Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink: The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing. The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding. (Washington Post)
• America Is Wrapped in Miles of Toxic Lead Cables: The U.S. has spent decades eradicating lead from paint, gasoline and pipes. A WSJ investigation reveals a hidden source of lead contamination that has not been addressed. (Wall Street Journal)
• iQuit: My Hellish Attempt to Leave Apple’s Walled Garden: If you want to transfer a decade of photos and texts out of Apple’s ecosystem, get ready for pain. (Businessweek)
• How Hollywood appeases China, explained by the Barbie movie: Vietnam banned Barbie over a map featuring the nine-dash line. Here’s why that matters. (Vox)
• A Good Prospect: Mining Climate Anxiety for Profit: From the opening, it was clear that the climate crisis itself has become a means for mining interests to obtain social license, providing a ready justification for the industry’s activities. Decarbonizing the modern world is going to make the mining world a lot of money — by Hoffman’s estimate, on the order of fifteen to twenty trillion dollars. At one point, Hoffman seemed to address a nameless, climate-conscious consumer, the sort of person who wants their personal choices to reflect their desire to save the planet — a desire that, in all likelihood, will enrich the people in that room. “To stop global warming,” he said, “you need us.” (The Drift)
• Why they’re smearing Lina Khan: My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory. She sure must be doing something right, huh? (Pluralistic)
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid: It’s not just a phase. (The Atlantic).
• The Republican Noise Machine: David Brock, the reformed conservative noise-maker, on how the Right has sabotaged journalism, democracy, and truth. (Mother Jones)
• She performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim. The right vilified her: Caitlin Bernard deserves a statue for her service. Instead, she’s been harassed and persecuted. (The Guardian)
• How an AI-written Star Wars story created chaos at Gizmodo: The error-filled story about Star Wars movies and TV shows demonstrates why artificial intelligence shouldn’t be involved in news-gathering, reporters said. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Tom Wagner, Co-Portfolio Manager at Knighthead Capital. The $10 billion event-driven is a deep value-focused investor specializing in companies that need financial and operational restructuring. He is a co-investor with football legend Tom Brady in several sports assets, including a Pickleball team, Birmingham City FC in the English Football League, and an endurance auto racing team. Wagner began his career doing hedge fund accounting at Ernst & Young.
Last week was the hottest ever recorded — here’s why we keep smashing records
Source: Science News
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