Is the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan the End of the American Empire? - Only time will tell whether the old adage about Afghanistan’s being the graveyard of empires proves as true for the United States as it did for the Soviet Union. - link
The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Space Flight - The F.A.A. is investigating the ship’s off-course descent. - link
After Hurricane Ida, How Much Longer Can New Orleans’s New Levees Hold? - The city may be better protected today than it was before Katrina, but with every day that passes the protection is waning. - link
An App Called Libby and the Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-Books - Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. - link
The Last Dance with My Dad - Before he died, of AIDS, my father took me on a Caribbean cruise for gay men. - link
From Vox
You can buy stuff online, but getting it is another story -
The holiday shopping season will be “a perfect storm” of supply chain bottlenecks, as the shipping crisis worsens. | Peter Boer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Supply chain delays, shortages, and delivery issues are here to stay.
The global supply chain is in hot water. The pandemic has made it notoriously difficult for shoppers to buy certain consumer goods, from home appliances and furniture to laptops and bicycles. And things aren’t getting better anytime soon, at least not this year. Shipments have been delayed, raw materials are in short supply, and businesses have scrambled to dole out apologies and assurances to anxious customers.
With the holidays a few months away, experts are predicting that the year’s busiest shopping season will be “a perfect storm” of supply chain bottlenecks. Shoppers, as a result, will face higher prices, even as retailers remain uncertain as to whether they can keep up with demand.
“This year, Christmas will be very different,” said Steven Melnyk, a professor of supply chain and operations management at Michigan State University. “We won’t see as many blowout sales leading up to the holidays, and prices are going to go up.”
The back-to-school season typically offers retailers a glimpse into consumers’ shopping patterns, but the delta variant has thrown a wrench into businesses’ hopes for an economic return to normalcy. Melnyk thinks customers will approach holiday shopping differently if they continue to face product shortages. More people will shop from brick-and-mortar stores given the uncertainty of online orders, and gravitate toward goods made in the US: “Shoppers will be focused less on price, and more on availability of the items they want.”
Today, the circumstances are no longer as dire as, say, the indelible toilet paper shortage of 2020, when big-box retailers rationed the number of rolls customers could buy. Companies like Coca-Cola have had time to nimbly adjust and manage their stock, so the most high-volume, in-demand items can remain on shelves. Yet, the supply chains that drive the global economy will likely remain vulnerable to delays until 2022 or 2023, according to experts, or until most of the world is vaccinated. Here’s why.
The implications of a global supply chain
Supply chains are global, made up of factories, processing centers, and shipping companies all over the world. Companies and industries have spent years — if not decades — fine-tuning them for maximum efficiency and maximum profit. To understand the size and scope of this global manufacturing system, it’s helpful to look at how individual products are made. As Hilary George-Parkin has previously reported for Vox, behind every sold-out product “there’s a vast supply chain linking raw materials to factory floors to distribution centers.” The pandemic has created a ripple effect in this system that often leaves, quite literally, minimal room for error, since companies rarely stock up on excess inventory. As a result, over a year later, businesses and suppliers are still grappling with the fallout.
American shoppers — and the companies that sell us stuff — have long grown accustomed to convenience, partly made possible by lean, “just in time” manufacturing. This production model was first used by the Japanese to build Toyota vehicles in the mid-20th century and was emulated by companies around the world. The premise of the just-in-time model is cost-efficiency, which means companies hold onto relatively little inventory or parts themselves. Instead, they rely on suppliers. To make a product, businesses look overseas for suppliers who can source raw materials and assemble components, sometimes in various locations, where labor and the cost of materials are cheaper. After a lengthy production process, the finished product is imported to warehouses and distribution centers before it’s shipped to the final destination.
