All posts tagged: much money

Saint Dismas

Saint Dismas

Published by skeptic

Illustrations by Michelle Garcia Carlito held one end of the rope, Omar the other. The three of us wore orange vests to seem official. Sebastián, our lookout, hid behind some bushes. “¡Here comes one!” I picked up my shovel and dug out some of the dirt we’d dumped in one of the potholes covering the road. Omar held up a gloved hand, signaling for the car to slow down and stop. Things had gotten more difficult for us recently, with the news warning of false checkpoints, where men dressed in military or police uniforms stopped vehicles under the pretense of government-sanctioned searches, forced all the passengers out of the car, and then drove off to have the car scrapped or sold. There was talk of rapes and beatings when the passengers failed to comply, and sometimes those things did happen. But we weren’t like that—we wouldn’t have known what to do with a car if we had managed to steal one. We wanted drivers who were willing to spend money to get dirt off their …

The Anti-abortion Movement’s Attack on Wanted Pregnancies

The Anti-abortion Movement’s Attack on Wanted Pregnancies

Published by skeptic

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, we’ve witnessed the sober consequences of denying abortions to people who desperately want them. Women have been forced to continue pregnancies that have almost killed them, and given birth to children they can’t afford to care for, children conceived by rape, and children they are simply not ready to have. Now we’re seeing the flip side of the anti-abortion movement’s push to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses: the denial of pregnancy to women who fervently want children. Last month, at least three major clinics in Alabama paused in vitro fertilization, or IVF,  treatments after the state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are considered children under the law. The details of the lawsuit that triggered the ruling are grim. A patient at a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, entered an IVF clinic located in the same building, removed several frozen embryos from storage, and dropped them, destroying them in the process. The families who lost embryos sued the clinic, arguing that …

Air Pollution Is a Creeping Tax on American Life

Air Pollution Is a Creeping Tax on American Life

Published by skeptic

It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag in the world of economic models. Different agencies and organizations use different estimates—no one can seem to agree on the precise going rate. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a statistical lifetime is valued at about $11.5 million in 2024 dollars. By one new analysis, that translates to about $250,000 per year of living. That’s important to know, because the EPA is in the business of calculating how much money is lost or saved by preventing people’s early demise through various environmental regulations. Making contaminated water safer and dirty air cleaner costs money, but the country also benefits financially by keeping people alive. In the EPA’s own language, the agency simply estimates how much people are willing to pay to reduce their risk of dying from …

The Lab-Diamond Revolution That Won’t Happen

The Lab-Diamond Revolution That Won’t Happen

Published by skeptic

Last year, a funny thing happened at Ring Concierge’s Manhattan showroom. A bride-to-be brought her engagement ring back to the popular jewelry store after wearing it for a few weeks and wanted to trade out her diamond for a worse one. The woman was worried that the original rock was too clear, too bright, too perfect for its large size, Ring Concierge’s CEO, Nicole Wegman, told me. She wanted to replace it with a lower-quality stone of a similar size—something a little less bright white. Brides sometimes bring in new rings for tweaks; maybe they want the fit adjusted, or they’re having second thoughts about the setting. Occasionally, they decide they want to pay the extra money to go bigger. That the central diamond is too good, however, is just not a complaint that jewelers get, except in cases of totally blown budgets. But this particular bride wasn’t worried that she’d spent too much money, Wegman said. In a sense, the bride was worried that she hadn’t spent enough. She and her fiancé had selected …

The Great Normalization – The Atlantic

The Great Normalization – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

America entered 2023 with two big problems and two leading theories about what was causing them. Over the preceding three years, the murder rate had reached levels not seen since the mid-1990s, which was widely attributed to reductions in policing following the protests over the murder of George Floyd. The inflation rate was even worse, by historical standards, peaking in 2022 at 9 percent, the highest number since 1981. This, in turn, was believed to be the result of Congress and the Biden administration pumping too much money into the economy. Each theory implied a solution to its respective crisis. To bring crime back down, America’s cities would have to empower their depleted and demoralized police forces. To tame inflation, the Federal Reserve would have to crush consumer spending by triggering a recession. Both theories now appear to have been wrong. Over the course of 2023, police forces kept shrinking, yet overall violent-crime rates plummeted to their lowest levels since the 1960s. And the economy boomed even as inflation came just about all the way …

