SCUMBAG OF THE WEEK

Owner of the NBA’s 76ers wanted to cut pay of coaches and staff by 20%, but reverses decision

Team co-owner Josh Harris, of Apollo Global Management, also wanted to cut pay for the New Jersey Devils, which he also co-owns
Josh Harris says after listening to his staff and players, 

it’s clear that the pay cuts were the wrong decision. 

AP Photo/Bill Kostroun


March 24, 2020 By Weston Blasi

The Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils have reversed course and have decided against forcing a 20% salary reduction on team employees. The news comes a day after announcing temporary pay cuts due to the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

Both the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils are owned by Josh Harris and David Blitzer. Harris co-founded Apollo Global Management and has a net worth of $3.8 billion, according to Forbes.

The NBA recently suspended its regular season for at least 30 days, and potentially longer.

There was apprehension among members of the Sixers coaching staff and front office staff on giving back money — especially with the uncertainty surrounding the future of their employment, according to ESPN.

Co-owner Josh Harris says after listening to his staff and players, it’s clear that the pay cuts was the wrong decision.

“This is an extraordinary time in our world — unlike any most of us have ever lived through before — and ordinary business decisions are not enough to meet the moment. To our staff and fans, I apologize for getting this wrong.”

Employees’ benefits were never changed and the teams plan on keeping their 1,500 hourly workers paid throughout the regular season.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Bow and Arrow Hunting
The invention of bow and arrow hunting is at least 65,000 years old
San Bushman Rock Art, Sevilla Rock Art Trail, Traveller's Rest, Cederberg Mountains, Clanwilliam, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Hein von Horsten / Getty Images
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By
K. Kris Hirst
Updated May 19, 2019

Bow and arrow hunting (or archery) is a technology first developed by early modern humans in Africa, perhaps as long as 71,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence shows that the technology was certainly used by humans during the Howiesons Poort phase of Middle Stone Age Africa, between 37,000 and 65,000 years ago; recent evidence at South Africa's Pinnacle Point cave tentatively pushes the initial use back to 71,000 years ago.

However, there is no evidence that the bow and arrow technology was used by people who migrated out of Africa until the Late Upper Paleolithic or Terminal Pleistocene, at most 15,000-20,000 years ago. The oldest surviving organic elements of bows and arrows only date to the Early Holocene of about 11,000 years ago.

RECENT DISCOVERY PUTS THIS DATE BACK 20,000 YEARS

Africa: Middle Stone Age, 71,000 years ago.

Europe and Western Asia: Late Upper Paleolithic, although there are no UP rock art paintings of archers and the oldest arrow shafts date to the Early Holocene, 10,500 BP; the earliest bows in Europe are from the bog site of Stellmor in Germany, where 11,000 years ago someone lost a pine arrow shaft with nocks in the end.
Japan / Northeast Asia: Terminal Pleistocene.
North / South America: Terminal Pleistocene.

Making a Bow and Arrow Set

Based on modern-day San Bushmen bow-and-arrow manufacture, existing bows and arrows curated in South African museums as well as archaeological evidence for Sibudu Cave, Klasies River Cave, and Umhlatuzana Rockshelter in South Africa, Lombard and Haidle (2012) operationalized the basic process of making a bow and arrows.

To make a bow and a set of arrows, the archer needs stone tools (scrapers, axes, woodworking adzes, hammerstones, tools for straightening and smoothing wooden shafts, flint for making fire), a container (ostrich eggshell in South Africa) for carrying water, ochre mixed with resin, pitch, or tree gum for adhesives, fire for blending and setting the adhesives, tree saplings, hardwood and reeds for the bow stave and arrow shafts, and animal sinew and plant fiber for binding material.

The technology for making a bow stave is close to that of making a wooden spear (first made by Homo heidelbergensis more than 300,000 years ago); but the differences are that instead of straightening a wooden lance, the archer needs to bend the bow stave, string the bow, and treat the stave with adhesives and fat to prevent splitting and cracking.

How Does It Compare to Other Hunting Technologies?

From a modern standpoint, the bow and arrow technology is definitely a leap forward from lance and atlatl (spear thrower) technology. Lance technology involves a long spear which is used to thrust at prey. An atlatl is a separate piece of bone, wood or ivory, that acts as a lever to increase the power and speed of a throw: arguably, a leather strap attached to the end of a lance spear might be a technology between the two.

But bow and arrow technology has a number of technological advantages over lances and atlatls. Arrows are longer-range weapons, and the archer needs less space. To fire off an atlatl successfully, the hunter needs to stand in big open spaces and be highly visible to his/her prey; arrow hunters can hide behind bushes and shoot from a kneeling position. Atlatls and spears are limited in their repeatability: a hunter can carry one spear and maybe as many as three darts for an atlatl, but a quiver of arrows can include a dozen or more shots.

