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The city of Los Angeles has rightfully gripped the nations attention this month as wildfires rage on. While the devastation induced by our changing climate demands superhuman effort to squelch it, the transportation sector (stubbornly responsible for the greatest share of U.S. emissions) is ironically observing a significant milestone. January 24, 2025, marked the centennial of the implementation of the Traffic Ordinance for the City of Los Angeles. This 35-page bureaucratic document redefined the use of Americas streets, tailoring them to the benefit of the automotive industry. American streets were once dominated by people. A documentary travelogue of New York City captured by Scenska Biografteatern from 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets in their daily routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional automobile jostle by, unhindered by traffic signals or centerlines. To us today, it can seem chaotic, but the pace of the street is slow, and people navigate each other with fluency. San Franciscos A Trip Down Market Street, shot just a year before the 1906 earthquake, shows the view from a streetcar, picturing the Ferry Building at the streets end obscured by intertwining streetcars, horses, bicyclists, cars, and people. Pedestrians stand undaunted in the center of the street, waiting to board the slow-moving streetcar. A boy playfully darts in front of the train, as if he is challenging it to a game of tag. Growing up in American cities meant playing in the streets, even in the countrys most dense neighborhoods. Back then, people shared the roadway with streetcars and bikes. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles had the most extensive electric streetcar system anywhere. From Minneapolis and Chicago to Washington D.C. and New York City, bicycles were used by women and men commuting to work in the 1890s. And they were not alone. As Evan Friss chronicles in The Cycling City, people rode bikes in U.S. cities as much as they now ride in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the best cycling cities in the world. This was all before the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance was passed. The Ordinance was written by Miller McClintock, then a doctoral student of municipal government at Harvard University, who was recruited by a champion of the automobile industry, Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had dropped out of the University of Chicago to sell Studebakers at 18-years-old. At 33, he was close to making his first million dollars in the industry and had been appointed chairman of the Los Angeles Traffic Commissiona body responsible for regulating streets. For the first time, the Ordinance prioritized cars on the citys increasingly congested roadways. It quickly became the template for the country. With a contemporary eye, the provisions created by the Ordinance may seem more logical than they were to city dwellers at the time. Historian and author Peter Norton has spent his career researching the automobile era and has well documented it in his books Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. Norton has scoured letters to the editors of local newspapers, written by everyday people who passionately argue for their place on American streets, just as it was being usurped. With the anniversary of the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance approaching, I interviewed him to understand its significance. Norton says that sharing streets always required negotiation, but before the Ordinance, the pedestrian had the absolute right to the street, to stroll into it at any point, and to cross it anywhere she chose . . . even a child had the right to the street. This was a social norm, but as Nortons research suggests, it was also defended by judges in U.S. courtrooms throughout the country. For example, in Fighting Traffic, he cites a Philadelphia judge who, in 1924, lectured drivers in his courtroom, saying, It wont be long before children wont have any rights at all to the street. He determined that motorists deserved restraint if they could not assume the responsibility of ensuring childrens safety and resolved, Something drastic must be done to end this menace to pedestrians and to children in particular. It may be hard to imagine today, in a country where the vast majority of people commute by car, but in Los Angeles and many U.S. cities in the early 20th century, most people didnt use cars to get around. The majority of American women didnt get drivers licenses until the 1960s, and if a family owned a car, men usually monopolized the use of it. People generally walked, rode streetcars, or biked. Norton argues that while the transition to auto-dominated streets is often seen as the arc of progress stimulated by consumer demand, it was actually a well-crafted campaign produced by those with an interest in selling automobiles. The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance changed who was prioritized on city streets. Between 1914 and 1922, the number of cars on the streets of Los Angeles quadrupled. To continue to boost sales, the automobile industry required an edge over its competition with the streetcar and one of its advantages was speed. At the time, a streetcar traveled at approximately 10-15 miles per hour, and without dedicated lanes, at even slower speeds when they were blocked by cars. In the Ordinance, McClintock imposed a 35-mile-per-hour threshold almost everywhere except for a few limited cases. But 35 miles per hour was unprecedented in the early 20th century. According to