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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
One of the major complaints Americans particularly young couples have is the cost of buying a house in the United States, and I don’t think many people understand what is really going on with housing real estate. Robert Reich addresses why this is happening in a very clear essay. If you, or someone you know, is looking to buy a house you might recommend this to them.
Drawing by Robert Reich
Ask average Americans why they’re grumpy — why, for example, they don’t credit Joe Biden with a good economy — and lack of affordable housing comes high on the list.
An important but little understood reason home prices and rents have skyrocketed across America — causing so many young people, in particular, to feel frustrated with the economy — is Wall Street’s takeover of a growing segment of the housing market.
The biggest reason home prices and rents have soared in the U.S. is the lack of housing. Supply isn’t nearly meeting demand.
But here’s the thing: Americans aren’t just bidding against other Americans for houses. They’re also bidding against Wall Street investors — who account for a large and growing share of home sales.
Democrats in Congress are finally beginning to give this trend the attention it deserves.
Let me explain.
The Street’s appetite for housing began after the 2008 financial crisis, when many homes were in foreclosure — homeowners found they owed more on them than the homes were worth. As you recall, Wall […]
Bill McKibben, Contributing Writer / Founder of Third Act - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Bravo Joe Biden. Finally, as this article describes, someone has stood up to the petroleum industry. A step towards moving out of the carbon era. Will most Americans know about or appreciate this? I doubt it, and that ignorance is part of America’s ongoing political tragedy.
‘Biden has called their bluff, and it’s beautiful to watch.’ Credit: Michael Reynolds / EPA
Ten days ago Joe Biden did something remarkable, and almost without precedent – he actually said no to big oil.
His administration halted the granting of new permits for building liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, something Washington had been handing out like M&Ms on Halloween for nearly a decade. It’s a provisional “no” – Department of Energy experts will spend the coming months figuring out a new formula for granting the licenses that takes the latest science and economics into account – but you can tell what a big deal it is because of the howls of rage coming from the petroleum industry and its gaggle of politicians.
And you can tell something else too: just how threadbare their arguments have become over time. Biden has called their bluff, and it’s beautiful to watch.
To give you an idea, politicians beholden to the industry are using this week and next to hold hearings about natural gas in Congress. Joe Manchin – who has received […]
DAVID BERREBY , Editor - the Robots for the Rest of Us - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
The AI revolution that is taking place, in my opinion, is not receiving anything like the attention from Congress that it should command. The United States Congress, particularly the House, reminds me of a kindergarten of spoiled brats arguing over who gets to get on the rocking horse. It is the worst most dysfunctional Congress in my lifetime, and the voters are to blame. How could anyone possibly think, to name but two examples, Jim Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Greene would be a good Congress member? We have the kind of Congress we do because American voters are not doing their jobs.
Inside the Guian Data Center of China Unicom, which uses artificial intelligence in its operations. Credit: Tao Liang / Xinhua / Getty
Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more “generative A.I.” Pundits compared the new technology’s impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution — or the discovery of fire.
Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology’s environmental footprint is large and growing.
A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity A.I. into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways A.I. could help reduce humanity’s environmental footprint. But legislators, regulators, activists, and international organizations now want to make […]
Here we go again. Medicine has known for decades that what are called Phthalates produce negative health effects. But they are oh-so profitable for the plastics industry. Yet one more example of profit being more important to an industry than fostering wellbeing because the people who lead the industry are personally greedy and lack a sense of ethics, and so tens of thousands of their fellow humans suffer.
Microwaving plastic food containers can lead to phthalates exposure. Credit: FreshSplash / E+ / Getty
A large-scale study in the United States has found that one out of 10 premature births is linked with pregnant women’s exposure to phthalates — chemicals commonly found in consumer plastic goods.
Frequently used to soften plastic, phthalates are found in items from plastic wrapping and containers to toys and personal care products, reported AFP.
“Phthalates are synthetic chemicals widely used in consumer products and have been identified to contribute to preterm birth,” the study’s authors wrote. “Increasingly, synthetic chemicals are being recognised for potential independent contributions. One class of synthetic chemicals, phthalates, which are used in personal care products and food packaging, induce inflammation and oxidative stress, and are endocrine disruptors, with varying degrees of estrogenic and anti-androgenic effects. Moreover, these pathways interact; inflammation can influence hormonal regulation in pregnancy.”
For decades, scientists have known that phthalates are “hormone disruptors” that affect the endocrine system. The compounds have been associated with heart disease, obesity, some cancers and fertility issues, AFP said.
