Tech optimists' crush of the decade is surely 3D printing. It has been heralded as disruptive, democratizing, and revolutionary for its non-discriminatory ability to make almost anything: dresses, guns, even houses. The process—also known as "additive manufacturing"—is still expensive and slow, confined to boutique objets d'art or lab-driven medical prototyping. But scaled up, and put in the hands of ordinary consumers via plummeting prices, 3D printing has the potential to slash energy and material costs. Climate Desk asks: can 3D printing be deployed in the ongoing battle against climate change?
We taste-tested Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Annie's Homegrown Macaroni & Cheese, Cheez-Its, and a simple, homemade pasta-and-cheese dish. Watch the video to see how they stacked up.
Perhaps you've heard about the recent outcry over the use of yellow dyes 5 and 6 in Kraft's popular Macaroni & Cheese. A couple of food bloggers have petitioned the food giant to ditch the artificial colors, calling them "unnecessary" and "potentially harmful."
The petition has already racked up more than 250,000 signatures. That isn't surprising, since Kraft's cheesy, gooey dish is a childhood staple. (I subsisted on a strict diet of it and Eggo waffles until about age 10.)
So just for fun, let's pretend that the petitioners succeed, and Kraft replaces its artificial dyes with natural coloring—or (gasp!) no coloring at all. Would the stuff then be healthier?
Well, let's consider the ingredients list for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese:
Now compare that to the ingredients list for Kellog's Reduced Fat Cheez-Its:
Enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate [vitamin B1], roboflavin [vitamin B2], folic acid); soybean and palm oil with TBHQ for freshness, skim milk cheese (skim milk, whey protein, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, annatto extract for color), salt, containst two percent or less of paprika, yeast, paprika oleoresin for color, soy lecithin
To me, the list looked pretty similar—except for one thing: Instead of yellows 5 and 6, Cheez-Its uses annato extract and paprika for color. Yes, you read that right: Cheez-Its uses natural coloring, while Kraft Macaroni & Cheese uses artificial. Indeed, agreed Jesse Jones-Smith, a nutritionist at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Kraft actually has a few extra additives, even compared to Cheez-its." She added, "If you gave a kid two servings of Cheez-its and a glass of milk, you would actually have more sodium in Kraft Mac & Cheese. Otherwise, the two meals are pretty nutritionally equivalent."
Nutritionist Marion Nestle isn't a fan of the stuff in the blue-and-yellow box, either. "Kraft Mac & Cheese is a delivery vehicle for salt and artificial colors and flavors," Nestle wrote in an email. "It is a non-starter on my list because it violates at least three of my semi-facetious rules: never eat anything artificial; never eat anything with more than five ingredients; and never eat anything with an ingredient you can't pronounce."
Right. But that got me wondering: What about Annie's Homegrown, the supposedly healthier brand of packaged mac and cheese? When Jones-Smith compared Annie's and Kraft's nutritional information labels and ingredients lists, she found that their dry pasta and sauce packets weren't too different:*
The real difference, she says, was in what the two manufacturers recommended adding: Kraft suggests making the dish with four tablespoons of margarine and a quarter cup of two-percent milk, while Annie's recommends two tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons of lowfat milk. "Margarine often has trans fat—why would they recommend margarine?" wondered Jones-Smith. The result is that when prepared, Kraft packs substantially more calories and fat into a serving than Annie's:
So what's a healthier alternative? I asked Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace, for a recommendation. She suggested a simple cheese, pasta, and cauliflower dish. Basically you mash up two cups of boiled cauliflower with a cup of parmesan, a little olive oil, and salt and pepper. Add it to a pound of pasta with a little of the pasta's cooking water, and you have a creamy, cheesy dish that Jones-Smith says is also more nutritious than both boxed versions: It's lower in sodium, fat, and calories, and slightly higher in protein. (It's slightly higher in saturated fat because of the real parmesan.)
It also tastes good. That's not to say that boxed mac and cheese tastes bad; it's hard to go wrong with cheesy, starchy comfort food. But I'm willing to guess that Adler's concoction is a few more steps removed from a bowl of Cheez-Its. Which is, well, comforting in its own way.
You can watch our taste test in the video at the top of this post.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated some of the values for Cheez-Its' nutritional information.
To the surprise of no one, Cyprus reached a deal at the very last second to bail out its banking system. The Financial Times has the basics:
Under the outlines of the deal, depositors with accounts worth less than €100,000 would not be touched. But those above those levels in Laiki Bank, the second largest and most troubled financial institution, would be severely cut, the officials said. The losses on large deposits in Bank of Cyprus, which will survive as a much smaller entity, have yet to be decided, but could be as high as 40 per cent.
