Labor and Working – Page 191 – The Tarbabys Blog

Want to see a snapshot of the U.S. economy? Look at patio furniture

Associated Press

Want to see a snapshot of the U.S. economy? Look at patio furniture

It’s expected that there will be a patio furniture shortage until 2023, but ‘you’re much better off having too much demand than too little’

Associated Press July 7, 2021

John Hessler, 62, the patio section manager at Valley View Farms in Cockeysville, Md., poses in his showroom. AP Photo / Julio Cortez

COCKEYSVILLE, Maryland (AP) — People used to go to Valley View Farms to buy five tomato plants and end up with $5,000 in patio furniture.

This year is different. After a record burst of sales in March, the showroom floor is almost empty of outdoor chairs, tables and chaises for people to buy.

The garden supply store in suburban Baltimore has been waiting six months for a shipping container from Vietnam full of $100,000 worth of wicker and aluminum furniture. Half of the container has already been sold by showing customers photographs. The container should have arrived in February, but it reached U.S. waters on June 3 and has just docked in Long Beach, California.

“Everyone is just so far behind,” said John Hessler, 62, the patio section manager. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The Biden economy faces the unusual challenge of possibly being too strong for its own good.

There is the paradox of the fastest growth in generations at more than 6% yet also persistent delays for anyone trying to buy furniture, autos and a wide mix of other goods. It’s almost the mirror opposite of the recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009, which was marred by slow growth but also the near-instant delivery of almost every imaginable product.

What ultimately matters is that demand stay strong enough for companies to catch up and shorten the long waits.

“This is a very good problem for the economy to have,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist for PNC Financial Services. “You’re much better off having too much demand than too little, because too little demand is the recipe for an extended recession.”

Republicans have held out the shortages and price increases as a sign of economic weakness, while Biden can counter that wages are climbing at a speed that helps the middle and working classes. But the real challenge goes far beyond the blunt talking points of politicians to an economy being steered by a mix of market forces, tensions with China, setbacks from natural disasters and the unique nature of restarting an economy after a pandemic.

A sign is seen on a sold patio furniture floor model at Valley View Farms in Cockeysville, Md. AP PHOTO/JULIO CORTEZ

As America hurtles out of the July 4th weekend into the heart of summer, the outdoor furniture industry provides a snapshot of the dilemmas confronting the economy. A series of shortages has left warehouses depleted and prices rising at more than 11% annually as Americans resume BBQs and parties after more than a year of isolation. The industry cannot find workers, truckers and raw materials — a consequence of not just government spending but crowded ports, an explosion at an Ohio chemical plant and the devastating snowstorm that hit Texas in February.

Patio furniture makers interviewed by the Associated Press say they expect the supply squeeze to end in 2022 or 2023 — meaning it could remain a political flashpoint even if the broader risk of inflation fades as expected by many Federal Reserve officials and Wall Street analysts. The shortages reflect both the stranded shipping containers, a dearth of truckers and the compounded effect of a fatal explosion in April at the Yenkin-Majestic Paints and OPC polymer plant in Columbus, Ohio that depleted the domestic supply of furniture pieces.

The Biden administration, well aware of the challenge, has made fixing supply chains a priority. It’s also trying to direct more money to making the U.S. power grid and other infrastructure more resilient against extreme weather events as part of a bipartisan deal reached with Senate Republicans.

“You saw what happened in Texas this winter: The entire system in the state collapsed,” Biden said in a recent Wisconsin speech. “That’s why we have to act.”

Administration officials expect the supply chain issues to self-correct, though they’re cautious about asserting a specific time frame because of the unprecedented nature of the recovery from the pandemic.

They noted that a shortage of toilet paper when the pandemic started was fixed within weeks because factories could ramp up production. But in this case, Biden’s White House views the problem in global terms, with many of the challenges being in Asian ports, rather than a problem that is solely domestic in nature.

Republican lawmakers have placed the blame exclusively on Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, saying the shortages are causing inflation that behaves like a tax by eating into workers’ salaries and savings. Outdoor furniture companies do say that finding workers has become more of a challenge in part because of the greater unemployment benefits, but they don’t buy fully into the Republican line that government dollars have caused a lasting price bump.

“The Biden inflation agenda of too much money chasing too few goods is causing major harm to hard-working families,” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana said at a June hearing.

The reality is not so simple for William Bew White III, who founded Summer Classics, an Alabama-based furnisher whose outdoor products look like they belong next to a Gilded Age mansion or terraced hotel along the Italian Riviera. He summarizes his problems as the three F’s: foam, fabric and freight.

“The freeze in Texas closed down two of the plants that make the chemicals that make foam,” he said. “These plants were not able to reopen until mid to late March. And supply dried up. I’m not sure how someone that’s in the upholstery business makes it on 40% to 60% of the needed products.”

His company can produce as many as 3,500 outdoor cushions a day, but for most of the year he was not getting the supplies he needed largely because of snow shutting down the Texas power grid. He’s having revenue growth of between 40% and 60% on an annual basis and it’s hard to judge how much to increase production to meet that demand and whether that demand can last.

He is more concerned with what his Chinese furniture suppliers are charging than prices at home. His prices in China have jumped as much as 26.5% since January, sometimes retroactively on orders that were already in shipping containers.

“This is not sustainable,” White said.

