Mistaken identity lands man in Hawaii mental hospital

Joshua Spriestersbach

HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii officials wrongly arrested a homeless man for a crime committed by someone else, locked him up in a state hospital for more than two years, forced him to take psychiatric drugs and then tried to cover up the mistake by quietly setting him free with just 50 cents to his name, the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court document asking a judge to set the record straight.

A petition filed in court Monday night asks a judge to vacate the arrest and correct Joshua Spriestersbach's records. The filing lays out his bizarre plight that started with him falling asleep on a sidewalk. He was houseless and hungry while waiting in a long line for food outside a Honolulu shelter on a hot day in 2017.

When a police officer roused him awake, he thought he was being arrested for the city's ban on sitting or laying down on public sidewalks.

But what he didn't realize was that the officer mistook him for a man named Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.

It's unclear how this happened as Spriestersbach and Castleberry had never met. Spriestersbach somehow ended up with Castleberry as his alias, even though Spriestersbach never claimed to be Castleberry, according to the Hawaii Innocence Project.

Spriestersbach's attorneys argue it all could have been cleared up if police simply compared the two men's photographs and fingerprints.

Instead, against Spriestersbach's protests that he wasn't Castleberry, he was eventually committed to the Hawaii State Hospital.

“Yet, the more Mr. Spriestersbach vocalized his innocence by asserting that he is not Mr. Castleberry, the more he was declared delusional and psychotic by the H.S.H. staff and doctors and heavily medicated," the petition said. “It was understandable that Mr. Spriestersbach was in an agitated state when he was being wrongfully incarcerated for Mr. Castleberry’s crime and despite his continual denial of being Mr. Castleberry and providing all of his relevant identification and places where he was located during Mr. Castleberry’s court appearances, no one would believe him or take any meaningful steps to verify his identity and determine that what Mr. Spriestersbach was telling the truth – he was not Mr. Castleberry."

No one believed him — not even his various public defenders — until a hospital psychiatrist finally listened.

All it took were simple Google searches and a few phone calls to verify that Spriestersbach was on another island when Castleberry was initially arrested, according to the court document.

The psychiatrist asked a detective to come to the hospital, who verified fingerprints and photographs to determine the wrong man had been arrested and Spriestersbach spent two years and eight months institutionalized, the petition said, noting that it wasn't hard to determine the the real Castleberry has been incarcerated in an Alaska prison since 2016.

According to records, a 49-year-old man named Thomas R. Castleberry is in the Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward, Alaska. His relatives couldn't be reached for comment. The Alaska public defender listed for him declined to comment Tuesday.

The Hawaii Innocence Project document also claims Spriestersbach had ineffective counsel: the Hawaii public defender's office.

Police, the state public defender's office, the state attorney general and the hospital “share in the blame for this gross miscarriage of justice,” the petition said.

Hawaii Public Defender James Tabe, Gary Yamashiroya, special assistant to the attorney general and Matt Dvonch, a spokesman for the Honolulu prosecuting attorney's office, declined to comment Tuesday.

Once the fingerprints and photographs were verified, officials moved quickly, but secretly, to release Spriestersbach in January 2020, the petition said.

“A secret meeting was held with all of the parties, except Mr. Spriestersbach, present. There is no court record of this meeting or no public court record of this meeting. No entry or order reflects this miscarriage of justice that occurred or a finding that Mr. Spriestersbach is not Thomas Castleberry," the court document said.

His lawyers said officials didn't think anyone would believe Spriestersbach or no one would care about the homeless man who fell asleep waiting for food, only to wake up to a living nightmare.

Spriestersbach, 50, who lives with his sister in Vermont, declined to comment for this story.

His sister, Vedanta Griffith, spent nearly 16 years looking for him. He moved to Hawaii with Griffith when her husband was stationed on Oahu with the Army in 2003. He moved to the Big Island and then disappeared, while suffering mental health issues, she said.

“Part of what they used against him was his own argument: ‘I’m not Thomas Castleberry. I didn’t commit these crimes. ... This isn’t me,’" she told The Associated Press. "So they used that as saying he was delusional, as justification for keeping him.”

After his release, he ended up at a homeless shelter, which contacted his family.

“And then when light is shown on it, what do they do? They don’t even put it on the record. They don’t make it part of the case,” Griffith said. “And then they don’t come to him and say, ‘We are so sorry’ or, how about even ‘Gee, this wasn’t you. You were right all along.’”

Spriestersbach now refuses to leave his sister’s 10-acre property.

“He’s so afraid that they’re going to take him again,” Griffith said.

___

AP journalist Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, The Associated Press

IN ALBERTA A MAN WAS PUT IN THE ALBERTA MENTAL INSTITUTE HOSPITAL, FOR A DECADE BEFORE THEY DISCOVERED THAT HE WAS THERE BECAUSE HE SPOKE ONLY POLISH.

 21ST CENTURY ALCHEMY

In Remarkable Experiment, Scientists Create a Golden Drop of Metallic Water

By IOCB PRAGUE AUGUST 1, 2021

On the left is a pure drop of sodium-potassium alloy, on the right is the drop with a layer of water, in which electrons liberated from the metal dissolved, giving it a golden metallic sheen. Credit: Artistic rendering by Tomáš Belloň / IOCB Prague

Pure water is not a good conductor of electricity. It is, in fact, an electrical insulator. In order to conduct electricity, water must contain dissolved salts, for example, yet the conductivity of such an electrolyte is relatively low, several orders lower than that of metals. Is it possible to produce water that is as conductive as, say, copper wire?

