iftttwall

• The pro-Russian separatists believed to be
  responsible for the crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight last week
  have agreed to
  hand over the bodies of the deceased and allow investigators to
  scrutinize the wreck site.
• Detroit officials
  delayed plans to shut off water for thousands of citizens who
  have not paid their bills. People will have 15 more days to pay
  before the city cuts off their water.
• Tony Dungy, an NBC sports analyst and the first black NFL coach
  to win the Super Bowl, told the Tampa Bay Tribune
  that he
  wouldn’t have drafted Michael Sam, the first openly gay
  national football player. “Things will happen,” he said.
• Azamat Tazhayakov became the first person to be convicted of
  crimes related to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Tazhayakov, a
  friend of bombings suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev,
  attempted to dispose of evidence that
  could incriminate the brothers.
• President Obama
  signed an executive order instituting new and vigorous
  workplace protections for LGBT employees.

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Which high-tech material will be the silicon of
the future: silicon carbide, gallium nitride, or some other
substance yet to be discovered?

No one knows for sure. But Governor Andrew Cuomo just bet $135
million of New York taxpayer dollars on backing GE’s silicon
carbide manufacturing efforts and IBM’s gallium nitride efforts.
Ira Stoll explains why Cuomo’s foray into corporate welfare and
crony capitalism is bad news for the Empire State.

View this article.

The sheriff of Saginaw County, Michigan, is
ditching orange jumpsuits for prisoners at the county jail in favor
of black and white stripes because, he says, he’s trying to adapt
to the culture.
MLive.com reports:

“It’s because as you see shows on television, like ‘Orange Is
The New Black,’ some people think it’s cool to look like an inmate
of the Saginaw County Jail with wearing all-orange jumpsuits out at
the mall or in public,” [William] Federspiel says, referring to the
Netflix drama. “It’s a concern because we do have our inmates out
sometimes doing work in the public, and I don’t want anyone to
confuse them or have them walk away.

“We decided that the black-and-white stripes would be the best
way to go because it signifies ‘jail inmate,’ and I don’t see
people out there wanting to wear black-and-white stripes.”

Federspiel insists he sees a trend, at least in Saginaw
County:

“I don’t want them to not be easy to spot,” he says. “That’s
scary. With the amount of people — it’s not all across the country,
but it’s here in Saginaw. I see a lot of people wearing all orange,
and they think it’s cool. And some people even put ‘Property of the
Saginaw County Jail’ on the back of it. I’ve seen that. It’s like,
‘What are you doing? Really?'”

The new jumpsuits cost less than $12 and are being phased in
according to the sheriff.

In recent years pink jumpsuits have become popular among some
jailers. Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio died
prisoners’ underwear because he said they were being smuggled out
of the jail for their logos while a jail in South Carolina faced a
lawsuit,
thrown out, over using pink jumpsuits for prisoners who engaged
in sexual misconduct. A sheriff in Mason County, Texas, claimed in
2007
that he reduced the number of inmates at his local jail by 68
percent by putting them in all pink gear.

Semi-related: This WikiHow on
dealing with prison time includes both orange and black and white
jumpsuits.

The U.K.’s Food Standards
Agency (FSA) said consumers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland
should be
given “wider access” to raw milk and proposed allowing its sale
in vending machines. Currently raw milk can only be bought directly
from farmers, as is common in American states
where raw milk sales are permitted. 

A briefing paper about the proposed change suggests that vending
machines would be the best way to make raw milk more
widely available, since they make it easy to tightly control
temperature. The FSA is still not recommending that raw milk sales
be permitted in supermarkets.

The FSA will vote on the proposals Wednesday; if approved, the
new rules will go into effect immediately. The changes to the rules
wouldn’t apply in Scotland, where all raw milk sales are
banned. 

The agency had launched a four-month consultation on the raw
milk regulations in January, which found consumers were largely in
support of widening raw milk’s availability. “In light of
consultation responses,”
the FSA began working on a change to its raw milk policy, it
says. Is it sad that I’m amazed to find the UK’s food policy body
so responsive to what the people it governs actually think and
want?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has
released its latest data on farmers planting of crops
genetically enhanced to tolerate herbicides (HT) crops and to
resist insect pests (Bt).

