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676 lines
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<title>06 October, 2021</title>
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<title>Daily-Dose</title><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport"/><link href="styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><link href="../styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><style>*{overflow-x:hidden;}</style><link href="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.css" rel="stylesheet"/><script src="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.js"></script></head>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Why Republicans Are Still Recounting Votes</strong> - The point of the so-called audits is not so much to delegitimize the past election as it is to normalize unnecessary reviews of future ones—including, perhaps, a 2024 race in which Trump’s name may be on the ballot. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/why-republicans-are-still-recounting-votes">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Fate of Afghanistan and the Measure of American Culpability</strong> - Watch highlights from the latest New Yorker Live, where writers and editors considered the chaotic U.S. withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-yorker-live-the-future-of-afghanistan">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Labour Party Is Britain’s Lost Opposition</strong> - Boris Johnson’s government has been a reckless failure, but Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, hasn’t offered a convincing alternative. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/the-labour-party-is-britains-lost-opposition">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>How Texas Abortion Volunteers Are Adapting After S.B. 8</strong> - In addition to helping people get to abortion appointments out of state, volunteer groups have been inundated with requests to deliver Plan B pills and pregnancy tests. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-activism/how-texas-abortion-volunteers-are-adapting-after-sb-8">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>“Titane,” Reviewed: The Body Horror of Family Life</strong> - In Julia Ducournau’s bold vision, a serial killer who’s impregnated by a Cadillac is at the center of a fireman’s crisis of paternity. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/titane-reviewed-the-body-horror-of-family-life">link</a></p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>The great book shortage of 2021, explained</strong> -
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<figure>
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<img alt="The interior of a bookstore with stacks of books on tables and on shelves." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oUxcAZYKinziV76eWygZeEcQQCs=/281x0:4757x3357/1310x983/cdn.vox-
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cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69958543/1298828367.0.jpg"/>
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<figcaption>
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A Barnes & Noble in Concord, California, in 2019. | Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Demand for books is way up this year. Supplies are way, way down.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fj99Vj">
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If there’s a particular book you’ve got your eye on for the holidays, it’s best to order it now. <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22650965/supply-chain-
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delays-2021-ongoing">The problems with the supply chain</a> are coming for books, too.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BNsPnM">
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“Think of the inputs that go into a book,” says Matt Baehr, executive director of the Book Manufacturers’ Institute. “There’s paper, there’s ink, and there’s getting the book from point A to point B. All of those things are affected.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="egWk06">
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The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21509105/back-order-furniture-
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heat-lamps-appliances-supply-chain">exacerbating existing problems in the global supply chain</a> for nearly two years now. Add to that pressure a global labor shortage, a paper shortage, the consolidation of the American printing industry, and an increased demand for books from bored stay-at-homers across the US, and you’re faced with what Baehr says is a “perfect storm” of factors to create what some observers are calling a <a href="https://bestlifeonline.com/book-shortage-news/">book shortage</a>.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KtTAcS">
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However, that doesn’t mean holiday book shoppers will be faced with empty shelves <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-
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goods/2020/10/25/21517545/bookstores-pandemic-booksellers-closing">at their local bookstore</a> come December, cautions Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. “There is no book shortage as such at the moment because the nature of the publishing cycle is that these books are planned many months ahead,” Daunt says.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aSXnkk">
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Most of this fall’s major releases have already been printed or have their printing runs scheduled, and any delays to those scheduled print runs are expected to be minimal. Still, some titles have seen their publication dates bumped by weeks or even months. Of those, some now won’t reach shelves until next year.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sSWzHm">
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The place where readers are most likely to find themselves in a crunch, though, is with surprise bestsellers. Every year, there are books that do much better than either publishers or booksellers expected them to and sell out their initial print runs. Normally when that happens, booksellers immediately order more books, and publishers are able to print those books and ship them out rapidly. In 2021, that’s going to be a lot more difficult. If a publisher unexpectedly sells out of a book early, it may not be able to send new copies to bookstores until well into 2022.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="05g3CV">
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So if there’s a book you’ve got your heart set on reading in print this fall, now is the time to preorder. Otherwise, you might find your heart broken in December.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YzYpBI">
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Here are the major issues leading up to the great book shortage (or, if we are being as pedantic as James Daunt would like, the surprise bestseller shortage) of 2021.
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</p>
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<h3 id="iN6XUC">
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More people are reading books
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rKtTIr">
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According to industry tracker NPD Bookscan, printed book sales have increased 13.2 percent from 2020 to 2021, and 21 percent from 2019 to 2021.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="O2ELnL">
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“Usually a good year means going up maybe 3 or 4 percent,” says NPD books analyst Kristen McLean. “The growth that we saw last year and this year is pretty unprecedented.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2UoRxH">
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McLean says it’s clear that the pandemic is what’s driving the growth in book sales, in part because of what kind of books are selling well and which aren’t. As global lockdowns began in March of 2020, sales of traditionally high-performing categories like self-help books and business books plummeted, while sales of educational books for home-bound kids and first aid books for emergency preppers took off.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8p40qQ">
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Since then, McClean says, book sales have tracked closely to the trends of the quarantine era: a lot of bread books early on, a lot of books on social justice and race in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests, and books on politics during the presidential election season. Then, after the election, sales of adult fiction began to really take off — a trend McLean pointed to as telling.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BGcnw0">
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“That’s one of the things I look at really closely,” McLean says. “When someone buys a nonfiction book, that could be because it’s a reference book, or because they want to understand something that they’ve heard. But when someone buys an adult fiction book, generally that’s for pleasure reading. So that is a good leading indicator that people are really engaging with books.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jjR2Dc">
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Reading is one of the hobbies that people have started to pick up over the course of the pandemic. And overwhelmingly, they’re reading printed books, not ebooks.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kXJlGj">
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“Ebook sales did go up last summer,” McLean allows, noting that many of the social justice titles of the summer, such as Ibram Kendi’s <em>How to Be an Antiracist</em>, rapidly sold out in print, driving readers to ebooks for their immediacy. Generally, however, ebooks are holding steady at just 20 percent of the US market.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3lcc0v">
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“There’s just more people who want to read and prefer reading print,” McLean says.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="obeUGm">
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Most years, the news that more people are reading books would be treated as an unalloyed positive. This year, the increased demand for books is colliding head-on with some major problems throughout the rest of the publishing industry.
