'Dumbest bet you could make:' NCAA under fire again for women's sports inequities

CBC/Radio-Canada  4/14/2021

© Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP The Central Florida women's volleyball team practices before the NCAA volleyball tournament on Tuesday. The NCAA is being criticized for subpar conditions at the Omaha, Neb., bubble.

Just one month after coming under fire for its mistreatment of women, the NCAA is once again taking heat for the same issue.

With the national women's volleyball championship tournament set to be begin Wednesday, players and coaches are speaking out about subpar conditions in the Omaha, Neb., bubble.

Among their issues are locker rooms that look more like tents, potentially dangerous flooring and a lack of broadcast coverage.


In March, NCAA women's basketball players revealed similar inequities compared to the men's tournament, most notably an underwhelming weight room.

"Anybody who put money on the NCAA changing in a week lost a lot of money and it was the dumbest bet you could ever make," CBC Sports contributor Meghan McPeak said on the latest episode of Bring It In.

"I was not shocked at the NCAA women's tournament and what they had. That's just the NCAA doing what they do best: not caring about anything but the men's side of sports. Not caring about their athletes, period."

Bring It In, CBC Sports' video podcast series, returned Tuesday with its first episode of Season 2, in which host Morgan Campbell discussed with McPeak and fellow contributor Dave Zirin the NCAA double-standards, the potential CFL-XFL partnership and more.

Upon arrival in Omaha, multiple coaches pointed out that the practice courts at the convention centre where the tournament will take place were just "sport court layered over cement flooring," according to Big Ten Network reporter Emily Ehman.

Those conditions increase injury probability — especially for a sport that requires so much jumping.

The locker-room tents and lack of commentary on broadcast streams, originally for the first two rounds of the tournament, also provided cause for concern.

The NCAA responded by saying it inserted felt between the cement and sport courts to ease impact, while adding ESPN commentary for all rounds — though not before claiming it had "no requirement" to include such.

"They didn't apologize because they felt bad, they didn't apologize because they were wrong, they didn't apologize because they had a misstep. They apologized because they got caught — publicly," McPeak said.

Campbell pointed out that the NCAA says it can't pay high-revenue sport athletes such as men's basketball and football players because those funds must be distributed to non-profitable sports.

The lack of investment in women's volleyball, then, is curious.

"Volleyball is a big business in [the U.S.]. Volleyball is huge. Volleyball is the second most popular sport in Brazil, which is only one of the biggest countries on earth. There is money to be made from women's volleyball, but they can't see it for the very reason they can't see that the weight room is absolutely disgusting and insulting compared to the men's," Zirin said.

Commissioner Mark Emmert should be held accountable for the NCAA's continued ignorance of women's sports, the panel agreed.

"He is hurting the NCAA's ability to make money, because women's basketball is on the precipice of being big business, but it can't be big business if its wings are clipped, and that's exactly what Mark Emmert is doing," Zirin said.

US women soccer players appeal decision against equal pay

SAN FRANCISCO — Players on the women’s national soccer team have asked a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court decision throwing out their lawsuit seeking equal pay to the men's team.

THEY SHOULD BE PAID MORE THEY WIN MORE

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Players led by Alex Morgan asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to reinstate the part of their suit that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner threw out last May when he granted a partial summary judgment to the U.S. Soccer Federation.

“For each win, loss and tie that women players secure, they are paid less than men who play the same sport and who do the same work; that is gender discrimination,” players' spokeswoman Molly Levinson said in a statement. “A pervasive atmosphere of sexism drove this pay discrimination.”

Appeals are assigned to three-judge panels. The 9th Circuit estimates that oral arguments in civil appeals will be scheduled 12-20 months from the notice of appeal and 9-12 months after written briefs have been completed.

The U.S. has won the last two Women's World Cups and is the favourite in this summer's Olympic women's soccer tournament.

Players sued the USSF in March 2019, contending they have not been paid equitably under their collective bargaining agreement that runs through December 2021, compared to what the men’s team receives under its agreement that expired in December 2018. The women asked for more than $66 million in damages under the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Klausner threw out the pay claim last May, ruling the women rejected a pay-to-play structure similar to the one in the men’s agreement and accepted greater base salaries and benefits than the men, who failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

The sides reached a settlement Dec. 1 on working condition claims that Klausner approved Monday. The deal calls for charter flights, hotel accommodations, venue selection and professional staff support equitable to that of the men’s national team.

The USSF says it pays equally for matches it controls but not for tournaments organized by soccer's world governing body.

FIFA awarded $400 million in prize money for the 32 teams at the 2018 men’s World Cup, including $38 million to champion France. It awarded $30 million for the 24 teams at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, including $4 million to the U.S. after the Americans won their second straight title.

FIFA has increased the total to $440 million for the 2022 men’s World Cup, and its president, Gianni Infantino, has proposed FIFA double the women’s prize money to $60 million for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, where FIFA has increased the teams to 32.

