Author: A.T.

Re yesterday’s Ridiculously Simple Way To Save Half A Trillion Plastic Bags, a brilliant CEO me-mailed:

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Your post got me wondering: what would the impact be of not throwing out all our plastic bags?  According to my half-assed calculations, 100 billion plastic bags weigh about 55,000 tons.  Sounds like a lot until you realize that we throw out 268 MILLION tons a year.  So, how much should we be willing to spend to reduce garbage by 0.2%?  How much inconvenience and economic inefficiency should we bear for that goal?  But I guess we no longer believe in math when it comes to religious questions?

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I replied:

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I see virtually no cost in putting up a hook, and virtually no inconvenience in bringing a tote bag to the supermarket.

But I asked Alexa: “How much do 100 plastic bags weigh” (planning to multiply the answer by a billion).

She said (I kid you not): “A hundred plastic bags weigh approximately 600,000 metric tons.”

She also told me that each bag weighs 6 grams.  So then I asked her to convert 600 billion grams into tons. “Six hundred billion grams is about 661,400 short tons.”   Which is about 330,000 “real” tons — admittedly –still trivial compared to 268 MILLION TONS a year.

So then I asked her how much plastic we throw away each year.  She said: about 35 million tons.

My conclusion?  We are way overdue for lunch.  When are you free?

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Over lunch, I will presumably ask my friend to help save democracy — this will come as no surprise to you or to him — and he, being a libertarian who hates Trump but has little patience for what he views as wrong-headed liberal economics, may or may not chip something in out of friendship.  It will be a stimulating lunch either way.

In the meantime, I have little doubt, one or two of you will put some real effort into getting numbers we can rely on.  Alexa is a great resource (“Alexa: what time is the eclipse tomorrow?” “2:18pm”), but you guys are even better.

BONUS: FROZEN SPINACH

While we’re wandering through the WASTE NOT / WANT NOT aisle, tote bag in hand, I wanted to tell you that my ancient side-by-side refrigerator had an aneurism in December just as I was heading south for the winter.

The freezer side was not cold enough to freeze things; the refrigerator side, barely below room temperature.

I hate throwing things out — shopping bags, for example — but because today’s refrigerators are so much more efficient, and because the refrigerator repair estimate was “$575-per-hour plus parts” — if they could fix it at all — I figured: what the hell?  You only live once.

But it turned out the $1,199 replacement I coveted wouldn’t fit; and that even if I could find one that did, the current fridge is too big to remove.  Even with the doors off, it’s too wide to squeeze through the kitchen door.  “Well, how did they get it in there in the first place?” you ask. It is a mystery.  Best guess: it was there before the kitchen was remodeled with a narrower door.  Who knows?

So here I was four months later, back north, ready to confront the problem head on, which meant approving the $575-an-hour estimate, hoping for the best, and taking everything out of the freezer in preparation.

And that’s when I found three bags of Seabrook Farms microwaveable once-frozen creamed spinach stamped “sell by October 27, 2007.”

As long-time readers know, this is just the sort of thing I love.

Though no longer frozen, each pouch was still vacuum sealed.

I ate them over three successive days while we waited for the GE replacement parts to arrive.

Delicious.

Nine hundred forty-seven dollars and twenty-one cents later, frozen is once again frozen, cold is once again cold, and all is right with the world.

Have a nifty, thrifty week.

Waste not, want not.

Waste impoverishes us all.

Alexa tells me we use 100 billion in the U.S. alone.

We do this mainly because we either forget to bring a bag from home when we go to the store, or we’re not coming from home.

So the store gives us a bag for our stuff, or a few bags, which we take home and throw out, even though most are eminently reusable.

Even if you’re of a mind to see them reused, stores typically won’t (or legally can’t) take them back (could the plastic-bag lobby have had anything to do with that law?).

But how about this?  A stick-on hook outside the store, near the door, maybe like these that cost less than a buck each.

Without even telling the store (plausible deniability!), you’d stick one up and hang a few bags on it, to get this started.

Just above the hook, you’d tape a little TAKE ONE! sign that says, basically:

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Forget to bring your tote bag? 

Take one of these . . .

. . . and next time, bring two or three for the hook. 

We waste 100 billion plastic bags in the U.S. each year. 

Save the planet!

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It could take a little while to catch on, but where’s the downside?  Stores shouldn’t hate your hook — it could save their buying thousands of bags each month.

Some might even give you permission to put the hook INSIDE, protected from the elements.

Or — wonder of wonders — install an official Tote Hook themselves!

Remember take a penny, leave a penny dishes back when there were pennies?

These would be take a tote, leave a tote hooks.

I pile up 50 or 100 indestructible Fresh Direct delivery bags each year that, for legal reasons, Fresh Direct can’t accept for reuse.  But I’m certainly allowed to put one under my arm when I go to the supermarket or the hardware store or the liquor store.  If there were TAKE ONE TOTE HOOKS nearby, I could just hang up my extras and feel good about it.