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</p>
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<h3 id="FSiXQh">
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It’s getting more complicated (and expensive) to physically make books
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="p9wrPE">
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Paper, ink, and printing presses are all at a premium right now. There’s not enough of any of them, and what we do have costs a lot.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jdf0yN">
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The paper shortage begins with the wood pulp shortage. According to <a href="https://www.sheridan.com/journals-blog/the-scarcity-of-paper-pulp-nonfiction">a report from the printing company Sheridan</a>, the price of wood pulp rose from $700–$750 per metric ton in 2020 to almost $1,200 per metric ton in 2021. Sheridan cites an environmental initiative in China that shut down 279 pulp and paper mills as one of the major drivers behind the spike in pricing, as well as a global backlash against plastic and the rush to replace plastic products with paper alternatives.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jcHolC">
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Meanwhile, with shoppers increasingly ordering products online, the price of cardboard in which to ship goods has gone up with demand. So paper factories have begun to invest more in producing cardboard, shifting their resources away from making book-grade paper in the process.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AnCTCF">
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“You have a combination of both fewer mills producing book paper and greater demand for wood pulp elsewhere, so that there is both a price and availability issue,” explains Brian O’Leary, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="muzMuf">
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A shortage of raw materials is also wreaking havoc in the inks market. According to <a href="https://www.reportlinker.com/p06018799/Printing-Inks-Global-Market-Report-COVID-19-Impact-and-Recovery-
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to.html?utm_source=GNW">a report by the Business Research Company</a>, the same Chinese environmental initiative that led to a shortage of wood pulp has also led to decreased availability of resins, monomers, photo initiators, oligomers, and additives. Moreover, ink manufacturers are rapidly consolidating. All of these issues combined means ink prices are steadily rising.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OE4oeW">
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Printing presses, meanwhile, are scrambling. The cause dates back more than a decade. In 2008, presses faced what appeared to be an existential crisis: the Great Recession on the one hand and the advent of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader on the other. Many in the industry predicted that printed books would soon be obsolete, and companies began to de-invest in printing books.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7U5Zwz">
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Instead, demand for print books has steadily climbed after a drop in 2008, and printers have not kept up.
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</p>
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<aside id="6yxbRv">
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<div>
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</div>
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</aside>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="u510tY">
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Most book printing happens in the US. Books with heavy color printing, like picture books, are sent to China, but in order to keep the cost of shipping low, most publishers do the rest of their printing domestically. That’s getting more and more difficult to manage.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cZucCu">
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Until 2018, there were three major printing presses in the US. Then one of them, the 125-year-old company Edwards Brothers Malloy, closed. The remaining big two, Quad and LSC, attempted to merge in 2020, but then the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit. Quad responded by getting out of the book business entirely; LSC filed for bankruptcy and sold off a number of its presses. Smaller printers have continued to operate, but the infrastructure to keep up with the demand for printed books in North America is in shambles.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RAe5Yn">
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So if demand is up, why are so many printers shutting down?
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I53kD0">
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Part of the issue is that printers find themselves squeezed by Amazon in both directions. As a major book buyer, Amazon has a lot of leverage to negotiate on price, allowing it to purchase its books from publishers at very low cost. Publishers pass the resulting losses along to their printing presses. Following the rules of capitalism, printing presses would like to pass the loss along to their workers in turn — but in the rural distribution regions where most of these presses operate, the other major employer is Amazon warehouses. And Amazon has set the floor for wages at $15 per hour.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vNJDB5">
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“I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing,” O’Leary says. “But you’re competing for labor.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yg8DQa">
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The labor shortage also means that even when printers raise their wages, they don’t have anyone to hire. The industry is chronically understaffed. “Printers, binders, the true book manufacturers, they could all hire an additional 10 to 20 percent of their current workforce without even batting an eye,” says Baehr.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iVLG1U">
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Meanwhile, very few new players are entering the game. Part of the reason is that it costs a lot of money upfront to enter the industry. “It’s a capital-intensive business, printing,” says O’Leary. “You have to spend from several million to more than $10 million on a printing press, and you generally amortize that over a long period of time.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="USUrWK">
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So right now, publishers and printing companies have to pay more for the paper that makes up any given book, more for the ink that prints the words in the book, more for the time at a printing company to get the book printed, and more for the labor to staff the press to get the book produced.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sOwc8b">
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Then come the problems with shipping.
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</p>
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<h3 id="4gGef2">
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It’s getting harder to ship books
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mKmCvz">
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Right now, distribution networks across the world are massively congested.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="k4KehE">
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“Los Angeles — which is a major port of entry for the United States — New York, and New Jersey are all pretty full up,” says O’Leary. “We’re hearing reports of delays of weeks for getting things cleared.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="a8RtOS">
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“Containers are not moving out of ports and onto trains quickly enough,” explains Chris Tang, a UCLA business professor specializing in global supply chain management. “And on top of that, all of the warehouses in the Midwest are full. So everything is stuck.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iezmrK">
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An increase in online shipping in part of what’s driving the congestion. Meanwhile, the complications of <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2019/1/23/18194235/brexit-no-deal-sony-dyson-economy">Brexit</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/4/2/22364278/suez-canal-ship-effects-ever-given-supply-chain">the internet’s beloved container ship Ever Given</a> — both of which dramatically disrupted global supply chains — certainly aren’t helping ports empty themselves out faster.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="F7nLi9">
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Even more pressing, however, is a shortage of truck drivers. There just aren’t enough trucks on the road to pick up as much stuff as we’re currently shipping around the world. “We’re talking tens of thousands fewer truck drivers than we need,” says O’Leary.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RzVDlV">
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And as stuff sits in warehouses, waiting to be picked up by increasingly scarce truck drivers, the price of storage goes up, adding to overall shipping costs. “It used to be around $3,000 per container,” Tang says. “Now the price is closer to $20,000.” The skyrocketing costs mean that companies selling luxury goods will take more warehouse slots, since they can afford them, while lower-priced goods, like books, compete for what’s left.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="t5y2Of">
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Barnes & Noble CEO Daunt notes that books do have one big advantage over other goods when it comes to shipping: They’re durable. “The reality is that books are fantastic because they don’t really perish, so you’re able to print lots of them in advance,” he says. “They’re incredibly robust, so you can send them through the most basic of supply chain routes. They’re not strawberries or peaches or delicate things.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WyzYjJ">
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But right now, even the most basic of supply chain routes are finding themselves overwhelmed.
