From a Bluesky post by Brent Toderian.
To carry 50,000 people per hour in each direction, a city needs a 175m wide road for cars. Even if those cars are electric. And then there’s all the parking. OR a city can move A LOT MORE people in a lot less space, with A LOT LESS public money, emissions, pollution, noise etc. Choices. Simple.
How much would trams carry? About a quarter or a fifth of a metro, but they are on the other hand cheaper to build and run.
From Chris Meder (EVCurveFuturist)
Solar passed nuclear in Texas 2 years ago. Now it's double. Texas is what makes this chart powerful. This isn't green ideology winning. It's pure economics. Solar is cheap, modular, scalable & incredibly fast to deploy. Wind keeps growing too. When economics take over, ideology becomes irrelevant.
You can politicise energy, but you can’t vote away the cost curve. Texas follows the money, and that solar curve tells you where it’s going, followed closely by wind. Add batteries and the economics get even harder to resist. Good luck stopping that. It's not even a race, its domination by new #SWB [Sun, wind, batteries]
Stunning new data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) shows the abysmally low rate of jobseeker means at least 3,000 more unemployed Australians die each year than would be the case were they not purposefully kept in poverty.
We often talk about how tough it is for those on jobseeker. But last week a report from the AIHW titled “Mortality outcomes among people receiving income support” shows talk is cheap when people are dying.
The report found that Australians on jobseeker are up to 10 times more likely to die than those not on welfare support.
In 2022, the rate of deaths for 35- to 44-year-olds not living on welfare support was 30 per 100,000. By contrast, the rate was 288 per 100,000 for those on jobseeker – 9.6 times greater.
Can someone explain why – in an economy in which the central bank has decided we need almost 700,000 people to be unemployed – those people live in such dreadful poverty that it can make you up to 10 times more likely to die in the prime of your life?
The Reserve Bank believes we need unemployment to be 4.5% to 5% to keep inflation stable. At that level, they believe total household income is such that we won’t buy too much stuff and there won’t be a wages breakout.
It’s not just the RBA: every government since 1996 has been more than happy to ensure the gap between the unemployment benefits and poverty has either grown or remained well above what it was when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating [Labor Prime Ministers] were in power:
Currently, jobseeker payments are almost half the poverty line – roughly $300 a week less than what would be needed for a single person to be right on the poverty line. The only time this was not the case was during the Covid pandemic when the Morrison government effectively doubled jobseeker temporarily.
During 2020, the death rate of those on jobseeker dropped 32% from 328 people per 100,000 the previous year to 224 people per 100,000:
It is too simplistic to say the doubling of jobseeker in 2020 was the reason the death rate dropped. A big factor was that the number of people unemployed almost doubled due to the Covid lockdowns. This group had not come from the level of poverty the usual cohort of unemployed people had, and as a result would likely be healthier.
Crucially, however, being unemployed did not automatically sentence them to poverty.
We therefore cannot say just how big of an impact the doubling of the payment had unless we were able to strip out the numbers of “unemployed due only to lockdowns”.
But while we cannot attribute the doubling of jobseeker to the drop in the death rate, that should not stop our anger at the higher death rates of those on unemployment benefits – and the disparity is getting larger.
In 2019, 328 people died per 100,000 of those on jobseeker. This fell to 224 in 2020, but then rose straight away to 300 the following year and then again to 326 in 2022. Conversely, over the same period, the rate of deaths for those aged 22-64 and not on welfare kept falling.
It means that the likelihood of dying for all unemployed people aged 22-64 is now nearly five times greater compared with those not on welfare – the biggest gap in the AIHW report:
The 2020 figure when jobseeker was doubled does however give us a good base to work from to estimate just how many more people on jobseeker die because they live in poverty.
The cruelty of poverty is that it sentences those in it to a poorer diet, less access to healthcare, less ability to afford exercise activities such as gym and sport club memberships, and as a result a much higher morbidity rate.
In 2022, 3,985 people on jobseeker died. If instead of dying at a rate of 326 per 100,000, the rate was the same as it was in 2020, then 1,246 fewer people would have died (a total of 2,739).
But let us lift our standards. There really is no reason why people on jobseeker should die more often than those not on welfare.
We are a rich country with supposedly universal healthcare. Raising jobseeker to the poverty line (about $37,000 a year) would cost roughly $11bn this year. For comparison, this year the Treasury estimates the richest 10% (people earning more than $162,000) will get about $22.5bn in superannuation tax breaks.
