Robinhood's Imperiled Investors; Bison Management; and River Management

#Hahhah Levintova, "Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "From its founding, [Robinhood's] business model was dependent on customers trading frequently, allowing the company the chance to earn a different kind of a commission -- known as PFOF, or payment for order flow -- from every transaction." "Lawmakers, financial experts, and regulators have pointed out that the order flow payments present glaring conflicts of interest. One of them is that the pay-per-trade system incentivizes brokers and market makers to encourage more -- rather than more-informed -- trading." 

According to a recent lawsuit, market makers paid just 17 cents per 100 shares on regular stocks, but 58 cents per 100 shares on options contracts." "Robinhood is stuffed with video game-like elements that lure investors into trading more, which is a losing strategy for most."

"This March, the House Financial Services Committee echoed concerns that platforms like Robinhood, 'encourage behavior similar to a gambling addiction.' " "Robinhood is ultimately encouraging users to act against their own financial interests by making frequent trades -- while PFOF and its related profits pile up for the app and its superrich collaborators." "Typically, brokers take 20 percent with the rest going to the customers as price improvement. Robinhood's contracts flipped this ratio, giving it 80 percent."

Michelle Nighwis, "The Long Road Home," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "In the early 1700s, North America was home to an estimated 20 million to  30 million bisons, more than enough to circle the equator if laid nose to tail." "In 1874, after Congress passed a bill restricting bison hunting, President Grant vetoed it. Twelve years later there were fewer than 300 free-roaming plains bison left in the entire United States." "Over the past century, the expansion of industrial farming and the continued absence of large herds of free-roaming bison have shrunk the total extent of the North American tallgrass prairie from the size of Texas to little bigger than Delaware, turning it into one of the most endangered landscapes in the world."

The treaty [the Linnii Initiative] -- signed by more than 30 tribes and First Nations in the U.S. and Canada -- 'really is about renewal and and restoration and cooperation' says Blackfoot researcher Leroy Little Bear, one of the original organizers of the Linnii Initiative. "While there are now an estimated half million bison on the North American plains, some 30,000 managed primarily for conservation other than commercial sale, politics has kept the fences in place, and only a few bison are fully free-ranging." 

#Jeremy Miller, "The Whisper of a River," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "In plain terms, 'vocational passage' means that the fish can migrate and complete their life cycle without human intervention," "In less than a century, the San Joaquin River was transformed from a free-flowing salmon superhighway into a corridor of agriculture and commerce." "In spite of the limitations, the salmon have shown tantalizing  signs of revitalization."  

The salvation of the San Joaquin River and its salmon, Julie Rentner, president of the Chico-based River Partners, believes, will ultimately depend on replacing the 'siloed and segregated' water policy that has dominated California for decades with a more holistic, ecosystem-based form of management.  

Horrors of Xinjiang Camps; Material-Laden Deep Waters; and More

 #Peter Hessler, "Year of the Bunny Hill," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "Currently, there are about thirty American correspondents left in China -- the government expelled many last year, as part of a tit-for-tat exchange with the Trump Administration."

"In China, where very few people know somebody who has been infected, the government pandemic strategy has enjoyed broad popular support, and, in a repressive political climate, it's particularly unlikely that citizens will question what's going on in Xinjiang." But [Peter Hessler] "can also recognize these same qualities -- dedication, meticulousness, attention to detail -- applied to horrifying effect in eyewitness accounts of the Xinjiang camps. The strategy is zero tolerance: essentially, the government has approached Ulghurs and other Muslim people as if they could be stamped out with relentless vigilance." 

#Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Deep," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "Under international law, countries control the waters within two hundred miles of their shores. Beyond that, the oceans and all they contain are considered 'the common heritage of mankind.' This realm, which encompasses nearly a hundred million square miles of seafloor, is referred to in I.S.A.-speak as the Area." 

"It has been estimated that, collectively, the nodules on the bottom of the ocean contain six times as much cobalt, and three times as much nickel, [as on land]." "The 'sunlight zone' extends down about seven hundred feet, the 'twilight zone,' another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that -- in the 'midnight zone,' the 'abyssal zone,' and the 'hadal zone '-- there's only blackness, and the light created by life itself." "All marine photosynthesis takes place in the sunlight zone. Beneath that, food is in such short supply that the occasional dead whale that falls to the ocean floor represents a major source of nutrients." 

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Viral Theories," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "The market and the institute have at times served as shorthand for the broad sets of possible answers about the origin of the virus: that it was 'zoonic,' meaning that it traveled directly from animals, or that it was transmitted by an accidental 'lab leak' from a place such as the Wuhan Institute." 

