Author Archives: muistenam

7 Recycling Mistakes You’re Probably Making

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7 Recycling Mistakes You’re Probably Making

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Matthew McConaughey Is Right: Science Does Prove the Value of Gratitude

Mother Jones

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This morning, everybody is talking about Matthew McConaughey’s folksy, funny, and kinda preachy Oscar acceptance speech.

In it, McConaughey did something you rarely hear in one of these: He crossed the streams of science and religion. Specifically, after thanking God, McConaughey added that “He,” with the super big capital H, “has shown me that it’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates.”

What is McConaughey talking about?

Turns out he isn’t just winging it: A decade of research has defined gratitude as a social emotion that, while related to empathy, is nonetheless distinct from it. Feeling gratitude helps bind us to our groups and communities and enhances social relationships. And it isn’t just humans: Primatologist Frans de Waal has observed behaviors that look a heck of a lot like gratitude in chimpanzees, who are more likely to share food with other chimps who have recently groomed them.

What’s the payoff of feeling grateful, of “paying it forward,” and of helping out those who help you? The research suggests more hope and optimism, a better ability to manage stress, a tendency to exercise more and even sleeping better. And while not all of us are as naturally adept at feeling grateful, the research also suggests there are interventions you can do to turn your life on a more thankful path: Simply writing down the things you’re thankful for, on a regular basis, seems to bring on these benefits.

On the Thanksgiving episode of Inquiring Minds last year, we discussed this growing body of research suggesting that the emotion of gratitude has many beneficial effects, singling out one recent gratitude study in particular, which showed a link between feelings of gratitude and the avoidance of risky behaviors like using drugs and engaging in teenage sex in African American youth. (The study did not, however, establish causation.) The discussion starts roughly at minute 3:

For a much fuller explanation of the science of gratitude, here’s a piece I wrote last year for Nautilus, unpacking all of this a bit more.

Obviously, a lot of people, like McConaughey, want to hop on board this research and ride it to a religious destination. But you don’t have to, because thankfulness can certainly occur outside of a faith-based context.

In other words, there was a gem of wisdom in McConaughey’s speech that, religious or not, you can put to good use.

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Matthew McConaughey Is Right: Science Does Prove the Value of Gratitude

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The West Wing’s Big Block of Cheese Day Ideas, Ranked

Mother Jones

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Wednesday is “Big Block of Cheese Day” at the Obama White House, an homage to two episodes of the television series The West Wing in which senior staffers were forced to spend a day dealing with constituents who don’t normally get an audience with the president. (That idea, in turn, was inspired by an enormous block of cheese housed in the Andrew Jackson White House.) The implication of the episodes is that the people who want to talk about these issues are kind of crazy, but a Mother Jones analysis of the projects presented to Sam Seaborn et al. reveals more nuance. On further examination, the dismissive tone with which Big Block of Cheese Day activists were greeted (or embraced) says more about the smallness of the Bartlet administration’s aides than it does about the issues at hand.

Here is the official Mother Jones ranking of Big Block of Cheese Day ideas, from best to worst:

Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Society: It’s never fully explained what the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Society wants, but we can probably guess. According to National Geographic, the Kemp’s ridley is “the world’s most endangered sea turtle” and according to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, there are somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 nesting females left. Their greatest threat is shrimp trawlers, which snare the tiny turtles in their nets. But the turtles are also vulnerable to man-made disaster. Most of the 156 turtles that died as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were Kemp’s Ridleys, because the spill interfered with the creatures’ nesting habitat. It’s a tragedy that these turtles can only get the government’s attention on “total crackpot day.”

Wolf highway: The plan: “Eighteen hundred miles from Yellowstone to the Yukon Territory complete with highway overpasses and no cattle grazing.” Badass! The price: “With contributions and corporate sponsorship, the cost of the taxpayer is only 900 million dollars.” Damn. We have no idea why it costs that much, though, and it seems like something that can be scaled down. Montana and Washington state have already built natural bridges to help animals cross highways at a considerably cheaper rate.

