Uber results for Q1 2020

Revenue of $3.5 billion, growing 14% year-over-year or 16% on a constant currency basis

Rides Adjusted EBITDA of $581 million

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER) today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020.

Financial Highlights for First Quarter 2020

Gross Bookings grew to $15.8 billion, up 8% year-over-year, or 10% on a constant currency basis, with Rides declining 3% and Eats growing 54% year-over-year, respectively, on a constant currency basis.
Revenue growth of 14% year-over-year, or 16% on a constant currency basis.
Adjusted Net Revenue (“ANR”) growth year-over-year of 18%, or 19% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted Net Revenue and segment Adjusted Net Revenue excludes the impact of COVID-19 response initiatives.
Net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. of $2.9 billion, which includes $277 million in stock-based compensation expense and pre-tax impairment write-downs of $2.1 billion. Net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. excluding the impairment write-downs, net of the tax benefit would have been $1.1 billion.
Rides Adjusted EBITDA delivered $581 million in profit, up $389 million year-over-year, and down $161 million quarter-over-quarter, and 23.5% margin as a percentage of ANR.
Eats Adjusted EBITDA of $(313) million, down $4 million year-over-year and up $148 million quarter-over-quarter.
Adjusted EBITDA of $(612) million, up $257 million year-over-year, and up $3 million quarter-over-quarter. Adjusted EBITDA excludes the impact of COVID-19 response initiatives.
Unrestricted cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were $9.0 billion.
COVID-19 response initiatives impact on GAAP revenue of $19 million and impact on GAAP cost of revenue of $5 million. (details and reconciliation below)

“While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO. “Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up. Our global footprint and highly variable cost structure remain an important advantage, as our expectation is that the Rides recovery will vary by city and country.”

“Our ample liquidity provides us with substantial flexibility to navigate the current crisis, but we are being proactive and taking actions to emerge stronger and more focused as a company,” said Nelson Chai, CFO. “We have recently exited eight unprofitable Eats markets, significantly reduced the size of our customer support and recruiting teams, and merged our JUMP unit into Lime. Building on the steps we have already taken, we are continuing to look at all levers to ensure our core Rides and Eats businesses emerge from this crisis stronger than ever.”

First Quarter 2020 Financial and Operational Highlights

Operating Highlights for the First Quarter 2020

COVID-19 Initiatives

Launched programs to support drivers: We launched a program to support drivers or delivery people who are diagnosed with COVID‑19, or individually asked to self-isolate, providing up to 14 days of financial assistance while their Uber account is on hold. We also accelerated cross-dispatch from Rides to Eats, as well as surfaced other earning opportunities on and off the Uber platform via the Uber Work Hub. Providing cleaning supplies and PPE: We are working with manufacturers and distributors to provide drivers and delivery people with cleaning supplies and PPE including face coverings and disinfectants. We have distributed millions of pieces of PPE and are working to secure more supplies and are prioritizing active drivers in the cities with the greatest need.
10 million free rides and deliveries: We have committed to provide 10 million rides and meals to healthcare workers, seniors and people in need, free of charge, and have started offering those services around the world. For instance, we’ve begun providing $1 million in rides and food to healthcare workers in New York City, and up to 200,000 free rides for NHS staff in London.
Vulnerable populations: Working with partners, we are delivering medication to housebound patients and essential goods to those in need around the world. We have also partnered with domestic violence organizations in 35 cities to provide free rides to shelter and safe spaces, and free meals. We introduced a dedicated phone number for people without a smartphone to get assistance with ordering a meal.
Supporting restaurants: We waived new restaurant activation fees in a number of markets and have made it quicker and easier for restaurants around the world to join Eats. We also launched a global feature allowing eaters to provide direct support to restaurants, resulting in over $3 million in direct contributions.
Freight relief efforts: Over 10 thousand relief loads of critical goods booked on the shipper platform in the U.S. were hauled at cost. Platform

Uber Rewards gained traction: Uber rewards has grown to more than 31 million members, and is now live in France, our sixth country, in addition to the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand.
Uber for Business (“U4B”) grows customer relationships: U4B now has relationships with 46% of the Fortune 500 and continues to gain traction among governmental organizations, including the U.S. Federal government as of April 2020. U4B deals increasingly include both Rides and Eats following the launch of Eats within U4B earlier this year, in certain jurisdictions, including in Brazil, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Launched Uber Direct and Uber Connect: Uber Direct is a delivery platform for retail items; Uber Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. These offerings highlight the flexibility of the Uber platform, while also providing additional earnings opportunities to drivers and delivery people.

Rides

Driver app enhancements improve cross-dispatching: During the quarter, we made enhancements to the Uber Rides Driver App that make it easier for drivers to become Eats delivery people. Nearly 40% of U.S. and Canada Drivers active on the platform cross-dispatched to Eats in the month of April.
Uber for Health scales rapidly: Uber for Health has grown more than 200% YoY as we build out enhanced capabilities, including the ability to order rides to medical appointments and other health services over the phone. Other Segments
Eats added key new accounts: Signed partnerships with Chipotle (2,500 locations) in U.S. and Canada, along with Dunkin’ (4,000+ locations) and Shake Shack (150 locations).
Eats enabled grocery and convenience options: Uber Eats has enhanced the ability for grocery and convenience partners to sell a limited menu of everyday essentials via our restaurant platform. The offering is live with nearly 4,000 partners in 35 countries, including partnerships with Carrefour in France, Sysco in the U.S., and Shell in the UK.
Freight improved load bundle and multi-stop load product features: Added improvements to the Uber Freight application that are intended to improve match of available loads with available carriers.
Uber Transit continued expansion: Uber users now have access within the Rides app to the transit system of more than 15 cities, including two new cities that have also added ticketing capabilities within our app. To date, more than 2 million Uber Riders have used Transit. Uber Works expanded: Expanded from Chicago and Miami to its third market, Dallas. We are supporting COVID-19 response efforts through Uber Works Hub, reinforcing Uber’s role as platform for independent work opportunities, including for existing drivers and delivery people; and providing essential personnel for light industrial and grocery supply chain customers.
Next generation JUMP hardware deployed: Within New Mobility, our fifth generation of hardware, which includes shared swappable batteries between bikes and scooters, is being tested in an effort to increase durability and reduce operational costs. Recent Developments

Uber Eats: On Monday, consistent with our long-term strategy, we announced a change to the geographic footprint of Uber Eats operations affecting 8 markets. We will discontinue Uber Eats in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and Ukraine, and will transfer Uber Eats operations to our Careem subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates. The discontinued and transferred markets represented 1% of Eats Gross Bookings and 4% of Eats Adjusted EBITDA losses in Q1 2020.
Headcount: On Wednesday, due to lower trip volumes and our current hiring freeze, we announced a reduction of our customer support and recruiting teams by approximately 3,700 full-time employee roles.
New Mobility: Today, we announced we are folding our JUMP e-bike and e-scooter business into Lime. Our customers will continue to have access to e-bikes and e-scooters in our apps. As part of the transaction, we made an additional convertible note investment of $85 million in Lime. The transferred business represents the vast majority of Gross Bookings, Adjusted Net Revenue and Segment Adjusted EBITDA loss for our Other Bets segment.

Webcast and conference call information A live audio webcast of our first quarter 2020 earnings release call will be available at https://investor.uber.com/, along with the earnings press release and slide presentation. The call begins on May 7, 2020 at 1:30 PM (PT) / 4:30 PM (ET). This press release, including the reconciliations of certain non-GAAP measures to their nearest comparable GAAP measures, is also available on that site.

We also provide announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and blogs, on our investor relations website (https://investor.uber.com/).

About Uber

Our mission is to ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion.
We revolutionized personal mobility with ridesharing, and we are leveraging our platform to redefine the massive meal delivery and logistics industries.
We are a technology platform that uses a massive network, leading technology, operational excellence and product expertise to power movement from point A to point B. We develop and operate proprietary technology applications supporting a variety of offerings on our platform. We connect consumers with independent providers of ride services, restaurants and food delivery services, public transportation networks, e-bikes, e-scooters and other personal mobility options. We use this same network, technology, operational excellence and product expertise to connect shippers with carriers in the freight industry. We are also developing technologies that will provide autonomous driving vehicle solutions to consumers, networks of vertical take-off and landing vehicles and new solutions to solve everyday problems.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Forward-looking statements include all statements that are not historical facts and can be identified by terms such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “hope,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “objective,” “ongoing,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will,” or “would” or similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors relate to, among others: developments in the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting impact on our business and operations, competition, managing our growth and corporate culture, financial performance, investments in new products or offerings, our ability to attract drivers, consumers and other partners to our platform, our brand and reputation and other legal and regulatory developments. For additional information on other potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted, please see our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019 and subsequent Form 10-Qs or Form 8-Ks filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All information provided in this release and in the attachments is as of the date of this press release and any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements in this press release, which are based on information available to us on the date hereof. We undertake no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

To supplement our financial information, which is prepared and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (“GAAP”), we use the following non-GAAP financial measures: Adjusted Net Revenue; Rides Adjusted Net Revenue; Eats Adjusted Net Revenue; Adjusted EBITDA; Adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of ANR; and net loss attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. excluding the impairment write-downs, net of the tax benefit, as well as, revenue and Adjusted Net Revenue growth in constant currency. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for, or superior to, the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures provide meaningful supplemental information regarding our performance by excluding certain items that may not be indicative of our recurring core business operating results.

