Rivian’s Electric Truck Gets All the Attention, But Its Fate Is Tied to Amazon



Edward Ludlow and Keith Naughton
Wed, October 6, 2021

In this article:
(Bloomberg) -- (This is the second story in a series examining Rivian’s origins and its future.)

Jeff Bezos stood before a packed conference room in Washington, D.C., and declared war on climate change. It was September 2019. His secret weapon, tucked deep into a chart-heavy presentation, was a bug-eyed cargo truck built by a startup few people had heard of.

“I am incredibly excited to announce that we have just placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans,” Bezos, then chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., told the stunned crowd. "They will be built by a company called Rivian.”

Amazon would be carbon neutral by 2040, he pledged — a game-changing moment for Bezos and the millions of Prime customers. But this was an even more defining moment for Rivian. The order immediately separated the auto rookie from the parade of promising electric startups, providing backing, a big book of business and legitimacy. It also would soon start to draw in additional investment from major players, including Ford Motor Co., T. Rowe Price, D1 Capital Partners and Fidelity.

For Rivian’s founder, R.J. Scaringe, the Bezos endorsement opened doors that were inaccessible to his rival Elon Musk in the early days of Tesla. While most of Rivian’s marketing focuses on its sleek and powerful consumer models — and Scaringe's vision for creating the Patagonia of pickups — the company is driven by the business Amazon is providing. Without it, say people familiar with the company's financials, there would be no hope of the $80 billion valuation Rivian is aiming for in its upcoming initial public offering.

Amazon's primacy as a customer is underscored now as production gets underway at Rivian's Illinois factory. Scaringe has prioritized building hundreds of delivery vans this year, while production of the highly anticipated new electric pickup runs at a trickle, according to people familiar with the plan.

On Friday, Rivian shared new details of the Amazon deal in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing how closely its fate is tied to one of its biggest benefactors. The e-commerce giant will have exclusive rights to Rivian’s delivery vehicles for four years after receiving its first one, and it gets right of first refusal to buy the vans for two years after that.

Rivian’s official debut came about a year before the Bezos announcement, at the 2018 Los Angeles auto show. Scaringe, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D., used the annual event to formally unveil his company, which had been operating in stealth mode until then. He’d been working on a premium electric pickup and an SUV.

Rihanna was among the guests at the launch party the night before the event. The singer posed for pictures with Scaringe in front of the sleek pickup, offering a thumbs up. She was there with her then-boyfriend, Hassan Jameel, whose family conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel had already invested millions in the startup.

In a 22-minute pitch at the car show, Scaringe explained that every detail of the R1T pickup and its close SUV cousin, the R1S, was developed in-house: the headlamps, storage, battery management system and quad motor system. The trucks would be built at the company’s recently acquired factory in Normal, Illinois. A team outside of Detroit was refining the engineering. And in Irvine, California, workers were designing the core battery and propulsion technology.

Scaringe, it turns out, was steering his venture into an entirely empty slot in the industry’s fastest lane. Americans were rapidly ditching their sensible sedans and indulging in the bigger is better ethos. As gasoline prices plummeted, SUVs became the modern family wagon and pickups were snapped up by suburban cowboys whose heaviest load was hauling mulch for the garden. By 2015, trucks and SUVs were outselling traditional cars in the U.S. Today, they account for three-quarters of the market, prompting automakers like Ford to get out of the sedan business entirely.

“When Rivian showcased its electric trucks and SUVs, it gave the EV market hope in the sense that electric vehicles could evolve to meet more mainstream preferences,” says Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at auto-market researcher Edmunds.

Rivian started to take pre-orders for the consumer vehicles at the L.A. show. Potential customers have put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to buy 48,390 R1T and R1S models. By comparison, Ford already has surpassed 150,000 non-binding reservations for its F-150 Lightning.

The most-hyped Rivian consumer today is Bezos, who has never said publicly how the startup landed on his radar. There are several connections between the two companies that offer some clues. In mid-2018, Rivian worked with a production company owned by director Peter Berg, who knows Bezos, to film material that would later be used at Rivian’s L.A. auto show reveal, people familiar with the matter said. Some of the impressive aerial photography was shot by Black Ops Aviation, a company owned by Bezos’ now-girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, the people said. Through the companies’ interactions with Rivian, word eventually got back to Bezos about a startup with an intriguing electric truck that was worth a look.

Due diligence by Amazon followed and in the late fall of 2018, Bezos flew to Rivian’s engineering facility in Plymouth, Michigan, and met with Scaringe. The Rivian founder presented a detailed document: his vision for an electric future. Throughout Amazon’s search for an electrified fleet, a particular sticking point was just how expensive it would prove to mass-produce the electric vans, according to a person familiar with the matter. Until that point, Bezos and Amazon had found no company that could build a battery-powered van at scale. Now he had.

“We weren’t super excited about the products that were available,” Ross Rachey, Amazon’s director of fleet and product, said in an interview in August 2020. “It was a combination of established manufacturers who were maybe a year or two farther out than we wanted. And it was a host of startups, some compelling, some non-compelling.”

In February 2019, Amazon led a $440 million investment round in Rivian just days before it stood up a target of reaching net zero carbon for half of all shipments by 2030. Six months later, Bezos was in Washington with more big, green goals: a plan to get all of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and to become entirely carbon neutral by 2040. (Amazon, Rivian and Berg declined to comment for this story. Black Ops Aviation did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scaringe had built two lines of business: one reliant on a just-in-time delivery empire and the other on environmentally conscious consumers. The vans for Amazon would deliver steady revenue, while the SUVs and trucks try to keep their momentum in a fickle retail market far more sensitive to economic conditions.