To Adopt or Not to Adopt

Archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that these technologies were rarely mutually exclusive—groups combined spears and atlatls and bows and arrows with nets, harpoons, deadfall traps, mass-kill kites, and buffalo jumps, and many other strategies as well. People vary their hunting strategies based on the prey being sought, whether it is big and dangerous or wily and elusive or marine, terrestrial or airborne in nature.

The adoption of new technologies can profoundly affect the way a society is constructed or behaves. Perhaps the most important difference is that lance and atlatl hunting are group events, collaborative processes that are successful only if they include a number of family and clan members. In contrast, bow and arrow hunting can be achieved with just one or two individuals. Groups hunt for the group; individuals for the individual families. That is a profound social change, affecting almost every aspect of life including who you marry, how big is your group, and how status is conveyed.

One issue that might also have affected the adoption of the technology may be that bow and arrow hunting simply has a longer training period than atlatl hunting. Brigid Grund (2017) examined records from modern competitions for atlatl (Atlatl Association International Standard Accuracy Contest) and archery (Society for Creative Anachronism InterKingdom Archery Competition). She discovered an individual's atlatl scores increase steadily, showing improvement in skill within the first few years. Bow hunters, however, do not begin to approach maximum skill until the fourth or fifth year of competition.

The Great Technology Shift

There is much to be understood in the processes of how technology changed and indeed which technology came first. The earliest atlatl we have dates to the Upper Paleolithic, only 20,000 years ago: the South African evidence is quite clear that bow and arrow hunting is much older still. But archaeological evidence being what it is, we still don't really know the complete answer about the dates of hunting technologies and we may never have a better definition of when the inventions occurred than "at least as early as".

People adapt to technologies for reasons other than just because something is new or "shiny". Every new technology is characterized by its own costs and benefits for the task at hand. Archaeologist Michael B. Schiffer referred to this as "application space": that the level of adoption of a new technology depends on the number and variety of tasks that it could be used on, and which it is best suited to. Old technologies are rarely completely obsoleted, and the transition period can be very long indeed.

Sources
Angelbeck B, and Cameron I. 2014. The Faustian bargain of technological change: Evaluating the socioeconomic effects of the bow and arrow transition in the Coast Salish past. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 36:93-109.
Bradfield J. 2012. Macrofractures on bone-tipped arrows: analysis of hunter-gatherer arrows in the Fourie collection from Namibia. Antiquity 86(334):1179-1191.
Brown KS, Marean CW, Jacobs Z, Schoville BJ, Oestmo S, Fisher EC, Bernatchez J, Karkanas P, and Matthews T. 2012. An early and enduring advanced technology originating 71,000 years ago in South Africa. Nature 491(7425):590-593.
Callanan M. 2013. Melting snow patches reveal Neolithic archery. Antiquity 87(337):728-745.
Coolidge FL, Haidle MN, Lombard M, and Wynn T. 2016. Bridging theory and bow hunting: human cognitive evolution and archaeology. Antiquity 90(349):219-228.
Erlandson J, Watts J, and Jew N. 2014. Darts, Arrows, and Archaeologists: Distinguishing Dart and Arrow Points in the Archaeological Record. American Antiquity 79(1):162-169.
Grund BS. 2017. Behavioral Ecology, Technology, and the Organization of Labor: How a Shift from Spear Thrower to Self Bow Exacerbates Social Disparities. American Anthropologist 119(1):104-119.
Kennett DJ, Lambert PM, Johnson JR, and Culleton BJ. 2013. Sociopolitical Effects of Bow and Arrow Technology in Prehistoric Coastal California. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 22(3):124-132.
Lombard M, and Haidle MN. 2012. Thinking a Bow-and-arrow Set: Cognitive Implications of Middle Stone Age Bow and Stone-tipped Arrow Technology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22(02):237-264.
Lombard M, and Phillipson L. 2010. Indications of bow and stone-tipped arrow use 64,000 years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Antiquity 84(325):635–648.
Whittaker JC. 2016. Levers, Not Springs: How a Spearthrower Works and Why It Matters. In: Iovita R, and Sano K, editors. Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Stone Age Weaponry. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. p 65-74.

Opinion: Suspending the Social Security payroll tax is a terrible idea

It doesn’t solve today’s problems and sets bad precedents in terms of messing with the program

March 24, 2020 By Alicia H. Munnel

I know that the president’s proposal for a Social Security payroll tax cut has met with little enthusiasm in Congress. But let’s put it to rest for good. It’s not the appropriate response to the COVID-19 crisis, and it’s best not to fool around with the nation’s most valuable program.

As I understand it, the initial notion was to suspend until the end of the year both the employee and employer portions of the payroll tax. That is, the government would stop collecting the 6.2% Social Security tax on the first $137,700 of earnings paid by the employer and the employee. It would also eliminate the 1.45% Medicare tax paid by both parties. Self-employed workers would be entirely relieved of the 15.3% they pay.

Such a cut would involve a massive loss of revenues. The Congressional Budget Office reports that total payroll taxes in 2019 amounted to $1.2 trillion. The proposed suspension is far more ambitious than the relief provided in 2011 and then extended through 2012, which reduced the Social Security payroll tax rate by 2 percentage points for employees and the self-employed.