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The West Wing’s Big Block of Cheese Day Ideas, Ranked

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Note to GOP: Don’t Reveal Your Fiendish Plan to Destroy Obamacare Until the Last Reel

Mother Jones

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One of the reasons that insurers aren’t too worried about the low signup rate for Obamacare is that it’s early days. They figure things will work out eventually, and in the meantime they’re protected from serious losses during the first three years by a provision of the bill called “risk corridors.” The details aren’t too important here. In a nutshell, if it turns out that an insurer has seriously miscalculated the cost of its coverage on the exchanges—perhaps because too few people have signed up—the federal government will reimburse them for part of their losses.

This is all very wonky stuff designed to smooth the transition to Obamacare. You’re only reading about it now because a little while back some bright spark decided that if you called this an “Obamacare bailout” it might turn into a big campaign issue. Maybe Republicans could even get it repealed, which in turn would make life so hard for insurers that they’d drop out of Obamacare entirely! Bwa-ha-ha!

But their plan isn’t going anywhere, and Dave Weigel thinks it’s partly because conservatives have acted too much like a stock villain from a James Bond movie:

I mention Bond villainy for a reason. What’s the mistake that Goldfinger and Blofeld and 006 et al constantly make? They explain the plot while there’s still time for 007 to stop it. Conservative groups from FreedomWorks to Heritage Action have rallied behind Rubio’s bill and a companion House bill, and obviously the hope is that a “no bailout” bill would gather momentum in the Senate and make life difficult for red state Democrats. But Congress just passed an omnibus funding bill that takes care of things for the rest of the year. A good chance to pressure the Senate on Obamacare — slotting the “no bailout” language in the House bill — has been lost. Even a scheme backed by Krauthammer, Ponnuru, and Cannon, all well-respected on the right, failed to gain traction in a Congress that’s been chastened by the shutdown, and is more fearful of causing a crisis to gut Obamacare.

Neither Democrats nor the insurance industry were ever going to be fooled by any of this, but by making it clear that the real goal of repealing risk corridors is to cripple Obamacare completely, proponents lost even the slim chance they had to get a hearing from the press and from independents. They might take another crack at making this a big issue when the debt ceiling comes up, but it probably won’t get them anywhere. Their tea party allies will be thrilled, but everyone else will see it as yet another in a long, tired string of contrived outrages designed to kill Obamacare. Time to move on, folks.

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Note to GOP: Don’t Reveal Your Fiendish Plan to Destroy Obamacare Until the Last Reel

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ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilizing to penalize homeowners who install their own solar panels—casting them as “freeriders”—in a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.

Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalizing individual homeowners and weakening state clean-energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama’s main channel for climate action.

More MoJo reporting on the American Legislative Exchange Council.


ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy


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What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?


Study: ALEC Is Bad for the Economy


Forced to Work Sick? That’s Fine With ALEC


ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

Details of ALEC’s strategy to block clean-energy development at every stage—from the individual rooftop to the White House—are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.

About 800 state legislators and business leaders are due to attend the three-day event, which begins on Wednesday with appearances by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and the Republican budget guru and fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan.

Other ALEC speakers will include a leading figure behind the recent government shutdown, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and the governors of Indiana and Wyoming, Mike Pence and Matt Mead.

For 2014, ALEC plans to promote a suite of model bills and resolutions aimed at blocking Barack Obama from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and state governments from promoting the expansion of wind and solar power through regulations known as Renewable Portfolio Standards.

Documents obtained by the Guardian show the core elements of its strategy began to take shape at the previous board meeting in Chicago in August, with meetings of its energy, environment, and agriculture subcommittees.

Further details of ALEC’s strategy were provided by John Eick, the legislative analyst for ALEC’s energy, environment, and agriculture program.

Eick told the Guardian the group would be looking closely in the coming year at how individual homeowners with solar panels are compensated for feeding surplus electricity back into the grid.

“This is an issue we are going to be exploring,” Eick said. He said ALEC wanted to lower the rate electricity companies pay homeowners for direct power generation—and maybe even charge homeowners for feeding power into the grid.

“As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other nondirect generation customers are being penalized,” he said.

