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Ukraine Claims it Has Captured Russian Soldiers

by JasmineSeymour Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Ukraine claims that it now has proof that Russian soldiers have been involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil:

Ukraine released video footage on Tuesday of what it said were 10 captured Russian soldiers, raising tensions as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, for talks later in the day with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro O. Poroshenko.

….The release of the videos and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border, prompting Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. “The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation,” he wrote.

….“Everything was a lie. There were no drills here,” one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator. He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine. After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Mr. Smirnov said.

This kind of thing represents a cusp of some kind. If it’s true, Putin has to decide pretty quickly whether to gamble everything on an outright invasion, or whether to back off. If it turns out to be a Ukrainian invention, Putin has to decide whether to use it as a casus belli. These are dangerous times.

UPDATE: Apparently Russia has admitted the soldiers are theirs:

Sources in Moscow have admitted that a number of men captured inside Ukraine were indeed serving Russian soldiers, but said they crossed the border by mistake….”The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained,” a source in Russia’s defence ministry told the RIA Novosti agency.

Uh huh. I suppose Putin will now claim that detaining the soldiers is an act of war unless they’re immediately released.

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Ukraine Claims it Has Captured Russian Soldiers

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Should Pregnant Women Eat Zero Tuna?

by GeorgiaRocha Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Food-safety experts at Consumer Reports crunched the numbers on mercury levels in seafood—and they have a new recommendation for pregnant women: Don’t eat tuna at all.

The FDA recommends that pregnant and nursing women consume between 8 and 12 ounces of fish per week to provide proper nutrition for a baby’s brain development and overall health. But some fish are very high in mercury, a neurotoxin that can lead to serious cognitive problems and birth defects in children and babies. And the mercury levels in oceans are rising—humans have tripled the mercury content in oceans since the Industrial Revolution—leading to further mercury absorption by predators like tuna.

Consumer Reports provides charts to help curb mercury levels during fish consumption. Courtesy of Consumer Reports

A team at the Consumer Reports National Research Center analyzed data from the Food and Drug Administration’s chart on mercury levels in seafood and determined that consuming 6 ounces of albacore tuna in a week—the level recommended as safe by the FDA for pregnant women—would put a 125-pound woman over the Environmental Protection Agency’s “safe” mercury threshold by more than two ounces.

Canned light tuna is thought to offer a lower mercury tuna option, but 20 percent of the FDA’s samples of it contained almost double the average level of mercury that it’s supposed to. Some samples had more mercury than the king mackerel—one of the FDA’s top four high-in-mercury fish—which the agency advises pregnant women and children to avoid. Canned tuna constitutes the second most frequently consumed seafood product in the United States.

Some experts like Deborah Rice, a former senior risk assessor for the EPA, think that research since 2001 suggests that there is “no question” that the FDA and EPA’s current limit for mercury consumption is “too high,” she told Consumer Reports. The magazine is urging the FDA and EPA to recommend that pregnant women avoid eating any tuna—and to provide more safety information concerning tuna for pregnant women, children and people who eat a lot of fish (24 ounces of fish, around seven servings, or more per week).

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Should Pregnant Women Eat Zero Tuna?

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Shorter Trees Could Make Peaches Cheaper

by Kandace86G Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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When it comes to peach and nectarine trees, bigger isn’t necessarily better. An orchard worker can spend as much as half of his or her day lugging around the ladders required to reach the branches of a typical 13-foot tree. Plus, the danger of climbing the ladders drives up the cost of workers’ compensation insurance—growers of peaches and nectarines pay about 40 percent more for it than growers of low-lying fruit like grapes.

Now scientists at the University of California are trying to shrink the cost of labor on peach and nectarine farms by shrinking the plants themselves. In a 4-acre orchard south of Fresno, researchers are growing trees that they expect to max out at seven or eight feet. They say the shorter trees, which would not require a ladder to harvest or prune, could cut down on worker injuries and slash labor costs by more than 50 percent. If cultivated correctly, the mini-trees could be as fruitful as their taller counterparts.

If the experimental orchard works, it could have environmental perks too. In comments to UC Davis, one farmer estimated it costs him $1,400 an acre to thin his 250-acre peach and nectarine farm. Because of the high cost of ladders, many of his fellow growers are switching to almonds, he said. And almonds, as we’ve said before, are sucking California dry.