No one would be forced to use a “previously owned” plastic bag or tote bag or Fresh Direct bag.

But wouldn’t you grab one from the hook?

Don’t you think this could catch on?

A tote-ally painless, essentially effortless, no-cost way to save perhaps half of the trillion plastic bags humans waste worldwide each year.  Maybe more.

BILLIONAIRE BONUS

Paul Krugman ponders Why Some Billionaires Support Trump.

He ends with this:

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. . . I’d also speculate that even billionaires who recognize Trump’s authoritarian leanings probably imagine, if they think about it at all, that their wealth will protect them from arbitrary exercises of power.

They should — but won’t — learn from the experience of the Russian oligarchs who helped put Vladimir Putin in power. They eventually discovered that once you’ve installed a dictator, your wealth isn’t the shield you might have thought it was and you may still find yourself sent to Siberia. And before you say that such worst-case-scenario thinking can’t possibly apply in America, bear in mind that the Trump alarmists have mostly been right and the apologists have mostly been wrong; I’m old enough to remember when Trump’s former acting chief of staff wrote that “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.”

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So if you’re a billionaire — or even just a deci- or centi-millionaire — read the whole piece and then, perhaps, click here.

Have a great weekend.

A Study in Senate Cowardice, Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in the Atlantic, begins:

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In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House.

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A short, gripping read.

Because what’s really at stake in November, when we say . . . “democracy is at stake” . . . is whether we’re going to live under the rule of law — imperfect as our justice system is — or under the rule of fear, as they do in “democracies” like Russia or North Korea, both of whose leaders Trump admires.  Putin wins the popular vote by a landslide, as Trump claims to have done, except that if you run against him, he murders you; and if you protest his war, you go to prison for 15 years.  It’s even worse in North Korea.  It’s Stalinesque.

Already in this country, you have to be somewhat brave to defy Trump — and he’s just a criminally indicted private citizen out on bail.

Imagine what it would be like if he were given the power to wreak his promised “vengeance and retribution.”

You have to be a little brave, if you’re a Republican, to cross Trump, especially if you can’t afford round-the-clock security.  He rules by fear.

We had a solution to the border crisis that would have passed Congress by a wide bipartisan margin, but Trump ordered it killed.  Trump needs the crisis for his campaign — needs “vermin” to rail against, just as another spell-binding orator did 90 years ago — and most Republicans in Congress are afraid to cross him.

You have to be a little brave, if you’re a poll worker or a judge or a witness or a CEO or an election official whom he might expose to the wrath of his mob.

And once the rule of law is replaced by the rule of fear, there’s no going back.  Just ask the Russians or the Haitians or the Venezuelans.

“It can’t happen here.”

Oh, but it can.

Please help if you can, so it won’t.

BONUS

The Great Struggle for Liberalism, by conservative columnist David Brooks, begins:

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In 1978, the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning us about the loss of American self-confidence and will. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” he declared.

Today, those words ring with disturbing force. The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals. Meanwhile, those who try to defend liberal norms can sometimes seem like some of those Republicans who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries — decent and good, but kind of feckless and about to be run over.

Into this climate emerges Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present. One of the powerful features of this book is that Zakaria doesn’t treat liberal democratic capitalism as some set of abstract ideas. He shows how it was created by real people in real communities who wanted richer, fuller and more dynamic lives.

His story starts in the Dutch Republic in the 16th century. The Dutch invented the modern profit-seeking corporation. The Dutch merchant fleet was capable of carrying more tonnage than the fleets of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined. By the 18th century, Amsterdam’s per capita income was four times that of Paris. . . .

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An interesting piece . . . about the importance of finding purpose in life.  And I just started listening to Fareed’s important new book.

DOUBLE BONUS

I saw SUFFS last night.  So good.  Grab tickets.

QUICK CLIPS

Two conservatives make the case for Biden (60 seconds worth sharing): “The nation can survive bad policy; we can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”

Chris Wallace asks Larry David about Trump (60 seconds).

Trump Doesn’t Want Nikki Haley Voters (But We Do) (30 seconds).

Lindsey Graham says it perfectly (60 seconds).

IRONY

You can’t be president if you were born in Canada and only moved here the following week, but you can be president if you’re a rapist who’s lied to the FBI, been twice impeached, plotted to overthrow an election, and sat idly by — for hours — while the Capitol was under a brutal attack for which you were “practically and morally responsible.”

I find some irony in that.

MILES

Bob: “Thanks yesterday’s tip about the Bilt credit card.  I looked but cannot find any mention of 60,000 bonus points.”

→ Oops!  Sorry not to be more clear.  It’s not a sign-up bonus; it’s the points you can get over the course of a year by paying your rent or condo charges via the card.