....While the deal spares Cyprus of the sweeping levy on all deposits that caused outrage earlier in the week, it could end up being far more painful for large depositors, including Russian account holders, in both banks. Bank of Cyprus is particularly heavily laden with Russian deposits.
Strict capital controls will remain in place to prevent wealthy Russians from withdrawing all the rest of their money the instant that banks reopen, which is pretty much what anyone with any sense would do if they were allowed to. No matter how emphatically the great and good of Europe insist that Cyprus's problems are now solved for all time, the EU's recent history suggests taking their assurances with a great big shaker of salt.
And it turns out that this isn't all. AP reports that even haircuts this colossal will raise only €4.2 billion. The remaining €1.6 billion demanded by the EU will come from "tax increases and privatizations." The Wall Street Journal reports on the likely result:
"The [deposit] haircuts will have a calamitous impact on Cypriot output, leading to a decline in gross domestic product of 10% this year and 8% in 2014," said Gabriel Sterne at Exotix, a hedge-fund advisory. "We think the peak-to-trough decline in annual real GDP will be in the order of 23%, similar to Greece, but we see risks more on the downside than the upside."
As with the rest of Southern Europe, Cyprus faces crippling job losses, rising business bankruptcies and slumping tax collections, said economists.
That could imperil the country's ability to meet budget targets, something that in turn could call forth even harsher measures and once again stoke fears about the island's long-term future inside the euro zone.
As for possible revenge from the Russian government, there's no word on that yet. Stay tuned.
Yesterday I wrote about a dispute over wage rules for foreign workers that's delaying the Gang of 8 from producing a draft immigration bill. I've now learned a bit more about this, thanks to Daniel Costa of EPI, and wanted to pass along a few further details.
This wasn't clear to me from the original LA Times article I read, but apparently this dispute is over an expansion of the current H-2B visa program for seasonal guest workers. These workers are already required to be paid the local prevailing wage, and one option for calculating this is a four-tier wage structure tied to skill levels. For example, here are the rates for landscapers in Baltimore:
Level 1 Wage: $9.01 hour
Level 2 Wage: $10.60 hour
Level 3 Wage: $12.20 hour
Level 4 Wage: $13.79 hour
The AFL-CIO has long wanted to ditch the four-tier structure and move to a single wage based on the local average. Employers have opposed this for just as long. A couple of years ago, in response to a court order, the Department of Labor issued a new rule that eliminated the four-tier structure and instead relied on a single mean wage (usually equivalent to the Level 3 wage), but Congress has blocked it from being implemented.
So the current dispute is really nothing new. Employers are eager for the H2-B program to be expanded to include nonseasonal jobs. However, there's little evidence of a labor shortage in the occupations likely to be most affected, which means an influx of new workers would probably drive down wages. As its price for going along with this, the AFL-CIO wants to set the prevailing wage at the mean level once and for all. The Chamber of Commerce is opposed because most guest workers are currently certified at the Level 1 wage, so the new rule would mean they'd have to start paying higher wages.
When I wrote about this yesterday, I suggested that the AFL-CIO proposal represented a "complicated new set of wage rules for the private sector," and obviously that's not the case. It would actually be simpler than the current rule.
I also suggested that the politics of this was difficult because it requires all guest workers be paid the average prevailing wage. Since some American workers are obviously paid less than average, this would, in effect, mean mandating higher wages for foreign workers than for (some) U.S. citizens. This is still arguably the case, though the political dynamics are obviously a little complicated.
So that's that. This isn't a topic I'm likely to spend a ton of time on, but since I wrote about it yesterday I wanted to follow up today now that I know more about it.
Last week AP won a court case against Meltwater, a company that allows organizations to keep track of where and how they're mentioned in the press. Meltwater provides its clients with the headline and a few snippets from each article that mentions them, and contends that this is fair use. AP argued that it isn't, and asked Meltwater to pay a license fee for using AP's content. James Joyner isn't impressed:
Now, this strikes me as silly. Meltwater is in no ways a rival news service. It’s not a news service at all. It’s a way for an organization to keep track of its coverage in the world press.
The think tank that employs me tried out Meltwater’s service some time back. I don’t know whether we ultimately signed up as a client; the rates were exorbitant. But it was a way, far more efficiently than possible through Google News or even Lexus-Nexis, to keep track of the mentions of the organization, its CEO, and other key stakeholders. In addition to the snippets, which I doubt we used all that much, there were various analytics and graphing packages.
While AP and NYT content was certainly included, this is in no way competitive with what they do....That is, unless the only reason you would read AP content was to find out what AP was saying about you or your business, Meltwater was not competition for AP.
Actually, this isn't as silly as it sounds. What James is describing is a clipping service, and organizations have used clipping services for decades to keep track of who's mentioning them. But here's the thing: clipping services pay a license fee to the news organizations they clip articles from. These days, it's mostly done via a central clearinghouse, but the fees are paid. Meltwater doesn't do this.
