What Voters Can and Can’t Learn from John Fetterman’s Stroke - Health is rarely the thing that differentiates a competent politician from an incompetent one. - link
John Kerry Is Looking for Money (to Help Save the Climate) - Private capital may require some “concessions” before it helps developing countries transition to clean energy. - link
Xi Jinping’s Historic Bid at the Communist Party Congress - In his efforts to escape the “cycles of order and disorder, rise and fall” that China’s emperors could not, is Xi himself slipping into them? - link
Polls Suggest the Battle for the Senate Is Still a Cliffhanger - Recent surveys show a shift to Republicans, but in the key battleground states the outcomes remain highly uncertain. - link
The Deer Who Lived Upstairs - Dillie, a whitetail from Ohio, defied many expectations during her unexpectedly long life. - link
From Vox
Everybody wants to be a LinkedInfluencer -
Getty Images
And the biggest power users are turning to ghostwriters.
In August, the CEO of Ohio-based marketing company HyperSocial decided that the best way to publicly deal with the layoffs he authorized at his company would be to post a photo of himself crying. “This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share,” wrote Braden Wallake in a LinkedIn post, then proceeded to detail the emotional toll that letting go of two of his employees had on … him, the CEO, who still had a job.
Within days, Wallake had become a meme, shorthand for the type of oversharing, virtue-signaling hustle bro who racks up thousands of followers on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and, most especially, LinkedIn. LinkedIn has always had its own curious posting conventions; while ostensibly geared toward average white-collar professionals seeking job opportunities or a talent pool to hire from, this year the company has gone all-in on “creators.” That is, users hoping to build a personal brand by spouting entrepreneurial advice or nuggets of wisdom (LinkedInfluencers, if you will). When such tools are wielded with skill, those who succeed can nab book deals and speaking gigs.
When done sloppily, they may end up on, say, the very popular Twitter account called @StateOfLinkedIn, which is devoted to mocking the worst offenders. A scroll through its timeline reveals long-winded, self-congratulatory threads detailing anecdotes that probably/definitely didn’t happen, bizarrely poetic descriptions of a day in the life of an entrepreneur, and “subtle” flexes of luxury logos. Together they make up a new sort of business-speak — less jargony a la Office Space and more inspiration-porn a la Gary Vaynerchuk — that runs rampant on places like LinkedIn.
For aspiring LinkedInfluencers, the field has never been more competitive. LinkedIn told Vox that there are currently 13 million users with “creator mode” turned on (a setting that expands the kinds of features users can deploy in order to grow their audience). Perhaps unsurprisingly, its focus on making its users famous has made it look and feel quite a lot like Facebook, as many have pointed out. There have never been more people trying to become LinkedInfluencers, and there have never been so many resources they can pay for to do it.
That’s why many of them are turning to professional ghostwriters to spearhead their content strategies. “There’s this perception that ghostwriting is like having someone else do your homework for you, but it’s a collaborative process, and it frees up so much of [the client’s] time,” says Amelia Forczak, founder of the ghostwriting firm Pithy Wordsmithery. In the past few years, her business has doubled.
Forczak specializes in ghostwriting how-to books for her clients, but social media is often a crucial first step. A typical client might be an executive in the corporate world who’s well-respected within their company or industry but not widely known outside of it, and often, those who’ve been in business and tech for decades have no idea how to self-promote. “They’ve had PR training where they’ve learned not to talk about anything personal,” she explains, “or anything that can be used against you.”
Now, the standard advice for LinkedInfluencers is to do the exact opposite: avoid business jargon and sound like a person. Nothing has made this clearer than the pandemic, which forced white-collar workers to move their lives, and more importantly, their reputations, online. “It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages for 12 LinkedIn posts for anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000.