In many cases, companies are simply trying to absorb the higher costs. Erik Mueller, CEO of the Cincinnati-based outdoor furniture and home recreation chain Watson’s, said he wants to protect his store’s reputation as providing value. He doesn’t see the situation as paralleling the 1970s mix of stagnation and inflation that helped to drive Jimmy Carter out of the presidency after one term.

“This isn’t the 70s,” he said. “We still have goods that are reasonably priced.”

While he believes that generous unemployment benefits have stunted hiring because people can earn more by not working, Mueller also sees the inflation as a spillover from the pandemic. Some people could not work because of the disease or their shifts were cut. The rush for supplies as economies reopened occurred too fast for factories and shipping firms not yet able to return to their previous capacity. All of that was coupled with a United States that after a brutal year simply welcomed the relief of lounging by the pool with friends.

The problem is one of market forces that are beyond anyone individual’s authority, even the U.S. president’s.

“You have just this exorbitant amount of demand due to a unique situation that was out of everyone’s control,” Mueller said.

If you want to fix climate change, you need to fix this flaw in conventional economic thought

MarketWatch – Project Syndicate

Opinion: If you want to fix climate change, you need to fix this flaw in conventional economic thought

Thinking along the margins does no good when what’s needed is wholesale change

By Tom Brookes and Gernot Wagner July 7, 2021

A thermometer at the visitors’ center at Death Valley National Park in June. AFP Getty Images

BRUSSELS, Belgium (Project Syndicate)—Nowhere are the limitations of neoclassical economic thinking—the DNA of economics as it is currently taught and practiced—more apparent than in the face of the climate crisis. While there are fresh ideas and models emerging, the old orthodoxy remains deeply entrenched. Change cannot come fast enough.

The economics discipline has failed to understand the climate crisis—let alone provide effective policy solutions for it—because most economists tend to divide problems into small, manageable pieces. Rational people, they are wont to say, think at the margin. What matters is not the average or totality of one’s actions but rather the very next step, weighed against the immediate alternatives.

The most effective way to introduce new ideas into the peer-reviewed academic literature is to follow something akin to an 80/20-rule: stick to the established script for the most part; but try to push the envelope by probing one dubious assumption at a time.

Such thinking is indeed rational for small discrete problems. Compartmentalization is necessary for managing competing demands on one’s time and attention. But marginal thinking is inadequate for an all-consuming problem touching every aspect of society.

Economics’ power over public discourse

Economists also tend to equate rationality with precision. The discipline’s power over public discourse and policy-making lies in its implicit claim that those who cannot compute precise benefits and costs are somehow irrational. This allows economists—and their models—to ignore pervasive climate risks and uncertainties, including the possibility of climatic tipping points and societal responses to them.

A return to equilibrium—getting “back to normal”—is an all-too-human preference. But it is precisely the opposite of what is needed—rapidly phasing out fossil fuels—to stabilize the world’s climate.

And when one considers economists’ fixation with equilibrium models, the mismatch between the climate challenge and the discipline’s current tools becomes too glaring to ignore.

Yes, a return to equilibrium—getting “back to normal”—is an all-too-human preference. But it is precisely the opposite of what is needed—rapidly phasing out fossil fuels—to stabilize the world’s climate.

These limitations are reflected in benefit-cost analyses of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The traditional thinking suggests a go-slow path for cutting CO₂. The logic seems compelling: the cost of damage caused by climate change, after all, is incurred in the future, while the costs of climate action occur today. The Nobel Prize-winning verdict is that we should delay necessary investment in a low-carbon economy to avoid hurting the current high-carbon economy.

To be clear, a lot of new thinking has gone into showing that even this conventional logic would call for significantly more climate action now, because the costs are often overestimated while the potential (even if uncertain) benefits are underestimated.

Marginalized ideas

The young researchers advancing this work must walk a near-impossible tightrope, because they cannot publish what they believe to be their best work (based on the most defensible assumptions) without invoking the outmoded neoclassical model to demonstrate the validity of new ideas.

The very structure of academic economics all but guarantees that marginal thinking continues to dominate. The most effective way to introduce new ideas into the peer-reviewed academic literature is to follow something akin to an 80/20-rule: stick to the established script for the most part; but try to push the envelope by probing one dubious assumption at a time.

Needless to say, this makes it extremely difficult to change the overall frame of reference, even when those who helped establish the standard view are looking well beyond it themselves.

Against the backdrop of this traditional view, recent pronouncements by the International Monetary Fund and the International Energy Agency are nothing short of revolutionary. Both institutions have now concluded that ambitious climate action leads to higher growth and more jobs even in the near term.

Consider the case of Kenneth J. Arrow, who shared a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972 for showing how marginal actions taken by self-interested individuals can improve societal welfare. That pioneering work cemented economists’ equilibrium thinking.

But Arrow lived for another 45 years, and he spent that time moving past his earlier work. In the 1980s, for example, he was instrumental in founding the Santa Fe Institute, which is dedicated to what has since become known as complexity science—an attempt to move beyond the equilibrium mind-set he had helped establish.

Because equilibrium thinking underpins the traditional climate-economic models that were developed in the 1990s, these models assume that there are trade-offs between climate action and economic growth. They imagine a world where the economy simply glides along a Panglossian path of progress. Climate policy might still be worthwhile, but only if we are willing to accept costs that will throw the economy off its chosen path.

