Talking Points
- The local ISIS offshoot in Kabul killed dozens in twin bombings
- Ismail Sabri Yaajob was sworn in as Malaysia's new prime minister
- Fashion giants signed a Bangladeshi garment worker safety pact
- An "ocean blob" was blamed for Chile's decade-long drought
- A FIFA corruption probe returned millions to... FIFA
- 2020 was proved to have been Europe's hottest year on record
- Biden was ordered to reinstate Trump's "remain-in-Mexico" policy
- Florida Covid-19 deaths and hospitalisations reached an all-time high
- Elon Musk admitted that Tesla's autopilot tech is "actually not great"
- The 'Nirvana baby' grew up (and sued the band for exploitation)
Dive deeper
The third wave of Covid-19 infections remains an exceptional threat to global health . We have the answer at hand: modelling has shown how to vaccinate our way out of a pandemic. But as the coronavirus pandemic trundles towards its second birthday, nations around the world are experiencing the crash of modelling with reality.
Cases up, deaths down (mostly)
Case numbers continue to rise in all the major hotspots around the world. Russia, Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom are reporting 20,000–35,000 infections per day. The European Union, which has exemplified the best and worst responses to this virus, tallies near 55,000. Thankfully, deaths have not kept pace with infections thanks to rising vaccination rates. Indonesia too, which until recently was ground zero for the delta wave in Asia, is finally seeing a welcome tapering off in cases and deaths. Though, it must be noted that Jakarta is easing restrictions at a dangerous moment.
And somewhere up in the ether, in a realm of its own (see: American exceptionalism), the United States is still seeing 150,000 new cases every day. And unlike Europe and the UK, the number of daily deaths is rising fast as well. Florida, the sunshine state, has been swamped by the latest delta wave. Hospitalisations and deaths have surpassed 2020 records but Florida's Republican governor continues to fights tooth and nail against mask mandates. From California to Illinois , America's war continues unabated between the libertarian conception of freedom, and public health. Meanwhile, Texans who are skeptical of vaccines are shooting up livestock deworming drugs in worrying numbers.
We don't need to retread ground on the shamefully inequitable distribution of health resources, vaccines, and money around the world . Suffice to say that the most vaccinated countries in the world are the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Singapore, Israel, Qatar, Chile, Denmark, Bahrain, Portugal, and Canada. These are – with the exception of Canada – small countries in both geography and population. And without exception they are wealthy developed countries. Each has administered more than 130 vaccines per 100 citizens. And the inequity will intensify as more rich countries pile into booster shots.
The model of a modern major upheaval
We create little models in our heads every day - based on all manner of current information and past experiences. And in normal times, these models inform and shape our decisions about various risks. But these are not normal times. And everyone reading this would be well abreast of the fact that the pandemic has played havoc with our natural ability to process information. This is a big enough problem at the individual level – it's compounded for a collective. To wit: those of us lucky enough to elect our leaders do so with the understanding that they will make weigh risks and make decisions for all of us.
But a major problem revealed by the pandemic is around expertise. We don't have the contingent scientific understanding to make decisions about epidemiology – but neither do politicians. And so, in the absence of good sense and judgment, policy settings (an admittedly anodyne term for the very superstructure that enables people to live lives worth living) have been reliant on modelling. Perhaps that's underselling it. It would be more apt to say that modelling has been an indispensable tool for public health authorities because it lends the imprimatur of science to risky or unpopular decisions. And just as importantly, it also defrays responsibility for real-world repercussions from those who govern. This gap between the model and the world it seeks to describe may provide wriggle room for politicians, but from its maw spring all sorts of problems.