In the same time span, ghostwriting for entrepreneurs has turned into a desirable and potentially lucrative career. Earlier this month, Business Insider published an anonymous account of a tech startup founder who makes $200,000 on his side hustle writing tweets for venture capitalists. “Funders have to build parasocial relationships with founders,” he explains. “A founder might read a tweet from a VC and say: ‘Wow, he’s a cool guy. He’s in on the joke. I want him on my board.’”
LinkedIn ghostwriters I spoke to say that they receive daily inquiries on how to break into the field. Horstmeyer says she’s constantly referring incoming work to other writers she knows, and is considering offering an online course to help aspiring writers build up a client base. Mishka Rana, a 22-year-old college student in India, says that she’s turned down several job offers because her ghostwriting business generates enough income to support her. “I know a lot of people who have left their corporate jobs to start their own agencies,” she says, attributing this in part to the favorable exchange rates (several of her clients are US- or UK-based). Her content packages, which start at $800 for one month and go up to $9,000 for multi-month commitments, have afforded her the ability to buy a car and travel domestically and internationally.
Ghostwriters, though, do more than just write; most of the writers I spoke to also describe their work as content strategy and marketing. Emily Crookston of the Pocket PhD was a philosophy professor before pivoting to ghostwriting; she says her LinkedIn services, for which she charges $2,500 per month, including blogging, strategy, and posts, had become particularly popular during the pandemic. Just like any other social media platform, there’s a little bit of gaming the algorithm, too. Many LinkedIn super users join “pods,” or groups of people who agree to like, comment on, and share each other’s posts in an attempt to increase their engagement. “LinkedIn is really savvy about pods — it knows, and it will hurt your engagement,” she warns. But the biggest mistake people make is “posting and ghosting,” failing to engage with other people’s posts and “using it like a billboard,” she explains.
It’s ironic, considering that one of the major benefits of having a career in tech and finance is the freedom not to have to do this kind of laborious self-promotion. That’s more typically reserved for artists and other people in creative industries, where the field is saturated and competitive and relies heavily on relationships and clout. Like probably any writer, I’ve briefly fantasized about what my life might look like if I worked in, say, finance, or some other high-paying but entirely anonymous job where I felt zero attachment to the numbers I entered into the screen every day and forgot about them on my way out the door. The idea that such a job may also require you to preen and maintain your digital profiles for maximum consumption makes the whole career seem far less enviable — but I suppose that’s why people hire ghostwriters.
Wallake, it seems, has not arrived at this same conclusion. A week ago, the crying CEO ended up on @StateOfLinkedIn again. “My grandma passed away today,” he began his post. The moral of his story was that perhaps hustle culture was making all of us miss out on the important things. A nice sentiment, of course — but not without ending with a plug for his own company.
This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels are deliberately frustrating -
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy | Knopf
The Passenger is out now, and Stella Maris is out in December. They’re McCarthy’s first new books since 2006.
It’s been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy published his apocalyptic masterpiece The Road, won the Pulitzer, and then, having secured his place in literary history, apparently vanished into the mists. Now, at 89 years old, he’s returned with two new books: The Passenger, out now, and its companion novella Stella Maris, out in December. Together they form less a capstone to McCarthy’s storied career than they do a compelling if uneven coda.
Some of McCarthy’s most celebrated novels are page-turners, but that’s not on the agenda here. These books are built to stand apart from the reader, to withhold, to refuse to satisfy. You can almost feel McCarthy swaggering a bit as, with great skill and elegance, he chooses time and time again to frustrate any desire the reader might have for either narrative or story.
The Passenger and Stella Maris occur 10 years apart from one another, each told by a different sibling. The Passenger takes place in the 1980s and is narrated by Bobby Western, a taciturn tough guy who was once a race driver, is currently a salvage diver, and maintains a deep knowledge of theoretical physics. Stella Maris takes place in the 1970s and is narrated by Alicia Western, a diagnosed schizophrenic and math genius. Their surname is Western because that’s what they stand for: the western postwar world order, with all its prosperity and order and all its moral compromises. In The Passenger, Bobby is in love with Alicia, who is dead. In Stella Maris, Alicia is in love with Bobby, who is in a coma. Both maintain they never consummated their relationship, but McCarthy gives you just enough room to wonder if that’s the truth.