Climate investments create jobs

The logic is straightforward: climate policies create many more jobs in clean-energy sectors than are lost in fossil-fuel sectors, reminding us that investment is the flip side of cost. That is why the proposal for a $2 trillion infrastructure package in the United States could be expected to spur higher net economic activity and employment. Perhaps more surprising is the finding that carbon pricing alone appears to reduce emissions without hurting jobs or overall economic growth. The problem with carbon taxes or emissions trading is that real-world policies are not reducing emissions fast enough and therefore will need to be buttressed by regulation.

There is no excuse for continuing to adhere to an intellectual paradigm that has served us so badly for so long. The standard models have been used to reject policies that would have helped turn the tide many years ago, back when the climate crisis still could have been addressed with marginal changes to the existing economic system. Now, we no longer have the luxury of being able to settle for incremental change.

The good news is that rapid change is happening on the political front, owing not least to the shrinking cost of climate action. The bad news is that the framework of neoclassical economics is still blocking progress. The discipline is long overdue for its own tipping point toward new modes of thinking commensurate with the climate challenge.

Tom Brookes is executive director of strategic communications at the European Climate Foundation. Gernot Wagner is clinical associate professor of environmental studies at New York University.

California braces for dangerously high temperatures in new heatwave

The Guardian

California braces for dangerously high temperatures in new heatwave

Erin McCormick in San Francisco July 7, 2021

<span>Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images</span>

A new heatwave is predicted to bring dangerously hot weather to California’s inland regions this week, as relentlessly high temperatures continue to torment the west coast.

Meteorologists are warning residents to prepare for “potentially record-breaking” temperatures as high as 115F (46C) in the Central Valley and 120F (49C) in desert areas like Palm Springs, with temperatures in Death Valley set to approach an all-time high. The heat is predicted to start to build on Wednesday and increase through the weekend.

“Temperatures are going to be about 10 degrees above normal for this time of year,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo a spokesperson for the California office of emergency services. “This will be a record-setting heatwave.”

The state is already facing extreme drought and fires spawned by the dry conditions. The fire situation could be intensified by gusty winds near the Oregon border and predicted lightning storms in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the forecasters said.

“The big story is the developing heat,” said Eric Schoening, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service (NWS). “This will be a long duration event, where it is not going to cool down much at night. So it is a dangerous time for the state.”

The warnings follow on the heels of last week’s record-setting heatwave in the normally-cool Pacific north-west, which left hundreds dead in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia from heat-related illness, and as North America emerges from the hottest June on record.

The fact that California’s heat is expected to continue at night raises the risks of heat illness, said Sierra Littlefield, an NWS meteorologist.

“When it’s hot in the day and warm at night, it really wears people down,” she said.

Littlefield said residents should prepare themselves to cope with the heat by drinking plenty of water, postponing outdoor work to the early mornings or evenings and making sure to get animals out of the sun. Residents should plan for a place to go, if it gets so hot they need air conditioning.

“People should know where they can find air conditioning – whether it’s with friends or at a cooling center,” she said.

The state office of emergency services is compiling a website with a list of cooling centers and tips for staying safe in high heat.

Forecasters said that those in the biggest population centers of the state, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which lie along the coast, will benefit from ocean cooling and not face the extra high temperatures.

One danger state officials are still assessing is whether the heatwave could result in power shortages, said Crofts-Pelayo.

She advised residents in the inland areas to pre-cool their homes, if they have air conditioning, and lower their shades to keep the cool air in. She also asked residents statewide to conserve electricity by shutting off unnecessary appliances.

“What we don’t want is for there to be a shortage of energy that requires power shutdowns,” she said.

BC Heat Wave Caused Over 1 Billion Tidal Creatures to Cook to Death, Scientist Says

EcoWatch – Heat Waves

BC Heat Wave Caused Over 1 Billion Tidal Creatures to Cook to Death, Scientist Says

By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams July 07, 2021

A mussel bed on Vancouver Island. Stephen Bentsen / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s “a frightening warning sign,” said one observer.

“Heartbreaking,” another commented.

“Can we now mobilize en masse to save all Earthly beings?” asked another.

Those were some of the responses to new reporting by the CBC on how last week’s extreme heatwave that gripped British Columbia may have led to the deaths of more than one billion intertidal animals like mussels and starfish that inhabit the Salish Sea coastline.

Christopher Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, told the outlet about how he had noticed a foul odor from dead intertidal animals on rocks at Vancouver’s popular Kitsilano Beach as the city experienced record heat. Harley then set off with a team of researchers to gather data on nearby coastlines.

What the researchers noticed, CBC reported, were “endless rows of mussels with dead meat attached inside the shell, along with other dead creatures like sea stars and barnacles.”

They tracked temperatures too, recording 50°C (122°F) on rocky shoreline habitats, well above the high 30s (around 100°F) mussels can endure for short spurts. Harley likened a mussel on the rock enduring the scorching temperatures to “a toddler left in a car on a hot day”—stuck “at the mercy of the environment” until the tide returns. “And on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, during the heat wave, it just got so hot that the mussels, there was nothing they could do.”

The heat wave was deadly for humans too.

Lisa Lapointe, British Columbia’s chief coroner, announced Friday that from June 25 to July 1, the province’s death toll was 719—three times higher than normal—and said heat was likely “a significant contributing factor to the increased number of deaths.” The heat wave was also blamed for dozens of deaths in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington.

The recent heat wave’s deadly impact on shellfish was noted in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as well.

The Daily Mail reported last week on comments from the family-run Hama Hama Oyster company in Washington. “The epic heatwave is something no one has seen and then we had a low tide that was as far as it has been in 15 years and it happened mid-day,” the company said.