Everlane sent an email to customers saying their supply chains are totally screwed up pic.twitter.com/2YdqDvG2W7
Historically, this production model has been a win-win for consumers and businesses — provided that nothing goes wrong. Companies are able to reduce inventories, cut costs, and deftly adapt to changing market demands, all while keeping prices low. But now that disruptions are affecting every step of this supply chain, there’s no quick-fix solution.
The coronavirus outbreak sent the global supply chain into an unprecedented slowdown at the start of 2020, as the virus made its way through China, Europe, and then the US. Manufacturers put thousands of factories on pause until Covid-19 safety policies were put into place. While supply chains didn’t fully recover from the initial shock, companies were optimistic heading into 2021. But the delta variant — and the lack of vaccine access in low-income countries — has prolonged the timeline for global recovery.
About half of the world’s sailors, who are crucial to the flow of global trade, are from developing nations where vaccine rollouts have been slow. In countries where the coronavirus is still rampant, factories have had to shut down or operate with limited staffing as workers had to quarantine. Vietnam, for example, is America’s second-largest shoe and apparel supplier, but most of its workforce remains unvaccinated. The country has managed to evade the virus through strict lockdowns for the first 14 months of the pandemic, but the highly contagious delta variant has forced many factories to close down. According to the Wall Street Journal, Vietnam’s government has begun requiring employees in high-risk regions to eat and sleep at their workplace, rather than go home, in an effort to maintain production rates.
Meanwhile, as economic activity resumed in wealthy, vaccinated places like the United States and Europe, the shipping industry is contending with a deluge of delays. Enormous container ships are stalled outside major ports, while more cargo just keeps arriving. In some cases, ship crews have had to wait days or weeks before unloading at ports.
“We are seeing a historic surge of cargo volume coming into our ports,” Tom Bellerud, the chief operations officer of Washington’s Northwest Seaport Alliance, told NPR in June. “The terminals are having a difficult time keeping up with processing all the cargo off these vessels fast enough.”
Inland freight hubs, where cargo is sent from the ports, have also been inundated with containers of goods. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “congestion on rail networks and a labor shortage of truck drivers and warehouse workers has led to big backups at cargo facilities.” Companies are struggling to unpack shipping containers and get them back into circulation. As a result, shipping containers are in short supply, even though there should be enough containers to handle global demand. Too many are just stuck in circulation and stay unused.
Major retailers like Walmart, Target, and Home Depot are chartering private cargo vessels and buying shipping containers to prepare for the holiday shopping season. This effort to directly oversee transportation and shipping can help reduce some supply chain problems, but Melnyk worries these efforts won’t be enough, especially with manufacturing slowdowns overseas and the domestic labor shortage.
“Companies also have to worry about the last mile — getting the product from the store to people’s front doors,” Melnyk said. For years, the trucking industry has been operating with a shortage of domestic drivers, caused by high turnover rates and its decades-long failure to increase workers’ wages and benefits. “Last year, there was an explosion of online shopping, but it’s possible shoppers also want to get back out to brick-and-mortar stores. Retailers have to prepare for multiple circumstances: if people want to order online and pick up in-store, or vice versa.”
A recent history of supply chain fallouts
Some of the recent product shortages, particularly those at the end of 2020, are the direct result of decisions made by retailers when forecasting consumer demand. At the height of the pandemic, it would’ve been difficult for, say, Walmart to predict in April 2020 that Americans would rush to buy outdoor heaters or fishing tackle. There was no way for retailers to accurately predict the popularity of these niche items. Instead, many big-box retailers shifted their focus toward restocking the most popular, in-demand consumer goods.
“Every retail chain is focused on their big sales items: what they sell most, what they’re known for, what the customers come to the stores to buy,” Rafay Ishfaq, an associate professor of supply chain management at Auburn University, previously told Vox. “If that means that the peripherals or seasonal items or secondary product categories run short, then so be it.”
