Tag: hit&run

In the United Kingdom, the West Midlands police department has paused applications for promotions after white male officers said the process discriminates against them. In seven of the last eight rounds of applications, half of all slots were reserved for women and racial minorities. The eighth round did not set aside a specific number of slots, but women and minorities were allowed to apply prior to white men, and many of the slots were filled before white men could even apply.

Turkey grown in bioreactors may someday grace American tables to mark our annual Thanksgiving celebration. The number of companies aiming to bring lab-grown meat and poultry to our supermarkets is rapidly proliferating. Also known as cellular agriculture, the technology involves producing meat from cultured animal muscle and fat cells by growing them in a bioreactor rather than harvesting steaks and chops from slaughtered livestock on a farm. These include Israel-based Future Meat Technologies (chicken), Silicon Valley-based Memphis Meats (duck and chicken), Tel Aviv-based Supermeat (chicken), Netherlands-based Mosa Meat (beef and pork), and San Francisco-based The Wild Type (salmon), among others.

The goal is produce “clean meat” using less land, water, and feed, and a product that is cheaper than conventional meat. For example, Memphis Meats claims that it can grow animal-free products using just 1 percent of the land and 1 percent of the water consumed by conventional meat producers. Future Meat Technologies believes that it can cut the cost of cellular agriculture to about $2.30 to $4.50 a pound by 2020. The price of a pound of ground chuck averaged $3.70 last month.

Good news is that last week, the murky regulatory environment for clean meat in the U.S. was clarified when the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced how the two agencies plan to oversee the commercialization of cultured meat products. In a statement, the two agencies agreed on “a joint regulatory framework wherein FDA oversees cell collection, cell banks, and cell growth and differentiation. A transition from FDA to USDA oversight will occur during the cell harvest stage. USDA will then oversee the production and labeling of food products derived from the cells of livestock and poultry.”

If the framework that the two agencies develop really turn out to be not too onerous, some companies ambitiously claim that their products could hit supermarkets before Thanksgiving next year.

Thanksgiving is a pretty self-explanatory holiday: It’s a time to take stock of one’s blessings. Over the years it has also evolved into a time to eat far too much turkey, to argue with relatives about politics, to watch football—and to help the less fortunate. Each November, millions of Americans volunteer at soup kitchens, participate in charity races, or find other ways to help the needy.

Philanthropy isn’t limited to Thanksgiving, of course. Many people and organizations work year-round to aid the sick, the poor, and the hungry. Unfortunately, their efforts are often hindered by the government. Here are six times the government didn’t quite get the spirit of charity in 2018:

1. Good Samaritans were charged with misdemeanors after feeding the homeless near San Diego.

In January, a group of Good Samaritans spent Martin Luther King holiday weekend feeding the homeless in El Cajon, California. El Cajon police officers spent the weekend handing out citations to the volunteers. A 14-year-old girl was among the people cited.

The city council had previously passed an “emergency” law to prevent the feeding of the homeless out of supposed concern for Hepatitis A. It was actually unlikely that the disease was being spread by non-homeless people passing out free food. Still, the ban turned turned the charity work into a misdemeanor offense. A group called Break the Ban deliberately broke the rule, both to help the homeless and to bring attention to the overreaching law.

2. A San Francisco landlord was fined for housing low-income vets.

The city of San Francisco is in the middle of a housing crisis. To help alleviate the burden on low-income veterans, San Francisco landlord Judy Wu converted 12 of her properties into 49 housing units. But the local zoning rules allowed for only 15 dwellings, so the city fined Wu $8 million and ordered most of the units dismantled.

City attorney Dennis Herrera tried to paint Wu as someone taking advantage of the disadvantaged. Yet her tenants indicated that they did not wish to move away. At least one described her as someone who had helped them rebuild their lives with respect and humanity. Nonetheless, the city evicted them.

3. Police shut down a charity lemonade stand in Denver.

Over the summer, two young brothers in Denver went to Charity International and found a five-year-old Indonesian boy in need of assistance. The Knowles boys set up a lemonade stand near the Denver Arts Festival, hoping to donate the proceeds to the Indonesian. They charged 75 cents for a cup of lemonade, or $1 for two.