And nowhere is this more evident right now, than in Australia. The country had notable success in pursuing a strategy of suppressing the coronavirus. In the nine months to July the national 7-day rolling average didn't creep above 30 new cases. But the delta variant put an end to that. Now, in lieu of having secured enough vaccines for its population, the government's strategy a la mode is to inflict harsh lockdowns. One state (which houses your writer) is in its sixth lockdown - more than 210 days all up. In Canberra, the federal government has revealed a plan to open up the national border in stages as the country passes various vaccination hurdles. Unfortunately, the modelling that it relied on suggests that thousands more people will succumb to Covid-19 in the months after opening up – an order of magnitude more than the current weekly deaths. This is a prickly enough message for the government to sell, and that's before bringing the other modelling into account. But the main issue is that the modelling has been shot to pieces by other academics because it is, after all is said and calculated, a subjective artifice.
And so here, as in various other countries, uncertain politicians try to defend their decisions by defending the models on which they are based. But those models may yet be reduced to splinters by the weight of reality.
Worldlywise
The hunger season
Recent flooding and wildfires have roused Asia, Europe, and North America from their climate slumber. As the developed world now ought to turn its eyes to an African nation living through a waking nightmare. Five failed rainy seasons have pushed Madagascar into its worst drought in forty years . Food production is almost non-existent in the south of the island. A million Madagascans are classified as food insecure – a label that doesn't quite capture the reality: scavenging for insects is now common practice. At least half a million children under the age of five face malnourishment and may suffer the attendant severe developmental problems. Issa Sanogo, the UN resident coordinator, put it bluntly, "the hunger season is coming".
With the world's first climate change-induced famine at hand, let's take stock of our efforts to mitigate them. Failure – and lots of it. For all the "build back better" rhetoric, we have spurned the opportunity to build back greener. Research from the energy think-tank Ember reveals global energy emissions are 12% higher than during pandemic lows, and 5% higher than in 2019 . The primary reason is the growing – yes, growing – use of coal. The 43% of growth in electricity demand met by coal somewhat blackens the gains made in renewables. China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan are given particular attention for their reliance on coal-fired power plants. However, to single out a handful of heavy-emitting Asian nations – several further down the development indexes – is an incomplete assessment. No country can claim a "green recovery" from the pandemic.
Dave Jones , the lead author of the Ember report, warned, "We are not building back better, we are building back badly. A super-fast electricity transition this decade is critical to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees". If we want any chance of avoiding a world in his namesake's locker, then this trend must be reversed. As for Madagascar, where the dry has come before the rising seas, a sense of injustice is palpable. The UN World Food Program chief David Beasley lamented, "This is an area of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change , but now, they're the ones paying the highest price."
OnlyFunds and moral money
OnlyFans, an unabashedly pornographic platform in which content creators stream themselves for an audience of paying subscribers, found itself in a sticky situation recently. For those living under a rock, it is Twitch except the streamers aren't playing with video-games. It boasts 130 million subscribers and has paid out $4.5bn to its content creators since 2016 (though not before taking a gluttonous 20% bite of the subscriber fee). But in a shock move, CEO Tim Stokely announced plans to ban sexually explicit material from the platform (nudity would remain under a look-but-don't-touch policy). Stokely insisted that his company was erecting a modesty blind to keep on the side of the Bank of New York Mellon .
The bank in question has taken up the mantle of America's morality police – a welcome change after its own rather embarrassing snafus. Back in the ancient history of 2020 BNY Mellon was found to have knowingly laundered illicit cash for two decades (trillions of it) and was caught red-handed manipulating currency markets. But, you've got to draw a line somewhere, and a line bisecting white-collar criminals from masturbators seems as good as any. BNY Mellon began flagging and rejecting all interbank transfers linked to OnlyFans. This is not the first time a payment processor has hastily shut the laptop screen on porn. In 2019 Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa stopped supporting transactions on Pornhub. And, next generation payment processors Square and Stripe don't allow any payments to adult entertainment.
This is all well and good, but the fact remains that the porn is still there. Pornhub has more monthly visits than Netflix. OnlyFans is an order of magnitude larger than the relatively above-the-belt content platform Patreon. It's big business – but it's also a source of great pleasure for many. And it's the livelihood of thousands of sex-workers. The uproar over the porn ban was so deafening that Stokely reversed it . A win in the short-term for OnlyFans (and the part-owners who are seeking a share-sale), but the tension around payment processors and porn remains. Sure, morality and money don't go hand in hand (see: the New Testament), but perhaps there ought to be a space for corporates in-between prurient and puritanical.
