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beardedmrbean · 1 year

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U.S. customs officials are cracking down on egg smugglers.

With egg prices soaring in the U.S. over the last year, more Americans are crossing into Mexico to buy the food item and trying to sneak cartons of raw eggs along some areas of the southern border, including California and Texas.

"We are seeing an increase in people attempting to cross eggs from Juarez to El Paso because they are significantly less expensive in Mexico than the U.S.," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Roger Maier told CBS MoneyWatch. "This is also occurring with added frequency at other Southwest border locations."

Egg prices have soared 60% in a year. Here's why.

Jennifer De La O, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection field operations director in San Diego, said in a tweet this week that her office "has recently noticed an increase in the number of eggs intercepted at our ports." Failure to declare agricultural items while entering the U.S. can carry fines of up to $10,000, she added.

Federal law prohibits travelers from bringing certain agriculture products — including eggs, as well as live chickens and turkeys — into the U.S. "because they may carry plant pests and foreign animal diseases," according to customs rules. Eggs from Mexico have been banned from entering the U.S. since 2012, according to the USDA. Cooked eggs are allowable under USDA guidelines.

The number of incidents in which raw eggs were confiscated at U.S. borders jumped more than 100% during the final three months of 2022 compared to the same period a year ago, according to Border Report, an online news site focused on immigration issues. The price for a 30-count carton of eggs in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is $3.40, according to Border Report.

Egg prices in the U.S. have surged to an average of $4.25 a dozen, up from roughly $1.79 a year ago, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The cost of processed eggs — used in liquid or powdered form in manufactured products including salad dressing, cake mix and chips — has also risen.

Those price increases are being driven by growing consumer demand along with a decrease in domestic egg supplies caused by an avian flu epidemic that has devastated U.S. poultry flocks.

Nearly 58 million birds have been infected with the disease, while more than 43 million egg-laying hens have been slaughtered, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making it the deadliest avian flu outbreak in American history. USDA officials are investigating what caused the outbreak.

People entering the U.S. must declare eggs at the border, Charles Payne, supervisory agriculture specialist at U.S. Customs in El Paso, Texas, told Border Report. A customs officer will still confiscate the eggs and have them destroyed, but will waive the penalty for the offender.

"We don't want to issue the penalties, but occasionally we have to," Payner told Border Report. "So if you declare what you've got, there won't be an issue."

#nunyas news #this could turn weird real fast

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rawvnoisevcruster · 8 months

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"Yes that's right, punk is dead,

It's just another cheap product for the consumers head.

Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors,

Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters.

CBS promote the Clash,

But it ain't for revolution, it's just for cash.

Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be

And it ain't got a thing to do with you or me."

-crass- music/art collective- 1978-

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gsirvitor · 1 year

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You will get chipped. It’s just a matter of time.

In the aftermath of a Wisconsin firm embedding microchips in employees last week to ditch company badges and corporate logons, the Internet has entered into full-throated debate.

Religious activists are so appalled, they’ve been penning nasty 1-star reviews of the company, Three Square Market, on Google, Glassdoor and social media.

On the flip side, seemingly everyone else wants to know: Is this what real life is going to be like soon at work? Will I be chipped?

“It will happen to everybody,” says Noelle Chesley, 49, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.”

Gene Munster, an investor and analyst at Loup Ventures, is an advocate for augmented reality, virtual reality and other new technologies. He thinks embedded chips in human bodies is 50 years away. “In 10 years, Facebook, Google, Apple and Tesla will not have their employees chipped,” he says. “You’ll see some extreme forward-looking tech people adopting it, but not large companies.”

The idea of being chipped has too “much negative connotation” today, but by 2067 “we will have been desensitized by the social stigma,” Munster says.

For now, Three Square Market, or 32M, hasn’t offered concrete benefits for getting chipped beyond badge and log-on stats. Munster says it was a “PR stunt” for the company to get attention to its product and it certainly succeeded, getting the small start-up air play on CBS, NBC and ABC, and generating headlines worldwide. The company, which sells corporate cafeteria kiosks designed to replace vending machines, would like the kiosks to handle cashless transactions.