But some hiccups, like factory shutdowns, scarce raw materials, and freight delays, are entirely out of retailers’ control. The shipping crisis has threatened to disrupt the transportation of wood pulp — the raw material for products like toilet paper — which is shipped out from South America. And for products like lumber, which is currently experiencing levels of demand not seen in a decade, suppliers can’t suddenly ramp up production overnight. One sawmill owner told Vox’s Emily Stewart that a new mill takes two years to build and costs $100 million, without any guarantee of raw materials. Trees, after all, take years to grow, and in some parts of the US, there’s limited sawmill capacity to turn timber into lumber.
One of the greatest concerns for automakers, medical device manufacturers, and consumer tech companies is the semiconductor chip shortage, which likely won’t be resolved for another year or two. These chips are responsible for powering a slew of consumer goods — home appliances, tech gadgets, automotive vehicles — that have been subject to supply chain slowdowns due to the sheer number of parts required to assemble a finished product. The chip shortage is affecting major American companies like General Motors, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Qualcomm, and Hewlett-Packard. This crisis is on the White House’s radar; the federal government plans to invest in chip manufacturing in the US, but the process could take years.
“Making a single chip takes an incredibly long time,” reported Recode’s Rebecca Heilweil. “At the same time, building more chip manufacturing plants, sometimes called fabs, requires years of engineering and construction and billions of dollars.”
A plant takes roughly two and a half years to build, according to Patrick Penfield, a supply chain management professor at Syracuse University. “We’ve got Intel, we’ve got a couple of smaller manufacturers, but it’s gonna take time — and I think there needs to be more of an investment,” he told Recode.
The pandemic has forced major companies and entire industries to reassess the risks of an interconnected supply chain. For years, this system has consistently boosted profit margins, and its vulnerability to unexpected events, like a pandemic or climate change, was not put into question. Still, most industries hesitate to make vast changes to their manufacturing process, which would be a costly and time-intensive endeavor. For now, consumers have no choice but to start getting used to these delays. It is, after all, the fault of the business model that habituated Americans to this “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it” consumerist mentality. Or maybe, it’s time to start buying locally and less.
What’s in the new Republican voting law that passed in Texas? -
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shakes hands with former President Donald Trump. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images
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Texas Democrats literally fled the state to try to block this bill.
On August 31, both houses of the Texas Legislature passed an elections bill that inspired many of the state’s elected Democrats to flee Texas in an unsuccessful attempt to block the bill. The Texas Constitution requires two-thirds of each house’s members to be present in order to approve legislation, so Democrats delayed passage of this bill by preventing the state House from achieving a quorum.
Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is an outspoken proponent of the election bill, known as SB 1, and is expected to sign it into law.
SB 1 has morphed and changed considerably over the last several months, and the final version does not include some of the most aggressive attempts to limit voting rights that were included in previous iterations. The final version stripped a provision that would have shut down many urban polling precincts, and another that would have ended early voting on Sunday mornings, when many Black churches sponsor “souls-to-the-polls” drives.
It also doesn’t include anything resembling the most troubling provision of Georgia’s recently enacted election law, which permits Republican officials to take over election administration in Democratic strongholds such as Atlanta, which has the potential to disenfranchise voters en masse.
That said, the bill does include a number of provisions that either make it harder to vote in Texas or tweak the state’s election rules in ways that advantage Republicans.
In 2020, for example, a few polling places in Harris County, a highly Democratic area that includes Houston, remained open for 24 hours. The Republican bill bans this practice while simultaneously expanding early voting in many smaller counties — which tend to be the domain of the GOP.
Similarly, the bill imposes new restrictions on absentee voting, such as a requirement that most voters provide their driver’s license number in order to vote by mail, and a provision that makes it a felony for election officials to send unsolicited absentee ballot applications to voters. In 2020, Republicans were much less likely to vote absentee than Democrats, most likely because then-President Donald Trump repeatedly denounced mail-in ballots.