Eick dismissed the suggestion that individuals who buy and install home-based solar panels had made such investments. “How are they going to get that electricity from their solar panel to somebody else’s house?” he said. “They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity.”

In November, Arizona became the first state to charge customers for installing solar panels. The fee, which works out to about $5 a month for the average homeowner, was far lower than that sought by the main electricity company, which was seeking to add up to $100 a month to customers’ bills.

Gabe Elsner, director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said the attack on small-scale solar was part of the larger ALEC project to block clean energy. “They are trying to eliminate pro-solar policies in the states to protect utility industry profits,” he said.

The group sponsored at least 77 energy bills in 34 states last year. The measures were aimed at opposing renewable energy standards, pushing through the Keystone XL pipeline project, and barring oversight on fracking, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Until now, the biggest target in ALEC’s sights were state renewable portfolio standards (RPS), which require electricity companies to source a share of their power from wind, solar, biomass, or other clean energy. Such measures are seen as critical to reducing America’s use of coal and oil, and to the fight against climate change. RPS are now in force in 30 states.

In 2012, ALEC drafted a model bill pushing for the outright repeal of RPS.

In the confidential materials, prepared for the August board meeting, ALEC claimed to have made significant inroads against such clean energy policies in 2013.

“Approximately 15 states across the country introduced legislation to reform, freeze, or repeal their state’s renewable mandate,” the task force reported.

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/842268-alec-2013-annual-meeting-policy-report.js”, width: 460, height: 500, sidebar: false, text: false, page: 4, container: “#DV-viewer-842268-alec-2013-annual-meeting-policy-report” ); ALEC 2013 Annual Meeting Policy Report (PDF)
ALEC 2013 Annual Meeting Policy Report (Text)

That compares to model bills in just seven states in support of the hot-button issue of the Keystone XL pipeline, according to figures in the documents.

“This legislative year has seen the most action on renewable mandates to date,” the documents said.

Three of those states—North Carolina, Ohio, and Kansas—saw strong pushes by conservative groups to reverse clean energy regulations this year.

None of those efforts passed, however, with signs of strong local support for wind farms and other clean energy projects that were seen as good for the economy—from Republicans as well as Democrats.

By August, ALEC evidently decided its hopes of winning outright repeal of RPS standards was overly ambitious.

At its meeting in August, ALEC put forward an initiative that would allow utility companies to import clean energy from other states—rather than invest in new, greener generation.

An “explanatory note” prepared for the meeting admitted: “One model policy may be the right fit for one state but not work for another”.

Elsner argued that after its bruising state battles in 2013, ALEC was now focused on weakening—rather than seeking outright repeal—of the clean-energy standards.

“What we saw in 2013 was an attempt to repeal RPS laws, and when that failed…what we are seeing now is a strategy that appears to be pro-clean-energy but would actually weaken those pro-clean-energy laws by retreating to the lowest common denominator,” he said.

The other key agenda item for ALEC’s meeting this week is the EPA. The group is looking at two proposals to curb the agency’s powers—one to shut the EPA out of any meaningful oversight of fracking, and the other to block action on climate change.

A model bill endorsed by the ALEC board of directors last August would strip the EPA of power to shut down a frack site or oil industry facility.

That would leave oversight of an industry that has to date fracked two-meter wells in 20 states to a patchwork of local authorities that have vastly different standards of environmental protection.

The model bill would explicitly bar the EPA from shutting down any oil or gas well or facility in any of them, limiting the agency’s capacity to enforce the clean water and clean air acts.

“The legislature declares that the United States Environmental Protection Agency…lacks the authority to deny permits of operation to these oil and gas wells and facilities,” the bill reads.

Eick said the bill was in keeping with the group’s broader philosophy of expanding power to the states.

“A national regulatory agency might impose a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all regulation on states in many instances,” he said.

The meeting will also focus on Obama’s plan, announced last June, to use the EPA to limit greenhouse gas emissions from future and existing power plants.

“The EPA’s forthcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and specifically carbon emissions from power plants will be of incredible interest to states and membership so we are going to be focusing on that. Absolutely,” Eick said.