There’s a clear recognition inside Rivian and with its investors that the van for Amazon is a priority and the pickup a sideshow until production can be ramped up to meaningful volumes. The deal gives Rivian visibility and guaranteed revenue, along with a deadline. An all-hands-on-deck edict has been issued to get the project up to speed — for now, the R1T is taking a back seat.

Rivian’s most immediate goal is to deliver 300 vans to Amazon by year-end, according to people familiar with the deal. The first 10,000 units are due by the end of 2022. The full order of 100,000 vans is due by the end of the decade. The vans, in different configurations, are principally for last-mile delivery. Each will have a range of up to 150 miles on a charge.

Over the summer, Scaringe fast-tracked testing on the R1T pickup to clear the decks for accelerated van production in the fall. In September, the company’s efforts refocused on building what is known internally as the Rivian Prime Van. The pickup is being produced in steady but modest numbers, according to people familiar with the plan.

The pickup has also faced multiple delays since the global coronavirus pandemic hit, most recently attributed to a global computer chip shortage. Rivian has promised each buyer a human point of contact, dubbed an “ambassador,” to set expectations before the vehicle is delivered. But to date that PR army has had little positive news to report.

Ross Gale, a car collector and business owner in New Jersey, ordered a launch green R1T pickup last November. Lately, he says, despite his excitement when he first placed the order, he’s been frustrated by the lack of communication from the company on when he can expect to receive his vehicle.

Once delivered, he plans to use the truck as his daily driver and to haul cars from his collection to auto shows. "I 100% believe in the product, having never seen one, having never touched one,” Gale says. “But I am annoyed with the failure to meet promises. I mean, just be honest. Tell us what you're doing."

Meanwhile, Rivian’s contractual requirements for Amazon may simply be an opening bid. Bezos, as he looks toward future orders, has set up a kind of bake-off (as he is known to do). In addition to Rivian, Amazon currently buys vans from Ford, Stellantis and Daimler, all companies that are quickly flipping the switch on electric models.

“You can safely assume 100,000 vans is not really the objective,” one source familiar with the deal says. “If Amazon really wants to change over their fleet — because how else are they going to become carbon neutral — then you can imagine the size of the order and how big it will be.”

The deal between the two companies is stacked in Amazon’s favor. Rivian's Oct. 1 filing details that Amazon’s logistics unit is not bound to buy any electric delivery vehicles from Rivian — and that it can still work with any other potential automotive partners it chooses.

Quantifying how much of a boost the Amazon deal will be to Rivian is tricky, as the specifics have never been disclosed. The unknown price of each van is just one part of the equation. The agreement between the two companies also includes provisions for recurring revenue for fleet management, such as software updates and running diagnostics, people familiar with the matter said.

PitchBook analysts forecast the total Amazon order could bring more than $4.5 billion to Rivian and, more importantly, additional commercial customers. “These orders are a validating signal for investors and set Rivian up well to supply electric delivery vans to other logistics companies,” said Asad Hussain, Pitchbook’s senior mobility analyst. “In the same way investors look to Tesla for the future of automotive, many investors look to Amazon for the future of logistics.”

Rivian will try to simultaneously launch three all-new electric vehicles. “Moving into the production on multiple fronts is a challenge for any automaker, let alone one that has never scaled up a single model before,” says BloombergNEF analyst Corey Cantor.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Rivian’s first customer will get a truck, the ambassadors will start booking delivery dates and Instagram will fill up with the 5,000-pound version of an iPhone unboxing video. Still, the wait for most customers will be long. Scaringe told Bloomberg in November that it would take two years to catch up on its order book.

Amazon currently is testing a handful of pre-production vans in cities across the U.S. And Bezos is no longer at the helm. He stepped down from the CEO’s perch in July and has been devoting time to his rocket company Blue Origin. Mere minutes before blasting himself into space in July, with much of the world watching, Bezos drove to the launch pad in a Rivian SUV. After touching back down to earth, his capsule was swarmed by vehicles — all Rivian pickups and SUVs, each of them shiny and dusty.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Nucor launches line of net-zero carbon steel with General Motors as first customer

Nucor introduces its Econiq line of net-zero steel as the industry rushes to decarbonize its products to remain competitive for major steel customers like the automotive and construction industries.

By John Downey – Senior Staff Writer, Charlotte Business Journal
a day ago


Nucor Corp. has launched a line of net-zero carbon steel products, and General Motors Co. will be the inaugural customer, receiving its first shipment in early 2022.

Steel companies internationally have been in the race to produce green steel products to help large customers meet their own carbon reduction goals. Nucor (NYSE: NUE) says its new line, branded Econiq, is the first of its kind at scale for the U.S. steel industry. It will be available across all of Nucor's product lines.

“For more than 50 years, Nucor has been built on a sustainable model of recycling steel to produce new steel and steel products,” says CEO Leon Topalian. “The addition of Econiq is a logical extension to our innovation legacy in the steel industry.”

Shilpan Amin, vice president of global purchasing for General Motors (NYSE: GM), praises Nucor’s plan in a prepared statement.

“It brings GM one step closer to its vision of a zero emissions future," he says. "General Motors is excited to be Nucor's first customer for Econiq as we work to integrate sustainability into all aspects of our supply chain."