The official line from the publishers is that The Passenger and Stella Maris each stand alone, but don’t believe them. The Passenger would be maddeningly opaque without Stella Maris to elaborate on some of its most compelling plot threads, and Stella Maris would be dry as book binding without The Passenger to leaven its many philosophical arguments. Reading them separately would be a cramped and despairing experience.
Not that The Passenger is exactly a light read in and of itself. While it gestures at a pulpy thriller plot involving a passenger vanishing from a crashed plane and mysterious government agencies chasing Bobby Western down, McCarthy serenely declines to either solve or, indeed, provide real suspects for any of his mysteries. They seem to exist merely to create the paranoid murk through which Western (as McCarthy consistently calls Bobby) must dive as he encounters and has Socratic dialogues with a series of colorful characters.
With a trans woman, Western discusses the question of whether there is a God or a female soul. With a magician turned private detective, he talks about the tragedy of beauty. And with an absolute blank slate of a character — so blank it’s almost offensive, really, as if McCarthy’s staring us in the eye and daring us to call him on it — Western gets into the real issue of these two novels: the atom bomb, quantum mechanics, and the question of whether reality is knowable.
“It’s all right to say that the reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world,” Western explains. (McCarthy’s still doing his thing with leaving out apostrophes and quotation marks.) “But the real mystery is the one that plagued Darwin. How we can come to know difficult things that have no survival value.”
Western comes by his understanding of this mystery honestly. He and Alicia are the children of one of the makers of the atom bomb, born, like all the postwar west, to the knowledge that they owe their wealth and good fortune to an atrocity that might have stopped a bigger atrocity. Both of them got an education in physics from their father, and both of them are deeply aware of the implications of modern physics for reality: the way it shows us that reality does not match our understanding, that the universe is less stable and more eerie than we thought.
Western responds to this knowledge by briefly pursuing a career as a physicist before failing his subject: He decides he isn’t quite good enough to do really valuable physics. Alicia, meanwhile, decides to go into pure math before being failed by her subject: since math has no provable reality independent of the human mind, she decides it is not equal to solving the problem of what reality is. Alicia’s project is to try to hold the truth of what contemporary physics and pure mathematics tell her completely in her mind, and the implication is that either the effort has shattered her mind or that only a shattered mind could attempt to do so in the first place.
Alicia appears periodically throughout The Passenger. Her death by suicide opens the novel, and in flashbacks we see her conversing with her hallucinations: a raggedy carnival barker of a man she calls the Thalidomide Kid, with flippers instead of hands, and all his hangers-on. (These hallucinations, it must be said, are appallingly tedious.) She doesn’t take center stage, though, until Stella Maris, which is made up entirely of Alicia’s conversations with her psychiatrist in the last year of her life.
There is something pleasingly, shockingly bare about Stella Maris after the lushness of The Passenger’s rich, haunted atmosphere. The Passenger takes place in New Orleans in the summer, but Stella Maris is all cold, cold, midwest in the winter. Gone, too, are The Passenger’s showy and circuitous plotlines about the JFK assassination being a cover for the mob taking out RFK and secret caches of gold buried in a dead grandmother’s basement. In Stella Maris, McCarthy has stripped away all the flesh down to the bare bone, the part that he’s actually interested in talking about.
It turns out the bone is more theoretical physics and pure math, the cosmic questions they inspire, and the creative work entailed in thinking them through.
“I knew what my brother did not,” Alicia explains to her shrink. “That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.” The inexplicable void at the core of quantum physics is the demonium.
Writing women has never been McCarthy’s strong suit, and Alicia doesn’t exactly hold up as a rich and three-dimensional character. Her voice is appealingly spiky, but she’s more philosophical construct than whole human being. Yet halfway through Stella Maris, it becomes clear that she’s also an avatar for McCarthy himself, and for anyone who finds their unconscious mind doing their creative work for them.
“The core question is not how you do the math but how does the unconscious do it,” she says. “How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it?” (Punctuation original.) You can slot in writing for math in that paragraph without changing the meaning a jot.
Speaking of writing, it’s just as great here as you would expect. Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with evaluating prose as “sentences” over the past few decades is simply that McCarthy’s are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise.
Here he is on what it means that our reality is dependent on our observations: “In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.” The rat-a-tat-tat of those terse and isolated clauses; the easy richness of the phrase “alleged being” against the showy imagery of hellish black fire and silent black planets: When you’re as good as McCarthy, you make it look easy.
Still, McCarthy is stingy with the pleasures of his prose. In this pair of novels, his most ravishing sentences tend to evoke horrors, either cosmic or personal. He is stingy, too, with the possibility of sweetness or joy. The only true tenderness in these novels comes from Alicia and Bobby’s incestuous love, which McCarthy treats as both redemptive and destructive.
Neither The Passenger nor Stella Maris is designed to be anyone’s gateway to Cormac McCarthy. They lack the visceral emotional intensity McCarthy can conjure at his best; they are pointedly spare and withholding. But taken together, they offer an intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer.
Biden has ambitious infrastructure goals. Made-in-America rules could slow them. -
Matt Dunne/Vox
New rules could hold back $1 trillion in infrastructure spending that extends to housing, broadband, and electric vehicle charging projects.
Nearly two years ago, the Tri-Valley Transit agency started to construct a new bus facility in Bradford, Vermont. The agency’s fleet, which residents across eight towns used to get to work, school, and medical appointments each day, was outgrowing the building it had been renting for 16 years. New buses were bigger than the vehicles they used to have, and they didn’t have the equipment to efficiently wash and maintain them.
Soon after breaking ground, officials ran into complications. The agency had planned to install a solar-powered heat pump system, which would have been cleaner for the environment and less expensive to maintain, said Jim Moulton, the agency’s executive director. But officials couldn’t find an American manufacturer to build a large enough system. Although two Italian companies could have fulfilled the order, the project was receiving federal funds, meaning that it was subject to “Buy America” rules that required manufactured products to be made domestically.
Moulton said the agency applied for a waiver from the federal government but was denied, so officials redesigned the $3.4 million project and purchased a wood pellet boiler system manufactured in the United States. Although the agency moved into the facility in August 2021, the debacle delayed the project for nearly three months and added on about $100,000 in extra costs.
“It was a little bit frustrating,” Moulton said. “We were anticipating that were would be a better balance of these rules.”
It was a logistical headache that could soon become more common — and extend to areas far beyond transit projects.
The $1 trillion infrastructure law passed last year expanded Buy America rules, which require state and local agencies to buy certain materials made in the United States for federally funded infrastructure projects. Rules that iron, steel, and manufactured products be made in America have been in place for decades, but they’ve traditionally applied to transportation and water-related projects, such as highways, rail, and public transit.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s new rules broadened the scope of goods that have to be produced in the United States by creating a new category for “construction materials.” It also expanded the types of infrastructure projects subject to the requirements to permanently include housing, broadband, and new programs for electric vehicle charging projects for the first time.
Ahead of the midterm elections, President Biden has hailed the bill as a once-in-a-generation investment in the nation’s infrastructure, promising that it would rebuild miles of crumbling roads and bridges, expand access to clean drinking water, and deploy broadband to communities that have long lacked high-speed internet.
“Instead of infrastructure week, which was a punchline for four years under my predecessor, it’s infrastructure decade,” Biden said in Pennsylvania last week.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden greets carpenter Gregory Allen Stahl before speaking about rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure on October 20 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Biden has also highlighted the package’s Buy America provisions, which the administration has said will help create American manufacturing jobs and improve the resiliency of the nation’s supply chain. During his first State of the Union address in March, Biden vowed that the country would “buy American to make sure everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails are made in America.”
But many state and local officials across the country say the new rules could delay much-needed infrastructure projects and significantly drive up costs amid the fastest inflation in 40 years. Some say they’re already struggling to deal with supply-chain disruptions that have emerged during the pandemic and worry that material shortages could worsen if they’re limited to domestic manufacturers. Higher costs could also lead to fewer projects and soften the impact of the package, officials say.
The effect could be felt beyond stalled roadway projects. Housing advocates worry the packages’ broader Buy America requirements mean it could take longer to build public housing. Broadband internet expansions could be delayed for the millions of Americans without reliable internet access.
Many state agencies, local officials, and industry groups have urged federal officials to delay implementation or provide more clarity surrounding the new rules. Individual federal agencies are tasked with enforcing the new rules, and several have granted waivers temporarily delaying them.
Mitch Landrieu, a senior advisor to Biden and the infrastructure coordinator, said it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect state and local officials to completely “turn on a dime” and that the administration would try to be flexible by evaluating waivers on a case-by-case basis.
“When you pressure test the system, you’re going to find holes in it,” Landrieu said. “We’re building a system that can actually implement these new rules and regulations, and of course, that takes time.”
Still, Landrieu said waivers would be limited and the administration would apply “downward pressure pretty aggressively on states and cities” to implement the requirements, which he said would help bolster the American manufacturing sector and the nation’s long-term economic prosperity.
“The imperative is to lean in, not to lean back,” Landrieu said.
Transportation projects will be subject to stricter rules
Before the infrastructure law passed last year, Buy America rules were mostly a collection of laws enforced by various agencies within the Transportation Department (although they sound similar, they’re different from “Buy American” rules, which deal with materials and products the federal government purchases directly).
Because there was no blanket rule across the Transportation Department, each agency formed its own interpretations of the laws and issued different waivers that were tailored to its own programs. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), for example, has had a waiver for manufactured products since 1983, meaning that roadway and bridge projects have only been required to use domestically made iron and steel products if they’re incorporated into the project permanently.
Under the new rules, three categories of materials have to be produced in the United States: iron and steel, manufactured products, and construction materials.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Pedestrians walk by a construction site in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in April 2021.
To be considered “produced in the United States,” manufactured goods now have to contain at least 55 percent domestic content and be manufactured in America. Construction materials, which have to be manufactured entirely in the United States, include plastic and polymer-based products, glass, lumber, drywall, and non-ferrous metals with the exception of cement and aggregate products like sand and gravel.
But the new requirements for transportation projects largely haven’t been in effect yet. In May, the Transportation Department issued a temporary waiver for construction materials to give state and local agencies time to adjust to the new category. The waiver, which is set to expire on November 10, should not be expected to be extended, a DOT spokesperson said in a statement. The FHWA also plans to initiate a review of its waiver for manufactured products by November 15.
Although many state and local agencies say they support the policy goals of Buy America, some have urged the Transportation Department to extend the construction materials waiver in recent months.
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which represents transportation departments in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, said in a public comment that domestic manufacturing was currently “unable to ensure the availability and timely delivery of many materials needed for transportation projects” and urged federal officials to extend the waiver period by 12 to 18 months.
Jim McDonnell, the association’s director of engineering, said state officials were fully supportive of boosting American jobs, but worried about how the new rules would be implemented and how they could increase costs if demand exceeds available supply. He said that officials, for instance, import many glass beads and metals like zinc from other countries since supply is limited in the United States.
“Six months isn’t enough time for a new industry to start churning out products or even for existing industries to ramp up production enough for a whole country,” McDonnell said. “We’re still concerned, even though we’ve got this six-month waiver, that state DOTs are going to have trouble figuring out where to get products.”
Jimmy Christianson, the vice president of government relations at the Associated General Contractors of America, said the organization wanted clearer final guidance from the federal government since there is confusion about what constitutes a construction material versus a manufactured product.
“Fiber optic glass is a construction material, but fiber optic glass is usually covered in some sort of rubber or plastic to prevent it from getting ruptured,” Christianson said. “If it’s covered in plastic, is it a construction material now or is it a manufactured product? We don’t know the answer.”
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released initial guidelines in April, which said that any item that consists of two or more construction materials listed and combined through a manufacturing process would be considered a manufactured product. The OMB is expected to issue more guidance in the coming months.
Christianson also urged the federal government to be flexible with future waiver requests. Although state and local agencies can submit individual waiver requests that are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, some say they’ve been discouraged by the process and told that waivers would unlikely be granted. Requests are eligible if certain materials aren’t produced in sufficient quantities in the United States, if the overall project cost would increase by more than 25 percent, or if the rules aren’t in the “public interest.”
A recent Associated General Contractors of America survey found that 93 percent of respondents were experiencing material shortages and most construction firms believed that meeting the new Buy America requirements would be difficult. Steel, non-ferrous metal, plastic products, electrical equipment, and HVAC systems would likely be the most difficult to source domestically, the respondents said. Lead times for some electrical equipment were reported to be nearly two years, and deliveries of ductile iron pipe and roofing materials were also reported to have waiting periods of more than a year.
Sarah Rice for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Construction workers work on the expansion of IMCO Carbide Tool in Perrysburg, Ohio, on October 7.
In some cases, the rules have discouraged officials from pursuing federal grants to buy equipment that could help reduce emissions. Ryan McFarland, the senior manager of government affairs at the Northwest Seaport Alliance, a marine cargo operating partnership of the Port of Seattle and Port of Tacoma, said the authority wants to purchase zero and near-zero emissions equipment — such as electric terminal yard tractors, hydrogen top handlers, and hybrid rubber-tired gantry cranes — to increase the efficiency of handling cargo.
But in most cases, the ports can’t find an American manufacturer that can certify that their equipment is Buy America compliant. Even though some manufacturers have production facilities in the United States, parts that are used to make the equipment are often sourced overseas or companies don’t track the sources of steel that are used in parts, McFarland said.
Because the equipment is more expensive than traditional diesel versions, it’s difficult for the ports to purchase without federal funds, meaning that it would be challenging for them to phase out emissions from port operations by 2050, McFarland said.
“We simply can’t afford to meet those goals by ourselves,” he said.
Domestic content requirements have gained support from both Democrats and Republicans in recent years, said Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation who has researched the topic extensively. But there is limited research on how the Buy America rules have directly impacted domestic job creation.
A 2014 Duke University study found that projects subject to Buy America preferences “mitigate the safety risks of using potentially inferior-quality foreign inputs while delivering more economic benefits to the US economy than outsourced projects.” In a case study of two large-scale bridge projects, the researchers — Lukas Brun, G. Jason Jolley, Andrew Hull, and Stacey Frederick — found that the project not subject to Buy America rules outsourced 27 percent of the funds spent.
Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which sponsored the Duke study, said he was confident that steel and iron manufacturers could meet the demand. He urged the federal government to allow current blanket waivers to expire, which he said could lead to manufacturers investing more in domestic production if federal officials fully enforce the rules.
“It’s time to get on with it,” Paul said. “Some of these waivers can just get extended indefinitely, and that certainly isn’t the intent of the law or what Congress had in mind when it passed.”
Other research has found that the rules don’t create a significant amount of American jobs. A 2018 study from Victoria University concluded that Buy America rules did provide a small boost to American manufacturing jobs, but they led to fewer jobs in other parts of the economy and made projects more costly.
The authors — Peter Dixon, Maureen Rimmer, and Robert Waschik — estimated that eliminating the domestic content requirements could result in a loss of about 57,000 manufacturing jobs, but lead to a net gain of about 306,000 jobs in industries like retail, restaurants, and nursing homes. The researchers found that eliminating the rules could allow the federal government to fund more projects or “return the savings to the private sector in the form of tax cuts,” which could increase consumption.
“These sorts of policies do generate jobs in manufacturing,” said Dixon, an economics professor at Victoria University. “But not many, and they come at a great cost.”
Housing, broadband, and EV charging projects are newly eligible
The expanded Buy America rules are also affecting new projects beyond traditional transportation programs. The law broadened the scope of infrastructure projects that are now subject to the rules, meaning that housing, broadband, and new programs for electrical vehicle charging projects are now permanently covered.
Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Biden speaks during a visit to General Motors’ all-electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit, Michigan, on November 17, 2021.
Some housing groups have objected to the new rules and called on the federal government to exclude public housing projects, since they say the requirements could increase costs and delay the construction of affordable housing units when there is already a nationwide shortage of homes. They’ve also said housing authorities lack staff members who could investigate whether all materials and products they purchase meet domestic content requirements.
That has caused uncertainty among housing authorities, said Sunia Zaterman, the executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities. HUD has issued a waiver delaying the implementation of the new rules for its financial assistance programs, but it’s set to expire on November 14.
“We think that we’re clearly exempt because we’re operating residential properties,” Zaterman said. “These aren’t school buildings. They aren’t courthouses. These are properties used for private residential purposes.”
Brien Thane, the executive director of the Bellingham and Whatcom County Housing Authorities in Washington, said officials were already struggling to deal with supply shortages. Thane said the authority is trying to replace about 100 windows in one of its properties for senior citizens and people with disabilities but they’ve struggled to procure them because lead times are about four to six months, significantly longer than before the pandemic, when it would have taken about 30 to 45 days to get a shipment. Ahead of the winter season, Thane said officials were worried about water intrusion since the windows are about 50 years old and “starting to fail.”
Thane said the authority ran into similar issues when Buy America rules were tied to funding in the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which resulted in officials having an “extremely hard time” sourcing toilets, refrigerators, and other materials.
“The infrastructure bill does not include one cent for public housing,” Thane said. “So why are we extending the domestic procurement requirements to public housing?”
Some broadband groups have also praised the infrastructure law’s $65 billion in funding to build out the nation’s access to reliable internet, but have said Buy America rules could impede projects. In January, a coalition of organizations urged federal officials to consider a waiver for broadband infrastructure programs since the rules do not “reflect the realities of the global” supply chain. A broadband network contains dozens of elements — including switching and routing equipment — and devices used in each of those elements often include hundreds of components that are sourced from around the world, according to the letter.
Shirley Bloomfield, the chief executive officer of NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, which signed the letter, said many rural communities are often served by smaller broadband providers who might struggle to procure supplies if they’re limited to domestic manufacturers and competing with larger companies. Bloomfield said some of the association’s members were already seeing delays of “well over a year” for fiber optic cable deliveries, and other equipment like handholes and pedestals were experiencing shortages. Bloomfield said she hoped to see the federal government further incentivize American suppliers to ramp up production.
“They’re going to have to make sure that the large guys aren’t able to grab up all the supplies so that the small carriers who are the ones building out into these rural communities don’t get stuck with the short end of the stick,” Bloomfield said.
Some contractors have said the new Buy America rules have made them hesitant to pursue federally funded projects, said Ben Brubeck, the vice president of regulatory, labor, and state affairs at Associated Builders and Contractors. Brubeck said contractors are mostly concerned about potential delays in receiving materials and how that could impact costs, especially since input prices are already up more than 40 percent since the pandemic’s start.
“There is work in the private sector, and if they can make profit in the private sector and not have to wade into all this uncertainty and added costs and regulatory risk, they will do that,” Brubeck said.
Patrick Murphy, the sustainability and innovations project manager at the Vermont Agency of Transportation, said he was worried that every state would be seeking EV chargers and necessary equipment like transformers and switchgear at the same time, which could strain supplies and increase costs. Vermont, which is set to receive $21.2 million over five years to build out its network, has so far identified 15 locations that will host chargers.
