How the US is exporting bad food and eating habits around the world

In his last episode of the season of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj looks at how the US, through the World Trade Organization, bullies other countries to force them to open their markets to unhealthy foods exported by the US so that the problems associated with such foods that we are so familiar with in the US, like diabetes, are now increasing globally.

At the end of the show, he spends a few minutes giving advice on how to deal with all the problems that his show raises and he recommends that each person focus on just a few things to act and be activists on, so as to avoid being overwhelmed into a state of inaction on everything.

Bogus productivity cost estimates

My attention was drawn to this article that said a manufacturer was marketing to businesses a toilet that was tilted. The idea was to make sitting on it uncomfortable in order to discourage workers from using their toilet breaks to relax and avoid quickly going back to work.

While this was yet another example of the extremes some companies will go to to squeeze more work out of their employees, what grabbed my attention was this part: “Well, apparently going to the toilet is just not productive. In its advertising, StandardToilet estimates that £4bn is lost yearly answering Mother Nature’s call.”

One often sees these estimates about the losses due to some factor (say due to being stuck in traffic or power outages, and so on) but they rarely specify how they arrived at the cost. One method is to take the time that was lost and multiply by the number of workers and the wages per unit time. But how realistic is that as a true estimate of loss? Surely the employee who lounges for a few extra minutes on the toilet will have to still do their work when they get back? Isn’t what we are seeing just a time-shifting of the costs, rather than an actual loss?

It may be that the main purpose of such estimates is as a scare tactic to get employers to buy some product.

Australian government absurdity on fires and climate change

Parts of Australia are going though a terrible time with bushfires burning out of control, coupled with a drought and heat wave. The city of Sydney is blanketed by a smoky haze because of the fires and there seems to be no real prospect or relief other than hoping for rain.

The conservative Australian government. like the US government, consists of people who want to do nothing about climate change . Like Trump, the Australian government is a fierce defender of coal, and in its attempt to shift attention away from the contribution that global warming may be playing in creating this crisis, its deputy prime minister has issued a statement that comes close to matching the stupidity of Donald Trump who blamed Californian forest fires to the forest floors not being swept clean of debris.

The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, has conceded Australia must take further action to combat the climate crisis and acknowledged that the bushfires ravaging New South Wales and South Australia have further shifted community sentiment on the issue.

But McCormack, who is acting prime minister while Scott Morrison returns from a much-maligned holiday in Hawaii, also linked the fires to other causes, including dry lightning strikes and self-combusting manure. [My italics-MS]

Football team doctors are not the players’ friends

Professional football is a brutal sport and players get injured a lot. It should not be surprising that NFL teams have doctors and other medical personnel on staff and on the sidelines to take action if needed. The sight of these people rushing on the field when a player gets hurt may give us the sense that the teams care about the well-bring of the players. But what the spectators and even some players may not fully realize is that the primary aim of these medical staff is not to protect and take care of the players. Instead they represent the interests of the team and its owners who are seeking to protect their financial investment and hence they may overlook potentially dangerous and even life-threatening conditions in their effort to squeeze more playing time out of the players.
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Billionaires want to control everything

Cory Doctorow explains that in the face of protests from internet freedom advocates, the move to give control of the .org domain name registry to a billionaire owned private equity fund has been halted, for the moment at least.

Here’s what’s happened: first, ICANN (the legendarily opaque US corporation that runs the internet’s Domain Name System) approved a change in pricing for .ORG domains, run by the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC) through its Public Interest Registry (PIR), allowing the registry to raise prices. The change was done entirely by staff, without board approval.

Next, several of the people involved in that decision migrate from ICANN to ISOC or to a brand-new private equity fund called Ethos Capital, whose major investors are three families of Republican billionaires: the Romneys, the Perots and the Johnsons.

Ethos then buys the Public Interest Registry from ISOC for a little over a billion dollars — about a billion dollars less than it’s likely worth — and makes a nonbinding pledge to limit its price increases to 10%, compounded annually (!!) and starts a PR campaign to argue that this is very reasonable (however, none of the defenders of this practice are willing to refinance their mortgages on these “reasonable” terms, nor to offer bonds for sale at that rate).
…

The self-dealing and corruption on display are so revolting and undeniable that the news spreads and spreads, and becomes part of the wider critique of the monopolization of the internet and the devastating tactics of private equity firms.

Doctorow says that it will take sustained and concerted action by internet activists and lawmakers to shut this move down permanently.

Why Scientists Should Be Atheists revisited

My Oxford University Press blog post on Why Scientists Should Be Atheists generated an interesting discussion in the comments of my blog post here that linked to it. One issue that was raised was my use of the word ‘should’ and why I was singling out scientists with that imperative. Why should scientists apply the same standards they use in science to everything in life? Of course, no one can be forced to do so and people can (and do) compartmentalize their thinking to enable them to be scientists by day and believers in all manner of supernatural entities by night (so to speak).
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The carbon bucket will soon overflow

A graphic from the Global Carbon Project vividly illustrates how close we are to a tipping point in climate change.

What is the benefit of remote starting cars?

I came across this tragic item of a person who was killed when a car that had been remotely started moved.

A New York man has died after being crushed by an empty car accidentally started by remote control.

Michael Kosanovich, 21, had been standing between two parked 2002 Lexus IS300s, on 6 December, when one of them had been started remotely by its owner, police said.

The car rolled forward and he was pinned between the two vehicles.

Bystanders tried to push them apart but as they did so, the car rolled forward and crushed him again.

Mr Kosanovich was taken to hospital with severe trauma to his torso and legs, according to the New York Police Department (NYPD). He died of his injuries on 7 December.

The NYPD said Mr Kosanovich had been inspecting one of the vehicles at the time of the accident, intending to buy it.

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