"According to official figures, COVID-19 has killed almost four million people; however, a study by 'The Economist' concludes that the true number may be close to thirteen million. Partisanship, in whatever form, can't be the guide here." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Letter writer Allen Frances, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. "But one must consider the fact that the history of psychiatry is filled with fad diagnoses  that lead to fake epidemics: while human nature is remarkably stable, the ways of labeling emotional diseases are changeable and subject to fashion."

*Lindsey Botts, "Open Season on Wolves," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "Wisconsin set a target quota of 119 wolves outside of tribal lands, but issued almost 2,400 hunting tags -- more than twice the estimated number of wolves in the state." "State legislatures are resurrecting barbaric old laws designed to increase hunting, reduce wolf populations and stymie any hope of further recovery."

*Kate Gordon, "Ocean's Eleven Zillion," Sierra, Summer 2021. - "Herring numbers have been trending down, but climate is not the only reason. Overfishing could be a factor. Habitat destruction is almost certainly another -- the eelgrass that herring lay eggs on has gotten trashed by waterfront development, chain ;dragged by moored or anchored boats, and the 'Cosco Busan' oil spill." 

Homeschooling; Jim Crow Again; Public Transit; and More

 #Casey Parks, "Going Home," The New Yorker June 21, 2021. - "(Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent on reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)" "Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent." "In 2020, around seventy percent of Detroit public school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state." 

"Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college, refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade." " 'United States History for Christian Schools,' first published in 1991, stated that most slave-holders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery 'is an example of the far reaching consequences of sin.' " 

"Betsy DeVos's first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding, while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs." 

"About half of Detroit's students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city."

#Ari Berman, "Facing Down Jim Crow Again," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. "The basic idea is the same: to couch voting restrictions in race-blind language to disenfranchise new voters and communities of color." "There are strong similarities between the Mississippi plan of 1890 and the Georgia plan of 2021." President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asked the Georgia state legislature to appoint its own presidential electors to overturn the will of the voters. 

The overall election board in Georgia has the authority to take over up to four county election boards it deems underperforming. "And since November, at least nine GOP-controlled counties have dissolved their bipartisan election boards to create all-Republican panels." 

"By the early 1900s, only 7percent of Black residents were registered to vote in seven Southern states, according to data compiled by the historian, Morgan Kausser, and Black turnout fell from 61 percent of the voting-age population in 1880 to 2 percent in 1912." The states-right jurisprudence of the post-Reconstruction era has been resurrected.

#Rachal Monroe, "The Go-Between," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. -"The half-dozen ransomware negotiations specialists and the insurance companies they regularly partner with, help people navigate the world of cyber extortion. But they've also been accused of abetting crime by facilitating payments to hackers." "By 2015, The F.B.I. had estimated that the U.S. was subjected to a thousand ransomware-recovery attacks per day; the next year, that number had quadrupled.:

"In 2018, the average payment was about seven thousand dollars according to a ransomware-recovery specialist [online company, Covewear (sp?)] By 2020, further increases in average payments caused some cyber-insurance companies began to exit the market. "Around three quarters of Fortune 500 companies eventually invested in kidnap-and-ransom insurance, but there was some discomfort with an industry that turned a profit by funneling money to the Mafia, terrorist groups, and criminal gangs." "These days, some ninety per cent of kidnappings are resolved, when specialists are involved, the success rate rises to ninety-seven percent."  

#Aaaron Wiener, "A Ride, Not a Privilege," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The cuts that cash-strapped transit agencies proposed, before being bailed out by Congress -- eliminating 40 percent of New York's City's subway services, a fifth of the DC regions Metro stations, and two-thirds of Atlanta's bus routes -- wouldn't have been their instant demise, but it was hard to see a way out of the death-spiral of mutually reinforcing service cuts and ridership losses."

"There's something for everyone in good public transit. It's essential to curbing climate change. The American Public Association estimates that every dollar spent on transit generates $15 in economic activity."

#Tom Philpott. "Empire of Dirt," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The Gateses own 242,000 acres nationwide, an empire of dirt more than 1.5 times the size of Chicago, and worth a cool $5 billion." "The world's cache of arable land is shrinking under pressure from sprawl, pollution, and desertification. Between 1940 and 2015, the average price of an acre of farmland increased six-fold, and economists expect that trendline to steepen."