This would go beyond paying with your smartphone. Instead, chipped customers would simply wave their hands in lieu of Apple Pay and other mobile-payment systems.

The benefits don’t stop there. In the future, consumers could zip through airport scanners sans passport or drivers license; open doors; start cars; and operate home automation systems. All of it, if the technology pans out, with the simple wave of a hand.

The embedded chip is not a GPS tracker, which is what many critics initially feared. However, analysts believe future chips will track our every move.

For example, pets for years have been embedded with chips to store their name and owner contact. Indeed, 32M isn’t the first company to embed chips in employees. In 2001, Applied Digital Solutions installed the “VeriChip” to access medical records but the company eventually changed hands and stopped selling the chip in 2010.

In Sweden, BioHax says nearly 3,000 customers have had its chip embedded to do many things, including ride the national rail system without having to show the conductor a ticket.

In the U.S., Dangerous Things, a Seattle-based firm, says it has sold “tens of thousands” of chips to consumers via its website. The chip and installation cost about $200.

After years of being a subculture, “the time is now” for chips to be more commonly used, says Amal Graafstra, founder of Dangerous Things. “We’re going to start to see chip implants get the same realm of acceptance as piercings and tattoos do now.”

In other words, they’ll be more visible, but not mainstream yet.

“It becomes part of you the way a cellphone does,” Graafstra says. “You can never forget it, and you can’t lose it. And you have the capability to communicate with machines in a way you couldn’t before.”

But after what we saw in Wisconsin last week, what’s next for the U.S. workforce? A nation of workers chipping into their pods at Federal Express, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and other top corporations?

Experts contend consumers will latch onto chips before companies do.

Chesley says corporations are slower to respond to massive change and that there will be an age issue. Younger employees will be more open to it, while older workers will balk. “Most employers who have inter-generational workforces might phase it in slowly,” she says. “I can’t imagine people my age and older being enthusiastic about having devices put into their bodies.”

Adds Alec Levenson, a researcher at University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations, “The vast majority of people will not put up with this.”

Three Square Market said the chips are voluntary, but Chesley says that if a company announces a plan to be chipped, the expectation is that you will get chipped — or risk losing out on advancement, raises and being a team player.

“That’s what we’re worried about,” says Bryan Allen, chief of staff for state Rep. Tina Davis (D), who is introducing a bill in Pennsylvania to outlaw mandatory chip embedding. “If the tech is out there, what’s to stop an employer from saying either you do this, or you can’t work here anymore.”

Several states have passed similar laws, while one state recently saw a similar bill die in committee. “I see this as a worker’s rights issue,” says Nevada state Sen. Becky Harris (R), who isn’t giving up. “This is the wrong place to be moving,” she says.

Should future corporations dive in to chipping their employees, they will have huge issues of “trust” to contend with, says Kent Grayson, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

“You’ve got to have a lot of trust to put one of those in your body,” Grayson says. Workers will need assurances the chip is healthy, can’t be hacked, and its information is private, he says.

Meanwhile, religious advocates have taken to social media to express their displeasure about chipping, flooding 32M’s Facebook page with comments like “boycott,” “completely unnecessary” and “deplorable.” On 32M’s Google page, Amy Cosari a minister in Hager City, Wisc., urges employees to remove the chip.

“When Jesus was raised, he was raised body and soul, and it was him, not zombie, not a ghost and we are raised up in the same way,” Cosari wrote. “Employees of 32Market, you are not a walking debit card.”

Get used to it, counsels Chesley.

Ten years ago, employees didn’t look at corporate e-mail over the weekend. Now they we do, “whether we like it or not,” he says.

Be it wearable technology or an embedded chip, the always on-always connected chip is going to be part of our lives, she says.

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fatehbaz · 2 years

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Downtown Chicago is surrounded by three sides: the West Side, the North Side, and the expansive South Side, which is also the name and location of a TV series that recently completed its second season on Comedy Central. [...] [The lead characters] work for a corporation called Rent-T-Own. And what makes the show futuristic is that there’s no household object that South Siders don’t rent from Rent-T-Own. The toaster is rented, the lamp is rented, the Xbox, beds, and end tables; whatever furnishes a house is not owned, but rented.