Norton, most cities held motor vehicles to 810 mile per hour speeds. In his words, the automotive industry realized that, If drivers cannot go faster than a streetcar, then theyre not going to buy a car, especially if they have a streetcar service available to them . . . So, we cannot afford to let speed be the culprit in traffic safety. Instead of focusing on speed, the Ordinance decried recklessness. Most importantly, it pinned reckless behavior on pedestrians rather than speeding cars. he Ordinance calls out jaywalkers, criminalizing pedestrians who do not obey signals or who walk outside crossings. Jaywalking, once used as derogatory slang, was employed formally to fix attitudes against wayward pedestrians. McClintock writes that, High-speed motor traffic makes the practice known as jay-walking almost suicidal instead of questioning the imposition of hurtling motor vehicles on streets occupied by people. As Norton suggests, You could use exactly the same facts that hes using to say that driving at speed is homicidal. The Los Angeles Record decribes the new Ordinance as less brutal way of abolishing jaywalkers than previous methods. In the 1920s, traffic injuries and fatalities were climbing. In his book Fighting Traffic, Norton observes that between 1920-1929 motor vehicles killed more than 200,000 people in the United States (approximately four times the death toll of the previous decade), long before most adults drove. Horrifically, many of those killed were the most vulnerable, including the elderly and children, especially in dense cities where the casualties were the highest. The public was naturally concerned about safety and the Ordinance addressed their concerns about the dangers of mixing cars and pedestrians, saying, These conflicts account for the great majority of the accidents and fatalities in Los Angeles and in every other city. However, the Ordinance co-opts safety as a tactic to make more room for cars. For the control and protection of pedestrian traffic, McClintock suggests restricting pedestrians to striped crosswalks, raised platforms on wide roads called safety zones, and even tunnels created to protect schoolchildren from motor vehicles. He overlooks the social life of the street and even requires that pedestrians not stop or stand on the sidewalk except as near as physically possible to the building line to remedy what he calls the too frequent congestion of pedestrian traffic by casual groups gathering on the sidewalk. The Ordinance didnt change city streets by itself. It was accompanied by a clever public relations campaign targeted at cultural norms and advanced by E.B. Lefferts, president of the Automobile Club of Southern California. Lefferts designed the campaign to succeed where other cities had failed. As Norton documents, Lefferts told an audience at the Chicago convention of the National Safety Council that the Ordinance worked because We have recognized that in controlling traffic, we must take into consideration the study of human psychology, rather than approach it solely as an engineering problem. As Norton summarizes, Lefferts tactics aimed to make people feel embarrassed, perhaps ashamed . . . to feel the sting of ridicule. Radio broadcasts aired a public education campaign about behavior on the street, the Boy Scouts were deployed to issue cards to offenders, letting them know they were jay-walking. Ultimately, the police were emboldened to blow whistles at anyone attempting to cross the street against the signal or outside marked areasshaming them into submission. Norton discovered multiple cases where people were humiliated by police officers who picked up pedestrians . . . (mostly women) and put them on the curb. Those who protested this new treatment were arrested. The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance established that streets would not be shared but dominated by cars. It was essentially a land grab. Once the roadway was secured for the benefit of motor vehicles, they were the heavyweight champion on streets that had once been for everyone. The Ordinance required that pedestrians were subject to the same directions and signals as govern the movement of vehicles without acknowledging that they were exceptionally vulnerable. Facing the mass of a speeding car, no other users of the roadway could compete in the physical battle to claim the streets. By upping speeds on American streets and designing them for accelerating cars, motordom prevailed. Even today, Norton says, we still hold the view that you try to make fast driving safe instead of signaling to drivers that they need to be paying attention and slowing down. The logic of the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance soon made its way into the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, which passed in 1928 under the direction of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, in close consultation with the automobile industry. It became the template for similar ordinances throughout the country. As Norton maintains, Just about everywhere you go when youre dealing with the local rules . . . theyre descended from this ancestor, the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance. McClintock went on to author a proposal for foolproof highways, in the mid-1930s, promising safety through gradual turns, grade separations, and streets for the exclusive use of the automobileagain with the promise of increasing speeds. Those highways would ultimately bring more cars into the hearts of urban areas, with a growing human toll. Outpaced by cars, and bullied to the margins, bicyclists also lost their place on the