The group is made up of M.I.T. professors and graduate students, researchers from other universities, and an advisory board of corporate executives, government officials, educators and labor leaders. In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, they included labor market analysis, field studies and policy suggestions for changes in skills-training programs, the tax code, labor laws and minimum-wage rates.
Here are four of the key findings in the report:
Most American workers have fared poorly.
It’s well known that those on the top rungs of the job ladder have prospered for decades while wages for average American workers have stagnated. But the M.I.T. analysis goes further. It found, for example, that real wages for men without four-year college degrees have declined 10 to 20 percent since their peak in 1980. (Two-thirds of American workers do not have four-year college degrees.) …
Robots and A.I. are not about to deliver a jobless future. .
Technology has always replaced some jobs, created new ones and changed others. The question is whether things will be different this time as robots and artificial intelligence quickly take over for humans on factory floors and in offices. …
Worker training in America needs to match the market.
“The key ingredient for success is public-private partnerships,” said Annette Parker, president of South Central College, a community college in Minnesota, and a member of the advisory board to the M.I.T. project. …
Workers need more power, voice and representation.
The report calls for raising the minimum wage, broadening unemployment insurance and modifying labor laws to enable collective bargaining in occupations like domestic and home-care workers and freelance workers. Such representation, the report notes, could come from traditional unions or worker advocacy groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs With Justice and the Freelancers Union.
The M.I.T. researchers also recommend changes to tax laws that favor corporate spending on machines rather than workers. …
Ron (RC) Weakley (a.k.a., Darryl for a while at EV) says:
“It’s not so linear,” says Rima Habre, who studies the connection between health and air pollution at the University of Southern California. When human emissions go down, she says, “pollutants like ozone that form in the air can actually go up in nonstraightforward ways.”
In fact, dramatic cuts in primary emissions seem to have triggered severe air pollution events. In northern China and in the Los Angeles area, for example, the strictest lockdown periods saw unusually intense ozone spikes.
The air pollution events in China were “a surprise for everybody,” says Aijun Ding, an atmospheric chemist at Nanjing University. After all, he says, “we almost entirely shut down the traffic and the factories.” The explanation is a nonlinear connection between nitrogen oxides (NO2 and NO) and secondary pollutants such as ozone.
“The exact response of ozone to lockdowns depends on what regime we were in to begin with,” explains Jesse Kroll, an aerosol chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All things being equal, if levels of nitrogen oxides are already relatively low, lowering them more causes a decrease in ozone.
If levels of nitrogen oxides are generally high—as they are in large cities like Los Angeles and Beijing—all bets are off. Abundant nitrogen oxides may sop up hydroxyl radicals, preventing them from reacting with volatile organic compounds in the air to form ozone. And when nitrogen oxides are abundant enough, they actually start reacting with ozone itself, removing that pollutant from the atmosphere (Nat. Chem. 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s41557-020-0535-z). Consequently, in urban areas where this chemistry is dominant, lowering NO2 levels actually causes ozone to rebound.
The special relationship between NO2 and ozone has been known since at least the late 1980s. One way scientists have been able to study it is by looking at the differences in air quality throughout the week: nitrogen oxide emissions fluctuate with traffic patterns, going up on weekdays and down on the weekends. But the emission differences during the pandemic were much, much greater—and, it seems, the resulting anomalies were weirder…
*
[This is a freakishly good site, but I don’t have time to make use of it. If you are a chem-head and have the time then check it out.]
Yo Diogenes, we may have found an honest republican:
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-georgia-doug-collins-coronavirus-pandemic-a36b023d910814fa8c20d5e62d8ad645
Don’t Fear the Robots, and Other Lessons From a Study of the Digital Economy
NY Times – November 17
(A) The 92-page report, “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” was released on Tuesday.
The group is made up of M.I.T. professors and graduate students, researchers from other universities, and an advisory board of corporate executives, government officials, educators and labor leaders. In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, they included labor market analysis, field studies and policy suggestions for changes in skills-training programs, the tax code, labor laws and minimum-wage rates.
Here are four of the key findings in the report:
Most American workers have fared poorly.
It’s well known that those on the top rungs of the job ladder have prospered for decades while wages for average American workers have stagnated. But the M.I.T. analysis goes further. It found, for example, that real wages for men without four-year college degrees have declined 10 to 20 percent since their peak in 1980. (Two-thirds of American workers do not have four-year college degrees.) …
Robots and A.I. are not about to deliver a jobless future. .
Technology has always replaced some jobs, created new ones and changed others. The question is whether things will be different this time as robots and artificial intelligence quickly take over for humans on factory floors and in offices. …
Worker training in America needs to match the market.
“The key ingredient for success is public-private partnerships,” said Annette Parker, president of South Central College, a community college in Minnesota, and a member of the advisory board to the M.I.T. project. …
Workers need more power, voice and representation.
The report calls for raising the minimum wage, broadening unemployment insurance and modifying labor laws to enable collective bargaining in occupations like domestic and home-care workers and freelance workers. Such representation, the report notes, could come from traditional unions or worker advocacy groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs With Justice and the Freelancers Union.
The M.I.T. researchers also recommend changes to tax laws that favor corporate spending on machines rather than workers. …
https://cen.acs.org/environment/atmospheric-chemistry/COVID-19-lockdowns-had-strange-effects-on-air-pollution-across-the-globe/98/i37
…
“It’s not so linear,” says Rima Habre, who studies the connection between health and air pollution at the University of Southern California. When human emissions go down, she says, “pollutants like ozone that form in the air can actually go up in nonstraightforward ways.”
In fact, dramatic cuts in primary emissions seem to have triggered severe air pollution events. In northern China and in the Los Angeles area, for example, the strictest lockdown periods saw unusually intense ozone spikes.
The air pollution events in China were “a surprise for everybody,” says Aijun Ding, an atmospheric chemist at Nanjing University. After all, he says, “we almost entirely shut down the traffic and the factories.” The explanation is a nonlinear connection between nitrogen oxides (NO2 and NO) and secondary pollutants such as ozone.
“The exact response of ozone to lockdowns depends on what regime we were in to begin with,” explains Jesse Kroll, an aerosol chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All things being equal, if levels of nitrogen oxides are already relatively low, lowering them more causes a decrease in ozone.
If levels of nitrogen oxides are generally high—as they are in large cities like Los Angeles and Beijing—all bets are off. Abundant nitrogen oxides may sop up hydroxyl radicals, preventing them from reacting with volatile organic compounds in the air to form ozone. And when nitrogen oxides are abundant enough, they actually start reacting with ozone itself, removing that pollutant from the atmosphere (Nat. Chem. 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s41557-020-0535-z). Consequently, in urban areas where this chemistry is dominant, lowering NO2 levels actually causes ozone to rebound.
The special relationship between NO2 and ozone has been known since at least the late 1980s. One way scientists have been able to study it is by looking at the differences in air quality throughout the week: nitrogen oxide emissions fluctuate with traffic patterns, going up on weekdays and down on the weekends. But the emission differences during the pandemic were much, much greater—and, it seems, the resulting anomalies were weirder…
*
[This is a freakishly good site, but I don’t have time to make use of it. If you are a chem-head and have the time then check it out.]