What looks like sitcom surrealism here is also the direction the world is moving in. What Marx called the consumption fund -- domestic goods purchased outright and in full (in short, a capitalist temporality with a defined beginning and end) -- is increasingly out of reach for wages that have been flat or falling for decades. [...]

[M]any rent-to-own schemes and operations of our time do suggest that everything is, to use an expression devised by Carlo Vercellone, “becoming-rent.” In the Fordist days you had wages that rose with inflation (due to escalator clauses established by union–management agreements), but in the post-Fordist world you instead have to borrow your inflation-adjusted wage increase. This translates into consumer debt, which skyrocketed following the 1990s -- the decade of capital’s defeat of union power. Labor had no need for credit cards during the Trente Glorieuses following World War II. You actually owned your toaster, your fridge, your end table.

The twilight of this postwar period is the world of the 1970s TV show Good Times, which ran on CBS between 1974 and 1979 (roughly between the Nixon Shock that brought an end to the Bretton Woods system, and the Volcker Shock that initiated there is no alternative–style capitalist realism in the US). Good Times was set in Chicago’s North Side, which, like the South Side, represented a section of urban Black America. [...] In the twilight of the good times for America’s wage-earning class, [the lead character] is a product of the American Century [...]. This place is very different from the economic and social world that William Julius Wilson observes in Chicago in his book When Work Disappears, and which Good Times sees a transition toward. [...]

With becoming-rent capitalism, whose aim is to totalize the society of speculators, wages no longer provide Keynesian effective demand (the defining postwar form of value extraction), but instead provide revenue streams that are securitized and distributed to high-end speculators around the world. Even those working in the gig economy -- an economic sector that fulfills the dream of human capital as promoted by Chicago School economists -- find that any repurposed item in the consumption fund is soon captured by speculation. [...]

Are there new weapons to challenge this new capitalist temporality, the time of endless debt servicing? [...]

The weapon against the capitalist totality determined by the universalization of speculation is none other than the universe itself. But how? It is by way of a wonder that detonates upon the collision between speculative temporality and the temporality of the cosmic. This is a wonder that breaks the spell of speculative time. It is also a wonder that exposes a form of time that precedes the clock time described by E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” a 1967 paper that influenced Moishe Postone and Lisa Adkins. This is sacred time, the time of the gods and their voices in the clouds.

-------

Text by: Charles Mudede. “The New Black Politics of the Cosmic.” e-flux (journal) 127. May 2022.

#time #temporality #futures #Great Lakes

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incarnateirony · 1 year

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hi!! you might've already mentioned this but I just noticed, what's your take on the salute to supernatural tacking on "other J&J projects?" to me it feels forced to keep jared explicitly involved somehow but maybe im just wearing hater goggles

Basically, yeah. For a while it was a contractual necessity, and at current it's more of a bridge, but it's not going to stay the branding long term. It may take a good year or so to change, but it will. We're at the transition horizon.

Previously Jared's contract had a lot of minimum requirements, cost a LOT to offset, etc. Which is also why even when his M&Gs start struggling to sell and stuff they pretended it could stay balanced, because it was part of The Brand these conventions are under.

But that was the Old Brand. The Original Brand. Now the kids are creeping in, the guys are nonexclusive, and as I've mentioned, the next half year or so are finding their balances on panels, greets, and their own audiences recognizing they're available there.

Meanwhile since CE contracts via WB, other more modernly relevant and better selling people are pulling in their features, like Gotham Knights, which is more of a sign of the way WB is likely to try to develop the cons along with the kids by next year. Walker is a CBS show, and it was liberty at best to add them, but they're also not selling. 3 bids on mitch. 8 on a windy *duo*, or 4 per. Looks like pretty stable interest numbers. Not good stable, unfortunately. Compare to the 10-18 of the TW kids at their first con most people didn't even realize they were at.