road. Eventually, streetcar tracks were pulled up, some replaced by buses. However, mass transit was increasingly restricted as tax dollars secured by the Highway Trust Fund were unevenly divided by an 80-20 split favoring spending on highways. Unfortunately, dedicating streets to cars did not guarantee safety. In 2021, more than 43,000 people died on U.S. roads. Cars have become larger, faster, and heavier, making them even more deadly, especially to children. In America, from the time a child can walk until she reaches adulthood, being hit by a car has been the number one cause of death for many decades (surpassed only recently by firearms). Norton objects to our collective history told as if auto dominance was the inevitable direction of progress. He has uncovered the mass of people who urged the country in a different direction. It was ordinary Americans from all walks of life, rich and poor, Black, Brown and White, male and female who were objecting to their loss of the use of the street. Among them was Philadelphian Barnett Bartel who, as the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance was being deliberated, urged Hoover to protect people on roads. Bartel describes the appalling loss of his sons to what he identifies as murdeers. Bartels 9-year-old was killed on his walk home from school by a truck that jumped the curb on his walk home from school, and his 18-year-old was run over by a car on his bike in a hit-and-run and left to bleed to death. Bartel was one of many bereaved parents whose letters crowded the local papers. Their protests continued in the 1950s when women-led baby carriage blockades obstructed streets so children could play safely outside. Norton acknowledges that it is incredibly helpful to recover these lost perspectives because then we can step out of the perspectives that we grew up in, and that we were socialized into, and look at them afresh with new eyes and possibly see opportunities. As jaywalking laws are repealed in cities and states across the country, as congestion pricing removes automobiles from the heart of the largest U.S. city to pay for transit, as pandemic-era open streets evolve into new permanent urban parkways, and as a new administration hangs its hat on advancing freedom, Norton encourages us to reconsider the 100-year history ushered in by the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance. He suggests a new version of our history that avoids the false advertising that Americans have always had a love affair with the automobile. Perhaps with the new space allotted on our streets, and the laws that govern them, we will reclaim the cultural history we gave up and the freedom of choice we once exercised so that at any age, we can walk, bike, and ride where we want to. If we recover that history, says Norton, we empower ourselves in choosing alternative futures. This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next Citys newsletter for their latest articles and events.
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E-Commerce
On a typical day, you cant turn on the news without hearing someone say that Congress is broken. The implication is that this dereliction explains why the institution is inert and unresponsive to the American people. Theres one element often missing from that discussion: Congress is confounding in large part because its members cant hear the American people, or even each other. I mean that literally. Congressional staff serve in thousands of district offices across the nation, and their communications technology doesnt match that of most businesses and even many homes. Members district offices only got connected to secure Wi-Fi internet service in 2023. Discussions among members and congressional staff were at times cut short at 40 minutes because some government workers were relying on the free version of Zoom, according to congressional testimony in March 2024. The information systems Congress uses have existed largely unchanged for decades, while the world has experienced an information revolution, integrating smartphones and the internet into peoples daily personal and professional lives. The technologies that have transformed modern life and political campaigning are not yet available to improve the ability of members of Congress to govern once they win office. Slow to adapt Like many institutions, Congress resists change; only the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it to allow online hearings and bill introductions. Before 2020, whiteboards, sticky notes, and interns with clipboards dominated the halls of Congress. Electronic signatures arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021more than two decades after Congress passed the ESIGN Act to allow electronic signatures and records in commerce. The nation spends about US$10 million a year on technology innovation in the House of Representativesthe institution that declares war and pays all the federal governments bills. Thats just 1% of the amount theater fans have spent to see Hamilton on Broadway since 2015. It seems the story of American democracy is attractive to the public, but investing in making it work is less so for Congress itself. The chief administrative office in Congress, a nonlegislative staff that helps run the operations of Congress, decides what types of technology can be used by members. These internal rules exist to protect Congress and national security, but that caution can also inhibit new ways to use technology to better serve the public. Finding a happy medium between innovation and caution can result in a livelier public discourse. A modernization effort Congress has