The clams “look like they had just been cooked, like they were ready to eat,” the company told the outlet.

In a June 30 Instagram post sharing an image of heat-impact clams, the company had a clear message: “Please vote for politicians who are brave enough to address climate change.”

Park rangers find body after tracking footprints away from car in New Mexico desert

Fort Worth Star – Telegram

Park rangers find body after tracking footprints away from car in New Mexico desert

Maddie Capron July 7, 2021

A line of footprints in the sand led park rangers in New Mexico to a hiker’s body.

White Sands National Park officials found an abandoned and unoccupied car within the park at 11 p.m. on July 4. A rescue team discovered a man’s body off-trail the next afternoon, the National Park Service said.

New Mexico State Police identified the man as Jeffrey Minshew, a 63-year-old from Moriarty, New Mexico. The incident is under investigation.

“During the extreme summer heat, it is critical to be prepared and know your limitations,” park officials said in a news release. “For summer hiking at White Sands, the park recommends starting in the coolest part of the day, early morning or early evening.”

Volunteers with the Organ Mountain Technical Rescue Squad spent hours searching for the man’s footprints on Monday. Once rescue officials located the footprints, they tracked them for a half mile before finding the body.

White Sands National Park and its never-ending sand dunes encompasses 275 square miles of desert. There is no shade or water along trails at the park, according to the National Park Service. Hikers should be prepared with food and water, a fully charged cell phone and know where they are.

“Each year, park rangers respond to dozens of search and rescue incidents in the park,” park officials said. “These frequently involve heat exhaustion, dehydration, and injuries.”

During the summer, temperatures can rise above 100 degrees during the day. Over the weekend, the high temperature reached at least 94 degrees.

“We also recommend that hikers bring at least one gallon of water per person per day and high energy snacks,” park officials said. “Wear a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses, and lightweight, loose-fitting clothing with long sleeves and long pants to help protect skin from the sun.”

The national park is about 95 miles north of El Paso, and also sits next to the White Sands Missile Range, where testing for the first atomic bomb took place in 1945.

Australia mice plague: How farmers are fighting back

BBC News

Australia mice plague: How farmers are fighting back

July 7, 2021

A mouse on a plastic sheet used as a trap on Terry Fishpool's farm in the New South Wales' agricultural town of Tottenham on 2 June 2021 — Australian farmers have been locked in a months-long battle with hordes of mice devouring their crops

There’s a debate in Australia about how to deal with a huge plague of mice across the east of the country. Poison? Regulator says no. Snakes? That could create another problem. So what then? Steve Evans of The Canberra Times goes in search of answers.

A friend of mine still remembers the last plague of mice.

They took over his house in Dubbo in northern New South Wales. They were everywhere, hundreds of them, coming under doors, running loudly in the loft, leaving a revolting stench, not least by dying in inaccessible cavities.

His answer was a brutal trap made of sticky paper. The mice would stick to it and he would drown them in a bucket. He still remembers the horror of the squealing.

In the current plague, all kinds of other ingenious methods have been devised.

Most hardware stores have run short of commercial mice traps, so people are improvising. One fills buckets with water and coats the rims with vegetable oil, placing a peanut butter lure in the water. Mice find the peanut butter irresistible and slip on the edge of the bucket to their doom.

A child chases mice from a wheat hold into a water-filled tub acting as a trap on Col Tink's farmland in the New South Wales' agricultural hub of Dubbo on 1 June 2021 — Some farmers have set up water-filled tubs to catch the rodents en masse

People are sharing recommendations.

“Plaster of Paris in flour will kill a mouse eventually but I prefer to see where the mice die and being able to get rid of the carcass,” Sue Hodge, a cleaner in the tiny town of Canowindra, three hours’ drive north from Canberra, told me.

She prefers traps, though they aren’t infallible. She reckons that what she calls “light-footed mice” can still lick a trap clean and get away alive.

‘The ground just moves with mice’

Some farmers around here have turned whole shipping containers into traps. The trick is to lure the mice in their hundreds in at one end and funnel them through to the bait and a drowning in a tank at the other end.

But that is arduous and inadequate for the numbers involved, so some favour industrial scale poison.

In response, the government of New South Wales has allocated A$50m (£27m; $37m) in grants for a chemical called bromadiolone which has been described as “napalm for mice”.

A plane drops poisoned pellets for mice as it flies over a paddock containing a canola crop on a property near Gunnedah, New South Wales, on 24 August 2020 in Australia. — Poison is one method being used on fields but there are concerns it is doing more harm than good

The snag is that it poisons pretty well everything else, too and destroys an eco-system.

The stuff kills mice within 24 hours but it stays active for months, and goes into the food chain as predators eat poisoned prey. That has now led the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to decline permits for its use in some places.

Why is there a mouse plague?

It started in the spring of 2020 during the harvest season
Ideal weather conditions for breeding and a bountiful harvest followed devastating bushfires and a years-long drought
Mice flourished with plenty of grain to feed on due to diminished populations of predators
Infestations reported at schools, hospitals, supermarkets and family homes
Farmers grapple with the costs of pest control and the destruction of their crops
Some farmers have also blamed damage to machinery on gnawing mice

Australia fires were far worse than any prediction

Farmers rejoice in the rain after Australia drought

Iceland trialed giving thousands of workers a 4-day workweek and saw improvements in well-being and productivity

Insider

Iceland trialed giving thousands of workers a 4-day workweek and saw improvements in well-being and productivity

Stephen Jones July 5, 2021

Reykjavik hosted the first of Iceland's four-day working week trials. — Reykjavik, Iceland. NurPhoto / Contributor Getty Images

Iceland experimented with giving some of its workers a four-day workweek.
One percent of Iceland’s workforce participated in two trials.
There was generally no reduction in productivity, and well-being improved, according to analysis.