In the 2011-12 period, the law provided that the Treasury make up for this reduction by reimbursing the trust fund with general revenues. Thus, the earlier cut had no direct financial implications for the short- or long-term outlook of Social Security. I presume the mechanics would work the same way under the current proposal.

The problem is that a payroll tax cut is the wrong medicine for our current problems

First, in terms of providing support to families, the major problem is people losing their jobs. A payroll tax cut only helps those who are working and not those furloughed or quarantined as a result of the virus. Second, in terms of a general stimulus, any relief would be dribbled out in bits and pieces. The worker earning $50,000 would see $74 a week from the employee tax cut. The impact of the cut of the employer’s tax would depend on the extent to which employers pass on their relief in terms of higher wages. Moreover, people do not respond very much to cuts they know are temporary.

In terms of the Social Security program, financing it through a general revenue transfer from the Treasury would be a big departure from financing it by an earmarked tax. It would break the link between contributions and benefits. In addition, while a general revenue transfer would not technically affect the program’s financial balance, it would have the potential of making Social Security’s shortfall look bigger to policy makers.

When considering changes to eliminate the long-run deficit in the program, Congress not only would have to find money to cover the 2.78% of taxable payroll reported in the 2019 Trustees Report, it would also have to consider the reaction of workers and employers when the current 12.4% payroll tax is reinstated after the suspension period ends. Solving the problem on the revenue side, which last year looked trivial, could now appear daunting.

In short, suspending the payroll tax is an ineffectual and potentially dangerous step. Let’s make sure that the idea doesn’t gain any momentum.

A green-minded stimulus to save the economy from coronavirus? This group thinks it has the $2 trillion answers
Open letter to Congress looks beyond billing airlines for emissions

AFP/Getty Images

Published: March 24, 2020 By Rachel Koning Beals

If the pandemic-hit economy needs stimulus now, why not skip the patch-up job and rework it for the long haul?

That’s the aggressive view of several high-profile environmental advocates who have penned a detailed, eight-point $2 trillion proposal and posted it as an open letter to Congress: A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy. They want the prep work done now to make environmental projects shovel-ready when the worst of the coronavirus’s clampdown on the economy has passed. They opened the plan to virtual public comment.

The effort is not a complete rewrite of the Democratic-led Green New Deal framework of last year, a proposal meant to slow the effects of man-made climate change that has languished so far in a divided Congress. Instead, the new effort folds in expanded ideas from organizations, private companies and academics, and keeps a few of the proposals from the Democrats who have dropped out of the 2020 presidential contest, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and known environmental champion Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington.

The Green New Deal was a starting point and a legislative long shot whose principal ideas somehow, even in dormancy, remain one sticking point in the emergency negotiations meant to salve the economy from the effects of COVID-19. The Senate was unable to agree on a bipartisan stimulus bill Monday, with negotiations apparently stalled in part because Democrats demanded that bailouts for airlines be conditioned on the companies lowering their emissions and that tax credits for wind and solar projects be extended.

Senate Majority Leader McConnell said of the delay, “Democrats won’t let us fund hospitals or save small businesses until they get to dust off the Green New Deal,” arguing that these “green” provisions have “have nothing to do with the coronavirus outbreak.”

Read:Any airline bailout must have climate-change conditions attached, says group of Democrats

McConnell and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday were optimistic that a compromise trillion-dollar coronavirus economic stimulus bill would be agreed to later in the day.

The Green Stimulus proposal covers eight pillars including: energy workers and infrastructure; agriculture and rural communities; green infrastructure and public lands; transportation; and foreign policy.

The range of proposals extends to green-housing retrofits and rural broadband, among other initiatives at the personal and household level. And the group proposes expanding public (school districts or electric co-ops among them) and employee ownership of the beneficiaries of the stimulus, including allowing equity stakes in companies receiving substantial direct investment, including the airline, fossil fuel and cruise industries.

“Many other groups are focused on the emergency stimulus package to stabilize our economy, on preventing harm in an equitable way — which we fully support — so this letter focuses on the longer-term challenge of jump-starting economic recovery and transitioning to a more sustainable economy,” the group writes in its introduction. “The question isn’t whether we will next need a major economic recovery stimulus, but what kind of stimulus should we pursue?”

Read:This controversial energy stance splits top Democrats — and likely the country

For some advocates backing greener infrastructure, transportation changes and more, anticipating a future economy even within emergency action is a critical move now and deserves attention amid what some consider to be a controversial bailout from Congress.

“If the stimulus can help the oil-and-gas industry by funding the President’s decision to buy oil CL00, 3.249% to completely fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and help the airlines park their jet fuel offshore, then they should be able to help renewable energy industries BE, +44.47% PLUG, +9.06% , which will also suffer due to the economic slowdown,” wrote advocates Monica Medina and Miro Korenha in their Our Daily Planet blog.

