Turning CO2 Into Food April 11, 2017 Are you marching for science a week from Saturday? Click here! (“Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now on pace to double this century, reaching the highest levels in 50 million years. Without further action, we’re headed to a point of no return for the planet.”) But here for 11 minutes of good news: If astronauts on a little spaceship to Mars can recycle the CO2 they exhale into food they consume — with the help of some microbes whose name I can’t pronounce — what if the soon-to-be 10 billion astronauts aboard our little spaceship Earth could do the same thing? Taking carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into food?
Fareed: Trump’s Long Been RIGHT On Health Care April 10, 2017April 10, 2017 I was once on Bill O’Reilly’s Show. Another time, we sat next to each other at dinner (as fellow contributing editors of PARADE, the Sunday supplement). He was perfectly cordial both times. But he has a temper. I’d not seen these 90 seconds before. Charming. As advertisers flee O’Reilly’s show, he retains at least one prominent endorser: the President. Donald knows Bill well, he says, and doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. (Do it with a Tic Tac, and who really has grounds for complaint?) But a presidential endorsement is not what it once was. “Meet The Press” commissioned a survey to find out how people would feel about a product endorsed by President Trump. As you may have seen Chuck Todd report yesterday morning, a full 18% said the endorsement would be effective: they’d be more likely to use the product knowing it had Trump’s seal of approval. But 49% said his endorsement would make them less likely to use it, with more than half those going further: 29% of all respondents said they would actively boycott the product. I’ll tell you whose endorsement would mean a lot to me: Fareed Zakaria’s. For me, “must-see TV” includes Fareed Zakaria every Sunday morning on CNN. And here’s a surprise. He thinks Trump has for a long time, until very recently, been right about something really important. As he began last Sunday’s show: The recent Republican debacle on healthcare could prove to be an opportunity. You see, it’s highlighted yet again the complexity of America’s medical system, which continues to be by far the most expensive and inefficient in the advanced world. But Donald Trump could actually use the legislative collapse to fix healthcare if he went back to basics and to his core convictions on the topic, which are surprisingly intelligent and consistent. Really! There is an understandable impulse on the right to assume that healthcare would work more efficiently if it were a free market, or a freer market. It’s true for most goods and services. But in 1963, the economist Kenneth Arrow, who later won a Nobel Prize, offered a simple explanation as to why markets would not work well in this area. He argued that there was a huge mismatch of power and information between the buyer and the seller. If a salesman tells you to buy a particular television, you can easily choose another or just walk away. If a doctor insists that you need a medicine or a procedure, you are far less likely to reject that advice. Every advanced economy in the world has implicitly acknowledged this argument because they have all adopted some version of a state- directed system for healthcare. Consider the 16 countries that rank higher than the United States on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom. All have universal coverage and state-driven, guided or operated systems. Hong Kong, often considered the most unregulated free market in the world, has a British-style government-run system. Switzerland, one of the most business-friendly countries, has a private insurance system just like the United States, but found that to make it work, it had to introduce a mandate like Obamacare. I am particularly struck by the experience of Taiwan, which canvassed the world for the best ideas before creating its system. It chose Medicare for all, a single government payer with multiple private providers. The results are astonishing. Taiwan has achieved some of the best outcomes in the world, while paying only seven percent of its GDP on healthcare compared to 18 percent in the US. I asked William Hsiao, an economist who helped devise Taiwan’s model, what lessons they took from the United States. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) WILLIAM HSIAO, ECONOMIST: You can learn what not to do from the United States rather than learn what to do. (END VIDEO CLIP) ZAKARIA: Americans often assume that despite its costs, American healthcare provides better services than others. For example, we often hear about the waiting time for care in other countries, but according to the Commonwealth Fund, among industrialized countries, the US is in the middle of the pack for wait times behind even the United Kingdom. Trump has now taken up the call to repeal Obamacare. But until recently, healthcare was actually one of the rare public policy issues on which Trump had spoken out consistently for 20 years. In his 2000 book, the America We Deserve, here is what he said: “I’m a conservative on most issues, but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses. We must have universal healthcare. We need, as a nation, to re-examine the single-payer plan as many individual states are doing.” [10:05:04] Trump was right on this issue for much of his life. He has recently caved to special interests and ideology, unmoored by facts. He should simply return to his convictions, reach out to the Democrats and he would help America solve its healthcare crisis. Zakaria and Trump are both American born Muslims (except for Donald), both magnificently educated deep thinkers (except for Donald), both courtly and unfailingly gracious (except for Donald) — so, okay, sure: they could hardly be more different. Could they? Yet on health care, until Trump’s recent flip, they both quite sensibly come out the same place as the rest of the civilized world.