The success of two four-day working-week trials in Iceland could act as an example for other governments, analysts say.

More than 2,500 people across 100 workplaces took part in two government-backed trials, representing roughly 1% of the country’s working-age population.

Many saw their workweek reduced to 35 hours from 40 without a reduction in pay and saw no real loss in productivity, according to joint analysis of the trials by the UK future-of-work think tank Autonomy and the Icelandic Association of Sustainability and Democracy.

We first saw the news via The Independent.

The results add credence to the concept of a four-day working week without a significant cut in pay, which has been increasingly pushed as a remedy for improving work-life balance, boosting employee performance, and helping the environment.

The trials were initiated by the Reykjavik City Council and the national government following lobbying by civil-society groups and trade unions, which claimed the nation lagged behind most of its Nordic neighbors in terms of work-life balance.

The first trial took place in the capital, Reykjavik, from 2014 to 2019 and initially saw childcare and service-center workers cut their hours to 35 a week from 40. It then expanded to encompass staff members in the mayor’s office and care homes.

The second, conducted from 2017 to 2021, saw 440 civil servants from several national government agencies reduce their hours. Their roles covered both traditional nine-to-five hours and irregular shift patterns.

Contrary to claims that working reduced hours could be counterproductive, and actually lead staff members to work longer, the analysis suggests that overall there was no overall loss of productivity or quality of service provided.

In fact, teams were encouraged to work more efficiently by reducing meeting time, reorganizing their schedules, and improving communication between departments.

There was also generally an improvement in worker well-being. Perceived levels of stress and burnout fell in many cases, with many employees saying they felt more positive and happy at work as a result of the new regime.

Participants say reduced hours meant they could spend more time exercising and socializing, which in some cases had an impact on their work performance. In workplaces where there was no noticeable improvement in well-being, there was also no marked decrease.

More governments could introduce 4-day-week trials

The researchers described Iceland’s trial as a “crucial blueprint” for how similar trials might be organized around the world, highlighting that in the years since trade unions had been able to negotiate the right to shorter hours for 86% of the Icelandic workforce.

“It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks — and lessons can be learned for other governments,” said Will Stronge, the director of research at Autonomy, in a statement issued alongside the analysis.

Iceland is not the only national government to test the concept of a four-day week.

In May 2021 the Spanish government approved plans for a three-year pilot and pledged 50 million euros to support businesses implementing the plans, according to The Guardian.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has also highlighted the concept as a means of helping the economy bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2020 Iceland ranked 10th for the shortest working hours, according to latest figures by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with Icelandic workers averaging 1,435 a year.

People in Germany worked the least hours in 2020, averaging 1,332 annually.

The 27 European Union countries collectively ranked 13th, with 1,513 hours worked annually on average.

In the 35th-placed US, workers notch an average of 1,767 hours annually.

We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie

Daily Beast

We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie

David Rothkopf July 6, 2021

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photo by Scott Olson/Getty

How could so many Americans believe in “the Big Lie?” We see the numbers and we shake our heads. Poll after poll shows that one third of all of us believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even though the matter has been adjudicated in scores of courts. Even though not a single scintilla of evidence exists that the election was anything but fair.

Six months after the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes?

It’s a question serious enough that it deserves a straight answer, even if that answer makes us uncomfortable. And I warn you, dear reader, the answer will make you uncomfortable. So, if you are tender-minded or sensitive to self-criticism, or a credulous stooge yourself, this might be a good time to stop reading.

Trump’s Big Lie Isn’t About 2020 but All the Elections to Come

Because even the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate. We were raised on lies—including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today.

That’s the problem. We are as a society—and by “we” I mean virtually all of us on the planet —brought up to believe howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey from our very first moments on Earth. We have massive lie-delivery systems that are the core institutions of our society. And we have created cultural barriers to even questioning those fabrications which are most deserving of skeptical scrutiny. For example, we regularly label as sacred those ideas that are least able to stand up to scrutiny. (Heck, we have folks in our society who can’t even handle the idea that the history we teach our kids might actually be based on what happened, you know, back in the past.)

Our parents lie to us. Our churches, synagogues, and mosques lie to us. Our schools lie to us. Hollywood lies to us. Madison Avenue lies to us. The media lies to us. Our leaders lie to us. Our friends lie to us. (They do. Going to the gym couldn’t hurt.)

What is more the lies they offer are not always big lies (e.g. Buying a particular brand of beer will not make you more attractive) while some are just gross oversimplifications (e.g. The Founding Fathers did a lot of good… but they were not the figures carved out of marble we were sold for years). Some have a seed of truth within them but are gross distortions (e.g. Columbus did not discover America). And some of the time we invite the lies because they open the door to enjoyment (e.g. Keto? All the bacon I can eat? I’m in).

But one of the key reasons we buy into so many small lies is that we have been force fed so many big ones. I mean really big ones. I mean ones that make the current Big Lie look like one of those low-calorie snacks that is actually a high-calorie treat shrunk to a smaller size and repackaged.