It's no mystery where we're about to start slanting. This fandom is full of adults with the emotional processing of children that refuse to understand why the market is going to adjust to the current consumers and product, but it *is* changing. Like I said. If 2po's con sources were worth a FUCK he'd have shut up about a lot of things a while ago.

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rabbitcruiser · 8 months

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Truck Driver Day

Professional truck drivers are honored and celebrated today with Truck Driver Day. In the United States, a driver is considered to be a truck driver when their vehicle has a gross vehicle weight—the weight of the vehicle loaded—of at least 26,000 pounds. They must obtain a commercial driver's license (CDL) to drive a vehicle of this weight. Employers often require their drivers to take a safety training program, and some also require a high school degree or GED.

Truck drivers carry all kinds of freight—livestock, food, canned goods, liquids, packages, and vehicles—all across the United States and the world. They often have to load and unload their freight and must inspect their trucks before taking to the road. Truck drivers often ship products to stores, and some may have to undertake sales duties. Many truck drivers work long hours. Some may have daily local routes that keep them close to home, while others may have routes and schedules that often change, and many have to be away from home for an extended amount of time.

Some trucks were on the road in the United States prior to World War I. Trucks continued to be used and developed during the war, and by 1920 there were more than a million trucks on the roads of America. Trucking continued to expand over the following decade, on account of advancements such as the introduction of the diesel engine, improved rural roads, the introduction of power brakes and steering, and the standardization of truck and trailer sizes. In the 1930s, a number of trucking regulations were implemented, and the American Trucking Association was created. Trucking activity increased in the 1950s and '60s, in large part because of the creation of the Interstate Highway System. Regulations on the weight of trucks continued to be updated.

The heyday of the truck driver came in the 1960s and '70s. At the time, a wide swath of the public viewed truck drivers as modern-day cowboys or outlaws. The rise of "trucker culture" was signaled with the proliferation of trucker songs and films, the wearing of plaid shirts and trucker hats by the public, and the wide use of CB radios and CB slang. The romanticization of trucker culture subsided by the dawn of the 1980s.

Many truckers went on strike during the energy crises of 1973 and 1979, after the cost of fuel rose. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 partially deregulated the industry. As a result, many new trucking companies were started. Trucker union membership also drastically declined, leading to lower pay. But the deregulation did reduce consumer costs, and it increased production and competition in the trucking industry. By the twenty-first century, trucking dominated the freight industry. In 2006, there were 26 million trucks on America's roads, which hauled about 70 percent of the country's freight. Truckers continue to play a prominent role in keeping the wheels of the economy turning, and for the hard work they put in to make this happen, they are honored and celebrated today!

How to Observe Truck Driver Day

Some ideas of ways the day could be spent include:

If you are a truck driver, get out there and drive! Or, take the day off. It should be up to you!

Wave to truckers or make a gesture like you are pulling a truck horn in an attempt to get them to honk their horns.

Thank a truck driver. Tell them thanks in person or make a social media post of thanks. Include the hashtag #TruckDriverDay.

Become a truck driver.

Listen to some truck driving songs such as "Convoy" and "Truck Drivin' Man."

Watch some truck driving films such as Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and Big Rig.

Talk on a CB radio.

Eat at a truck stop.

Attend or take part in the National Truck Driving Championships, which are held around the time as Truck Driver Day.

Read a book about trucking or truckers such as Trucking Country: The road to America's Wal-Mart Economy or The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road.

Explore the websites of organizations and companies related to the industry such as American Trucker, Truckers News, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the American Trucking Associations, and the Women in Trucking Association.

Source

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communitymedia · 1 year

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DIY MEDIA

I wrote this in 2015 and updated it slightly in 2017. These ideas are central to all the work that I do.

Comcast (through merger with GE/NBC/Universal), Viacom, Disney (who now controls most of Newscorp/Fox’s media), CBS, and Time Warner currently control 90% of American media. This media oligopoly is more dangerous than we often give it credit for. These five companies exert incredible power over our modern political landscape. (They are responsible for things like the DMCA, and the TPP, EME, and today’s Net Neutrality decision, in addition to our ever increasing copyright terms.)