The best of times
Ballena azul
Blue whales are returning to Spain’s Atlantic coast after more than 40 years of absence . Four specimens have been spotted throughout the region since 2017, some of which have returned in consecutive years. Centuries of whaling caused the world’s largest mammal to all but go extinct by the 1970s. In 1986, the act was banned in Spain following international pressure. Researchers are not yet sure why the whales have returned, but some think it could be due to the whales’ memory.
Bessé went for a walk one day
This week archaeologists unveiled the first genetic evidence of the Toalean people taken from 7,200-year-old remains. The discovery confirms the Toalean people inhabited the Wallacean islands before Neolithic hunters spread to Indonesia 3,500 years ago. Additionally, the DNA of the teenager dubbed Bessé contains genetic sequencing not shared by anyone living today or any known humans. As such, Bessé’s DNA will help trace how and when humans first migrated from mainland Asia to what is now Australia and New Guinea via Mallacea.
The worst of times
When it rains it melts
Between August 14 and 16, a record seven billion tonnes of rainfall poured across Greenland. During that time, the country’s highest peak saw rainfall for the first time ever. The record threatens to accelerate the already rapid deterioration of the world’s second largest ice sheet . Spanning 1.7m square kilometres, it holds enough ice to raise sea levels by seven metres if it melts entirely. Research released last year revealed that the ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in 12,000 years, a speed which has increased sixfold since the 1990s.
Dubai's dead forest
Hundreds of thousands of trees have died in Dubai after a feud between private developers and government officials. The one million tree initiative was announced in 2010 by the United Arab Emirates’ prime minister to prevent desertification. After four years, the land was handed over to private developers who intended to build other projects there. While the initiative was defended in court, water was intermittently cut off and the site was blocked from public access. As a result, almost 80% of the more than 590,000 trees were completely dead by December 2020.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"Gong tong fu yu (common prosperity)."
– Chinese President Xi Jinping has embellished a crackdown on the private sector with new warm and fuzzy rhetoric. He's mentioned the phrase 60 times in addresses this year alone, signalling that he fully intends to put the 'state' back into state capitalism to manage stark and growing wealth inequality. It's sent tremors through the Chinese upper crust at home and abroad.
The numbers
16,000 containers
- Danish shipping giant Maersk has placed an order for eight 'carbon neutral' container vessels from Hyundai Heavy Industries. At a capacity of 16,000 containers these ships are only marginally smaller than everyone's favourite big boat, MV Ever Given (which ominously is traversing the Suez again this week). The difference is these new boats run on green methanol , saving 1m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere annually. It's a salutary course for a sector that has appeared largely unhurried on matters pertaining to sustainability.
10x
- All Maersk's shiny new ships might be spending a good deal more time anchored at port than traversing the open ocean. A shortage of shipping capacity and port congestion is slowly constricting global trade. Right now it costs 10 times more to ship a container from Asia to Europe than this time last year. At this point, and at these prices, another Suez-like accident could compound trade bottlenecks like a multi-car collision.
The headlines
"Pigs in blankets at Christmas could be hit by post-Brexit supply problems" – The Independent . Excuse me?
"It's coming home: law gives neighbours right to retrieve lost ball in Belgium" – The Guardian .
The special mention
Vale, Charlie Watts. The rock of the Rolling Stones has come to a rest. In the words of Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, "Charlie is not just a drummer – he's a genre. Every beat I play, there's Charlie Watts in there someplace."
A few choice long-reads
- How did the mega-retailer Target get cozy with cops? An American saga from Bloomberg Businessweek.
- Apple exemplified an era of global capitalism that has passed. Perfect writing from The Economist.
- All these billions poured into Silicon Valley and yet all their super apps aren't that super. Financial Times with a timely whack.
Tom Wharton @trwinwriting