But the spike in absentee voting in 2020 is largely attributable to the pandemic — many voters did not want to risk voting in person when they could catch Covid-19 — and that concern is unlikely to play much of a role in future elections. Plus, Texas already has extremely rigid restrictions on absentee voting: Most Texans under the age of 65 may not vote by mail. So the new restrictions are likely to have only a marginal impact on voter turnout.
That could be enough to flip a very close election, but the new restrictions on absentee voting are unlikely to turn a comfortable Democratic victory into a Republican win.
One potentially troubling provision of the GOP bill requires election officials to conduct monthly purges of the state’s voting rolls, ostensibly to identify noncitizens who may have registered to vote. Another provides new legal protections to partisan poll watchers, who are permitted to observe elections and the vote-counting process — but who may also attempt to disrupt the election.
Yet, it’s worth noting that both of these provisions are less aggressive than similar provisions written into earlier versions of the bill.
No one who cares about voting rights should celebrate SB 1. It erects unnecessary barriers between voters and the franchise, and it subtly changes Texas’s election law in ways that are likely to benefit the party that wrote the bill. But much of SB 1 makes only marginal changes to Texas’s already quite restrictive voting laws.
With that overarching picture in mind, let’s dig a little deeper into the two most troubling parts of the bill.
SB 1 revives a failed effort to purge voters from the state’s voter rolls
In 2019, then-Texas Secretary of State David Whitley produced a list of nearly 100,000 registered voters he claimed might not be US citizens. And he called for a review of the state’s voter rolls to purge any supposed noncitizens.
Whitley’s office compiled the list by matching the names of registered voters against the names of Texas residents who told the state they were not citizens when they obtained a driver’s license or other ID card. But the list included many lawful voters who were not yet citizens when they received their driver’s license but were later naturalized.
Ultimately, Whitley resigned his office — he’d been serving in a temporary capacity and could not be permanently confirmed as the state’s top elections officer after he falsely accused thousands of Americans of being noncitizens. Texas also agreed to scrap the planned purge of its voting rolls as part of a settlement of three voting rights lawsuits.
SB 1 contains some language that will revive this purging effort, although with an important safeguard that wasn’t in place during Whitley’s failed 2019 purge. The purge will resume under SB 1, but the state “may not consider information derived from documents presented by the voter to the department before the person’s current voter registration became effective.”
In theory, this provision should provide a check against voters being disenfranchised if they obtained a driver’s license first and then became a citizen. A voter who obtains a driver’s license in April, becomes a naturalized citizen, and registers to vote in July could not be purged just because the state has evidence that they were not a citizen prior to July.
That said, voter purges of this sort are notoriously unreliable, often resulting in false positives among voters with common names. To give just one example, there are more than 130 people named “Juan Gonzalez” living in Dallas. If just one of these individuals is a noncitizen with a Texas driver’s license, that could lead the state to falsely identify a different Juan Gonzalez as an unlawfully registered voter, especially if the noncitizen has the same birthday as a citizen with the same name.
Texas law does require the state to notify a voter swept up in such a purge and give them an opportunity to prove their citizenship. But the burden of providing such proof is likely to fall disproportionately on citizens with Spanish surnames, or on those who are otherwise disproportionately likely to be falsely flagged as noncitizens.
SB 1 could make it easier for partisan poll watchers to harass election officials
Like many states, Texas permits candidates and political parties to appoint poll watchers, who observe the voting process and the counting of ballots. In 2020, however, some poll watchers appointed by the Trump campaign in several key states behaved disruptively or made frivolous legal claims against the election officials they observed.
Earlier versions of SB 1 made it quite difficult for election officials to remove poll watchers who disrupt an election. The final version does permit the senior-most election official at a particular polling place (known as the “presiding judge”) to “call a law enforcement officer to request that a poll watcher be removed if the poll watcher commits a breach of the peace or a violation of law.” But in most cases, presiding judges cannot remove a poll watcher unless an elections official personally witnesses them violating the law.
