Category: The Dish

The ocean should be a lot more plasticky than it actually is:

For a decade or more, scientists have assumed our seas carry millions of tons of plastic, much of which should be floating in open water, forming vast midocean “gyres” – islands of man-made mess such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But according to a new study, something more worrying is happening to 99 percent of the ocean’s plastic: it’s disappearing.

The study outlines the findings of scientists who trawled the waters around five large ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. The data they obtained put them far short of the expected amount of plastic in the ocean — rather than millions of tons, the global load of ocean plastic was calculated at 40,000 tons at most.

So what happened?

Though it’s possible that sunlight is eroding it into nothingness, or that tiny pieces are washing back ashore, researchers are skeptical. What’s probably happening, scientists theorize, is that tiny fish are eating it. The most likely plastic-snackers are lanternfish and other small “mesopelagic” species, meaning those that live in the middle swath of the ocean, swimming to the surface at night to feed. These are far and away the most populous fishes in the sea. …

We don’t have a good sense of what swallowing plastic does to these fish, or even whether they’re able to excrete or throw up their plastic meals. That’s worrisome, since the toxic chemicals in plastic might permeate their tissue – bad for mesopelagic fish, but also potentially bad for humans. Pellets in the 0.5-5-millimeter range are also commonly found in the bellies of the predators who eat these smaller fish, according to the study. Those include tuna, mackerel and other sushi-menu faves.

For the larger chunks of plastic, drones could help:

[G]etting to the scale needed to map the world’s ocean garbage will require a gigantic remote-controlled swarm of nautical drones. Ultimately the idea is to deploy thousands of swarming, meter-long sailboats equipped with sensors and dragging nets behind them to scoop up the garbage.

Protei’s shape-shifting robotic hull is the project’s breakthrough technology, and the design is open source for anyone to use. The hull bends and curves like a snake in order to control the boat’s trajectory through the water. Touted as unsinkable, self-righting, and hurricane-ready, the drone uses wind power, and the latest prototype can tow a payload of under five pounds, the group claims. The vessel would use a custom plastic sensor to locate the trash; the sensor is able to measure “slices” of pollution at various depths.

Recent Dish on plasticky sedimentary rocks here.

(Photo: A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) swims in oil slick alongside a black plastic bag off the shore of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. By Wild Horizons/UIG via Getty Images)

Libby Nelson considers the failings of personal finance education:

Just 17 states require personal finance courses for students, and only six test students on what they’ve learned. But those classes don’t seem to make much difference anyway: students who took a semester-long class in personal finance fared below average on the Jump$tart survey. There is no evidence that the classes actually made students worse at managing money, the group wrote in its report. But it certainly didn’t make them any better.

Academic research backs up that conclusion. A 2008 study from two Harvard Business School professors studied the relationship between education and saving and investing behavior. They found state-required financial literacy education had no effect on graduates’ saving behavior later in life. The money spent on financial literacy education, they concluded, produced little in return.

McArdle chides Americans for spending so much and saving so little:

[W]hat we have is people spending more than they have to on the big basics. The average car loan, for example, is more than $25,000, and for people with the worst credit ratings, it’s actually higher: almost $30,000. This is not because you have to spend $27,000 to get yourself from Point A to Point B. It’s because people are pouring a big fraction of their income into driving something “nice.”

By the same token, raising your kids in a modestly sized home is not physically impossible. But we’ve come to regard as deep deprivation anything less than one bathroom and one bedroom per person. Cash-strapped people mention giving up vacations as if doing so were as great a sacrifice as giving up food or heat.

Rebecca Traister makes a compelling case:

The last thing any woman in politics needs is the appearance of having won only because her would-be opponents gave her a pass. This perhaps goes double for Clinton, whose years in the spotlight have demonstrated again and again that she is at her most appealing when she is fighting and scrappy, and at her most loathed when she is self-assuredly coasting. Clinton and her party require arresting, attention-drawing competition. She needs to be duking it out, and not just with a bunch of white guys. How many people are salivating at the thought of a Martin O’Malley candidacy? 19? 20?