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Shorter Trees Could Make Peaches Cheaper

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Panasonic BK-3HCCA4BA eneloop pro AA High Capacity New Ni-MH Pre-Charged Rechargeable Batteries, 4 Pack

by 07ld5ksl Posted on August 3, 2014

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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The Supreme Court Just Decided an Internet Case No One Understands

by AlanKXQWcflxcog Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, handed over-the-air broadcasting giants—including ABC, NBC, and Disney—a big victory over Aereo, a tiny, internet-based startup. Aereo’s lawyers had warned the high court that a ruling against the company would sound a death knell for other Internet technology, such as cloud-based computing. But in all likelihood, the internet will be fine.

Here’s a brief history of the case: Aereo, a small Brooklyn based start-up, operates thousands of tiny antennas that capture signals from public television broadcasts. It charges its customers about eight bucks a month to select programs and record and stream this content to their Internet devices via the cloud. It has been touted as the VCR of the future.

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The Supreme Court Just Decided an Internet Case No One Understands

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At the Moment, Inflation Is Our Friend, Not Our Enemy

by ImogeneEnright Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Atrios makes a point today that’s been on my mind as well. So instead of writing it myself, I’ll just let him say it:

I think more people need to make the point regularly (even Krgthulu!) that the lack of inflation risks isn’t simply because we don’t have any actual inflation, it’s because if there’s one thing the major central banks know how to do — and are biased in favor of doing — is killing inflation. If we do wake up and discover that we’ve had sustained inflation at, say, the unimaginable level of 3% for several months, ushering in the Zombie Apocalypse, our great and glorious central banks will actually step on the brakes. Genuine inflation risk isn’t about a few months of too high inflation (which we should have but that’s another discussion), it’s about “irresponsible” central banks that will keep stepping on the gas even as hyperinflation is destroying the world. But that isn’t going to happen and no one with half a brain really believes it’s going to happen. Are those who fret about inflation evil or stupid? I have no idea, but…

In addition, I’d expand a bit on his aside that a few months of high inflation would be a good thing. That’s true, and it’s the primary reason we shouldn’t let inflation fears overwhelm us. If the CPI rises by 4 or 5 percent for a few months, that’s not a problem. It’s happened before, and then reverted back to the mean. Even a year wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, it would probably be helpful since it would implicitly reduce real interest rates and act as a spur to the economy. And if inflation stays at an elevated level for more than a year? Then Atrios is right: if there’s one thing the Fed knows how to do, it’s kill inflation. There’s a ton of controversy over whether and how the Fed can influence other things (growth, employment, strength of the dollar, etc.), but there’s no question about its ability to curb inflation if it wants to. This is something that left and right both agree about.

So yes: we should tolerate higher inflation for a while. With the economy still as weak as it is, there’s a lot of potential upside and very little potential downside.

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At the Moment, Inflation Is Our Friend, Not Our Enemy

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Want a job? Knock on Tesla’s door

by RufusLZIaogjuun Posted on May 19, 2014

A workforce in a fast lane

Want a job? Knock on Tesla’s door

By

pestoverde

Hey, Toyota, eat Tesla’s dust!

The electric-car maker added 3,000 jobs during the past year or so as it ramped up production of its Model S sedan and prepared for the release of an SUV model, building up its Californian workforce to 6,000 factory workers, engineers, and other employees. And the company is expected to add another 500 jobs in California by the end of this year.

Bloomberg reports that Tesla now employs more Californians than any other automaker. Toyota, which used to hold that honor, now provides just 5,300 jobs in the state. And that number will fall to 2,300 after it shifts many of its white-collar workers from Torrance, Calif., to Texas over the next few years. More from the Bloomberg story:

Led by billionaire Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, Tesla is the rare company doubling down on making products in California, which has relatively high labor and energy costs and stiff environmental guidelines for laying down new plants. Texas and other states, meanwhile, are luring manufacturers with vows of lower taxes and less red tape.

“Tesla’s scaling up here in California is terrific news,” said Gino DiCaro, spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association. “It’s also an exception — and we certainly need more of them.”