___

More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

The Associated Press

Opinion: Under fire on race, the AMA should drop its support for the war on drugs

Opinion by David L. Nathan, H. Westley Clark, and Joycelyn Elders 


The American Medical Association (AMA) recently made the news for its stance on institutional racism, and not in a good way. The longtime editor in chief of the association's flagship journal, Dr. Howard Bauchner, was put on administrative leave after JAMA tweeted, "No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?"

© Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images A jar of Insane OG, a strain of marijuana, is displayed at the opening of a California dispensary.

The now-deleted tweet promoted a podcast in which JAMA's deputy editor Dr. Ed Livingston said, "Structural racism is an unfortunate term ... Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help. Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist." He wasn't the only one offended. Now Dr. Bauchner and JAMA are facing fellow physicians' outrage for these and other actions, an alleged "failure to diversify the editorial staff and/or displaying blatantly discriminatory behavior patterns."

The podcast episode has since been withdrawn and replaced online with an apology from Dr. Bauchner, who said comments made in the podcast were "inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA." He also said structural racism exists in the US and in health care.

The AMA's racist tweet was not a momentary lapse of judgment. JAMA's doubt about "structural racism in health care" lays bare the hypocrisy within an organization that has struggled with racism since its creation before the US Civil War. Through most of the AMA's history, Black physicians were refused membership in the organization because they were denied prerequisite membership in many state medical societies. As recently as 1966, the AMA successfully persuaded the federal government to exempt physicians from signing a statement of compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discriminatory practices in federally funded hospitals.

There have been a few bright spots in the AMA's long history of racism and misguided support for the drug war. In 1937, the AMA's Legal Counsel Dr. William Woodward testified before Congress in strong and unequivocal opposition to the prohibitionist Marihuana Tax Act. He eerily predicted our current crisis of mass incarceration, asserting that the government "would meet with the same difficulty that it met in prosecuting under the National (Alcohol) Prohibition Act; inadequacy of courts ... (and) the inadequacy of jails."

Woodward was an exceptional physician and lawyer for his time. In a career that spanned six decades, he served as a public health officer and president of the American Public Health Association. He also taught medicine and law at six prestigious universities, including Howard -- a historically Black medical school whose graduates were banned from the AMA of Jim Crow America. The association probably unknowingly accepted its first Black physicians in 1888 when the AMA set rules to offer membership to all state medical society members, and a few in Northern states were Black. Some Southern states, in contrast, didn't stop discriminating against Black physicians until at least the 1950s.

During the Black Lives Matter protests last year, the AMA issued a news release that denounced its own racist past. In November, the nation's largest physicians' association proudly declared that they had "detailed a plan to mitigate (systemic racism's) effects."

The AMA pointed to police brutality, unconscious bias and systemic racism without a single mention of its support for cannabis prohibition, a centerpiece of what is arguably the most powerful instrument of systemic racism: our nation's failed war on drugs.

The AMA actively supports cannabis prohibition, a cornerstone of the drug war, even as it hypocritically condemns systemic racism for creating inequity and limiting access to health care among communities of color. The organization fails to appreciate or chooses to ignore the fact that the uneven application of laws on cannabis prohibition contributes to poverty, which is one of the largest obstacles to health care access in communities of color.

Cannabis is demonstrably safer for the vast majority of adults than alcohol, but the AMA doesn't call for a return to alcohol prohibition. Cannabis is far less harmful to adults than tobacco, but the AMA advocates tighter regulation rather than the prohibition of tobacco products. While the medical community offers an evidence-based, nuanced assessment of the health effects of cannabis, the AMA hyperbolically asserts that "without question, the public health risks (of legalization) are immense."

Cannabis use is not the "immense" public health threat that the AMA claims, but its prohibition is a powerful weapon of racially biased policing. In 2019, US law enforcement made over 500,000 arrests for simple cannabis possession alone. An American Civil Liberties Union report from 2018 found that Black people in America are nearly four times more likely than Whites to be arrested for cannabis possession, despite similar usage rates between the two groups. According to a 2013 ACLU report on race and marijuana prohibition, low-income people of color face disproportionate consequences from cannabis arrests due to their inability to pay fines, inadequate access to counsel and potential loss of housing, employment, and student loans.

Despite the cost in Black and brown lives, cannabis prohibition has failed in its most basic objective: the prevention of underage use. For decades, government statistics have shown that around 80% of American twelfth graders can easily access cannabis. Interestingly, as legalization spreads around the country, underage access is now trending downward, and underage use has remained level in legalized states. In fact, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published a study showing that the number of US high schoolers who had ever tried cannabis increased from 2009 to 2013 and decreased from 2013 to 2019. The turning point was in 2013, a year after US states began legalizing and regulating cannabis for adult use.