HT soybeans went from 17 percent of U.S. soybean acreage to 94
percent in 2014. Plantings of HT cotton expanded from about 10
percent of U.S. acreage in 1997 to 91 percent in 2014. The adoption
of HT corn reached 89 percent of U.S. corn acreage in 2014.

Plantings of Bt corn grew from about 8 percent of U.S. corn
acreage in 1997 to 80 percent in 2014. Plantings of Bt cotton also
expanded rapidly, from 15 percent of U.S. cotton acreage in 1997 to
84 percent in 2014.

See the chart below for the trends.

Why are modern biotech crops so popular with farmers?

Earlier this year, U.S. News
reported the views of Illinois farmer Katie Pratt:

According to Pratt, her family uses GMO crops because of the
clear value they bring to their family business. They have
greatly reduced the amount of insecticide that needs to be sprayed,
and they only need to treat the weeds at one point, not several
times over a growing season. Her soil has now improved, because she
and her family don’t have to tromp through the fields as often. The
family also uses less fuel, because they spend less time in the
tractor. “No one is more aware than the farmer of the impact
we have on the environment, in addition to the urgency to feed and
fuel a growing population, while
reducing our footprint on the planet,” she maintains.

And remember folks, biotech crops are not only good for the
environment, eating them as caused not so much as a cough, sniffle,
sneeze or bellyache. For example, a statement issued by the Board
of Directors of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest
scientific organization in the United States, on October 20, 2012
point blank asserted that “contrary to popular misconceptions, GM
[genetically modified] crops are the most extensively tested crops
ever added to our food supply. There are occasional claims that
feeding GM foods to animals causes aberrations ranging from
digestive disorders, to sterility, tumors and premature death.
Although such claims are often sensationalized and receive a great
deal of media attention, none have stood up to rigorous scientific
scrutiny.” The AAAS Board concluded, “Indeed, the science is quite
clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of
biotechnology is safe.”

The New Republic has
a longish piece on how John Kerry got the latest iteration of
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process restarted and how it fell
apart around him. It involved a lot of talking and self-importance
on all sides. The article includes a lot of reporting on the
details of conversations between John Kerry and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abba,
and other Israeli and Palestinian officials. Among the reported
conversations is this one that started about Palestinian
incitement:

Kerry pressed on: “When I fought in Vietnam, I used to look at
the faces of the local population and the looks they gave us. I’ll
never forget it. It gave me clarity that we saw the situation in
completely different ways.”

“This isn’t Vietnam!” Netanyahu shouted. “No one understands
Israel but Israel.”

Kerry tried explaining himself again: “No one is saying it’s
Vietnam. But I’ve been coming here for thirty years, and I’m
telling you, what’s building up in the Palestinians has only gotten
worse. I’ve seen it. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong; it
just is. It can’t be solved if you can’t see it how they see
it.”

Read the rest of the rather unsurprising way Kerry’s peace
process unfolded
here.

On Friday a jury in Escambia County, Florida,

decided that R.J. Reynolds should pay $23 billion in
punitive damages to Cynthia Robinson, the widow of a smoker who
died of lung cancer in 1996. It is not the largest award ever in a
case involving a single smoker, but it’s close. And like a
California jury’s 2002
award of $28 billion to a smoker who sued Philip Morris (a sum
that the judge later reduced by
a factor of 1,000), the case illustrates both the arbitrariness of
punitive damages and the implausibility of claiming that tobacco
companies managed to conceal the hazards of their products.

Although the main purpose of tort litigation is supposed to be
making victims whole, so-called punitive damages explicitly aim to
punish wrongdoers. That is usually the function of the criminal
justice system, which therefore provides additional
protections for defendants, including a higher standard of proof,
stricter evidence rules, and penalties prescribed by statute.
Attorneys seeking punitive damages do not have to contend with any
of those safeguards.

