What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won →

...With uncomplicated language and simple sincerity, Sanders has rallied millions of Democrats under the banner of “democratic socialism”—a kind of neo–New Deal liberalism, set against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s attempted synthesis of Great Society policies and Third Way politics—and moved “socialist” from the realm of epithet to legitimate label.
Win or lose, that counts. It’s the Democratic analogue to Reagan’s 1976 primary against Gerald Ford—a sign of the times and of the future. If Sanders wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and the nomination, then he’ll bring (or drag) the Democratic Party to the left. If he loses, then he’ll represent the largest faction in the party, with the power to hold a President Hillary Clinton accountable and even shape her administration, from appointments and nominations to regulatory policy.
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The Iowa caucus will make or break the Sanders campaign. Without a win, it’s hard to see his path to the nomination. But it means little for his legacy. Sanders is already a historic candidate—the first socialist in a century to build a genuine mass movement in American party politics. And whatever the Democratic Party is in the next 20 or 30 years, it will owe a great deal to Sanders and all the people—young or otherwise—who felt the Bern.

As W.H.O. Deems Zika a Global Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies →

Behind the Zika headlines, there are underlying drivers of disease risk that are not getting sufficient attention. Climate change and El Nino have been mentioned, and – as with any pest and illness restricted to certain temperature zones – can be factors.
But most important is the simple fact that, after a burst of effective mosquito eradication decades ago, a host of countries (Brazil in particular) relaxed such efforts, and did so just as humanity’s boom in urbanization and global mobility got into high gear.
In essence, the tropics are not facing a Zika emergency nearly as much as they are facing an Aedes aegypti emergency.
This mosquito species thrives in trash-strewn, puddly cities, bites in daylight (limiting the utility of bed nets) and has long posed a peril by carrying a host of dangerous ailments, including yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue.
Zika is simply the newest globe-hopping hitchhiker.

Putting A Price Tag On The Stress Of Having A Child →

It would be one thing if the rhetorical Village actually helped raise the child.

Neat little paper. Seeing more of these kinds of studies (including ones like those cited in the article which look at overall happiness). With any luck, this will lead to a better balance on society.

With Imposed Transparency and Concerned Millennials, a Boom in Corporate Responsibility? →

Way back in 2008, I wrote about Wal-Mart’s emerging effort to cut environmental and social harms from its business operations by exerting influence back along globe-spanning supply chains.
There were, of course, lots of issues, including this one, as I wrote at the time: “Wal-Mart is still selling consumerism even as it pledges to cut the social and environmental costs of making the stuff in its stores.”
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Here are some factors that appear to be driving the shift...

Obama is taking new actions to try to close the gender wage gap →

...On Friday he announced that the government is going to start collecting data on employee demographics and salaries from all large employers, not just federal contractors.
The new move is going to expand one of Obama's two April 2014 executive actions to promote equal pay.
One of those actions prohibited federal contractors from punishing employees who discuss their salaries with each other. The other required federal contractors to submit data on what they pay their employees, sorted by race, gender, and ethnicity. The latter rule is being expanded to include all businesses with more than 100 employees, not just federal contractors. The first report will be due September 2017, and the data is expected to cover about 63 million workers.

Chicago Police Have Been Sabotaging Their Dash Cams →

After the notorious video of Laquan McDonald getting shot by Chicago police officers 16 times went viral last November, investigators have been making their way through the other videos of the scene. In doing so, they've discovered that three of the dash cams pointed at McDonald that day did not record video, and others had no audio. Now a Chicago Police Department audit reveals that many of the department's dashboard cameras have been deliberately sabotaged.
Last month the CPD found that 80 percent of its 850 dash cams do not record audio, and 12 percent don’t record video either. The CPD has blamed the failures on "operator error or in some cases intentional destruction," and a close reading of that review by DNAinfo Chicagoreveals the extent of the latter. Officers frequently tampered with dash cams, stashing microphones in their glove boxes or pulling out batteries. Some dash cams were found with their antennae deliberately destroyed, and others had had their microphones removed altogether.

The Insanely Complicated Logistics of Cage-Free Eggs for All →

YOU MAY NOT have noticed while you were scarfing your avocado toast, but 2015 was the year of the egg, at least as far as the food industry was concerned. An Avian flu outbreak briefly sent egg prices soaring. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food chain and one of the biggest egg buyers anywhere, announced it would ditch its conventionally farmed eggs and sell nothing but cage-free eggs in all of its US and Canadian restaurants. By the end of the year, just about every major fast food chain and a handful of multinational food companies had followed suit, including Subway, Starbucks, Nestle and most recently Wendy’s, which joined in just this month.
But these announcements had a catch. The companies said the switch to cage-free would take anywhere from five years to a decade to complete. How could it possibly take ten years to let a bunch of chickens out of their cages?
As it turns out, going cage-free requires much more planning, money, and logistical engineering than the seemingly simple notion of setting some hens free would suggest. Ironically, this massive supply chain overhaul stems from consumer demand to return to the egg-producing practices of our pre-industrial past, but without undoing all the positive benefits of scale, affordability, and safety that were achieved through industrialization. It actually took farmers a really long time to figure out how to put the bird in the cage—and it’s going to take a while to figure out how to get it back out.

So why go cage-free?

Rose Acre Farms, one of the biggest egg producers in the US, has about 25 million laying hens. In 2014, the US as a whole produced nearly 100 billion eggs, totaling $10.2 billion in revenue. This kind of mass production depends on cages. With those tiny wire boxes, farmers can micromanage everything about a bird’s life. They can even help automate egg collection by forcing the bird to lay its eggs directly into a funnel that drops down into a collection area. Today, eggs are widely available and cheap mostly because of caging systems.
But keeping a living thing in a metal cage so small that it can’t move its wings or stand up for the duration of its short life has raised inevitable questions about animal suffering and welfare. It’s no longer enough to churn out cheap eggs. Especially in recent years, consumers have increasingly demanded to know more about their food’s origins—where it’s from, how it was raised, and under what conditions.