QAnon Believer Teamed Up With Conspiracy Theorists to Plot Kidnapping, Police Say

The original big lies are so big that if you are like most people some of them are ingrained in your identity, they are who you are. They come from religions and heritage. They are cooked into the primal soup of our minds. Many of them have been around for longer than many of the “facts” we have and as such are so covered in the dust of history and tradition that they appear to be as substantial as what is true. Indeed, some have a timeworn patina that makes them seem almost more important than that which is verifiable or even knowable.

Social science research gives a variety of reasons for why we are inclined to believe “alternative facts.” (Studies show a person is “quick to share a political article on social media if it supports their beliefs, but is more likely to fact check a story if it doesn’t.” We tend to vote for what we want to be true or what our friends believe. According to Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California, “our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.” That said, another reason is often cited for our willingness to buy into the bullshit we are being fed. According to a 2019 University of Regina study, “People who believe false headlines tended to be the people (who) didn’t think carefully, regardless of whether those headlines aligned with their ideology.” So, one way or another, we fall for fake news because it’s easier for us, socially or intellectually.

Many of these lies were created out of necessity. Life is finite. (OK, I’m sorry. It is. Take a deep breath if you need to and then continue reading.) If we don’t come up with a good story about what happens after it ends or why we are here we will all go mad. So we make up preposterous stories about magic people in the sky and then immediately say that we cannot question those stories, that “faith” in them is more important than knowledge of what is real. Why? Because they will not stand up to scrutiny.

QAnon at a Crossroads: Leaders Try to Rein In the Crazy

When challenged, the defenders of these original big lies say the truth is unknowable. Good try. Hard to argue with that. We don’t know there is not an omniscient rule-maker beyond the clouds or a heaven filled with virgins to give pleasure to the faithful so how can you question it? But of course, selling what is unknowable as a truth is one of the most important categories of lies we encounter in life. Indeed, it is the foundation of much of (speculation-based and often hooey-ridden) human philosophy. And it works.

According to a 2011 poll from the Associated Press, nearly eight out of 10 Americans believe in the existence of angels and a 2015 poll showed 72 percent of Americans believe in Heaven and 58 percent believe in the existence of Hell. A 2019 YouGov poll showed that almost half of all Americans believe in demons and ghosts… and 13 percent believe in vampires. (Note: Over half of Republicans believe in demons, whereas only 37 percent of Democrats do. How far is it from there to a similar percentage of Trump voters, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, believing that the Hillary Clinton campaign was a hotbed of “pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse?”)

There are other big lies, of course. Some are related to the religious lies—like the divine right of kings or the lie that the clergy somehow are more in touch with truth than, say, scientists who actually devote their lives to studying the truth. Some come from political leaders. For example, the lie that to die in war is glorious is one that has done irreparable damage for eons. It has been disproven for thousands of years and yet remains so essential to getting young men and women to give up their lives to serve the ambitions of the rich and powerful that it endures. You know many of the other lies that have lived for centuries—about the superiority of races or genders or nationalities, about patriotism, about comforting ideas like that everything is for the best or things work out in the end. It’s not. They don’t. Read a book.

Republicans Who Watch Fox News More Likely to Believe COVID-19 Falsehoods: New Poll

We dress these lies up in protective cloaks. You will burn in Hell for all eternity if you don’t believe one set of lies. You are betraying your country if you don’t believe in the merits of a particular war. Don’t question your elders. If a teacher says it it must be true. Priests and rabbis and imams are tighter with the Alleged Almighty than you. (Do you capitalize the “a” in alleged when you are using it to question the existence of a God?)

All these lies are aided and abetted by the fact that simply believing in what you are told to believe is much easier than actually figuring out the truth. What is more, if your family and friends believe in a lie, challenging that lie might make you an outcast, might alienate those with whom you have or wish to have a bond. With the advent of social media, where like-minded friends become “editors” and select the news their followers see, lies spread among audiences inclined to believe and thereby endorse them. We live in an age of media “echo-systems”, ecosystems that reinforce disinformation spreading it from dubious sources like QAnon to Facebook to TV propaganda networks to you.

And of course, when lots and lots of people adhere to a lie it is seemingly validated. And to help that along for millennia, the purveyors of lies have made it clear that not believing those lies makes one an other, apart, the enemy, an infidel. It’s not just wrong to question these big lies, by doing so you actually side with evil, with the enemy. We have created a world divided and left bloody by the differences between the lies to which different groups of people adhere.

Which brings us back to today and to our own Big Lie of the moment. (Although I would argue Trump is responsible for two big lies at least—the other being that the pandemic was not serious, that science was not necessary to combat it.) When that lie is preached from the pulpit, propagated by elders and friends and neighbors, pumped up on your favorite quasi-news network and rejected by your enemies—by the other—of course you cling to it as though it were, well, gospel. That’s what you have been taught to do all your life.

Soledad O’Brien to Media: Stop ‘Elevating Shit That’s a Lie’

We have the Big Lie because we have so many big lies. We have the Big Lie because many of the most powerful institutions in our society teach lies and condemn critical thinking. And herein we get to the central problem of our democracy. If we are to have a government of the people—and that is for the moment, an open question, I am afraid—and those people thrive on lies, follow liars, reject the search for truth, fear science and history and math, don’t want to do the work required to figure out what is really happening around them—then we will have an irreparably fucked-up government.

