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 Polluting Industries Say the Cost of Cleaner Air Is Too High  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/business/economy/smog-rules-economics.html  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to announce new regulations governing soot — the particles that trucks, farms, factories, wildfires, power plants and dusty roads generate.   public health advocates argue that the averted deaths, illnesses and lost productivity that air pollution caused far outweigh the cost. The E.P.A. pegs the potential benefits at as much as $55 billion by 2032 if it drops the limit to nine micrograms per cubic meter, from the current 12 micrograms. That is far more than the $500 million it estimates the proposal would cost in 2032.

So how are communities weighing the potential trade-offs? On a state level, it depends to a large degree on politics: Seventeen Democratic attorneys general wrote a joint comment letter in support of stricter rules, while 17 Republican attorneys general wrote one in favor of the status quo.

But it also depends on the mix of industries prevalent in a local area.

Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufakis-thinks-it-is-and-he-knows-who-killed-it-213992    November 8, 202 Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society; capitalism has morphed into a “technologically advanced form of feudalism”. ..

In the early 19th century,” he writes, many feudal relations remained intact, but capitalist relations had begun to dominate. Today, capitalist relations remain intact, but techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them. “vassal capitalists” are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”. ..Access to the “digital fief” comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% “on all their revenues”, while Amazon charges its sellers “35% of revenues”. This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs’ produce because he owns the estate and everything within it....This is not extracting profit through the production or provision of goods and services, as these platforms are not a “service” in the sense in which the term is used in economics. They are extracting rents in the form of the huge cuts they take from the capitalists on their platforms..

Every time we use our cloud-linked devices – smartphones, laptops, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri – we replenish the capital of the Big Tech cloudalists. This in turn increases their capacity to generate more wealth. How? We train their algorithms, which train us, to train them, and so on, in a feedback loop whose goal is to shape our desires and behaviour. They are “selling things to us while selling our attention to others”...For Varoufakis, we are not just living through a tech revolution, but a tech-driven economic revolution. He challenges us to come to terms with just what has happened to our economies – and our societies – in the era of Big Tech and Big Finance...

Towards the end of Technofeudalism, Varoufakis canvasses some proposals, drawn from his earlier book Another Now (2020), for how to address these issues. These include ending the cloudalists faux “free service” model and replacing it with a universal micro-payment model, instituting a Bill of Digital Rights, and using digital technology to “democratise companies” (with decisions being taken collectively by “employee-shareholders”).

Varoufakis also proposes to “democratise money”. This plan would involve central banks issuing digital wallets, a universal basic income, reconfiguring “the central bank’s ledger” in the direction of a “common payment and savings system”, and abolishing the current capacity of private banks to “create money”.

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