On the other hand, unlike a traditional clipping service, Meltwater isn't giving its clients full clips. Just a headline and a few paragraphs.
On the third hand, Meltwater describes itself as a clipping service. In court, Meltwater tried to argue that they're really a search engine that provides a "transformative function" on the clips in question, but the judge didn't buy it:
Just as a news clipping service should do, Meltwater systematically provides its subscribers with what in most instances will be the essence of the AP article relevant to that reader. And again, despite the obvious point of comparison given its characterization of itself as a search engine, Meltwater does not attempt to show that the extent of its taking from the copyrighted articles is no greater than that customarily done by search engines. AP, in contrast, has offered evidence that Google News Alerts do not systematically include an article’s lede and are — on average — half the length of Meltwater’s excerpts.
....Based on the undisputed facts in this record, Meltwater provides the online equivalent to the traditional news clipping service. Indeed, Meltwater has described itself as adding “game-changing technology for the traditional press clipping market.” There is nothing transformative about that function.
If Meltwater is a specialized search engine, it doesn't need to pay licensing fees. If it's a clipping service—even an electronic one—it does, just like clipping services have always done. That's mainly what this case is about. If this ruling stands up, it will indeed narrow the scope of fair use, but it's a pretty small and specialized bit of narrowing, applied solely to a for-profit enterprise in a very specific niche market. It probably doesn't mean much to the rest of us.
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, on Sunday delivered this message to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg: Spend all the money you want; it won't make a whit of difference.
He's going to find out that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and he can't spend enough to try to impose his will on the American public. They don't want him in their restaurants, they don't want him in their homes, they don't want him telling them what food to eat. They sure don't want him telling them what self-defense firearms to own. And he can't buy America. He's so reckless in terms of his comments on this whole gun issue.
LaPierre claimed that Bloomberg's ramped-up involvement in the debate over gun control had prompted a backlash: "Millions of people," many of them presumably NRA members, were mailing in $5, $10, and $20 checks "telling us to stand up to this guy that says that we can only have three bullets, which is what he said. Stand up to this guy that says ridiculous things like, 'The NRA wants firearms with nukes on them.'" He went on, "I mean it's insane the stuff he says."
As he often does, LaPierre argued on "Meet the Press" that America's gun violence problem resulted from poor enforcement of existing laws, not a lack of regulation. He said the NRA supported "better enforcement" of federal gun laws, and that the failure to enforce gun laws was the Obama administration's fault: "I know they don't want to do it, but they ought to do it. It's their responsibility." LaPierre declined to mention that, for decades, the NRA and other gun-rights advocates have done everything they can to gut the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the agency that enforces federal gun laws.
On Friday I showed you a picture of my mother's cat, Tillamook. But a funny thing happened while I was snapping his picture: he suddenly got shy and decided to go hide under a car. I followed him, zoomed in, and took a few pictures, not figuring they'd be worth anything. Oddly enough, though, they turned out quite spectacularly. And one of them in particular reminded me of a very famous picture. Enjoy.
The Bush White House’s “compassionate conservatism” was the last major Republican attempt to claim the political center — to balance traditional conservative goals on taxes and entitlement reform with more bipartisan appeals on education, health care, immigration and poverty.
....But once Bush’s foreign policy credibility collapsed, his domestic political capital collapsed as well: moderates stopped working with him, conservatives rebelled, and the White House’s planned second-term agenda — Social Security reform, tax and health care reform, immigration overhaul — never happened.
Boy, I sure don't see this. Social Security reform was never going to happen, period. Democrats were unwaveringly opposed from the start, and would have been under any circumstances. Likewise, although it's true that immigration reform was sabotaged by a conservative rebellion, there's little reason to think it had anything to do with the war. It was a grassroots revolt from a party base that had always hated the idea. As for tax and healthcare reform, I don't remember those even being on the table. There was never any serious push for healthcare reform—or any expression of interest from the Bush administration—and tax reform was more a vague wish than a serious proposal.
The mundane truth is that presidents rarely accomplish big things domestically in their second terms. And to the extent they have, they've done it under worse circumstances than Bush: LBJ had Vietnam, Nixon had Watergate, Reagan had Iran-Contra, and Clinton had Monica Lewinsky. The Iraq War may have played a part in Bush's second-term collapse, but his domestic failures were due far more to scandal, political miscalculation, and garden variety weariness than to the war—and Obama's win in 2008 was due to all those things plus an epic financial collapse. His margin of victory was pretty much exactly what you'd expect given a lousy economy and eight years of his party being out of office.
