Exploring the Consumer and Environment Issues
With the exception of the One-handed Economist, quite a few of these consumerism and environmental articles show up in my In-Box. Some of them are actually quite good. In the past I did have some of them my In-Box Post. I thought this time I would break them out separately. Most of the are from Treehugger and Consumer Affairs.
Consumerism:
What is credit and how does it work? ConsumerAffairs, Jessica Render. People are getting credit from traditional financial institutions or providers such as department or electronics stores. Stores offering their own cards or financing programs. These usually have the backing of larger financial institutions. Credit cards are the most common type of credit.
FTC wants consumers to be able to ‘click to cancel’ subscriptions, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. It’s easy to sign up for a subscription. But canceling one? Not so much.
CFPB throws the book at one of the biggest debt collection companies, consumeraffairs.com, Gary Guthrie. The Bureau got tired of the ringing in its ears and ordered repeat offender Portfolio Recovery Associates (PRA) to pay more than $24 million for continued allegedly illegal debt collection.
Phishing attempts are growing like wildfire and becoming harder to detect, consumeraffairs.com, Gary Guthrie. Only two months ago, impersonators were heavily into delivery companies like DHL and FedEx and “You’ve just won!” come-ons. Now, according to the latest impersonation study by Cloudflare, AT&T has taken over the #1 spot, followed by PayPal, Microsoft, DHL, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), the IRS, Verizon, Adobe, Amazon, and Apple.
Here’s how retailers are changing the future of health care, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. AB: I would like to believe this invasion would have a big impact on healthcare costs, it won’t. This is superficial. Top layer stuff. We have to dive deeper into the costs.
What Is Fair Trade? Overview, treehugger.com, Gia Nora. A global movement that strives to provide standards for how products like food and clothing are grown, produced, and sold. These standards help ensure equitable trade by directly connecting small-scale producers in developing nations to buyers in the developed world.
US Postal Service Is Going All-Electric After All. treehugger.com, Haley Mast. In a major reversal of its previous plans, the U.S. Postal Service has cranked up the number of electric versions of its next generation delivery vehicles (NGDVs) to 45,000 out of the 60,000 NGDVs on order. Looks like Louis reversed himself.
Dutch City Moves to Ban Ads for ‘Intensively Farmed’ Meat, treehugger.com, In an unprecedented move to curb the promotion of products deemed prime contributors to the climate crisis, city officials have approved a measure to ban intensively farmed meat advertisements from buses, shelters, and screens in public spaces.
Poisonous Household Products, ASPCA, Have you ever wondered if a particular household cleaning product or human medication is poisonous to your pets? (888) 426-4435
Wells Fargo payments to wronged customers are going out now. Here’s what you need to know, consumeraffairs.com, Gary Guthrie. Wells Fargo customers wronged by abuses that cost the bank $3.7 billion in fines are now getting details of how they’ll get their portion.
Enviromental
How to Recycle Batteries, treehugger.com, Katherine Gallagher. What to do with batteries once they’ve died?
The 12 Fruits and Vegetables With the Highest Pesticide Residues, treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer. Thirty years in passing since the National Academies of Sciences landmark studies revealing the dangers of pesticides to children. Yet here we are, with 75% of non-organic fruits and vegetables sold in the United States coming with notable traces of potentially toxic agricultural chemicals.
What Are the Three Pillars of Sustainability? treehugger.com, Liz Allen. Sustainability is broken into three intertwined categories: social sustainability, economic sustainability, and environmental sustainability. Together, these three forms of sustainability are known as the “three pillars of sustainability.”
US to Relocate 3 Tribal Groups Impacted by Climate Change, treehugger.com, Andrew Burton. The Biden administration has allocated $135 million to help Native American groups grappling with the climate crisis. Half of the funding will go to three tribes needing relocation due to severe flooding, erosion, and destructive storms.