The very concept of punitive damages is oxymoronic, since
actual damages (a.k.a. compensatory damages) are a measure of the
harm caused by a tort. Punitive damages, by contrast, express a
jury’s outrage at the defendant’s conduct and may be completely
unmoored from the injury suffered by the plaintiff (who
nevertheless gets the money). In this case, the punitive damages
are about 1,400 times the actual damages,
which the jury put at $16 million. That huge mutiple seems to
violate
Florida law, which caps the ratio of punitive to
compensatory damages at three or four unless “the defendant had a
specific intent to harm the claimant”—a description that clearly
does not apply to a tobacco company with millions of customers,
even if it prevented them from making informed decisions by hiding
the dangers posed by its products. 

The latter claim, which is central to this sort of
lawsuit, is hard to credit. The jury evidently was swayed by
evidence indicating that R.J. Reynolds executives questioned the
hazards and addictiveness of cigarettes in public while
acknowledging them in private. There surely is nothing to admire in
that sort of duplicity, but did it actually fool anyone? The first
surgeon general’s report linking smoking to deadly diseases came
out in 1964, and the subject received a great deal of attention
during the ensuing decade. By the time Cynthia Robinson’s husband
began smoking (around the age of 13, according to her testimony,
which would have been 1973), every pack of cigarettes carried a
warning stating that “The Surgeon General Has Determined That
Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.” In 1985 that
statement was replaced by rotating warnings referring to specific
risks such as lung cancer, heart disease, and ephysema. As for the
addictive potential of tobacco, it has been widely acknowledged for
centuries, as I show in my
book on the anti-smoking movement.

Anyone who began smoking in the 1970s and continued smoking for
the next two decades voluntarily assumed the well-known risks
associated with the habit. Nothing R.J. Reynolds said or failed to
say changes that reality, because it is impossible to conceal
common knowledge, no matter how much the tobacco companies might
have wished otherwise.

As if flying weren’t costly enough, your
next plane ticket is going to be more expensive, thanks to the
federal government. Today the Transportation Security
Administration’s (TSA) security fee rose by more than double.

CNN reports:

Until Monday, a passenger was charged $2.50 for each leg of a
journey. For a nonstop round trip, the cost
was $5. For a round trip with a connection each way, the cost was
$10.

The fee was capped at two flights each way. That means you
couldn’t get charged more than $5 each way or $10 round trip, even
if you took three flights to get your destination.

Now, passengers must pay a flat fee of $5.60 in each direction,
no matter how many plane transfers are made to get from one city to
another.

For passengers flying a nonstop round trip, that means the fee
will increase from $5 to $11.20.

Passengers flying round-trip with a connection each way will see
their fees increase $1.20 to $11.20 per round trip, versus $10
before the fee increase.

Domestic flyers will also get hit with an additional $5.60 if
you have a layover that’s four hours or longer.

“Business travelers who fly non-stop routes, and travelers in
secondary markets requiring connections,”
suggests Fox News, “will see the biggest impact.”

“Due to new TSA fee hike, travelers will pay a
billion dollars more per year in added taxes/fees,” tweeted Nick Calio, the
president and CEO of Airlines for America, an industry advocacy
group.

The securirty agency, which operates with an annual budget of
over $7 billion, gets a lot of flak.
More than half of Americans believe all those pat-downs and
invasive body scans are mere security theater that have no real
deterrent on hijackings.  And those skeptics are right.
Research on the 13-year-old agency shows it so far
hasn’t had a measurable effect on air travel safety.  

The “TSA estimates the hike will generate $16.9 billion more
than current collections,”
explains USA Today. The heftier fee won’t actually do
much (if anything) to improve security, though. “Congress agreed to
the increase in December to raise $12.6 billion to cut the
deficit,” and nothing will go to security improvement until that’s
paid. 

Airlines for America
criticizes that the government treating “airlines and their
passengers as its own personal ATM,” though some members of
Congress say they never intended for the TSA to charge this much.
Senate Budget Committee chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has
contested that the TSA changed how defines a “round trip”
flight in order to work around the cap Congress placed on the
agency’s fees.