“More than 350 scientists and conservationists from 40 countries have signed a letter calling for global action to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises from extinction.”
“By far the biggest threat is becoming accidently captured in fishing equipment and nets, which kills an estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a year.”
“The scientists say that more than half of the 90 living species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, are of conservation concern”
“The study found a consistent pattern across measures: Americans incorrectly believe that members of the other party dehumanize, dislike, and disagree with them about twice as much as they actually do.”
https://beyondconflictint.org/americas-divided-mind/
“But on child care and school, a specific, urgent response has been missing, or at least one that acknowledges our new reality. President Trump threatened to withhold federal funding for education if schools didn’t open back up, counter to schools’ insistence they need more money to provide a safe education amid the pandemic.
“While the CARES Act, an omnibus COVID-19 relief bill signed into law in late March, gave extra stimulus funding to families with children, schools and child care businesses so they could remain afloat, a Democratic-backed bill to give a $50 billion bailout of the child care industry has gotten little attention.
“Teachers around the country have voiced doubt that necessary safety measures for in-school teaching will be sufficient, and Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the country’s largest school systems, has decided not to reopen classrooms when schools go back in session in August.
“Some worry that while distance learning is safer, socially different children and those without stable internet connections or computers — who are already at the margins in normal times — will fall irrevocably behind.
“There is no cohesive solution to America’s child care problem. But the relative inattention to this crisis, one that’s so foundational to a functioning society, the economy and family units across the country, is revealing.
“It shows that for all the changes that have happened in American life — more female elected officials, a MeToo movement and a workforce that is around 47 percent female — our power dynamics remain fundamentally skewed.
“We are failing to collectively understand what our most critical and pressing problems actually are.”
Clare Malone
We can only walk from where we stand
Andy Ihnatko
How a party spent decades making itself white
“At key moments in history, Republicans considered greater outreach to minority voters but ultimately didn’t take that path.”
“The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade. Since the mid-20th century, the Republican Party has flirted with both the morality of greater racial inclusion and its strategic benefits. But time and again, the party’s appeals to white voters have overridden voices calling for a more racially diverse coalition, and Republicans’ relative indifference to the interests of voters of color evolved into outright antagonism.”
Listen to the podcast here:
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-how-the-gop-chose-to-be-a-white-party)
And read the article here:
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-republican-choice)
Take retail as an industry. Physical retailers pay rent for good locations, expecting footfall to come their way. That rent payment is actually part of their customer acquisition cost.
In the digital world businesses don’t pay rent in the traditional sense, but customer acquisition still isn’t free. Getting your products in front of the right people online is essentially paying temporary rent – and Facebook, Instagram & Google have the biggest malls in town.
(https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2020/7/3/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians)
“They’ve built these massive laboratories where they can track what you buy with your card and sort of deduce a lot of things about you, based on those patterns. So, for instance, a good example is the study done by Canadian Tire in 2002. Canadian Tire is a big retailer that sells all types of things. It’s like Wal-Mart.
“What one of the executives there did, he looked at how people were using Canadian Tire credit cards and tracking what products they actually purchased. Then he found out that people, who for instance buy premium wild bird seed, it turns out that they very infrequently went bad on their debts. Whereas people who bought chrome accessories for their car, they walked away from their debts more frequently.”
(https://www.marketplace.org/2009/05/15/how-credit-card-companies-track-you/)
danelabonte 