Read: Will the Seine be safe for swimmers in the 2024 Olympics? Interesting Stuff. The one-handed economist). Time, Vivienne Walt. The French capital officials is set to accomplish a rare feat for a major metropolis. A feat making the heavily polluted waters of the Seine fit for swimming again.
Listen: In a noisy, tumultuous world, how can we find inner peace? Interesting stuff, The one-handed economist, David Zetland. Currently Listening, Golden – Twenty Thousand Hertz, Andrew Anderson. This episode features two stories about the transformative power of silence.
Review: We Made Every Living Thing from Water, The one-handed economist, David Zetland. Focusing on declining water quality due to failures in controlling pollutants flowing into waters.
Think: The Netherlands had more sunshine in 2022 than in any year since records began (1965) as well as a shortage of rain. Interesting stuff – The one-handed economist, David Zetland.
Review: We Made Every Living Thing from Water, The one-handed economist, David Zetland. Declining water quality is due to failures to control pollutants flowing into waters.
Modern twist on tradition: Chennai, The one-handed economist, “Connor a student.” Storms are looming on the horizon. With climate change churning its course, cyclone events are only expected to worsen in the Bay of Bengal. Chennai needs to be ready.
US Agencies Release Blueprint for Decarbonizing Transportation and It’s Amazing, treehugger.com, Lloyd Alter. “Transportation policy is inseparable from housing. Energy policy and transportation accounts for a major share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. We must work together in an integrated way to confront the climate crisis.
Miss Universe: Miss Thailand Wore a Dress Made Out of Soda Tabs, insider.com, Anneta Konstantinides. The upcycled ensemble — which was designed by the brand Manirat and is known as the “Hidden Precious Diamond Dress” — combines the aluminum pull-tabs of soda cans with Swarovski crystals.
The Slow Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our
NY Times – March 27
Our economy today has been described variously as “weird,” “really weird” and “very, very weird.”
Weird because this is a yo-yo economy where gas prices shot up to more than $5 a gallon and then settled back down. The inflation rate for used cars dropped, then accelerated at a 40 percent rate before deflating at a record rate. Housing has gone from boom to bust, then to boom again. Economic indicators have been described as “a Jackson Pollock painting of data points and trends.”
Economists can’t figure it out. Economic models are only getting us as far as separating top-flight economists into Team Stagflation and Team Soft Landing. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist, talks about the prospects of the Federal Reserve nailing a soft landing like he is handicapping a team’s Super Bowl prospects: “I think they still have a chance, but it’s a tougher chance than it was.”
Economists tried to deal with the twin stresses of inflation and recession in the 1970s without success, and now here we are, 50 years and 50-plus economics Nobel Prizes later, with little ground gained. The Fed and the Treasury Department buttressed the banking structure in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Fifteen years later, we are seeing it breeched. …
The Slow Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our Economy
NY Times – March 27
Our economy today has been described variously as “weird,” “really weird” and “very, very weird.”
Weird because this is a yo-yo economy where gas prices shot up to more than $5 a gallon and then settled back down. The inflation rate for used cars dropped, then accelerated at a 40 percent rate before deflating at a record rate. Housing has gone from boom to bust, then to boom again. Economic indicators have been described as “a Jackson Pollock painting of data points and trends.”
Economists can’t figure it out. Economic models are only getting us as far as separating top-flight economists into Team Stagflation and Team Soft Landing. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist, talks about the prospects of the Federal Reserve nailing a soft landing like he is handicapping a team’s Super Bowl prospects: “I think they still have a chance, but it’s a tougher chance than it was.”
Economists tried to deal with the twin stresses of inflation and recession in the 1970s without success, and now here we are, 50 years and 50-plus economics Nobel Prizes later, with little ground gained. The Fed and the Treasury Department buttressed the banking structure in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Fifteen years later, we are seeing it breeched. …
The Slow Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our Economy
Our economy today has been described variously as “weird,” “really weird” and “very, very weird.” …
… There’s weirdness yet to come, and a lot more than run-of-the-mill weirdness. We are entering a new epoch of crisis, a slow-motion tidal wave of risks that will wash over our economy in the next decades — namely climate change, demographics, deglobalization and artificial intelligence. Their effects will range somewhere between economic regime shift and existential threat to civilization. The risks to the economy, to the stability of our society and to civilization are enormous if we don’t get the economic models right for what’s coming.