been working to modernize itself, including experimenting with new ways to hear local voices in their districts, including gathering constituent feedback in a standardized way that can be easily processed by computers. The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution. House leaders are also looking at what is called deliberative technology, which uses specially designed websites to facilitate digital participation by pairing collective human intelligence with artificial intelligence. People post their ideas online and respond to others posts. Then the systems can screen and summarize posts so users better understand each others perspectives. These systems can even handle massive group discussions involving large numbers of people who hold a wide range of positions on a vast set of issues and interests. In general, these technologies make it easier for people to find consensus and have their voices heard by policymakers in ways the policymakers can understand and respond to. Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada, and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki. In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement. In the meantime, Congress is looking at ways to use artificial intelligence as part of a more integrated digital strategy based on lessons from other democratic legislatures. Finding benefits Modernization efforts have opened connections within Congress and with the public. For example, hearings held by videoconference during the pandemic enabled witnesses to share expertise with Congress from a distance and open up a process that is notoriously unrepresentative. I was home in rural New Mexico during the pandemic and know three people who remotely testified on tribal education, methane pollution, and environmental harms from abandoned oil wells. New House Rules passed on January 3, 2025, encourage the use of artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations and allow for remote witness testimony. Other efforts that are new to Congress but long established in business and personal settings include the ability to track changes in legislation and a scheduling feature that reduces overlaps in meetings. Members are regularly scheduled to be two places at once. Another effort in development is an internal digital staff directory that replaces expensive directories compiled by private companies assembling contact information for congressional staff. The road ahead In 2022, what is now called member-directed spending returned to Congress with some digital improvements. Formerly known as “earmarks, this is the practice of allowing members of Congress to handpick specific projects in their home districts to receive federal money. Earmarks were abolished in 2011 amid concerns of abuse and opposition by fiscal hardliners. Their 2022 return and rebranding introduced publicly available project lists, ethics rules, and a search engine to track the spending as efforts to provide public transparency about earmarks. Additional reforms could make the federal government even more responsive to the American people. Some recent improvements are already familiar. Just as customers can follow their pizza delivery from the oven to the doorstep, Congress in late 2024 created a flag-tracking app that has dramatically improved a program that allows constituents to receive a flag that has flown over the U.S. Capitol. Before, different procedures in the House and Senate caused time-consuming snags in this delivery system. At last, the worlds most powerful legislature caught up with Pizza Hut, which rolled out this technology in 2017 to track customers pizzas from the store to the delivery driver to their front door. Lorelei Kelly is a research lead at Modernizing Congress at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Several years ago, a little-known drug named Ozempicpreviously used only to treat diabetesemerged as a promising new drug for weight management. The Food and Drug Administrations approval of Ozempic in 2021 for weight loss treatment ushered in a new era for the class of drugs called glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, or GLP-1. Today, GLP-1 drugs, including Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, have become household names and key tools in the fight against obesity: 1 in 8 American adults say they have used a GLP-1 drug, and forecasts show that by 2030, 1 in 10 Americans will likely be using these medications. Now, research from my lab and others suggests that GLP-1 drugs could help treat dozens of other ailments as well, including cognitive issues and addiction problems. However, my colleagues and I also found previously unidentified risks. I am a physician-scientist and I direct a clinical epidemiology center focused on addressing public healths most urgent questions. My team works to address critical knowledge gaps about COVID-19, long COVID, influenza, vaccines, effectiveness and risks of commonly used drugs, and more. On January 20, 2025, my team published a study of more than 2.4 million people that evaluated the risks and benefits of GLP-1 drugs across 175 possible health outcomes. We found that these drugs lowered risks of 42 health outcomes, nearly a quarter of the total that we analyzed. These include neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimers disease and dementia, substance use and addiction disorders, clotting disorders, and several other conditions. Unfortunately, we also found that GLP-1 drugs come with significant side effects and increase the risk of 19 health conditions we studied, such as gastrointestinal issues, kidney stones, and acute pancreatitis, in which the pancreas becomes inflamed and dysfunctional. Cognitive benefits One of the most important health benefits we found was that the GLP-1 drugs lowered the risk of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimers disease and dementia. These findings align with other research, including evidence from preclinical studies showing that these drugs may reduce inflammation in the brain and enhance the brains ability to form and strengthen connections between its cells, improving how they communicate with one another. These effects contribute to mitigating cognitive decline. Two other key studies have shown that patients treated with a GLP-1 drug for diabetes had a lower risk of dementia. All of these studies strongly point to a potential therapeutic use of GLP-1 drugs in treatment of the cognitive decline. Ongoing randomized trialsthe gold standard for evaluating new uses of drugsare looking at the effects of GLP-1 drugs in early Alzheimers disease, with results expected later in 2025. Curbing addiction and suicidal ideation GLP-1 drugs have also demonstrated potential in reducing risks of several substance use disorders such as those involving alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, opioids, and stimulants. This may be due to the ability of these drugs to modulate reward pathways, impulse control, and inflammatory processes in the brain. The effectiveness of GLP-1 drugs in curbing addictive behavior may explain their spectacular success in treating obesity, a chronic disease state that many have suggested is indeed a food addiction disorder. Our study demonstrated a reduced risk of suicidal thoughts and self-harm among people using GLP-1 drugs. This finding is particularly significant given earlier reports of suicidal thoughts and self-injury in people using GLP-1 drugs. In response to those reports, the European Medicines Agency conducted a review of all available data and concluded that there was no evidence of increased risk of suicidality in people using GLP-1 drugs. Now at least two studies, including our own, show that GLP-1 drugs actually reduce the risk of suicidality. Other benefits In addition to the well-documented effects of GLP-1 drugs in reducing risks of adverse cardiovascular and kidney outcomes, our study shows a significant effect in reducing risk of blood clotting as well as deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. One puzzling finding in our study is the reduced risk of infectious diseases such as pneumonia and sepsis. Our data complements another recent study that came to a similar conclusion showing that GLP-1 drugs reduced risk of cardiovascular death and death due to infectious causes, primarily COVID-19. This is especially important since COVID-19 is regarded as a significant cardiovascular risk factor. Whether GLP-1 drugs completely offset the increased risk of cardiovascular disease associated with COVID-19 needs to be thoroughly evaluated. GLP-1 drugs may also be useful in treating fatty liver disease and conditions ranging from asthma to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, depression, and eye disorders. Risks and challenges Despite their broad therapeutic potential, GLP-1 drugs are not without risks. Gastrointestinal issues, such as nausea, vomiting, constipation, and gastroesophageal reflux disease are among the most common adverse effects associated with GLP-1 drugs. Our study also identified other risks, including low blood pressure, sleep problems, headaches, formation of kidney stones, and gall bladder disease and diseases associated with the bile ducts. We also saw increased risks of drug-induced inflammation of the kidneys and pancreasboth serious conditions that can result in long-term health problems. These findings underscore the importance of careful monitoring in pople who are taking GLP-1 medications. A significant challenge with using GLP-1 drugs is the high rates at which patients stop using them, often driven by their exorbitant cost or the emergence of adverse effects. Discontinuation can lead to rapid weight gain. Thats a problem, because obesity is a chronic disease. GLP-1 drugs provide effective treatment but do not address the underlying causes of obesity and metabolic dysfunction. As a result, GLP-1 drugs need to be taken long term to sustain their effectiveness and prevent rebound weight gain. In addition, many questions remain about the long-term effectiveness and risks of these drugs as well as whether there are differences between GLP-1 formulations. Addressing these questions is critical to guide clinical practice. Ziyad Al-Aly is a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
If you have spent any time traveling in the U.S. over the past 10 years, you may have noticed a curious vending machine filled with jars. Instead of crinkle-cut chips or wired earbuds for that movie you want to watch on the plane, these vending machines sell freshly made apple pecan salads, blueberry chia overnight oats, and mediterranean bowls. They are run by a company called Farmers Fridge, and they are slowly taking over airports in the U.S. Since it launched in 2013, the company has installed its vending machines at about 20 U.S. airports, including LAX, Chicago OHare, Dallas Fort-Worth, and most recently, Las Vegas. (I first stumbled on its leafy offerings at JFK airport, while on a quest for a meal that didn’t involve a side of soggy fries.) And it’s not just airports. These fridges are cropping up everywhere, from hospitals like New York Presbyterian and Boston Medical Center, to Amazon fulfillment centers, college campuses like Northwestern and Harvard, and