China: Moving Away From Coal, Filling The Void We’re Creating April 6, 2017April 6, 2017 When Trump pulled out of the Transpacific Partnership (that would have lowered tariffs for American exports and — importantly — solidified our leadership in the Pacific region), he handed China a tremendous strategic gift. That’s not what this Daily Beast article is about — All Mapped Out: How China’s Charting Its Course as a Superpower — but it’s useful context. Did you know that to the Chinese, golf symbolizes corruption? Take a read.
Simon Schama Saw It Coming -- Hillbilly Elegy and Your Daughter Pastiche April 5, 2017May 3, 2017 But before we get into all that — what shall we name the baby? Not mine (I’ve had a lifelong fear even of picking them up, let alone changing their diapers; I am enormously grateful to those who get them to age 2, when they become — sort of — people; and age 4, when they become — many of them — adorable; and age 10, when — the precocious ones — do magic tricks; and age 18, when their failure to register and vote makes me crazy, but it’s more our fault than theirs, because, “if the pupil hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”) Your baby. Or your daughter’s, or your co-worker’s . . . someone you know must be pregnant. If it’s a girl, I think we go with: Tesla. If it’s a boy: Einstein. (As in, “Get over here, Einstein.” “What do you think, Einstein?”) In the latter case there are potential pitfalls, to be sure; but I’m of the view that a little adversity in childhood can lead to a more interesting, successful adulthood. Click here for ten other suggestions, all from the world of inventors. Or you could go with Pistachio. “Pistachio Klein.” “Pistachio Smith.” “Pistachio O’Malley.” Think about it. (His sister? Pastiche. “Hey, y’all. We’re Peter and Patsy Podlodowski. Meet our kids, Pastiche and Pistachio.”) No? Well, your call. I’m just trying to be helpful. Meanwhile, I just finished reading Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance — or, more accurately, listening to J.D. Vance read it to me. You really have to start doing that. For autobiographies read by the subject, you are spending five or ten hours privately — quality, intimate time — just you and Trevor Noah! You and Steve Martin! You and Amy Schumer! You and Barack Obama! You and Tina Fey! From their vocal cords direct to your brain pan. Who gets to do stuff like that?! Reading their books with your eyeballs is okay — though hard to do while driving or hiking, waiting in line or resting. But kinda like reading a transcript of the Gettysburg Address when you had a chance to hear Lincoln recite it himself. Yet more being lost if Lincoln, like Tina Fey, had done impressions. Sign up with Audible.com and the first book is free. You can set Audible to read at 1.25X speed or 1.5X speed, which doesn’t sound squeaky and for many books is a more enjoyable pace. Read an eight-hour book in six. And if you have Alexa, and you come in from your hike and don’t want your earphones in while you soak in the tub, you can say, “Alexa, read my book.” And she will say, “Resuming Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance” and pick up exactly where you left off. What a world. And Hillbilly Elegy gets us back to the point. It’s an autobiography about a special tribe of Americans — hillbillies — of whom the author is one. A tribe for whom life has been exceptionally hard. And while it’s only a very little about politics (you will be relieved to know), and a tremendously engaging read (don’t worry about being depressed; you’ll really enjoy it), it does relate to today’s brief assignment — the excerpt of a column by Professor Simon Schama in the Financial Times that I offer below. Of particular note: it was written days before the election. . . . The polls are tightening and the result might be closer than the received wisdom supposes. This is the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court deprived the electorate of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the one aimed at preventing states and counties from manipulating registration. Now who would do a thing like that? Greensboro County, North Carolina, for a start, which has reduced the number of stations available for early voting from 16 to one, and thus has seen a steep drop in pre-election day polling. At the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, a city clerk made sure only one early voting location was available, a 15-minute drive from the campus because, it was revealed, he assumed most of the student body leaned Democratic. . . . [C]ontrary to many narratives, the root cause of Trumpian rage has not been economic. The vision, much rehearsed in the press and reiterated ad nauseum by Mr. Trump, of legions of the unemployed rising from the dereliction of the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the south makes a dramatic story but is actually a myth. Exit polls of nearly 100,000 Trump voters in the primaries produced a median household income of $72,000, about $20,000 higher than the national median. The most deep-dyed red Republican states are often those like the Dakotas or Nebraska with 3 per cent unemployment. Rock-ribbed Trumpian Appalachian states like Kentucky and Tennessee are among the regions which, far from seeing manufacturing disappear, are seeing it return in the “reshoring” of jobs and investment