Catherine Zhang

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 134

“Reducing the amount of food people in the UK waste in their homes appears to have had a knock-on effect in reducing the amount of food people need to purchase,” Tom Quested, lead analyst at WRAP, told me in email. “Furthermore, research focusing on the EU suggests that this effect could ripple all the way up the supply chain, reducing the amount of food we need to grow.”
Food waste’s enormous impact on animal welfare: wasted meat, milk, and eggs - Vox
Decreasing food waste should help reduce the need for increased production and slow down deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other environmental challenges.
Food waste’s enormous impact on animal welfare: wasted meat, milk, and eggs - Vox
Federal legislation to standardize expiration labeling — which is done by retailers and manufacturers — would go a long way to reduce consumer confusion and waste. Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic recommends requiring manufacturers that choose to use a date label for quality reasons to use the phrase “best if used by,” and reserve “expires on” for more high-risk foods.
Food waste’s enormous impact on animal welfare: wasted meat, milk, and eggs - Vox
Which is not to say that it’s impossible, so to speak, to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain. But the demands of capitalism — specifically that for food produced cheaply and at great volume in order to yield a profit — frequently undermine that goal.
Why Building a Sustainable Food Supply Chain Means Ending Factory Farming - Eater
In 2018, the journal Science published the results of a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of 40,000 farms in 119 countries. It found that while meat and dairy supplied just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein, they used 83 percent of farmland — and produced 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.
Why Building a Sustainable Food Supply Chain Means Ending Factory Farming - Eater
The choice before us — if we’re serious about climate action and animal welfare — is to either significantly change the meat we eat or eat significantly less of it. Should hybrid meat fulfill its promise, we may be able to do both.
Plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives are being combined to create “hybrid” meat - Vox
Advances like the James Webb Space Telescope make me think about how we, humanity, are a part of the universe that looks back upon itself. The Big Bang, the birth of stars, the formation of galaxies ... we are just as much a consequence of the physics and evolution of the universe as anything else that exists out there. So when we peer back through the cosmos with a telescope like the Webb, we’re completing a loop.
NASA released the James Webb Space Telescope’s first color images. They’re awesome. - Vox
One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else.
Opinion | It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam - The New York Times
A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system.
Opinion | It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam - The New York Times
“We’ve come full circle, to ‘let’s take things that are free and lock them behind cryptographic solutions and charge people for them and … make digital things that could be available to everyone ownable by someone,’”
From bitcoin to stablecoins to NFTs, what is the point of crypto? - Vox
“In some sense, the people pushing for mass adoption today, that’s a little bit risky, I think. Because it’s sort of okay if it’s the crypto zealots who are using this stuff, because they have had a lot of training in how to use blockchains without having all of your assets hacked from you all the time,” Carter said. “But when we do see episodes of mass adoption — NFTs are a good example — you see a huge explosion in fraud and phishing, because all of a sudden there are less initiated people that are using this stuff.”
From bitcoin to stablecoins to NFTs, what is the point of crypto? - Vox
In DeFi, instead of bankers and lawyers running the show, it’s software developers, but the show is kind of the same.
From bitcoin to stablecoins to NFTs, what is the point of crypto? - Vox
Beyond some modest (or, if you have enough money, significant) speculation, there’s not a lot for normies to really do in crypto. What people can do in the space currently also has some kinks, and some of it doesn’t make sense.
From bitcoin to stablecoins to NFTs, what is the point of crypto? - Vox
The business community will necessarily have a critical role to play, given that the private sector accounts for most of the capital and jobs in our economy, but it cannot lead. It is neither structured to serve this role effectively nor does it have the democratic legitimacy required. Instead, we must work together to fix rather than bypass our public institutions and democratic processes.
The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 3 | by Tariq Fancy | Medium
a generation of leaders that has done extremely well in recent decades is refusing to let go of a particular version of capitalism that has made them rich and powerful but is increasingly damaging society. And instead of reforming the system, they’re feeding us dangerous placebos intended to preserve the status quo.