Power plants are the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 40 percent last year. The EPA last September proposed new standards for future power plants, and will tighten limits for existing power plants next June.

“It just shows that ALEC uses lawmakers as lobbyists to block climate legislation at every turn,” said Connor Gibson, a researcher for Greenpeace. “They try to undermine the authority of agencies that have the power potentially to control carbon pollution, so whenever there is a new EPA rule that pops up, they retool their arsenal of model bills to make sure they are blocking the new rule.”

The resolution on the EPA for ALEC members’ consideration this week argues that requiring tougher standards from the next generation of power plants lead to spikes in electricity prices and would damage the economy.

“ALEC is very concerned about the potential economic impact of greenhouse gas regulation on electricity prices and the harm EPA regulations may have on the economic recovery,” the resolution reads.

Environmental lawyers said the resolution amounted to a “new manifesto” against the EPA regulating carbon pollution. “They don’t want the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ann Weeks, legal director for the Clean Air Task Force.

She disputed a number of claims within the ALEC resolution—including the assertion that reducing carbon pollution would lead to an 80 percent rise in electricity prices. Economic analyses by the EPA and others have suggested those rises would be fairly limited.

“They will probably tell you they don’t want the EPA to regulate anything, so it is in their interest to turn what the EPA has proposed into something that is grotesque and unreasonable, which I don’t think is true,” Weeks said.

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ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy

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Why the Renewable Energy Era is Doomed

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems. Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal. President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change. True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.

Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on “clean” natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All this sounds promising indeed. There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down. The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables. Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called “unconventional” oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking—the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them—is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries. In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It’s true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here’s the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.

In addition, as the IEA explains, an ever-increasing share of that staggering investment in fossil fuels will be devoted to unconventional forms of oil and gas: Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, shale oil and gas, Arctic and deep-offshore energy deposits, and other hydrocarbons derived from previously inaccessible reserves of energy. The explanation for this is simple enough. The world’s supply of conventional oil and gas—fuels derived from easily accessible reservoirs and requiring a minimum of processing—is rapidly disappearing. With global demand for fossil fuels expected to rise by 26% between now and 2035, more and more of the world’s energy supply will have to be provided by unconventional fuels.

In such a world, one thing is guaranteed: global carbon emissions will soar far beyond our current worst-case assumptions, meaning intense heat waves will become commonplace and our few remaining wilderness areas will be eviscerated. Planet Earth will be a far—possibly unimaginably—harsher and more blistering place. In that light, it’s worth exploring in greater depth just how we ended up in such a predicament, one carbon age at a time.

The First Carbon Era

The first carbon era began in the late 1800s, with the introduction of coal-powered steam engines and their widespread application to all manner of industrial enterprises. Initially used to power textile mills and industrial plants, coal was also employed in transportation (steam-powered ships and railroads), mining, and the large-scale production of iron. Indeed, what we now call the Industrial Revolution was largely comprised of the widening application of coal and steam power to productive activities. Eventually, coal would also be used to generate electricity, a field in which it remains dominant today.

This was the era in which vast armies of hard-pressed workers built continent-spanning railroads and mammoth textile mills as factory towns proliferated and cities grew. It was the era, above all, of the expansion of the British Empire. For a time, Great Britain was the biggest producer and consumer of coal, the world’s leading manufacturer, its top industrial innovator, and its dominant power—and all of these attributes were inextricably connected. By mastering the technology of coal, a small island off the coast of Europe was able to accumulate vast wealth, develop the world’s most advanced weaponry, and control the global sea-lanes.

The same coal technology that gave Britain such global advantages also brought great misery in its wake. As noted by energy analyst Paul Roberts in The End of Oil, the coal then being consumed in England was of the brown lignite variety, “chock full of sulfur and other impurities.” When burned, “it produced an acrid, choking smoke that stung the eyes and lungs and blackened walls and clothes.” By the end of the nineteenth century, the air in London and other coal-powered cities was so polluted that “trees died, marble facades dissolved, and respiratory ailments became epidemic.”