Competitive race

Topalian has been touting Nucor’s push into cleaner steel since he became CEO in 2020. The company has pushed to become a bigger supplier to green energy projects — racking for solar and towers for wind. But it has also sought to reduce its own carbon footprint and make products that reduce vendor carbon emissions — called Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions — for its major customers.

Charlotte-based Nucor is not alone in this race for a top position in clean steel. In July, Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal SA (NYSE: MT) announced a $1.2 billion investment in Gijon, Spain, to build what it says is the first large-scale zero carbon production plant. It will produce 1.6 million tons of carbon-free steel a year, the company says, and is slated to begin production in 2025.

Nucor steel production is already very low in carbon and other greenhouse gases because of its use of electric arc furnaces, rather than coal blast furnaces, high efficiency and specific steps the company has taken to further reduce carbon.

But it does not operate a zero-carbon plant. The Econiq net-zero steel will be produced using Nucor’s existing low-carbon steel and “100% renewable electricity and high-quality carbon offsets” to negate the carbon used in in procession.
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions

Topalian has stressed repeatedly that green steel is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Today, Nucor produces steel with 70% lower concentration of carbon and greenhouse gases than the steel industry average. In July, as Arcelor made its plant announcement, Nucor said it would cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 77% of today’s global average.

And it’s working to go beyond that, Topalian told analysts last month as he announced a $2.7 billion investment in a sheet steel plant to produce low-carbon steel for the automotive industry.

“In January, we put together an environmental technical process team to evaluate all the different (decarbonization) technologies are that are out there,” he said. “We believe that there are several million more tons (of industry capacity) that … may become obsolete in the coming years due to cost position in carbon intensity.”

The race to decarbonize the steel industry comes amid major expansions at Nucor, like the sheet plant announced in September, to cement its leadership in the market and in targeted products and technologies.

Last week, a subsidiary of Nucor’s David J. Jones Co. scrap metal operations announced the purchase of two companies at an undisclosed price to boost the supply chain for plant expansions and new construction in the Midwest. Nucor converts scrap steel and iron into its steel products in its electric arc furnaces.

WAIT , WHAT?!
U.S. suspends authority to ship nuclear materials to China's CGN


Timothy Gardner
Tue, October 5, 2021

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. nuclear power regulator last month suspended the shipment of radioactive materials and a hydrogen isotope used in reactors to China's largest state-owned nuclear company, CGN, reflecting Washington's concerns about the country's buildup of atomic weapons.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in the order, dated Sept. 27, that the White House had determined that the suspension was "necessary to further the national security interests of the United States and to enhance the United States common defense and security consistent with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954."

The suspension on the exports covers radioactive materials and deuterium for CGN, or China General Nuclear Power Group, its subsidiaries or related entities. Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope of the element hydrogen that is used in heavy water fission reactors in nuclear power plants.

The suspension further tightens controls set in 2018 by the administration of former President Donald Trump on shipments to China of civilian nuclear technology to prevent it from being used for military or other unauthorized purposes.

CGN was placed on a U.S. blacklist in August 2019 for allegedly making efforts to acquire advanced U.S. technology and material for diversion to military uses in China.

The Pentagon, in a report to Congress last year, estimated that China could at least double the number of its nuclear warheads over the next decade from the current stockpile "in the low 200s."

The head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Navy Admiral Charles Richard, has warned lawmakers this https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-nuclear-plutonium/update-1-china-reactors-will-yield-weapons-grade-plutonium-u-s-commander-idUSL1N2ME1U8  year that a new generation of nuclear power plants China is developing could produce large amounts of plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

China has said its nuclear power program is for peaceful purposes.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

BUT WAS HE A MIKADO FAN(ATIC)

Gary Poste: Who was the alleged Zodiac killer identified by ‘Case Breakers’?


Gary Poste: Who was the alleged Zodiac killer identified by ‘Case Breakers’?


Oliver O'Connell
Wed, October 6, 2021

Gary Francis Poste was identified by volunteer investigative group The Case Breakers as a potential new suspect in the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, the serial killer who terrorised the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

Because of the cryptic letters and ciphers the killer sent to authorities and The San Francisco Chronicle at the time, the case has long fascinated true crime aficionados and has been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, TV shows, and movies, most famous the David Fincher-directed dramatisation starring Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal.

The Case Breakers reportedly identified Mr Poste, who died in 2018, through a series of photographs that they uncovered, dating back to 1963, supposedly from his “darkroom”, according to a press release issued by the group.

They found photos that showed Mr Poste with supposed scars on his forehead that they believe matched marks shown on a police sketch of the Zodiac killer. A news clipping sourced by the group indicates that they believe the scars were the result of a car crash in 1959 in which an airman was killed and Mr Poste, also with the 782nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, was injured.

The group, which focuses on cold cases and consists of former law enforcement and forensics specialists, also claims to have forensic evidence including DNA, and further says that if you remove the letters of Mr Poste’s full name from one of the ciphers left by Zodiac, it reveals an alternate message, Fox News reports.

Much of the Case Breakers’ reported evidence centres on linking Mr Poste to a murder in Riverside, California, that was connected to the Zodiac Killer in the mid-70s, but is now no longer considered by authorities to be connected.

The brutal slaying of Cheri Jo Bates on 31 October 1966 occurred two years before the Zodiac is known to have been active, hundreds of miles to the north. Though in one of Zodiac’s letters he claims to have killed 37 people, far more than the five officially attributed to him.