We believe that both management and investors benefit from referring to these non-GAAP financial measures in assessing our performance and when planning, forecasting, and analyzing future periods. These non-GAAP financial measures also facilitate management’s internal comparisons to our historical performance. We believe these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors both because (1) they allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making and (2) they are used by our institutional investors and the analyst community to help them analyze the health of our business.

There are a number of limitations related to the use of non-GAAP financial measures. In light of these limitations, we provide specific information regarding the GAAP amounts excluded from these non-GAAP financial measures and evaluating these non-GAAP financial measures together with their relevant financial measures in accordance with GAAP.

For more information on these non-GAAP financial measures, please see the sections titled “Key Terms for Our Key Metrics and Non-GAAP Financial Measures,” “Definitions of Non-GAAP Measures” and “Reconciliations of Non-GAAP Measures” included at the end of this release.

How Instacart works : The Complete revenue and business model

Instacart is an on-demand grocery delivery platform facilitating doorstep deliveries of groceries and other home essentials in major cities of USA. The technology driven business model of Instacart boosts of delivering groceries to customers in as little as 1 hour, making it one of the most promising and futuristic company of USA which is based on sharing economy model.

This grocery delivery startup has become so famous in the on-demand sector that a lot of budding entrepreneurs are interested to learn more about Instacart business model and understand its overall working in order to develop the next big thing in the sharing economy. This post from Juggernaut will show you how Instacart works and makes money along with some interesting facts and figures about this $2 billion valuation company.

Founders, Funding received, Facts and Timeline

Instacart was founded in year 2012. It is one of the most recent technology developments which has shaken the world by its business model. Being considered as a leader in on-demand economy, Instacart has received massive funding to expand its grocery delivery operations all across USA. Here are few facts about Instacart:

Founded by: Apoorva Mehta (CEO / Founder) and Max Mullen (Co-Founder)

Funding received: $275 million (Till the mid of year 2015)

Company Valuation: $2 Billion. (As per Jan 2015)

Revenue: $100 million (As of Jan 2015).

Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA.

The amount of funding received by Instacart clearly shows the trust of investors in this start-up and its projected future. To understand what makes Instacart a promising company, let me quickly take you through the salient features and the value propositions of Instacart. Thereafter, we’ll move on to understand Instacart’s core working and its customer segments.

Salient Features of Instacart:
Available in major areas of the USA including SF Bay Area, San Jose, NYC, Brooklyn, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and Los Angeles.
A collection of over 300,000 items from several stores such as Whole Foods, Safeway or Costco enabling customers to place orders from their favourite store or to mix items from different stores into one order.
Crowdsourced Marketplace model with users being connected to personal shoppers who shop for ordered items and deliver them to the customers.

Value Proposition:
Tie-ups with existing supermarkets
Willing part time workers and their cars
Vast inventory
Extremely quick delivery
No warehouses
No shiny delivery trucks

Instacart’s 3 Customer Segments Explained:

Users:

They have an app from where they can order groceries by choosing one or more stores.
They can even order from a desktop or laptop using a web based interface.
Users pay online for their order and can tip their shopper in advance during check out.
Option to shop from any of the available stores in their area. An order can even be placed by combining items from different stores.
Users can schedule orders for a specific day and time.

Shoppers:
Shoppers receive orders on their smartphones.
Shoppers are stationed near the stores in order to save time.
They pick up the ordered items manually and deliver it to the customer.
Apart from the per hour pay, shoppers often get a tip from customers.

Stores:
Instacart has tie-ups with major superstores in various cities.
These stores have been able to increase their revenue through online sales via Instacart.
Instacart Business Model Canvas [Image: changes done] The 4 step model about How Instacart Works:
A customer places his order for groceries and pays online to instacart.
A personal shopper receives the order and starts collecting items as mentioned in the order.
Shopper pays the bill through Instacart’s prepaid debit card which is accepted at the store.
The shopper then goes to deliver the groceries to the customer as per the address mentioned in the order.
Any tip paid in cash at the time of delivery directly goes to the shopper and the tip paid to shopper during checkout gets accumulated in his Instacart account and is paid at the end of the week along with the salary.

Instacart revenue model – How it makes money?
Delivery Fee
Every order processed by Instacart which is above the value of $35 attracts a standard delivery fee of $3.99 for a scheduled or 2 hour delivery and $5.99 for a 1 hour delivery.

Orders under $35 value are charged at $7.99 for a scheduled or 2 hour delivery and $9.99 for a 1 hour delivery.

Membership Fee (Instacart Express)
Instacart offers an annual membership by the name ‘Instacart Express’ priced at $99. Users having this membership can get free delivery of groceries for full 1 year with few terms and conditions.
Mark up prices (15%+ more)
Some stores selling their products on Instacart offer the same prices as their in-store prices but few stores listed on Instacart have a mark-up of 15%+more from their in-store prices. The revenue from these mark-up prices goes to Instacart which helps them pay the shoppers.

How Instacart finds customers?

Word of Mouth Advertising
Internet Marketing
Free first delivery
Various offers

The process of Recruiting Shoppers:
Application are invited from individuals who want to earn money by shopping in their free time.
Applications are processed by the recruitment team and a face to face, one on one interview is scheduled.
Proper training is provided to selected individuals before they are ready to shop and deliver groceries.

Key Problems and Solutions:

Shopper Retention : As all shoppers work part time, it is difficult to retain them for a long time. To enhance the earnings of shoppers, Instacart added an option to pay tip to a shopper in the check-out section of the website.
Reduce Delivery time : Delivering groceries within 2 hours was a challenge for Instacart. To reduce the delivery time, Instacart places its shoppers outside the stores where it has tie-ups. Whenever a shopper receives an order, he is already at the store saving him 50% of the time.
Shopper Shortage : As Instacart shoppers work as freelancers with flexible schedules, it is difficult to manage the freelancers fleet and assign instant tasks to them. To deal with this problem, Instacart introduced a “busy pricing” policy by which it adds few dollars as delivery charges to a customer’s bill depending on how busy its shoppers are. A part of this additional price is also paid to the shoppers so that they can work as quick as they can.
Customer Trust : Customers lost their trust in Instacart when they came to know that the company is putting up its own pricing for products. These prices are marked up from the in-store prices. Instacart soon admitted to the marked up prices. However, few uses might have stopped using Instacart due to this, but majority are ready to pay the mark-up prices in order to get groceries at their door step.
Wrong item Delivery possibilities : Sometimes a shopper picks up the wrong item and delivers it. To handle all such issues, Instacart has a dedicated support team which can be reached over the phone or through email. Refund is processed if the personal shopper misses an item in the order list.
Out of stock items : Sometimes, Items in the shopping list go out of stock. In such cases, shoppers replace the non-available items with similar items that are available, which might not be wanted by the customer. To deal with this problem, Instacart allowed customers to add notes and they also added a “often out of stock” button on such items for the reference of customers.

The Future:

Grocery delivery business has a great future as more people want the most easy and convenient way to buy grocery items. Promising delivery within 2 hours, instacart has become a powerful solution in the US and with $275 million funding, it is ready to take on other cities in the USA as well as expand outside the country. Forbes has ranked Instacart at the Number 1 spot in the list of America’s most promising company.

So now you know how Instacart works. This amazing technology can be used to create a similar business model in the on-demand segment. If you are dreaming to make the next big thing in this world, then this is the time to take action.

Upload : Amazon series

Rolling Stone Review by Alan Sepinwall



Early in Amazon Prime Video’s new sci-fi comedy Upload, a character explains that her grandmother is in heaven. “Which one?” she’s asked.

The question makes sense within the context of the near future depicted in Upload, where tech companies can — for the right price — digitize human consciousness and grant customers a virtual afterlife of their choosing. There are computerized heavens modeled on the hills of Tuscany, the casinos of Las Vegas, the African veldt, and more, including Lake View — “the only digital afterlife modeled on the grand Victorian hotels of the United States and Canada” — where our hero, young coder Nathan (Robbie Amell) finds himself after dying in a self-driving car accident. .

But the question applies just as easily to the context in which Upload arrives. We are in the middle of Peak TV Afterlife, with lots of shows — many of them from people who used to work on Parks and Recreation with Upload creator Greg Daniels — set partially or entirely in versions of heaven where things aren’t working quite as they should. We only just said goodbye to The Good Place, and, even more recently, the finale to Devs discussed the idea of the recently deceased being given a new digital life. Amazon already dabbled in afterlife ennui with the short-lived Maya Rudolph/Fred Armisen vehicle Forever, and the first season of TBS’ Miracle Workers reimagined heaven as a corporate factory run by an incompetent CEO named God. The HBO miniseries Years and Years had one of its leads attempt to upload themselves to the Web before they died. And several Black Mirror episodes — including arguably the two most famous ones, “San Junipero” and “USS Callister” — involve characters gaining immortality through digital consciousness transfer..