from China. GE’s Appliance Park is in Louisville, Kentucky. Under pressure from under supply of skilled labour, real wages are going up not down. So where does the flood of rage come from….? The poisoned fountainhead is, of course, the one subject barely touched on in the campaign and that is race. Eight years ago, elated by the Obama election, many of us naively assumed that epochal event would somehow take the edge of racial polarization. But the Obama presidency–high-minded, characterized by unflappable composure, exemplary in its domestic life–only provoked still madder furies of resentment. It was bad enough that an African-American had reversed what to alienated whites was the natural order of things; it was even worse that he should lecture them from his pulpit of intellectual superiority. When Birther Trump came along, giving disgraceful credence to racist fantasy, impervious to even the minimal obligations of evidence, conspiracy mutterings went mainstream. What Trump supporters celebrate as the repudiation of ‘political correctness’ is really the permission that their leader has given them to vocalize the happy rush of hatred. . . . Unexpectedly, to those living in the echo chamber of broadsheet news and policy seminars, conservative and liberal alike, something altogether outside the norms of their arguments has risen from history’s tomb: the cult of the pure national tribe is back with a vengeance. It stalks the globe, from eastern Europe to the crypto-fascist ‘alt-right.’ The world now divides into those who wish to live only with people who look, sound and pray like them, and those who live, in fact celebrate, heterogeneity, the marketplace of the modern city. (Thanks, James Altschul!)
Mayer, Mercer, Merrick, McConnell April 4, 2017April 4, 2017 Ms. Mayer wrote the book on Dark Money (now out in paperback with a new preface), and here, in the New Yorker, gives us Robert Mercer — The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency. Enough to make non-billionaires take to the streets, though the UN warns that Americans’ right to protest is in grave danger. (I’d say that headline is a little strong, but still.) Republicans effectively “filibustered” Merrick Garland for 10 months — they wouldn’t even let his nomination get that far (the ultimate filibuster) — arguing that we would have to see what the people wanted in the next election. By a margin of millions, the people wanted Merrick Garland. The Electoral College could theoretically elect a president who lost the popular vote by 20 million votes, but — although that would legitimately install an unpopular president — it would not represent the will of the people, any more than Trump’s loss by 3 million did. Not to mention the loss would have been by more if we had not been attacked by Russia . . . and that most Trump voters were more focused on jobs than on rejecting Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell was wrong to flout the Constitution, changing the rules to deny Garland a hearing. He was wrong to change his own standard and take Trump’s loss by 3 million votes as proof the people wanted a Republican-appointed Justice. And he will be wrong if he changes the rules the Senate agreed upon, holding Supreme Court nominees — though not lower court judges — to the 60-vote standard. Three wrongs, let alone all by the same guy, don’t make a right. I checked in with the friend who suggested Home Depot a couple of years ago at $89. With the stock at $147 or so, he’s holding on, hoping for double from here over the next three or four years.
The Russians Are Here! The Russians Are Here! But That’s Not What Scares Elon Musk April 3, 2017 Friday, I offered my high school pal Howard Blum writing in Vanity Fair on the possibility the Kremlin really does have its hooks into our president. Earlier, I linked to Russia’s Art Of War in Foreign Affairs. (According to FBI former special agent Clinton Watts — on yesterday’s Meet the Press — Donald Trump, wittingly or unwittingly, has helped the Russians amplify their attacks on America . . . and those attacks are succeeding, here and around the world.) Today, I offer high school pal Richard Factor’s thoughts on solar energy (he drives an electric car that he may soon be powered from his roof) . . . and whether you should take the plunge. Could Tesla become the first “terrabuck” company — worth $1 trillion? Elon Musk hopes soon to become the leading U.S. luxury car manufacturer; but that’s nothing. Imagine the millions of solar roofs he might sell, coupled to his battery packs. With continued improvements, how many homes a decade from now — let alone two — will have disconnected from the electric grid altogether (just as millions of cell phone customers have abandoned land lines)? How many cars and trucks and homes and businesses will draw their energy not from ExxonMobil and PG&E, but from the sun? (You probably know this quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” — Thomas Edison) But before you grow too sanguine (as if that were possible, post November 8), here is Maureen Dowd in Vanity Fair on what scares Elon Musk. As technology races ahead to free us from fossil fuels and high voltage power lines and perhaps even to colonize Mars, so does it also race ahead to make machines smarter than their creators. Uh, oh. One more way our clever little species can do itself in.