Among the evidence that the Case Breakers believe links the cases and Mr Poste is a Timex wristwatch with a broken band found at the crime scene and purchased at a military base in the mid-sixties.

Mr Poste was receiving medical check-ups following a gun accident injury, the Case Breakers say, and as a US Air Force veteran was being treated at March Air Force Base hospital, just 15 minutes from the crime scene. It is unclear if the dates overlap.

The Case Breakers believe that paint spattered on the wristwatch’s face is because at the time of the murder Mr Poste had been a house painter for three years and continued to be for decades afterward.

A size 10 heelprint from a military-style boot is also believed to be in the style of those allegedly worn by Mr Poste and they say the same as those found at three other Zodiac crime scenes. Brown hair found in the victim’s hand is also said to match that of Mr Poste.

Fox News spoke with a Vietnam veteran, Hams Smits, who says he spent 10 years hiding a Zodiac whistleblower named Wil who had escaped a “criminal posse” headed by Mr Poste that allegedly roamed around in California’s High Sierra region.

Wil, who now lives in the northwest, alleges Mr Poste “groomed me into a killing machine” and that he witnessed him burying murder weapons.

In an extract from a longer interview with the Case Breakers, Wil claims that Mr Poste killed animals of all sizes “indiscriminately” and would “mess with the carcasses”.

Other witnesses brought forward by the Case Breakers include Mr Poste’s daughter-in-law, a woman named Michelle, who claims that when her marriage ended she was harassed, threatened, and assaulted by Mr Poste’s posse until she left the state.

Gwennie, a California woman who lived next door to Mr Poste and his wife, told Fox News she believes he’s the Zodiac killer based on the evidence collected to date.

She said Mr Poste and his wife babysat her as a child in the 1970s and 1980s and he would teach her how to shoot firearms several times a week. She also said that she witnessed his callousness and violence towards his wife who only slept on the couch.

Recently, Gwennie said she caught up with his wife who is now in assisted living and was told over the phone: “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell the cops about his [Zodiac] past,” The Case Breakers report in their press release adding their parentheses.

“He lived a double life,” she told Fox News. “As I’m adult thinking back, it all kind of makes sense now. At the time when I was a teenager, I didn’t put two and two together until I got older. It hit me full-blown that Gary’s the Zodiac.”

To date, no DNA has been matched to any of the Zodiac crime scenes, nor to evidence retained from the death of Ms Bates.

In 2020, after private citizens cracked one of the ciphers, the FBI said the Zodiac case was ongoing.

Read More

Former cops claim to have identified Zodiac Killer and linked him to another victim

Some Americans still believe Ted Cruz might be the Zodiac killer. Here's why they're wrong

Letter from Zodiac Killer decoded after 51 years

Vaccines Can’t End Pandemics Alone—And We’ve Known That Since We Eradicated Smallpox


Kyle Harper
Tue, October 5, 2021

Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) performing his first vaccination on James Phipps, a boy of eight, on May 14, 1796. Painting by E. Board in the Welcome Museum, London. Credit - Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

President Thomas Jefferson in 1806 wrote a letter to English physician Edward Jenner. Ten years earlier, Jenner had intentionally infected a boy with cowpox, in order to protect him against the much more terrifying smallpox disease. It worked. Jenner gathered more evidence, and two years later he published his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox. News traveled across the Atlantic, and Jefferson was among the first Americans to recognize the revolutionary potential of vaccination. He praised Jenner in lavish terms: “Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility.” In fact, Jefferson foresaw an end to a disease that was then the most deadly and most feared affliction in much of the world. “Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated.”

Jefferson was visionary—but too optimistic. Mortality from smallpox declined precipitously as vaccination spread, but progress stalled and at times reversed in the late 19th century. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, there were still thousands of cases of smallpox a year in the United States, and not until the late 1920s was the disease completely eradicated from the country. Globally, progress was even more halting. A massive global health crusade in the 1960s and 1970s finally realized Jefferson’s vision of rendering the disease a thing of the past. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox occurred in 1977—171 years after Jefferson’s letter to Jenner imagined a world without the disease.


The example of smallpox elimination is one of many that reminds us the control of infectious disease requires both technical and social adaptations. Jenner’s discovery of vaccination ranks as one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. But technical solutions on their own are never enough. In the U.S., the spread of vaccination required an effective communication campaign, cultural acceptance of vaccines and, above all, changes in the nature and power of the state. Namely, the rise of public health boards, and their ability to mandate vaccination, were necessary to bring the disease completely to heel domestically.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a painful reminder that confronting the challenge of infectious disease requires both science and social adaptation. The development of multiple safe and highly effective vaccines against COVID-19 in under a year is a marvelous accomplishment. And yet the combination of vaccine hesitancy at home, and vaccine inequity abroad, has let the pandemic surge anew and linger, with no end in sight. Before COVID-19, the U.S. was ranked high on pandemic preparedness. And yet our response has been an embarrassment and a tragedy—as well as a detailed map of our weaknesses, which our nation’s enemies are sure to be tracking in detail. Our science was ready, but our society was not.