“And the logic is that if there is going to be a stimulus, it should incentivize investments in renewable energy, which employs far more people than fossil fuel companies and has the capacity to employ even more,” they added

The Conversation
Opinion: A Seattle ER doctor on the coronavirus front lines: Is this new patient infected too?

My biggest fear is missing a case and potentially exposing hundreds of other health-care workers and patients
Published: March 24, 2020 By Nicholas Johnson

A nurse at the University of Washington Medical Center’s testing facility.

Getty Images

The Conversation is running a series of dispatches from clinicians and researchers operating on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.

Inside, as usual, patient beds are near capacity, and the emergency department is filled with not only the usual mix of patients with trauma, stroke, chest pain and other concerns, but also dozens of people worried they might have COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

I am an emergency and critical-care physician who cares for patients in the emergency department and intensive care units at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, a public hospital with 413 beds owned by King County and staffed by doctors from the University of Washington School of Medicine.

UW Medicine has seen dozens of COVID-19 cases since the first patient arrived here in late February.

Everything feels different in the hospital now. Door entrances are locked, streets outside are quiet, the building feels empty given the lack of visitors and outpatients but also bustling with a different kind of energy.

As emergency and critical-care doctors and nurses, we think about and train for these types of situations regularly, but nobody expects to be the epicenter of a pandemic in the U.S. But here we are, and as a result, my colleagues and I have been working to find out ways to help not only our patients but also other doctors around the country who will soon experience what we have, if they haven’t already.



Nicholas Johnson, a Seattle ER doctor courtesy Nicholas Johnson

Within a few days at Harborview, we went from normal operations in late February to thinking about how to protect ourselves, our colleagues and our patients with every encounter. Every time I see a new patient, the first question I ask myself, regardless of why they come in, is: “Could this be COVID-19?”

If the answer is yes, I begin the laborious process of “donning” personal protective equipment, moving the patient to one of our few isolation rooms, and then “doffing,” or removing, personal protective equipment. These words were barely in my lexicon two weeks ago. My biggest fear is missing a case and potentially exposing hundreds of other health-care workers and patients. In the last week, I have found myself putting on personal protective equipment for almost half of all patient encounters.

In the emergency department, this means not only having suspicion with every cough and runny nose, which are so common this time of year, but also considering whether patients who come in after car crashes, falls or even cardiac arrest may also be infected. This is in direct tension with the knowledge that resources, like personal protective equipment, testing and isolation rooms, are finite.

Read:See what life during a pandemic looks like for people across the U.S.

In the ICU, under normal conditions, the most rewarding parts of my job are spending time at the bedside with critically ill patients and having deep conversations with families, learning about the patient and what they value. This not only helps me make medical decisions in line with what my patients care about, but it also allows me to form important human connections that make the job enjoyable.

These interactions are deeply difficult now and often relegated to brief visits in full personal protective equipment or phone interactions. Instead of sitting face to face with patients, I now call their cellphones from outside of their room, making a personal connection that much harder. Face-to-face family meetings have been moved to telephone or telemedicine as well. Being in the ICU is lonely enough for patients; but that feeling of being alone has to be that much more profound with visitor limitations and health-care workers having to take extra precautions to keep themselves safe.

My colleagues and I are worried, but in odd ways unique to health-care providers who tend to worry about others more than themselves. I’m more worried about running out of protective gear or getting sick and not being able to take care of patients. I’m also worried about bringing the virus into my home, where I have a 1-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. Fortunately, children have not yet been heavily impacted by this disease, but my 70-year-old mother also lives with my wife and me, and she is in a higher-risk age group.

After hearing about health-care providers getting sick, I, like many of my colleagues, have reminded my spouse about my preferences if I were to become critically ill.
Lessons learned

In these challenging weeks, one thing I did not expect was the overwhelming number of emails and texts from friends and colleagues throughout the country, who recognized that, while Seattle was first, their day with COVID-19 was soon to come.

As a result, several colleagues and I began to collect “lessons learned” on our department’s website. Fortunately, UW Medicine has also been generous about sharing all of our protocols so that others can benefit from our experience. Some of these are basic, like training everyone to use personal protective equipment, but the number of guidelines and protocols that we’ve had to rapidly develop has been staggering, such as changing how we safely place breathing tubes without exposing ourselves.

To the public, I want everyone to know: We’re ready for this and we’re here for you, but we cannot do it alone. We need your help in so many ways.

Our health system is already taxed and busy; our hospital runs over 100% capacity most days, even before COVID. Please follow local public-health guidelines about social distancing and hand hygiene.

Please do not use or buy personal protective equipment. Not only is it generally not effective when reused, but it is in short supply. Donate it to health facilities if you have it. If we get sick, we can’t care for you.

Lastly, be kind and patient. We’re in this for months, at best. We need all the support we can get.