After they’d raised $200, the boys’ operation was shut down by police. If they wanted to stay in business, they were told, would need to purchase a permit for $125 a day. That’s more than half of the money they raised. The boys’ mother suspects that another vendor, who was selling lemonade for $7 a cup, may have had a hand in the cops’ arrival.

Country Time lemonade has offered to pay the lemonade fines and permit costs for up to a year for kids in similar predicaments.

4. A North Carolina woman was arrested for sheltering pets during a hurricane.

Tammie Hedges wanted local pets to have a safe place to stay as Hurricane Irma made landfall in September. So her nonprofit, Crazy’s Claws N’ Paws, took in 27 pets, and volunteers made sure they were taken care of round the clock.

Days later, Hedges was arrested and charged with administering medicine to the pets without a license. Most of the charges, Hedges told the Goldsboro News-Argus, were a result of her administering amoxicillin, which is used to treat bacterial infections.

After her story went viral, the county announced it was dismissing the charges. But a statement from the district attorney suggested it was simply the bad publicity that led prosecutors to give up on the case. The local government has not addressed the larger issue: Volunteers are often best equipped to save animals during disasters, and those who donate their time to care for pets certainly shouldn’t be punished.

5. Kansas City officials would rather bleach food than let the homeless eat it.

The nonprofit group Free Hot Soup showed up at four different locations November 4 with hot food for the homeless. City officials responded by seizing their chili, sandwiches, and soup and soaking them in bleach. The health department and Mayor James Sly claimed this was an issue of food safety: Free Hot Soup didn’t have a permit to feed the homeless, so the city hadn’t been able to check whether the food is safe to eat. Never mind the fact that the organization’s food comes from volunteers who help out when they can, making it near impossible for the city to inspect every kitchen where food might be prepared.

Free Hot Soup was back at it the following week—but at least at one location, volunteers had to serve less healthy prepackaged foods rather than hot meals.

6. An Akron landowner has had to fight the city to keep the homeless on his property.

Sage Lewis, a wealthy businessman and former candidate for mayor of Akron, Ohio, lets homeless people camp out in tents behind a commercial building he owns in a poor part of town. But his nonprofit, The Homeless Charity, doesn’t have a zoning permit for a tent city, and officials don’t want to give it one.

Originally, the city said the homeless had until November 23—the day after Thanksgiving—to vacate the premises, though that deadline has since been extended by two weeks. The city is working with an anti-homelessness organization called Continuum of Care to rehouse those who are displaced. But you still have to wonder why the city thinks it can stop a private landowner from letting needy people live on his property in the first place.

Government apologists often argue that without coercion (read: taxes), the disadvantaged will not have their needs met. So why spend those taxes trying to deter people from helping one another?

Minneapolis is putting to the test the notion that people don’t eat healthy foods because businesses refuse to stock them. So far, it is failing.

In 2014, the city passed its Staple Food Ordinance which requires all grocery stores—barring a few exceptions—to keep on hand fresh produce, and other healthy foods they were not devoting enough shelf-space to.

The law went into effect in 2016, but two years on, the city is not seeing any discernable increase in the amount of healthy food people are buying. Instead, its healthy food mandate is leading to frustrated grocers and reports of food waste.

“If I could sell the oranges and the apples like the chips, I will take off the chips and sell the oranges,” said one convenience store owner to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an article published Monday, adding that he threw away more of the fresh fruit than he actually sold.

Starting in 2014, a team from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health has been trying to tease out the effects of the ordinance by conducting surveys of what stores are selling and what customers are buying in Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul (which has no such ordinance).

Dr. Melissa Laska, one of principles on the study, says there has been an increase in the availability of healthy foods in both of the Twin Cities. The fact that this change is occurring in both Minneapolis and St. Paul suggests that it is not the policy that is producing the results.

“If this was specifically due to the policy, classically we’d be able to say Minneapolis [stores] are increasingly getting healthier in their food offerings compared to St. Paul,” Laska tells Reason. “That’s not what we saw.”