The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 3 | by Tariq Fancy | Medium
if you favor top-down, government-led action to protect against something that’s a greater risk to your generation, why don’t you favor the same approach for something that’s a greater risk to my generation?
The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 3 | by Tariq Fancy | Medium
Worse, our lofty and misleading marketing messages were also delaying the patient from undergoing chemotherapy. And all the while, the cancer continues to spread.
The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 3 | by Tariq Fancy | Medium
What’s most galling about the entire debate is how Friedman’s own message has been mangled. Yes, he said that the sole purpose of a business is to generate profits for shareholders. But that didn’t mean that he thought no one should look out for the public interest: in the very same paper he argued that the responsibility for protecting society fell to civil servants, whose authority business executives should not usurp as such roles “must be elected through a political process.” In fact, he called the idea of business executives taking on this role to be “intolerable” on grounds of political …
The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 3 | by Tariq Fancy | Medium
“Nothing will work, but everything might”
Optimism as a strategy – The X Blog
First you cut the budget for government programs, then you do a study that shows that government programs are not that effective. Then you say, ‘government is a hopeless failure, let’s just dismantle this government program altogether,’” he said. Then whatever problem is at hand is turned over to the private philanthropic sector, whose proponents will say that they can do more good than the government could — and they have more of a justification for why they should pay less in taxes.
The real scandal behind ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt paying for Biden’s science office - Vox
It’s a question of what kind of presence private philanthropy should have in government. Government is expected to be fairly transparent and accountable to the public, while the philanthropy world is often opaque and subject to the whims of private, ultra-wealthy individuals
The real scandal behind ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt paying for Biden’s science office - Vox
Why are we dependent upon a tech bro being generous, in what’s supposed to be the richest country on Earth in the worst pandemic in a century, to outfit our medical workers?
The real scandal behind ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt paying for Biden’s science office - Vox
Whittaker is describing how the profit motive is entangled with racism, sexism, and other oppressions. It is inseparable from the injustices perpetrated against certain groups within tech firms, just as it inseparable from the injustices perpetrated against certain groups by the technologies that these firms create.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
These three elements—white-collar unionization, intercompany organizing, and management backlash—may very well define the next stage of the movement, as it evolves past its initial insurgent phase and looks to put down deeper roots.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
Historically, the tech industry had been relatively successful at giving its salaried staff the impression that they had real control of their work and real input into the direction of their company. The post-election moment demonstrated that this was not the case. Rather, it seemed to confirm the fundamentals of TWC’s class analysis: that the tech industry, like any industry, was divided into workers and bosses.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
The Tech Workers Coalition doesn’t see tech workers as a special kind of worker. But we understand that we do have a strategic position with regard to our place in production that we can leverage to stand in solidarity with other workers—not only with the service workers who work as security guards and bus drivers in our workplaces, but with all workers.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
For many of these companies’ employees, seeing their leaders so swiftly accommodate the president-elect after condemning him during the campaign was a disillusioning experience.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
These elements take a range of forms, but among the most consequential are those rooted in race and gender. To borrow a formulation from Stuart Hall, race and gender are modalities through which class is lived. In the case of the tech worker movement, they are modalities through which tech workers of the middle layers live the proletarian elements of their contradictory class location.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
But the most radical realization facilitated by these encounters would be the simplest: the idea that tech’s full-time office employees were also workers.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
suggesting that the tech industry’s managerial innovations are nearly as important as its technical ones
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
The second category is subcontracted office workers.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
The first is subcontracted service workers: those who perform service labor for a tech company without being directly employed by that company.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
Broadly, tech worker struggles have fallen into three categories. The first involves what might be considered bread-and-butter issues: wages, benefits, and working conditions. The second centers on the demand for safe and equitable workplaces, free from sexism, racism, and other kinds of oppression—the Google walkout is a good example. The third is motivated by concerns about the social harms inflicted by particular products, contracts, or technologies.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
There are lessons here for working-class organizers in countries like the United States, who will have to find many friends in the middle in order to build a movement deep enough to defeat their enemies at the top.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
Advanced capitalist societies generated more heterogeneous class structures, with growing numbers of people occupying clerical, technical, supervisory, and professional roles that were neither bourgeois not proletarian.