For Great Britain and other early industrial powers, the substitution of oil and gas for coal was a godsend, allowing improved air quality, the restoration of cities, and a reduction in respiratory ailments. In many parts of the world, of course, the Age of Coal is not over. In China and India, among other places, coal remains the principal source of energy, condemning their cities and populations to a twenty-first-century version of nineteenth-century London and Manchester.

The Second Carbon Era
The Age of Oil got its start in 1859 when commercial production began in western Pennsylvania, but only truly took off after World War II, with the explosive growth of automobile ownership. Before 1940, oil played an important role in illumination and lubrication, among other applications, but remained subordinate to coal; after the war, oil became the world’s principal source of energy. From 10 million barrels per day in 1950, global consumption soared to 77 million in 2000, a half-century bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning.

Driving the global ascendancy of petroleum was its close association with the internal combustion engine (ICE). Due to oil’s superior portability and energy intensity (that is, the amount of energy it releases per unit of volume), it makes the ideal fuel for mobile, versatile ICEs. Just as coal rose to prominence by fueling steam engines, so oil came to prominence by fueling the world’s growing fleets of cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships. Today, petroleum supplies about 97% of all energy used in transportation worldwide.

Oil’s prominence was also assured by its growing utilization in agriculture and warfare. In a relatively short period of time, oil-powered tractors and other agricultural machines replaced animals as the primary source of power on farms around the world. A similar transition occurred on the modern battlefield, with oil-powered tanks and planes replacing the cavalry as the main source of offensive power.

These were the years of mass automobile ownership, continent-spanning highways, endless suburbs, giant malls, cheap flights, mechanized agriculture, artificial fibers, and—above all else—the global expansion of American power. Because the United States possessed mammoth reserves of oil, was the first to master the technology of oil extraction and refining, and the most successful at utilizing petroleum in transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and war, it emerged as the richest and most powerful country of the twenty-first century, a saga told with great relish by energy historian Daniel Yergin in The Prize. Thanks to the technology of oil, the US was able to accumulate staggering levels of wealth, deploy armies and military bases to every continent, and control the global air and sea-lanes—extending its power to every corner of the planet.

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Why the Renewable Energy Era is Doomed

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Albertsons Is Dropping Its Loyalty Card Program. Unfortunately, They Seem to Be an Outlier.

Mother Jones

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A regular reader who likes to humor my hobbyhorses points me to a Time piece about the decline in loyalty card programs. Hooray! Unfortunately, I’m a little skeptical. Loyalty program membership has actually gone up substantially over the past couple of years, and the only real evidence of a decrease is in the supermarket sector, which I suspect was simply saturated. Time also cites the fact that Albertsons is discontinuing its loyalty card. Here’s their explanation:

We found that tracking individual shopping habits isn’t as critical to our overall strategy as knowing what our customers in our neighborhoods are shopping for. Tracking individual purchases can be one way to do it, but it’s not the only way. Getting to know our customers in neighborhoods, learning each store like it’s our only store, and offering best-in-class customer service is as much of a differentiator.

Uh huh. I’m not sure what the real reason is, but this isn’t it. This is just marketing hot air. I wonder what’s really going on?

Time also quotes from a recently released Colloquy study of loyalty programs: “Savvy customers understand that loyalty programs gather and utilize customer data to make marketing decisions….If programs are not crystal-clear in providing benefit to the customer in exchange for that information, and are not clear in their privacy policy, consumers can back off from participating.”

I’d love to believe this, but I have my doubts. Very few people seem to understand how supermarkets use and market their loyalty card data. And anyway, what isn’t crystal clear about the benefits? You get discounts on the stuff you buy. That’s about as clear as it gets. Finally, there’s this:

At the same time, other supermarket companies are putting an even greater emphasis on loyalty programs—and the potential they give for customized marketing and personalized pricing. As CNBC and the Associated Press have reported, Safeway and Kroger’s, among others, have been stepping up efforts to use customer’s shopping histories to present them with personalized deals and coupons to boost spending. “There’s going to come a point where our shelf pricing is pretty irrelevant because we can be so personalized in what we offer people,” Safeway CEO Steve Burd said earlier this year, according to the AP.

