Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of plastic-eating bacteria could make the idea a reality. The impact of plastic waste on the environment and our health has gained increasing attention in recent years. The latest round of UN talks aiming for a global treaty to end plastic pollution just concluded in Ottawa, Canada earlier this week, though considerable disagreements remain.

Recycling will inevitably be a crucial ingredient in any plan to deal with the problem. But a 2022 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found only 9 percent of plastic waste ever gets recycled. That’s partly due to the fact that existing recycling approaches are energy intensive and time consuming. This has spurred a search for new approaches, and one of the most promising is the use of bacteria to break down plastics, either by rendering them harmless or using them to produce building blocks that can be repurposed into other valuable materials and chemicals. The main problem with the approach is making sure plastic waste ends up in the same place as these plastic-loving bacteria.

Now, researchers have come up with an ingenious solution: embed microbes in plastic during the manufacturing process. Not only did the approach result in 93 percent of the plastic biodegrading within five months, but it even increased the strength and stretchability of the material. “What’s remarkable is that our material breaks down even without the presence of additional microbes,” project co-leader Jon Pokorski from the University of California San Diego said in a press release. “Chances are, most of these plastics will likely not end up in microbially rich composting facilities. So this ability to self-degrade in a microbe-free environment makes our technology more versatile.”

More here.

William H. Janeway at Project Syndicate:

Whether mobilizing for war or (re)constructing advanced manufacturing capabilities in peacetime, success turns on the functioning of complex supply chains. But this truth was long forgotten – or at least under-appreciated. Not until recent supply-chain shocks did academics, policymakers, and others start paying more attention to the complicated, barely studied “meso” (middle) domain between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

While microeconomics deals with the behavior of individual agents (firms, consumers, workers, investors), macroeconomics addresses the behavior of statistical aggregates (as represented by GDP, national income, and so forth). But the space between has largely been neglected, particularly with respect to how it serves as the dynamic context in which economic policies play out. One source of this lacuna may be the simplistic faith that markets can be trusted to deliver the most efficient solution, or at least trusted more than corruptible politicians.

The issue that has called attention to this domain has been the fragility of an economy whose structure has been optimized for efficiency.

More here.

Eric B. Schnurer in The Hedgehog Review:

For thousands of years, humankind has fancied itself the apex of creation and the dominant force in the world. Yet humans are now gripped by the fear that yet another species of our own creation—artificially intelligent machines—will presently displace us from our position of unchallenged domination, perhaps even enslaving us.

This is simultaneously a misplaced conceit and misconceived fear: There are varied environmental niches to exploit and to dominate even in ecosystems with an apex-predator competitor. After all, various species, from bacteria to dogs to maize, have all been able to get humans to do their work for them, sometimes fatally addicting us to doing so. Still more have survived the onslaught of the Anthropocene and even devised strategies to turn the advent of mankind to their advantage. Human society can do the same even in the most extreme vision of an “AI Apocalypse.”

More here.

Raymond Offenheiser in The Conversation:

I spent 20 years as the president of Oxfam America, an international humanitarian organization, and have overseen humanitarian responses to some of the biggest crises of the past three decades, from the war in Kosovo to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know from experience that the major aid organizations know how to run large, well-integrated operational responses to emergencies like Gaza. However, this is not happening, in part because Israel is not giving aid groups what they need to do so.

More here.

Michael Erard in the European Review of Books:

Language as self, language learning as magic, the mortifications of the flesh: these themes run through The Centre, a debut novel by British-Pakistani writer and translator Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi. Its narrator, Anisa, is a Pakistani translator of Urdu living in London, grappling with tensions of her immigrant identity and cosmopolitan desires. Yes, she had achieved her dream of moving to England but dislikes the cold and the myriad forms of casual racism she encounters. She complains that living outside of Pakistan has tainted her Urdu (her mother tongue) with Hindi words, and she resents the fact that she uses Urdu merely to translate Bollywood film subtitles — as opposed to the great literature she admires. To top it off, her other language, French, is mediocre. « Not like French-person French, » she complains to a friend.

One day, at a translation conference, she overhears a young white man speaking Mandarin, Russian and French. At first she resents him, especially after watching Chinese students marvel at his fluent Mandarin. « It’s always been like that, I thought, so much gratitude and admiration when a white person speaks a non-white language and only contempt and indignation for non-white people who don’t speak English. » But this resentment melts into amazement and then attraction. What’s the secret of Adam’s linguistic success?