John: “Yes, the Bilt credit card does work for Condo and HOA fees — you just have to tell it to mail a check and do it enough in advance for the check to arrive on time. My wife is a master at this stuff and she set it up. BUT there are some hoops to jump through. You need to do 5 other transactions on Bilt each billing cycle or you don’t get points for the rent or HOA fees.  Also, on the first day of the month, you get double points on Bilt for every category (except rent or HOA fees). Since you need to do 5 transactions each billing cycle beyond rent or HOA, it makes sense to do them on the 1st. Gift cards bought from restaurants count. It’s a bit of work – it’s my wife’s part time job – but if you use the points it’s worth it.

PS – My book is now live on Amazon.

→ Thanks — and congratulations on the book!

Carl: “It’s a scam, just like your America-last communist administration.”

→ Carl is referring to what he calls “the small print” requirement to make those 5 other charges on the card each cycle.  But I’m pretty sure almost anyone charges 5 transactions a month — ranging from a cup of coffee to a couple of gallons of gas.  Hardly a high bar, even for communists who hate America.

Maybe they don’t want four years of vengeance and retribution.  Maybe they don’t want to hand Ukraine to a war criminal.  Maybe they’re tired of being asked to believe he won by a landslide when they know he lost, or that he’s a stable genius when his own Vice President, cabinet secretaries, and chiefs of staff say he’s truly dangerous and incompetent.

Maybe they’re shocked he blocked the resources and legal fixes needed to solve the border crisis.  He wants the crisis.  He sees it as his ticket back to power.  Power this time closer to the kind his friends Putin, Orban, and Kim Jong Un wield.  Rule by fear.

Maybe they don’t see him as a good role model for their kids.  Maybe they’re tired of being asked to buy Bibles and sneakers to pay his legal bills.  (One judge found him guilty of rape, another of fraud, even as he fights multiple criminal indictments.  Does anyone doubt he lied to the FBI about the documents he claimed not to have?  Even for ex-presidents, lying to the FBI is a crime.)

Maybe, at least for some, the “show” is getting old.

But whatever the cause:

‘They’ll Never Vote for Trump Again’: Voters in GOP Strongholds Souring on Ex-President.

We’re gonna win.  We have to.*

Please help.

+ Democrats aren’t perfect.  Surely Liz Cheney would agree, yet she’s devoting (and risking) her life to defeat Trump.

+ And some of us have taken “woke” too far (I’m with Bill Maher on that).  But some of the fever has broken, I think, whereas democracy, once lost, doesn’t peacefully right itself.  

The thing about woke, is that when it doesn’t go too far, it’s spot on.  We should be sensitive to and respectful of people’s views and feelings — including Trump voters’ views and feelings — and we should strive for liberty and justice for all, not just for those most like ourselves.

So let’s take a topic that 20 years ago, let alone 50, was rarely spoken of and that even now seems fringy to most people, because most still don’t have trans friends, colleagues, or family members.

If you’re in that boat, take a minute to read about my pal Martine Rothblatt and ask yourself whether she doesn’t seem worthy of respect and fair treatment — perhaps even someone you’d like to have over for dinner or in whose company you wish you had invested.   

And then perhaps read Friday’s Presidential Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility and ask yourself if there isn’t some stuff in there that makes you proud to be an American.

Yes, of course, we can discuss how to handle trans athletes in sports (as, for example, the governing board of the NCAA did in setting guidelines to keep things — in their judgment — safe and fair).  And, yes, we can have opinions on what parents and children — in consultation with doctors and psychologists — should do at various ages, and how much those very personal decisions should be made by state legislators.

In broad strokes, though, is there much, if anything, in that Proclamation you object to?

BONUS: THE MONEY TIP

I just signed up for a no-fee Bilt Mastercard.

I’m happy with the three cards I currently use and wouldn’t normally add another — but look!  This one allows you to pay your rent — and, I think, but don’t yet know for sure — your monthly condo and homeowners’ association fees — even though landlords don’t accept credit cards!  (Or else charge convenience fees if they do.)

Hello: another 60,000 frequent flier miles a year, free for nothing, just for taking the trouble to set this up.  (Thanks, Brian!)

> If you give this a try, be sure to set up automatic payment so as never to accidentally incur interest charges or late fees.

*Just listen to Lindsey Graham.

Just after I clicked “post” yesterday (Splitting the Bill at The Last Supper), the former president added “Bible salesman” to his long list of grifts. Yes, where some keep a Bible by their bedside, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches; and, yes, the one time we know he went to church — clearing peaceful protesters violently to make way — he held the Bible upside down.  But Two Corinthians.

Sixty dollars plus shipping.

Help if you can.

Decades ago I shared a beach house where, per House Rules, we split weekend food and beverage expenses evenly.