Read more: The History of Vaccines, From Smallpox to COVID-19

As a historian of infectious disease, who expected that we would face a destabilizing pandemic in our lifetime, I do not find this pattern surprising. But it is concerning that we are not absorbing the lesson. Last month, the Biden Administration released a preview of its future pandemic preparedness plan. The vision is admirably bold. It proposes a $65 billion investment over 10 years that will be managed “with the seriousness of purpose, commitment, and accountability of an Apollo Program.” The plan is motivated by the sober reality that another pandemic is inevitable. Indeed, as the plan states, “There will be an increasing frequency of natural—and possibly human-made—biological threats in the years ahead.” And, as it notes, the next one might well be worse. COVID-19 is a severe and deadly disease, but there is plenty of opportunity for a new pathogen that is equally contagious yet more virulent.

President Joe Biden’s proposed strategy offers much to like. It promises to make major investments in critical areas where we do not do nearly enough, from surveillance and early-warning systems to real-time tracking of viral evolution. It outlines a path towards even more rapid vaccine development and deployment, as well as fundamental improvements in the treatment of viral diseases. It proposes basic improvements in public health infrastructure domestically and globally.

The problem, however, is that nearly all of the agenda focuses on technical solutions. There are only modest hints of an effort to understand how societies respond to the challenge of pandemics and how we can work to make ourselves more resilient. The plan calls for “evidence-based public health communications,” which is laudable, but otherwise there is nothing that matches its scientific aspirations with an equally ambitious call to prepare our society to handle the next threat with greater cohesion and strength. So, two cheers for the Apollo-like vision. But pandemic preparedness is a categorically different project than getting to the moon, because success depends on the behavior of more than 300 million Americans and 8 billion people globally.

It is a disheartening fact that the experience of COVID-19 has rendered our society less ready for the future challenges. The tribalization of our response to masking, vaccines and other mitigation measures has been swift and extreme, and this represents a serious obstacle to preparedness. The reality is that public health is always political. But it is not always bitterly partisan, especially in a polarized society. If anything, we have taken a step backward. Compulsory vaccination, for example, allowed us to conquer smallpox and other menacing diseases, and it became part of our constitutional order and social fabric. In 1905, when a man from Massachusetts protested against a vaccine mandate, saying the requirement violated his individual liberty, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that mandatory vaccination was within the power of the states. The majority opinion held that “there are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good…” On any other basis, organized society could not exist with safety to its members.” Some of the constitutional particularities have changed, but the fundamental issues have not. We are relitigating our sense of the common good, at a time when divisiveness and mistrust are at high tide.

The sooner we grapple with that reality, the better prepared we will be. Evidence-based public health communication is a start, but it is far from adequate. A fully-fledged plan should establish an R&D agenda that draws from the social sciences and humanities; it should put in place the framework, resources and incentives to drive forward our knowledge of the determinants of successful public health initiatives. There is a huge amount of ongoing research that is trying to help us understand why countries (and even states) have responded to COVID-19 so differently. It is already evident what a complex question this presents, involving both apparently fixable variables like good leadership, but also much deeper, historically-rooted cultural factors. A plan to build resilience will have to confront the tensions between individualistic values and social cohesion, the decline of public trust in institutions, the poison of polarization, the role of social media in shaping attitudes toward health and medicine, and the structural inequalities that have been so apparent throughout the pandemic. In short, we need a bold, coherent agenda to advance our understanding of the human side of the equation.

The Biden strategy as proposed earns an A on the technical front, but unless its shortcomings are redressed, it will fail on its social-behavioral agenda. We know all too well how that combination has worked – both throughout history and in our present moment.

Rome Didn't Fall When You Think It Did. Here's Why That Fabricated History Still Matters Today


Edward J. Watts
Wed, October 6, 2021, 2:18 PM·7 min read

A drawing showing Flavius Odoacer forcing Romulus Augustus to resign in 476 AD.

Odoacer forces Romulus Augustus to resign in 476 AD. Credit - Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

In September of 476 AD, the barbarian commander Odoacer forced the teenaged Western Roman emperor Romulus Augustus to resign his office. The Constantinopolitan chronicler Marcellinus Comes would write in the 510s that when “Odoacer, king of the Goths, took control of Rome” the “Western Empire of the Roman people … perished.” But no one thought this at the time. The fall of Rome in 476 is a historical turning point that was invented nearly 50 years later as a pretext for a devastating war. The fact that it has since become recognized as the end of an epoch shows how history can be misused to justify otherwise unpalatable actions in the present—and how that misuse can also distort the lessons future generations take from the past.

Although everyone from schoolchildren to scholars now learn that the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, 5th century Romans did not see anything particularly special about Odoacer’s coup. Nine different Western Roman emperors had risen and fallen since 455 and most of them had been overthrown by barbarian commanders like Odoacer. In four cases, the barbarian generals toppled one emperor and delayed appointing another. One of these imperial vacancies stretched for 20 months, a span longer than the entire reigns of more than 20 previous Roman emperors. Even Romulus Augustus himself was a usurper who assumed the imperial office after an imperfectly executed coup that left Julius Nepos, the legitimate emperor Romulus replaced, still in charge of Western Roman imperial territories in what is now Croatia. In other words, while the West had lost an imperial usurper in 476, it still had a legitimate Roman emperor.