Douthat's followup is even harder to credit:
This collapse, and the Republican Party’s failure to recover from it, enabled the Democrats to not only seize the center but push it leftward....Nor is it a coincidence that these liberal policy victories have been accompanied by liberal gains in the culture wars. True, there’s no necessary connection between the Bush administration’s Iraq floundering and, say, the right’s setbacks in the gay-marriage debate. But cultural change is a complicated thing, built on narratives and symbols and intuitive leaps.
As The American Conservative’s Dan McCarthy noted in a shrewd essay, the Vietnam War helped entrench a narrative in which liberal social movements were associated with defeat in Indochina — and this association didn’t have to be perfectly fair to be politically and culturally potent.
In a similar way, even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well.
I don't get this at all. Social liberalism proceeded apace all through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The failure in Vietnam did nothing to slow it down at all. And the aughts were a mixed bag. Abortion and gun rights, for example, stayed stuck in the same rut they'd been in for years. Gay rights advanced, but that was just the continuation of a long-term trend. I'm hard put to give Iraq credit for any of this.
There's no question that the Iraq War debacle was one entry on the bill of particulars against the Republican Party in 2008. But take a look at what's happened since then. Obama has all but adopted Bush's foreign policy as his own: he launched a war against Libya; escalated the war in Afghanistan; enormously expanded the use of drone attacks; and embraced virtually all of the worst aspects of Bush's national security policy. But on the domestic side, he passed a big stimulus bill; repealed DADT; passed financial reform; and enacted a historic healthcare reform bill.
To believe that Iraq was responsible for this, you have to adopt the perverse view that a huge foreign policy failure was responsible for (a) a continuation of that very foreign policy, but (b) a repudiation of Bush's completely unrelated domestic policy. That doesn't strike me as very plausible. Unfortunately the evidence suggests just the opposite: on a wide variety of measures, the effect of the Iraq War has actually been startlingly modest. It played no more than a bit role in ushering us into the Obama Era.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants new gun control legislation so bad that he's set to spend a staggering $12 million of his own money on ads targeting US senators in a dozen states.
As the New York Times reports, Bloomberg's new wave of ads, which begin on Monday, support universal background checks for nearly all gun purchases, but do not mention a ban on assault weapons. The ads, run under the auspices of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group funded and co-chaired by Bloomberg, will target Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Patrick Toomey (R-Penn.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).
Bloomberg's $12 million ad buy further cements his position as the main political force challenging the clout of the National Rifle Association. For decades, the NRA has used its money and manpower to oust politicians who support any new regulation of guns in America. The threat of NRA attacks helped stifle any effort at new gun laws, including requiring background checks for most gun purchases and reinstating the ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004. Now, by pumping money into Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Independence USA, his super-PAC, Bloomberg hopes to counter the might of the NRA, while giving cover to pro-gun-control legislators.
Here's more from the Times on Bloomberg's new ad blitz:
In each [state], the commercials urge support for the measure to require background checks for nearly all firearms purchases, not just those in gun stores, the most debated element of the legislation and a coveted goal of gun control advocates.
Mr. Bloomberg has singled out Mr. Flake, who already voted against the expansion of background checks in the Senate Judiciary Committee, by producing a special, scolding commercial aimed at Arizona. "Flake's vote," the ad declares, equals "no background checks for dangerous criminals."
The mayor, who over the years has spent tens of millions of dollars to support his favored candidates, holds the power to use his "super-PAC" to wield influence in the midterm Congressional elections next year and beyond. He said he would heavily favor "candidates who will stop people from getting killed."
"There is an easy measure of how you decide who those are," he said, noting that gun rights groups rate lawmakers. "The NRA keeps score of it for you. They are public information."
To those who might fear his financial might, he added: "If they pass sensible gun legislation, there is not an issue."
Bloomberg has scored a handful of recent gun-related victories. He pumped nearly $10 million into Independence USA in the 2012 elections; the super-PAC went on to spend $3 million to defeat Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.), a pro-gun rights congressman. Independence USA also spent millions last month in the Democratic primary for Illinois' 2nd congressional district to defeat Debbie Halvorson, who had an "A" rating from the NRA. Democrat Robin Kelly, whom Bloomberg supported, ultimately cruised to victory.
The NRA has said it plans to fire back at Bloomberg with an advertising campaign of its own. And an NRA lobbyist told the Times that it's confident that many Americans won't buy into Bloomberg's message. "What he is going to find out is that Americans don't want to be told by some elitist billionaire what they can eat, drink and they damn well don’t want to be told how, when and where they can protect their families," Chris Cox, the NRA's top lobbyist, said.
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To the surprise of no one, Cyprus reached a deal at the very last second to bail out its banking system. 
find out what AP was saying about you or your business, Meltwater was not competition for AP.
table. There was never any serious push for healthcare reform—or any expression of interest from the Bush administration—and tax reform was more a vague wish than a serious proposal.