They collectively control so much of our political and economic landscape that it’s difficult to effectively understand, or begin to trace, the breadth of their influence. And that’s without stopping to consider how much the media we consume can shape our views. It’s hard to believe that the near constant coverage of President Trump in the months before the election didn’t influence his performance in the election.

We are constantly bombarded with entertainment and news media from these five companies, to the point that it is nigh inescapable. Even if the companies that feed us our news and entertainment were benign (and, don’t kid yourself, they aren’t), it would be nearly impossible to keep their biases out of our media. Simply put, we cannot afford to have such a vital part of our society controled by so few.

If we’re ever going to actually effect social change, we’re going to need to provide home grown, community alternatives to the media produced by the entrenched power structures represented by these mega-corporations. We need to hit them at their bottom line, which means creating (and consuming) compelling community TV, Film, Games, Prose, Music, and other art.

Many are already working towards these goals, and we should support them. Others are considering embarking on path towards DIY media. We must encourage and support them. As consumers, we must actively support the creators who choose to work independently.

See, it’s like this: When we buy stuff from major corporations, we transfer money (and therefore power) out of our local communities, and in to the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. When we make stuff, or buy stuff from our communties, that wealth (and power) stays within our communities.

Until recently, there were economic and logistic obstacles that prevented comunties from providing the same kind of Community alternatives for most kinds of media. Thankfully, this is no longer true.

Kids in their bedrooms can record and produce an album that sounds “professional” with a few hundred dollars worth of gear, or record an album that sounds “good enough” with a smartphone or a laptop and some free software. Countless news stories of the last few years broke on Twitter, or Facebook thanks to a citizen journalist and their smartphone. There have been many TV show style series released on the web, from amatuers and professionals alike.

People are making their own media, and that’s awesome.

For the first time in the history of mass broadcasting, anyone can reach an audience of millions. (Sure, at the moment, we largely rely on corporate behemoths like Google and Facebook to do it, but the DIY Tech movement is well underway with decentralized services like Mastodon going strong, and new platforms being developed every day.)

The products of modern hobbyists can rival and surpass the output of media conglomerates both in terms of quality and consumption in nearly every field. In fact, with the exception of a couple of NPR or BBC endeavours, most successful modern podcasts/audio dramas are community-centered productions.

Make Something!

At this point, I feel like the act of creating media outside of the control of a multi-million dollar corporation is a radical act in and of itself.

Media controls our perception of reality. Current media companies are monopolistically huge, and thanks to modern copyright law they exert undue control over the figures of our modern folklore

Studies have shown time and again that when people experience fiction about people, they identify and empathize with those people.

We experience the world through our media. We use it to contextualize and understand our environment. When the most popular TV shows and Movies are about renegade cops and violent vigilantes that take the law in to their own hands, we internalize and normalize that.

We have to control our own media.

The bit I mentioned about copyright before is why the Creative Commons foundation is so important. Copyright reform might be a defining battle of our age, but we can skip it by embracing CC.

I currently view independent media production and distribution as among the most significant and necessary acts of protest available to regular folks.

This was the message Punk was supposed to teach us, before it got co-opted by shitty white supremacists, and people so afraid of teenage girls that they burned down the whole institution.

We gotta make our own stuff, even if it’s garbage. But beyond that, we gotta support one another when we make stuff. A lot of Punk (and a lot of late 60s/early 70s Jazz) was recorded on potatoes, basically. It was of “low quality” compared to the output from the major labels of the era.

But it was also radical and revolutionary, and some of it unquestionably changed the face of modern music.

So, what I’m saying here, is don’t worry if your stuff is “good.”

Make it. Get it in the world. Share it.

Support One Another!

So, what can you do? You can make things. You can consume things. You can seek out independent media, and support it (by paying the creators, and spreading the word.) You can get off Facebook, and join something community run.