Nicholas Johnson is an assistant professor, Emergency Medicine & Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine (Adjunct) at University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. This was first published by The Conversation — “‘My first question every time I see a new patient now is: Could this be COVID-19?’ A Seattle doctor on the frontlines”

Outside the Box
Opinion: Beyond the medical crisis, coronavirus will test our national sense of community
The risk is that rather than unify us, COVID-19 will only highlight our differences

Published: March 24, 2020 By Donald F. Kettl

Will we go our own way after this crisis? AFP via Getty Images

The COVID-19 bug doesn’t care about red states or blue states—or national borders, for that matter. This coronavirus lives just to eat and grow, and its pernicious biological drive has disrupted the lives of Americans to their core. But its biggest victim has been our shared sense of community and our confidence in government’s ability to help all of us, wherever we live.

We’re at an especially perilous time in the battle against the virus, not just because of the rapid spread of the disease but also because it threatens to drive us apart, especially on red-blue lines. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, for example, issued an order requiring anyone arriving on a flight from New York City to isolate themselves for 14 days, rather than follow the lead of other governors who asked their own citizens to stay at home.

In the middle of March, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 68% of Democrats were worried that the virus might infect a member of their family. For Republicans, the number was just 40%. Twice as many Democrats as Republicans, by about 80% to 40%, believed that the worst was yet to come.

That difference has narrowed as the virus has spread, with the Republican-Democrat gap in judging the seriousness of the problem narrowing from 21 points to 11 points in just a week, from March 16 to March 23. But at the core, there’s the inescapable conclusion that the problem has seemed very different depending on where people live and who they talk to.

On one level, this huge difference is scarcely surprising, because Americans have been getting wildly different messages from both elected officials and the media. Red-state and blue-state bases have tended to retreat even more into their respective echo chambers.

Read:See what life during a pandemic looks like for people across the U.S.

But on another level, the disease’s spread has reinforced the partisan divide. In the early days, it was easy for red-staters to convince themselves that the disease was a blue-state virus. After all, the virus began its assault in places like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. The states that saw the disease hit last—or, at least, get diagnosed later—were red states like West Virginia.

And even though the disease pays no attention to voting patterns, the higher a state’s vote for President Trump in 2016, in general the lower the reported rate of infection (as of March 22, as measured on the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracking website).



Even these numbers produce confusing results, because some states have had far more testing than others while other states have used very different ways of reporting the tests. Some states report only positive results. Others include negative results.

Some have changed their reporting strategy in midstream. As a result, Yale School of Medicine expert Harlan Krumholz told the Washington Post, “We’re basically flying blind because we have so little idea about its penetration into our society and the number of people affected.”

That, in turn, has made it even easier for citizens to see the virus through partisan lenses.

The response has varied greatly as well. The virus is now quickly spreading everywhere, but red states have more hospital beds as a share of the population to accommodate patients. Many red states are more rural, so the beds might be farther from where people live. But it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that, just as the spread of the virus has varied, so is the capacity to respond.



The states that moved fastest to lock down their communities leaned blue in the 2016 presidential election. Within some red states like Texas, state officials have largely left it to local officials to decide about sheltering in place. “Local officials have the authority to implement more strict standards,” Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said.

In a state as large as Texas, there are vastly different challenges in big cities like Dallas and Houston than there are in the hundreds of small communities scattered throughout the state. But there’s no escaping the fact that the state’s Republican governor has been on a different page than the Democratic mayors of the big cities, which have put tough measures into place.

Now, there’s certainly a case for flexibility in battling the virus. This is a vast country, and it presents different challenges in different places. However, India, with a far greater population, locked down the country. The Trump administration has resisted taking ownership of the response, and the president has pointed to the governors. Some governors have acted aggressively, while others have left the problem to their mayors. Without strong guidance, many local officials have been uncertain about just what to do.

As Texas State Rep. Erin Zwiener, a freshman Democrat from Driftwood (population: 144), put it, “I see my city councils, my city administrators, my county commissioners desperate for answers on what the right thing to do is, and they’re not getting answers; they’re getting general advice.”

In fact, it’s been up to the media to track which states are taking which actions. The New York Times, for example, has its own stay-at-home fact page, but even that has a ring of uncertainty. Its reporters ask anyone whose state or city isn’t listed to email a copy of the order to the reporters so the map can be updated.

At the national level, the lack of a call to community has been startling. That’s all the more important because COVID-19 is as much a political crisis as a medical one.

The March crisis has been the gradual recognition of the danger that COVID-19 poses. The April crisis will be the discovery that it spread differently in different places, that different places will have different capacity to respond, and that different leaders will lead differently.

Read:A Seattle ER doctor on the coronavirus front lines: Is this new patient infected too?

And the May crisis: Will the biggest victim of the virus be the nation’s sense of community? Will this ultimately become a unifying event that breaks through the nation’s pernicious polarization? After all, the disease pays no attention to party or anything else. The strategies that work best in fighting it work regardless of where people live. Like the response to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, it could be a great unifying force that reconnects community.

Or will we go down a road that emphasizes the differences that have already grown up around COVID-19? Of pushing leadership down to communities without often providing the support and guidance and resources they need to fight back? Will media coverage and public debate reinforce the differences that have already split the nation into vastly different communities?