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement
enhanced oil recovery,
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
“the key message I take away isn’t that we need lots and lots of BECCS; it’s that we need to find a way to remove lots and lots of carbon from the atmosphere — whether that’s BECCS or other options that the modelers haven’t yet figured out a way to model.”
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
critics generally emphasize that the technology is too costly, too underdeveloped, and will detract from more important steps society needs to take. Other critics see the fossil fuel industry’s interest in carbon capture as glaring proof that this is not really about environmental protection at all, but a way to boost the bottom line of oil and gas companies. After years of denying and obfuscating climate science, why should the government help out these companies and effectively give them more political power to fight climate regulation?
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
According to the International Energy Agency, using carbon capture yields a 37 percent reduction in emissions per barrel of oil compared to conventional oil production.
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
Unions argue that the most important priority is to reduce emissions and decarbonize the economy, not necessarily to move off fossil fuels as fast as possible.
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
There’s also greater recognition among climate experts that emissions from the industrial sector — like those associated with aviation fuel, cement, and steel — can’t be easily reduced with renewable sources.
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
“There’s no good justification for doing carbon capture for oil, gas, and coal power other than to keep an industry alive that has not been good for the planet. That doesn’t mean there aren’t valid uses for it, and there are some — like in the industrial sector, heavy industry, where we don’t have a clear path forward yet. There I do think we should continue to do more research and development because ultimately we do need to decarbonize every sector of our economy.”
The Environmental Left Is Softening on Carbon Capture Tech
Short-term profits are everything. Years of reckless greed by Wall Street and financial operators dragging healthy companies into leveraged buyouts, and piling on so much debt they become weak, rendered them barely able to survive in normal times. Excessive corporate debt turns out to be a main underlying condition comorbid with the economic effects of the pandemic.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear. The right twisted and exploited nostalgia in the 1970s and ’80s to get its way, selling people on a restoration of old-time America with storybook depictions that omitted all the terrible parts of the past—including the epidemics before we had a U.S. public-health system and before government-funded vaccines that governments required citizens to get, the economic panics and collapses before governments intervened to help unemployed workers, the phony miracle cures marketed by huckster showmen before government put a stop to that.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
The faction that was now dominant in the Democratic Party had been pushing for a more centrist economic and social-welfare policy since the 1970s, but the Republican Party after 1980 had no comparable moderating faction—which in a two-party system meant that Democrats kept moving toward a center that kept moving to the right.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
That long view, however, tended to omit the history that had made the previous industrial revolutions come out okay in America—the countervailing forces that took a century to build, all the laws and rules and unions and other organizations created to protect citizens and workers and keep the system reasonably fair and balanced. And it was exactly this web of countervailing forces that, at exactly that moment, were being systematically dismantled by the right.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
What happened at newspapers (and magazines) back then also had disproportionate impact on this history of the right’s hijacking of America’s political economy, because once journalists were actively ambivalent about organized labor, that disenchantment spread more contagiously than if it had just been random young professionals bad-mouthing unions. News stories about labor now tended to be framed this way rather than that way or were not covered at all. Thus like most Democratic politicians at the same time, media people became enablers of the national change in perspective from left to right …
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on. Americans’ boats stopped rising together; most of our boats stopped rising at all. Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism
Many of the most interesting innovations revolve around novel production, funding, and ownership models that shift the balance of power toward workers and ordinary people.
⚡️ Take Back the Future! - Reboot
Federal funding also offers a sorely needed alternative to industry-dominated research.
⚡️ Take Back the Future! - Reboot