stadiums like L.A’s Crypto.com Arena. Today, the company counts 1,600 locations around the country, and in the next 10 years, CEO and founder Luke Saunders is hoping to reach 100,000. How? With an understanding of cold chain logistics, an ever-expanding menu, and a swanky new fridge. This month, the company is debuting a new design that could help the company roll out more fridges at a faster clip. Five years in the works, the new fridge comes with a pitched roof that stands out from its flat-topped competitors. It boasts a new UX where various parts of the machine (from the payment module to the recycling bin where you can return your jar) light up to guide you through your purchase. And perhaps most importantlyat least when it comes to business growthit is made of two flat-pack modules that can be assembled in just 30 minutes, compared to four hours for the previous model. For now, the team is rolling these out at new locations onlythe first 50 fridges are already on the ground in Chicago and New York. But if these fridges prove as efficient as hoped, the company will begin swapping them out, one airport at a time. As we look to expand into new markets, our strategy is always to start with the airport, Saunders told me. Once we have the airport locked in, we build out the market with other verticals to saturate the market. [Photo: Farmer’s Fridge] The vending machine boom Lipstick, guacamole, earrings: You can buy pretty much anything out of a vending machine today (especially in Japan.) But in the early 2010s, when Farmer’s Fridge was just a seed in Saunders’s mind, vending machines in the U.S. were only beginning to diversify. Best Buy launched its first airport vending machine in 2008. Sephora launched its in 2009. Benefit followed suit in 2013 with their now-iconic kiosk designed to look like a pink bus. Saunders’s biggest influence, however, was Redbox, the now-defunct movie rental kiosk company. That, and ATMs, he says with a laugh. Prior to [ATMs], you had to go into a bank, talk to somebody, wait in line, and now you could go anytime you wanted, he says. ATMs, like vending machines, were convenient, and they were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Why has no one done this for food? he wondered. At the time, most vending machines sold snacks with a disturbingly long shelf life. The reasons for that are obvious. When food doesn’t need to be refrigerated, the level of urgency to get it from the facility where its made and into people’s mouths is significantly lower than when it’s fresh. A granola bar, for example, can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to make it into a vending machine. A salad from Farmer’s Fridge can only spend 24 to 48 hours in transit. After that, Saunder says, the fridge won’t let you buy it. Farmer’s Food makes every meal in-house, from a 100,000 square-foot facility in Chicago. The workday begins at 4 a.m. with washing and chopping veggies, cooking pasta, and mixing dressings. The assembly line begins at 8 a.m., and by 6 p.m., the company has to decide where these meals will be shipped off to. The team makes this decision based on a cost-function algorithm that Saunders himself built in the early days to calculate the probability the company will sell an item against the profitability of that item. The algorithm takes into consideration purchasing data, historical foot traffic data, and other variables like the weather. Today, the software mostly gets it right, but that wasn’t always the case. Ten years ago, Saunders says about 50% of meals were left unsold. Now, that number has dropped to 5%. (Unsold meals get either donated or composted, depending on the location.) [Photo: Farmer’s Fridge] From salads to . . . sushi? From the beginning, Saunders suspected that the biggest hurdle to scaling wouldnt be a lack of interest, but a lack of infrastructure. To prove out his theory, he set out to find a pilot location and eventually installed his first Farmer’s Fridge in a food court in Chicago. As Saunders recalls it, the food court was desperate for a tenant, and he himself was desperate for a landlord. The food court ended up shuttering soon after that, but the machine had done its job, and interest snowballed from there. In the first year, the company made about $350,000. This year, Saunders says it is projected to make 30 to 40 times that, which could amount to as much as $140 million. To date, the company’s best-selling item is the chicken southwest salad. In 2018, the company introduced sandwiches (and won a packaging award in the process). This year, they are rolling out protein bowlsand even contemplating sushi. The idea of eating raw fish from an airport machine might put some people off, but Saunder is convinced the idea has merit. And it’s not just intuition. Every time people buy something from Farmers Fridge, they are asked to fill out to a survey with their wish list. The most requested item? You guessed it. Sushi in a vending machine is not an entirely new concept. Japan has them in troves. But for Americans to buy in will likely depend on a variety of factors, including how much confidence the fridge can inspire. People get nervous about stuff like that, and Im the guy whos like, ten years ago, people were telling me that about salad, says Saunders. If you make good sushi, people will buy it. If its bad, they wont buy it. That the company spent five years fine-tuning the design of its fridges suddenly makes sense considering every fridge bears the burden of luring customers. Back in 2013, the first fridge looked as if a vending machine and a restaurant had a baby, says Saunders. It came with wood paneling, fresh plants on the roof and astroturf. Now, the company has pared down the aesthetic in favor of something clean and bright. The plants are gone. The wood paneling has made way for powdered-coated metal. But what the company has lost in rustic charm, it’s hoping to make up for in brand trust. This new design might not win any awards for hygge designbut it acknowledges that the fridge is just a shell, and the actual star is what’s inside it. Whether it comes with a side of soy sauce, or not.