Juneteenth; ACT UP; and Voter Fraud Fiction

 #Jarrell Ross, "Who made Juneteenth?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - [Robert C. Conner, author of 'General Gordon Granger Behind Juneteenth'] Gen. Granger's General Order No. 3 "declared absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves." "As word spread, so did jubilation, shock, religious awe and anger. But Black people have always been involved in the fight to make our own American lives, demanding something of the country that stole so much from us, that fact is by folktale and firm record, key to the Juneteenth story." 

#Michael Specter, "In the Midnight Hour," The New Yorker, June 14, 2021. - "ACT UP was born, in 1987, when tens of thousands of Americans -- mostly gay men -- had died of AIDS, and more were dying every day, even as the government remained largely indifferent." 

"ACT UP helped establish the first successful needle-exchange programs in New York City. It also took on insurance practices like the exclusion of single men who lived in predominantly gay neighborhoods."

"By 1990, the F.D.A. had adopted this approach (known as the 'parallel track'), which would make  selected drugs available to H.I.V. patients." "Today, drug candidates for life-threatening conditions are frequently put on a parallel track for 'expanded access.' " 

"The politics of AIDS -- 'gay-related immune deficiency,' or GRID -- was an early designation, as if a medical condition might have a sexual orientation, was inevitably a connection with homophobia." 

"During the late eighties, countless T-shirts bore the logo, and 'Silence = Death' stickers could be found on what seemed like every newspaper box or wall in New York City." "When people of color raised issues of particular concern to them, they routinely met the rejoiner, 'What does this have to do with AIDS?, or were told, 'We don't have time.' " "In the end, in what was called ACT UP's 'tragic split,' was precipitated more by disagreements over research than by disagreements over race."

"Any list of the most important medical trials of modern times would have to include the AIDS Clinical Trials Group Protocol 076 study, which was launched in 1991. That study was designed to determine      whether the antiretroviral AZT, administered during advanced pregnancy, would have prevented H.I.V. transmission from mother to child."

#Sue Halpern, "Anti-democratic," The New Yorker, June 14, 2021. - "Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last year's election was about 0.00006 percent of total ballots cast." "Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast  ballots, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University." "In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for 'technical infractions,' such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the polls." "Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers."

"The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohost of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the the ultimate goal of the current Republican effort. It's up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy."

ADDENDUMS:

*Letter writer Annamarie Pluhar, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "There are millions of spare bedrooms in the United States, many of them in the homes of seniors who live alone. In the midst of an affordable-housing crisis, helping seniors find housemates who can offer companionship in exchange for reduced rent is a win-win proposition."

*Letter writer Arthur Hoolerman, The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. - "As the country's population ages, the loneliness epidemic will only become more pronounced. A higher moral imperative than objectivity is the alleviation of suffering. If a senior's life is improved by the harmless private fiction of  rebo-pet possessing real emotions, it is a good thing."

*Hannah Fry, "Maps Without Places," The New Yorker, June 21, 2021. "Back when long distance travel was provided by horse-drawn stagecoaches, departure timetables were suggestive rather than definitive."

Abortion Burdens; GOP Content Creators; and Natural Gas Setbacks

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Undue Burdens," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Mississippi imposes a twenty-hour waiting period after mandating in-person counselling." "Cruelly, fifteen weeks is well before the point at which a fetus would be viable outside the womb, and that is also the point at which the Supreme Court has said that a woman's interest n controlling her own body outweighs any other interests the state has."

"The Guttmacher Institute tallied twenty-eight  new restrictions signed into law in the four days between April 26th and April 29th alone." About ninety per cent of the counties in the United States lack an abortion clinic." Early in June, the Texas state legislature approved  what is known as a 'trigger law,'  which would go into effect if Roe is overturned. It would ban abortion almost entirely as would similar trigger laws that exist in in a dozen states, such as Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah.

#Tim Murphy, "Mr. Troll Goes to Washington," Mother Jones , July + August 2021. Th GOP's most ambitious officials view their primary responsibility less as public servants than as content creators, churning out an endless stream of takes, memes, studies, and podcasts. So any podcasts." "There was no issue grave enough to take seriously, too petty to weigh in on. Anything could be resolved via tweet, precisely because nothing really can: the ephemerality was the point."

"The biggest crises in America right now, according to Cruz, CPAC, and Trump, are the interlocking threats of Big Tech and 'cancel culture.' But with a nudge from Trump, the right has become ever more dissociated from reality, channeling the energy into an endless series of fights over 'deplatforming' and who's triggering whom."