The FHWA has proposed initially waiving all Buy America requirements for EV chargers and components until January 1 and then gradually phasing out parts of the waiver through 2024. Still, Murphy said he was worried that it could take more time for American manufacturers to ramp up capacity.
“We’re already experiencing extreme aspects of climate change throughout the country,” Murphy said. “We need to build out the infrastructure that encourages more people to adopt electric vehicles as quickly as possible. Anything that hinders that will be an issue.”
From The Hindu: Sports
Mojito and Agostini Carracci excel -
Peyo, Evaldo, The Sovereign Orb, Douglas, Stormy Ocean and Worldly Wise please -
Koneru Humpy off to winning start in Women’s Candidates chess -
T20I rankings | Kohli storms into top 10; Bhuvneshwar, Pandya also rise - Virat Kohli climbed five spots to ninth in the ICC T20I batting rankings, Bhuvneshwar Kumar jumped two spots to the 10th spot in the bowlers' rankings and Hardik Pandya rose three places to third in the all-rounders chart
T20 World Cup | Rain washes out New Zealand-Afghanistan clash - The no-result at the Melbourne Cricket Ground leaves last year's runners-up New Zealand top of Group 1 on three points and Afghanistan remain bottom of the group on one point
From The Hindu: National News
Use of square mesh cod-ends evokes mixed response from fishermen - Fishers complain of non-availability of new gear, poor catch; Puthuvype fisherman says its use helped him save fuel
Man held for throwing beer bottles at women football players from Ghana - The arrested is a lower division clerk in Kozhikode Corporation office
Kodenchery panchayat to deploy native shooters to hunt down wild boars - Financial constraints prevent the local body from engaging shooters from Telangana on a regular basis
Watch | ‘Britain has outgrown its racism’: Shashi Tharoor on Rishi Sunak’s elevation as UK Prime Minister - A video of Shashi Tharoor’s reaction to Rishi Sunak’s appointment as UK’s new PM
SCR to run 14 special trains between Tirupati and various stations from Nov.4 to Dec. 30 - According to the Railway officials, SCR will run 100 special trains from November 4 to December 30 for the convenience of passengers
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: Russia troop deployment to Belarus prompts speculation - Russia is sending thousands more troops to Belarus. Is the country going to join the war in Ukraine?
China accused of illegal police stations in the Netherlands - A Dutch media report says China is running an undeclared police operation to pressure dissidents.
Macron-Scholz: Difficult Paris summit awaits German chancellor - Relations between France and Germany are strained as the two countries pull in different directions.
Turkey arrests doctors’ chief for ‘terror propaganda’ - Sebnem Fincanci is held after calling for an inquiry into claims that the army used chemical weapons.
Mercedes-Benz becomes latest Western company to pull out of Russia - The company said it did not expect the move to have a significant effect on profitability.
From Ars Technica
2022 iPad Pro review: Impressively, awkwardly fast and capable - This year’s iPad Pro has even more power. It’s nice, but a true upgrade beckons. - link
2022 iPad review: The best one—except for all the others - Apple’s latest tablet doesn’t quite justify its price compared to other iPads. - link
The feds’ new open-access policy: Who’s gonna pay for it? - Currently, researchers often have to choose between publishing and science. - link
With shots and infections, the most common COVID symptoms have shifted - Beware of unexplained sneezing, which is becoming a more common COVID symptom. - link
Apple releases patch for iPhone and iPad 0-day reported by anonymous source - Freshly released iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16 also fix 19 other vulnerabilities. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
The sex position formerly known as 69 is now called 96. -
Due to the economy, the cost of eating out has gone up.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24139166/GettyImages_1244104627.jpg)
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24130365/GettyImages_1311720561t.jpg)
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24130517/GettyImages_1243980716t.jpg)
Sarah Rice for The Washington Post via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24139201/GettyImages_1236631761t.jpeg)
Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images