SB 1 also makes it a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, if an elections official “intentionally or knowingly refuses to accept a watcher for service when acceptance of the watcher is required by” the law. So officials may be reluctant to remove a disruptive poll watcher out of fear they could be prosecuted and face a draconian sentence.
Indeed, one feature of SB 1 is that it imposes extraordinarily high criminal penalties on elections officials who commit minor violations. An official who “solicits the submission of an application to vote by mail from a person who did not request an application” commits a felony, as do most election officials who send an unsolicited application to vote by mail to a voter. Officials who send “an early voting ballot by mail or other early voting by mail ballot materials to a person who the clerk or official knows did not submit an application for a ballot to be voted by mail” risk up to 180 days in jail.
With such high penalties for such minor offenses, SB 1 risks discouraging qualified individuals from serving as election officials. Why take such a job if it can land you behind bars?
This September, the Vox Book Club returns with Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi -
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke | Left, Bloomsbury. Right, Sarah Lee.
Spend September with the haunted, haunting Piranesi, from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.
Susanna Clarke’s haunting, haunted Piranesi is one of the most astonishing books I’ve read in a very long time, sort of Narnia meets Paradise Lost meets Borges. From the author of the much-beloved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it tells the story of a man called Piranesi, living all alone in a vast and flooded marble house, full of statues.
As far as Piranesi knows, the house is the only thing in the world, and he himself one of the only living men in it. He loves his life, and he loves the house. He calls himself the house’s Beloved Child. So gentle and compelling is his voice that when you read the book, you can feel yourself getting swallowed up by Piranesi’s beloved house, and by Piranesi’s terrible, radiant innocence.
As the Vox Book Club reconvenes for September, we’re coming back in style by reading Piranesi. We’ll talk about the Narnia parallels, the Jonathan Strange parallels, and what Piranesi has learned from his house. Then, at the end of the month, we’ll be meeting with Susanna Clarke herself (!!!) live on Zoom. Subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll let you know the RSVP details as soon as we have them, and in the meantime, you can catch up on our Piranesi review from last year here.
Friday, September 17: Discussion post on Piranesi published to Vox.com
Date TBA: Virtual live event with author Susanna Clarke. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the RSVP link as soon as it’s available. Reader questions are encouraged!
From The Hindu: Sports
England elects to bowl as India includes Umesh and Shardul in playing XI, no place for Ashwin - India also made two changes with Umesh Yadav replacing Ishant Sharma and Shardul Thakur coming in place of Mohammed Shami
Tokyo Paralympics | Bhagat enter semifinals; Suhas, Krishna and Tarun also win, mixed day for Kohli - Pramod Bhagat and Palak Kohli will play Siripong Teamarrom and Nipada Saensupa in mixed doubles class SL3-SU5 on September 3
Shooter Rahul Jakhar ends 5th in mixed 25m pistol at Paralympics - The 35-year-old Jakhar was eliminated at the end of the seventh series in the finals after qualifying second with a score of 576, which included 284 in precision and 292 in the rapid stage.
Taekwondo player Aruna withdraws from Paralympics repechage due to suspected fracture - Ms. Aruna was scheduled to feature in the repechage round after she lost to fourth-seeded Espinoza Carranza of Peru in the quarters.
We are the team that everyone wants to beat: Virat Kohli - During an interaction around his new book, Ravi Shastri was asked about the ongoing series, which stands at 1-1 right now, and he promised things are set to get “spicier” in the last two games.
From The Hindu: National News
MP wants name of Rajiv Gandhi dropped from Nagarahole national park in Karnataka - Requests that the park be named in honour of Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa
BJP selling what Congress created in 70 years, Centre’s asset monetisation plan will destroy entire generation: Pawan Khera - Mr. Khera said the Centre’s plan to sell or lease out public infrastructure would only create a monopoly in key sectors, something that the previous Congress-led governments always avoided.