In a nation where tens of millions of adults consume cannabis, and according to a November Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of Americans support the legalization of cannabis, groups like the AMA have retreated to a watered-down version of prohibition.

"Decriminalization" is a policy that theoretically reduces or removes penalties for cannabis possession while maintaining the illegality of cultivation and sales. Decriminalization encourages the illegal cannabis industry and prevents the government from regulating cannabis products. In practice, decriminalization doesn't stop arrests for minor cannabis offenses, and racial disparities persist.

Therefore, the AMA finds itself in the morally and logically indefensible position of opposing government regulation of a drug that it wants decriminalized. It sends the message that we are better off with an untested cannabis supply, vulnerable to contamination and adulteration. By opposing regulation, the AMA stands against standardized labeling of cannabis products with health warnings, ingredients, and potency. It would put the nascent regulated cannabis industry back in the hands of unregulated growers and dealers who don't pay taxes and sell cannabis -- sometimes with more dangerous drugs or heavy metals and pesticides -- to minors as well as adults.

Given that its policy runs counter to basic principles of scientific evidence, social justice, and common sense, there can be only one conclusion: The AMA still suffers from the institutional racism it claims to oppose.

Fortunately, a rapidly growing number of physicians recognize that only legalization can end the social injustice of the war on cannabis, and effective regulation is a no-brainer for a drug consumed by a significant percentage of American adults. In 2016, we launched Doctors for Cannabis Regulation (DFCR), which now has members in nearly every US state and territory and recently joined the broad-based Marijuana Justice Coalition. Along with our allies -- including the Drug Policy Alliance, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Marijuana Policy Project, and other organizations -- DFCR believes that regulation and education are the best tools for addressing cannabis misuse.

This year, the AMA has doubled down on its support for a social policy that criminalizes millions of Americans, disproportionately in communities of color. In an effort to invalidate the ballots of an overwhelming 74% of Mississippi voters, the AMA filed an amicus brief with the Mississippi Supreme Court in January to overturn the state's wildly popular medical cannabis ballot initiative.

Last week, AMA President Dr. Susan Bailey posted that "Our AMA does not support legalization of cannabis for adult use until additional scientific research has been completed to fully document the public health, medical and economic consequences of its use." She cites a webpage of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to shoot down the health benefits of cannabis, but she conveniently overlooks NASEM's 486-page report in which experts evaluate decades of copious government-funded research into the health effects of cannabis, which are far less negative than those of alcohol and tobacco. Since the scientific method makes it impossible to "fully document" the impact of any drug, Dr. Bailey has now signaled that the AMA will not change its position no matter what the evidence tells us.

The organization's current position will not stop the nation's march toward cannabis legalization. But make no mistake: Its active opposition to legalization prevents cannabis regulation and delays the end of this racially biased policy. The AMA's blindness to its own institutional racism is a moral stain on our profession. And with every passing year -- every day -- a heavy cost is paid in Black lives.

Voters around the nation approved all five cannabis initiatives on the ballot in November -- three for adult use, one for medical use and one for both uses -- so the need to properly regulate this drug has never been greater. If the AMA is serious about righting the wrongs of its past, it must renounce the racist war on drugs and support effective regulation of cannabis as the only logical alternative to the destructive policy of prohibition.

NEW YORK FARMERS PLAN TO SWITCH FROM HEMP TO MARIJUANA

ALBANY, N.Y. — Legal marijuana is coming to New York and hemp farmer Samir Mahadin sees it as a potential lifeline.

Farmers dealing with depressed prices for plants that produce CBD are eager to take part in a statewide marijuana market expected to generate billions of dollars a year once retail sales start.

They already know how to grow and process cannabis plants, since hemp is essentially the same plant with lower levels of THC, marijuana's active ingredient.

Now they're waiting on rules that will allow them to switch seeds.

“I would love to get a license to grow cannabis. My wife and I love working with this plant, I believe in its ability and power as a medicine," said Mahadin, who runs Breathing Web Farms in the Finger Lakes with his wife. "And it could save my farm because what happened with the hemp has been catastrophic.”

Last month, New York became the second-largest state to legalize recreational marijuana after California, with retail sales expected to begin as early as next year.

Existing medical marijuana businesses in New York are expected to play a major role in the new adult market, but lawmakers wrote in provisions to mitigate market dominance. Half of the licenses are supposed to go to “social and economic equity” applicants, which would include financially distressed farms.

Regulators are likely months away from answering market-defining questions such as how many licenses will be made available and how much they will cost. High prices for cultivation licenses, for instance, would freeze out some smaller farmers from the market, said Allan Gandelman, president of the New York Cannabis Growers & Processors Association.

And while commercial marijuana is often grown in highly controlled, indoor settings, Gandelman expects regulations to allow farmers to grow outdoors.