More here.

Acadian Lane

Indigo against ocher, Atlantic
Blue abutting shore cliffs, bluffs, and sand,
All of the earth on Prince Edward Island
The red of dry blood, of weather-worn brick,
Of the rutted, twisting road leading down
Through the fishing village to the harbor
Where lobster boats rock, scarlet as lobster;
The bay’s depth, smoked glass, reflecting the town.
A few dogs rustle in the heat of the noon;
The gulls, the bitterns lift, circling again.
A man is walking this Acadian
Lane, the fine red dust rising off his clothes;
He begins to sing a slow French tune—
La mer, la terre, Le monde est seulement choses!*

by David St. John
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

*The sea, the land, the world, is only things!

Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

Biden’s announcement this week to sharply raise tariffs on Chinese imports is an escalation in the yearslong tariff war on China. The new tariffs specifically target green goods, most notably electric vehicles, duties on which have now quadrupled to 100 percent. Tariffs on lithium-ion batteries, critical minerals, and solar cells will also be substantially increased. The measures are set to take effect in 2024 (with the exception of graphite, where Chinese dominance is most stark and tariffs begin 2026).

Why now? There is no doubt that the announcement of these tariffs are performative. With Trump leading the polls in several swing states, Biden’s decision to fly the protectionist flag is intended to win over voters.

The performative aspect is also to reassure investors in domestic manufacturing, who despite the IRA’s generous manufacturer and consumer subsidies, are worried about the flood of cheaper Chinese imports outcompeting domestically made green goods. The combination of new protective tariffs plus IRA subsidies is meant to buy time for US-based firms to catch up in green technologies.

Biden’s tariffs are more targeted than those on over $300 billion of Chinese imports introduced by Trump in 2018. But the signal they send is that tariffs on China are bipartisan; given this broad anti-China sentiment in Congress, they will be almost impossible to unwind.

Tariffs on EVs are already at 27.5 percent (Trump slapped an extra 25 on top of the standard 2.5 percent US tariff). That combined with the IRA’s anti-China tax credit design has meant that only Polestar (owned by China’s Geely) has been exporting Chinese EVs to the US. Chinese batteries, on the other hand, are still being imported but the IRA’s “foreign entity of concern” rules aim to bar the $3,750 tax subsidy from going to EVs containing battery metals processed in China, whether by foreign or Chinese firms.

More here.

Álvaro García Linera in Metapolis:

Carlos Bravo Regidor in The Ideas Letter:

Carlos Bravo Regidor: Let me start with a deliberately general question: Why does inequality matter?

Branko Milanović: High inequality matters because it deprives many people of equal access to various activities: school, health services, good jobs, and so on. It wastes human potential and reduces social mobility; it is inefficient and unfair.

I emphasize “high” inequality because not every kind of inequality has the same consequences. Inequality-versus-equality is not a binary proposition, with equality being good and inequality, bad. Inequality is like temperature; it is a gradual thing. Temperature is zero degrees and it is 100 degrees, as well as all the degrees in between. Likewise with inequality. On the one hand, very low inequality is problematic because then people have little incentive to study or work hard, or to take risks. On the other hand, very high inequality has all sorts of negative impacts: social instability, lack of investment, distrust in government, lower economic growth. So, again, the problem is high inequality, not inequality per se.

What is the “ideal” level of inequality? We can’t put an exact number on it, but somewhere between low inequality and high inequality there is inequality that delivers the right incentives without breaking society into two.

More here.

Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post:

James Stewart in The New York Times:

It’s been 14 years since Goldman Sachs was vilified as a “vampire squid” by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. “Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy,” he concluded then. Goldman has since experienced some hard times, tarred by scandal (the looting of a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund) and forced to bail out of consumer banking. Big companies like Walt Disney are under attack not so much from the socialist left, but by conservatives for being too “woke.” Yet organized greed lives on, a seemingly intractable aspect of human nature, as three new business books make clear.

The age-old swing of the pendulum between greed, excess and regulation is the subject of TAMING THE OCTOPUS: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation (Norton, 290 pp., $29.99), by Kyle Edward Williams, a history of efforts to temper capitalist excess through social responsibility, whether self-directed by corporations or imposed by regulators. Inevitably, greed and scandal breed regulation, which in turn provokes proponents of the free market to decry government overreach. Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from more speculative investment banking during the Great Depression only to be relaxed by the Clinton administration more than six decades later. The cycle then begins anew.