It fell to me to do the tally each Sunday afternoon.

One weekend it came to $62.40 a head.

I checked my math and made the announcement.

“Sixty-two dollars and forty cents?!” moaned Luis Sanjurjo, may he rest in peace.  “But I only had one yogurt!”

He’d been out house-hopping all weekend — no one disputed that — but rules are rules.

We laughed, he cried — and paid up.

That wildly expensive yogurt came to mind just now when, with Palm Sunday and Easter in the air, one of you kindly shared: Splitting the Bill at The Last Supper (42 seconds).

However they wound up splitting it (and whatever your religious beliefs — I have none), Jesus’s teaching were clear.

Love thy neighbor, judge not lest ye be judged — basically, be kind and help those less fortunate.

He was so badly treated, you might expect to see, “I’d like to punch him in the face” someplace in the New Testament (“Two Corinthians” maybe?) but no.

Instead, Jesus was the original bleeding-heart liberal.

Where Biden is a pretty serious Catholic and empathetic family man, Trump is an irreligious bully.  For him, white Christian nationalism is all about the white part.  He loudly advocated the death penalty for five innocent black teenagers and, even after they were proven innocent, refused to express remorse.

Yet millions today identify as Trump-loving white Christian nationalists.

This New Report Suggests the Election Need Not be Played Out on Christian Nationalist Terms.

Biden’s Done Playing Nice With Netanyahu — Politico.

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After decades of building a “close, personal” friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister. Now he’s hitting him hard — and it may be working.

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Schumer’s speech — a long but really thoughtful episode of The Daily.

Well worth the time.

BONUSES

+ George Santos is now running for Congress as an Independent because he finds the G.O.P. too “embarrassing.”

+ Mike Gallagher is timing his resignation for next month, ensuring his Republican seat will go unfilled until January.

+ A special election April 30 is likely to fill a vacant seat with a Democrat, at which point the House will be 217-214.

+ It’s likely no House Republican will have the courage to switch parties.  But if three more followed Ken Buck (this past Friday) and Mike Gallagher (next month) and resigned, the House would be tied 214-214.  (Imagine the two sides agreeing on a Speaker.)

And if none of that happened but all the Democrats showed up to work one day when a few Republican House members were out sick . . . well, we live in interesting times.

Help if you can.

Former Bain consultant Daniella Ballou-Aares worked for corporate clients on three continents but now runs the Leadership Now Project, comprised of business leaders committed to saving American democracy:

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So a few years ago, I was catching up with a friend from business school, a Turkish executive who, on the surface, seemed to be thriving.

She had a great career, a beautiful family, and she was just one of those people who seemed to have it all together. But in reality, she was struggling.

The Turkish government had started going after business leaders whose views it disagreed with. Some of their companies had been shut down. Others were in jail.  And she was scared.

And she felt guilty because she and everyone she knew had stayed out of politics. They had focused on building their companies and raising their children, and now they were paying the price.

As she left, she said to me with urgency, “In Turkey, we’re in season 10 in this series we call ‘The Demise of Democracy.’ In the US, you’re in season three.”

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That was a few years ago, before she founded Leadership Now.

Read or watch her TED Talk.

Help, if you can.

ASSISTED SUICIDE

He did it.  Right on time.

So sad; but so much more humane than what he watched his mother go through — and what most Alzheimer’s patients and their loved ones go through.

Hal Malchow: R.I.P.

Putin will be doing all he can — again — to elect Trump.

Liz Cheney will be doing all she can to stop him.

She disagrees with Biden on tons but believes all that really matters this November is preserving democracy.

She’s right.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s former editor-in-chief:

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America Isn’t Nazi Germany, but It Looks a Little Like 1933

To be clear, I don’t think . . . America is walking into a replay of 1933 . . . [but] we can see in contemporary extremists of both left and right echoes of the tactics the Nazis deployed—especially the way in which they mobilize language.

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A long thoughtful piece.

He works pretty hard to call out the left as well as the right, this being the Journal; but stops short of asserting moral equivalency.

It’s hard, after all, to equate . . .

“Folks, we are the United States of America!  And there is nothing beyond our capacity — nothing! — if we do it together” . . .

. . . with the rhetoric of carnage, grievance, vermin, and retribution.

Or maybe it’s Hungary that the Republican Party, now officially a Trump family affair, hopes to emulate.

Heather Cox Ricardson here reports on Victor Orban’s recent visit.

To Mar-A-Lago, of course, but also to the Heritage Foundation:

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. . . The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the plan Heritage has led, along with dozens of other right-wing organizations, to map out a future right-wing presidency. In Hungary, Orbán has undermined democracy, gutting the civil service and filling it with loyalists; attacking immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; taking over businesses for friends and family, and moving the country away from the rules-based international order . . .

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