A predictable primary is a boring primary, and a boring primary leads to a disinterested Democratic Party—a major hindrance going into a general election.

Part of what hooked voters in the mesmerizing 2008 race was the thrum of newness, the frisson of history-making every time a woman and a black man stood on a debate stage together. And while we could reproduce that thrill in a variety of ways—there is, after all, a shameful abundance of racial, ethnic, religious, and gendered history to be made before presidential politics become remotely inclusive—one of the most realistic, ready-to-roll scenarios of 2016 is the one in which multiple women show up to debate each other.

But there’s more at stake here than the health of the party in one presidential election. Viewing women as adversaries—ideologically and also within their own parties—is an urgent next step in helping the nation adjust to the idea that female politicians are just like, you know, regular politicians. That means we have to swiftly abandon the processional model, in which one diligent woman takes her hard-earned turn, while the next waits patiently in the wings. …

When a single avatar stands in for womankind, womankind projects onto that avatar its own varied ideas and priorities and standards. Clinton suffered from this last time, metaphysically unable to satisfy a million divergent hopes. She couldn’t be progressive enough, authentic enough, strong enough, stoic enough, or well-dressed enough for everyone. That’s part of why it’s dangerous for one woman to mean so much to so many.

Meanwhile, Nyhan checks in on Clinton’s approval numbers:

[Her] artificially inflated poll numbers have made her seem like an especially strong presidential candidate, but the Clinton bubble is quickly coming to an end. …

[W]e tend to overrate the importance of candidate image, which is largely a function of the flow of partisan messages. When opposition elites withhold criticism during, say, a presidential honeymoon or a foreign policy crisis, politicians can seem unstoppable, but when normal politics resume, their images — and their poll numbers — quickly return to earth. The same will be true for Ms. Clinton.

(Photo: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lunch with her replacement in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand, at Oscars Restaurant in New York City on January 25, 2009. By Enid Alvarez/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

In the wake of Israel’s vengeful and disproportionate response to the murders of the three teenagers, Paul took the opportunity to burnish his neocon cred with an op-ed at NRO defending Israel’s actions and calling for a cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority. It’s a miserable, asinine piece of boilerplate designed, quite patently, to pander to the Adelson crowd. (The commenters, by the way, suggest that there is actually a robust debate on this among conservatives that is never allowed to be aired at NRO or the Weekly Standard.) Chait gets to the point:

“Israel has shown remarkable restraint,” Paul argues. “It possesses a military with clear superiority over that of its Palestinian neighbors, yet it does not respond to threat after threat, provocation after provocation, with the type of force that would decisively end their conflict.” What kind of force would “decisively end their conflict”? Killing every single Palestinian man, woman, and child?

His op-ed proceeds to demand the cutoff of aid — which is opposed by AIPAC, for the obvious reason that it would create even more dysfunction and empower terrorists. Paul’s bill does boast the support of the extreme right-wing group Zionist Organization of America. Paul’s gambit here is obviously to win over Republican hawks justifiably concerned he shares his father’s kook foreign-policy ideology. His remedy is to embrace a different kind of kookery.

And what happened to his previous call for ending foreign aid to Israel as well? Poof! Kilgore blasts Paul’s naked opportunism:

Paul, of course, has been engaged in a intensive process of overcoming his and his father’s reputation as “anti-Israeli” for favoring a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel. So there is probably no act Israel could commit that won’t be aggressively praised by the peace-loving senator (in an impressive display of hypocrisy, he’s calling his bill for a termination of U.S. aid to the PA the “Stand With Israel Act.”) But blasting the administration for exercising actual diplomatic care over an explosive situation crosses the line from opportunism to cynical demagoguery.