Such a concept may strike some shoppers as being inherently unfair: How would you like paying twice as much for hamburgers or coffee than the person checking out in front of you? Then again, a scenario like that is likely to make you sign up for the loyalty program, which is sorta the point. Many customers will, in fact, love personalized pricing because it’ll make them feel special—like they’re getting a unique deal created just for them.

As far as I’m concerned, loyalty card programs have long since gone from being annoying to extortionate. At one time, they offered members a smallish discount. That might have annoyed me, but it wasn’t a big deal. These days, however, they’re used virtually as threats: allow us to track your buying habits in minute detail or else get stuck paying insanely high prices. The non-loyalty prices can sometimes be half again as much as the loyalty-card price. You have to keep a sharp eye out to avoid getting ripped off.

But despite what the Colloquy study says, nobody seems to care. In fact, most people seem to think I’m half-deranged for even grousing about this. I’m still waiting for the Edward Snowden of loyalty card programs to drop a few crates of secret documents on me, but until then, maybe I’ll just give the subject a rest. Resistance is futile.

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Albertsons Is Dropping Its Loyalty Card Program. Unfortunately, They Seem to Be an Outlier.

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What’s up with Gina McCarthy’s nomination to head the EPA?

What’s up with Gina McCarthy’s nomination to head the EPA?

Reuters/Jason Roberts

Many of Obama’s nominees have not been popular with Republicans in the Senate, but Gina McCarthy has faced a particularly tough fight. GOP senators boycotted a committee vote on her nomination two months ago, mostly because of their knee-jerk hatred of all things related to the EPA (or, as some prefer to call it, the job-killing organization of America).

McCarthy has a reputation as a tough and experienced policymaker committed to fighting climate change, whose work as Massachusetts’ top environmental advisor contributed to the Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 ruling giving EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. She’s worked for Republicans as well as Democrats and collaborated constructively with industry, but that background hasn’t calmed GOP worries about what the EPA might do on climate change.

Over recent months, McCarthy repeatedly assured senators that the EPA was not working on carbon regulations for existing power plants. But then last week, Obama announced in his big climate speech that he planned to order EPA to develop just such regulations. Politico reported last week that this could further endanger McCarthy’s nomination because GOP lawmakers might accuse her of misleading them or argue that she was out of touch and incompetent (although the only people Politico quoted to support that theory were an oil-industry lobbyist and a GOP energy strategist).

But now, a week later, Politico reports that, on the contrary, a McCarthy confirmation is looking increasingly likely. Enough Republicans are philosophically opposed to filibustering presidential nominees that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, says she isn’t concerned about having to lock up 60 filibuster-proof votes in McCarthy’s favor.

Some Republican senators, like Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), find McCarthy qualified and seem likely to support her. So do some fossil-fuel-friendly Democrats, reports Politico:

“My constituents are generally very upset with the EPA and [its] overreach and [its] overregulation,” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said.

“Having said that, I have honestly gotten nothing but positive comments back from the industry groups in Louisiana on Gina McCarthy herself. I mean, while the industry groups are very negative towards the EPA generally, they are very positive towards Gina McCarthy as a person … that could potentially find compromises on some of these things.”

Democratic Senate leaders plan to put McCarthy up for a vote sometime this month. As of Monday, EPA has been without a permanent administrator for 137 days, the longest period of time in its history. It’s been 119 days since McCarthy’s nomination, also a record delay.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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What’s up with Gina McCarthy’s nomination to head the EPA?

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RIP Michael Hastings. Here’s His Advice to Young Journalists.

Mother Jones

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Michael Hastings, a respected young journalist for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles Tuesday, according to his boss, BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith.

Hastings, who was 33, was perhaps most famous for “The Runaway General,” his June 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan. President Barack Obama fired McChrystal after the publication of the article. Hastings expanded “The Runaway General” into a book, The Operators, that was published in January 2012 and became a New York Times bestseller.