Scientists have hypothesized that this may take place in the cores of large planets, where high pressure compresses water molecules to the point that their electron shells begin to overlap. At present, generating that kind of pressure on Earth exceeds human capabilities, and it was therefore assumed that preparing metallic water under terrestrial conditions would remain an elusive goal for the foreseeable future. However, an international team of researchers headed by Pavel Jungwirth of IOCB Prague has developed a new method with which they succeeded in making metallic water under terrestrial conditions that lasted for several seconds. Their paper was recently published in Nature.

The drop of sodium-potassium alloy exposed to the action of the water vapor at 10-4 mbar. A layer of water forms on the drop, in which electrons liberated from the metal dissolve, giving it a golden metallic sheen. Credit: Phil Mason / IOCB Prague

The idea of using immense pressure to make metal out of water is nothing new. In principle, it should be possible to compress water molecules to the point that their electron shells begin to overlap and form a so-called conduction band similar to the one in metallic materials. The required pressure of 50 Mbar (i.e. approximately 50 million times greater than on the surface of Earth) can be found in the cores of large planets, but we are not yet able to achieve it under terrestrial conditions.

Dissolution of electrons

In collaboration with researchers from the University of Southern California, the Fritz Haber Institute, and other institutes, Jungwirth’s team recently developed a method that has allowed them to prepare metallic water while completely sidestepping the need for high pressure. The method builds on earlier research of the Pavel Jungwirth Group focusing on the behavior of alkali metals in water and liquid ammonia. Inspired by work with alkali metal-liquid ammonia solutions, which at high concentrations behave like a metal, the researchers decided to attempt creation of a conduction band not by compressing water molecules but rather by way of massive dissolution of the electrons released from the alkali metal. In doing so, however, they had to overcome a fundamental obstacle: on introduction to water, alkali metals immediately explode.

The first image shows a pure drop of sodium-potassium alloy; in the next images, we see the drop exposed to the action of the water vapor at 10-4 mbar. A layer of water forms on the drop, in which electrons liberated from the metal dissolve, giving it a golden metallic sheen. Credit: Phil Mason / IOCB Prague

“Throwing sodium into water is one of the most popular school experiments and the subject of many a YouTube video. As is well known, when you throw a chunk of sodium in water, you don’t get metallic water but an immediate and substantial explosion that takes out your apparatus,” says Jungwirth, who heads a group at IOCB Prague specializing in molecular modeling. “In order to contain this intense and, for laboratory purposes, rather counterproductive chemistry, we approached it the other way around; instead of adding the alkali metal to the water, we added the water to the metal.”

Golden drop of metallic water

Inside a vacuum chamber, the researchers exposed a drop of sodium-potassium alloy to a small amount of water vapor, which began to condense on its surface. The electrons liberated from the alkali metal dissolved in the layer of water on the surface faster than the chemical reaction that results in the explosion. There were a sufficient number of them to overcome the critical limit for the formation of a conduction band and thus give rise to a metallic water solution, which in addition to the electrons also contained dissolved alkali cations and chemically formed hydroxide and hydrogen.

A pure drop of sodium-potassium alloy. Credit: Phil Mason / IOCB Prague

“Thanks to this, we were able to create a thin layer of gold-colored metallic water solution that lasted for several seconds, and that was enough for us to not only see it with our own eyes but also measure it with spectrometers,” says Jungwirth, adding: “We more or less jury-rigged the necessary apparatus in a small lab at our institute in Prague, which is also where the fist experiments took place. We then obtained the key evidence for the presence of metallic water using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy on the synchrotron in Berlin.”

The drop of sodium-potassium alloy exposed to the action of the water vapor at 10-4 mbar. A layer of water formed on the drop, in which electrons liberated from the metal dissolved, giving it a golden metallic sheen. Credit: Phil Mason / IOCB Prague

The study of the researchers at IOCB Prague and their colleagues not only shows that metallic water can be prepared under terrestrial conditions, but it also provides a detailed characterization of the spectroscopic properties connected to its beautiful golden metallic sheen.

Prof. Pavel Jungwirth, head of the Molecular Modeling Group at IOCB Prague. Credit: Tomas Bellon / IOCB Prague

Reference: “Spectroscopic evidence for a gold-coloured metallic water solution” by Philip E. Mason, H. Christian Schewe, Tillmann Buttersack, Vojtech Kostal, Marco Vitek, Ryan S. McMullen, Hebatallah Ali, Florian Trinter, Chin Lee, Daniel M. Neumark, Stephan Thürmer, Robert Seidel, Bernd Winter, Stephen E. Bradforth and Pavel Jungwirth, 28 July 2021, Nature.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03646-5

What we still don't know about Beirut's port explosion

It's been a year since one of the world's largest ever non-nuclear explosions ripped through Lebanon's capital, killing more than 200 people.

By Tamara Qiblawi, CNN 

© Houssam Hariri/NurPhoto/Getty Images A view of the port the day after a massive explosion at the port on August 5, 2020 in Beirut, Lebanon. According to the Lebanese Red Cross, at the moment over 100 people died in the explosion and over 4,000 were injured in explosion at Beirut Port. Officials said a waterfront warehouse storing explosive materials, reportedly 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, was the cause of the blast. (Photo by Houssam Hariri/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On any given day in Beirut's worst-affected neighborhoods, theories about the explosion still circulate. No two stories of human tragedy are alike, and most interactions between people here end not with a goodbye, but with an invocation that Lebanon's ruling elite be toppled.

© Marwan Naamani/dpa/picture alliance/Getty Images A man sits in the rubble of a destroyed house near the port, almost a year after the blast.