Larison is disappointed that Paul’s willingness to buck GOP hawks on issues like Iraq doesn’t seem to extend to Israel:

On most things related to Israel, Sen. Paul is always too defensive, too eager to say what he thinks most Republicans want to hear, and too worried about being judged wanting in his support for the client state. Like his unnecessary security guarantee to Israel last year, this latest push to cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority is a doomed bid to beat hard-liners at their own game.

The larger problem with this is that it helps to perpetuate an undesirable status quo in U.S.-Israel relations. At present, Israel can act in whatever way it wishes without having to fear the loss of any U.S. aid or diplomatic support, and the U.S. then naturally takes some of the blame for the behavior of its client. That enables Israel to behave in harmful and ultimately self-destructive ways, and that undermines U.S. interests in the process. This is the phenomenon that Barry Posen refers to in Restraint as “reckless driving,” which the U.S. encourages by providing uncritical and effectively unconditional support to some of its allies and clients. Sen. Paul should be trying to discourage this recklessness and reduce the U.S. role in enabling it, but at the moment he is doing just the opposite.

It might even confirm to some that, in fact, there is an effective litmus test on both the GOP and Democratic primaries that demands that all potential presidents adhere to this ruinous policy for both Israel and America – or be tainted mercilessly as anti-Semitic. I want to support Paul in many ways. But this is a sign that he has no spine at all. He’s a sad, pathetic panderer on this – and libertarians and non-interventionists need to see that writing very clearly on the wall.

BOOM http://t.co/rZaLqz6brv pic.twitter.com/6mZsKV1JOe

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 3, 2014

And it’s also lower than it was when Ronald Reagan won re-election on a “Morning In America” theme. But it’s a recovery from a far deeper recession, and one clearly inherited by Obama and not created by him. Vinik evaluates the new report:

For the past few years, it was like clockwork: A disappointing summer of job growth would give way to a much stronger winter. Economists would hesitantly forecast that the economy was about to kick into second gear. Then the summer would come and the disappointing data would return.

But finally, it looks like we are ready to break that trend: The economy added 288,000 jobs in June, soundly beating economists’ expectations of 211,000, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent. You can see this pattern of strong winter and weak summer—and the possible breaking of it—in the three-month moving average of job numbers:

That five-month streak “is the longest since the late 1990s and provides convincing evidence that the recovery has rebounded after unexpectedly shrinking during this year’s harsh winter.” Ylan Mui continues:

Perhaps most important, Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans were working full-time in June, one of the highest rates since the polling company began tracking the figure in four years ago. The government data released Thursday showed the size of the country’s workforce holding steady, albeit at a low level. Still, there is hope that the surprising slide in the size of the labor force may be ebbing, if not starting to turn around. “While few might agree that the economy has fully recovered from the Great Recession, there is no doubt that the job market is much stronger now than in prior years,” Gallup said in its report.

And never forget this chart:

Not bad for the worst president since World War II.

Meanwhile, Danielle Kurtzleben declares that today “is the total solar eclipse of jobs days”:

— a rare day when both initial jobless claims and the monthly unemployment report come out simultaneously.

At the same time the government reported the economy added a strong 288,000 jobs in June, it also reported that the number of Americans who filed initial claims for unemployment insurance was at 315,000 for the week ending June 28.

That figure held relatively steady from the week before, when initial claims totaled 313,000. And though weekly initial claims data can be volatile, the smoother 4-week moving average also only shifted up by 500, to 315,000. That smoother moving average makes it easier to see trends than the raw numbers, and it shows improvement even in the first half of 2014. Since then, it has declined from nearly 350,000.

This level of claims is right around where claims were before the financial crisis hit. It is also a vast improvement over the middle of the recession, when claims were more than double where they are now.

Yglesias’ two cents:

One important data point from today’s release — “wages rose 2 percent over the past year.”

This is a bit of an ambiguous indicator. The number is high enough that people who’ve been itching for interest rate hikes can certainly point to it as a sign that economic slack is gone and it’s time to shift to tighter money. On the other hand, 2 percent year-on-year growth is hardly mind-blowing prosperity. It’s not even a hint of catchup from the years-long span of massive slack and no wage growth. Giving workers a chance at seeing some real gains requires the Fed to not have an itchy trigger finger on those rate hikes.