The coming weeks will be crucial in fighting the disease. But these weeks could have even more lasting effects in defining who we are as a nation: whether COVID forges a community that joins together to fight a common foe, or whether it splits us into increasingly different communities that prove even harder to join together—or to govern.

Donald F. Kettl is the Sid Richardson Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work.” Follow Him on Twitter @DonKettl.

The Very Real Prospect Of $5 USD Oil

THAT WOULD MAKE WESTERN CANADA CRUDE PRICES TO BE TWO BITS.
By Tom Kool - Mar 20, 2020



The rebound in oil prices on Thursday didn’t last long as bearish sentiment once again took hold on Friday morning, with some analysts contemplating the possibility of $5 WTI.



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Friday, March 20th, 2020

Oil prices rebounded on Thursday on hopes of a trillion-dollar stimulus package from Washington, along with other stimulus measures from governments around the world. The rally was short-lived however, with a growing number of analysts see a deeper bottom for oil.

Citi: $5 oil is possible. Citigroup laid out a pessimistic scenario in which WTI falls to $5 per barrel. Energy Aspects said Brent could fall to $10. Mizuho Securities said some oil could even fall into negative territory absent shale shut-ins. “This is Operation Desert Storm, Enron, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina/Rita, Lehman Bros, combined,” Stephen Schork, president of the energy consultancy Schork Group Inc., told Bloomberg.

Majors could store jet fuel at sea. Oil companies are rushing to store oil at sea, but the glut has become so severe that the majors are looking at even storing jet fuel at sea. That practice is rare because jet fuel degrades more quickly than other fuels and is sensitive to contamination. “The industry generally expects products will be used within three months of being produced,” said George Hoekstra, an independent consultant, told Reuters.Related: Russia Sees Oil & Gas Income Fall By Almost $40 Billion

Texas considers the unthinkable – regulating production. Several oil executives have reached out to the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas in the state, asking for regulation on production in order to rescue prices, according to the WSJ. In Bloomberg Opinion, Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton proposed rationing production, cutting output in the state by 10 percent.

North Dakota to keep inactive wells inactive. North Dakota regulators are considering moves that would allow oil producers to keep their wells inactive, rather than forcing them to choose between producing and reclamation. The logic would be trying to keep unwanted production offline.

Halliburton furloughs 3,500 workers. Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) furloughed 3,500 workers on Wednesday, putting them on limited work schedules for two months.

Moody’s: Oilfield services most at risk of credit shock. Moody’s said that weaker oilfield services companies are the most vulnerable to a credit shock. Roughly $32 billion in debt in oilfield services falls due between this year and 2024. Smaller regional players “face the brunt of the sector’s weakness, and therefore the greatest refinancing risk.”

Refiners look to cut processing. Low oil prices are typically good for refiners, but demand destruction is putting refiners in a bind. Refining margins for transportation fuels fell into negative territory in Europe and Asia. Marathon (NYSE: MPC) cut production at its Los Angeles refinery, California’s largest. Meanwhile, a growing number of refiners are sending staff home because of the coronavirus, including HollyFrontier (NYSE: HFC), Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) and Valero (NYSE: VLO).

Total to cut spending and freeze recruitment. Total (NYSE: TOT) said that it would halt its share buyback program, its recruitment program and also cut capex, perhaps by as much as 20 percent.

Iraq calls for emergency meeting. Iraq’s oil minister called for an emergency OPEC meeting, but a meeting seems unlikely before June.

Shell suspends construction at cracker plant. Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) suspended construction at its massive ethane cracker in Western Pennsylvania due to the coronavirus. The project has around 8,000 workers on site. Related: April Could Be Worst Month Ever For Oil

ConocoPhillips suspends flights to Alaska North Slope. The coronavirus has forced ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) to cancel flights for hundreds of workers to Alaska’s North Slope for at least two weeks.

Shale drillers getting crushed. More shale drillers are exploring debt restructuring as WTI sinks into the mid-$20s.

Shale industry lost $2.1 billion last year. A survey of 34 North American shale-focused drillers reported a combined $2.1 billion in 2019, according to IEEFA. That capped off a decade in which they spent $189 billion more than they generated.

Capex cuts top $31 billion. The global oil and gas industry has already slashed $31 billion from spending plans this month, following the historic collapse in prices.

Natural gas prices could rise on shale knockout. With the Permian basin on the ropes, associated gas production could decline as drilling dries up, tightening up the gas market. “We increase our 2021 price forecast to $2.45/MMbtu as we expect to see accelerating production declines next year,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a note. At the same time, gas demand in the power sector is down as the U.S. goes on lockdown and appears set to enter into economic recession.

Oil crash could destroy biofuels market. The crash in oil prices makes ethanol comparatively expensive around the world.

What Happens If U.S. Shale Goes Bust?