If those on jobseeker died at the same rate as those not on welfare payments, in 2022 just 817 people would have died – 3,168 fewer than in reality:
Poverty kills. And the way to lift people out of poverty is to lift the unemployment payment (and other forms of welfare).
Raising the level of jobseeker would save thousands of lives.
These sorts of results are not unique to Australia:
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| A passenger jet on approach to Newark Liberty International Airport flies over the setting sun in Newark, N.J., March 27, 2019. (AP Photo/J. David Ake, File) |
From AP
Flight attendants and pilots are at the highest risk of dying from radiation-related cancers — even more than people who work with radioactive materials, according to a new study.
Cosmic radiation comes from space. Only a small amount reaches the Earth’s surface, but exposure is greater for people flying at high altitudes.
There’s been limited evidence from small studies suggesting that the exposure translates to higher cancer death rates among people who fly often — particularly pilots and flight attendants. The new study “brings important new evidence to bear on this question,” two Australian radiation experts who weren’t involved in the research wrote in an accompanying commentary.
The latest study, published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine, used national data from more than 12 million death certificates that included information about occupations. The authors looked at death rates from cancers that are tied to radiation exposures, including leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and cancers of the skin, breast, thyroid, prostate and central nervous system.
Among more than 500 occupations, flight attendants had the highest percentage of deaths from radiation-related cancers, and pilots were second, the researchers found. For those two occupations, the odds of dying were unusually high for each type of radiation-related cancer.
Neither group showed higher-than-normal death rates from cancers that aren’t tied to radiation exposure, noted the commentary writers, Catherine Olsen and Ken Karipidis. That fact “supports the hypothesis that occupational radiation exposure, rather than lifestyle or socioeconomic factors, underlies the observed excess,” they wrote.
The researchers found that flight attendants had about 50% higher odds of dying from a radiation-related cancer than the general working population, and pilots had about 36% higher odds.
In terms of absolute risk, about 6.9% of flight attendant deaths were from these cancers — roughly 1 in 14. Among pilots, it was 6.7%. For the general working population, it was 5%, said the study’s first author, Dr. Vishal Patel of Harvard Medical School.
The authors acknowledged some limitations in their study. They do not know how much exposure each flight attendant and pilot got in the air or from other sources. It’s also possible occupations were misclassified on some death certificates.
They also could not account for another possible contributor specific to the professions: Cancer risk can be worsened by frequent disruption of the body’s internal clock, which can be affected by jet lag, crossing time zones and irregular work schedules.
The Federal Aviation Administration has acknowledged that aircrews are exposed to ionizing radiation, but the government does not set federal dose limits or require monitoring, the authors noted.
“You can’t manage an exposure you’ve decided not to measure,” Patel said in an email.
Sara Nelson, who leads a union representing 55,000 flight attendants, said the report reinforces that radiation exposure needs to be taken seriously, as the union has suggested for years.
“The risk is known, but crew are not educated or informed. And, no one is taking responsibility,” said Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
Annual skin examinations may be warranted for all people working on high-altitude flights, and women in those jobs may want to get mammograms earlier or more frequently, Olsen and Karipidis wrote. Doctors who care for pilots and flight attendants also should have a “heightened index of suspicion” for cancer when evaluating these patients, they said.
Air travel adds to greenhouse gas emissions. It's bad for the world. Now it turns out it's bad for the people who fly us.
And Mars's atmosphere is only 0.6% as dense as the Earth's. The cancer risk will be much higher there, even from shorter exposures.
From Our World in Data
The chart shows the relationship between GDP (gross domestic product) per capita — a measure of average incomes in a country — and people’s living conditions.
Where GDP per capita is higher, living conditions are far better in many ways. Where average incomes are higher, children die less often, fewer of them are born dead, mothers die less often, fewer children suffer from hunger, doctors can focus on fewer patients, people live longer, more people can read, children have better access to education and better learning outcomes, more people have access to electricity and clean drinking water, and people are happier with their lives.
The disparity between countries with a low and a high GDP per capita is enormous. Looking at the first panel, for example, you can see that a child born in one of the poorest countries is more than 20 times as likely to die as a child born in one of the richest.
In my article “What is growth?”, I have written about why a high GDP per capita is so important for our living standards and how economic growth is possible
From Elena Sgarbossa MD
Each of us can make a difference for our planet by eating vegan No other diet is better for the climate or for human health