Right now, the DIY media community is just beginning to stretch it’s legs. We have found what appears to be a viable funding model through services like Kickstarter and Patreon, though these are not without fault. We are building the communication channels needed to enable solid Content Discovery (though this is still the largest problem facing the community today.)

So, consumers of media, I encourage you to intentionally seek out experiences that weren’t designed by one of the major players, and support community creators financially when possible.

Hop on Bandcamp and listen to music that was recorded in someone’s bedroom. Seek out independently produced films on Youtube. Go watch something out of the Public Domain. Listen to a podcast. Enjoy some fanfiction. Play some Indie computer games (no really), or read some independently published novels. Actively and intentionaly spend even a small portion of your media budget on something that wasn’t produced by one of the big 5.

And Creators: Keep making weird, wonderful stuff. Every piece of media created outside the sphere of influence of the big 5 is an act of protest. Keep fighting the good fight.

The effects, while slow to start, will snowball. If we work together, and support one another, we can break the hold this oligopoly has on our media. We can take our culture back.

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lenbryant · 1 year

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Time to cut the cord Long Post (LATimes) Don’t like Tucker Carlson’s racist spiel? If you’re a cable subscriber, you’re paying for it anyway.

(Jason Koerner / Getty Images)

Let’s say you hate Fox News.

Maybe you believe that the cable channel’s retailing of baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden has damaged democracy.

Maybe you’re repulsed by the open racism voiced by Fox star anchor Tucker Carlson, not to mention his noxious spouting of antimasking and antivaccination claptrap that undermines public health.

Or maybe you believe that Fox’s willingness to feed its audience lies that its executives knew were lies — as suggested by the emails unearthed by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox — makes it not a “news” channel at all but a funnel for right-wing ideological mythmaking.

— Then-CBS chair and CEO Les Moonves chortles over Donald Trump’s role in the 2016 election

You wouldn’t be caught dead patronizing any of Carlson’s advertisers, such as the MyPillow crackpot or the nutritional supplement mountebanks that fill the ad space between Fox News house ads.

That’s your way of boycotting Fox News, perhaps in the hope that the decline of advertising will prompt the channel to change its ways.

Tough luck. If you’re a cable channel subscriber, you’re almost certainly paying for Fox News, whether you like it or not.

This essential fact about how cable programming works is especially important at the moment for two reasons. One is that the trial of Dominion’s lawsuit is on the verge of starting in a Delaware courtroom.

(The trial was supposed to begin Monday, but the judge has deferred proceedings for a day to give the two sides a crack at an eleventh-hour settlement; if that doesn’t happen, jury selection will be completed Tuesday and opening statements begin.)

The other reason is that negotiations between Fox and several major cable systems over the monthly fees the systems pay to carry Fox News are now underway or will be shortly.

In the past, the cable systems have largely bowed down to Fox’s demands; how the company’s legal headwinds play into those negotiations going forward is anyone’s guess.

One might be tempted to call Fox’s reliance on so-called carriage fees the dirty little secret of Fox News’ survival despite the flight of its blue-chip advertisers, except that it’s not much of a secret.

For years it’s been clear that Fox collects far more from what it calls “affiliate fees” than from advertising sponsors. In its most recent financial statement, for the quarter ended Dec. 31, Fox said it collected $1 billion in affiliate fees for its cable programming, but only $451 million from sponsors.

For the most recent full fiscal year ended June 30, Fox collected $4.2 billion in affiliate fees, compared with $1.46 billion in advertising. If advertising on Fox cable channels fell to zero, the segment would still have reported an operating profit of about $1.47 billion.

Fox Corp. doesn’t break out the fees it collects for Fox News specifically, but it’s possible to construct an estimate. The company reported that the news channel had 75 million subscribers as of last June 30.

Industry reports place the fee it collects from the cable operators that carry Fox News at about $2 per cable subscriber per month, which works out to $1.5 billion a year in carriage fees.

These figures don’t mean that 75 million cable viewers regularly tune in to Fox News — that’s just the number of subscribers claimed by the cable systems that carry the channel. A more accurate estimate is that Fox News can claim about 3 million regular viewers. The other 72 million are paying for nothing.