The political class is, overwhelmingly, blamed for the disaster.

At just after 6 p.m. on August 4, 2020, hundreds of metric tons of ammonium nitrate ignited, sparking the massive blast in the city's port.

The industrial chemicals had been improperly stored there for years due to the failure to act by successive governments and lawmakers across the political divide. That much is clear.

But for people across Lebanon, there are still many unanswered questions about what led to the tragedy, and there has been no sense of closure in the 12 months since the explosion.

Here's what we still don't know.

What triggered the blast?

Because of the many inquiries by journalists and rights groups over the past year, we know that the ammonium nitrate -- stored alongside fireworks in a poorly maintained warehouse -- was a disaster waiting to happen.

Six urgent letters sent by customs officials since 2014 -- the year the material was unloaded at the port under mysterious circumstances -- had alerted the authorities to the danger posed by the chemicals.

One was written by a port official in May 2020, just months before the blast. "This substance, if ignited, will lead to a large explosion, and its outcome will almost obliterate the port of Beirut. If the substance were exposed to any kind of theft, the thief would be able to use this substance to build explosives," warned the document, which was obtained by CNN after the incident.

Beirut's port is just 100 meters from some of the city's most densely-populated neighborhoods. The blast destroyed not only a large part of the port, but also left swathes of the city in tatters. The damage was estimated at between $3.8 and $4.6 billion.

It is clear that successive leaders — four governments and three prime ministers — either would have or should have known about the threat posed by the material, and that little was done to address the danger.

But what is far from clear, 12 months on, is what ignited the ammonium nitrate.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, Tarek Bitar, the judge charged with investigating the explosion, is looking into several theories.

One is that sparks from welding works that day caused a fire in hangar 12, the warehouse where the chemical was being stored.

Another is that an Israeli strike was the catalyst, though Lebanese aviation officials reported that local radar systems did not detect military aircraft over Lebanese airspace in the hour or so before the blast, Israeli officials have denied any involvement, and Bitar himself has said the Israel theory was highly unlikely, according to HRW's report.

Bitar is also exploring the theory that the explosion was an intentional act, according to HRW.

"Speculation that Hezbollah may have wanted to destroy the ammonium nitrate at the port supposedly to hide that some of the ammonium nitrate in the stockpile had been used by Hezbollah's ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria to produce barrel bombs increased as reporting emerged regarding the connection between the cargo owners and individuals sanctioned by the US for alleged links to Assad," the report said, referring to an investigative report by local journalist Firas Hatoum.

Hatoum linked the shipment of ammonium nitrate -- which that arrived in 2013 and was unloaded the following year -- to companies linked to, according to the HRW report, Syrian-Russian businessmen "who have been sanctioned by the US government for acting on behalf of the Syrian government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."

Hezbollah has repeatedly denied involvement in the blast.

Several Lebanese factions were heavily involved in Syria's civil war earlier in the conflict. Affiliates of Lebanon's Saudi-backed former prime minister, Saad Hariri, materially aided anti-Assad forces for a time. Hezbollah intervened on Assad's behalf and is widely believed to have helped save his presidency.

Adding to the mystery around the ammonium nitrate is the fact that all of Lebanon's major political parties have a strong presence at the port.

"Lebanon's main political parties, including Hezbollah, the Free Patriotic Movement, the Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces, the Amal Movement, and others, have benefited from the port's ambiguous status and poor governance and accountability structures," the HRW report said.

"Political parties have installed loyalists in prominent positions in the port, often positioning them to accrue wealth, siphon off state revenues, smuggle goods, and evade taxes in ways that benefit them or people connected to them," it added.

Was any ammonium nitrate missing? What happened to it?

The judicial investigation's third theory, that the ignition was an intentional act, has gained prominence over the past year.

Several reports have suggested that far less ammonium nitrate exploded last August than initially thought. According to Reuters, an FBI report estimated that only 20% of the 2,755 tons of ammonium nitrate brought to the port in 2013 actually detonated. The HRW report also cited an August 2020 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in which three European intelligence sources estimated that the size of the blast was equivalent to as little as 700- 1,000 tons.

The theory goes that the ammonium nitrate was left at the port, where it could be siphoned off by factions in Lebanon.

Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab told CNN he only found out about the existence of the ammonium nitrate in early June 2020, and immediately requested further information. He said he received a file on the situation at the port on July 22 -- but that the part predicting the catastrophic effects of an explosion had been omitted.

Diab said he forwarded the file to the Ministry of Public Works, under whose purview the port falls, and the Ministry of Justice, and asked them to investigate the chemicals at the port.

CNN has seen a document showing that the Ministry of Public Works stamped the front of the file on August 4, 2020.

The blast happened at 6.08 p.m. the same day.

In a December 2020 interview with CNN, Diab -- by then the country's caretaker Prime Minister -- called the timing "suspicious."

"There is something suspicious for (the report) to come in July 22 ... and then for it to blow up. There is something suspicious. Even though this is a seven-year issue. Seven years, for God's sake," Diab told CNN at the time. "There's something that's unexplainable, the timing of this."

How will Beirut rebuild?

Perhaps one of the most glaring unanswered questions surrounding the Beirut port explosion is whether the city will ever go back to what it was.

Since the blast, the city has buckled under the strain of a rapidly plummeting currency, long power outages, and severe medicine, milk and fuel shortages. Lebanon's dire economic straits mean most of the rebuilding efforts have been privately funded, or supported by non-profit organizations. A year later, much of the repair work is still ongoing.

But many home and shop owners say they neither have the financial means nor the psychological strength to return to affected neighborhoods.