Daniels is among the most gifted and influential comedy minds of the last 25 years of television, responsible for everything from classic Simpsons episodes like “Bart Sells His Soul” and “Homer Badman” to excellent shows he created or co-created, such as King of the Hill, the American Office, and Parks and Rec. But Upload has been in development for what seems like an epoch, going back to the HBO regime of Michael Lombardo (who hasn’t worked there since the Obama administration). So, through no real fault of his own, he can’t help but seem way behind the curve this time.

The show’s satiric portrait of a world in which the afterlife is just an app with pop-up ads and different subscription tiers plays like a longer, gentler Black Mirror story. Nathan’s dawning realization that his wealthy girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) — who can video chat with him and even visit him in Lake View using virtual reality equipment — is a vapid monster with whom he will soon be doomed to spend eternity recalls the questions Forever asked about what happens when “’til death do us part” gets an unlimited extension. The bumbling artificial intelligence (Owen Daniels) that staffs Lake View is basically a creepier, much less helpful version of Janet from The Good Place. Nathan quickly grows frustrated to find this grinning A.I. around every corner; the sense of familiarity that Upload unwittingly evokes is just as omnipresent.

Upload has some sharp points to make about income inequality. Nathan can’t afford Lake View himself, and winds up prisoner to the whims of his sponsor Ingrid, while our frequent glimpses of the world he left behind suggest the have-nots have less than ever. (The One Percent can not only get into these digital heavens, but are the only people left who can afford real food, as opposed to the kind made in a 3D printer.) Its commentary about all the ways we’ve allowed corporations’ long tentacles to wrap themselves around our lives (or afterlives) is reminiscent of half of Black Mirror (get ready to be reminded of the one about the perils of being able to rate humans on a five-star scale), but that doesn’t make it any less pertinent to our own increasingly dysfunctional world.

Still, the déjà vu of it all makes the humor play softer than may have been intended. Where Upload is most successful is in depicting a star-crossed romance between Nathan and Nora (Andy Allo), the optimistic customer service rep for the company that runs Lake View. He’s technically involved with Ingrid, and Nora is forbidden from even befriending the “guests,” let alone dating one, yet their attraction is clear from the start. Their attempts to overcome the metaphysical distance between them is one of the few aspects of the show that feels completely current, and not borrowed from another recent series(*).

(*) Even smaller details inadvertently conjure thoughts of other shows. While Nathan is exploring the perks of Lake View, there’s a scene scored to Walter Murphy’s disco classic “A Fifth of Beethoven,” which is the theme song for FX on Hulu’s Mrs. America.

The chemistry between Amell and Allo is strong enough to push aside some sense of of overfamiliarity, and to cover for aspects of the show that don’t quite click. (An investigation into whether Nathan was murdered never really gets up to speed, and Ingrid is so cartoonishly awful that she throws the tone of everything else out of balance.) Once you get past the exposition-laden 45-minute premiere episode, the rest of it is a quick and mostly likable binge. And there are periodic moments of inspiration, be they comic (even in heaven, you can ask to speak to a manager) or something more divine.

Among the show’s running gags is that every corporation we know in 2020 has combined with at least one other, so that Nora and her colleagues are asked to encourage Lake View guests to try a new Nokia Taco Bell dish, while the scientists of Oscar Meyer Intel are hard at work trying to prove that the recently deceased can be downloaded back into clones of their old bodies. This itself is not a new joke — the final season of Parks and Rec, set in what was then the near future, did the same thing — but it seems fitting for a series that feels like an amalgamation of so many pre-existing ideas. Spend too much time in the afterlife — whichever version you prefer — and even the miraculous can get old.

Why China has zero new covid 19 cases and the rest of the world doesnt

April 27, 2020

In this weekly round-up, Richard Lehman looks at a personal selection of articles of relevance to clinicians dealing with covid-19
The Kung Fu of Covid

One third of a year has passed since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, but there is little sense of shared global wisdom. The Chinese sage Kǒng Qiū (551-479 BCE) would be saddened. Among the many sayings attributed to him are: “All people are the same; only their habits differ.” China, with the largest population in the world, is the only one which has come close to eliminating covid-19 within its borders (with the possible exceptions of New Zealand and Iceland, as we go to press). Among 1.4 billion people, daily deaths are zero. Why then isn’t the rest of the world rushing to adopt the habits of China? Another maxim of Confucius/Kung Fu is “Learn avidly. Question repeatedly. Analyze carefully. Then put what you have learned into practice intelligently.”

Dialogue concerning the two world systems

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”

Galileo wrote a dialogue to show you could not believe contrary things at once: either the sun revolved around the earth, or the earth revolved around the sun. Unfortunately the Pope was office-bound to believe the first, and Galileo’s book made him look a fool. Mistake. The pope remained a fool for life, and Galileo remained under house arrest for life. Now, with covid-19, any containment policy either revolves around the value of individual life, or it revolves around the economy. It cannot do both at the same time. China exemplifies the first, and Britain exemplifies the second. On 12 March our chief medical officer, chief scientific officer, and our prime minister Boris Johnson declared in favour of “herd immunity”, and nothing that has happened since shows serious intent to prevent the cull which that implies. Britain has already lost ten times more people per head of population than China during the whole of its epidemic. If we had started by valuing the individual, this would not have happened. And our economy would be less ruined too. Maybe there is time to mend our ways in the second wave.

Controlled Avalanche

“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
So let’s say you have embraced the idea of herd immunity, without waiting for a vaccine. That means allowing the infection to spread through the population. It will kill those it is going to kill, but in a “controlled avalanche” that will be spread out to allow some to return to normal economic activity and health provision. That sounds like a good British compromise, though in fact the following model comes from Israel. “Individuals whose probability of developing serious health conditions is low (i.e. 20-49 years old with no comorbidities) will be offered the option to be voluntarily exposed to the virus under controlled supervision, and will then be issued ‘immunity certificates’ if they are confirmed to have developed SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.” I can see that having some appeal, especially to altruistic health professionals who have already voluntarily exposed themselves to covid-19 risk through lack of protective equipment. What I can’t understand is how the modellers come to the conclusion that this “reduces the overall mortality by 43%, reduces the maximum number of people in need for ICUs by 62%, and decreases the time required for release of 50% of the low-risk population by more than 2 months.” How can any controlled infection strategy reduce the virulence and case-fatality rate of the infection itself?

Face value

“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”

When you put on a mask in public, you lose a lot of face. You also stop a lot of droplets. But this is at the cost of adopting a habit that many people in English-speaking countries seem to find repellent. I think they lose more face by insisting on randomised controlled trial evidence than they ever would by just putting on a mask. No RCT is ever going to be as good for detecting harms as a natural experiment involving 2 billion people. No cluster randomised trial of sufficient scale is going to be able to adjust for confounders any better than an observational comparison. Every population observation we have favours masking. Then triangulate this with some simple, common sense physical experiments, such as this: “We found that most home fabrics substantially block droplets, even as a single layer. With two layers, blocking performance can reach that of surgical mask without significantly compromising breathability. Overall, our study suggests that most double-layered cloth face coverings may help reduce droplet transmission of respiratory infections.” I do wish that some EBM-loving friends would admit that some ideas that have face validity are in fact valid until proven otherwise. On faces, even.

Ventilator Mortality

“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”
A month ago the question on everyone’s mind was how many very sick covid-19 patients would have to be turned away from ventilators. For some of us older people, there was also the question of whether it was worth going on to a ventilator at all. In fact it seems that very few ventilator rationing decisions have had to be made in the UK, and thanks to the brilliant work of ICNARC we know that the mortality of ventilated patients in the UK is 67%. This is based on a much larger sample than from any other country. A more pertinent question may be: which patients really need ventilation and which might do better with a non-invasive strategy? Since continuous positive airways pressure was first proposed as an alternative, surprisingly little seems to have appeared about it in the clinical literature. Meanwhile, high flow nasal cannulas are making an appearance. I hope someone sorts all this out before I arrive on an ICU.

Natural History
“No matter how busy you make think you are you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”

I may have been reading the wrong journals, but so far I’ve found little about the varied natural histories of the illness called covid-19. For sure, there have been plenty of symptom lists and time-course diagrams and so forth, but nothing that’s helped me understand the transition from what I’ve called benign covid into malignant covid. Now a very comprehensive review of the world literature has appeared in medRxiv.

This divides covid-19 into three stages: “the time of infection (Stage I), sometimes progressing to pulmonary involvement (Stage II, with or without hypoxemia) and less frequently to systemic inflammation (Stage III).” The hard-working authors go on to attempt to map therapy on to each stage. That is certainly the central challenge, though it seems hardly addressable in the present state of ignorance.

PM Question Time

“The essence of knowledge is, having it, to use it.”