He also points to this encouraging tweet:

Labor force up by 81K. Unemployed down by 325K. –> That’s how you want the unemployment rate to drop.

— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) July 3, 2014

But this, from economist Justin Wolfers, could be the tweet of the day:

There is simply no bad news in this jobs report. Go on, dig into the detail, and see if you can find it. I dare you.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) July 3, 2014

Jordan Weissman tries his best:

I think there’s some reason for optimism, especially given the fact that employers kept hiring while the economy retracted during the winter. Companies may finally feel good enough about the future to keep adding to their payrolls. On the other hand, as Neil Irwin points out at the Times, we’ve been here before. Below, I’ve graphed out a three-month rolling average of U.S. job creation. The labor market is almost back to the pace it hit in January 2012, after which employment growth took a nosedive.

It’s also possible, Irwin points out, that schools juiced this month’s numbers a bit by staying open later into the summer to make up for days lost because of the miserable winter weather. And as Wolfers notes, there’s always a margin of error of +/- 90,000 jobs on each of these reports. For now, we have some good news—but it’s too early to tell if we’re reaching a new new normal.

And Casselman notes that “as always, there are caveats” to any good report:

June’s employment gains were mostly in part-time jobs, and the number of people working part time because they couldn’t find full-time work rose by 275,000. Much of the job growth was concentrated in low-paying sectors, such as restaurants and retail, while hiring in the better-paying construction sector continued to lag. The number of people out of work six months or more fell to a five-year low, but, at least as of May, not because the long-term unemployed were actually finding jobs.

Patrick Brennan anticipates some grousing from the right:

Skeptics — see that incorrigible pessimist Arthur Brooks — will always question why exactly we’re celebrating the labor-force-participation rate merely staying steady, at the lowest rate since the 1970s, and jobs growth at a rate at which it will take years to return to employment levels, as a share of the population, that we saw before the recession.

Two points: It’s all relative, and it is notable that we are seeing stronger growth now than we have seen in years. Second, the labor-force-participation rate isn’t just being pushed down by a bad economy — it’s in a secular demographic decline. I’d like it to rise, and to be higher than it is, but in a certain sense, it’s not ridiculous to celebrate its holding steady as a victory.

Zoe Fenson emphasizes that for many women, including herself, using birth control isn’t even about contraception:

On a regular basis, I encounter women with [Polycystic Ovary Syndrome] who rely on oral contraceptives to keep their reproductive organs in check. And even beyond our experience, there are a host of medical issues, tangentially or completely unrelated to reproduction, for which birth control serves serious medical uses. I’ve known women who take birth control to limit pain from endometriosis, to stave off migraines, to address skin-scarring cases of acne.

These issues almost never come up in discussions about access to birth control, because the conversation is so dominated by sex, and by extension, pregnancy.

Even when it does come up, the debate immediately gets redirected back. Witness Sandra Fluke’s passionate defense of contraceptives on behalf of her friend, who lost an ovary to PCOS. The loudest shouters in the public discourse immediately turned the conversation to her own sexual proclivities, accused her of agitating for consequence-free sex, and the point was completely lost. I watched that spectacle play out, raged over it, and cried quietly when my rage was spent.

Caitlin Dickson adds:

One of the birth control pills’ greatest benefits to users is a reduced risk of ovarian and endometrial cancer. Studies have found that the protective effects of oral contraception against both types of cancers increase the longer a woman takes the pill and lasts for years after she stops using it.

A reader joins the conversation:

IUDs are not just birth control devices.  They are used to prevent heavy hemorrhaging due to fibroids (growths in the uterus) in perimenopausal women.  Absent these devices, the women would have to undergo hysterectomies.

This is not just about sex.  It is about an employer making decisions, based on their religious beliefs, about the health of their employees.