"They've ruined us. I'd sell my soul to leave this country," said one shop owner on the once hip but still extensively damaged Gemmayze street, referring to the country's ruling class. "May they never again see a good day."

 

Equality and fairness: Vaccines against this pandemic of mistrust

by Tony Ward, The Conversation

Credit: The Conversation/Cohn et al, CC BY-ND

The COVID crisis has laid bare a crisis of trust.

In many Western nations there's a small but significant minority refusing to follow distancing guidelines, wear masks or get a vaccination. Protests in recent weeks have demonstrated just how much they mistrust politicians, scientists, bureaucrats, the "mainstream media" and many of their fellow citizens.

And that's a problem—because higher trust levels have been shown to be associated with markedly better outcomes in handling the virus. As the World Happiness Report 2021 published in March concluded, generally the higher the level of social trust, the lower the nation's COVID-19 death rate.

So what can be done to combat this pandemic of mistrust?

Using data on national trust levels published over the past few years, my analysis suggests more than 80% of differences in trust levels between nations can be explained by just two factors: economic inequality and, to a lesser extent, perceptions of corruption.

This calculation underlines the importance of tackling the conditions in which misinformation thrives. Censorship and other blunt instruments have their place, but only treat the symptoms. To treat the cause requires promoting equality and fairness.

What 'lost wallets' reveal about trust

The World Happiness Report's conclusions about the correlation between effective COVID responses and level of social trust drew on past research, including evidence from the 2019 World Risk Poll (sponsored by Lloyd's Register Foundation).

That poll surveyed more than 150,000 people in 142 nations. One crucial question asked them to imagine losing a small bag of financial value and then say how likely it was that a stranger would return that bag. This question is a staple of social trust research, known as the "lost wallet test."

For my analysis of the relationship between trust, inequality and corruption, I've mainly used another "lost wallet" study published in 2019, by University of Michigan behavioral economist Alain Cohn and colleagues in Switzerland. Their study went one better than asking people about their expectations; it actually tested levels of trustworthiness by "losing" 17,000 wallets in 355 cities across 40 nations and measuring how many came back to their "owners."

This study broadly found actual returns to be slightly higher than expectations in the World Risk Poll. But both found consistent differences in social trust (and trustworthiness) between nations, in line with other survey results.

The results from the Cohn study are therefore a good measure of both trust and trustworthiness in different countries.

Measuring the impact of inequality

According to my calculations, inequality explains two-thirds (68%) of the differences between countries in social trust levels.

This is shown in the graph below. It uses only the 23 countries in the Cohn study that are members of OECD, because these have the most robust data measuring inequality.

The left Y axis shows the percentages of wallets returned. The bottom X axis shows the Gini coefficient: the standard measure of economic inequality, with the nations closer to 0 being more equal.

There's a strong correlation between equality and levels of social trust, though clearly other factors are involved as well.

For example, consider the return rate for New Zealand (one of the highest in world), and then Australia, to the lower rates in Spain and Italy (less than 50%), despite all four countries having similar levels of economic inequality.

I calculate close to half of this difference can be attributed to perceptions of corruption. I did this using data from anti-corruption organization Transparency International, which publishes annual survey of perceptions of corruption across the world and scores countries on a 100-point scale (the closer to 100 being better).

In 2020, New Zealand equal topped the list with a score of 88, compared with Australia on 77, Spain on 62, and Italy 53. (Australia has seen the biggest recent drop of any of these OECD countries, slipping from a score of 85 in 2012).

All up, equality and corruption perceptions appear to explain 82% of the differences in trust and trustworthiness between nations.

Promoting equality and fairness

Correlation doesn't necessarily mean one factor causes the other. But in this case, there is strong supporting evidence to suggest inequality and perceptions of unfairness fuel mistrust.

As this year's World Happiness Report noted, higher social and institutional trust levels are associated both with greater community resilience to natural disasters and individual resilience to ill health, unemployment and discrimination. More trusting societies and individuals are also happier.

If this wasn't strong enough incentive for policies that promote fairness and equality, the epidemic of misinformation and mistrust exposed by COVID-19 should be. As psychologist John Ehrenreich has written in Slate: "Conspiracy theories arise in the context of fear, anxiety, mistrust, uncertainty and feelings of powerlessness."

At the American Economics Association's annual conference in January, a number of speakers focused their attention on the importance of trust. The Economist magazine summarized their conclusions: "higher levels of trust and social responsibility were associated with less skepticism of media reporting on COVID-19 and greater willingness to accept stringent lockdown measures. "

Mistrust has been a major barrier in combating the coronavirus—and will present more challenges in the aftermath. Policies to enhance equality and fairness, and to reduce corruption, are potent vaccines in these tasks.People more confident about vaccines in countries where trust in science is high

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

OPINION
Frito-Lay workers resolved their labour battle – the next front will be automation



LINDA NAZARETH
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED AUGUST 3, 2021

Linda Nazareth is host of the Work and the Future podcast and senior fellow for economics and population change at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.

If the only way to get Fritos into bowls (leaving aside whether that should even be a goal) is to force people to work long hours in overheated factories, something apparently needs to give. For the workers at the Frito-Lay factory in Topeka, Kan., who staged a strike last month, what needs to change is their working conditions and, presumably, the deal they struck with parent company PepsiCo Inc. will help with that.