Here is the latest report on global warming. It is not a happy report, and it makes it clear that unless humanity takes climate change far more seriously than it has we are in for catastrophe. “Doom is not inevitable,” we are told but it is getting much closer.
For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service.
World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts.
This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark ‘Paris agreement’, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.
Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists say.
“To go over [1.5C of warming] on an annual average is significant,” says Prof Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society.
“It’s another step in the wrong direction. But we know what we’ve got to do.”
Limiting long-term warming to 1.5C above “pre-industrial” levels – before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels – has become a key symbol of international efforts to tackle climate change.
A landmark UN report in 2018 said that the risks from climate change – such as intense heatwaves, rising sea-levels and loss of wildlife – were much higher at 2C of warming […]
Wealth inequality in the United States has become so exaggerated so outrageous and obscene that I don’t think most Americans can even conceptualize it. While millions of families struggle to have enough to eat and pay their mortgage or rent, there is a small group of men who literally make more every 15 minutes than most Americans will make in their lifetimes. Look at the graph at the head of this report. All of this has occurred because, beginning with the Reagan administration the Republicans, bribed by the rich — thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that legalized the bribery of politicians — have rigged the tax system so that the rich pay a tiny fraction of their income in taxes.
When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires.
For the last 18 months one of the most opulent and unnecessary vessels ever constructed has been floating in a narrow channel next to a jungle gym and a fleet of industrial cranes at the Port of San Diego. Built in Germany, and formerly managed by a firm in Monaco and flagged to the Cayman Islands, the superyacht Amadea is 348 feet long, with a helipad, a swimming pool, two baby grand pianos, and a 5-ton stainless steel art-deco albatross that extends outward from the prow like a bird reenacting Titanic. It can accommodate 16 guests and 36 crew, and costs $1 million a month just to maintain. Who, exactly, has been picking up that tab in the past is a matter of some dispute, tangled up in a web of trusts and LLCs, code names and NDAs, and legal proceedings in two countries. But the ship’s current owner is a bit less […]
The voters of Florida are getting what they voted for, a state government reconstructed by their MAGAt Republican governor and legislature to harm hundreds or thousands of children, the poor, the elderly, females, and the LGBTQ community. Florida is becoming a sad failed state. Oh, I should also mention that the Republicans they voted for are not properly preparing for the effects of climate change which has already made it difficult, if not impossible, to get home insurance. I hope the Republican voters are happy to live in the debacle their Republican leadership has created.
MAGAt Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Credit: New Civil Rights Movement
A central theme of Ron DeSantis’ reign as Florida’s culture war GOP governor and in his now-defunct presidential campaign has been “parental rights,” a far-right movement that began by empowering right-wing parents’ political and social grievances at the expense of children’s rights to a complete and well-rounded education, while ignoring the rights and needs of children.
Governor DeSantis’ infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law, first launched to include just children up to third grade, then expanded to all public school grades, was just the beginning.
Now, Florida Republicans including Governor DeSantis are moving to take healthcare, food, and workplace protections away from children.
“DeSantis and conservative/Trumpian/MAGA public officials” are “disassembling Florida’s social service safety net,” according to an op-ed by Barrington Salmon at the Florida Phoenix.
They are “refusing to allocate money or enough of it for school lunch programs to feed hungry children; rejecting no-strings-attached federal government dollars to expand Medicaid that would allow the state to enroll 1.4 million people; not prioritizing […]
This, I think, is an early sign of a trend that is going to radically change societies around the world, and is going to affect literally billions of people. AI and robots are going to change how everything is manufactured, which is going to radically change employment. What are those workers displaced by AI and robots going to do. Few in this dysfunctional school sandbox Congress, I doubt, are even thinking about this.
Atlas is by far the most advanced humanoid robot ever built, capable of explosive athleticism and remarkable agility Credit: Boston Dynamics
It’s a shock video because Atlas is unboxing and racking shocks – sorry about that. But it’s also a shock because Atlas has always been a humanoid robotics research platform, not a commercial product – and this new video has us wondering.
The work of building cars is perfect for robotic automation – large volumes, heavy parts, high potential for human injury, high precision and reliability requirements – and indeed, there are already a ton of job-specific robots involved in the manufacturing and assembly lines.
But there are also still a lot of jobs that look much more random and disorganized – and that’s where humanoid robots seek to step in. Obviously, that’ll be one of the early applications for Tesla’s Optimus robot, and we’ve seen recently that Figure is pursuing a similar path with BMW.
We didn’t expect to see Atlas rolling up its sleeves on this kind of work, and yet here we are:
