Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Forget Gold and Bitcoin: Kissing Is the New Currency

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
kiss-dollar

With the global economy generally pretty out of whack, you've heard the calls for a shift to the gold standard. (If not, here's Ron Paul.) And you're probably still wondering what Bitcoin is, too. Then there's this list of alternative currencies Katherine Ward put together for New York magazine in April. And now: there's the kissing economy. The world will run on affection, where hatred is a fine. You can buy a go-kart by hugging your husband or wife. The Metro St. James Cafe in Sydney, Australia, is allowing its customers to buy coffee by kissing their partners between 9 and 11 a.m. So, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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Is Your Greek Yogurt Destroying the Earth?

May 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Your Greek yogurt just might be harming the planet, according to a story at Modern Farmer (which you should all be reading). So, Greek yogurt. You see it everywhere, and you probably even eat it, too. It's healthy and tastes enough like nothing that you can make it taste good. But to make it healthy-enough, there's a menacing byproduct called "acid whey." As Justin Elliott writes: For every three or four ounces of milk, Chobani and other companies can produce only one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt. The rest becomes acid whey. It’s a thin, runny waste product that can’t simply be ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Rural Talent Migration

May 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Rural America is dying. Rural America is in good company. Half of the countries of the world are experiencing demographic decline. The typical reaction is to plug the brain drain. That doesn't work. Also, such policies are anti-economic development. Restricting geographic mobility does more harm than good (if it does any good at all). Some communities embrace attraction. Rural Kansas is dangling carrots in front of prospective residents. Such schemes have a poor track record. Luring immigrants, as Iowa has done, is more effective. But what happens if the source country of those immigrants ... Read More

More like this: Burgh Diaspora
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Things Aren’t Looking So Good for the Graduating Class of 2013

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Stacey Kalivas should be celebrating her graduation from college later this week. Instead, the 22 year-old is getting ready to move back home with broken dreams and in debt. Kalivas is a member of the class of 2013, the fifth successive wave of students to enter into a stubbornly weak U.S. labor market—marked by high unemployment, a large number of part-time workers, and many who have given up the hunt for jobs. "It's kind of tough to be graduating and not having anything," said Kalivas. The finance major will graduate from Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, on May 18. It has ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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How the Trailer Park Could Save Us All

April 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park "Pismodise." Park manager Louise Payne calls it "a holding tank for the great beyond." Louise has short hair and blunt bleached bangs that give her the air of a preteen skateboarder, but at 72 she's often found rolling by the park's 333 trailers in her electric golf cart, alternating between her roles as mother hen and whip-cracker. California is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young get very old. If they're lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Health, May-June 2013
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The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester

February 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Barring the biggest Washington miracle since Dolly Madison ferreted paintings out of a burning White House in 1812, sequestration—the automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, discretionary and certain health programs totaling $85 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, and $1.176 trillion over the next decade—will take effect March 1. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these cuts will cost 750,000 jobs in 2013, and reduce gross domestic product for 2013 by up to 0.5%. The effects stand to be disastrous: that much is clear. But when it comes to the politics of the ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Politics
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The Other Health-Care Reform

January 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Nothing rattles the mind quite like a toothache; anybody who’s suffered one can attest to that. What’s less appreciated is that poor oral health can throw the rest of the body into disarray as well. Research has linked gum disease with diabetes, heart and lung ailments, strokes, and premature births. Children who don’t see a dentist are more likely to miss school because of infected teeth and gums, and to grow into adults with serious dental problems. And missing teeth make it all but impossible to secure a middle-class job. Dentistry, it turns out, is destiny. It’s also a scarcely ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2013
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Today in Dubious Trends: Are Spaniards Really Resorting to Eating Garbage?

September 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Yesterday, a prominently placed story in the New York Times claimed that Spain's economy has gotten so bad, a newsworthy percentage of its residents have had to resort to eating garbage. Though dumpster-diving is a fairly common activity around the desperate edges of any society, the story suggested that Spain's trash-rifling has changed sufficiently to suggest a trend, and become specific enough to represent a visible symptom of the stricken country's economic malaise. I'm not a press critic, and though a resident of Barcelona, it's only a handful of years' experience, and I have yet to ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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My Nuclear Bomb Detonates More Safely Than Your Nuclear Bomb

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In yet another example of the serendipity of science, a University of Michigan research team applied “cocrystallization”—a process used in the pharmaceutical industry to alter the physical properties of drugs—to the production of high explosives, and discovered what may improve explosives technology in use for the last half century. Mixing two mainstays, the volatile CL-20 and the popular HMX (two parts to one), chemist Adam J. Matzger and colleagues cooked up an explosive that travels about 1 percent faster than HMX alone, the military’s explosive of choice since the 1940s. Not a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings, Politics, Science & Environment
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Bain, Solyndra, and Fannie Mae: Separated at Birth?

August 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Naked Capitalism pointed out something yesterday that confounds conventional wisdom on what kind of capitalism private equity firms like Bain Capital really engage in: ... most members of the public do not know that close to half the investment capital in private equity funds is contributed directly by government entities. In this respect, private equity is little different than companies like Fannie, Freddie, and Solyndra that are regularly criticized in the media as recipients of government subsidies. “Government entities” here refers to public employee pension funds, or entities that ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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