Over the longer term, however, the real shift will likely be toward the use of much more automation to churn out the snack foods in question, a reality that will solve and create problems at the same time, and which both sides at the table should talk about next

The nearly three-week strike by the unionized workers in Kansas unveiled to the world a lot consumers might not have known about what goes into the manufacturing of their bowls of chips. Workers in the plant detailed what, by any measure, sound like dreadful conditions, including forced, back-to-back 12-hour shifts in non-air-conditioned plants that can hit temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 C).

Although the contract that was finally agreed on did not address every worker issue, it provided “additional opportunities for the union to have input into staffing and overtime,” which presumably will solve some problems over the short term.

The strike shows a darker side to the company that became visible amid the euphoria around PepsiCo’s recent quarterly earnings. Partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Americans have been staying home, staying close to their couches and streaming services, and reaching for snacks. Since the snacks have included Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos (all brands manufactured by PepsiCo), sales have soared.

Last month, the company reported its second-quarter revenue was up 20 per cent from the same period a year earlier, thanks to strength in many of its divisions, including Frito-Lay North America. Following the announcement, PepsiCo shares rose to an all-time high.

Both the company and the workers, however, have had to cope with new economic realities as the COVID-19 pandemic begins to fade. On the earnings call after the announcement, company executives noted they were seeing higher costs for things such as freight and labour, and were likely to raise prices later this year. They also likely were having problems hiring enough people to meet the insatiable demand for snacks, hence the need to have workers put in longer hours against their wishes.

From the union side, although work hours topped the list of concerns that prompted the strike, after-inflation earnings were also an issue. With U.S. inflation now topping 5 per cent, the 4-per-cent wage increase negotiated in the two-year contract means inflation-adjusted earnings for workers will slide unless they actually put in more hours.

The Frito-Lay experience is being repeated in workplaces across North America as companies and workers sort out the pulls of high demand, high prices and the division of the spoils. As to what happens next, one (perhaps wistful) narrative circulating is that a recovery will lead to a rise in workers’ power and demands – whether through unions or not – and ultimately result in higher wage

Unfortunately, that seems unlikely beyond the very short term. If more work cannot get done easily while keeping the price of Cheetos in check, the reality is that Frito-Lay and companies like it will try to find other solutions, and that probably means looking to fewer workers and more automation.

Frito-Lay is already well known for the sophistication of its operations, and during the pandemic it has ramped up its abilities. Giant consulting firm Gartner Inc. puts PepsiCo at No. 7 in its ranking of companies with top supply chains, no doubt noting things such as PepsiCo’s sophisticated data-gathering systems. If chip lovers in one zip code, for example, like Cool Ranch Doritos and those in another like Nacho Cheese ones, the company can adjust inventory quickly, and make sure everyone is happy.

Robots are already part of the process, too. PepsiCo has tried out a partnership with Robby Technologies Inc. that allows some university students to order snacks from an app and have them delivered by a six-wheeled mobile vending machine robot called Snackbot.

Snackbot doesn’t work on the assembly line at the Frito-Lay plant yet, but surely in many ways it would be better if the robot did. After all, machines don’t care about overtime and uncomfortable temperatures, nor are they able to spread viruses to each other. Unsurprisingly, companies have been using them, or other kinds of automation, at an increasing rate since the pandemic began.

As of June, U.S. employment in manufacturing is about 12.3 million, compared to 12.8 million before the pandemic. Some of the rest of the jobs will come back, although it is not clear how many.

Last month, a robotics company called Berkshire Grey Inc. successfully debuted on the Nasdaq, and industrial automation companies such as Rockwell Automation Inc. and Eastman Machine Co. are reporting brisk orders. Boston Dynamics might be best known for its Twitter-favourite dancing robot, but earlier this year the company also showcased a new robot called Stretch, the first it’s built expressly for warehouse automation.

It does not take a lot to figure out how this will go for the Frito-Lay workers, whether it takes one year or 10. This is not old-style bargaining, in which workers win some concessions, things change a bit and the assembly line goes on.

The next step will be for fewer workers as more automation comes in, and with that lower demand for labour will come less union bargaining power and fewer jobs. Economist Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has estimated that every automated device replaces six human workers, with about half of those workers finding new jobs and the other half forced into some form of early retirement. This is not to say that overall employment will not rise as technology advances, but the jobs will not be on assembly lines and will require different skills.

At the moment, we are in some zone late in the pandemic in which consumers are still snacking and workers are still getting them their snacks. The next phase of economic change may or may not have consumers cutting back on the Doritos, but it will certainly have new processes in place to manufacture them.

That is what workers and companies should be discussing and what will no doubt be on the table sooner rather than later.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/08/anatomy-of-anti-union-meeting-how-no.html

How No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company, squashed a union drive

Duda shocks world champion Carlsen to reach Chess World Cup final 

• By Michael Houston
 
•  Tuesday, 3 August 2021

---

Poland's Jan-Krzysztof Duda delivered an upset victory over world champion Magnus Carlsen in the semi-finals of the Chess World Cup in Sochi.

The 12th seed was taken to a tiebreak after two stalemates with Norway's Carlsen over the last two days.

Alexander Vlasov, the vice-governor of Krasnodar Krai, where Sochi is located, played the first move of the game.

After a slow start, both players agreed to a draw in the first tiebreak game, meaning the winner of a fourth game between the pair would take the tie.

Duda managed to find an advantage and pressed the favourite late in the game with both low on time.

Following a mistake with his bishop, Carlsen was on the ropes and conceded defeat.

Carlsen's attention now urns to his upcoming match with Russian 30th seed Vladimir Fedoseev, who he will play in the third-place playoff.

Duda faces 10th seed Sergey Karjakin in the final, with the Russian defeating Fedoseev yesterday to progress to the showpiece match.

