Saturday, May 18

Tag: essential

Essential To Keeping Capitalism From Crashing – Wall Street Isn’t Just A Casino Where Traders Can Bet On GameStop And Other Stocks
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

Essential To Keeping Capitalism From Crashing – Wall Street Isn’t Just A Casino Where Traders Can Bet On GameStop And Other Stocks

Shares of GameStop and other companies or assets that shot up in value in recent weeks are now dropping like stones. While I feel sorry for the many investors who will likely lose a lot of money, the stocks’ return to Earth is actually a good thing – if you want to avoid financial meltdown to the long list of crises the U.S. is facing. The reason has to do with what financial markets are – and what they are not – as well as what happens when prices of stocks and other securities become untethered from the fundamental value of the assets they’re meant to represent. As a finance professor who does research on how markets respond to new information, I believe it is important to maintain a close link between security prices and fundamentals. When that stops happening, a market collapse may b...
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LA’s Office Of Immigrant Affairs Aims To Help Immigrant Business Owners And Essential Workers Affected by COVID
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COVID-19

LA’s Office Of Immigrant Affairs Aims To Help Immigrant Business Owners And Essential Workers Affected by COVID

Seville Dry Cleaners is in Huntington Park, a working class, heavily Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles County. A hair salon and a dental clinic sit on either side of the building, and across the street is a large United States post office. Pre-COVID, these businesses helped to draw foot traffic to the area. But since Californians have had to shelter in place, the once bustling street has gone quiet. Isabel Delgadillo, who opened Seville with her husband in the early 1990s after immigrating from Mexico, estimated their income has dropped by 40%. “There are no clients,” Delgadillo says, adding that she’s worried because the business is the only source of income for her family. L.A. County has more than 3.6 million immigrants, a third of the population, according to a recent report from th...
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Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads

Intense wildfires are raging in California, Oregon and Washington state, spurring mass evacuations and leaving charred towns in their wake. A regional heat wave is keeping temperatures high and humidity low, creating difficult conditions for firefighters. These five articles from The Conversation’s archive explain what’s driving Western fires and how they’re affecting residents. 1. Welcome to the Pyrocene Age Many factors have combined to create conditions for today’s epic wildfires, including climate change, land use patterns and decades of fire suppression. Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, argues that Earth may be “entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lak...
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Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts
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Journalism

Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts

The big idea Black and Latino essential workers are more likely to feel stressed over job safety and security as well as family pressures than white workers, according to a recent survey of essential workers we conducted in Massachusetts, among them doctors, sanitation workers and grocery employees. Specifically, 70% of Black workers and 78% who are Latino reported that they didn’t feel safe on the job, compared with 58% of white people. This is not simply because Latino and Black workers were more likely to be in low-wage jobs. When we analyzed low-wage workers separately, Latino and Black people in this group were still far more likely to feel unsafe in the pandemic than their white counterparts. We found that access to benefits on the job is critical to maintaining personal and famil...
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Low-wage essential workers get less protection against coronavirus – and less information about how it spreads
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COVID-19, WORK

Low-wage essential workers get less protection against coronavirus – and less information about how it spreads

Low-wage essential workers are more likely to face dangerous working conditions and food insecurity than high-wage workers, even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research provides some of the first data on the safety of essential workers during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that COVID-19 is not the “great equalizer,” as Andrew Cuomo once called it. In fact, inequality is getting worse. We found that across income levels, roughly two-thirds of essential workers were unable to practice social distancing. Low-wage essential workers include grocery clerks, home health aides and delivery drivers, while high-wage workers include nurses, doctors and managers. However, low-wage workers were two to three times more likely than high-wage workers – workers earning over US$40/hour – ...
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We call workers ‘essential’ – but is that just referring to the work, not the people?
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

We call workers ‘essential’ – but is that just referring to the work, not the people?

By this point in the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve probably heard a lot about “essential workers.” They’re the people working in hospitals and grocery stores, on farms and in meatpacking plants. They’re keeping public transit, shipping and utilities running. But is “essential” describing the workers themselves? Or only the work they do? Right now, many don’t feel like they’re being treated like they’re essential, and workers at Amazon, Walmart and other companies have organized strikes to protest unsafe working conditions. There seems to be a disconnect between how some low-wage workers are being described and what they’re experiencing on the ground. As an expert in sociolinguistics, I can’t stress enough the importance of framing – how we emphasize perspectives and priorities through o...
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In the rush to innovate for COVID-19 drugs, sound science is still essential
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

In the rush to innovate for COVID-19 drugs, sound science is still essential

Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have been at the center of debate in recent weeks over which drugs should be used to treat COVID-19. Neither product has strong evidence to support use for this purpose, and small studies reported to date have either had significant flaws or failed to demonstrate effect. Nonetheless, the president can’t seem to stop pushing them, arguing that patients have nothing to lose. As physicians, bioethicists and drug law experts, we have a responsibility to inject caution here. As public officials and scientists rush to innovate, no one should overlook the critical role of strong regulatory protections in supporting our ability to actually figure out which drugs work against COVID-19. Weakening commitment to science and evidence during this crisis truly would be...
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Who’s at risk of not being counted in the 2020 census: 6 essential reads
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Journalism

Who’s at risk of not being counted in the 2020 census: 6 essential reads

The census aims to count everyone in the U.S. Of course, that’s not so easy. Overall, the 2010 census was accurate, with a net overcount of just 0.01%. Still, some 16 million people were likely omitted from the final count. The data that the Census Bureau gathers is used to make important decisions about congressional apportionment and federal funding. So, if one county is undercounted more than another, that may mean that they are less well represented politically, or that they get less than their fair share of money over the next decade. A few groups are at particular risk of being undercounted. African Americans Demographers first realized that the census was not counting everyone equally in World War II, and that places with large nonwhite populations were being underrepresented. “...
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Journalism

9 Essential Reads For Your Racial Justice Conversations

By now we know that racism is a discussion that everyone needs to have, yet it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all. These discussions can challenge what we know. There is still much we don’t know about each other and the impact of race and racism in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, our local governments. Many of our families and communities are simply microcosms of the greater society that often miseducates us. When we enter school, we learn about the fact of slavery but too often without context or judgment. We don’t learn about the resistance movements. Or the full stories of Nat Turner or John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth. This is changing slowly. Small groups of people of all racial backgrounds are discovering the centuries of literature that do tell these s...
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