Now let’s look at the few who die. Remember that modern medicine was not built on numbers but on observation: living patients reviewed on a daily basis, and then examined post mortem should they get unlucky. Autopsy just means seeing for yourself. I am baffled that medicine today should employ so many statisticians and so few gross pathologists. A new article tells us about the lung findings in 38 patients from Northern Italy. Terminal covid-19 is a systemic disease, but I guess it’s better to know about the lungs than about nothing. They are a mess, of course. “The features of the exudative and proliferative phases of Diffuse Alveolar Disease (DAD) were found: capillary congestion, necrosis of pneumocytes, hyaline membrane, interstitial oedema, pneumocyte hyperplasia and reactive atypia, platelet-fibrin thrombi.” There is lots about those thrombi in small arterial vessels, confirming that coagulopathy often dominates the end-stage of covid-19. In 4 patients, there were multiple small lung abscesses caused by bacterial infection.

Silver lining

“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” Two and a half millennia later, this Confucian saying reappeared on the lips of Louis Pasteur (1822-95) as “Fortune favours the prepared mind”. Pasteur’s experiments with yeast and cotton wool had prepared his mind to discover that infectious diseases were transmitted by filterable micro-organisms. Before long, other people discovered that certain infectious diseases, like smallpox, were spread by organisms that seemed to be invisible and pass through filters. Subsequently, with better filters and stronger microscopes, these viruses appeared in their full glory. The image of a blob covered in a mass of collar studs that you see everywhere is a triumph of cumulative science. Forget post-modernism. This represents knowledge that is certain and will never go away. Soon it will lead us to an effective vaccine. There is no reason to doubt that: the only question is when and which of the 115+ candidate vaccines it will be. And then it will all seem so straightforward. “Anyone can find the switch after the lights are on.”

No, Confucius did not really say that. There is no record that he invented the electric light in 500 BCE. Yet you can find it in a list of his sayings on Google.
Richard Lehman is professor of the Shared Understanding of Medicine at the University of Birmingham.

The Assistant - subtle movie of the year

The fact that it was directed by a documentary filmmaker like Kitty Green sets the tone for the movie. Just imagine a movie about predatory behavior at workplaces and they dont show the predator or the victims POV but rather the entire mundane life of an omnipresent employee of the firm It explores the tolerance of the public to the nefarious behavior of the wealthy and powerful and how it translates in to the decadence of society.I like how the movie literally walk-through the entire day of the assistant detailing the grind of chores and adhoc requests/tirades thrown at her. There is minimal dialogue in this movie and the director seems to prefer to let silence and facial expressions detail the mood and feelings of the protagonist. This demands an intricate performance fro the artist which Julia garner executed for this role. The minimal use of BGM and devoid of any flashy editing leads to a real life atmosphere throughout the movie.There is no explanation for the

How ARR scored Bombay

National interest - trust the data

Aubade by Philip Larkin

Aubade

By PHILIP LARKIN

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape
. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Why "The office" is not relatable to reality

By Julia Alexander - The Verge

The scenes that make The Office special aren’t overly zany but are extremely relatable, like Dwight Schrute making an obnoxious sales call at his desk, while Jim and Pam roll their eyes at their colleague’s behavior. It happens almost every episode: two people, the stand-ins for the audience, acknowledging just how annoying the workplace is.

 The Office is a show about the random, boring bits of everyday work life and the comedy that ensues from being surrounded by the same people on a daily basis. Employees sit at their desks, jokes are made, and snacks are munched on. Fifteen years later, it’s still one of the most enduring sitcoms because The Office is an extraordinarily ordinary depiction of modern working life in America — well, it was.

 How jobs look has shifted radically over the last decade. The coronavirus pandemic simply sped up the circumstances for many industries. The gig economy is one of the biggest notable transitions. Uber, Lyft, Fiverr, Amazon Flex, and Airbnb didn’t exist 15 years ago when The Office premiered. Now, there are more than 55 million gig economy workers in the United States, according to Forbes. That’s more than 55 million people who don’t go into an office every day and share a kitchen with co-workers. Their idea of day-to-day work is already different from what The Office presented.

 Before the pandemic forced us inside, The Office was relatable. How does a workplace comedy operate without a workplace? Today, it feels like a piece of popular culture from eras past. Social distancing measures mean more people are working from home. Gags have shifted from pranking your deskmate to creating weird glitch art on Zoom using random anime backgrounds; hijinks in the shared kitchen turned into creating new Slack emoji to deliver a joke faster

. Even those who aren’t in gig economy jobs are facing a time when physical offices aren’t necessary for most companies. Instant communication tools like Slack make talking with co-workers possible from anywhere, remote work is easy to do with an assortment of productivity services. Michael Scott’s outbursts in The Office don’t transition well to Slack, where the equivalent is a message typed out in all-caps. That’s not as funny. Videoconferencing has also never been easier. Services like Zoom allow remote workers to talk face-to-face, all from the safety and comfort of their own homes.

 In 2019, Zoom saw heights of 10 million daily users — by March 2020, Zoom was hitting “more than 200 million daily meeting was
 both free and paid,” CEO Eric S. Yuan wrote in a blog post. “We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home,” Yuan wrote.

 Companies have transitioned quickly from operating in physical spaces to moving everything online. Zoom is hitting record-breaking numbers, as is Microsoft Teams, a group chat and collaboration tool from Microsoft that rivals Slack. Slack is no different. CEO Stewart Butterfield shared numbers in a lengthy tweet thread, noting that on Tuesday, March 10th, Slack’s concurrent users passed 10 million. That number jumped to 10.5 million just six days later, reaching 12.5 million on March 25th. “We have an incredible business that has been growing very quickly and that will continue to do so for many, many years to come,” Butterfield told Slack employees, as seen in screenshots he tweeted. “We provide a platform that is going to become even more useful to the world in the years to come.” This pandemic will forever change parts of our lives, much like the 1918 influenza did more than 100 years ago. A big part of that will be the physicality of work. “The age of the office as we know it is probably over, and the bell can’t be unrung,” Matt Burr, CEO at Nomadic Learning, wrote in The Wall Street Journal recently.


 More employees, once ready to commute into an office every day, will use tools like Slack and Zoom to work from home more often, according to Burr. Companies will see less of a reason to have physical space and will use remote advantages to build teams in different cities. Work has changed, and television will follow. Pop culture has always reflected our lives at a certain moment in time. Similar to how we revisit The Dick Van Dyke Show or Growing Pains to scratch the nostalgic itch for times when families were corny and homely or marathoning shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother to reminisce about a time when people actually hung out, The Office yearns for simpler times. Actress Angela Kinsey (who played Angela Martin on the show) described the series as inexplicably comforting. That comfort comes from the normalcy of a work routine — something I’ve come to miss in the weeks I’ve been at home.


 Less than 20 years ago, people worked in offices. Now, many of us work from home. Ben Silverman and Paul Lieberstein, co-producers on The Office, are developing a new workplace comedy, but this one won’t include characters like Dwight and Jim throwing pencils at each other over their computers. Instead, the show is about a “wunderkind boss who, in an effort to ensure his staff’s connectedness and productivity, asks them all to virtually interact and work face-to-face all day,” according to Deadline. We’ve walked toward this change in work culture for years, but now it’s here for millions of people. The pandemic didn’t suddenly flip a switch; it proved that people can — and will — work without an office.

Last year, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 26 million Americans, or approximately 16 percent of the total workforce, work from home. Imagine if half of The Office’s cast suddenly stopped showing up because they could conduct calls at home and check in with co-workers online. Between 2005 and 2015, employees who telecommuted rose by 115 percent, the bureau reported. Those years also happen to represent The Office’s run. As The Office went off the air, so did the idea that day-to-day work would look the same as it did in 2005. More than 55 million people are gig workers who don’t have offices to go to, more people are set to work from home than ever, and an entire generation of employees may not experience that type of work setting — one considered universal less than 20 years ago. That’s the future pop culture will incorporate. There’s something poetic about The Office’s co-producers being some of the first to try. “Start with the office comedy, lose the office and you’re just left with comedy,” co-producer Lieberstein told Deadline. “The math works.”


 In themeantime, many of us are at home, so lonely that we are wistfully streaming old episodes of The Office, longing for the Dwight Schrutes in our lives, wishing they could do something annoying enough that we could turn to another colleague for just a moment and roll our eyes.

Westworld : season 4 wicked games

One of the best violin pieces...

Ramin djawadi is a legend in television music. Always able to capture the moment in the episode

People in the trees

Then there was the matter of the jungle profligacy which I began to resent as if it were an overdressed woman parading her entire cache of sparkly jewels before me. I felt that the jungle was constantly showing off to itself - every rock, every tree, every surface that would stay still was trimmed, bedecked , baroque with greenery there was fistulas of bushes wrapped with creeping vines and spotted with moss ....... It was an exhausting performance that never ended and for what? To prove the imperturbability of nature , I suppose it's unknowability it's fundamental lack of interest in humanity. Or at least that's what it seemed like at the time a mockery. It was absurd. I knew to wake each day and resent the jungle and my own insignificance in it . But I couldn't help it. I began to think that I might be going a little ,- well not crazy I suppose but that I might be losing touch as they say now. And then I felt childish and amazed ............

An excerpt in The people in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Building a Fire - By Maxine scates

Staring at the flames of the woodstove fire
guarded by its glass door, I’m trying to remember
what I’m good at—surprised when it occurs to me
I’m good at making this fire out of kindling
I’ve split, plus one piece of fir and two of oak, cut
from the large branches of the neighbor’s oak
that fell across the road two years ago
on a winter evening. We were driving home
when we saw the flashlights telling us to slow,
the road impassable. It was then I lost my glasses
climbing over a downed tree, and when we
reached our house I called my neighbor,
not yet home from work, to tell him his tree
had fallen and, at first, he thought it had fallen
on his house, as if he already saw our oak glancing
off his roof a year later during the ice storm,
when it seemed every oak in the neighborhood
fell at the same moment. By then, our neighbor


had enough wood and so we cut our old oak
and hauled it up the road. All our ricks
are overflowing now, filled with oak
and four fir trees that died over four summers
due to drought or sunburn, the man who cut
them down said, the consequence, no doubt,
of the woods in front of us being clear-cut to build
a house free of the hazards of trees. Today,


I had jury duty and the D.A. asked me if I thought
economic hardship could impact a relationship
and I said yes, I certainly did. And when the defense
attorney asked about domestic violence, I said
I’d grown up with it, it being the shout and stumble,
the raw confusion of the shove and slap . . .
though it was all I said, and then I said I’d listened
to the charges and the judge’s emphasis on the phrase
“beyond a reasonable doubt” and thought I could
be fair, perhaps because, like my fire contained
in its iron box, for a moment I believed in the clarity
of language, its unblurred definition. I should


have known what I’d said was enough
for the defense attorney to want me gone from
that grim room where the jurors’ chairs did not face
the defendant, accused of harming two people
who shared his name, and the bailiff’s shoes
were scuffed and the judge seemed to be looking
at his computer screen most of the time. And when
I picked up my belongings to go, even as the judge
was thanking me, I hurried, feeling as if I’d done
something wrong, to the door, where I realized
I didn’t know how I’d gotten there because
the bailiff had led us, so for a while I walked down
hallways where each door opened to a courtroom
where people’s lives were changing one way
or the other. Then I came home and built this fire,


and my brother called to tell me my mother
had done just fine with the physical therapist until
she started to shake because her muscles tire. They
both live where there is no need to build a fire on
a cold night though the hills around them
are rimmed by the glow of fire pushed by warm
winds in this dark December. I doubt they think
of those long-ago nights in our small house,
nights grown distant enough that even I thought
I could judge the facts as if they were discrete—
and free of unending consequence

Toss a coin to your Witcher

Witcher Season 1 review : IGN

In its first, short season, Netflix’s The Witcher has a lot of work to do. A whole new world must be introduced, with all its many races, kingdoms, and the laws - both political and metaphysical - that govern it, not to mention a cast of characters with strange names and unfamiliar positions in society. But Netflix’s fantasy darling rises to this challenge, and by the end of its eight-episode run has transformed Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s books into a fascinating cinematic world of fearsome monsters, corrupt kings, and scheming mages. But the journey to that end point is messy, convoluted, and littered with poor performances, dialogue, and direction. It makes for a show that is equal parts entertaining and exasperating, and falling a little short of its massive potential.

The Witcher is headlined by a dedicated performance from the perfectly cast Henry Cavill, taking on the role of Geralt of Rivia; a grizzled man mutated to the point of being superhuman. Shunned by society, he makes his way through life by slaughtering monsters for anyone who will pay the coin, be they prince or pauper. The season’s first episode introduces him as a character with a starkly black-and-white view of the world; there is good and evil, and no sense of anything in between. He harbours, almost Batman-like, an unbreakable rule: he never kills humans.

Cavill clearly relishes the role; he’s often shared his adoration of the books and the CD Projekt Red video games, and that shines through. His look and demeanor for the show is essentially a high-end cosplay of Geralt from the games. His gravelly vocal performance captures the character’s decades-long weariness, which, when combined with mostly curt, short lines of dialogue helps convey a man who often has little interest in the debauched kings or squabbling people who hire him. But while those traits make him true to the source material, a lack of genuine plot development for Geralt means there's a little depth or nuance; a couple of episodes challenge his values, but by the finale it feels as if the White Wolf is no more interesting than he is in the premiere.

Geralt is the driving force behind most of the show’s action sequences, which feature some of the best sword fight choreography seen on television. Their direction fully embraces that this is a fantasy show, rejecting any need for historical accuracy or realistic strength. One particular battle, set within the decadent halls of a palace, utilises camera work that follows the combatants’ blades in swinging motions, which calls to mind the slick, stylized fights of superhero films.

While always entertaining, the quality of each individual fight does vary depending on Geralt’s opposition. Choreography is at its very best when he’s clashing with humans, as it allows for tense and loud sword parries. Against monsters the results are less explosive; creatures rendered in CGI have less weight and often look a little cheap, and so make for less believable encounters. Netflix's The Witcher: Cast vs. Video Game Characters Monster designs are always fantastic, though, even if their construction doesn’t make for the best action. Part of the appeal is their root in Polish and Slavic folklore; chances are you’ve not seen anything like them in any Western European or American fantasy show before. Episode 1 opens on a fight with a kikimora, and while the CGI budget sadly doesn’t allow for it to be a Game of Thrones-style delight, the crustacean-like horror of its numerous bony limbs still has a sense of grim fun. The best creatures are those with enough human properties to allow a prosthetic-covered human to still convey a sense of emotion, though; a goat-headed Sylvan or a knight with an hedgehog-like face and spines for hair are among the show’s best-realised beasts.

Geralt may be The Witcher’s protagonist by virtue of him being the titular character, but he is just one of a trio of core characters. And while Cavill provides the best embodiment of the three, it’s Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer that actually proves the show’s most compelling character. Acting as an origin story, this season chronicles Yennefer’s rise from deformed farm-hand to embittered sorceress. It’s a dark, harrowing tale dealing with abuse, betrayal, and anger, which delivers consistent growth and enjoyable turns with each successive episode.

Chalotra deserves recognition for her portrayal of Yennefer in her earliest scenes, in which a mouth-piece and hunchback prosthesis is used to bring her deformities to life. Despite all the visual elements, her performance focuses on Yennefer’s sadness and anger, which significantly humanises what could have been an uncomfortably one-note story. Unfortunately that subtlety is lost as Yennefer becomes stronger in the narrative. Chalotra’s on-screen confidence doesn’t match that of Yennefer’s growth, leaving her feeling unconvincing in later episodes.

Completing the trio is Freya Allan’s Ciri, princess of the Kingdom of Cintra. Her destiny is entwined with Geralt’s, and much of her story follows her journey to meet with the Witcher whom she has never previously met. From the first episode Ciri is emphasised as an important piece of the show’s puzzle - she’s of particular interest to the Nilfgaardian Empire, this world's evil stampeding force - and her fate is the subject of the show’s overarching narrative. It’s frustrating, then, that so little time is spent with her; one episode entirely ignores her for all but its final few minutes. This neglect makes Ciri feel little more than a macguffin for Geralt to find, rather than a compelling character in her own right.

The other result of Ciri’s limited screen time is a sense of tardiness in the season’s pacing. Episode 1 acts as a strong introduction to Geralt and Ciri, setting up the stakes involved and why it’s vital that the two characters meet. But Ciri’s continued relegation to the back seat of the show means that half the season goes by before any even limited development is made upon the problems set out in the premiere.

This is made worse by a confused approach to the show’s overall construction. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich has opted to adapt short stories from Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny collections and thread them together with longer-running plotlines, and the season constantly feels like a war between these brief and extended formats. The short story adaptations, always featuring Geralt, make for a series of fun monster-of-the-week style episodes akin to The X-Files or Supernatural. Their one-and-done nature means Geralt is always in the thick of it, with the show constantly exploring fun new ground, but the lack of connective tissue between each adventure limits his development, and means he’s almost always divorced from the larger plotlines. Ciri’s story is serialised in nature, but feels hamstrung while it waits for Geralt to catch up - which he never does because he’s still got short stories to episodically experience. Only Yennefer’s storyline feels as if it truly works, almost certainly because much of her story is original material written for the show that neatly weaves her adapted sequences into a larger framework.

Furthermore, each character’s adventures are distinctly different in tone. Geralt’s stories often involve humour and have an almost Dungeons & Dragons podcast vibe, while Yennefer’s story is incredibly dour and tragic. It could be argued that this variety of perspectives demonstrates the world’s plethora of experiences, but it mainly serves to undermine any sense of cohesive tone and iron-forged identity. Is this a fun romp that’s designed to chronicle tabletop RPG-like antics, or a dark look at the perils of power? If it’s the latter, frequent soap opera-esque dialogue and ham-fisted handling of the show’s most interesting morality issues derail any genuine sense of seriousness. The Witcher is an oddly camp show, mixing traditional fantasy dialogue with jarringly modern turns of phrase (largely a crime committed by Jaskier, Geralt’s increasingly irritating bard companion). And by not consistently playing the world straight, the show can occasionally feel as if it lacks conviction in its own setting.

