and 70s, and it’s stayed there for the past 15 years.

The authors of the report try to make a case that the subdued medical inflation of the past few years is due to Obamacare, but they try too hard. Obamacare has likely had some effect, but basically it just had the good luck to go into effect at a time when medical inflation was already pretty low.

What this all shows is that we should change how we think of medical inflation. Most of us think of it as something that’s out of control, and we hope that the recent slowdown isn’t just a blip. Instead, we should think of the period from 1980-2000 as a blip. Except for those two decades, medical inflation has run steadily at about 1.5 percent above overall inflation, and there’s no special reason to think this will change. That’s the normal rate for the postwar era.

Link:

ERP Blogstorm Part 4: Miscellaneous

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ERP Blogstorm Part 4: Miscellaneous

Donald Trump Is Once Again the Day Trader in Chief

by JimmieOdonnell Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Early this morning Donald Trump launched another one of his famously random tweets:

The F-35 program is pretty famously over budget. I don’t think anyone will argue with Trump about that. But Christopher Bouzy asks an interesting question. Here’s a chart showing Lockheed Martin’s stock price today:

Bouzy wonders if someone profited by knowing about Trump’s tweet a few minutes before it went out. This is a reasonable suspicion if you look at tweeting and trading times down to the minute, but if you look at them down to the second you get a different picture. Trump’s tweet went out at 8:26:13 and there were a flurry of small trades ten seconds later, followed by a second flurry three seconds after that. This caused Lockheed Martin’s price to drop considerably, but only because pre-market trading volume is pretty low and illiquid, so even a smallish trade can send prices down. Most likely, these flurries were day traders who happened to see Trump’s tweet and acted instantly, or perhaps some kind of bot that reacts to Trump tweets.1

But even if there was no hanky panky, our president-elect still seems to have had an effect: Lockheed Martin stock traded very heavily today and closed down by more than two percent. Coincidence? Or a response to Trump’s tweet?

This revives a question we asked last week after Trump tweeted about Softbank, sending Sprint and T-Mobile stock upward. Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump’s tweets? That doesn’t seem to have been the case today, but if you knew a day ahead, for example, your trade would get lost in the noise and no one would ever know.

I assume the answer to these questions is no, isn’t it?

1Ridiculous? Not at all. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t done this.

Link:  

Donald Trump Is Once Again the Day Trader in Chief

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is Once Again the Day Trader in Chief

Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

by SaulP27iii Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

You guys are way too smart. I posted my mystery map of the Middle East yesterday morning, and in less than an hour you had figured out what it represented. For the rest of you, here’s the map with its real title:

I’m going to make an obvious point about this, but I want to make it carefully. Ever since I wrote my piece about the link between violent crime and leaded gasoline, I’ve gotten periodic questions about whether lead might be responsible for other things. The most common answer is maybe—but it’s unlikely we’ll ever have the data to prove it. For that reason, I try to stay pretty restrained about exactly what lead might and might not be responsible for.

That said, there’s a lot of evidence that leaded gasoline produced a wave of violent crime between 1960-1990 in the developed world, and that the introduction of unleaded gasoline eliminated that wave and eventually brought crime rates down nearly to 1960 levels. In most developed countries, leaded gasoline was phased out starting around the mid-70s, which benefited children born after that. When those children reached their late teenage years in the early 90s, they were much less prone to impulsiveness and aggression, which led to lower crime rates.

But not every part of the world followed that timetable. In particular, leaded gasoline continued to be used in the Middle East up through the late 90s. Egypt began phasing it out in 1998, and most other countries followed over the next decade or so. Only a few—including Iraq and Afghanistan—still sell significant amounts of leaded gasoline.

Since lead poisoning affects infants, its affects show up about 18-20 years later. What this means is that in the bright red countries, the cohort of kids who reach their late teen years around 2020 should be significantly less aggressive and violent than previous cohorts. Around 2025 the countries in lighter red will join them. Around 2030 the countries in pink will join. By 2040 or so, the process will be complete.

Obviously this means that crime rates in the Middle East should decline steadily between 2020-40. But there’s more. Given the effects of lead, it seems almost certain that reducing lead poisoning in teenagers and young adults should lead to a decline in terrorism as well.

This is where I want to be careful. Obviously terrorism, like crime, has a lot of causes. What’s more, you could eliminate every molecule of lead in the world and you’d still have plenty of crime and plenty of terrorism. But you’d have less. If terrorism follows the path of violent crime, eliminating leaded gasoline could reduce the level of terrorism by 50 percent or more.

It’s also possible—though this is much more speculative—that effective terrorism requires a minimum critical mass of people who are drawn to it. If you fall below that minimum, it might wither away. In other words, it’s possible that removing lead from gasoline could reduce terrorism by even more than 50 percent.

In any case, this leads to a concrete prediction: Between 2020 and 2040, the level of terrorism emanating from the Middle East will drop by at least half. Ditto for violence more generally, including civil wars. In a decade or so, we should begin to get hints of whether this prediction is correct.