Laska’s team also interviewed some 3,000 customers outside targeted stores to see if the staple food ordinance was actually encouraging people to buy healthier foods. So far, it has not.

“We did not see any significant changes in the healthfulness of customer purchasing. We can’t point to customer purchasing and say purchases are getting healthier as a whole,” says Laska.

As to reports of food waste, Laska says this is something they’ve heard from some managers they’ve interviewed for their study, but it was not a universal complaint.

Total compliance according to the study was also remarkably low. Only 10 percent of stores were in full compliance, although large majorities were stocking at least some of the items they were required too.

That low compliance rate can possibly be explained in part by just how minute the requirements of the ordinance are.

The law requires, for instance, not only that milk be carried, but that five gallons be on hand, and feature at least two non- or low-fat options. Milk items not in gallon or half gallon containers do not count toward this requirement, nor do flavored milks.

It’s a similar story with eggs. Stores must keep six one-dozen containers on hand. Six-count or 18-count containers don’t count toward this requirement. Nor do one-dozen containers if the eggs inside are medium or extra-large sized.

Stores have to stock approximately 13 cans of beans, but baked beans don’t count toward this requirement, nor do cans that mix beans and meat, despite canned meat being another required ware.

The prescriptiveness of the ordinance rankles convenience store managers who often don’t have much space to work with within their stores, says Lance Klatt, executive director of the Minnesota Service Station and Convenience Store Association.

“Some retail food owners don’t have a huge footprint. It’s harder to expand in that category,” says Klatt, adding that “we understand you have to have healthy food offerings. We don’t like them being mandated and being forced down our throats.”

These rigid requirements are a particular cause of grief for the city’s ethnic grocers who’re forced to stock foods that their customers’ native cuisines have little use for.

“The implementation of it was forcing all supermarkets to sell a certain diet that really only pertains to certain people in Minneapolis, particularly Caucasians,” said Eric Fung, the owner of Asian grocery United Noodles, to the Minnesota Daily.

The mounting complaints are enough that the city is preparing to amend its Staple Food Ordinance to make it more flexible and more inclusive of ethnic food varieties. City officials are still not abandoning the idea of mandating healthy food in stores, however, preferring to see their current struggle as a careful balancing act.

“How do we meet the public purpose that we are trying to meet in the way that also meets our other public purposes, which are supporting our businesses, making sure we are not perpetuating institutional racism or cultural bias?” says Daniel Huff, the city’s environmental health director to the Star Tribune.

Yet when when the explicit goal of legislation is to change people’s preferences, it’s almost inevitable that this will conflict with people’s culturally-conditioned dietary preferences.

And even if the law is written in a way that is more ethnic-cuisine neutral, it will still bump up against the homegrown American preference for convenience stores stocked with more junk foods and fewer fresh veggies.

This is an inherent tension in a lot of public health legislation, and it continues to pop up in food fights across the country.

Sometimes public health officials will try to square this circle by claiming that this or that population is being “targeted” by greedy corporations who’ve manufactured an artificial demand for unhealthy products. This was the argument used by proponents of Seattle’s soda tax, and for menthol cigarette bans across the country—including Minneapolis.

The example of Minneapolis suggests that this relationship works the other way, that businesses stock products based on what their customers want. Trying to change that with mandates has, at least in Minneapolis, produced few observable health gains, and a number of upset store managers.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, writes Veronique de Rugy, it’s important to remember the many tremendous technological advancements we should be thankful for: better cellphones, safer cars, Lasik eye surgery, and drones that deliver pizza and life-saving medications. Technology also provides life-changing services like Uber and Airbnb, too. We should all be grateful for innovators and visionaries who aren’t afraid to dream big.

View this article.

Shoppers in Venezuela needed a stack of 9.5 million bolívar fuertes—equal to just $1.45 U.S.—to buy one kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of steak earlier this year. In summer 2018, the socialist-run country was experiencing an inflation rate of nearly 100,000 percent, leading President Nicolás Maduro to introduce a new currency: the bolí­var soberano. (Each new bill is worth 1,000 fuertes.) Maduro has yet to figure out how to fix the other problem with shopping in Venezuela: The country’s shattered economy has left many stores nearly empty, making it all but impossible to purchase basic goods for any amount of cash.