Making things feel further disjointed is the fact that all three main characters exist in different time periods, with their stories told at different speeds. For one character, this season takes place over a matter of days. For another, it’s three decades. The core trio being separated by space and time is something that the show makes very little effort to communicate outside of a few off-hand lines of dialogue. I believe this comes from a good place - showrunner Hissrich is on record saying that she trusts the audience to be smart - but unfortunately the indicators simply aren’t strong enough. While the timelines do finally combine and produce a satisfying merging of the stories, the payoff does not justify the obtuse journey, especially as it has no real narrative payoff such as that seen in HBO’s Westworld.

These problems prevent The Witcher from achieving its potential, but they don’t derail the experience entirely. On an episode-by-episode basis the stories are often engaging and provide some solid thrills. As an anthology of standalone quests the show is actually pretty successful, if not played as straight as the stories deserve. And special note should be paid to composers Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, who provide an exceptional score for the series that builds atmosphere and provides The Witcher with a genuinely unique signature.

But viewing the season as a whole reveals an admirably adventurous experiment gone awry, where the fundamentals of cinematic storytelling are discarded in a misguided attempt to surprise viewers with multiple time periods, and the storytelling is muddled between episodic and serialised plotlines. That it all comes together at the end of the season is satisfying mostly because it's a relief that The Witcher makes it there largely intact. Essentially, it’s less than the sum of its parts.

Verdict The Witcher’s first season is unconventional and messy. It’s failed by its convoluted structure, which ultimately restricts character growth, and prevents the show from having any true sense of depth. This makes for an unsatisfying big picture, but thankfully there are plenty of things to enjoy in its individual components. Henry Cavill has found his perfect match in Geralt of Rivia, and his appreciation of the role helps elevate all of the White Wolf’s storylines above their imperfections. Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer doesn’t get the depth of character exploration that her character deserves, but does demonstrate the show’s ability to weave a complex, consequential journey. And, weak CGI aside, the show is filled with beasts - both human and monstrous - that give the show a unique, Slavic flavour.

This eight-part season is effectively a prologue for the show’s main story, which has only just begun in the finale’s last scene. And while that does mean that these hours do feel somewhat inconsequential and exposition-heavy, they do establish a fascinating world worth exploring. Indeed, as the credits roll you’ll almost certainly reach for a copy of The Last Wish or boot up the games to continue that adventure. But if you do, you’ll likely discover that Netflix’s The Witcher has a bit of work to put in before it hits the high quality bar set by the story’s other mediums.

Sophie Cabot black

“To Burn Through Where You Are Not Ye

Those who take on risk are not those
Who bear it. The sign said to profit

As they do, trade around the one
Particular. Let them credit what you hunt,

Let future perform. Results are for your
Children anyway; returns can be long

To notice, and when wrong, will right
Unless the drawdown is steep, or of your own

Doing. If only to have known then the now:
The thesis did not revert, never worked;

You did not move
Except to the already—

And as the prodigy breaks from the pack,
Disrupts into the new for just one more

Click above the dial, the deal
Downriver is how you will get paid,

Later, further. Out beyond
Where you just see. Trust the flow

Is what he said, sort out the secular
As each day reconciles you

Into a morning of leaving. Or at least going;
Coming back at dark to take off your shoes

And ease into that chair. With that glass. Filled
Again. Not yet paid for. All resting

On an infinitesimal wire you have never seen.
Their wire. Their there. You here. Not there.

What it is like to be human ?

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas day who receives an absolutely magnificent Castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this Castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the Castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the Castle isn't built. It's in tiny intricate pieces, and although there's a book of instructions you don't understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal Castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build--------------------

A wonderful excerpt from " the humans " by Matt haig

How to recycle plastic

INCINERATION TRANSCRIPT
9.20.19 Burn, baby burn

 [THEME]

SEAN RAMESWARAM (HOST): Students across the world today are walking out of school to protest for action on the climate. It's in conjunction with the big U.N. climate summit. Maybe you heard about the 16-year-old climate activist Greta who took a boat across the Atlantic for the occasion. Everyone's focusing on the big, but I'm sort of caught up on the small, and I'm catching up Today, Explained in the small. I asked producer/reporter Noam Hassenfeld to help me on this quest because I heard that there was a chance that my recycling was being burned!

NOAM HASSENFELD (REPORTER): Yeah, Sean you sent me this article in The Guardian from a couple months ago and it was about how Philadelphia was having problems with its recycling system and was sending its recyclables to an incinerator outside the city.

SEAN: Yeah, and I think it was kind of like shocking, right? Because it flies in the face of things that we were taught as children — what happens to your recycling.

NOAM: Yeah, I sort of couldn't believe that it was happening. And so I had to go check it out for myself. I wanted to go to a local incinerator operated by the same company and so I went to an incinerator in Alexandria, Virginia, right outside of D.C.

KEVIN MCGUNNIGLE (Covanta official): This is a view inside the combustion chamber. So this is where we're burning waste at about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a good view in there.

NOAM (at incinerator): Holy shit!

JAMES REGAN (Covanta official): Yeah. Bend down if you can and look directly up.

NOAM (at incinerator): Oh my god… That’s scary! Yeah, it's just crazy to see this like huge... I mean, that's a bigger fire than I've ever seen in my life, I think.

SCORING - Q TWO

NOAM: The US is in a recycling crisis.

SCORING BUMP



REPORTER 1: Say goodbye to recycling if you live in the city of Deltona. With lower demand for recyclable products and rising cost of recycling, the city decided to suspend its recycling program.

REPORTER 2: The city of Jackson is suspending its curbside recycling program until further notice.

REPORTER 3: In Sierra Vista, concerns over contamination and cost force city leaders to do away with curbside service.

REPORTER 4: “A slow moving recycling crisis.”

REPORTER 5: This comes after China stopped accepting the bulk of American recycling last year.

REPORTER 6: So now we’re sending this stuff to Southeast Asia.

REPORTER 7: So we were doing that for a while, what’s happened is because there’s so much plastic that we’re talking about, a lot of the Southeast Asian countries have now been overwhelmed and they have also put in their own plastic bans. So there's there's all these tons of plastics basically floating around with no clear home.

SCORING OUT

NOAM: The story of this recycling crisis starts at the beginning of 2018.

NOAM: That was when China essentially stopped accepting the world’s crap. The ban was... disruptive.

JENNA JAMBECK (University of Georgia): About half of the plastic that we were recycling was getting exported to China.

NOAM: Jenna Jambeck. She’s a National Geographic Fellow and a professor at the University of Georgia.

JENNA: There were a few reasons why this came to be.

NOAM: Reason number one:

JENNA: Basically in the mid-1990s, recycling was changing in the U.S. and we went to this single-stream system. We could just put all of our recyclables into one bin, and then we designed facilities to separate those materials out.

NOAM: Those facilities didn’t always do the best job….

JENNA: And so they needed sort of this secondary sort.

NOAM: Which China was down to do. In large part because of reason number two:

JENNA: The WTO was really encouraging global trade.

NOAM: China shipped goods to the US, those ships had to make a return trip….

JENNA: And they could go back with this recycled plastic that then could be imported into China.

NOAM: But the profit margins on recycled plastic are tiny, and eventually China said all the extra pollution wasn’t worth it to them. Which basically gets us here.

Reporter 1: “A slow moving recycling crisis.”

NOAM: But, it’s worse than it seems.

SCORING - PLASTIC SONG

NOAM: The U.S. was in a recycling crisis well before China’s ban.

JENNA: Even when we were exporting it, our average recycling rate for plastic has been around 9 percent. So you know that means over 90 percent of our plastic was not getting recycled anyway.

NOAM: To be clear: that means, for the majority of plastic in America…

JENNA: About 79 percent was getting landfilled.

SCORING BUMP

NOAM: It wasn’t that long ago that plastic seemed like a miracle.

THE GRADUATE:

MR. MCGUIRE: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

BENJAMIN BRADDOCK: Yes, sir.

MCGUIRE: Are you listening?

BRADDOCK: Yes I am.

MCGUIRE: Plastics.

NOAM: Well, I just want to say one word to YOU: COMPLICATED!

SCORING BUMP

NOAM: We all learned that plastic needs to be separated from trash, yeah, sure. And it helps if your city separates plastic from glass and metals. But beyond that… plastic needs to be sorted from other plastic. You know those numbers on the bottom next to the recycling logo? Those are actually different types of plastic, all made from different materials, all of which have to be separated.

JENNA: Ones and twos are more recyclable. Those are things like your beverage bottles, your detergent bottles.

NOAM: Milk jugs, peanut butter jars….

JENNA: Then from there, numbers three through seven are things like polypropylene.

NOAM: Like the container my takeout came in on Thursday...

JENNA: And things like PVC, you know when you think of like water pipes and things like that. And they all have different properties in terms of processing so you can't mix them together.