Odoacer maintained most of the structures of the Roman government during the nearly 17 years he controlled the state. The Senate continued to meet in Rome just as it had for nearly a millennium. Latin remained the language of administration. Roman law governed the land. Roman armies continued to fight and win victories on the frontiers. And Roman emperors appeared on the coins that Odoacer minted. These coins showed Julius Nepos at first and then, after Nepos’s death in 480, they featured the busts of the Eastern Roman emperors who reigned in Constantinople.
More from TIME

These aspects of Roman life continued after the Gothic ruler Theoderic overthrew Odoacer in 493. Theoderic proved even more successful than Odoacer in reviving Italian fortunes after the political chaos of the mid-5th century. His armies campaigned successfully in modern Croatia, Serbia and France. He made much of Spain into a protectorate for a time. Large scale repairs were made to churches and public buildings throughout Italy. Either Theoderic or Odoacer undertook renovations to the Colosseum following which senators proudly inscribed their names and offices on their seats.

Rather than imagining that Roman rule had ended in 476, Italians in the late 5th and early 6th centuries spoke about its recovery. Bishop Ennodius of Pavia spoke of the “filth” that Theoderic “washed away from the greater part of Italy,” leaving Rome, as it emerged from “the ashes,” “living again.” Theoderic’s military victories meant that “the Roman empire has returned to its former boundary” and returned “the culture of our ancestors” to Romans who had lived in the regions he reconquered. Ennodius even went so far as to claim that “the revival of Roman renown brought Theoderic forward” as a rival to Alexander the Great because he had sparked a Roman “Golden Age.”

How did it happen that Odoacer’s coup, the beginning of this Roman resurgence, instead came to be seen as the fall of Rome? The answer lies not in Italy but in Constantinople. As Italian power returned under Odoacer and Theoderic, relations with the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople deteriorated. By the time of Theoderic’s death in 526, Romans in Constantinople had begun considering the possibility of invading Italy.

Read more: The Fall of Rome and the Lessons for America

It is at this moment of East-West tension that we can return to Marcellinus Comes. Marcellinus’s Chronicle appeared in the late 510s and represents the first historical work known to claim that Rome fell in 476. Marcellinus’s text also gives away why he said this. Marcellinus describes Odoacer as “the king of the Goths” when he caused the Roman Empire to “perish.” This is a fabrication. Odoacer was not a Goth. Theoderic, however, was a Gothic king and he had taken power from Odoacer. As the Gothic-led Western Roman state found itself in increasing tension with Constantinople, the fall of Rome emerged as a way to justify an Eastern Roman invasion that would restore Italy to Eastern Roman control.

Marcellinus did not invent this idea in a vacuum. He served in Constantinople as an aide to the future Eastern Roman emperor Justinian, who was at the time the imperial heir apparent. Marcellinus later received several honorific titles from Justinian following the publication of his Chronicle, a work that bluntly hammers home its main theme that the Western Empire had fallen and Justinian’s Eastern Roman Empire should restore it.

This propaganda worked well. In 535, Eastern Roman armies attacked Italy. Justinian explained this aggression by claiming that “the Goths have used force to take Italy, which was ours, and have refused to give it back.” His troops entered the city of Rome in December of 536. On this day, Justinian’s official historian Procopius wrote, “Rome became subject to the Romans again after a time of 60 years.” The number 60 was not arbitrarily chosen. The capture of Rome by the East came 60 years and three months after Odoacer’s coup of 476.

Despite these initial successes, Justinian’s armies struggled to consolidate control over the peninsula. The Italian war did not conclude until 562 and the fighting devastated both the city of Rome and much of Italy. Goths recaptured Rome in 546, lost it in 547, retook it in 549, and then lost the city for good in 552. Residents of Rome survived by eating weeds, mice and dung during a long Gothic siege in 546. It is estimated that Rome’s population fell from perhaps 500,000 in the mid-5th century to as little as 25,000 in the 560s. Other Italian cities suffered even worse fates. Milan, once Italy’s second largest city, was razed to the ground in 539 with its entire population either killed or enslaved. The Eastern Roman Empire had recovered Italy—and destroyed much of it in the process.

The Western Roman Empire had clearly fallen by the 560s. Italy was controlled by Justinian, many of its cities were ruined and much of its infrastructure was severely damaged. When later historians looked for the moment when the Western Empire fell, they found Marcellinus and his claim that Rome fell under Odoacer. In the memorable framing by the historian Brian Croke, the fall of Rome in 476 is a manufactured historical turning point that has become an accepted historical fact. But it was Justinian’s invasion, not Odoacer’s coup that decimated Italy and ended the Western Roman state. For 1,500 years, we have picked the wrong time and blamed the wrong person for the fall of Rome.

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This mistake matters for two reasons. First, Marcellinus’s manufactured fall of Rome helped create conditions that permitted Justinian to launch a war that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed the prosperity that Roman rule had once created in the West. His words had real, deadly and long-lasting consequences.

Second, the manufactured fall of Rome reveals the unstable boundaries between historical epochs. For 1,500 years, Odoacer’s coup has concluded a cautionary tale about how barbarian commanders in the Roman army ended Rome’s empire. People around the world have scrutinized this story so that their societies may avoid suffering Rome’s fate. But, if we recognize that Rome did not fall in 476, the lessons we take from Roman history become quite different. Rome’s story then does not warn us of the danger of barbarous outsiders toppling a society from within. It instead shows how a false claim that a nation has perished can help cause the very problems its author invented. We ignore this danger at our peril.

Union at Exxon Beaumont, Texas, refinery faces removal vote


 Exxon Mobil Beaumont locks out refinery workers

Erwin Seba
Wed, October 6, 2021, 2:41 PM·2 min read


HOUSTON (Reuters) -Members of the union representing locked-out workers at Exxon Mobil Corp's Beaumont, Texas, refinery have submitted a petition to force a vote on removing the union, the union and company said on Wednesday.