View this article.

New York’s Eastport-South Manor Central School District has sent a letter to parents telling them the days of unlimited condiments are over. Students will be limited to one or two packets of ketchup, depending on the meal they get. Mayonnaise and mustard will also be rationed. School officials say they are trying to limit the amount of salt and sugar students eat, and they fear failing to do so will jeopardize state funding.

“We live in a culture that kind of revolves around shame,” says director Jason Reitman. “If you’re someone who experiences shame, you drop out of the race. If you’re someone who doesn’t experience shame, not only do you stay in, but you thrive.”

Reitman’s new film, The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman, is based on the true story of Gary Hart’s 1988 democratic presidential campaign, which was derailed on allegations that Hart was having an affair with model Donna Rice.

The director Reitman—a self-described libertarian whose prior credits include Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007)—also co-wrote the screenplay with political reporter Matt Bai and former political operative Jay Carson. It chronicles Hart’s doomed campaign through the experiences of his family, campaign aides, and a press corps wrestling over whether the candidate’s sex life should be treated as newsworthy.

Reason’s Meredith Bragg sat down with Reitman, Bai, and Carson to discuss the film, how the interest in Hart’s scandal changed the way the media covers political figures, and the filmmakers’ search for a “reasonable conversation.”

Click here for full text and downloadable versions.

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In the midst of a federal campaign against underage vaping, a new study finds that downward trends in smoking among teenagers and young adults accelerated as e-cigarette use rose. The findings, based on data from five national surveys, suggest that the official panic about the “epidemic” of e-cigarette use by minors, which has led to restrictions that affect adult access to vaping products and government-sponsored propaganda that exaggerates their hazards, is fatally misguided.

“A long-term decline in smoking prevalence among US youth accelerated after 2013 when vaping became more widespread,” Georgetown public health researcher David T. Levy and his co-authors report in the journal Tobacco Control. “These findings were also observed for US young adults, especially those ages 18–21. We also found that the decline in more established smoking, as measured by daily smoking, smoking half pack a day or having smoked at least 100 cigarettes and currently smoking some days or every day, markedly accelerated when vaping increased.” While “it is premature to conclude that the observed increased rate of decline in smoking is due to vaping diverting youth from smoking,” Levy et al. say, “it is a plausible explanation.”

What about concerns that vaping is having the opposite effect, leading to smoking by teenagers who otherwise never would have used tobacco? As Levy and his colleagues note, the fact that teenagers who try vaping are more likely than teenagers who don’t to subsequently try smoking does not necessarily mean that vaping is a “catalyst” for smoking. “The joint susceptibility hypothesis, also known as the common liability hypothesis, suggests that vaping is more likely to occur within a population with a propensity to use cigarettes due to shared common risk factors,” they write. But “even if there is some validity to the catalyst hypothesis, its impact is dwarfed by other factors.”

Since vaping is far less dangerous than smoking (at least 95 percent less dangerous, according to an estimate endorsed by Public Health England), the balance between these two possible effects is crucial in evaluating the public health impact of underage vaping and efforts to prevent it. “The divergent findings between individual-level cohort studies, which show a possible causal relationship between vaping and smoking, and those of population trends showing a negative association between vaping and smoking are not necessarily inconsistent,” Levy et al. note. “Rather, it is possible that trying e-cigarettes is causally related to smoking for some youth, but the aggregate effect of this relationship at the population level may be small enough that its effects are swamped by other factors that influence smoking behaviour.” The substitution of vaping for smoking is one of those factors.

This study did not include data for this year, when the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) found a sharp increase in vaping among teenagers, who mostly use Juul e-cigarettes, which offer better nicotine delivery than many competing products and might therefore be more addictive. But Levy says that development won’t necessarily change the main thrust of his team’s conclusions.