Gandelman, who runs Head & Heal CBD products, is among about 700 hemp farmers in the state. Many of them are motivated to move into marijuana not only because of their familiarity with the flower, but a crash in commodity prices driven by oversupply. Even growers who have succeeded in the retail market for CBD, like Gandelman, see marijuana as integral to their future.

New Frontier Data estimates the legal production of smokable flower in New York will surge to 1.3 million pounds by 2025, all of which would have to be grown within the state.

"If you’re a cannabis grower, you should be able to grow cannabis, period,” said Gail Hepworth, CEO of Hempire State Growers in the Hudson Valley.

Hepworth grows hemp at the large organic farm she runs with her sister in the Hudson Valley and they sell CBD products retail and wholesale through their Hempire business. She said keeping farms like hers from the marijuana market would be like telling a tomato farmer “you can only grow beefsteak, you can’t grow cherry tomatoes. It just doesn’t make sense.”

She'd like to follow the same integrated business model for marijuana that they have for CBD, though the law sets limits on most licensed growers from running retail dispensaries.

One exception would be a “microbusiness” license that would allow “limited” growing and selling. Gandelman compared it to New York’s farm brewery program, but with customers coming to picturesque farms to buy craft buds instead of craft beer.

The idea would link cannabis to rural New York's tourism industry.

“Something I could envision for the northeastern states, and New York is no exception, is for example leaf peeping tours in the fall where you tour a cannabis farm and then you go wandering in the Adirondacks,” said John Kagia chief knowledge officer of New Frontier Data.

Mahadin and his wife Kristin Rocco are considering the microbusiness option for the picturesque farm where they also raise chickens and grow organic vegetables. Ideally, they'd like to grow it outdoors or in a greenhouse.

“I want to stay farming," he said. “And I want to work with the cannabis plant in all facets.”

Neighbouring New Jersey also must establish state regulations for its marijuana market after voters approved legalization in November. New Jersey CannaBusiness Association President Edmund DeVeaux said he did not expect outdoor marijuana growing in New Jersey, in part because of fickle Northeast growing seasons. In Connecticut, lawmakers were considering legislation to legalize recreational marijuana.

In New York, marijuana regulations can't come soon enough for farmers, who typically plant in early May.

But the five-member board governing the new Office of Cannabis Management has yet to be appointed. Attorney Karl Sleight, who has experience with the state's cannabis industry, expected more clarity on regulations by Labor Day.

“It might take a little time and the road will be bumpy,” Gandelman said, “but ultimately, this will be a good thing for farmers around the state of New York.”

Michael Hill, The Associated Press

Summer high: Molson Coors' JV Truss launches 6 pot-infused drinks in Canada

ONLY IN CANADA YOU SAY, PITY*

(Reuters) - Miller Lite beer-maker Molson Coors Beverage Co's cannabis joint venture Truss Beverage Co on Wednesday launched six pot-infused beverages in Canada, as it hopes that summer demand will offset recent sales hits from COVID-19 lockdowns.

Coronavirus restrictions in major provinces including Ontario have forced weed stores to shut for extended periods, and are expected to hit cannabis companies' results for the March quarter.

The summer season, which tends to represent peak demand for beverages, will be crucial for companies to undo the damage.

Truss, jointly run by Canadian pot producer Hexo Corp, launched five CBD-infused beverage brands in August last year and claims to have already won a 43% market share in the category in Canada. https://bit.ly/3wThh2D

"Summer ... is the biggest opportunity for the beverage category; it is the inflection point for consumers to try out our products," Truss Beverage's Chief Executive Scott Cooper told Reuters in an interview.

"Cannabis-infused beverages are still new and tend to be an impulsive purchase, so having the store open is important to the trial and awareness of the category," he added.

Truss said its latest beverage line included watermelon, lemonade, sparkling tonic and honey green iced tea flavors, and are expected to be rolled out to retailers over the next few months.

*MOTTO OF THE RED ROSE TEA COMPANY OF CANADA

Ford's first VW-platform electric car is a small SUV, report says

Andrew Krok 

Vehicle development takes a pretty long time, which is why it came as no surprise when we didn't really hear much after Volkswagen and Ford announced a platform-sharing partnership that would see the American automaker using the German company's MEB scalable electric-vehicle platform. While official news has yet to land about the fruits of their partnership, a new report gives us an idea of what to expect in the near future.

© Provided by Roadshow Ford's Cologne facility is currently undergoing a $1 billion renovation to shift its focus to electrified vehicles. Oliver Berg/AFP/Getty Images

Ford's first use of VW's MEB platform will spawn a small SUV, Autocar reported Monday, after sighting what it believes to be the vehicle in question. Representatives for Ford did not immediately return a request for comment, Volkswagen declined to comment, and neither automaker provided comment for Autocar's report.