NOAM: And when you get to some of these higher numbers, more plastic starts ending up in landfills.

JENNA: There's many places that really just even wouldn't accept them in the first place, because again you don't have enough value in capturing those. And then what we are putting into the recycle bin, if it's contaminated then that doesn't get recycled itself and so that percentage that is able to even be recycled just gets smaller and smaller.

NOAM: But great news: even this is way worse than it seems.

        SCORING OUT

NOAM: The US only recycles 9 percent of its plastic. Seems bad. But that’s only plastic we recycle once. And most plastic can only be recycled once or twice.

JENNA: You know really recycling just delays. It doesn't ever really prevent disposal at whatever point and that would be in a landfill or incinerator, and so it really simply only delays that eventual disposal that's needed.

NOAM: So, only some plastic can be recycled, and during the process, more and more gets disqualified. And all of this only delays the inevitable, which is plastic going to an incinerator, a landfill, or likely even worse, the ocean. And this is all happening while plastic production is skyrocketing.

MR. MCGUIRE: There’s a great future in plastics.

JENNA: That has been rapidly increasing since we started recording this in 1950, and annually now it's over 330 million tons. We also calculated the cumulative amount of plastic that we had produced and that was equal to 8.3 billion metric tons. It's very hard to imagine and even when we turned it into something like it's actually equal to 80 million blue whales it's still very hard to imagine.

        SFX: WHALE SOUNDS

NOAM: But here’s a twist: contrary to everything you’ve been taught, throwing your recycling in the trash might actually be better for the planet.

THOMAS KINNAMAN (Bucknell University): A question that was always on our minds was what would be the optimal recycling rate.

NOAM: Thomas Kinnaman. Economics. Bucknell University.

THOMAS: We were hearing that a complete circular economy with 100 percent recycling was a goal. And that sounded great. But we were concerned about the environmental costs of recycling combined with the economic costs.


NOAM: If you care about recycling, you probably throw your plastic in a bin and you feel like, “Great. I did my part!” But your plastic goes on a journey, it has to be transformed, and all that effort makes your good deed… complicated.

SCORING - SILVERWARE

NOAM: At each stop in the recycling journey, there are both economic and environmental costs.

THOMAS: So that recycling bin is put out on a Monday morning….

        SFX

THOMAS: With all of your other recycled materials and probably a different truck than the garbage truck will come down and collect those recycled materials.

        SFX

THOMAS: The truck dumps it at some local processing facility where all the plastic is separated. Ideally….

SCORING AND SFX OUT

THOMAS: This is all ideal because a lot of the plastic ends up in a landfill at this stage. Because they open up the recycling truck and there’s plastic wrap in there and you know vegetable containers and different types of plastic that buyers don't want in their plastic. And so the buyer comes and looks at it and says, I won’t take that. And it ends up going to the landfill. Um...

        SCORING BACK IN

THOMAS: But if it is being truly recycled then it will be put in a container with other exact materials like it….

SFX

THOMAS: And that container will then be trucked somewhere else, probably far from your home.

SFX

THOMAS: So that's a long truck drive, probably shredded into little bits which required energy, and those little plastic bits then could be used in some type of….

SFX OUT

THOMAS: New product.

NOAM: Think about every individual cost in that journey.

THOMAS: The cost of the trucks, the equipment, the labor, the gasoline necessary to go around and collect the recycled materials to transport them to market the materials and then processed.

        SFX

THOMAS: This requires energy, as well as additional labor.

NOAM: All of that energy and all of that labor has a significant environmental cost.

        SCORING OUT

NOAM: In the end, adding it all up...

THOMAS: Plastic is one of those materials where the benefits are outweighed by the costs. My results suggest maybe we shouldn't even be considering recycling for plastic. Given that the social costs seem to be higher than if we were to do other things with it.

NOAM: You're, you’re basically saying that recycling can be bad for the environment. Not just like neutral or forgettable, but actually bad.

THOMAS: It can be. Landfills tend to be closer to a municipality than a final recycling outlet is. Or you take it to the coast and have it shipped to a developing country which still does ocean dumping… you know which bottle is more likely to end up in the ocean: the one you sent to your Missouri landfill or the one that's being shipped to a developing country that still dumps in the ocean? So in some cases recycling could actually be bad for the planet. Absolutely.

NOAM: And why do you think these sort of second-layer questions about, you know, whether recycling can actually be good or bad are not necessarily being asked by most people?

THOMAS: I think it became more of a social question than an economic question. The idea was that we produce too much garbage, it's not sustainable. Recycling is a way of kind of entering into a more circular economy and therefore it just makes sense to do this.

NOAM: Yeah.

THOMAS: And I think recycling maybe at some point was considered to be sort of like a gateway activity, a gateway into the world of responsible environmental living that you know we can get people starting to recycle, this will trigger other questions: How else can I help the environment? Maybe I'll stop driving everywhere and get my bike working and use that more often or I'll walk, and I'm not sure that’s taken off like that. Instead of a gateway maybe it’s been used as an excuse, like hey, I recycle, now I don’t need to do anything else.

NOAM: Mmhm.

THOMAS: And so now I can continue to drive my SUV to work and keep my house nice and cold in the summer because I recycle my plastic. I’m… I’m ok, you know I’m doing something.

NOAM: Let’s say I'm putting you in a situation where you're standing in front of a trash can and recycling bin and you're holding that one water bottle. For you the cost is exactly the same, you know you can put it in either bin. Which would you decide to put it in yourself?

THOMAS: Well you know I'm a... I'm a creature of habit like so many of us. So I still find myself putting it in the plastic bin. It’s possible that if we want to keep this supply chain going just in case there is technological innovation that occurs soon, we’re all hoping for that, right?

NOAM: But to be clear, for right now, it’s better to throw that bottle away?

THOMAS: With plastic, yeah, it's better to landfill or incineration.

        SFX - FIREBALL

        SCORING - GALAXY

SEAN: After the break I started off this whole thing was like incineration is shocking, that absolutely cannot be the thing that we should do, right.

But what if it is?

This is Today, Explained.

SEAN: I started off this whole thing saying incineration is SHOCKING. That absolutely cannot be the thing we should do, right?

But what if it is?

Noam stares down the fire after the break on Today, Explained.

     [MIDROLL]

SCORING - LOCKED IN THE PANTRY

NOAM: Before we get to incineration, let’s just set the stage:

Our recycling system is broken.

The vast majority of America’s plastic is not getting recycled. It’s mainly ending up in landfills. Or worse — the ocean.

So what do we do?

Well, to figure it out, I hopped on a bus...

Stop requested...

NOAM: And headed down to the Covanta Incinerator in Alexandria.

It’s one of about a hundred waste to energy plants in the US, and like the name says, it’s designed to do two basic things.

Get rid of waste. And generate energy.

SCORING OUT

KEVIN: All right, it can be a little dusty out there and you know we have a few thousand tons of trash so there will be an odor, too.

NOAM: Kevin McGunnigle. Environmental Compliance Specialist. He also gives the tours.

NOAM (at incinerator): Yeah, there’s an odor.

NOAM: To be honest, though, it’s not that bad. Like, it’s certainly not as bad as where I used to live in New York.

KEVIN: So, yeah, the crane operator is operating the crane, or claw using a series of joysticks.

NOAM: We’re in a giant warehouse. There’s a guy on a perch operating a jumbo version of that arcade claw game, picking up mountains of crap instead of teddy bears.

There’s a huge wall of mixed waste on either side of us. Plastic. Cardboard. Furniture. Banana peels. You name it. And right in front of us, there’s maybe a 30-, 40-foot drop down to where trucks are dumping waste.

In the waste-to-energy process, this is the beginning.

Step 1: Sorting.

KEVIN: Waste comes in, it’s dumped onto the tipping floor, before being pushed into the refuse storage pit.

NOAM (at incinerator): So Kevin I just saw the claw like lift up and then sort of drop a chunk down was that the mixing process?

KEVIN: Yeah that's... we call it fluffing the waste. It's preventing you from just having all of one kind of material, all cardboard, or all paper. You know, we know some waste has more heating value like plastics, wet  cardboard is going to have less heating value. So that's why they're mixing it before feeding it.

NOAM: They need to get it just right. There’s this sea of waste out here, but they’re always burning one-third plastic, two-thirds non-plastic. And on the upper ledge with us is a series of hoppers, which are basically these huge buckets with slanted ramps for the waste to slide down on its way to the combustion chamber. Once the claw picks up a good mix….

KEVIN: It's gonna be dropped into that hopper, where it’s going to be gravity-fed. This waste will be reduced to ash in about one hour to two hours.

NOAM (at incinerator): All the trash in the hopper gets burnt up?

KEVIN: Yeah, it's going directly into the municipal waste combustor.

NOAM (at incinerator): Can we see some fire?

KEVIN: Absolutely.

NOAM: Step 2: Combustion.

KEVIN: This is a view inside the combustion chamber. So this is where we're burning waste at about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The way we're generating electricity is we have water-walled tubes lining the inside of the boiler; they’re heating up water to convert steam, steam goes to a generator and turns the blades to generate electrical energy. There’s a good view in there.