By Haley Zaremba - Mar 24, 2020

This month has seen a spectacular oil price crash the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. The last time we had since a single day oil price drop as drastic as Monday, March 9 was way back in 1991, when the U.S. launched airstrikes directed at the Iraqi military in response to the invasion of Kuwait. The price drop earlier this month was similarly staggering, with Brent benchmark global oil prices down by 22 percent and United States prices down by 20 percent.  This cataclysmic crash was caused by a perfect storm of market-spooking factors: the accelerating global spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the continuing oil price war being waged by Saudi Arabia after the OPEC+ alliance, which formed in 2016 to include Russia, imploded at the beginning of this month. The implosion itself was caused by coronavirus, as the plummeting oil demand caused by the industry- and economy-stalling pandemic led Russia and Saudi Arabia to initiate talks to address the issue, which subsequently led to bitter disagreement and an ultimate disbanding of the alliance and then an all-out price war. 

The oil price war and subsequent crash have had devastating effects on U.S. shale, which was already struggling with diminishing profit margins. “Few U.S. shale firms can withstand prolonged oil price war,” Reuters proclaimed last week. “For the last five years, U.S. shale oil producers have been battling suppliers for lower costs and running equipment and crews hard to drive drilling costs down by about $20 a barrel,” the article reports. “The oil market rout last week, however, has left most shale firms facing prices below their costs of production.”

Subsequent news out of the Permian Basin has been grim, with World Oil reporting this week that “Shale plays, oil patch see tens of thousands of layoffs across the industry.” According to analysis by Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton, tens of thousands of oil industry workers are being laid off across Texas, and World Oil writes that “while workers in just about every industry are threatened by the economic slowdown, few are more at risk than those in the oil patch.”

Related: Barclays Slashes Oil Price Forecast On Demand Shock

This news is what is leading a lot of us to ask, what would happen if the U.S. shale industry goes bankrupt? This is exactly the question that Robert Rapier sets about answering in an opinion column for Forbes this week. “The real consequences of letting the U.S. shale industry fail is to hand global control of oil production back to Saudi Arabia. Millions of Americans will lose jobs, domestic oil production will fall, and our oil imports will soar. Saudi Arabia will then be free to once again withhold production to drive up the price.” While some shale companies in the U.S. will inevitably go bankrupt in the coming months, if too much of the industry fails it could have a lasting negative impact on the United States’ national security. Ultimately, he argues, letting U.S. oil collapse is far too risky in the short term, even if moving away from fossil fuels is, ultimately, a net good.

“Look, you may think the U.S. oil industry deserves to go bankrupt. You may believe we should all be driving around in wind-powered electric vehicles or riding bicycles. But that’s not the world we live in today,” he writes. “Should we use less oil? Yes. And we will over time. But right now the U.S. still uses a lot of oil, and we will continue to do so for several years, even as we transition to electric vehicles.”

On the other hand, as oil is proving to be an increasingly volatile sector, and even Saudi Aramco is talking about peak oil by mid-century, isn’t it high time to let go? As climate action increases, the Financial Times warning that this oil crash is “only a foretaste of what awaits energy industry,” maybe it’s time to read the writing on the wall and more seriously divest from oil in favor of creating jobs and infrastructure in more progressive and forward-leaning energy sectors.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Governors reject Trump’s timeline to reopen economy; ‘Job one has to be save lives,’ Cuomo says

Amid coronavirus crisis, Maryland governor says White House running on ‘imaginary clock’

THE VERY OPPOSITE OF TRUMP

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference

 Tuesday in New York. Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas — Governors across the nation on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s new accelerated timeline for reopening the U.S. economy, as they continued to impose more restrictions on travel and public life in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The dismissal of Trump’s mid-April timeframe for a national reopening came from Republicans and Democrats, from leaders struggling to manage hot spots of the outbreak and those still bracing for the worst.


In Maryland, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, the head of the National Governors Association, expressed bewilderment at the White House, calling the messaging confusing and running on a schedule made of some “imaginary clock.”

The governors’ reaction revealed a striking disconnect between Trump and the state leaders closer to the front lines of a crisis that threatens to overwhelm U.S. hospitals and claim thousands of lives. In most cases, it’s state leaders — not the federal government — who are responsible for both imposing and lifting the stay-at-home orders and other restrictions intended to stop the contagion.

Trump’s optimism appears to reflect his desire to limit the economic damage from the outbreak. The president is eager to get the U.S. back to work as the crisis takes a political toll and the economy, which had been the cornerstone of his re-election bid, begins to wobble. He tweeted that people “will practice Social Distancing and all else, and Seniors will be watched over protectively & lovingly. We can do two things together. THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM!”

But governors suggested that view had little connection to the reality they’re facing. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he and Trump are “clearly operating under a different set of assumptions.”

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said the infection rate was doubling every three days and pleaded for more federal help as the number of cases in the state surpassed 20,000.

“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life,” Cuomo told reporters Tuesday. “Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Trump was “not taking into account the true damage that this will do to our country if we see truly millions of people die.” A fellow Democratic governor, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, told WWMT-TV/Sinclair Broadcast Group that Trump’s “off-the-cuff statements are really going to undermine our ability to protect people.”