We have known this is a special challenge of democracy and good governance since the Enlightenment. It’s just a bit of a sensitive subject. It calls more than just the ugliness and ignorance of Trumpism into question. Rather it notes that Trump is just like generations of other demagogues who sought to profit from the easy appeal of deception for the intellectually lazy, lock-step indoctrinated masses. Trump, like so many others since time immemorial, peddles lies because he knows people are buying, he knows lies are easy and the truth is hard.

Climate Change Is Making It Harder for Campers to Beat the Heat

The New York Times

Climate Change Is Making It Harder for Campers to Beat the Heat

John Schwartz July 5, 2021

Jill Laidlaw, a director of Camp Cavell, in Lexington, Mich., on June 29, 2021. Laidlaw who has observed climatic changes at the camp since she started there in 1984. (Ali Lapetina/The New York Times)

Jill Laidlaw has worked for 37 years at Camp Cavell in Lexington, Michigan, a little spot of paradise on Lake Huron. But she has seen trouble in paradise: climate change.

Temperatures in Michigan have risen by 2 to 3 degrees, on average, in the past century, and Laidlaw said she had seen the effects of that warming in many ways, from hotter days and warmer nights to stronger rainstorms, harmful algae blooms in the region’s lakes and an explosion of ticks. And increasingly common bans on any kind of burning have even restricted one of the most beloved aspects of summer camp, she said: “We’ve had ‘flashlight campfires’ the last few summers.”

Climate change, which affects many aspects of children’s lives, is upending the camp experience, as well. After more than a year of pandemic isolation and disrupted schools and social lives, the 26 million children who typically attend day and sleep-away camps are ready to get back to summer fun. But the stewards of many of those camps say that the effects of climate change — not to mention the continuing coronavirus precautions that many camps are dealing with — are making it harder to provide the carefree experiences that past generations enjoyed.

Rising temperatures, wildfire smoke, shifting species ranges and more are introducing risks, and camps are struggling to adapt. And with deadly heat waves, like the one in the Pacific Northwest, dealing with extreme heat is becoming a necessity to keep campers safe.

Beating the heat has long been part of what makes camp camp, of course, and while the connection between any single weather event and climate change varies, the effects of global warming are being felt in many ways.

“The reality is yes, they are having more high-temperature days, and generally more heat waves, and other impacts, as well,” said Donald J. Wuebbles, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. “When we do get rainfall, it’s more likely to be a bigger rainfall, and when we get a drought, it’s more likely to be a bigger drought,” he said.

As a heat dome trapped citizens of the Pacific Northwest in record-breaking temperatures that caused a spike in heat-related deaths over the past week, the directors of Camp Killoqua in Stanwood, Washington, made a decision: delay the start of their day camp. The heat — made even less bearable by the state’s coronavirus requirement that campers wear masks — forced their hand.

“We realized it would be too miserable for our campers to be here,” said Cassie Anderson, a director of the camp. “We just didn’t want to put our kids at risk of getting sick.” The pause was brief, however; within a day, things had cooled off enough that Killoqua reopened.

At Camp Sealth on Vachon Island in Puget Sound near Seattle, summer camp director Carrie Lawson said that the effects of climate change were evident. “This year, our county went into burn ban before the end of June, the earliest I’ve ever experienced.”

The link between wildfires and climate change is strong: The warming planet is making areas like the American West hotter and drier, with longer wildfire seasons; last year was the worst season on record for fire activity in California, Washington and Oregon.

Dave Jarvis of the Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp in Hillside, Colorado, said wildfires had forced him to evacuate his campers twice in the past five years — once, on drop-off day, as the parents were saying goodbye to their children. A nearby camp was able to accommodate his campers both times, but the 2011 fire kept everyone out of Rainbow Trail for five weeks.

And Lawson said that in two of the past three years, “our region has been blanketed in smoke from wildfires, making it unhealthy or even dangerous to be outdoors.”

When asked about how the burn bans and flashlight campfires affect camp traditions like making s’mores, Laidlaw replied with an email that simply contained a single image: a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

It’s not just camp days that have changed; with climate change, nights don’t cool down as much. Valerie Wright, executive director of House in the Wood camp in southeast Wisconsin, said that fans at night used to be enough to cool cabins and campers. “About 10 years ago, we noticed this was no longer the case,” and they installed air-conditioning in the cabins, adding significantly to camp expenses, after a “particularly brutal summer.”

Unpredictable conditions have become part of life for Julie Kroll of Camp Caroline Furnace Lutheran Camp and Retreat Center in Fort Valley, Virginia. She has studied the probable effects of climate change on her facilities, and her best-case scenario involved taking expensive measures that included installing air-conditioning, increasing insulation and replacing windows to combat an increase in weather extremes including flooding, snowstorms, microburst storms and derechos. “We are already seeing all of the ‘best-case’ impacts now, and I expect all to continue to worsen,” she wrote in an email.

In an interview, she added that she had consulted camp records of backpacking and canoeing hikes and camp-outs going back decades, and found that climate change and encroaching urban sprawl were having an unsettling effect. Water sources “that used to be reliable in the ’90s that are no longer reliable, or no longer exist,” she said, and “the river levels are no longer consistent.”

The coasts are affected, too. Fox Island Environmental Education Center, a Virginia institution run by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for more than 40 years, shut down in 2019 because soil erosion and sea-level rise destroyed so much of the island’s salt marsh that its owners declared it unsafe.

