Hi there!
Let’s start this week with some good news for a change, because why not! You look like you could do with some.
The recent uptake of solar and renewable energy by homes and businesses (inevitably powered by government rebates) is finally showing some traction. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency is “staggered” by the increase in green energy investments in the past two years, “brightening” the prospects of the planet we all live on, whether we like it or not.
“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago. Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.”
Good news indeed! But as the Guardian noted, Debbie-downer that they perennially are in these matters, gas emissions from the energy sector remained “stubbornly high” leading to the weather-pocalype that was 2023, thus forcing forward climate change at “frightening speed”. Perhaps the winds are a-changing though. Certainly Mr Murdoch announcing a kinda-maybe-sorta retirement will help things a little, but in reality it’s either we keep on keeping-on with this fixing-energy-for-everyone thing asap, or we put all our coins on a really bad poker playing edge-lord with deep pockets.
Anyway, the climate isn’t the big story this week. I mean, it should be, but it isn’t.
Last week we mused ‘a bit’ about the future of labour, strikes and the change in labour trends. This was because it was timely, sure, given the summer of strikes we all witnessed - but there was a clear sea-change coming in terms of how people work. Post-plague we’ve seen deep shifts in attendance and location-based labour behaviours, and all the boring back-to-office, revert-to-type-A drama that came after. But it’s deeper than how people work. We’re seeing real shifts in how labour identifies itself within the economy. Hamilton Nolan, labour-beat journalist of note, defined this pretty well last month in the context of current US political discourse. Last week the Biden administration tackled the provably-false (and country music beloved) ‘welfare queen’ trope head on. Today, Biden himself joined the UAW picket line - the first sitting US President to do so. This could be seen as a political maneuver before the election cycles begin in earnest, but regardless of posturing, it brings union discourse and sustainable labour policy back into the conversation in a big way - a conversation which until now has been S&P dominated by a blanket ‘economy at all costs’ doctrine. One to watch closely on both sides of the border. There will be fall-out.
AI is taking up headline space again - because, hey, speculation needs hype to survive. OpenAI’s ChatGPT this week joined ‘the chat’. And by that I mean it can talk now (or something similar). If that sounds like Alexa, then, yeah it is like Alexa - but the ChatGPT version is not limited to answering your basic questions about weather or streaming the wrong Taylor Swift track to your car. ChatGPT is, of course, run by Sam Altman - who until very recently, lest we forget, was shilling WorldCoin crypto. Alexa’s tech-daddy, Jeff Bezos, responded to the somewhat ‘her’-like product launch by throwing $4B in Amazon vouchers at Anthropic, a splinter AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI people that jailed-awaiting-trial-for-fraud FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried invested $500M worth of magic beans into. Something smells…off? Anyway, this weeks best take on the rolling AI member-measuring contest comes from niche-musician-of-the-end-times Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) who this week, somehow, got profiled by the New York Times. Good for him.
Lopatin finds most of the hand-wringing about A.I. to be silly. “It’s over, we’re all gonna die, the machines are coming to get us,” he said, laughing. “That’s really boring. What’s more interesting for me is seeing how A.I. fails.”
Indeed Daniel. INDEED. There was a time when AI was just weird imaginary pictures of dogs, that could one day build us new futures - and now it’s proving itself to be something of a universal version of Clippy that has a habit of making weird stuff up with a side portion of magical thinking. Great for data processing and insights…not so great for human-society-level psycho-engineering.
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Champagne papi
Jay Dort discovers that climate change cares not for your spooky season enjoyment at all.
In a recent win for one of my favourite statistical oddities, Mr. Champagne (Canada’s frizzante Minister for Industry) met with the inevitably few grocery executives this week in order to stabilize food prices and fulfill his nominative determinism destiny.
Canada and the US have been hit hard by food-price inflation, but you’ll get different answers on what the root cause is depending on who you ask. In Canada, much of the finger pointing is aimed at the 2 retailers who control 50% of the market: Sobeys and Loblaw. For comparison, in the US there is clearly a single stand-out player (Walmart) that commands 25% of food sales alone, but they’re small potatoes up North with only 8% of the Canadian market. Aside from Walmart, the US is much more stratified with the other 9 of the top 10 grocery stores only amounting to a combined 30% of total sales.
In the past year, food prices have increased about 12% in Canada and 8.5% in the US, but we’re in for a perfect storm just in time for spooky season. Cocoa producers in West Africa have been dealing with torrential rains that have reduced crop yields in the double digits and resulted in 46 year highs in cocoa prices. By rule of the FDA, milk chocolate only needs to contain 10% cacao paste, so even though North American cocoa bean processing is down 12% from last year, we’re pretty good at stretching out the goods.
The average American spends just over $150 per year on chocolate, and consumes 9kg per person, meaning halloween is big business. In 2022 the US spent 3 billion on halloween candy, so it might make sense to sock up before things get even more out of control.
If you’re wondering why The huuman Layer is seemingly always about food, it’s because the writers will literally not stop complaining until North America becomes a South of France style utopia where there’s a Jacques Pépin on every corner and a sub-$20 chicken on every table.