Visit source:

Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

by Rita7799phdn Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

A few weeks ago the New York Times got hold of the first page of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return. It showed a net operating loss of $916 million, which Trump was able to use to offset his income over the next 20 years, thus avoiding millions of dollars in income taxes. But while solving one mystery, it opened another: Just exactly how did Trump manage to declare such a big loss? Several theories made the rounds, but the Times now thinks it has the answer, thanks to a cache of “newly obtained documents.” Here’s the nutshell version of the Times’ explanation:

Trump was a terrible businessman and lost a huge amount of money on his casino operations in the early 90s.
As part of his bankruptcy negotiations in 1991, he persuaded banks to forgive hundred of millions of dollars in loans.
Forgiven loans count as “Cancellation of Debt” income, which should have offset his huge operating losses. But somehow they didn’t. Why?
The Times says it was because Trump used a legally dubious “equity-for-debt” swap. Basically, he swapped the bonds he couldn’t pay for new bonds that he classified as equity shares in the casino partnership.

The Times makes a good case that Trump’s own tax lawyers told him this plan was extremely risky (see the excerpt from the official tax opinion on the right) and would most likely be disallowed by the IRS. But we don’t know if it was. The trail stops cold in 1995.

If I’m reading this right, the basic story is that Trump gave his banks “New Bonds” in place of their old bonds and classified the new bonds as equity shares in the casino partnership. Trump then valued the equity as equal to the old debt, thus showing no net loan forgiveness and therefore no COD income. This despite the fact that, in reality, the equity was close to worthless.

So Trump then had $916 million in operating losses, but no debt forgiveness to offset it. “Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations,” says the Times, “this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.”

At this point, the question of how Trump gamed the tax system is mostly a matter of academic interest. Still, I’ve written about this before, and figured I should follow up with the latest theory. And this is it.

Taken from:

NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

by KatrinaSxn Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The withdrawal of Aetna from many of its Obamacare markets has unleashed a torrent of commentary about how Obamacare is now well and truly doomed. From Republicans, this is the usual hot air. From Democrats, it’s a little different. It’s also way overblown, and I’m happy to see Jonathan Chait make the case for Obamacare’s basic solvency here. Go read it.

For myself, I just want to focus on one of Chait’s points: The reason Aetna withdrew is that they weren’t making money. The reason they weren’t making money is because their premiums were too low. The reason their premiums were too low is because they were competing with other insurers for business. In other words, competing on a level playing field, they couldn’t succeed. That’s life in a free market.

So what happened? For some reason, insurers underpriced their policies substantially when Obamacare was introduced. It’s possible that their actuaries all badly miscalculated the makeup of the market. Or it’s possible that they were underpricing deliberately as a way of building market share. Or maybe a combination of both.

My own guess is that the underpricing was mostly deliberate. After all, even the Congressional Budget Office had a pretty good idea of what average premiums ought to be, and it’s hard to believe that a bunch of experienced insurance companies couldn’t do the same math as the CBO. Either way, though, this is, once again, life in a free market. Some vendors make mistakes and fail. Some can’t compete and fail. Some just decide to focus on other markets.

The flip side of this is that free markets usually stabilize eventually. In the case of Obamacare, this means premiums have to go up. Sorry. However, as that happens, new insurers are likely to enter. Eventually supply will more or less equal demand, and the market will find an equilibrium. This is why I’m much less panicked over Obamacare’s immediate problems than most people.

Obamacare is an artificial market in many ways, but that’s true of health care in general, which is highly regulated and has well-known eccentricities. Nonetheless, Obamacare is a market, and right now it’s operating like one. Prices are looking for an equilibrium, consumers are deciding whether to participate, and vendors are jockeying for position. That’s not painless, but then, nobody ever said capitalism was painless.

Of course, if you do want painless, we know how to do that too: true national health care funded through taxes. Dozens of countries do this, and it works fine.

Short of that, we could still reduce the pain considerably. Is Obamacare too expensive for many people? Yes. That could be fixed by increasing subsidies. Are insurers losing money in the early years? Yes. That could be largely fixed by funding the risk corridors. Are the poor still underserved? Yes. That could be addressed by adopting the Medicaid expansion in all states. Are there plenty of details here and there that ought to be cleaned up? Yes. That could be fixed via legislation.

If Republicans actually cared about providing health care to people, all of this would be trivial. But they don’t. To the extent that Obamacare has problems, this is why. There’s nothing inherent in the design that prevents it from operating successfully. In fact, as the chart on the right shows, even now, with all its problems, Obamacare is operating more successfully than anybody thought it would when it was first passed. 20 million newly insured people is nothing to sniff at.

Taken from: 

Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

Shell has started pumping from the world’s deepest underwater oil field.

by botai3dkwu Posted on September 12, 2016

What could go wrong?

The Stones field, 200 miles south of New Orleans and 1.8 miles beneath the water surface, is far deeper than the field tapped by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and spilling about 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The new project, the Guardian reports, could be a boon to Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, whose annual bonus is linked to completing major new projects. But some Shell shareholders will be less than pleased. At the company’s annual meeting last year, many shareholders pushed to end CEO bonuses for actions that harm the climate and to require investments in renewables.

Last year, van Beurden admitted that we cannot burn all the fossil fuel reserves on the planet and expect global temperature rise to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. Above 2C, climate scientists warn that the consequences will be severe and, in some cases, irreversible. So far, we’re halfway there.

But Shell is just continuing on with business as usual: The company forecasts that its deep-water production capacity will grow dramatically by the early 2020s.

Originally from:  

Shell has started pumping from the world’s deepest underwater oil field.

Posted in alo, Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Shell has started pumping from the world’s deepest underwater oil field.