Recent surveys reveal that young people accept the science of climate change at far higher numbers than older generations, and so they take to the lessons. Today’s youngsters are conscious of heat and health, said Janice Kerber, director of the Everglades Youth Conservation Camp in Florida; they carry water bottles and use sunscreen. Kerber, who was raised in Florida, said sunscreen was rare when she was a girl.

She has been involved with the camp since 1996, and said, “There’s been a marked difference in how much hotter it’s been.” In the late 1990s, she said, a heat index of 105 was highly unlikely. Today, a “115 heat index is not unheard-of.”

Last year, the coronavirus pandemic drove camp enrollment down to 19.5 million from 26 million, said Kyle Winkel of the American Camp Association. As this year’s season begins, camp directors and counselors will employ a variety of techniques honed over the years to deal with spiking temperatures.

At Camp Longhorn, outside of Burnet, Texas, Bill Robertson, general manager of the camp, quoted the late Tex Robertson, the founder and his father.

“It’s not hot — it’s summertime!” he said with a knowing smile.

Camp Longhorn has always dealt with high temperatures, since, despite the proximity of the cooling breezes from Inks Lake, the thermometer can rise well past 100 degrees. A warming planet simply means closer attention to the things they have been doing all along, he said, citing procedures and traditions laid down by his father’s generation.

Longhorn staff members keep campers out of the sun from 1 until 4 in the afternoon. And Robertson says he watches for signs that it’s too hot for rigorous outdoor play, like “when the kids aren’t smiling and they’re not running to their activities.”

Water is everywhere. Sprinklers spray the grass, and the campers, and plenty of activities take place in the lake. Even in the age before ubiquitous water bottles, the camp built a multi-spigot water fountain that delivered a refreshing but hard-to-control blast known as “Old Face-full.”

Many camps turn their climate woes into a learning opportunity — part of their mission of connecting children with the natural world. “We’ve been trying to educate children and adults about nature and our environment since we started since the 1950s,” said Kroll. Laidlaw also said they taught campers about climate change, and added that she tires of the politicized arguments over the science of a warming planet.

To those who would argue against the evidence, she has a suggestion: “Get out in nature and see the changes.”

A 70-Year-Old Man Had 3 Tickborne Diseases at Once—Here’s How That Happens

Prevention

A 70-Year-Old Man Had 3 Tickborne Diseases at Once—Here’s How That Happens

Korin Miller July 4, 2021

Photo credit: Nataba - Getty Images — Photo credit: Nataba – Getty Images

The idea of having one tickborne illness is terrifying enough, but one man is recovering after being diagnosed with three at the same time.

The 70-year-old man’s health ordeal made it into BMJ Case Reports published in April, which detailed his diagnosis and recovery. According to the report, the man went to the ER with a fever, swelling in his ankle, and nausea. Doctors discovered that he had leg pain, too, and lab tests showed that he had anemia, low blood platelets, injury to his kidney, and elevated aminotransaminases, which usually suggests a person has liver issues.

The man mentioned he had small red bump on his ankle about a month before, and assumed he had been bitten by a bug. He was eventually diagnosed with Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis—three major diseases transmitted by ticks.

The man was treated with a combination of antibiotics, an anti-fungal, and an anti-parasitic medication, and he eventually recovered.

Being diagnosed with three separate diseases may seem like a lot after a tick bite—and it is—but doctors say these so-called co-infections happen more than people realize.

What is a co-infection?

A co-infection is when a person is infected with more than one illness at the same time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You can have a co-infection with just about any illness, from tickborne diseases to HIV and hepatitis.

While co-infections occur with tickborne illnesses—especially with Lyme disease and another infection—it’s pretty rare for someone to have three of these diseases at once, says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “Three is Olympic gold medal-worthy,” he says.

How does someone get more than one tickborne illness at once?

The same tick could carry several diseases at once, explains infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The black-legged tick, for example, can transmit Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis and “the same tick can infect the same person,” Dr. Adalja says.

Even though that’s possible, it’s still rare. “It’s relatively uncommon for a tick to have all three diseases,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. “It’s more common for a tick to have two out of three, and most common for a tick to have one.”

It’s also possible for you to be bitten by several ticks and not realize it. “Tick bites are often unnoticed,” Dr. Schaffner says. “A person can have more than one bite and get a co-infection that way.”

Do doctors usually check for tickborne co-infections?

“Most people who get tested for these things will also have routine blood work done,” Dr. Adalja says. Diseases like babesiosis and anaplasmosis will give abnormal results on these routine tests, like lower white blood cell counts and elevated markers for liver issues. However, doctors “don’t routinely test a patient for all three unless they have some reason to do so,” Dr. Adalja says, like if they practice in an area that has a high tick population.

How are tickborne co-infections treated?

It depends on which tickborne infections you have. Anaplasmosis and Lyme disease are treated the same, Dr. Adalja says, so, “it doesn’t make too much of a difference in whether both are caught.”

But treatment for babesiosis is different—it involves an anti-parasitic and anti-fungal medication that you wouldn’t use to treat anaplasmosis and Lyme disease. “It makes things more complicated and, because of that, it’s very important to make the diagnosis,” Dr. Schaffner says. If a patient has a co-infection and isn’t properly treated for babesiosis, they will continue to feel symptoms of the illness or even suffer complications.

If you’re diagnosed with a tickborne infection and you’re not getting better with treatment, Dr. Russo says that it’s important to speak up and keep pushing for answers. “Advocate for yourself,” he says. “If there is concern for one tickborne infection, there should be concern for all.”