Pictures published by Autocar show a vehicle wrapped in a blue cover, with only a hint of its styling revealed on the lower portion of the car. Based on its color, it could be a full-size clay model, but since automakers routinely decline to discuss future vehicles until the time and date of their choosing, answers will likely be hard to come by until Ford delivers more information on its efforts, which Autocar understands will happen later this year. The report says that Ford will build this MEB-based EV at its factory in Cologne, Germany, which is currently being renovated specifically to produce future electrified vehicles.

Ford's Cologne facility is currently undergoing a $1 billion renovation to shift its focus to electrified vehicles.

Given its size relative to the workers standing by it in Autocar's photos, this small SUV looks to slot beneath the Mustang Mach-E and would likely be analogous to VW's own ID4, which relies on the same MEB platform.

Rumors of a Ford and VW partnership first surfaced in 2018, and the two automakers chose the Detroit Auto Show to announce their joint venture, which at first was limited to midsize pickup trucks and commercial vans . Later that year, VW announced it would invest $2.6 billion in Argo AI and allow Ford to use its MEB EV platform for future vehicle development. It's all part of Ford's plan to go entirely electric in Europe by 2030, including commercial segments.

Canada's Northland Power buys Spanish wind farms and solar park

MADRID (Reuters) -Northland Power has made its first foray into Spain's fast-growing renewable energy generation market with a deal to buy a portfolio of wind farms and solar parks, the Canadian company said on Wednesday.

A wave of global targets to cut carbon emissions are stoking investor interest in renewable energy businesses, and Spain's sunny plains, windy hillsides and political enthusiasm for the sector have made it a focus for the market in Europe.

Northland Power said in a statement it will pay 345 million euros ($413.3 million) in cash for the assets, which are located across Spain, and take on 716 million euros in debt.

The seller is an investment fund set up by asset manager Plenium and Bankinter.

Santander advised Northland on the transaction, a spokesman for the bank said.

The solar and wind parks in question were built under a previous regulatory regime, which fixes the returns the owners receive for their output for an average of 13 years across the portfolio. ($1 = 0.8347 euros)

(Reporting by Isla Binnie; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Alistair Bell)

Revenge: Spectrum Workers on Strike Build Their Own ISP

Whitney Kimball 
4/14/2021`

If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider. If the city throws its support behind it, People’s Choice Communications could liberate New Yorkers from cable gangsters once and for all.

© Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)

The city itself is almost constantly fighting Spectrum. With its rise to dominance in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has tried to evict it; attorneys general had to chase it around for allegedly defrauding 2.2 million New York customers; and the company was accused of putting employees in harm’s way just one month into the pandemic. Unionized Spectrum workers just hit the four-year anniversary of their strike, during which time Spectrum’s parent company Charter made its CEO the third-highest-compensated executive in America.


The Spectrum workers behind the co-op, members of IBEW Local 3, have been on strike practically since Charter showed up in 2016 and bought Time Warner. Workers have said that the company showed no interest in good faith bargaining over the contract it inherited, attempting to jettison pensions and health insurance. “Their goal was to try to eliminate the union, and we could see that from the first time they came to the bargaining table,” survey technician, striker, and IBEW Local 3 steward Troy Walcott told Gizmodo. “They presented us with an offer that was impossible for us to accept.”

Walcott told Gizmodo that, while some have been forced to go back to Spectrum, about 1,200 of the 1,800 strikers are still holding the line and making ends meet with odd jobs. Walcott said that people are still losing homes, and the strain has broken up families, while media attention has dissipated. “Everybody kind of looks past it,” he said. “We’re kind of a ghost in the city.”

After attempting to convince the city to establish a municipal network, organizers turned to the idea of a cooperatively owned model, the kind of radical concept recently in the realm of activist dreams. Workers co-own the company; the building residents own the network; the C-Suite doesn’t extract a cent. Residents pay for the installation fee in monthly increments, which organizers believe might range from $300-$400 per apartment. But residents cover the cost similar to a mortgage, in monthly payments of around $10-$20, which also covers service.

By comparison, Spectrum’s lowest-priced offering is $50, with packages going up to $150—which represents over a quarter of a public housing resident’s monthly rent.

People’s Choice operates light, scalable infrastructure. The fixed wireless network is enabled by a “mesh network”: antennas are installed on individual buildings, which receive a wireless signal from the co-op’s central hub. Building residents then connect routers via ethernet cables and operate as normal.

Sascha Meinrath, a mesh network pioneer who helped architect People’s Choice, compared the system to a spider web. In the event of a link break, building antennas can connect and reroute through each other, reducing the likelihood of large-scale outages.

The co-op makes a radical proposal in the business structure itself. Parsing out the network to customers and the ISP company to workers implies that both groups get an equal share of bargaining power. Customers who own the infrastructure will be promised the option to bring in a new service provider; the reverse is true for workers, who can pull their services. “It means people will have to collaborate, and I think that’s really interesting,” Meinrath told Gizmodo. “It means that you’re going to pay fair wages,” he said. “It means that customer service is going to be really important.”