In traditional theories about consumer behavior, people who don’t like or don’t trust a product can vote with their feet, simply by choosing not to buy.

That’s not how things work with cable television. Fox News has notched its impressive subscription figures because cable consumers typically don’t have a choice. Fox News is one of the channels that cable systems treat as a must-have offering and, therefore, bundle it into their basic cable subscriptions. (Among the others are ESPN and CNN.)

It’s remotely conceivable that cable magnates will examine the declining, if not completely evaporated, credibility of Fox as a news channel and decide to play hardball, either by offering smaller carriage fees or taking Fox News off the basic subscription tier entirely.

The operative term is “remotely.” The television industry is a thin reed to lean on when it comes to the public interest. Many of its executives are moral black holes. Recall, for example, how Les Moonves, then the chairman and CEO of CBS, giggled and chortled in 2016 over the horrifying inanity of the race for the GOP presidential nomination and its featured star, Donald Trump.

“Man, this is pretty amazing,” Moonves told the audience at a media conference. “Who would have thought this circus would would come to town? It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. [Laughs] The money’s rolling in. ... This is fun.”

To peals of laughter, Moonves continued, “This is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry, it’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald, go ahead. Keep going. ... For us, economically, Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” (Moonves left CBS in 2018 after allegations surfaced of him sexually harassing and intimidating female employees.)

The industry’s surpassing love of lucre beyond all else doesn’t only infect political coverage. Southern California sports fans can cast their minds back to the six-year blackout of Dodgers games on most of the region’s pay-TV services starting in 2013.

That’s when the Dodgers’ new owners, led by Guggenheim Partners, reached a 25-year, $8.35-billion deal with Time Warner Cable to create a Dodgers cable channel. Time Warner figured it could make the deal pay by hawking the channel to the other pay-TV outlets in the region.

But Time Warner demanded such a high price for the channel that it received a firm “no” from every other pay-TV system, which included Cox, Charter Communications, the fiber services Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse, and the satellite companies DirecTV and Dish. Time Warner Cable served only about 30% of the pay-TV households in the Southland, so Dodger games were effectively blacked out for the other 70%.

The Dodgers held out for the highest price they could get for the TV rights, figuring the team is such a jewel in the Southern California sports crown that the sky was the limit. Time Warner figured it could squeeze the other pay-TV companies for every last dime because, really, what TV service would dare not carry the Dodgers, whatever the price? The answer was: all of them.

The blackout was lifted only after Time Warner Cable merged with Charter to create the Spectrum service. Who lost? The fans, that’s who.

Fox News isn’t the only channel that cable subscribers pay for but don’t watch. Basic cable tiers probably include a majority of channels that the average subscriber never watches and may not even know exist.

For years, consumer advocates maintained that giving subscribers a la carte options from cable menus instead of the one-size-fits-all model would save people money.

Alas, this nirvana has proved to be a chimera. Streaming channels have peeled off from cable lineups and established their own individualized subscription services, with the result that what used to be bundled together in premium tiers are now separate charges. My own combined monthly bill for streaming services now comes to well more than $100, while my cable bill has risen faster than inflation.

The supine Federal Communications Commission deserves plenty of blame for this. The FCC has waved through cable mergers, including the Time Warner-Charter deal and Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal, that have achieved nothing but the shrinkage of consumer choice.

What choices do consumers have regarding Fox News? Not many, if any. The progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America is pushing an “Unfox my Cable Box” grass roots initiative, but it’s too early to say if it has any traction.

Consumers can cancel their cable subscriptions and turn to external antennas to receive local broadcast channels, but the betting here is that it will be a long time before the decline in cable subscribers is large enough to force cable executives to reconsider their basic tier offerings. The FCC might be able to impose consumer choice on cable systems by regulation, but that’s a slow process even under the best circumstances, and would surely come under a years-long legal attack from the industry.

Still, consumers shouldn’t stay silent. Cable executives have kowtowed to Fox News in the past because its viewers have tended to speak with a single voice, backed by right-wing politicians; losing access to the channel would surely provoke an outcry from people with megaphones.