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</p>
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<h3 id="4TGrcM">
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Underlying all these issues is the increasingly dire labor shortage
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TPixa1">
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One of the big underlying problems when it comes to printing and shipping books is <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22673353/unemployment-job-search-linkedin-indeed-algorithm">the same labor shortage</a> that’s currently roiling the rest of the country. There aren’t enough press operators to get books printed, and then there aren’t enough truck drivers to get them to bookstores. <a href="https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/wages-keep-rising-as-employers-
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try-to-lure-reluctant-americans-back-to-work-66450379">Wages have gone up</a>, but there still aren’t enough people working.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EGl7OZ">
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“In the whole national workforce, you’ve got <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf">8.4 million unemployed</a> but <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm">10.9 million open jobs</a>,” says Baehr. “That’s a two and a half million-person shortage, period, and that’s across all buckets. The book industry is getting hit with that just as much as the paper industry is getting hit with that just as much as the transportation industry is getting hit with that. It all just compounds on itself. It’s just a rough spot right now for the book business.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EEfRpy">
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“Simply put, the working-age population in the US has stopped growing,” says Gad Levanon, founder of the Labor Market Institute. “And the working-age population without a BA is shrinking quite rapidly.” That’s a major issue for the industries we’re discussing here because in general, people with college degrees prefer not to work in warehouses, as truck drivers, or in printing presses.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="icxcRV">
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The pandemic has only exacerbated this issue. As Covid-19 spread, many people preferred not to work in the close quarters of a factory or warehouse, or in a job that required as much in-person interaction as making deliveries. They were also likely to want to stay home to care for their now home-bound children. For a while, enhanced unemployment benefits meant that it was even financially possible for people to do so. Some older workers simply retired early.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7MvDvl">
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Levanon expects the labor force to increase slightly this fall as enhanced unemployment benefits expire and children return to in-person school. But he says that in the long term, the US labor force will continue to shrink for the next decade.
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</p>
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<h3 id="jExwfz">
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Where do we go from here?
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="F3xGzG">
|
||
So should we all be worried about the long-term destruction of our book-producing ecosystem?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tiQEMQ">
|
||
Yes and no.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="bQGQdF">
|
||
Chris Tang projects that shipping congestion will ease in early 2022, after Chinese New Year. “Demand will come back down after the holiday season,” he says. “In Asia they do a big push to produce everything before the Chinese New Year because that’s when all the factories will close for one month. So in that case, after that they will clear the old backlog.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="X7JrX4">
|
||
In the long term, it’s likely that as current agreements between printers and publishers expire, the printers will begin to charge publishers more for their services to better manage the rising costs of paper, ink, and labor. At that point, book prices will likely go up. No one is entirely certain what that increase will do to the book retail market, but it’s unlikely that demand will keep scaling up indefinitely.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eStmrC">
|
||
“I think it would be very hard for 2022 to match what we’ve done this year and last year, just because it’s so unusually high,” says Kristen McLean. “But these days you can never be sure, right? It’s been such a roller coaster for us that the market could surprise me again.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uKIpHx">
|
||
Levanon argues that to end its labor shortage, the US will need to do more than raise wages. “Before the pandemic, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/18/18270916/labor-shortage-workers-us">when there was also a shortage</a>, we saw a large increase in the labor force participation of demographic groups that are less connected to the labor market,” he says. “The best example was Latina women. Their labor force participation increased dramatically. So attracting more people from groups that are less connected to the labor market and increasing immigration would help.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Wvs8zb">
|
||
Increased automation is another possible way to ease the labor crunch, and some tech groups are hopeful that automation could solve the truck driver shortage on its own. But <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-
|
||
goods/22557895/automation-robots-work-amazon-uber-lyft">automation comes with its own problems</a>. “Putting 40 thousand pounds worth of books on an automated truck and hoping they get to New York without killing somebody?” says O’Leary. “Not a big fan.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yjgLL1">
|
||
“If it was easier to automate the job,” Levanon agrees, “they probably would have done it already.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QxfWKn">
|
||
This holiday season, bookstores will be able to mostly fill their orders. However, O’Leary warns, “you might see that there’s a hair cut across the top.” Publishers may only be able to print, say, 70 percent of the copies they’d like to print of any given book, and in that case they’d only sell booksellers 70 percent of their ideal order.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="W0AhFB">
|
||
“If you really want a book, order it early or buy it early if you can,” says O’Leary. “Because if it gets hot, it’s going to be hard to replace.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SCxtgX">
|
||
Daunt suggests not getting too attached to any particular title, noting that on the whole, there are still more than enough books to go around. “The thing for bookshops is, we’re amped for books,” he says. “So if we don’t have one book for you, we’ve definitely got plenty of other alternatives to suggest.”
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>The Supreme Court confronts the CIA’s worst-kept secret</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JbXqahhCp1gp0fUjO-
|
||
eN852R8SA=/171x0:2838x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-
|
||
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69958420/GettyImages_520956554_copy.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
The Supreme Court will hear a case about a man who was falsely accused of being a member of al-Qaeda and tortured by the CIA. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Can America’s legacy of torture be a “state secret” if it isn’t even a secret?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uewY2G">
|
||
<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/united-states-v-abu-
|
||
zubaydah/"><em>United States v. Zubaydah</em></a>, which the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday, is a case about a man who was tortured by the CIA over an intelligence failure. It’s also a case about one of the US intelligence community’s worst-kept secrets.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gGksD2">
|
||
Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (often referred to as “Abu Zubaydah”) is a Palestinian man who is currently held at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After he was captured in Pakistan in 2002, American officials concluded that Zubaydah was one of al-Qaeda’s top leaders, and he was <a href="https://casetext.com/case/husayn-v-mitchell">repeatedly waterboarded</a>, locked in a tiny coffin-sided box for hundreds of hours, denied sleep, and forced to remain in “stress positions,” among other abusive interrogation tactics — all in a vain effort to extract information that Zubaydah never possessed.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FeN0KB">
|
||
In 2006, the CIA formally concluded that it had made a mistake. Zubaydah, according to the agency, “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-
|
||
captured-tortured-and-cleared-abu-zubaydah-hes-still-in-gitmo">was not a member of al Qaeda</a>.” He has never been charged with a crime, but nevertheless remains a prisoner at Gitmo. According to his lawyers, Zubaydah cannot even testify in any legal proceeding regarding his torture, “because the Government summarily decided nearly twenty years ago that he would <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-827/187427/20210813121611737_20-827%20Respondent%20Brief.pdf">remain incommunicado for the rest of his life</a>” — a decision that is <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf">confirmed by internal CIA communications from 2002</a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LkHU4D">
|
||
None of the most important facts regarding Zubaydah’s detention and torture can reasonably be disputed. In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a lengthy report detailing the CIA’s use of torture. Although the full report is classified, Zubaydah’s name <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf">appears 1,343 times</a> in an unclassified “executive summary” of that report and its accompanying documents.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EXU71e">
|
||
Among other things, this summary reveals that Zubaydah “became ‘completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth’” during a waterboarding session.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div class="c-float-right">
|
||
<figure class="e-image">
|
||
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xaLdsIu9WF4zBAtNo7378sBqPWA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-
|
||
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22903512/113147207.jpg"/> <cite>Department of Defense/Tribune News Service via Getty Images</cite>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, is imprisoned at Guantanamo and was falsely accused of being a member of al-Qaeda.