“This is not a charity,” Meinrath added. “This is a sustainable social enterprise.”

It also means that speeds get faster and service gets cheaper as more customers sign-on. “Once you get critical mass of people, you will be able to buy more bandwidth in bulk, which drops the cost per megabit dramatically,” Meinrath said. “By dramatically, I mean, it can drop by multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between one and two gigs is very different than the difference between ten and one hundred gigs. It’s remarkable how cheap bandwidth gets when you buy it in bulk.”

They still haven’t worked out all the costs, but they’ll certainly offer a better return on any co-owners’ investment. We rarely get a hard metric to define how much telecoms are charging through the nose, but a 2015 investigation found that Comcast was pocketing 97 percent profit margins. Co-ownership necessitates transparency. The money left over from anticipated minimal monthly payments is meant to fund community services and payback co-owners in dividends.

“Having ownership of something as big as a cable system is definitely going to be a game-changer in the community that we’re serving,” Troy Walcott said.

While a relatively small number of people are currently using the system, People’s Choice claims that it already has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of Bronx residents.

“We have a big portion of most of the Bronx covered with our antenna,” Walcott said. “Now we have to go building by building to let people know we’re out there and start turning them on.” (You can reach out and ask for service here.) A few dozen Spectrum strikers have been actively involved in the installations, but Walcott expects that at least one hundred workers are waiting in the wings for the project to scale up.

Walcott says that they’re equipped to hit a minimum speed of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload, the requirement to legally qualify as a broadband connection.

Spectrum’s “low-income internet” offering is 30 megabits per second, though the company qualifies this with the disclaimer that “wireless speeds may vary.” (Spectrum is not known for transparency, and in 2018, it settled for $174.2 million with the state for alleged lies.) Co-op organizers say that speeds for the customers online are now much higher than Spectrum’s minimum average due to the low customer base, but they hope that as they scale up People’s Choice can reach a minimum download speed of 50 megabits per second.

“Up until this past year, this idea of creating mesh networks, or fixed wireless networks, was basically something that only like anarchist nerds did, speaking as an anarchist nerd myself,” Erik Forman told Gizmodo. Forman is the education director for the Platform Cooperation Consortium, a coalition that envisions worker-owned alternatives to major tech platforms (one example of that effort is a worker-owned alternative to Uber). He describes himself as a “co-op developer.” Forman says People’s Choice was mostly built by sweat equity, with grants from partners Metro IAF, a nonprofit affordable housing developer, and BlocPower, a renewable energy startup. Brooklyn Law School’s tech clinic, BLIP, chipped in with administrative support, Forman said.

Forman says he’s been mulling over the idea of worker-owned co-ops since he attempted a unionization effort at Starbucks years ago. “A lot of people I’ve met in the restaurant industry would say their dream was to own their own restaurant someday,” he said. “So I started thinking, well, what if we direct our energies not just to unionize the employers, but to abolishing them and to putting the production under worker ownership?”

The city now has to decide whether to take Spectrum strikers up on that bid. New York City is now soliciting proposals for affordable wireless networks for underserved areas like NYCHA housing. At the time of publishing, Gizmodo was unable to immediately reach a city administrator for comment on whether it plans to consider their proposal.

Even a relatively small initial investment could propel the network into self-sustaining momentum. “With significant funding upfront, we can go after a thousand people from day one,” Meinrath said. The alternative is recruiting batches of 100 customers who have to bear higher up-front expenses for things like individual pieces of equipment that could be bulk ordered at a much lower cost.

In other words, it seems that without some help, the future is uncertain. Good service isn’t fully guaranteed yet (not that it is anywhere, now). They might have some issues with scaling, and it’s unclear if the nascent cooperative will be able to sustain employees full-time. But the fact that you’re paying down the installation with a cheap monthly bill offers little risk to people who want to try it.

And at this point, the city has scant excuse to reject a bold worker-led and coalition-backed alternative. “I know that the city is thinking outside the box on a lot of business models behind this,” Meinrath said. “The open question is whether they are then putting their money where their mouth is.”

Customers who can afford to pay Spectrum’s exorbitant rates have been sort of stuck with the company. As In These Times reported back in February 2020, the city ominously hinted that it would renew Spectrum’s franchise agreement, which is protected by federal law. The state only gets an out in “especially egregious cases.”

Gizmodo has reached out to Spectrum and will update the post if we hear back.

People’s Choice prioritizes the Bronx, a borough specifically left with an utter dearth of Spectrum service. As of November 2020, the New York City comptroller’s office estimated that 100,000 students were still entirely without internet service. Just a few months into the outbreak of the pandemic, the company petitioned the FCC to impose data caps, artificial limits on internet usage in order to charge more. Thousands of published Better Business Bureau complaints in the New York metropolitan area report service outages, surprise bills for unused service, and massive price hikes.