NOAM (at incinerator): Holy shit!

KEVIN: By the time the waste get to this wall it's reduced to ash.

NOAM: At this point we’ve taken a pile of mixed waste, burned it, and what’s leftover is ash and chunks of unburnt metal. Which brings us to….

Step 3: Metal recovery.

KEVIN: Basically ash passes off the end of this vibrating pan and falls into one truck. Then metal is picked up and dropped into a separate box, which is eventually sent to a scrap metal yard. So we should see some recovery here; I'm sure you'll see some spoons and knives and stuff like that coming through.

NOAM (at incinerator): So this is just like an enormous rotating magnet.

KEVIN: Yes. There’s a bicycle just went by. A shopping cart.

NOAM: It’s hard to picture just how crazy this all looks. There are big chunks of metal, like mattress springs, bed frames, silverware, all just going zhhooOOP! And sticking to this huge rotating magnet.

KEVIN: We get about 30 tons a day of that material, 11,000 tons per year.

NOAM: That’s 11,000 tons of metal that’s being recycled every year instead of heading to a landfill.

KEVIN: The air pollution control, I'll walk you through it. We’ll just go outside.

NOAM: Step 4: Pollution control.

KEVIN: See that ductwork there? That's where all the flue gases come. So you burn trash, you've got gases that come off of that. That's where that ductwork is. Basically you're injecting a lime slurry.

NOAM: A lime slurry is basically a chemical mist that reacts with the flue gas to reduce acid gas emissions.

KEVIN: Then it goes to a bag house.

NOAM: Kevin walks over to the bag house, which handles the bigger pieces of flying ash.

KEVIN: There are six compartments where gases are going through. It’s designed that way so they go through a cleaning cycle one at a time: just blasts air, knocks ash down, down into a hopper here and drops it back into the boiler. So it's kind of a closed-loop system. You've got combined ash sent into a truck which is eventually at this at this site, it’s sent to a monofill or ash landfill.

NOAM: That ash goes to a landfill, but that’s only about 10 percent of the size of the original waste.

Finally we get to step 5. Energy creation.

KEVIN: So the steam enters the turbine, which generates electricity goes to a switch yard owned by Dominion Virginia Power who will sell that to the end user.

        SFX - LIGHT SWITCH

        SCORING - 8 LEG DOWN

NOAM: OK. That’s how they work. So should we be burning all our plastic?

MARCO CASTALDI (City College of New York): It's not ideal. The ideal situation is to reduce waste.

NOAM: Marco Castaldi. Chemical engineering. City College of New York.

MARCO: The ideal situation after that is to reuse it. And then whatever cannot be reduced or reused or recycled, you have to extract the energy from it. And converting it with waste-to-energy has a lower environmental impact than landfilling.

NOAM: There’s something called the waste hierarchy.

MARCO: The waist hierarchy starts with reduce, reuse, recycle...

NOAM: And that’s all most of us got in school. Just the first three words of the waste hierarchy.

And that’s best to worst: reduce, then reuse, then recycle.

But guess what’s next?

THE GRADUATE: PLASTICS!        


NOAM: NO! Go away. It’s INCINERATION!

SCORING OUT

NOAM: Then, all the way at the bottom, the worst thing we can do with our waste is drop it in a landfill.

MARCO: When you’re putting material into a landfill, you're releasing methane….

NOAM: ...which is 86 times stronger than CO2 over a 20-year time frame, which means….

MARCO: For every one ton that you convert in waste energy facility, you have offset one ton of nominally one ton of CO2. So greenhouse gas emissions, definitely a benefit with waste-to-energy.

NOAM: Still, there’s obviously the whole burning waste thing.


MARCO: Anytime you're dealing with this garbage there's gonna be emissions in one form or the other whether it's air emissions or solid emissions. But the amount of dioxin that's released from waste to energy facilities is minuscule. You will get more exposure to dioxins looking at a firework display for 15 or 20 minutes then you will be exposed to dioxins of a waste to energy facility processing waste for 100 years.

NOAM: And there have been studies that examined the effects of living near these plants.

MARCO: In fact one that's just come out where there was a seven-year study on facilities in the UK that looked at infant mortality, you know, birth outcomes in terms of you know abnormalities and it showed that there was none.

NOAM: Even so. Incineration is really controversial.

ANA BAPTISTA (New School in New York): Most of the incinerators in the U.S. today are located in communities of color and low-income communities that are often referred to as environmental justice communities. And they contribute pollution to local communities that are already overburdened by other pollution sources.

NOAM: Ana Baptista runs the Environmental Policy program at the New School in New York.

ANA: It's very difficult if not impossible to trace public health outcomes to any one particular facility. What I am confident about is incinerators are definitely contributing to the overall pollution burden in a community. Environmental justice communities if you ask them what their target is that they would say that they don't prefer landfills or incinerators.

NOAM: Professor Baptista wants the world we were promised. Ideas like….

ANA: Zero waste solutions that divert a lot more of the waste stream to composting and to recycling and in some cases looking at opportunities to reduce the overall burden and load on waste systems.

SCORING - NIGHTTIME

NOAM: I should point out that this particular debate is very American. In Europe, it’s a whole different ball game.

SCORING BUMP

NOAM: First of all, they’re just way better at recycling. They’re also wayyyyyy more into incinerating. There’s about 500 incinerators in Europe. America’s got under 100.

NEWS: In Greater Paris, garbage that can't be recycled is converted into energy, some of which the plants use to run themselves.

NOAM: Sweden burns half its waste and even imports some from the UK just to burn it.

NEWS: Sweden is considered the world leader in the field of waste-to-energy.

NOAM: In Vienna, the incinerator is featured on postcards.

PERSON IN VIENNA: I think it's a pretty remarkable step that the city of Vienna did this.

NOAM: But the most original plant is probably in Copenhagen.

NEWS: Downhill, downtown. This is the city center power station the neighbors don't object to.

NOAM: The Danish plant has an actual ski slope on its roof. Seriously.

DANISH PERSON: Our ski slope here at Copenhill is a lot different than when visit a mountain.

        SCORING OUT

DANISH PERSON: Ah, that was so good!

NOAM: There’s a lot of reasons why the US and Europe are so different when it comes to le waste.

Europe needs the energy from incineration more than the US does, because it’s not as rich in fossil fuels. And they have much, much less cheap land for landfilling. Most European countries even have landfill bans.

But most noticeably, incinerators are right there in the middle of some of the ritziest neighborhoods.


JANEK VAHK (Zero Waste Europe): The most well known like the one in Vienna, the Copenhagen, the one in Amsterdam, in Paris. It's not necessarily areas where you have poverty. I mean, most plants in Europe, I would not say that they are kind of hidden somewhere.

NOAM: Janek Vahk. Zero Waste Europe. Brussels. Not a fan of incinerators. But not because of the pollution.

JANEK: I don't think the air pollution is the main issue nowadays. It's mainly the lock-in effect. The fact that these are plants to be there for, in order to pay back, at least 25, 30, 40 years, and that locks the waste management system into burning.

NOAM: Even though countries in Europe are some of the best recyclers on Earth, Janek wants even more government investment in recycling. Like Professor Ana Baptista at the New School, he wants the world we were promised: Reduce. Reuse. Maybe even recycle. In Europe it doesn’t feel nearly as out of reach.

        SCORING - FIVE YEARS IN A MINUTE

NOAM: Back in the United States. Things are a little more dire. China doesn’t want our plastic. We’re using more and more if it every day. Only 9% of it is getting recycled. And then… people are scared of incineration. But maybe that’s because people don’t understand just how bad waste really is. And who can blame them? Europe is burning things out in the open. We’re mostly doing it in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Europe talks about landfill bans. The US talks about plastic straw bans. And that is NOT putting much of a dent in those 80 million blue whales worth of plastic.

Incineration can and should be part of the solution, but we can’t just go burning all of our plastic. Plants can’t handle it, which is why Covanta stopped burning recyclables outside of Philly and has rejected similar offers from other cities too.

What’s left is a choice with no easy answer. Either we stop making so much plastic, or somehow we innovate our way out of the problem.

In a sense, China forcing our hand here might have been a good thing. It might force us to confront the ugly realities of incineration. Or the even uglier realities of landfills. Or the ugliest reality of floating plastic islands the size of Texas. Whatever the less than ideal scenario is, we’re living it right now. And most of us don’t even know it.

SCORING OUT

SEAN: Noam Hassenfeld. Reporter. Producer. Today, Explained.

I’m Sean Rameswaram.

Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of the show.

Efim Shapiro’s the engineer.


Brigid McCarthy, Amina Al-Sadi and Haleema Shah produce.

And Will Reid has been our summer intern, but all good summers come to an end. What he’s taught us is that where there’s a Will, there’s a way.

Shout outs to Jelani Carter for being our best friend in New York City.

And the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, who I can only assume is heading to Area 51 right now.

Today, Explained is a 401-episode co-production of Stitcher and Vox. We’re part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

 [THEME/CREDITS]