For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired. …
For demographics, birth rates are on the decline in the developed countries. China’s population is in decline, for instance, and South Korea just set a mark for the lowest birthrate in the developed world. As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.
We are reversing the globalization of the past 40 years, with the links in our geopolitical and economic network fraying. “Friendshoring,” or moving production to friendly countries, is a new term. The geopolitical forces behind deglobalization will amplify the stresses from climate change and demographics to lead to a frenzied competition for resources and consumers.
We can see the impacts of climate change, demographics and deglobalization coming. The fourth, artificial intelligence, is a wild card. But we already are seeing risks for work and privacy, and for frightening advances in warfare.
These risks are going to accelerate and affect us for decades. If our economic models can only get as far as Team Stagflation versus Team Soft Landing — if we can’t get a firm hold on pedestrian economic issues like inflation and recession — the prospects are not bright for getting our forecasts right for these existential forces. …
(The above is from…)
The Slow Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our Economy
NY Times – March 27, 2023
(There’s more that’s worth posting, but you’ll have to get that on your own.)
The problem here is not that our economic models don’t work at all. The models seem serviceable when things are simple and stable, when we are in a steady state with tons of past data to draw on. The problem is that the models don’t work when our economy is weird. And that’s precisely when we most need them to work.
Economists have admitted as much. At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth II asked the question that no doubt was on the minds of many of her subjects: “Why did nobody see it coming?” The response, some months later, by the Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas, was blunt: Economics failed with the 2008 crisis because economic theory has established that it cannot predict such crises.
A key reason these models fail in times of crisis is that they can’t deal with a world filled with complexity or with surprising twists and turns. For example, the mathematical models of economics analyze a representative agent — be that an individual or a firm — and assume the overall economy will behave the way that this one agent behaves. The problem here, and a problem broadly with complex and dynamic systems, is that the whole doesn’t look like the sum of the parts. If you have a lot of people running around, the overall picture can look different than what any one of those people is doing. Maybe in aggregate their actions jam the doorway; maybe in aggregate they create a stampede.
Economists fancy themselves as the physicists of the social sciences, wielding mathematical models to bring solutions to the economic world. But we are not a mechanical system. We are humans who innovate, change with our experiences, and at times game the system. Reflecting on the 1987 market crash, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman remarked on the difficulty facing economists by noting that subatomic particles don’t act based on what they think other subatomic particles are planning — but people do that.
What if economists can’t turn things around? This is a possibility because we are walking into a world unlike any we have seen. We can’t anticipate all the ways climate change might affect us or where our creativity will take us with A.I. Which brings us to what is called radical uncertainty, where we simply have no clue — where we are caught unaware by things we haven’t even thought of. …
(The above is from)
The Slow Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our Economy
NY Times – March 27, 2023
Nice roundup … I’m ‘borrowing’ one
The article posted at “https://angrybearblog.com/2023/03/exploring-the-consumer-and-environment-issues” explores the intersection of consumer behavior and environmental issues, particularly in the context of sustainable consumption. The author provides an overview of the challenges facing consumers and policymakers in promoting sustainable consumption practices, such as the complexity of supply chains and the lack of information available to consumers. The article also discusses potential solutions to these challenges, including greater transparency and accountability in supply chains and the use of behavioral economics to encourage sustainable consumption. Overall, the article provides insightful analysis of the complex relationship between consumer behavior and environmental issues and offers practical recommendations for promoting sustainable consumption practices.
Syed:
Thank you for your comment. You read much into my simple introductory paragraph.