Peter Coy | What Americans Don’t Understand About China – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

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Keyu Jin is in the West but not entirely of it. She’s fluent in English and French, studied at Harvard and teaches at the London School of Economics. She knows her way around Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. But she is still a proud Chinese. She lived with her parents in Beijing during two recent maternity leaves. And she has just written a book about what she calls “reading China in the original.” Unfiltered, that is, by a Western perspective.

It sometimes comes as a surprise to Europeans and Americans that Chinese people who have seen and enjoyed the best of the West nevertheless prefer China. What about the lack of democracy and the repression of minorities such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans? The pollution? The threats against Taiwan and incursions in the South China Sea?

“Keyu Jin is in the West but not entirely of it. She’s fluent in English and French, studied at Harvard and teaches at the London School of Economics. She knows her way around Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. But she is still a proud Chinese. She lived with her parents in Beijing during two recent maternity leaves. And she has just written a book about what she calls “reading China in the original.” Unfiltered, that is, by a Western perspective.

It sometimes comes as a surprise to Europeans and Americans that Chinese people who have seen and enjoyed the best of the West nevertheless prefer China. What about the lack of democracy and the repression of minorities such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans? The pollution? The threats against Taiwan and incursions in the South China Sea?”

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 | Do Handouts Work? – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“Josephy Amosi Kamanga, who lives in Malawi, couldn’t afford to pay the examination fee for his eldest child, so she dropped out of school two years ago. She later got pregnant and is living at home. The fee that changed his daughter’s life? Just $4.98.

That story comes from GiveDirectly Inc., an American charity that offers a simple proposition: Give poor people cash, with no strings attached, and good things will tend to happen. It certainly did to Kamanga and his family. GiveDirectly gave him $51.75 a month for a year. That enabled him to reopen a shop that sells soap, drinks, body lotion, sugar, eggs and cooking oil, and to buy a secondhand phone to operate the business. With the profits from the grocery he covered school expenses for three other children. He told a GiveDirectly interviewer that the news he’d been selected to receive the money “brought joy in my heart.” “

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 | Brazil’s President Lula Has No Easy Choices – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“Brazil’s new president is hemmed in by protesters on one side and financial markets on the other. He needs to spend money to please the public, but he needs to demonstrate fiscal responsibility to keep investors from abandoning Brazilian assets, which could cause interest rates to soar and cripple the economy. Unfortunately, it will be extremely difficult to do both at once.

It’s a tough spot for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist who served two terms from 2003 to 2010 and narrowly won election to a third term in October over the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. On Sunday, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters broke into government buildings in the capital, Brasília, to protest what they falsely believe was a stolen election.”

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.”