Peter Coy | The Case Against (Some) Buybacks – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

“Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is determined not to let America’s tech giants play her for a fool. If they want taxpayer money under the CHIPS and Science Act, they will need to promise not to turn around and give the money to their shareholders through dividends or share repurchases.

I think that makes good sense. On the other hand, sometimes companies should pay dividends or buy back shares. Those are two of the main ways that they reward their shareholders — who are, after all, the owners — rather than sit on excess cash or spend it wastefully.”

Peter Coy | A Gold Mine of Clean Energy May Be Hiding Under Our Feet – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

“Sometimes we miss things in front of our faces. We don’t see what we aren’t looking for. “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness,” Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who shared a Nobel in economic science, wrote in his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” A flower, for instance. “Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” the artist Georgia O’Keeffe once wrote.

You know what else has been hiding in plain sight? Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen, which is heralded as the clean energy carrier of the future because its only combustion product is water.

Sure, we’ve known about the hydrogen that’s locked up with oxygen in water molecules and with carbon in fossil fuels like propane. But we — and by “we” I mean everybody except for a handful of scientists and some people in Mali (I’ll get to that) — never really saw, and never expected to see, hydrogen floating around on its own in gaseous form.

“Hydrogen does not exist freely in nature,” the National Renewable Energy Laboratory confidently states on its website. “Hydrogen occurs naturally on Earth only in compound form with other elements in liquids, gases or solids,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration avers.”

“. . . . . But the optimism is welling up. There may be hundreds of millions of megatons of hydrogen in Earth’s crust, and even if only 10 percent of it is accessible, that would last thousands of years at the current rate of consumption, Geoffrey Ellis, a research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, told me. He and a colleague, Sarah Gelman, presented their findings to the Geological Society of America in October.

OK, I asked him, but isn’t the idea that the future rate of consumption would be much higher than the current rate? True, he acknowledged. Right now hydrogen is mainly used for lightening and sweetening crude oil, making ammonia for fertilizer, treating metals and processing foods. Cheap hydrogen could also be used to generate electricity or power vehicles. “If we found it everywhere, we’d use it for more things, so maybe it would last only hundreds of years,” he said. “But hopefully in hundreds of years we have cheap fusion so we don’t have to worry about any of this.”

As for cost, natural hydrogen from the ground should be producible for less than $1 per kilogram, versus around $5 per kilogram for green hydrogen that’s derived from water by electrolysis, said Viacheslav Zgonnik, the chief executive of a Denver-based start-up, Natural Hydrogen Energy. “My opinion is biased, of course, but I believe that it will happen. That’s why I’m continuing to work on it,” he said. ” . . . . .

Peter Coy | Worker Overtime Pay Is Dying. It Shouldn’t Be. – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“Time and a half for overtime is one of the best-known and most important protections for workers in the United States. Yet many employers routinely undermine the protection by misclassifying workers as managers and thereby making them ineligible for overtime pay.

The extent to which employers game the overtime system was made starkly clear in January in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The title says it all: “Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid Overtime Payments.” “Food cart manager,” “price scanning coordinator,” “carpet shampoo manager,” “lead shower door installer,” “grooming manager” and “director of first impressions” (for a front desk clerk) are some of the “fake-sounding” titles uncovered by the authors, Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School and Umit Gurun and N. Bugra Ozel of the University of Texas at Dallas School of Management.

I talked to three people who want to make it harder for employers to misclassify workers: Nick Hanauer, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded Civic Ventures, a public policy incubator in Seattle; Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on low- and middle-income workers; and David Weil, who ran the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor during the Obama administration but was rejected by the Senate for the same job in the Biden administration.”

Peter Coy | Making Farms Organic Is Paying Off – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“I talked by phone on Thursday with Garrett Mussi as he was driving around 1,000 acres in California’s San Joaquin Valley where he grows organic corn, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic and almonds using environmentally friendly methods. He spoke about being a good steward of the rich soil. He described using drip irrigation to conserve water and cover crops to add nitrogen to the soil and compost to enrich it.

Learning to farm in an organic way “has been a good experience,” he told me. “It definitely has its challenges, but farming overall is a challenge. I enjoy it. Always learning something new.”

Mussi doesn’t own any of the acres he tends so carefully. He is a tenant farmer. The owner of the land is Farmland L.P., an investment fund that buys farmland and readies it for certification as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture: using pesticides sparingly, and only the least harmful kinds; minimizing erosion; sequestering carbon in the soil; rotating crops regularly and providing habitats for butterflies, bees and other pollinators. Some organic farmers use lady bugs to eat aphids and owls to eat rodents.

What we have here is finance meeting farming and doing good, not evil.”

Peter Coy | Can Raise Thorny Questions – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“The last week of the year is a big one for writing checks to charities, especially for Americans who are fortunate enough to have incomes high enough to justify itemizing their deductions. There’s something bewildering about the ritual, though. On what basis do we decide who should get our money? And how much should each receive? Normally we feel good about spending as little as possible on things, but with charitable giving, we tend to think of more as better.

I began thinking about this after I received an email from a psychology professor, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, criticizing what he called “the capitalist system of charities in the U.S.A.” He wrote that charities are “competing to the death for the same 50 cents.”

“Thus,” he went on, “hundreds of organizations fight hunger locally and nationally. When it comes to illnesses, there are thousands of organizations competing. This means a terrible waste of resources.” He recommended that I look at Germany, where the government performs functions that charities perform in the United States.