The Democrats’ Grocery-Store Problem – The Atlantic

The Democrats’ Grocery-Store Problem – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

The economy is hot, but the people are bothered. Americans think the country is in dreadful economic shape despite strong wage growth, low unemployment, and steadily declining inflation. We know this from survey after survey. What we don’t really know is how people formed those judgments. To find out, The Atlantic commissioned a new poll. When the results came in, one finding jumped off the screen: Americans are really, really unhappy about grocery prices. Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was …

How to Keep Time: How to Look Busy

How to Keep Time: How to Look Busy

Published by skeptic

Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters? According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can be a status symbol for others to notice. And when it comes to the signals we create for ourselves, sociologist Melissa Mazmanian reveals a few myths that may be keeping us from living the lives we want with the meaningful connections we crave. Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts The following transcript has been edited for clarity: Becca Rashid: Ian, I was having lunch with a friend last weekend who was trying to organize a birthday party for her colleague. Ian Bogost: Okay; great. Rashid: …

Parties, Pills, and Paintings at Miami Art Week

Parties, Pills, and Paintings at Miami Art Week

Published by skeptic

“Miami,” in the art world, is short for Miami Art Week, which is short for a week-long bacchanal of eye candy, nose candy, parties, and pills held in the name of shopping for art. The first week of December marks the kickoff to Miami, which features two or maybe three dozen different art fairs, the most prestigious of them being Art Basel Miami Beach, an import from Switzerland that, if you’re in the know, is simply called “the main fair.” I wasn’t in the know, or at least I hadn’t been until recently. I’d spent much of my adult life convinced that art wasn’t for me. But as I hit my mid-30s, I started to worry that I was missing out on something important. I wanted to understand art—why it matters, how to engage with it, why both artists and scientists insist it’s fundamental to our humanity. So a few years ago, I spent months working in galleries and artists’ studios, spackling walls, stretching canvases, writing press releases. Then, as December neared, I started to …

The Post-Strike Future of Hollywood

The Post-Strike Future of Hollywood

Published by skeptic

If the recent Hollywood strike were a movie, it would have a satisfying ending. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) got the important things they were asking for, namely better residuals for streaming shows and some protections from AI. Fran Drescher, an actor and the president of SAG-AFTRA, made a convincing case that this was a historic victory for labor and women’s empowerment, and recently said Meryl Streep was urging her to run for president of the United States. The sequel to this saga, however, looks a lot darker. Like previous strikes, this one was instigated by a genuine reckoning for the industry. Every time there is a new technological innovation—TV sets, video cassettes, pay TV, digital downloads—Hollywood has an identity crisis. The latest tech foil was streaming. It was an exciting, generative, endlessly replicated innovation—or seemed that way until everyone started to slow down and look at the numbers. Disney, for example, has lost $10 billion on its streaming service since 2019. And many writers, actors, and studio …

Where Are All the Missing Students?

Where Are All the Missing Students?

Published by skeptic

In 2006, the School District of Philadelphia, in partnership with Microsoft, opened the School of the Future. The idea was simple enough: Establish a learning environment centered on technology—no textbooks, just laptops and Wi-Fi—that would provide students in relatively poor districts the same benefits that those in wealthier areas enjoyed. The district built a handsome, well-lit building and filled it with state-of-the-art trappings including electronic lockers and Italian-marble bathrooms. It was heralded as a path-defining achievement for public-private partnerships in education. Two years later, Michael Gottfried, now an economist at the University of Pennsylvania but then a graduate student there, was part of a team examining whether such a technological revolution actually made a difference in student achievement. But he soon realized that the technology was somewhat beside the point: “We were talking to a teacher [at the School of the Future] and she said, ‘Here’s the thing, we can talk all you want about smart boards and laptops per student and curriculum moving online, but I have a bigger problem: Half of my class …