Hastings first rose to prominence for his coverage of the Iraq war in Newsweek. His then-fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in Iraq in 2007; he later wrote a book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, about his years in Iraq.

You can find Hastings’ Rolling Stone archives here and his BuzzFeed stuff here, but his Newsweek writing is mostly not available online. Rolling Stone‘s obituary for him is here.

Hastings aided and mentored many other journalists during his all-too-short career. Last year, he posted his advice for aspiring journalists on Reddit. Here it is:

Okay, here’s my advice to you (and young journalists in general):

1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it’s medical school or law school.

2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word “prose,” or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

3.) Be prepared to do a lot of things for free. This sucks, and it’s unfair, and it gives rich kids an edge. But it’s also the reality.

4.) When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.

5.) Also, keep the stories simple and to the point, at least at first.

6.) You should have a blog and be following journalists you like on Twitter.

7.) If there’s a publication you want to work for or write for, cold call the editors and/or email them. This can work.

8.) By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained. (In other words, if you can’t come up with a rough headline for your story idea, it’s going to be a challenge to get it published.)

9.) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it’s more important to you than anything else in your life–family, friends, social life, whatever.

10.) Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading.

Hastings is survived by his wife, Elise Jordan.

Link: 

RIP Michael Hastings. Here’s His Advice to Young Journalists.

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How the World’s Dullest Story Became the Target of a Massive Leak Investigation

Mother Jones

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Four years ago, Fox News reporter James Rosen wrote a story saying the CIA had learned that North Korea planned to carry out a nuclear test if the UN approved additional sanctions:

What’s more, Pyongyang’s next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take — but not announce — once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday. The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North’s spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North’s uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Justice Department immediately launched a leak investigation, which culminated in charges against Rosen’s source, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, an analyst at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been detailed to the State Department. As part of this investigation, DOJ tracked Rosen’s movements and subpoenaed his phone records. Journalists are apoplectic about this, but Jack Shafer wonders just what Rosen thought he was doing:

Although Rosen’s story asserts that it is “withholding some details about the sources and methods … to avoid compromising sensitive overseas operations,” the basic detail that the CIA has “sources inside North Korea” privy to its future plans is very compromising stuff all by itself. As Rosen continues, “U.S. spymasters regard as one of the world’s most difficult to penetrate.”

Hmmm. There’s really no other way to get information this detailed except from a source inside North Korea, so it’s not clear to me that Rosen really gave anything away with that line. At the same time, it’s not clear why Rosen published this story at all. As Michael Tomasky says:

No offense intended to Rosen, but…I don’t even see where that’s such big news. Of course North Korea was going to do something to protest a UN sanctions vote. Do what? Well, missile tests is what it’s been doing for the last several years now to scare people, so…a missile test. I mean, if I’d read that on June 11, 2009, I’d have stopped after three paragraphs and thought tell me something I don’t know. So why was the government so up in arms about it in the first place?

Tomasky’s point is that it’s outrageous that DOJ would go ballistic over a story that basically revealed nothing. But that misses the point. The story is completely uninteresting. And yet, by its very publication, it alerted North Korea to a possible mole in high places. So why would you run a piece like this? Here’s Josh Marshall:

It’s difficult for me not to be more shocked by the self-interested preening of fellow journalists over a comically inept reporter and source than the arguable dangers this episode holds for press freedoms. Indeed, I’ve tried and failed. I can’t.

I don’t like the fact that the Obama administration has been so aggressive at investigating leaks, and so aggressive at targeting reporters when they do. But it’s stuff like this that prevents the American public from sympathizing much. When they look at a case like this, most of them don’t see the government eroding a reporter’s First Amendment rights. They see a reporter recklessly divulging legitimately sensitive information and destroying a career in the process —and apparently doing it just for the hell of it.

I still don’t condone the DOJ actions in this case—especially since they basically had Kim’s confession and didn’t really need Rosen’s phone records—but at the same time I’d sure be interested in hearing Rosen’s defense. What was he thinking when he did this?

Link:  

How the World’s Dullest Story Became the Target of a Massive Leak Investigation

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