Fit to Print - News, Driving, Regulations, and Trump
News
Last week, a listener posed a question during the Distraction podcast that felt pertinent to what we do here at ASD. It was, loosely paraphrased - are more things happening in modern times, or do we simply have more access to information about things happening?
I would humbly suggest the two are interrelated. Perhaps more ‘things’ are happening because we have open access to information. What was the Arab Spring, if not a networked uprising enabled technology to pierce borders where information had long been suppressed. The BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were sparked by a shocking video disseminated across those same wires.
While interconnectivity may make things happen in places they otherwise wouldn’t, it also makes those events easier for journalists and bystanders to document - if not for a brave teenage girl with a cell phone, George Floyd would have perished in obscurity. And so we have millions of citizen scribes sharing whatever crazy shit is going down in the corner of the world they inhabit.
Does knowing about all the crazy shit help a person navigate their lives, or does it just make everything seem worse? I ask myself this often, as someone who spends time each week trying to digest, distill, and highlight whatever fresh horror has found its way into my browser tabs.
Why do some of us choose to dive face-first into the horrors of humanity? Why aren’t we like the broad majority of First Worlders, tuning out cable news, steering clear of social media brawls, and spending our time doing wholesome activities like (I assume) taking the kids to karate or woodcarving or whatever?
Unfortunately, this physician cannot heal himself. Justice sensitivity is one psychological theory to explain the tendency to ‘doomscroll’ or take in an unusual amount of injustice, which the world has plenty of on offer. Social media and algorithms make it easy to end up in a funhouse of bad news and negativity. Other choices - like reading depressing newsletters! - can reinforce a general sense of hopelessness, when faced with a ceaseless stream of Fucked Up Shit.
Last week’s newsletter detailing the horrors of the Israeli siege of Gaza led a larger-than-usual number of readers to unsubscribe and, you know what, I totally get it. It was excruciating to read about that stuff, much less write about it in anything other than a long, anguished scream.
With this in mind, this week’s newsletter will look on the bright side, since we could all use some cheering up.
Driving
Here is some good news - driving deaths fell 4 percent last year! Hooray! They’re still up 25 percent from the 2010s, and three times higher than the average developed country but…progress!
Vehicle and pedestrian fatalities are a thing we’ve been over, but a new FT analysis surfaces a few interesting datapoints, and provides a little hope that a better, safer world may be on the horizon.
The first is that our headlong rush into bigger, heavier cars does not necessarily correlate with more fatalities on the road. A few other nations have Gone Big and not suffered an increase in pedestrian deaths:
Another bit of good news for some Americans is that not all states are created equally lethal - the safest US states are about as safe as other rich countries:
This is great news for people driving in the safer states, which tend to be in the Northeast (a shocking fact, I know, given how bad the drivers seem if you live there.) The data indicate that levels of road safety change dramatically depending on where one lives.
Perhaps road deaths, along with murder rates in cities, are falling because we’re putting increasing distance between us and the horrors of the pandemic, and as the trauma eases our anger and anguish and disregard for safety will ease as well. In the mean time, if you have to drive, be safe out there.
Regulations
Often, when government agencies grace these pages, we’re talking about their abject failure to do things to protect us. However! The week the Biden administration has made some unusually bold moves.
The Department of Transportation finalized rules that require airlines automatically refund passengers for cancelled or significantly delayed flights, as well as clearly stating additional fees up front. This brings us more closely in line with the EU, which has stronger airline passenger protections.
The FCC is set to restore net neutrality, which was eliminated by Trump’s cartoonish former chief. This will revive stricter oversight of ISPs so they can’t privilege certain sources over others. Consumer advocates had been concerned that companies like Comcast would charge competitors more money to deliver content to their subscribers, etc.
The EPA announced it will require coal-fired power plants to reduce their emissions by 90% by 2039. It also imposed regulations on toxic emissions from the plans, like mercury, and restricted toxic coal ash runoff into groundwater. Despite the relatively long timeline, these are long overdue regulations impacting the dirtiest of our power generation companies, and accelerating the phaseout of coal more broadly.