“The data that I have seen so far indicates that vaping has increased, but little has changed in terms of smoking rates,” Levy told Gizmodo. “Much of the vaping is low-intensity use (less than 5 days in the last month), but some is more regular use as indicative of addiction. It is much too soon to say the combined effects, and I expect that we probably will not even have a good indication of the effects for at least another year.” The 2018 NYTS results for smoking, unlike the results for vaping, have not been published yet, but they reportedly include an increase in past-month cigarette smoking among high school students from 7.6 percent to 8.1 percent, a change that was not statistically significant.

Notably, Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says his agency did not consider the inverse relationship between smoking and vaping among teenagers when it decided to ban almost all e-cigarette flavors from stores that admit minors, which account for the vast majority of outlets selling e-cigarettes. “I’m sure that there’s a component in there of kids who are using e-cigarettes in lieu of combustible tobacco and otherwise would have used the combustible tobacco,” Gottlieb told me in an interview last Friday. “But from our standpoint, that’s a hard justification for us to use as a public health justification when our mandate is no child should be using a tobacco product.”

In other words, the FDA is bound to do everything it can to curtail underage vaping, even if that means more smoking-related disease and death over the long term. When the goal of preventing e-cigarette use by minors conflicts with the mission of minimizing morbidity and mortality, public health loses.

The flavor restrictions are not the only way the FDA is undermining public health. Consider “The Real Cost” Youth E-Cigarette Prevention Campaign, which the agency proudly unveiled in September. “There’s an epidemic spreading,” says one of the TV spots, which shows worm-like parasites wriggling and spreading under the skin of young vapers and invading their brains. “Scientists say it can change your brain. It can release dangerous chemicals like formaldehyde into your bloodstream. It can expose your lungs to acrolein, which can cause irreversible damage. It’s not a parasite, not a virus, not an infection. It’s vaping.”

The intent of these ads, I’m sure, is to convince teenagers that vaping is not as harmless as they might think it is. The FDA notes with alarm that, according to the Monitoring the Future survey, “about 80 percent of youth do not see great risk of harm from regular use of e-cigarettes.” But the thing is, regular use of e-cigarettes, as far as we can tell, doesn’t pose a “great risk of harm,” certainly not compared to regular use of combustible cigarettes. If teenagers erroneously conclude from the FDA’s icky, scaremongering ads that vaping is just as dangerous as smoking, maybe even more so, they may be more inclined to smoke rather than vape, even though smoking is in fact much more dangerous than vaping.

Furthermore, as Competitive Enterprise Institute policy analyst Michelle Minton notes, teenagers are not the only ones who see these ads. The share of American adults who incorrectly believe that vaping is just as hazardous as smoking is already on the rise, thanks in no small part to overwrought, misleading, and sometimes flat-out inaccurate warnings from activists and public health officials. In one survey, the share of adults who incorrectly said vaping is as harmful as or more harmful than smoking tripled between 2012 and 2015, from 13 percent to 40 percent. Propaganda like the FDA’s can only encourage that trend, making it less likely that smokers will switch to vaping and more likely that those who have switched will resume smoking.

On top of that discouragement, the FDA is now making it harder for adult smokers to get the e-cigarette flavors they prefer. Products that were once available in thousands of supermarkets and convenience stores will now be available only from tobacconists, vape shops, or online outlets that have age verification. At the margin, the added inconvenience is bound to deter some smokers from switching and lead some who already have quit to return to the cigarettes they used to smoke, which remain as readily available as they were before. Gottlieb presents that cost, which is unambiguously bad for public health, as a necessary tradeoff for reducing underage vaping. But if reducing underage vaping results in more smoking by teenagers, it is hard to see any way in which the tradeoff can be justified.

Minneapolis is putting to the test the notion that people don’t eat healthy foods because businesses refuse to stock them. So far, it is failing.

In 2014, the city passed its Staple Food Ordinance which requires all grocery stores—barring a few exceptions—to keep on hand fresh produce, and other healthy foods they were not devoting enough shelf-space to.

The law went into effect in 2016, but two years on, the city is not seeing any discernable increase in the amount of healthy food people are buying. Instead, its healthy food mandate is leading to frustrated grocers and reports of food waste.