Exxon and the local United Steelworkers union said they were notified by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, which will oversee the vote, that a petition calling for removal had been filed. It was unclear when the vote would occur.

The union represents 650 workers who have been locked out of their jobs since May 1, following failure to reach a new contract after the previous one expired in February.

At least 30% of the members must sign the petition for the decertification vote to take place. Decertification is the formal name for the removal process.

"You've got people that have been locked out for six months, it's getting pretty tough," Bryan Gross, USW international representative, said about the petition.

NO RIGHT TO GRIEVE NO RIGHT TO REPRESENTATION AGAINST MANAGEMENT
"The company respects employee choice and believes in the value of a direct relationship between the company and employees, without a third party union," Exxon said in a message to Beaumont employees, as confirmed by an Exxon spokesperson.

The USW in April filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging Exxon had violated federal law by providing an employee with decertification materials, employee email addresses and use of a company computer and email system to campaign for decertification.

The petition comes a week after Exxon made its first concession at the bargaining table when it offered greater seniority and job security protection for the lube oil plant workers.

Exxon said it began the lockout to avoid the disruption of a possible strike. The USW said the company's contract proposal would wipe out seniority and create separate contracts for the workers at the refinery and the adjoining lubricant oil plant.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Chris Reese and Cynthia Osterman)

NEVER WORRIES ABOUT DEFICITS

The US Navy sold 2 obsolete aircraft carriers to scrap dealers for a cent each

Thomas Colson

Wed, October 6, 2021, 

The USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in Hong Kong in 2008. Reuters

• The US Navy sold two old aircraft carriers for a cent each to a ship-breaking firm.

• The USS Kitty Hawk and USS John F. Kennedy had been decommissioned for years.

• They are due to be broken up by a firm in Texas, which can make money from the scrap metal.

The US Navy sold two aircraft carriers to a ship-breaking company for 1 cent each after decades of service.

The cut-price fee reflects the fact the company will profit from selling the ship metal for scrap, officials said.

Naval Sea Systems Command, a US Navy suborganization, said it had agreed to sell the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS John F. Kennedy to International Shipbreaking Limited, which is based in Brownsville, Texas, USA Today reported.

Towing and ship-breaking is a costly process, and the Navy has previously paid ISL large sums of money to recycle its ships, the Brownsville Herald reported.

"The contract values reflect that the contracted company will benefit from the subsequent sale of scrap steel, iron, and non-ferrous metal ores," said Alan Baribeau, a spokesman for the Naval Sea Systems Command in a statement cited by USA Today.

Both ships were launched in the 1960s and were capable of carrying dozens of aircraft. The Kitty Hawk was deployed in the Vietnam War, and the John F. Kennedy featured in the Gulf War.

The Kitty Hawk was decommissioned in 2o09 and the John F. Kennedy in 2017. Both have spent their time since being maintained in naval yards.

The ships are due to be towed to Brownsville for scrapping in the coming months, an ISL spokesperson told the Brownsville Herald.

Bank of America raises U.S. minimum hourly wage to $21


A Bank of America logo is pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City

Wed, October 6, 2021, 

(Reuters) - Bank of America Corp said on Wednesday it had raised its U.S. minimum hourly wage to $21, as it works to keep its promise of increasing the pay to $25 an hour by 2025.

Bank of America in May disclosed plans to raise its minimum wages for its U.S. employees, joining a clutch of firms that have pledged to pay employees more after a year of pandemic risks and government subsidies fueled conversations on whether companies pay their workers enough.

The $25 figure is higher than at competitors, and the second-largest U.S. bank has also asked its vendors to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour.

In the last four years, Bank of America raised the minimum hourly wage to $20 from $15.

Companies have sometimes been prodded to boost wages by employee complaints that spill into the public sphere. But there are also political pressures and a competitive reality in which one big company outlines a higher pay scale and others follow suit.

Walmart Corp, Starbucks Corp, Amazon.com Inc and CVS Health have raised or are planning to hike wages.

The current minimum wage at the federal level is $7.25 per hour, enacted more than a decade ago.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)

With Minimum Wage on the Rise, These Are Some of the Retailers With the Highest Starting Pay


Samantha McDonald and Aaron Royce
Tue, October 5, 2021,


The movement toward a higher minimum wage is on the rise — and some of the country’s biggest retailers are coming out on top.

At the start of the year, annual cost-of-living adjustments and other scheduled gains led wages to jump by pennies to a dollar for workers across 20 states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont and Washington.

Later in the year, another four states — Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon and Virginia — plus Washington, D.C., will see an increase in their baseline pay.

Some retailers have hiked pay and benefits in an attempt to attract and retain workers — perhaps as well as incentivize them to return to work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Others, however, raised wages as part of previously announced plans.
Amazon

The online giant’s minimum wage for all U.S.-based employees currently stands at $18 per hour — more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Costco

The membership-only warehouse chain’s minimum wage has increased to $16 this fall. During a Senate panel hearing, CEO Craig Jelinek shared that more than half of U.S. employees are “paid at the top of our scales, in excess of $25 an hour.”

CVS

The pharmacy giant has announced its plan to achieve $15 hourly minimum wages for all employees by July 2022, with hourly increases beginning late last month.