Karjakin won the Chess World Cup in 2015 with a win over fellow countryman Peter Svidler.

The Women's Chess World Cup final concluded yesterday - Alexandra Kosteniuk defeated fellow Russian and top seed Aleksandra Goryachkina - but the third-place playoff continued today.

China's seventh seed Tan Zhongyi won in a tiebreak against Ukrainian fourth seed Anna Muzychuk, with the pair first drawing their first game of the day.

Tan took advantage of an under-pressure Muzychuk - who was running out of time on the clock - and finished off the second game to secure her spot at the 2022 Women's Candidates Tournament.

Kosteniuk crowned inaugural Women's Chess World Cup champion 

• By Michael Houston
 
•  Monday, 2 August 2021

---

Alexandra Kosteniuk claimed the first Women's Chess World Cup title today in Sochi in an all-Russian tie against top seed Aleksandra Goryachkina, drawing today's game to seal the win.

The 14th seed capitalised on a Goryachkina mistake yesterday to win the first game, meaning a draw today would be enough to win the World Cup.

Kosteniuk played it safe, only having to avoid defeat, and held off a late press from Goryachkina, who eventually accepted a draw.

In the third-place match, Chinese seventh seed Tan Zhongyi and fourth seed Anna Muzychuk from Ukraine drew for a second day in a row, but it was Muzychuk who was forced to defend against an attacking Tan, holding out to take the game to a tiebreak tomorrow.

In the open Chess World Cup semi-finals, world number one Magnus Carlsen of Norway drew with Polish 12th seed Jan-Krzysztof Duda for a second time.

Both players tried unorthodox methods to find a way to win, but after exchanging queens, the game looked set to go to a draw, which eventually it did.

Whoever wins tomorrow's tiebreak will meet 10th Sergey Karjakin in the final, who claimed a victory fellow Russian Vladimir Fedoseev.

The pair tied yesterday, but it was Fedoseev who looked the best earlier in the game.

Following a series of blitzing moves, Karjakin took 25 minutes to decide to move a pawn out from its starting position, which seemed to unnerve his opponent, who made mistakes under pressure and eventually lost the game and the match.

It is Karjakin's second World Cup final after reaching the same stage in 2015 in Baku - a final which he won

 

Over half of Canadians think we should prioritize alternative energy sources: Angus Reid Institute

Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, talks about a survey that shows over half of Canadians say alternative energy sources should be the most important priority for the federal government. 

But, one-in-three say oil, coal and natural gas should receive equal priority alongside renewables.

Finance firms plan to close coal plants in Asia

Published15 hours ago
COP26

IMAGE SOURCEGETTY IMAGES

Some of the world's biggest financial institutions are working on a plan to speed the closure of coal-fired power plants in Asia, the BBC has been told.

The initiative was developed by UK insurer Prudential, is being driven by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and includes major banks HSBC and Citi.

The ADB hopes the plan will be ready for the COP26 climate conference, which is being held in Scotland in November.

The plan aims to tackle the biggest human-made source of carbon emissions.

Don Kanak, the chairman of Prudential Insurance Growth Markets, who developed the initiative, told the BBC: "The world cannot possibly hit the Paris climate targets unless we accelerate the retirement and replacement of existing coal fired electricity, opening up much larger room in the near term for renewables and storage."

"This is especially true in Asia where existing coal fleets are big and young and will otherwise operate for decades," he added.

Under the proposal, which was first reported by the Reuters news agency, public-private partnerships will buy coal-fired plants and shut them far sooner than their usual operating lifespan.

"By purchasing a coal-fired power plant with, say, 50 years of operational life ahead of it and shutting it down within 15 years we can cut up to 35 years of carbon emission," Ahmed M Saeed, ADB's Vice President for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific said.

The ADB hopes to launch a pilot programme in a developing South East Asian nation - potentially Indonesia, the Philippines or Vietnam - in time for the COP26 event in November.

A key feature of the initiative is that it aims to raise the money for the purchases at well below the normal cost by giving lower than usual returns to investors.

Aspects of the plan that are yet to be finalised include how coal plant owners can be convinced to sell them, what to do with the plants after they are closed, and what role if any carbon credits could play.

It comes as commercial and development banks and other major investors have become increasingly reluctant to back new fossil fuel power plants as they strive to meet climate targets.

Coal-fired electricity generation accounts for about a fifth of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, making it the biggest polluter.

The International Energy Agency has forecast that global demand for coal will grow by 4.5% this year, with Asia making up 80% of that rise.

Meanwhile, the International Panel on Climate Change has called for global coal-fired electricity generation to fall from 38% to 9% by 2030.

HSBC and Citi did not immediately respond to a request for information from the BBC.

Prudential in talks to buy out and shut coal-fired plants in Asia

Scheme with Asian Development Bank could help make big progress on climate goals, says insurer

Jillian Ambrose
Tue 3 Aug 2021 

The British insurer Prudential is working with the Asian Development Bank on a scheme to buy out coal-fired power plants in Asia in order to shut them down within 15 years.

Its backers say the plan is designed to limit use of the polluting fossil fuel while allowing workers time to find new jobs and incentivising countries to invest in clean energy alternatives.

The Guardian understands there have been “promising” early talks with Asian governments and multilateral banks about the programme, known as the “energy transition mechanism” (ETM), which could also include the banking groups HSBC, Citi and BlackRock Real Assets.


Don Kanak, the chair of Prudential Insurance Growth Markets, said that a “well funded mechanism like ETM” could help developing countries “make big progress on climate goals in the next 10-15 years, not deferring the heavy lifting until mid-century”.