Tesla is now a bigger employer than many other high-tech California companies. It has a larger workforce than San Francisco-based Twitter, which employs about 3,000 people, and it’s gaining on nearby Menlo Park-based Facebook, which has about 7,000 employees.


Source
Tesla Edges Out Toyota as California’s Top Auto Employer, Bloomberg

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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North Dakota Is the Deadliest State to Work In

by AlissaVigna Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fracking has done some incredible things for North Dakota: It has the fastest-growing economy and lowest unemployment in the nation, and it is second only to Texas in churning out oil. But as with any gold rush, the boom comes with a human cost for those involved—illness, injury, and fatalities. (For a first-hand view of conditions in North Dakota’s fracking fields, watch the video above, which we produced in 2012.)

In fact, across all industries, North Dakota has the least safe working conditions of any state in the country, according to federal data compiled in a new report from the AFL-CIO. The report ranked North Dakota dead last for workplace safety. (Massachusetts ranked the most safe.) North Dakota had by far the highest overall workplace fatality rate, 17.7 deaths per 100,000 workers—about five times higher than the national average. According to the report, that’s one of the highest fatality rates ever reported in any state.

The rise in fatality rates coincides with the state’s oil and gas boom: In 2007, before the boom was really underway, the rate was 7 deaths per 100,000 workers, still on the high end but not exceptional. The chart below shows how that rate began to skyrocket in 2010-2011, just as oil production began to surge as well.

Of the 65 people killed on the job in North Dakota in 2012, 15 worked in the mining and oil and gas industry. Another 25 worked in construction. Some jobs that are classified as construction are in fact linked directly to oil and gas operations, like the workers who build well pad sites and roads before the actual drilling begins. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics records aren’t granular enough to know exactly how many construction workers were killed doing jobs related to the oil and gas boom.)

A spokesperson for the North Dakota Petroleum Council pointed to a slight drop in premium rates for the state’s worker’s comp program as evidence that “workplace safety has improved,” but the BLS data compiled in the AFL-CIO report tell a different story.

As blue-collar workers flooded the state for an essentially limitless number of high-paying, risky jobs driving trucks and working on fracking rigs at a breakneck pace, the energy industry’s fatality rate in North Dakota climbed to unbelievable heights. According to the report, in 2012 the mining and oil-and-gas sector rate was 104 deaths per 100,000 workers, six times the national average; in the construction sector, the rate was 97.4 per 100,000, almost 10 times the national average.

Tim McDonnell

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North Dakota Is the Deadliest State to Work In

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Test Scores Are Up! (Except In the One Place It Actually Matters)

by julyye49 Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

I periodically try to remind everyone that test scores for American students have not, in fact, plummeted over the past few decades. In fact, they’re up. To the extent that standardized tests can measure learning, American kids simply aren’t doing any worse than kids in the past. They’re doing better.

But there’s always been a caveat: this is only for grade school and middle school kids. All those test score gains wash out in high school, and today brings the latest evidence of this. Scores from the 2013 NAEP—widely considered the most reliable national measure of student achievement—are now available for 12th graders, and they confirm what we’ve known for a while. In reading, scores have been basically flat since 1992, and the scores for every racial subgroup have been pretty flat too. Math has only been tested since 2005, and scores have risen a few points since then. But not enough to demonstrate any kind of trend.

There are technical issues with testing 12th graders that can affect these scores. As dropout rates go down, for example, the test population becomes less proficient. And senioritis can affect how much effort kids put into these tests. Still, the best evidence indicates that we’re making pretty good progress improving the proficiency of students all the way through middle school, but we still haven’t cracked the code for high school. And in the end, that’s all that matters. It’s great that fourth graders are doing better, but if all those gains wash away in the final three years of high school, we’re not ending up any better than before.

UPDATE: Actually, math has been tested since 1990, but the test was revised in 2005 and scores before then aren’t comparable to current scores. A crude comparison suggests that scores actually have increased for 12th graders since 1990, perhaps by as much as ten points, though this is in direct contradiction to the long-term NAEP, which shows no gains at all for 17-year-olds. My own guess, based on both of these results, is that math scores have increased slightly since 1990, but probably not enough to really be noticeable.

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Test Scores Are Up! (Except In the One Place It Actually Matters)

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