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9HjomH">
|
||
There is overwhelming evidence that, for at least part of his ordeal, Zubaydah was held at a secret CIA facility in Poland. In 2015, the European Court of Human Rights determined that <a href="https://casetext.com/case/husayn-v-mitchell">Zubaydah was held at such a facility in Poland</a> from December 2002 until September 2003. Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the former Polish president who was in office during this period, admitted in 2012 that the Polish government “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-827/187427/20210813121611737_20-827%20Respondent%20Brief.pdf">agreed to the intelligence cooperation with the Americans</a>,” though he claimed that “we did not have knowledge of any torture.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="z1rg6V">
|
||
Yet the primary issue in <em>Zubaydah</em> is whether the United States can claim that Zubaydah’s torture and his detention at a CIA facility in Poland are “state secrets” that can be kept from Polish prosecutors investigating whether any Polish nationals were complicit.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5fR0uB">
|
||
In 2010, Zubaydah’s lawyers and several human rights groups filed a criminal complaint in Poland seeking an investigation into any Polish officials who contributed to Zubaydah’s detention and torture. Initially, this complaint proved fruitless, but after the European Court of Human Rights determined that “the treatment to which [he] was subjected by the CIA during his detention in Poland … <a href="https://casetext.com/case/husayn-v-mitchell">amount[ed] to torture</a>,” Polish prosecutors reopened their investigation.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JQ5kC8">
|
||
To aid this investigation, Zubaydah’s lawyers asked a US court to compel the testimony of two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who helped develop the torture techniques used on Zubaydah and other detainees<strong> </strong>— Mitchell and Jessen’s company was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/cia-paid-torture-teachers-more-80-million-n264756">paid $81 million by the CIA</a> to devise and oversee the agency’s use of torture. Zubaydah’s lawyers also seek documents from Mitchell and Jessen related to their client’s torture.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="s4zUU6">
|
||
A federal appeals court held that at least some of the information sought by these attorneys should be made available to them. Although the Supreme Court has long held that the federal government may prevent private parties from obtaining information that, “<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/1">in the interest of national security, should not be divulged</a>,” the appeals court reasoned that the government cannot hide information that is already public.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="i1l1Gi">
|
||
“<a href="https://casetext.com/case/husayn-v-mitchell">In order to be a ‘state secret,’ a fact must first be a ‘secret,’</a>” Judge Richard Paez wrote in a fairly nuanced opinion laying out the process a trial court should use in determining what information about Zubaydah’s detention and torture may be disclosed to his lawyers — and, ultimately, to Polish investigators.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aJ7LAY">
|
||
The federal government, meanwhile, has taken the firm position that nothing may be disclosed. Even if many of the facts about Zubaydah’s torture are widely known, the government argues in its brief, “first-hand evidence from Mitchell and Jessen would <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-827/183172/20210702181407431_20-827tsUnited%20States.pdf">confirm or deny the accuracy of existing public speculation</a> and risk significant harm to the national security.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8P2qVZ">
|
||
The government is so committed to its position that many publicly available facts cannot be confirmed that its brief even suggests that some of the information confirming that Zubaydah was tortured, and that he was detained in Poland, may be some kind of elaborate false flag. “Intelligence officers routinely deploy tradecraft to cloak the true nature of their activities and misdirect attention,” the brief explains. And thus, it claims that “public information” about Zubaydah “can be of uncertain reliability.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3Wlj7z">
|
||
So the Supreme Court must dive into the rabbit hole that is the <em>Zubaydah</em> case, with the United States unwilling to admit many facts that it cannot reasonably deny.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="meBzJ4">
|
||
The “state secrets” doctrine, briefly explained
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QWHC0g">
|
||
Some information presents such a genuine threat to national security that it should not be disclosed, even if a litigant would otherwise have a valid claim to it. Imagine, for example, that a party to a lawsuit wanted to know about troop movements in the middle of a war, or if they wanted to see documents that would reveal US diplomats’ bottom line in an ongoing negotiation with a foreign nation.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wyiKxL">
|
||
The seminal case involving federal claims that certain information is a state secret is <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/1"><em>United States v. Reynolds</em></a> (1953). <em>Reynolds</em> involved a lawsuit brought by three widows whose husbands died while they were aboard a test flight of an Air Force bomber that contained secret electronic equipment.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gfw8IJ">
|
||
The widows sought the Air Force’s official report on the accident, but the Air Force refused, claiming that it could not be disclosed “without seriously hampering national security, flying safety and the development of highly technical and secret military equipment.”
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="C7FUrr">
|
||
In agreeing that the government could withhold this report, the Supreme Court announced several principles that guide state secrets cases. Among other things, the Court explained that information should remain a secret when “there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="knEEfJ">
|
||
At the same time, the Supreme Court required the government to clear certain procedural hurdles in order to prevent it from invoking this state secrets privilege too often. Among other things, the government may not claim this privilege unless there is a “formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter.” This senior government official must also engage in “actual personal consideration” of whether the privilege should be invoked — they cannot delegate this task to a subordinate.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KZgGfH">
|
||
The Court noted that the privilege is strongest when a party could obtain the information they seek through other means, and weakest when the opposite is true. “Where there is a strong showing of necessity,” according to <em>Reynolds, “</em>the claim of privilege should not be lightly accepted.” Nevertheless, the Court added that “even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that military secrets are at stake.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BREdXR">
|
||
Though the Supreme Court did not make this point explicitly in <em>Reynolds</em>, the judiciary is often in a position of weakness when the government claims that certain information must remain a state secret. The trial judge in <em>Reynolds</em>, for example, ordered the government to turn over the contested Air Force report so that the judge could review it in private to determine if it contained material that should be withheld. But the government refused to do so.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hWBETF">
|
||
Ultimately, if the federal government simply insists that it will not turn over certain information no matter what, there’s not much that the courts can do.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DegEEP">
|
||
The final chapter of the <em>Reynolds</em> case, moreover, offers a cautionary tale about what can happen if the courts are too quick to trust the government in state secrets cases. When the accident report at the heart of the case was declassified in the 1990s, the public learned that it did not even mention the equipment that the Air Force wanted to keep secret.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uSm3Yp">
|
||
According to a Senate Judiciary Committee report, however, it did “<a href="https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/110th-congress/senate-report/442">contain embarrassing information revealing Government negligence</a> (that the plane lacked standard safeguards to prevent the engine from overheating).”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="RD2Okv">
|
||
What does all of this mean for Zubaydah?
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="92RIE6">
|
||
The factors laid out in <em>Reynolds</em> offer fodder to both parties in the <em>Zubaydah</em> case. On the one hand, it’s hard to argue that at least some of the information sought by Zubaydah would “expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged,” when that information is already widely known and was already disclosed in the unclassified summary of a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Re3Kqk">
|
||
At the same time, it’s unclear that Zubaydah can make a “strong showing of necessity.” Why does he need Mitchell and Jessen to reveal information that is already in the public record?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Ye91sW">
|
||
Judge Paez’s opinion for the appeals court drew a line between information that is already known and information that remains secret. Some of the information sought by Zubaydah, Paez’s court ruled, such as “the identities of foreign nationals who work with the CIA,” <a href="https://casetext.com/case/husayn-v-mitchell">should not be disclosed</a> because doing so “risks damaging the intelligence relationship [between the United States and Poland] and compromising current and future counterterrorism operations.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hLkiop">
|
||
At the same time, already-public information such as “the fact that the CIA operated a detention facility in Poland in the early 2000s; information about the use of interrogation techniques and conditions of confinement in that detention facility; and details of Abu Zubaydah’s treatment there” could potentially be disclosed — although, even under Paez’s opinion, it’s not clear if Zubaydah is entitled to any of the information he seeks.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JkulHr">
|
||
If a trial judge determines that there is no way to reveal the less sensitive information sought by Zubaydah without also disclosing genuine state secrets, then, under Paez’s approach, all of the information should be suppressed.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8DEvqJ">
|
||
At this point, you may be wondering what all this means. Frankly, it is unclear what’s actually at stake in this case, at least for Zubaydah, if the only information he’ll be able to obtain is stuff that is already available to the public.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sWD4fl">
|
||
But even if Zubaydah has little chance of walking away with much new information about who is responsible for his torture, the case could have profound implications for future cases where the government wishes to keep certain information secret.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rt48UF">
|
||
The federal government seeks an extraordinary level of judicial docility whenever it raises a state secrets claim. Its brief is gravid with phrases like “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-827/183172/20210702181407431_20-827tsUnited%20States.pdf">utmost deference</a>,” and suggests that only executive branch “officials possess ‘the necessary expertise’ to make the required ‘[p]redictive judgment’ about risks to the national security.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UZTOPz">
|
||
These are not frivolous arguments. The Court has historically warned judges against intruding too far into questions of foreign policy or national security — although the Court’s current 6-3 conservative majority has <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/8/24/22640424/supreme-court-remain-in-mexico-trump-biden-samuel-alito-immigration">not always heeded these warnings</a> since Democratic President Joe Biden took office.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xxrILR">
|
||
But, as the Court emphasized in <em>Reynolds</em>, “a complete abandonment of judicial control <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/1">would lead to intolerable abuses</a>.” Imagine a world where the government can commit any atrocity, then keep the truth of that atrocity secret forever.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="95rhvj">
|
||
This is why state secrets cases are hard. They require judges, often acting on imperfect information, to make difficult choices about when the interests of justice overcome fears about national security.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GQvMSL">
|
||
But <em>Zubaydah</em> also isn’t a typical state secrets case. It’s a case about whether the government will reveal horrible truths that are already largely known.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><strong>Self-driving cars: The 21st-century trolley problem</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="Tesla CEO Elon Musk exits a Tesla." src="https://cdn.vox-
|
||
cdn.com/thumbor/Y5PvmmFU3TBvxiqfXtCQre58GrU=/313x0:5312x3749/1310x983/cdn.vox-
|
||
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69958288/GettyImages_1233947645.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
Tesla and Waymo have similar goals — safely transporting people — but totally different ways of getting there. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Autonomous tech could lead to deaths at the hands of robots. But is continuing to let humans drive even worse?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p class="p--has-dropcap" data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OLj5Jw">
|
||
Last year saw a <a href="https://www.vox.com/22675358/us-car-deaths-year-traffic-covid-pandemic">jump in the number of car fatalities</a>, even as the pandemic kept many Americans off the roads. The number of deaths per 100 million miles driven grew 24 percent from a year earlier. It was the <a href="https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estimated-to-be-
|
||
highest">biggest single-year rise</a> on record — and 2021 is on track to be just as bad. At the same time, the promise of autonomous cars has never been closer. Waymo and Tesla are continually improving their autonomous capabilities, drawing the tantalizing prospect of markedly less human suffering ever nearer. But getting to that future is complicated.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="07ywDu">
|
||
The decision to switch to autonomous vehicles presents a very modern take on an old ethical dilemma: the famed trolley problem.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hAdLhl">
|
||
This thought experiment involves a trolley car driver on a collision course with a group of pedestrians. The driver can do nothing and kill several people on the track ahead or take action, switching tracks so that just one person dies. These days, doing nothing means that about <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries">1.3 million people</a> will die each year globally in regular car accidents, the leading cause of death in people under 30. Switching tracks would involve more rapidly developing and adopting autonomous vehicles that could eventually prevent thousands of deaths per day. The problem is that the technology has a long way to go before it can drive people safely on its own in everyday conditions. In the meantime, it could lead to deaths at the hands of robots, if not humans.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Eo0Zce">
|
||
Waymo and Tesla are at the forefront of the driverless car push and thus have a front seat to this dilemma. Both have similar goals — to safely transport people in autonomous vehicles — but they are operating with wildly different strategies.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3UhkDw">
|
||
Waymo, which shares a parent company with Google, is slowly and methodically rolling out its autonomous vehicles in the form of a robo-taxi service. The company boasts it has logged well over 20 million miles of autonomous driving without a single death. But currently, regular people can only ride in one of several hundred Waymo vehicles, in sunny Phoenix. <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/30/22702962/cruise-waymo-california-dmv-autonomous-vehicle-
|
||
permit">Last week</a>, the company got permission to launch its taxi service (with a human monitor behind the wheel) in a second city — San Francisco — where hills, weather, and traffic complicate the task. The company eventually plans to launch in other cities and license its automated driver technology to car manufacturers. But Waymo doesn’t know when that will happen because, as its co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told Kara Swisher at the September 2021 Code Conference, the company is “in the process of learning.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1XMNf7">
|
||
“It’s, I would say, the engineering challenge of our generation. That’s what’s taking it so long,” Mawakana said. “Safety takes time.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div id="WKJLJX">
|
||
<div class="volume-video" id="volume-placement-111">
|
||
|
||
</div></div></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xpBRqy">
|
||
In the meantime, people will continue to die in car accidents, with <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13069a-ads2.0_090617_v9a_tag.pdf">94 percent of fatal car crashes caused by human error</a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yEIwbk">
|
||
Tesla, on the other hand, has rolled out autonomous features much more quickly. In September, Tesla CEO <a href="https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-fsd-schedule-beta-request-
|
||
button/">Elon Musk announced</a> that drivers with a record of safe driving and who paid for the feature could request permission to beta test its “Full Self-Driving” technology. It includes more advanced driver assistance features<strong> </strong>than Autopilot, Tesla’s existing semi-autonomous feature, which helps drivers steer, brake, and accelerate within a lane.<strong> </strong>The company <a href="https://www.tesla.com/autopilot">claims</a> that the hardware — but not the software, which is still being tested — in new Teslas is capable of “full self-driving in almost all circumstances” and is “designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.” According to the <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-
|
||
safety">National Highway Traffic Safety Administration</a> (NHTSA), there are currently no fully automated or self- driving cars for sale, and such technology is years away.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4eKBX7">
|
||
The head of the National Transportation Safety Board <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-push-to-expand-teslas-driver-assistance-to-cities-rankles-
|
||
a-top-safety-authority-11632043803">has said</a> that Tesla should fix existing safety deficiencies before rolling out the new tech. Meanwhile, other Tesla critics say that names like “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” cause people to place <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/business/tesla-autopilot-accident.html">more faith in the technology than they should</a>, erroneously taking their hands off the wheel or not paying attention.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GdWvER">
|
||
This dissonance has resulted in tragedy. In August, the NHTSA opened a formal investigation into Autopilot after crashes involving Teslas and emergency vehicles (<a href="https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INIM-PE21020-84913P.pdf">12 so far</a>). The agency has also opened special investigations into accidents suspected to have happened while advanced driver assistance systems were engaged and which have resulted in 12 deaths.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qtOhhT">
|
||
Musk maintains that, despite the deaths, these cars are <a href="https://thedriven.io/2021/04/19/tesla-says-autopilot-nearly-10x-safer-than-
|
||
average-car-as-two-die-in-texas/">10 times safer</a> than regular cars.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YPzdRO">
|
||
“Even if you, for argument’s sake, reduce fatalities by 90 percent with autonomy, the 10 percent that do die with autonomy are still gonna sue you,” Musk told Swisher at Code. “The 90 percent that are living don’t even know that that’s the reason they’re alive.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div id="dIVIer">
|
||
<div class="volume-video" id="volume-placement-53">
|
||
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8LbHFr">
|
||
There’s some truth to that. By taking humans out of the equation, autonomous cars have the potential to save lives and alleviate incalculable social and economic losses. As <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety">NHTSA put it</a>, “Fully automated vehicles that can see more and act faster than human drivers could greatly reduce errors, the resulting crashes, and their toll.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lrTXcp">
|
||
The key is getting to that future quickly without jeopardizing it by causing the very harm you’re attempting to stop.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="mJC0fN">
|
||
Two roads traveled
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wG8fUD">
|
||
If the goal is to get autonomous driving assistance to the masses, Tesla is closer. If the goal is to have cars that safely drive themselves, Waymo is winning.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NAG0Hz">
|
||
“Tesla is doing high-altitude flights or near- space flights, and Waymo is landing on the moon,” Mike Ramsey, vice president at research firm Gartner, told Recode. “One is trying to achieve something that’s far harder to do than the other. But that’s not to say that the high-altitude flights can’t keep getting higher and higher.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RGg7Qx">
|
||
In other words, while Tesla probably won’t be delivering a fully autonomous vehicle anytime soon — despite its misleading naming — it could incrementally get better and better assistance features that would eventually lead to true self-driving capabilities.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WW3Bzi">
|
||
Tesla vehicles are considered to be at level 2 on the <a href="https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update">engineering society SAE International’s automation scale</a>. That means Tesla’s system requires<strong> </strong>constant driver supervision, even if the assistance features are handling some of the steering and braking. Waymo vehicles are level 4, meaning the car can drive itself under limited geographic conditions and doesn’t need driver supervision. However, the technology that powers them is not ready for mass-market use outside of its test areas.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="k4CKhI">
|
||
Waymo’s hardware is much more robust than Tesla’s. It uses several redundant sensor systems, including lidar, radar, and cameras, to create a real-time picture of where it’s operating. The company also <a href="https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-mapping.html">maps</a> areas ahead of time by having human drivers manually drive the vehicles through them. Meanwhile, Tesla vehicles rely exclusively on cameras and ultrasonic sensors.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="quiSB3">
|
||
“The more sensors you have, it adds to the complexity of the system, but it also makes it way safer,” Ramsey said.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="P5h3ML">
|
||
Cameras aren’t as accurate at gauging distance as lidar or radar, and<strong> </strong>their ability to map an area can be impaired by everyday hazards like snow, dust, or darkness. However, cameras are a lot cheaper, and that matters when it comes to getting this technology into consumers’ hands.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="E8vFgd">
|
||
You can purchase a souped-up Model 3 Tesla for around $75,000. However, experts don’t think Tesla vehicles could be fully autonomous with their current hardware, and will likely need to incorporate other technology like lidar to get there. We don’t know the exact price of Waymo vehicles — which are Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar I-Paces outfitted with Waymo’s sensors and autonomous driver tech — but the company’s former CEO <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ceo-says-tesla-is-not-a-competitor-gives-estimated-cost-
|
||
of-autonomous-vehicles/">previously said</a> it “cost no more than a moderately equipped Mercedes S-Class,” which has a price tag of about $180,000. Waymo says its <a href="https://blog.waymo.com/2020/03/introducing-5th-generation-waymo-
|
||
driver.html">costs have come down significantly</a> with the latest generation.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3JgkYi">
|
||
But by selling its vehicles to the general public, Tesla is able to collect lots of real-world driving data that will be useful in helping solve autonomous driving challenges. Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an autonomous vehicle pioneer, calls Tesla’s data collection an “incredible advantage” but warns that data is “part of the answer, but it’s not the entire answer.” Still, he thinks Waymo ought to collect more of it from regular drivers in regular conditions.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AxMUzg">
|
||
“We should be driving them whenever they can drive themselves and, when they do not, humans drive themselves,” Rajkumar said. “And for a time we collect experience. We understand what works, what does not work, and we refine.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QJs6OI">
|
||
Tesla’s relatively wide reach also means rolling out a truly autonomous vehicle, when they eventually make one, will be a lot easier.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="58ZKH7">
|
||
“Tesla’s strategy is interesting because, if it works, it could be a lot more scalable. They could launch a lot faster in other cities than their competitors could,” Tasha Keeney, an analyst at Ark Invest, which has a large stake in Tesla, said. Keeney said a faster rollout of autonomous vehicles will hasten a safer driving future, but it won’t be without cost.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="M0O4zu">
|
||
“Are computers better than humans at driving? I think yes,” she said. “Will there be mistakes along the way? Yes.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="8fEL7L">
|
||
What’s next for autonomous vehicles?
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6gArPA">
|
||
Experts estimate that we could have level 3 or 4 cars for sale within the next 10 years. But in the meantime, it’s important not to overlook the benefits that the pursuit of autonomous cars has already wrought. Cars will soon be able to reliably take over in some instances, say, on the highway — where the lanes are clearly marked and the rules are pretty clear — but humans might take over on city streets.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Fxlob7">
|
||
Already a number of advanced driver assistance features are showing up on regular vehicles. Automatic emergency braking, technology that automatically slows or stops the car before it hits an object, has been shown to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7037779/">reduce injuries and fatalities</a> and will be standard on most vehicles sold in the US next year. Consumers can expect more of these features to spill over from the quest for autonomous vehicles in the next few years.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OGLNsw">
|
||
“We should all stop thinking in terms of something magical will happen and all of a sudden cars will become self-driving,” Rajkumar said. Rather, the shift will happen feature by feature, after many tests and improvements. “That last change will be so incremental you won’t be able to realize it happened over the last five to 10 years.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Wo1QoX">
|
||
When cars do become fully autonomous, there are also benefits beyond safe driving. Keeney said autonomous technology would also greatly reduce the cost of travel because of cars’ increased utilization as taxis, without the expense of a driver. “It’ll give a lot of people access to very inexpensive point-to-point travel, which could totally change our lives and how we get around.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MaenHg">
|
||
In the meantime, perhaps the path forward for self-driving cars isn’t a binary choice at all. We’ll likely see a spectrum of improvements from many car companies as they incorporate more and more driver assistance features. And although in the near term the tech might not be the self-driving future we were promised, it will be better than nothing.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DSXdxI">
|
||
“We should not lose sight of the benefits the technology can bring,” Rajkumar said. “It takes time, but we’ll eventually get there.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Sri Lanka women’s cricket tour to Pakistan postponed</strong> - The three-match ODI series until October 29 would have been the first ever tour of Pakistan by Sri Lanka women for a bilateral series.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>India sweeps FIH annual awards; men’s Olympic champion Belgium says this is not normal</strong> - Hockey Belgium reacted sharply to the announcement of the winners and questioned the process as none of their Tokyo Games champions managed to win an award.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>We will go all out in T20 series, need to win it at any cost: Harmanpreet</strong> - Harmanpreet missed both the ODIs and Test due to a thumb injury and having recovered now, she is desperate to draw the curtains on the Australia tour with a rare series win under her belt</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>England committed to Ashes after Root confirms participation</strong> - Aaron Finch said he sympathised “fully” with England players’ concerns but was glad to hear a resolution had been reached.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>IPL 2021 | Kolkata Knight Riders eyes handsome win over Rajasthan Royals to remain ahead in play-off race</strong> - With 12 points from 13 matches, KKR are currently sitting at the fourth position in the pecking order, just ahead of defending champions Mumbai Indians on net run-rate</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Narendra Dabholkar murder case: Defence counsel refuses to accept prosecution documents</strong> - Narendra Dabholkar, who headed anti-superstition outfit Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, was shot dead in Pune on August 20, 2013, allegedly by members of a right-wing extremist group</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Head Constable with Cyberabad police killed in road accident</strong> - He served in the Department for more than 20 years.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>SC directs full-fledged probe into collusion of Tihar jail officials with ex-Unitech promoters</strong> - The Supreme Court Wednesday directed a full-fledged probe into the collusion of Tihar Jail officials with Unitech’s imprisoned ex-promoters Sanjay an</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Cabinet approves setting up of 7 mega integrated textile region and apparel parks with ₹4,445 crore outlay</strong> - Textiles Minister Piyush Goyal informed about the decision after the Cabinet meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Bengal CM writes to PM: Asks permanent solution to ‘man-made’ Bengal floods</strong> - In a four-page letter sent on Tuesday, the chief minister alleged that the floods were “man-made” and caused by “uncontrolled and unplanned” discharge of water from DVC dams in Jharkhand’s Panchet and Maithon</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Spain rent: Monthly €250 bonus plan for under-35s</strong> - Anyone aged from 18 to 35 would be offered the money to help them leave their parents’ home to rent.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Russia investigates prison torture allegations after videos leaked</strong> - More than a thousand videos that appear to show widespread abuse are leaked to a human rights group.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Slovenia summit: Balkan leaders look to EU to open up club</strong> - After years of delay, Western Balkan states want proof the EU is serious about them joining.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Fishing rights row: France warns that agreements with the UK are at risk</strong> - French PM Jean Castex accuses the UK of not respecting its Brexit deal commitments on fishing.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Chemistry Nobel awarded for mirror-image molecules</strong> - A Briton and a German have been awarded the chemistry Nobel for their work to build new molecules.</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>D-Wave announces new hardware, compiler, and plans for quantum computing</strong> - In addition to its standard roadmap, D-Wave will try building gate-based systems. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801425">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years</strong> - Syniverse and carriers haven’t revealed whether text messages were exposed. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801405">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A civil war is brewing for the Iron Throne in House of the Dragon teaser</strong> - “Dreams didn’t make us kings. Dragons did.” - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801306">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Report: Amazon-designed fridge will use the same tech as Amazon Go stores</strong> - It uses the computer vision tech that enables Amazon stores’ “Just Walk Out.” - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801284">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Physics Nobel goes to complexity, both general and climatic</strong> - An award for understanding complex systems, including the climate. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801216">link</a></p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><strong>A gorilla dies of old age at a zoo right before the zoo opens. It is the only gorilla at the zoo since they are not very profitable.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
|
||
<div class="md">
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
However, the gorilla is their most popular attraction by far, and they can’t afford to go a day without it. So the zoo owner asks one of his workers to wear a gorilla suit they have in storage for an extra $100 a day if he will go in the gorilla cage and pretend to be the gorilla until the zoo can afford a new one.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Quickly, the new “gorilla” becomes the most popular craze at the zoo. People from all over are coming to see the “Human-like” gorilla.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
About a month in, the craze has started to wear off. So, to get peoples’ attention back, he decides to climb over his enclosure and hang from the net ceiling above the lions’ den next to him. A large crowd of people gather watching the spectacle in awe and terror. Suddenly the man loses his grip and falls to the floor of the lion’s den. The man starts screaming “HELP!! HELP!!!” Suddenly a lion pounces him from behind and whispers in his ear, “Shut the fuck up right now or you’re going to get us both fired.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<!--
|
||
SC_ON -->
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/3Vishal"> /u/3Vishal </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2d0s4/a_gorilla_dies_of_old_age_at_a_zoo_right_before/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2d0s4/a_gorilla_dies_of_old_age_at_a_zoo_right_before/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>One day the boss of a company approached his Secretary</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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He said that he wanted to have sex with her. Naturally she said no but the boss responded that he would make it very quick.
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“I’ll throw $1000 on the floor, by the time you bend down and pick it up I’ll be done”
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She thought for a moment, then decided to call her boyfriend and tell him the proposition. Her boyfriend told her to accept the offer but told her
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“Ask him for $2000, bend down and pick it up as fast as you can and he won’t have time to undress himself!”
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She agrees and proposes this to her boss who also agrees. The boyfriend hangs up laughing already thinking what they could do with the money.
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</p>
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Half an hour goes by and the boyfriend has still not heard anything back, so decides to call his girlfriend.
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</p>
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She answers the phone and he asks her what has happened? The girlfriend responded
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“The bastard used coins.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Happy__Emo"> /u/Happy__Emo </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2gjsk/one_day_the_boss_of_a_company_approached_his/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2gjsk/one_day_the_boss_of_a_company_approached_his/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>A man asks a farmer if he can work for a night’s lodging and a meal.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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Farmer gets a knock on his door, it’s a man in his mid-thirties who looks like he’s been traveling a while. The man asks if he could earn a meal and a place to stay for the night.
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“Do you have any skills?” The farmer asks.
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“Well, I do have a rare gift – I can communicate with animals.”
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</p>
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“…sure you can,” the farmer says. “But I like your style. I’ll put you to work.”
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</p>
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So the man does a few chores around the farm and earns his meal. At dinner, he says to the farmer, “I know you don’t believe me, but I actually do communicate with animals. I can prove it. I spoke to the hens, and they said you were there every morning before dawn to collect their eggs, and you’ve been doing so every day for years since your wife passed.”
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</p>
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The farmer says, “Wow, that’s exactly right!”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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The man continues, “I spoke to your cow, and she said you’ve faithfully milked her every day before dawn, and you’ve been doing so every day for years since your wife passed.”
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The farmer says, “I’m amazed. That’s true.”
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</p>
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The man says, “And I spoke to your sheep…”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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“That sheep’s a fucking liar!”
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</p>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Waitsfornoone"> /u/Waitsfornoone </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q20er7/a_man_asks_a_farmer_if_he_can_work_for_a_nights/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q20er7/a_man_asks_a_farmer_if_he_can_work_for_a_nights/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>A woman is walking through the park when she sees a very attractive man sitting on a park bench. He’s reading a book and eating some fruit out of a Tupperware container. Slowly the woman gathers the courage to go ask the man out.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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So, she walks over and takes a seat next to him on the bench, turns to him and says, “Sorry to bother you. I know this may be a little forward but I would love to grab coffee with you some time.” Flattered, the man responds, “Sure… but what makes you so certain you and I would get along so well?”
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</p>
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“Well,” the woman says, “A couple things, actually. I noticed you were wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. Iron Maiden are my favourite band of all time. When they went on their reunion tour in 1999 my parents took me to see them in Cleveland. I was 12 years old, it was the first concert I ever went to. I absolutely love Iron Maiden.”
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</p>
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The man can’t believe it. “I saw them play Cleveland in ‘99! First concert I ever went to on my own. My best friend Jimmy Spitz and I told our parents we were sleeping at each others’ houses, snuck out, took a bus into the city and saw them play at the Plain Dealer Pavillion!” Naturally, they’re both shocked.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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“If that isn’t weird enough,” says the woman, “I noticed you’re reading Mark Twain. I was a communications major in university and I actually wrote my thesis on Mark Twain, how he used satire as a lens to comment on current events of the time, comparing him to satirical news sources of today. He’s my favourite author”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Now the man is really taken aback, “Get out of here. I was an English major in university! I specialized in 19th century American literature, this is like my fourth or fifth time reading Tom Sawyer, I absolutely love Mark Twain.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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They both can’t believe it, this has got to be a match made in heaven.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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“Ok,” the woman says, “well, buckle up because here’s the icing on the cake. I noticed you’re eating a prune. Prunes are my absolute favourite fruit. When I was a kid, my grandfather lived on a farm. He had an orchard that mainly grew apples and some lemons, but he knew how much my sister and I loved prunes so he kept a couple of plum trees. Every year at the end of the summer, we’d go up and harvest the plums with him. He’d dry them and by the time we’d go back to his place for Thanksgiving he’d always have those prunes saved just for us. They’re my favourite fruit! I love prunes, you’re eating a prune, this has got to be fate. What do you say?”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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The man puts down his fruit and responds,
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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<em>“It’s a date.”</em>
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||
</p>
|
||
</div>
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||
<!-- SC_ON -->
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/3Vishal"> /u/3Vishal </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2d0az/a_woman_is_walking_through_the_park_when_she_sees/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q2d0az/a_woman_is_walking_through_the_park_when_she_sees/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>My wife said she was going to come to the Halloween party dressed as our Sex life</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
|
||
<div class="md">
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
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So she didn’t come
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
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<!-- SC_ON -->
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/toothscrew"> /u/toothscrew </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q26x1a/my_wife_said_she_was_going_to_come_to_the/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/q26x1a/my_wife_said_she_was_going_to_come_to_the/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
|
||
</ul>
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