“If I could sell the oranges and the apples like the chips, I will take off the chips and sell the oranges,” said one convenience store owner to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an article published Monday, adding that he threw away more of the fresh fruit than he actually sold.

Starting in 2014, a team from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health has been trying to tease out the effects of the ordinance by conducting surveys of what stores are selling and what customers are buying in Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul (which has no such ordinance).

Dr. Melissa Laska, one of principles on the study, says there has been an increase in the availability of healthy foods in both of the Twin Cities. The fact that this change is occurring in both Minneapolis and St. Paul suggests that it is not the policy that is producing the results.

“If this was specifically due to the policy, classically we’d be able to say Minneapolis [stores] are increasingly getting healthier in their food offerings compared to St. Paul,” Laska tells Reason. “That’s not what we saw.”

Laska’s team also interviewed some 3,000 customers outside targeted stores to see if the staple food ordinance was actually encouraging people to buy healthier foods. So far, it has not.

“We did not see any significant changes in the healthfulness of customer purchasing. We can’t point to customer purchasing and say purchases are getting healthier as a whole,” says Laska.

As to reports of food waste, Laska says this is something they’ve heard from some managers they’ve interviewed for their study, but it was not a universal complaint.

Total compliance according to the study was also remarkably low. Only 10 percent of stores were in full compliance, although large majorities were stocking at least some of the items they were required too.

That low compliance rate can possibly be explained in part by just how minute the requirements of the ordinance are.

The law requires, for instance, not only that milk be carried, but that five gallons be on hand, and feature at least two non- or low-fat options. Milk items not in gallon or half gallon containers do not count toward this requirement, nor do flavored milks.

It’s a similar story with eggs. Stores must keep six one-dozen containers on hand. Six-count or 18-count containers don’t count toward this requirement. Nor do one-dozen containers if the eggs inside are medium or extra-large sized.

Stores have to stock approximately 13 cans of beans, but baked beans don’t count toward this requirement, nor do cans that mix beans and meat, despite canned meat being another required ware.

The prescriptiveness of the ordinance rankles convenience store managers who often don’t have much space to work with within their stores, says Lance Klatt, executive director of the Minnesota Service Station and Convenience Store Association.

“Some retail food owners don’t have a huge footprint. It’s harder to expand in that category,” says Klatt, adding that “we understand you have to have healthy food offerings. We don’t like them being mandated and being forced down our throats.”

These rigid requirements are a particular cause of grief for the city’s ethnic grocers who’re forced to stock foods that their customers’ native cuisines have little use for.

“The implementation of it was forcing all supermarkets to sell a certain diet that really only pertains to certain people in Minneapolis, particularly Caucasians,” said Eric Fung, the owner of Asian grocery United Noodles, to the Minnesota Daily.

The mounting complaints are enough that the city is preparing to amend its Staple Food Ordinance to make it more flexible and more inclusive of ethnic food varieties. City officials are still not abandoning the idea of mandating healthy food in stores, however, preferring to see their current struggle as a careful balancing act.

“How do we meet the public purpose that we are trying to meet in the way that also meets our other public purposes, which are supporting our businesses, making sure we are not perpetuating institutional racism or cultural bias?” says Daniel Huff, the city’s environmental health director to the Star Tribune.

Yet when when the explicit goal of legislation is to change people’s preferences, it’s almost inevitable that this will conflict with people’s culturally-conditioned dietary preferences.

And even if the law is written in a way that is more ethnic-cuisine neutral, it will still bump up against the homegrown American preference for convenience stores stocked with more junk foods and fewer fresh veggies.

This is an inherent tension in a lot of public health legislation, and it continues to pop up in food fights across the country.

Sometimes public health officials will try to square this circle by claiming that this or that population is being “targeted” by greedy corporations who’ve manufactured an artificial demand for unhealthy products. This was the argument used by proponents of Seattle’s soda tax, and for menthol cigarette bans across the country—including Minneapolis.

The example of Minneapolis suggests that this relationship works the other way, that businesses stock products based on what their customers want. Trying to change that with mandates has, at least in Minneapolis, produced few observable health gains, and a number of upset store managers.