“Big telecoms are more interested in making fifty to a hundred dollars a month serving people on the Upper East Side than they are in the Bronx,” Forman told Gizmodo. “It would be an utter outrage if the city gave a single cent of taxpayer dollars to Spectrum after what’s done in the past four years.”

UPDATE
Interactions between early modern humans and Neanderthals were a lot more common than we thought

By Ashley Strickland, CNN 

4/14/2021


The Neanderthal DNA in East Asians today can be traced back to interactions between Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe 45,000 years ago.

© Nikolay Zaheriev, MPI-EVA Leipzig This is the entrance to the Bacho Kiro Cave. Excavations have occurred just inside the entrance and to the left.

The oldest known remains of modern humans in Europe have been identified in the Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, according to new research published last week in the journal Nature.

These remains, which belong to five individuals, were radiocarbon dated between 42,580 and 45,930 years ago. Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago.

By analyzing the ancient genomes from the Bacho Kiro remains, researchers were able to determine their relation to humans today, as well as the complexity of populations as humans migrated from Africa to Eurasia thousands of years ago.


Human ancestors

The three oldest of the individuals whose remains were found in the cave are most closely connected to current populations in East and Central Asia as well as the Americas. Their genomes revealed between 3% and 3.8% of Neanderthal DNA. In decoding the genetic material researchers concluded that the individuals had Neanderthal ancestors five to seven generations back across their family histories.

© Marek Jantač The skull of a modern human female individual from Zlatý kůň.

"These individuals represent an early expansion of modern humans into Europe that was previously unknown in the genetic record, with implications for the broader out-of-Africa expansion," said Mateja Hajdinjak, study author and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow within the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in England.

"Crucially, the genomes of Bacho Kiro Cave individuals point out that the early human groups in Europe commonly mixed with Neanderthals."

The researchers believe that mixing between modern humans and Neanderthals was much more common than they had previously thought, especially when the first modern humans arrived on the scene in Europe.

© Tsenka Tsanova, MPI-EVA Leipzig Human bones have been recovered from the cave along with stone tools, animal bones, bone tools and pendants.

"They may even have become absorbed into resident Neandertal populations. Only later on did larger modern human groups arrive and replace the Neandertals," said Svante Pääbo, study coauthor and Director for the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, in a statement.

Remains of four of these individuals were found together with stone tools linked to the Initial Upper Paleolithic Era, or the earliest known stone tool culture that is associated with modern humans in Eurasia. The Upper Paleolithic began about 40,000 years ago.

These stone tools, along with personal ornaments made from animal teeth recovered from the cave, are similar to those found across Eurasia.

A fifth individual found in the cave, dated to about 35,000 years ago, was found to belong to a group that's genetically distinct from the others and belonged to a different population.

"This shifted our previous understanding of early human migrations into Europe in a way that it showed how even the earliest history of modern humans in Europe may have been tumultuous and involved population replacements," Hajdinjak said.

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The Bacho Kiro Cave was first excavated by archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in 1938 with later excavations occurring in the 1970s. Researchers revisited and excavated the cave in 2015, investigating a layer that was rich with thousands of animal bones, tools made from stone and bones, pendants, beads, and the fragmented remains from five Homo sapiens.

Hajdinjak said the next steps would be accessing genomic data from other sites that are associated with the Initial Upper Paleolithic across Eurasia.

"The emerging picture of early human groups shortly after out-of-Africa migration is a complex one, and it would be amazing to see if this archaeological culture found across vast geographical area (spanning from East Europe to Mongolia) is made by different human groups, how they relate to each other, and importantly how they relate to resident archaic groups," she said via email.


A different population

More research released last week shed light on another population of early modern humans.

A skull recovered in the Czech Republic belonged to one of the earliest modern human populations in Eurasia that stemmed from migrations out of Africa.

The skull was found at the Zlatý kůň site and belonged to a woman who carried 3% Neanderthal ancestry. Her group in Eurasia did not contribute genetically to later populations in Europe or Asia. This is likely the oldest reconstructed modern human genome to date.

Efforts to secure radiocarbon dating of the skull failed due to collagen contamination from cattle, likely animal glue used to preserve parts of the skull in the past century. However, Neanderthal segments within the genome suggest that the skull may have be older than 45,000 years.

Parts of the skull were first recovered in 1950. Researchers initially thought it was only 15,000 years old.



"We have found out that the Zlatý kůň woman belonged to group of modern humans that were among the first to settle in Europe after modern humans left Africa more than 50,000 years ago," said Kay Prüfer, co-lead author of a study that published last week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Prüfer is also the group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The Zlatý kůň woman belonged to a separate lineage of non-Africans that went extinct later on, Prüfer said. She represents a population that formed in the dawn before ancestors of those in modern-day Europe and Asia split apart.