My psychologist friend has a point about the waste of resources, I think, as I chuck another stack of fund-raising pitches into the recycling bin. (When I spy a nickel or a quarter through the glassine window, I take that out first, with zero guilt pangs.)”

David Lindsay wrote to Peter Coy,   coy-newsletter(at)nytimes.com:

Hi Peter,

This is an interesting topic, I missed having comments after your piece.

You made excellent points.  You left out people like me — climate hawks.

I have cut my normal donations down this year, when I felt I had to make a lot of political contributions, since the current Republican Party is more pro fascism than democracy, and more dirty Anthropocentric growth, than sustainable development.

Second, I usually don’t give to charities as much as I used to that mostly help people survive, since people are causing the decline of other species in dramatic terms. In a non election year, I give most of my donations to Environmental and family planning organizations.

I posted a piece other species decline this morning from 2001 in my blog:

https://inconvenientnews.wordpress.com/2022/12/28/why-protecting-30-of-lands-and-waters-is-critical-the-wilderness-society/

sincerely,

David Lindsay

Peter Coy | In Retirement, You May Not Need to Spend So Much – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“If the recent rout in the stock market has you drastically cutting back your retirement spending plans, it probably means that you were counting too much on ever-rising asset prices. But a new research paper suggests that spending less at advanced ages is not necessarily a sign of failure to plan. Even people who plan perfectly do it.

Let’s back up for a minute. The notion that your spending should be consistent over your lifetime is known as consumption smoothing, an economic concept developed by Milton Friedman, Franco Modigliani, Robert Hall and others. The core idea is simple: No amount of luxurious living at age 60 compensates for living in penury at 25 or 85. So you should borrow when you’re young, save and pay off debts during your peak earning years and then spend down your savings in old age. If you do it right, you will enjoy an even standard of living throughout your adult life.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Great essay. I wish it had included, that if you reduce your consumption, you will probably reduce your carbon foot print, with just a little effort.

David Lindsay wrote “The Tay Son Rebellion,” and blogs at InconvenientNews.net.

Peter Coy | The Politicization of the Supreme Court Is Eroding Its Legitimacy – The New York Times

By Peter Coy    Opinion Writer

“Legitimacy is for losers,” a political scientist once said. It’s a profound concept. The winning side in a decision will gladly accept it without asking why. But the losing side — whether the decision is made by a basketball referee or the Supreme Court — will accept defeat only if they believe the decision was made fairly and by the book.

That’s why the politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court is so alarming. People on the losing end of Supreme Court decisions increasingly feel that justice is not being served. That’s a scary situation for the high court, and for American democracy in general.

“The Supreme Court has no power to enforce its decisions,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me on Friday. “It doesn’t have an army. The only thing it has power to do is write PDFs and put them up on its website.”

Peter Coy | Cash Is Out. Crypto Is In. What’s Happening to Money? – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Mr. Coy is a newsletter writer in Opinion.

“I felt two unexpected emotions — pity and guilt — one day recently while I was packing loose pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters into paper rolls to take to the bank. Coins, which were a big part of my childhood, have come to seem like inconvenient relics, as anachronistic as my grandfather’s stamp collection.

All over the world, people are abandoning old forms of money and adopting new ones, like cryptocurrency, faster than our brains and customs can process.

“We are at an interesting juncture,” Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist, told me. “It is a period of a great degree of concern about what happens to traditional forms of money and whether these technological developments we see around us are going to benefit us in some way or just create more disruption and turmoil.”

In much of Europe and East Asia you can go for weeks without touching paper money or coins. In 2013, a bank robber in Sweden was thwarted because the bank he targeted didn’t have any money to steal — the branch was a “cashless” location. Five years later, Cecilia Skingsley, then deputy governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, told The Financial Times, “If you extrapolate current trends, the last note will have been handed back to the Riksbank by 2030.” “

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

I vote against allowing bitcoin or any crypto currency any serious place in our system going forward. Bitcoin should be made illegal, until it reduces its enormous carbon footprint to something closer to zero. That mobsters, thugs and terrorists all like these untraceable systems, that allow the avoidance of any identification or taxation, should be enough to alert sensible people that you can’t run a town, state or country on an untaxable economy.

Peter Wehner | In Liz Cheney vs. Donald Trump, Guess Who Won – The New York Times

By Peter Wehner

Mr. Wehner, who served in various roles in the three Republican administrations before the Trump administration, is a contributing Opinion writer.

Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

“I asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.

“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”

“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”

Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.  . . . “

The columns ends: “Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.

Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.”

Peter Wehner | The End of Trump Can Be the Beginning of America – The New York Times

By Peter Wehner

Contributing Opinion Writer

• Jan. 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

• 741

Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

“This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five-and-a-half years.”

Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to tears watching a Democratic president get sworn in, but I was. It just felt so good to hear someone who understands and loves this country and constitution, and is an honorable person, take the oath. I’m praying for healing.”

I’ve had conversations with others who tell similar stories.

Joe Biden is an admirable human being, empathetic and generous in spirit, and his speech was elegant and uplifting. But the tears had to do with something else: We had just emerged from a national trauma. It was only two weeks earlier that the Capitol, on whose steps Mr. Biden took the oath of office, was under assault from a mob that had been incited by his predecessor, Donald Trump, in order to undo an election Mr. Trump lost.