#Rebcca Leber, "Gaslit," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "Burning natural gas in commercial and residential buildings accounts for more than 10 percent of US emissions, so moving toward homes and apartments powered by wind and solar electivity instead could make a real dent. Gas stoves and ovens also produce far more indoor air pollution than most people realize; running a gas stove and oven for just an hour can produce unsafe pollution levels throughout your house all day." 

"The gas industry also has worked aggressively, with legislation in seven states to enact laws -- at least 14 more have bills that would prevent cities from passing cleaner building codes." "Over the past hundred years, gas companies have engaged an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat." 

"In some of the most populous cities -- particularly in California, New York, and Illinois -- well over 70 percent of homes now rely on gas for cooking. Indeed, the data shows that California's buildings emit more nitrogen oxides than power plants, and only slightly less than cars." "In California's most populous cities  -- which account for 8 percent of construction-related greenhouse gases -- phase out all gas-fired [appliances], other states will likely follow suit." "The industry has spent a century convincing Americans to fall in love with gas stoves, just as the public begins to fully understand the risks of what used to be its favorite appliance." 

ADDENDUM:

*Monika Bauerlein, "Are You Screwed Without Trump?" Mother Jones, July + August 2021. -  "For one thing, 2020 proved that even a deluge of batshit crazy can't save the traditional business model. More than 16,000 news jobs disappeared last year, a rate not seen since the crash of 2008." 

"As Mojo voting rights reporter Ari Berman discovered, the parallels between today's wave of anti-voting legislation and the white supremacist movement that ended Reconstruction are stunning."

*Jacon Rosenberg, "Inflation," Mother Jones, July +August 2021. - "A just-so story emerged about how low-employment and higher wages inevitably result in inflation, a framing in which unemployment has a natural rate, but inflation is always an ill to be eradicated." "Inflation hysteria is always a class war of one kind or another, waged on behalf of the asset-holders against perceived forces of 'social destabilization.' " "It's about the wrong kind of people getting too much stuff."

Vaccine Culture War; Elder Care Growth; and Telemedicine Facts

#David French, "Can we escape the vaccine culture war?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "After all, the history of the pandemic is intertwined with the culture war, and from the beginning, the response to COVID has broadly split between blue and red, urban and rural, with virtually every important issue decided by your response to a single, vital question: How dangerous is COVID-19?" "[Heavily] Republican white evangelicals are more reluctant to take the vaccine than any other religious community." Vaccine hesitancy is strongly concentrated in the red states.

"When Trump drew the line in the sand, minimizing the virus in the first months of the pandemic, millions of his supporters drew that line right with 'him -- and not as a self-consciously partisan pose, rather, as a deeply held belief and tribal identification." "Partisan tribalism is the primary cause of Republicans reluctance, and it's the reason while evangelicals are disproportionately hesitant to take the vaccine." "Once an issue becomes political, why evangelicals are often more partisan than they are religious." [Existing] data shows that "white evangelicals are more ideologically aligned with a singe political party than any other religious sub-group. in the U.S." 

"From lockdowns to masks to schools to shots, all too many of us are; still living in the political culture created by Donald Trump, the man who faced the great challenge of his presidency, and responded by trying to lie his way to health, prosperity, and that elusive second term." 

#Abigail Abrams, "Elder care grows up," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "Nursery homes and other group facilities are inherently petri dishes for pathogens." 

In most states, older adults must have a monthly income under $2,382, and $21,000 or less in assets to qualify. That leaves many middle-income American with too much money for Medicaid but unable to afford expensive care. Roughly 8 million seniors  fall into this category, a number expected to reach 14.4 million by 2029, according to a 'Heath Affairs' study.

"Homecare workers earn a mean hourly wage of $1,250, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than 15% live in poverty, and more than half rely on some form  of public assistance, like food stamps." "Some 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, and the Census Bureau projects the number of seniors will reach 74.6 million by 2060, with the majority expected to need long-term-care services at some point." 

#Janie Ducharms, "No therapists still need couches?" TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "In a series of TIME/Harris poll of national surveys conducted this winter and spring, about half of respondents reported using telehealth since the pandemic began, compared with about 25% who said they had beforehand." "High prices mean both therapy and teletherapy remain unattainable for many." More than 125 million people in the U.S. now use telemedicine facilities, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.

Training more clinicians from underserved backgrounds is the single most impactful way to encourage people of color to get help."