Dollar General

According to investment banking firm UBS, which analyzed the employee-reported salaries of 25 major nationwide retailers in the United States, Dollar General pays its workers the least of the group but still above the national minimum at $9.68 an hour on average.

Dollar Tree

Dollar General isn’t the only discount chain that pays better than minimum wage: UBS reported that Dollar Tree’s starting pay is $10 per hour on average.
Sam’s Club

Starting last month, the Arkansas-based retailer raised its starting hourly salary from $11 to $15.

Target

In July, the Minneapolis-based company made good on a target (no pun intended) to raise its starting pay from $13 to $15 by year’s end.

Under Armour

In June 2021, Under Armour raised its minimum wage to $15 as a way of luring people back to work amid a labor shortage.

Walgreens

The Chicago-based pharmacy announced plans to raise its minimum hourly pay to $15 last month. Gradual raises have already begun, with the goal to be put in effect for all of Walgreens’ 9,000 stores by November 2022.

Wayfair

The home goods retailer has raised wages as of this January for all U.S. employees, who will make at least $15 per hour.

Walmart

The Bentonville, Ark.-based business improved wages for about 165,000 hourly workers — or roughly 11% of its U.S. workforce — in October as part of the rollout of a new operating model in its Supercenter stores. Its minimum wage remains at $11. Depending on location and market, some associates average around $16.40.

The US must avoid war with China over Taiwan at all costs


Lt Col Daniel L Davis (ret)
Tue, October 5, 2021

Photograph: Taiwan Ministry Of National Defense/EPA

Since last Friday, the People’s Republic of China has launched a total of 155 warplanes – the most ever over four consecutive days – into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone; Ned Price said the state department was “very concerned”. There have been more than 500 such flights through nine months this year, as opposed to 300 all of last year.

Before war comes to the Indo-Pacific and Washington faces pressure to fight a potentially existential war, American policymakers must face the cold, hard reality that fighting China over Taiwan risks an almost-certain military defeat – and gambles we won’t stumble into a nuclear war.

Bluntly put, America should refuse to be drawn into a no-win war with Beijing. It needs to be said up front: there would be no palatable choice for Washington if China finally makes good on its decades-long threat to take Taiwan by force. Either choose a bad, bitter-tasting outcome or a self-destructive one in which our existence is put at risk.

The prevailing mood in Washington among officials and opinion leaders is to fight if China attempts to conquer Taiwan by force. In a speech at the Center for Strategic Studies last Friday, the deputy secretary of defense, Kathleen Hicks, said that if Beijing invades Taiwan, “we have a significant amount of capability forward in the region to tamp down any such potential”.

Either Hicks is unaware of how little wartime capacity we actually have forward deployed in the Indo-Pacific or she’s unaware of how significant China’s capacity is off its shores, but whichever the case, we are in no way guaranteed to “tamp down” a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Earlier this year, Senator Rick Scott and Representative Guy Reschenthaler introduced the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act which, Representative Reschenthaler said, would authorize “the president to use military force to defend Taiwan against a direct attack”. In the event of an actual attack, there would be enormous pressure to fast-track such a bill to authorize Biden to act. We must resist this temptation.

As I have previously detailed, there is no rational scenario in which the United States could end up in a better, more secure place after a war with China. The best that could be hoped for would be a pyrrhic victory in which we are saddled with becoming the permanent defense force for Taiwan (costing us hundreds of billions a year and the equally permanent requirement to be ready for the inevitable Chinese counter-attack).

The most likely outcome would be a conventional defeat of our forces in which China ultimately succeeds, despite our intervention – at the cost of large numbers of our jets being shot down, ships being sunk, and thousands of our service personnel killed. But the worst case is a conventional war spirals out of control and escalates into a nuclear exchange.

That leaves as the best option something most Americans find unsatisfying: refuse to engage in direct combat against China on behalf of Taiwan. Doing so will allow the United States to emerge on the other side of a China/Taiwan war with our global military and economic power intact.

It would take Beijing decades to overcome the losses incurred from a war to take Taiwan, even if Beijing triumphs

That’s not to suggest we stand passively aside and let China run over Taiwan with impunity. The most effective course of action for Washington would be to condemn China in the strongest possible terms, lead a global movement that will enact crippling sanctions against Beijing, and make them an international pariah. China’s pain wouldn’t be limited to economics, however.

It would take Beijing decades to overcome the losses incurred from a war to take Taiwan, even if Beijing triumphs. The United States and our western allies, on the other hand, would remain at full military power, dominate the international business markets, and have the moral high ground to keep China hemmed in like nothing that presently exists. Xi would be seen as an unquestioned aggressor, even by other Asian regimes, and the fallout against China could knock them back decades. Our security would be vastly improved from what it is today – and incalculably higher than if we foolishly tried to fight a war with China.

Publicly, Washington should continue to embrace strategic ambiguity but privately convey to Taiwanese leaders that we will not fight a war with China. That would greatly incentivize Taipei to make whatever political moves and engage in any negotiation necessary to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo. The blunt, hard reality is that a Taiwan maintaining the status quo is far better than a smoldering wreck of an island conquered by Beijing.

The only way the US could have our security harmed would be to allow ourselves to be drawn into a war we’re likely to lose over an issue peripheral to US security. In the event China takes Taiwan by force, Washington should stay out of the fray and lead a global effort to ostracize China, helping ensure our security will be strengthened for a generation to come.

Daniel L Davis is a senior fellow for defense priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the US army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America