“The world cannot possibly hit the Paris climate targets unless we accelerate the retirement and replacement of existing coal-fired electricity, opening up much larger room in the near term for renewables and storage,” Kanak said.

“This is especially [true] in Asia, where existing coal fleets are big and young and will otherwise operate for decades. That’s why we conceived the energy transition mechanism and worked with ADB and others to validate feasibility.”


Prudential and ADB hope to have a model ready for the UN’s Cop26 climate conference, which is being held in Glasgow in November. Alok Sharma, a former UK business secretary and now president-designate of Cop26, said he would make it a “personal priority” to consign coal to history because of the major role it plays in the climate crisis by accounting for about a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Kanak added that the framework had already been presented to finance ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Commission and European development officials.

A spokesperson for the ADB was not available to comment on the plans.

The potential role of big UK lenders in the scheme, first reported by Reuters, has raised eyebrows among climate campaigners because of the recent track record among many banks in financing new coal plants in Asia.

Adam McGibbon, a campaigner at Market Forces, which calls for financial institutions to use their wealth to protect the environment, said the initiative would “only have meaning if HSBC commits to no longer finance the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and phases out its fossil fuel financing in line with the goals of the Paris agreement. Otherwise, this is just HSBC trying to make money from both ends of the climate catastrophe,” he said.

HSBC has vowed to phase out coal financing by 2040 but participated earlier this year in a $400m (£290m) loan to the Indonesian coal company Adaro Energy, which produced 54m tonnes of coal in 2020.

A spokesperson for HSBC said the company “has a clear net zero ambition”.

BlackRock joins Citi to study plan to shut coal plants early


Krystal Chia, Bloomberg News

BlackRock Inc. and other major financial institutions are working on plans to accelerate the closure of coal-fired power plants in Asia in a bid to phase out the use of the worst man-made contributors to climate change.

The world’s biggest asset manager is partnering with Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc and the Asian Development Bank to study the proposals, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. BlackRock is assessing the plans through its real assets unit, one of the people said.

The proposals, which are being led by the Asian Development Bank and Prudential Plc, involve buying coal plants in developing economies in Asia and operating them for as long as 15 years before closing the sites ahead of current schedules. The plan was first reported by Reuters.

ADB couldn’t immediately confirm the identities of the proposed partners. Representatives for Citi and BlackRock declined to comment. HSBC didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

Even as governments set out goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, coal remains a principal source of energy for many countries in Asia, with China and India accounting for two-thirds of global demand. Consumption in key markets is forecast to increase for the next few years and coal-fired electricity generation could hit a record in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

By acquiring and running the power plants at a lower cost of capital than is currently available to commercial operators, ADB and partners would be able to generate similar returns over a shorter period, facilitating the early closures of the assets, Reuters reported.

Funding for the ADB plan is expected to come from both public and private institutions, although targets have not been set, said Ahmed M Saeed, the lender’s vice president for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

ADB is currently in discussions with governments in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines on the proposal, and may see a pilot acquisition that is “big enough to matter” next year, Saeed said. ADB plans to start raising funds at the COP26 climate conference in November.

For the plan to be successful, it will need countries to commit to not replace eliminated coal use with other fossil fuels, said Saeed. The timeframe of 15 years will allow for sufficient planning, and will help to avoid consequences such as poor regions suddenly losing access to heating, he said.

Earlier this year, Citi met with large institutional investors in London to pitch a vehicle intended to acquire coal mines and shutter them before 2045.

A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week. And it should shock us all

A newly released memo shows that Trump told the acting attorney general: ‘Just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen’

Opinion
Robert Reich
Tue 3 Aug 2021

We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core.

Republicans will defend their Caesar but new revelations show Trump’s true threat | Lloyd Green

On Friday, the House oversight committee released notes of a 27 December telephone call from Trump to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in which Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R congressmen.” The notes were taken by Richard Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy, who was also on the call.


The release of these notes has barely made a stir. The weekend news was filled with more immediate things – infrastructure! The Delta strain! Inflation! Wildfires! In light of everything else going on, Trump’s bizarre efforts in the last weeks of his presidency seem wearily irrelevant. Didn’t we already know how desperate he was?

In a word, no. This revelation is hugely important.

Rosen obviously rejected Trump’s request. But what if Rosen had obeyed Trump and said to the American public that the election was corrupt – and then “left the rest” to Trump and the Republican congressmen? What would Trump’s and the Republicans’ next moves have been? And which Republican congressmen were in cahoots with Trump in this attempted coup d’état?

Make no mistake: this was an attempted coup.

Trump knew it. Just weeks earlier, then attorney general William Barr said the justice department had found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have overturned the results.

And a few days after Trump’s call to Rosen – on 2 January – Trump told Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” votes to change the election outcome. He berated Raffensperger for not doing more to overturn the election.

Emails released last month also show that Trump and his allies in the last weeks of his presidency pressured the justice department to investigate totally unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud – forwarding them conspiracy theories and even a draft legal brief they hoped would be filed with the supreme court.

Some people, especially Republican officeholders, believe we should simply forget these sordid details. We must not.

For the first time in the history of the United States we did not have a peaceful transition of power. For the first time in American history, a president refused – still refuses – to concede, and continues to claim, with no basis in fact, that the election was “stolen” from him. For the first time in history, a president actively plotted a coup.

It would have been bad enough were Trump a mere crackpot acting on his own pathetic stage – a would-be dictator who accidentally became president and then, when he lost re-election, went bonkers – after which he was swept into the dustbin of history.