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E-Commerce
The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have made one threat very clear: Climate change is undermining the insurance systems American homeowners rely on to protect themselves from catastrophes. This breakdown is starting to become painfully clear as families and communities struggle to rebuild. But another threat remains less recognized: This collapse could pose a threat to the stability of financial markets well beyond the scope of the fires. Its been widely accepted for more than a decade that humanity has three choices when it comes to responding to climate risks: adapt, abate or suffer. As an expert in economics and the environment, I know that some degree of suffering is inevitableafter all, humans have already raised the average global temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Thats why its so important to have functioning insurance markets. While insurance companies are often cast as villains, when the system works well, insurers play an important role in improving social welfare. When an insurer sets premiums that accurately reflect and communicate riskwhat economists call actuarially fair insurancethat helps people share risk efficiently, leaving every individual safer and society better off. But the scale and intensity of the Southern California fireslinked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply. How climate change broke insurance Historically, the insurance system has worked by relying on experts who study records of past events to estimate how likely it is that a covered event might happen. They then use this information to determine how much to charge a given policyholder. This is called pricing the risk. When Americans try to borrow money to buy a home, they expect that mortgage lenders will make them purchase and maintain a certain level of homeowners insurance coverage, even if they chose to self-insure against unlikely additional losses. But thanks to climate change, risks are increasingly difficult to measure, and costs are increasingly catastrophic. It seems clear to me that a new paradigm is needed. California provided the beginnings of such a paradigm with its Fair Access to Insurance program, known as FAIR. When it was created in 1968, its authors expected that it would provide insurance coverage for the few owners who were unable to get normal policies because they faced special risks from exposure to unusual weather and local climates. But the programs coverage is capped at US$500,000 per propertywell below the losses that thousands of Los Angeles residents are experiencing right now. Total losses from the wildfires first week alone are estimated to exceed $250 billion. How insurance could break the economy This state of affairs isnt just dangerous for homeowners and communitiesit could create widespread financial instability. And its not just me making this point. For the past several years, central bankers at home and abroad have raised similar concerns. So lets talk about the risks of large-scale financial contagion. Anyone who remembers the Great Recession of 2007-2009 knows that seemingly localized problems can snowball. In that event, the value of opaque bundles of real estate derivatives collapsed from artificial and unsustainable highs, leaving millions of mortgages around the U.S. underwater. These properties were no longer valued above owners mortgage liabilities, so their best choice was simply to walk away from the obligation to make their monthly payments. Lenders were forced to foreclose, often at an enormous loss, and the collapse of real estate markets across the U.S. created a global recession that affected financial stability around the world. Forewarned by that experience, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board wrote in 2020 that features of climate change can also increase financial system vulnerabilities. The central bank noted that uncertainty and disagreement about climate risks can lead to sudden declines in asset values, leaving people and businesses vulnerable. At that time, the Fed had a specific climate-based example of a not-implausible contagion in mindglobal risks from sudden large increases in global sea level rise over something like 20 years. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could create such an event, and coastlines around the world would not have enough time to adapt. The Fed now has another scenario to considerone thats not hypothetical. It recently put U.S. banks through stress tests to gauge their vulnerability to climate risks. In these exercises, the Fed asked member banks to respond to hypothetical but not-implausible climate-based contagion scenarios that would threaten the stability of the entire system. We will now see if the plans borne of those stress tests can work in the face of enormous wildfires burning throughout an urban area thats also a financial, cultural and entertainment center of the world. Gary W. Yohe is a Huffington Foundation professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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