ADDENDUMS:

Sean Gregory, "A turning point for athlete mental health," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "According to the 'British Journal of Sports Medicine,' the reported prevalence of mental health symptoms and disorders in elite male athletes in team sports varies from 5% for burnout and alcohol use to 45% for anxiety and depression."

*Raj Panjabi, Alarms don't ring themselves," TIME, June 21/June 28, 2021. - "For every $1 a county invests in community health workers, an estimated $10 is returned to society, creating jobs and setting up for a faster way out of the next pandemic." 

Business Cycles; Death of a Hospital

 #Charles Duhigg, "Cool Story, Bro," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Economics is a science of cycles. There is the business cycle and the inflationary cycle, the rhythms of housing booms and credit busts." "John Maynard Keynes wrote that the marketplace is frequently guided by 'animal spirits' that 'depend on spontaneous optimism rather than a mathematical expectation.' " "Financial affairs have an 'instability due to the characteristic of human nature.' "

"After the First World War, a group of speculators promised easy stock-market profits through a new fad: the mutual fund. Today, the mutual funds are among the safest and most popular investments." "Jeff Epstein, an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, who runs a SPAC of his own, said, 'We've just lived through one of the greatest wealth-accumulation periods in history, and a lot of the public has been blocked from participating."  Virgin Galactic, which proposed to send customers into space for a substantial payment, forecast 2020 revenues of thirty-one million dollars, but the company had collected only two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars. "It is still unclear when, if ever, it will send customers into space."

"If an everyday investor had brought one share of stock in each of his SPACs on the first day the stock traded, three of those investments would have lost money. Many other SPACs have done much worse. Some public shareholders lured by impossibly rosy financial protections, have lost enormous amounts of money investing in companies that otherwise would likely have never been sold to the public."

#Chris Pomorski, "Death of a Hospital," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. - "Philadelphia is one of the poorest big cities in the United States, with about a quarter of its 1.6 million residents living below the poverty line." "Hospitals in the U.S. are estimated to be closing at a rate of about thirty a year. Most closures happen for financial reasons, in places where there are relatively few privately insured patients. Increasingly, hospitals are regarded as businesses like any others: at least a fifth of hospitals are now run for profit."

"In the decades after the Second World War, the cost of hospital care rose significantly, spurred by expensive procedures, and by the adoption of medical insurance." "Medicare and Medicaid, which account for more than sixty per cent of all U.S. hospital care, often pay less than the cost of treatment: according to an analysis by the American Hospital Association. In 2018, Medicare and Medicaid underpaid the cost of care by a combined $76.6 billion." 

"The nurse-consultants sometimes second-guessed the diagnoses of residents. 'They were thinking about the bottom line, and we were just thinking about the patients,' Christy Johnson, a former resident said." 

"Since 2008, American hospitals have been involved in more than a thousand mergers and acquisitions, resulting in large, powerful health systems with influence on the price of hospital care and the reimbursement rates paid by private insurers."

The Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, along with another medical center, St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, for a hundred and seventy million dollars, by American Academic Health System, a company controlled by the California private-equity firm Paladin Healthcare Capital. Joel Freedman, the founder and C.E.O. of Paladin, had managed a sizeable hospital in Washington, D.C., and a few smaller ones in Los Angeles.

In early April, the Hahnemann University Hospital foretold the demise of Hahnemann by laying off a hundred and seventy-five employees, including sixty-five nurses. Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, told the article's author that Hahnemann's demise reminded her of the retail sector, where hedge funds and private equity have used leveraged buyouts to purchase chains like Sears and Toys R Us, and then stripped their assets, including  real estate, on a route to bankruptcies. "Patients were released without clear follow-up care and often ended up back in the E.R. within twelve hours."

The story of Hahnemann is as much about the structural forces that have compromised many American hospitals -- stingy public investment, weak regulation, and a blind belief in the wisdom of the market -- as it is about the motives of private-equity firms."

#Shreya Chattopadhyay, "By the Numbers," The Nation, 6 . 14 - 21 . 2021. 

$236B - Total US military aid to Israel from 1946 to 2018.

$38B - US military aid pledged to Israel from 2019 to 2028.

0 - Number of countries set to receive more US military aid than Israel between 2019 and 2028.

59% - Share of US foreign military aid in 2021 set to go to Israel.

50 - Number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the US's most advanced stealth aircraft, purchased by Israel from Lockheed Martin with US funds.

51:1 - Ratio of US military aid received by Israel to US humanitarian assistance received by Palestinians in 2021.

1 - Number of countries that are allowed to use US military aid for their own domestic weapons industry.