We might then merely regret this temporary lapse in American presidential history. At best, Trump would be seen as a fool and the whole affair an embarrassment to the country.

But Trump was no accident and he’s not in any dustbin. He has turned one of America’s two major parties into his own cult. He has cast the major political division in the US as a clash between those who believe him about the 2020 election and those who do not. He has emboldened state Republicans to execute the most brazen attack on voting rights since Jim Crow. Most Republican senators and representatives dare not cross him. Some of his followers continue to threaten violence against the government. By all accounts, he is running for president again in 2024.

Donald Trump’s proto-fascism poses the largest internal threat to American democracy since the civil war.

What to do about it? Fight it, and the sooner the better.

This final revelation – Trump’s 27 December call to the acting attorney general in which he pleads “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” – should trigger section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars anyone from holding office who “engaged in insurrection” against the US. The current attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland, should issue an advisory opinion clearly stating this. If Trump wants to take it to the supreme court, fine.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for The Guardian US

Website Run by ‘Dumbest Man on the Internet’ Helped Fuel Trump’s Effort to Cancel Democracy

Asawin Suebsaeng, Adam Rawnsley 

The Daily Beast

According to contemporaneous Justice Department notes taken during the end of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president directly and repeatedly berated his top federal law enforcers to back his election-fraud lies. But when they wouldn’t support his anti-democratic crusade, Trump resorted to accusing his senior DOJ officials of not being as extremely online as he was.

© Provided by The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

For starters, he was chastising them for not reading enough of The Gateway Pundit.

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” then-President Trump told acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue during a Dec. 27 phone conversation, according to the recently released DOJ documents.

During Trump and Republicans’ months-long, and at times deadly, blitz to nullify President Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 election, the 45th U.S. president and his allies consumed and regurgitated a lot of garbage information and unhinged conspiracy theories from “the internet.” And one of the websites Trump was specifically citing was the ultra-right-wing and habitually wrong Gateway Pundit; the president was known to sometimes brandish printed pages of the website around the West Wing after the 2020 election.

The Gateway Pundit’s small role in Trump’s endeavor to weaponize the DOJ against the American electoral process underscores just how easily a discredited far-right media site established a pipeline to the decision-making of the then most powerful person on Earth. It also shows how this one website—founded by a guy repeatedly dubbed the “dumbest man on the internet”—managed to play a part in fueling the efforts that brought the country to the brink of democratic rupture.

According to a former senior Trump White House official and another person with direct knowledge of the matter, during the final weeks of his presidency, administration officials saw Trump on multiple occasions holding printed-out pages of Gateway Pundit articles in the White House, sometimes in the Oval Office. The former senior official recalled one instance when Trump handed them a page printed from the website, which nonsensically alleged massive pro-Biden fraud, and told the official to find out more and to do something about it.

“I didn’t really do anything about it,” the ex-official told The Daily Beast. “I think I threw it out. Maybe I recycled it.”

In those closing months of the Trump administration, high-ranking officials were used to receiving dubious materials, sometimes ones personally briefed to Trump himself, that they then often discarded or ignored entirely. In January, for instance, Trump’s friend and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell met with the outgoing president in the Oval Office to show him six pages of baseless conspiracy theories about China and other foreign governments rigging the election for Biden.

At the time, Lindell told The Daily Beast that he also attempted to share the documents with other senior White House staff, who quickly dismissed the theories and barred him from seeing Trump again that day. But during his brief meeting with Trump in the Oval, Lindell said he told the then-president that these documents were “all over the internet.”

But other members of Trump’s inner circle were more obliging about leveraging the machinery of government to pursue bizarre, internet-driven conspiracy theories that had drifted into Trump’s field of view. In one notorious incident, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asked the Justice Department to follow up on “Italygate,” a sci-fi conspiracy theory ginned up by Trump supporters that posited Italian military satellites had been used to somehow switch votes on American voting machines.

The Gateway Pundit, for its part, was another part of how Trump was “following the internet” in the days before a DOJ official jotted down the notes about his conversations with the Commander in Chief. Just a week before that phone call, Trump was absorbing election coverage by The Gateway Pundit, and promoting it to his millions of followers.

One piece amplified by Trump in late December falsely claimed that supposed statistical anomalies in the counting of votes in Arizona represented proof of election fraud. The same argument garnered a Trump tweet when The Gateway Pundit used the wrong total for voter participation nationwide in the 2020 election to claim that Biden and Trump’s vote totals were impossibly high.

The former game-show host also hyped a Gateway Pundit piece with claims from a debunked forensic report carried out as part of a lawsuit challenging Antrim County, Michigan’s tallying of votes.

The site has routinely been cited and sued as a source of misinformation across a range of topics. Twitter suspended the outlet’s account and that of its founder, Jim Hoft, for spreading election misinformation in February. In November 2019, Wikipedia included the site in its list of untrustworthy sources which editors should not rely on. The site is notorious for falsely blaming Democrats or Trump critics for breaking acts of mass violence, as it did during a shooting at a Jacksonville, Florida video game tournament and at the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally. The latter earned Hoft a lawsuit when his site falsely claimed that a State Department diplomat “staged” an attack on anti-racist protesters. The suit remains ongoing.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the site was particularly close to the Trump campaign’s legal team as it attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. In early December 2020, The Gateway Pundit published a conspiracy-laden internal report from the Trump campaign’s legal team falsely casting Dominion Voting Systems as a suspicious company with ties to Venezuela. The report was sent to the Trump legal team by an aide to Trump’s then-top trade adviser Peter Navarro, former Trump legal-team adviser Bernard Kerik told The Daily Beast in March.