by William Langewiesche, The Atlantic
This was a great read. The story of flight MH 370 has fallen out of the news, which means updates have come out in small bits over the years. If you haven’t been paying close attention (like me) this article comes as a bit of a shock with how much is actually known about what went wrong in the flight and in the aftermath.
by Simon Denyer, The Washington Post
It’s true! When I was there (briefly) it seemed like everything in the grocery store had a layer more of plastic than what I would have expected from a store in the US.
My bagels come individually wrapped in sealed plastic bags. At the counter, if I’m not paying attention, they’re carefully packed together in another plastic bag, before being placed inside a third plastic with the rest of my shopping.
Japan’s obsession with hygiene combined with its pride in “omotenashi,” or customer service, dictates that everything is meticulously wrapped, re-wrapped and bagged in multiple layers of plastic.
Collecting and sorting refuse is a big deal in Japan, but a lot of plastic ends up burned:
Thanks to this monumental effort, Japan’s government boasts that 86 percent of the 9 million tons of plastic waste the country generates every year is recycled, with just 8 percent burned and the rest sent to landfills.
An impressive number. Until you look under the hood.
In fact, despite all the sorting, around 58 percent of Japan’s discarded plastic ends up being sent for what is called “thermal recycling:” incinerated to produce heat and electricity.
by Alia Wong, the Atlantic
Like most other colleges across the country, Newbury College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Brookline, Massachusetts, held classes through the end of this past spring semester and then bid farewell to cap-and-gown-wearing seniors. But unlike almost every other college, those classes, and that farewell, were the school’s last: Newbury officially ceased operations at the end of May.
The article spends most of its time on Newbury College but does talk a bit about how this closure fits in larger national trends. Even though college applications are increasing, that doesn’t translate to increased enrollment at lower-tier schools:
Yet selective colleges and universities—those that accept fewer than half of prospective students—have enjoyed a disproportionate share of that growth, receiving close to two out of every five applications despite accounting for fewer than a fifth of the country’s higher-education institutions. What’s more, the number of applications doesn’t correlate with the number of students. (The number of applications per high schooler has soared in part thanks to the Common App, which makes applying to additional schools much easier.) In fact, a gradual downturn in U.S. birth rates has led to a decrease in the country’s current high-school population (which remains four-year colleges’ primary source of students). A recent report by the National Student Clearinghouse research center underscores just how dramatically this is playing out. In spring 2019, overall postsecondary enrollment decreased by 1.7 percent, or nearly 300,000 students, from the previous spring.
And the decline in birth-rates isn’t uniform across the country - in regions where it is more pronounced, the schools which aren’t really able to attract students from other regions are hit hardest:
This is perhaps most devastating for the colleges in these regions faced with the double whammy of demographic change and proximity to brand-name institutions that eclipse them with their practically unlimited resources and academic accomplishments. The kinds of colleges most at risk in this confluence of bad news? Small, less selective liberal-arts institutions that tend to draw primarily from their local populations. Institutions like Newbury.
I’m not sure how much of these trends will translate to other schools - what I usually here about is rising costs and declining public support. Shifting demographics aren’t really something you can change easily with local, public policy.
by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
John Overholt from Harvard’s Houghton Library spotted a paper towel dispenser whose prominent EULA prohibits refilling it with non-Tork brands of towels, with Tork vowing to “enforce its rights under applicable laws and agreements.”
Great!
Doctorow makes the great point that, this being a non-digital product, the EULA has a lot fewer teeth due to the absence of DRM and the DMCA.
by Yuji Nakamura and Yuki Furukawa, Bloomberg
This seems okay, I guess:
Hiroyuki Suzuki couldn’t be happier that his company is charging him and all other employees about $100 an hour to use meeting rooms. “People really cut back on useless meetings,” says Suzuki, 37, who works at chip-equipment maker Disco Corp. and is one of the company’s 5,000 employees taking part in a radical experiment in business management.
But then it gets weird:
At Disco, everything has a price, from office desks and PCs to a spot for your wet umbrella. Teams bill each other for their work, while individuals operate as one-person startups, with daily auctions of work assignments and battles for the best ideas in the aptly named “Colosseum.” Payments are settled in a virtual currency called “Will,” with balances paid in yen at the end of each quarter.
In the first case - it seems good to align (even artificial!) marginal costs with outcomes you want (fewer meetings). But does the organization really want more wet umbrellas all over the place? Or less inter-team collaboration? Billing for that opens up the possibility of getting less of it (I always like to say that people have a tendency to do exactly what you pay them to do - this isn’t always true, but you should plan on it being true).
by Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker
I’m a bit dubious of the claims, but I appreciate that the argument isn’t just limited to buy-backs - the economist in question (William Lazonick) is skeptical of public companies relentless returning of short-term profits to shareholders, not buybacks specifically.
Part of the argument is that not investing internal profits harms innovation:
He is currently co-writing a paper comparing Cisco unfavorably with Huawei, the giant Chinese company that is building a global 5G network, the next generation of Internet technology. “Huawei is one of the most innovative companies in the world, because it retains and invests its profits,” Lazonick told me.
But what happens to the profits after they are returned? They are presumably not destroyed. Maybe the theory is that an existing technology company can innovate in the area with lower overhead than a new one? I haven’t finished the article yet, so maybe that is explained.
An aspect of the argument against short-term-ism is that returning profits to shareholders (the wealthy class) instead of investing in the company (which can take the form of investing in labor/staff) exacerbates income inequality. That makes sense - but I feel like their must be external market forces that allow for under-investiment in labor (more monopsonies in the labor market? Less social mobility?) which have to go along with that.