Modi govt mishandled economy, alleges Rahul - Accusing the Centre of mishandling the country’s economy, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said the nation was at a “critical crossroad” and
Kerala High Court asks Bevco to abide by Excise Commissioner’s directives - Kerala High Court orally observes that despite its intervention, long queues are still seen in front of certain liquor outlets
In Moga, police resort to baton charge and water cannons on farmers - Police say they had to use mild force to control situation after the protesters started pelting stones and attacking them
From BBC: Europe
Inger Stoejberg: Danish ex-immigration minister faces impeachment trial - Inger Stoejberg is accused of unlawfully ordering the separation of young asylum-seeking couples.
Mikis Theodorakis, composer of Zorba the Greek, dies aged 96 - Mikis Theodorakis was also a key figure of resistance to the Greek military junta of the 1970s.
Spain hit with severe flooding after storm - Homes in north and central Spain are left isolated and without electricity as roads are forced to close.
WhatsApp issued second-largest GDPR fine of €225m - The Irish data watchdog has handed WhatsApp the second-highest ever GDPR fine.
Ronaldo breaks men’s international goal record - Cristiano Ronaldo breaks the world record for goals scored in men’s international football with two headers against the Republic of Ireland.
From Ars Technica
Michelle Gomez is a time-traveling Madame Rouge in Doom Patrol S3 trailer - “Sometimes you have to set worlds on fire so you can make something new.” - link
Report: Big new health features are coming to the Apple Watch—just not this year - Temperature and blood glucose tracking could arrive as soon as 2022. - link
Spaceship carrying Richard Branson flew off course [Updated] - Also, an explanation of why Mark “Forger” Stucky left Virgin Galactic. - link
Locast’s free TV service is in peril as Big 4 networks win copyright ruling - Locast can’t use revenue from users to expand into new markets, judge rules. - link
EA bucks convention with preview of extremely unfinished Dead Space remake - EA was surprisingly candid with this early look at the game’s preproduction. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Hitler dies and goes in front of a hell gate… -
St. Peter is waiting, judging him.
They stand in silence when Hitler breaks it:" St. Peter, where am I?"
Two aliens landed in the desert near a petrol station that was closed for the night. -
They approached one of the pumps assuming it was an earthling and the younger alien addressed it saying, ‘Greetings, we come in peace. Take us to your leader.’
The pump, of course, didn’t respond.
The younger alien was stumped. The older alien said, ‘I’d calm down if I were you.’ But the younger alien ignored the warning and repeated his greeting. Again, there was no response. Shocked and insulted by what he perceived to be the pump’s haughty attitude, he drew his ray gun and said impatiently, ‘Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Do not ignore us this way! Take us to your leader or I will fire!’ The older alien again warned his comrade saying, ‘You probably don’t want to do that! I really don’t think you should make him mad.’
‘Rubbish,’ replied the cocky, young alien. He aimed his weapon at the pump and opened fire. There was a huge explosion. A massive fireball roared towards them and blew the younger alien off his feet and deposited him a burnt, smoking mess about 200 yards away in a cactus patch.
Half an hour passed. When he finally regained consciousness, he refocused his three eyes, straightened his bent antenna, and looked dazedly at the older, wiser alien who was standing over him shaking his big, green head.
‘What a ferocious creature!’ exclaimed the young, fried alien. ‘He damn near killed me! How did you know he was so dangerous?’
The older alien leaned over, placed a friendly feeler on his crispy friend and replied,
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my intergalactic travels, you don’t want to mess with a guy who can loop his penis over his shoulder twice and then stick it in his ear.’
I asked a prostitute for sex but she refused because I only had $5. She instead offered me a ‘penguin blowjob’. I had no idea what it was but thought for $5, that was a pretty good deal.
She took off my belt and lowered my trousers and underpants to my ankles and began sucking. As things were heating up, she stopped, turned around and started walking away. I ran after her with my trousers and underpants still around my ankles, pleading for her to finish.