In a big win for workers, the FTC voted to adopt a comprehensive ban on noncompete agreements. Though commonly associated with highly-paid jobs like banking and executives, they’ve been abused by employers all across the job spectrum - the FTC’s ruling cites sandwich chain Jimmy John’s using them to punish low wage service workers.
Obviously, because we live in a dysfunctional legal state controlled by six unelected robed wizards who invent new legal doctrines when it suits their political desires, some of these regulations will be challenged, and it’s an open question whether the Court will attempt to overthrow the regulatory state entirely, but I’d argue the chilling effect of the rules being announced will lead to positive changes regardless, even if it’s initially companies and employers ass-covering for fear they might end up in violation.
Trump
We are now in the second week of Trump’s criminal trial for the various frauds he did while covering up the Stormy Daniels story back in 2016. All legal analysis aside, there have been some extremely funny moments so far:
…reporter Maggie Haberman, who reported in print, online, and on CNN that Trump was visibly nodding off while in court. “He appeared to be asleep,” she told the network. “He didn’t pay attention to a note his lawyer passed him. His jaw kept falling on his chest, and his mouth kept going slack.”
It comes as no surprise that a man in his seventies whose diet consists entirely of junk food is having a tough time staying awake for six straight hours in a courtroom. But perhaps the funniest moments came during jury selection:
“I don’t think this is what they meant by Orange is the New Black,” read one post shared by a jury candidate’s husband around 2016 and which featured a photo of Trump and Barack Obama.
“Trump invites the Thai boys to the White House, and the boys request to return to their cave,” read a joke shared by another prospective juror, referring to the young soccer team rescued in Thailand in 2018.
“I’m dumb as fuck,” an AI version of Trump said in one video shared by a prospective juror about two weeks ago.
Trump was forced to sit helpless as dozens of mocking social media posts were read into both the public record and his sleep-deprived face.
Whether it’s complaining about the media coverage, the sketch artists, or the temperature in the courtroom, Trump’s raging on social media and at post-trial press conferences does not appear to be engendering much sympathy. He’s got so little juice that hardly any of his fervent sycophants showed up to wave flags across the street.
Despite centrist pundits and conservative hangers-on insisting that Trump’s trial would make him stronger politically, the opposite appears to be true. Outside his tiny social platform, the right-wing media apparatus that caters to Trump enthusiasts is out of gas, with all but Fox News losing more than half their web traffic compared to 2020. All this comes as many of the sycophants who tried to overthrow the last election are finally being charged by state AGs.
It is good news for our country that a criminal ex-president is finally facing any sort of consequences for his actions, even if the bulk of his trials may be delayed past election day by a Court taking its sweet time to decide whether the president is immune from prosecution for crimes. Maybe we only need the one.
Cool Stuff
In a nod to optimism, here are two things that happened this week that I’m excited about:
Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.
With avian flu back in the news, we can feel a little better knowing there are scientists out there trying to head off the next pandemic. The new vaccine could potentially be delivered via nasal spray as well as injection.
The EU has approved a new antibiotic for serious illnesses such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections, marking a step forward in the drive to combat the growing resistance of “superbugs” to existing drugs. Emblaveo, marketed in Europe by US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, combines two existing medicines to tackle so-called Gram-negative bacteria that are among the leading drug-resistance threats.
It’s good to know we’re doing something to combat the threat of drug-resistant bacteria. The world may suck politically, etc, but we may not all die of horrible, preventable diseases before everything else falls apart. Optimism!
Short Cons
WSJ - “The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into consulting firm McKinsey related to its past role in advising some of the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers on how to boost sales.”
404 Media - “While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment.”
ABC Action News - “It's called "pay-to-stay", charging inmates for their prison stay, like a hotel they were forced to book. Florida law says that cost, $50 a day, is based on the person's sentence. Even if they are released early, paying for a cell they no longer occupy, and regardless of their ability to pay.”
American Prospect - “I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley’s fetish for “disruption” as the highest human value, noting that healthy societies also recognize the value of preserving core values and institutions, and feeling gaslit in return when the group came back heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn’t fetishize disruption at all.”
NYT - “Mr. Nedohin was opening his latest livestream on the right-wing video site Rumble, where he has about 1,400 followers who share a devotion to Trump Media & Technology Group, the former president’s social media company.”
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