As soon as next week, Trump wants to take another look at recommendations about business closures and self-isolation, and said Tuesday the country could reopened by Easter Sunday — less than a month away. “Our people want to return to work,” Trump tweeted.

Even some of Trump’s usual allies are continuing move ahead with tighter controls on travel, commerce and mobility, despite the president’s words. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed stay-at-home orders that continued to spread through the biggest cities. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said public health needed to come first, and South Dakota Gov. Krisiti Noem is stressing limiting business activity, not relaxing them.

“This situation is not going to be over in a week,” said Noem, whose state has more than two dozen cases. “We have another eight weeks until we see our peak infection rate.”

The U.S. is now more than a week into an unprecedented effort to encourage all Americans to drastically scale back their public activities. The orders closing schools, restaurants and businesses have largely come from a patchwork of local and state governments — with areas hit hardest imposing the most restrictions, while other communities are still weighing tighter rules.

That means the White House is eyeing ways to ease the advisories while some areas are still ramping up their responses.

Among the few statehouse leaders to publicly endorse Trump’s view was Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, 69, who on Monday suggested that people his age and older can “take care of ourselves “ as the nation gets back to work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people over 65 are at higher risk for the disease.

Friction between Trump and the governors has been steady throughout the crisis. The president said last week that states should be doing more to obtain their own critically needed supplies and while insisting that the federal government was not a shipping clerk. States, meanwhile, have been pressing the government to help procure necessary protective and breathing equipment.

“Some of the messaging coming out of the administration doesn’t match,” Hogan, the Maryland governor, told CNN. “We don’t think that we’re going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days or so, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock.”

For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. Worldwide, more than 375,000 cases have been reported, and while most people recover in weeks, more than 16,000 have died from the virus.

Bill Gates on Trump call for quick end to lockdown: It’s tough to tell people ‘keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner’

Published: March 24, 2020 By Mark DeCambre

Getty Images

‘There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people, “Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, [and] ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts.” ’— Bill Gates

That’s billionaire Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft MSFT, +9.09% and noted philanthropist, sharing in a TED interview as described by the Vox Media site Recode his view on the drumbeat, notably from President Donald Trump, for an earlier end to public health policies aiming to mitigate the spread of a deadly pandemic that has brought much of the world’s business activity to a screeching halt.

Most of the U.S., including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, are under rules that limit movement and travel. Those efforts to dull the impact of the outbreak of COVID-19 are putting the U.S. economy into a recession and have tanked U.S. equity markets that were just a month ago at record highs.

See:Governors reject Trump’s timeline to reopen economy; ‘Job one has to be save lives,’ Cuomo says

The illness that carried by the novel strain of coronavirus first identified in China in December has been contracted by some 414,000 people and killed more than 18,000 across the globe, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday afternoon.


In the U.S., where the epidemic is likely still in its nascence, some 51,542 have been infected.

Trump, however, said on Tuesday during a Fox News interview in the White House Rose Garden that he hopes to have the country reopened as early as Easter on April 12, though most countries have taken months to achieve some semblance of managing the infection.

Trump has argued that a longer U.S. shutdown would make it more difficult for the economy to rebound from a recession. “The longer it takes, the longer we stay out, the longer that is to do,” he explained.

An early end to the lockdown in the U.S. has been viewed as ill-advised by many experts and politicians who fear that lives would be sacrificed in the bid to resume business-as-usual, and achieve a stock-market rebound, before the virus subsides.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose updates on the virus’s impact on the Empire State have been closely followed, expressed views similar to those of Gates on Tuesday. “No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of human life, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth. Job [No. 1] has to be save lives,” the governor said.

See:‘You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die’: New York’s Cuomo, in plea to Trump administration for ventilators

Gates told TED, according to Recode, that “it’s very irresponsible for somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds,” referring to mitigating the impact of the deadly pathogen on human lives and keeping the economy whirring.

U.S., and global, stock markets have been in turmoil due to the viral outbreak, with some at least partly attributing Tuesday’s biggest percentage gain since 1933 by the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +11.36%, up 11.4%, to a belief that Trump’s administration may push forward with reopening the U.S. economy, despite public health experts indicating that such a move would likely be premature. Noted infectious-diseases specialist Anthony Fauci suggested at a late-afternoon news conference at the White House that it might be worth exploring an idea floated by Trump that some sections of the country could have restrictions eased ahead of others.

The Dow surged 2,112 points on Tuesday, while the S&P 500 index SPX, +9.38% soared 9.4%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +8.12% finished Tuesday’s session up 8.1%.

Gates, who boasts a net worth of $94.6 billion, according to Forbes (making him the second wealthiest man in the world behind Amazon.com’s AMZN, +1.95% Jeff Bezos) is among a group of billionaire philanthropists who have said they would give away at least half their wealth to charities under terms of the Giving Pledge. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $100 million to pandemics science and testing.