Previous research has suggested that modern humans had already migrated to southeastern Europe between 43,000 and 47,000 years ago, but the fossil record has been lacking support for this.

This finding, together with the Bacho Kiro Cave individuals, suggests an intriguing theory.

"It is possible that Europe was settled by two different groups of modern humans in the time before 45,000 years," Prüfer said. "The Bacho Kiro and Zlatý kůň finds tell us different pieces of the story of how Europe was first settled, but we do not know how the groups represented by these individuals were related. That is a clear next question for us to answer."

How scientists found 'Nemo,' Australia's newest dancing spider

Justin Meneguzzi 
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

4/14/2021

  

© Photograph by Joseph Schubert 'Maratus nemo the Nemo Peacock Spider standing on the surface of a leaf'.

In a wetland near South Australia’s Mount Gambier, Sheryl Holliday crouched in ankle-deep water, camera lens trained on blooming purple orchids a few feet away. Just as Holliday prepared to hit the shutter, she caught a glimpse of something tiny jumping out of the frame.

She didn’t know it on that clear day in November, but she’d just discovered an entirely new species of peacock spider, a group of little-known Australian jumping spiders known for vibrant colors and elaborate mating dances.

“I’ve been chasing peacock spiders for three or four years,” says Holliday, an ecological field officer for Nature Glenelg Trust and citizen scientist, but this one looked different. For one, its abdomen was drab, and the creature had distinctive orange-and-white facial patterns.

Intrigued, Sheryl shared her photos to a Facebook peacock spider appreciation page, which caught the attention of page administrator and arachnologist, Joseph Schubert, who had never seen one like it before.

The pair connected, and Holliday collected and sent live specimens to Melbourne, allowing Schubert and colleagues to formally identify the arachnid as Maratus nemo, after Nemo, Disney’s heroic clownfish. (The Walt Disney Company is majority owner of National Geographic Partners.)

The Nemo peacock spider, described recently in the journal Evolutionary Systematics, is the latest in a flurry of peacock spider discoveries that has brought their known numbers from just 15 in 2011 to 92 today.

Schubert, a biologist at Museums Victoria, credits the boom to the ease of modern photography, in which anyone can quickly take a photo on their smartphone and upload their findings to social media.

Of course, being popular also helps. These rice grain-size arachnids’ charming mating dance has led to countless viral memes that have made the peacock spider an internet sensation.

Movers and shakers

That doesn’t mean they’re easy to find. Most of the year, peacock spiders are brown; only males gain their striking colors after they molt in the spring. Combine that with their diminutive size, and it’s no surprise studying the non-venomous arachnids can be a challenge.

That’s why, when identifying a new species, Schubert hones in on the male’s colorations as well as their mating dance, which is unique to each species and involves a male flexing and gyrating to show off its fitness. When Schubert encouraged a male Nemo to dance for a female in the lab, he was surprised by what he found.

This one individual didn’t “lift its abdomen completely like other species, and it doesn’t have those opisthosoma flaps”—which give the spider its famous colorful display—"underneath the abdomen. It’s just got a little brown booty,” explains Schubert.

Instead, the male impressed the female by raising its third set of legs and vibrating its abdomen on the ground, generating an audible sound. It’s unknown, he says, whether this is a trademark dance of the Nemo peacock spider.

Schubert noted Nemo’s wetland home is also “really strange,” as the majority of other known peacock spiders prefer dry scrublands.

But peacock spiders are always surprising him. In 2020, scientists found one species, Maratus volpei, living in a salt lake. “We’ve learned that we should be more open to the sorts of habitats where we look for peacock spiders,” Schubert says.

Though peacock spiders play a valuable function as a predator controlling insect populations, there’s still far too little known about their role in the ecosystem and conservation status, he adds.
A tangled web

“Peacock spiders are excellent because they challenge the prevailing view of spiders as being big, hairy, and dangerous,” says Michael Rix, principal curator of arachnology and research fellow at Australia’s Queensland Museum, who was not involved in Schubert’s study.

“This is a really excellent example of just how interesting, diverse, and still understudied the Australian spider fauna is,” Rix says.

Only around 30 percent of Australia’s invertebrates have been formally documented, and there could be as many as 15,000 spider species still to be identified.

Discovering new spiders can also benefit humankind, whether it’s controlling agricultural pests or inspiring new medical treatments, Rix says. Proteins from funnel-web spider venom are already being used to develop pain relief medication, as well as treatments for epilepsy, stroke, and potentially some cancers.

Meanwhile, arachnid and insect populations are plummeting worldwide. In Australia, habitat loss, wildfires, and pesticides may kill off entire spider species before we’ve had a chance to find them, Rix cautions.

“Fundamentally, we can't conserve our biodiversity for future generations,” he says, “if we don't know it even exists.”