When DirecTV (which is part-owned by AT&T) announced last year that it would drop the right-wing channel OAN, six red-state attorneys general accused the satellite service of bowing to “powerful left-wing voices.” DirecTV dropped it anyway.

But OAN is a relatively small player. Fox News is not. Moreover, having been founded in 1996, it has been a fixture on cable TV for the better part of a quarter-century. That makes it harder to excise.

But not impossible. Those who find the presence of Fox News on their cable menus detestable should let their cable operators know it. If the Dominion lawsuit resumes Tuesday, more evidence of the cable channel’s irresponsible promotion of false antidemocratic claims may emerge. Another lawsuit against Fox, a $2.7-billion claim filed in New York by the voting machine company Smartmatic, is in the offing, and could pile on further allegations.

At some point, cable executives may find that the drawbacks of keeping Fox News on basic cable outweigh the benefits of keeping it on. If those can be translated into dollars lost because subscribers are going away, maybe the cable firms will act in a way that serves, rather than undermines, the public interest, by kicking Fox News to the curb.

#Fox News Lies #tucker carlson #right-wing media #fox #fox lies #fox “news”#propaganda #right-wing #shills for trump #cutting the cord #you're soaking in it #you're paying for it

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kp777 · 1 year

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By Cara Korte

CBS

April 6, 2023

How we grow food, consume it and waste it may play a big role in whether the world can avert a climate catastrophe, environmentalists and climate change analysts say. One big obstacle to changing the most damaging practices is that many of them are in fact encouraged and financially incentivized by countries — including the U.S. — possibly pushing us faster toward a world that's too dangerously warm.

"If we do everything right — if we reduce energy-related emissions [and] transportation-related emissions as much as we all need, and we don't address emissions from agriculture, we are still not going to avoid a climate catastrophe," said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

The global food system — the growing, processing, transporting, distributing, consumption and disposal of food — makes up a third of greenhouse gas emissions every year. From cutting down trees for grazing cattle, to food waste in landfills, each stage of the food system creates greenhouse gases: a study published in March estimated that emissions from food production and waste alone could push global temperatures up by as much as 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

Methane is the second biggest greenhouse gas producer after carbon dioxide, and it's 25 times as powerful as CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Overall, high-methane foods are on track to make up more than 80% of food-related warming by 2100. Livestock and agriculture are big methane producers — particularly cattle and rice. Manure and gas from cows is rich in methane, as are rice paddies, which emit the gas after they're flooded.

In the U.S., perhaps the most influential factor in agriculture policy affecting climate change is the farm bill, a massive, contentious measure that sets agriculture policies and regulations. It's passed by Congress every five years and is up for renewal this year.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) published an analysis of U.S. agriculture spending from 2017-2020, a period during which the environmental quality incentives program of the farm bill provided more than $3.6 billion of funding to farmer. But EWG found that just 23% of incentive payments "were for practices that mitigate climate change," according to the Agriculture Department's own list of "climate-smart practices and enhancements."

Some of those climate-smart practices include converting manure into organic fertilizer, improving soil health by increasing plant diversity and minimizing soil disturbance.

But implementing new and climate-friendly practices may be costly and adversely affect yield, cutting into farmers' bottom lines and making their crops or herds less attractive to investors and buyers. That reality, according to the World Economic Forum, has resulted in a cycle in the U.S. that rewards "the systems that are least regenerative, emit the most greenhouse gases, and result in the most land degradation." These damaging systems, the World Economic Forum said, "are the most likely to have access to capital."

The EWG analysis found that the majority of environmental quality incentives program practices funded by the farm bill were for structures, equipment or facilities that were not even on the department's "climate-smart" list, and further some of the items receiving the most funding, like waste storage facilities, which are used for manure, actually increase methane emissions, a point that has been acknowledged by the Agriculture Department. The department has a list of climate-friendly alternatives for managing cattle waste, among them, the use of microbes to anaerobically digest manure or composting, but all of these approaches come with attendant costs or labor.