Stephan: A free press is essential for a healthy democracy.. But there are Rightwing forces trying to destroy America's free press. I see this as just another datapoint on the trend describing the attempt by Republicans to destroy America's democracy. I tell you yet again, if you believe in democracy, and I assume most, but not all, of my readers do, you better get involved and not only vote Democratic in 2022 and 2024, but actively try to get at least 10 friends or family members to do the same. If the Republicans take over the House or Senate in 2022, you can kiss democracy in the United States goodbye.
Credit: Ricardo Rey
The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Prior to the building’s completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect “fragments” of various historical sites—a brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peter’s Basilica—and send them back to be embedded in the tower’s facade. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen before—“romance in stone and steel,” as one writer described it. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune.
Virginia Lau and Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir, - msn money/Bloomberg
Stephan: American workers have poor working conditions, low pay, little vacation time, and almost no child support assistance. I think that is one of the reasons we are finally seeing so much labor unrest. Here is what more intelligently governed nations with policies designed to foster wellbeing are discovering.
Iceland city Credit: ODD Andersen / AFP
Even as the Covid-19 pandemic forced companies around the world to reimagine the workplace, researchers in Iceland were already conducting two trials of a shorter work week that involved about 2,500 workers – more than 1% of the country’s working population. They found that the experiment was an “overwhelming success” – workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being.
The Iceland research has been one of the few large, formal studies on the subject. So how did participants pull it off and what lessons do they have for the rest of the world? Bloomberg News interviewed four Icelanders, who described some of the initial problems that accompanied changed schedules, yet they were helped by their organizations which took concerted steps like introducing formal training programs on time-management to teach them how to reduce their hours while maintaining productivity.
The trials also worked because both employees and employers were flexible, willing to experiment and make changes when something didn’t […]
Stephan: The ocean pollution of plastics by humans is an especially stupid thing to do because it is destroying the ocean ecosystem, and the impact of that collapse on human civilization cannot be overstated. It is becoming catastrophic. It is my personal view that either the U.S. Navy or a newly created agency should have fleets of ships out collecting this waste, while engineers screen off the world's rivers as needed. And here is some very good news showing the way.
Plastic waste is hauled onboard as part of the Ocean Cleanup’s latest test Ocean Cleanup Project Credit: Ocean Cleanup Project
Back in August, the Ocean Cleanup Project returned to the waters of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with a redesigned trash-collecting system that was its largest yet. This upsized approach appears to be paying some dividends, with System 002’s final phase of testing hailed a success and marked by a “massive” haul of plastic waste.
The Ocean Cleanup Project first popped up back in 2013 with grand plans to clean plastic from the oceans using massive floating barriers, and the system has undergone a number of reinventions since.
The System 002, nicknamed Jenny, that was launched in August marked a significant departure from previous iterations, as it ditched a passive design in favor of active propulsion. This meant rather than relying on floating system that moved with the wind and the motion in the ocean, the horseshoe-shaped Jenny would be towed along by crewed vessels at either end.
The idea was to move Jenny through the Great Pacific Garbage […]
Stephan: Just as President Dwight Eisenhower made the creation of the interstate highway system, so President Joe Biden and the Congress need to make the creation of a power grid to recharge EV batteries a priority so that we have one grid that can be universally used. This also requires creating a common universally shared charging connector.
Monitors manage New York’s electric grid on June 3 from a control room at a substation in East Greenbush. Credit: Kate Lovering/The Washington Post
COPENHAGEN, N.Y. — On a good day, a fair wind blows off Lake Ontario, the long-distance transmission lines of New York state are not clogged up and yet another heat wave hasn’t pushed the urban utilities to their limits. On such a day, power from the two big wind turbines in Vaughn Moser’s hayfield in this little village join the great flow of electricity from upstate as it courses through the bottleneck west of Albany and then heads south, where some portion of it feeds what is currently the country’s largest electric vehicle charging station, on the edge of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
There, at an installation opened earlier this year by a car-sharing company called Revel, on the site of the old Pfizer pharmaceutical headquarters, this carbon-free power can help juice up a whole fleet of sleek vehicles that aim to leave the internal combustion engine behind.
Stephan: America's wealth inequality is obscene, grossly unfair, and destructive to the country's wellbeing. If we don't fix our tax laws as Biden is proposingit is going to get worse, to a point where it will be be easy to repair..
New data from the Federal Reserve shows that the top 1 percent of wealthy individuals in the U.S. now have more wealth than the entire middle class combined.
As of this summer, the middle 60 percent of American earners, which economists typically categorize as the middle class, now own only 26.6 percent of the national wealth, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent control 27 percent of the nation’s collective wealth. This is the first time the richest Americans have had more wealth than the middle class since the Fed began recording such data in 1989.
The past decades have seen growing accumulation of wealth for the richest Americans, coupled with steadily declining wealth for the middle class. In 1989, the top 1 percent controlled 17.2 percent of the nation’s wealth, whereas the middle 60 percent controlled 36.4 percent.
The top 1 percent is made up of 1.3 million households making more than about $500,000 a year — a small fraction of the over 120 million households […]