More here.

The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How the soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

by Pat Schneider
from Good Reads

From Medical News Today:

The proponents of intermittent fasting often cite benefits such as weight loss, improved blood sugar, and reduced cholesterol. And there is some scientific evidence to support these claims — at least in the short term. But what about intermittent fasting’s effects in the long run? And could it actually do more harm than good for the human heart? Intermittent fasting is a rather contentious topic when it comes to health and well-being. While there are studies that point to its short-term benefits such as reduced cholesterol when people eat within a 10-12 hour window, or an improved gut microbiome in people with obesity, there is some conflicting evidenceTrusted Source on its benefits for weight loss.

Some studies have also shown that intermittent fasting can help lower certain heart disease risk factorsTrusted Source, such as reduced cholesterol and blood pressure. However, a recent poster presented at EPI Lifestyle Scientific Sessions 2024 in Chicago suggested that eating within an 8-hour time window may increase the risk of cardiovascular death by as much as 91%. Considering that time-restricted eating is a relatively new area of research, experts agree that there is a lack of long-term studies on the effects eating practices such as intermittent fasting have on the body, in particular the cardiovascular system.

More here.

From BenGreenfieldLife.com:

As I’ve been researching and writing Boundless 2.0, I’ve found myself reevaluating many of the health and fitness strategies that I previously endorsed.

Walking the Beach, September 10, 2001

I like seashells, Jake announces as he holds up periwinkle
after periwinkle, as if each one’s so different
it can’t be left where it is. I like periwinkles,
he says, the way kids do
when they’ve just learned a word and won’t keep
from the pleasure of saying it again
and again. I like limpets. I like mussels. I like barnacles.
I like razor clams. I like spoon shells.
Is there nothing on the beach this kid doesn’t like?
He can’t just pick up a shell,
he’s got to declare his degree of commitment to it,
as if, at three and a half, he knows that it’s not enough
to fall in love; you’ve got to make the world
understand just how much.
I like canoe shells, Opa, but the big, spirally ones too.
and the ones with ripples. And this one
with scribble on it. Jake greets each day
as someone might welcome a long-lost cousin
who’s crossed thousands of miles
to meet him. If these shells had the patience
to travel such great distance to get here and were willing to be
broken in the effort, then he sees it as his and Opa’s job
to gather them all. But it’s exhausting
liking so many things: shells the color of old dentures,
clams even the seagulls are tired of, the ruined armor
of horseshoe crabs. Jake throws himself into his work.
Life would be so much easier for him
if he didn’t need to see, touch, know everything,
feel that it’s all up to him
to make sense of the universe. The world can’t help
but disappoint this child. Finally
it will have to break the heart of a boy determined
to pick up every snagged fishing line, washed-in buoy,
every tar-stained dog welk, heel of a slipper shell,
ponderous ark, spotted moon.
Jake’s got a whole beach to cover
and only so much time.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Christina Wang at McSweeney’s:

Hi there, just stopping by to thank you for your loyalty. It’s flattering, really, how you find a way to wedge me into every email, team meeting, and LinkedIn post.

Look, you and I both know why I’m summoned so frequently. I am to vocabulary what a vintage wine is to a dinner party—a not-so-subtle attempt to impress. Like a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, I am plucked from the linguistic cellar and dusted off to add sophistication and depth to any conversation.

After all, why settle for the tragically impotent verb “use” when you can utilize “utilize” to showcase your rock-hard lexical prowess?

More here.

Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.

That’s exactly what’s happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. “There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently,” said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To make a language model’s answers more consistent — and make the model more reliable overall — Jacob and his colleagues devised a game where the model’s two modes are driven toward finding an answer they can agree on. Dubbed the consensus game, this simple procedure pits an LLM against itself, using the tools of game theory to improve the model’s accuracy and internal consistency.

More here.

Sarah A Smith in The Guardian:

Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92.

Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never embraced that genre.

Her one attempt, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is more accurately described as a collection of interlinking tales. Throughout her career, she developed this method of cross-referencing stories and continuing themes and characters across a collection, most notably in The Beggar Maid (published in Canada as Who Do You Think You Are?), which was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, and in the Juliet stories of the epiphanic collection Runaway (2004).

For Munro, short stories were the result of practical considerations, rather than choice.

More here.