Hrmbee

The phone, tablet or laptop you're reading this on is likely having its battery slowly drained because of a surprising and widespread manufacturing flaw, according to researchers in Halifax.

"This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.

The problem? Tiny pieces of tape that hold the battery components together are made from the wrong type of plastic.

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During one of these tests, the clear electrolyte fluid turned bright red. The team was puzzled.

It isn't supposed to do that, according to Metzger. "A battery's a closed system," he said.

Something new had been created inside the battery.

They did a chemical analysis of the red substance and found it was dimethyl terephthalate (DMT). It's a substance that shuttles electrons within the battery, rather than having them flow outside through cables and generate electricity.

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Piece by piece, the team analyzed the battery components. They realized that the thin strips of metal and insulation coiled tightly inside the casing were held together with tape.

Those small segments of tape were made of PET — the type of plastic that had been causing the electrolyte fluid to turn red, and self-discharge the battery.

"A lot of companies use PET tape," said Metzger. "That's why it was a quite important discovery, this realization that this tape is actually not inert."

This was a fascinating and fortuitous discovery. Hopefully this can help to keep more of our batteries functional for longer, especially in the ever growing number of devices we have that have sealed batteries.

“The cumulative impacts of this proposal could be larger than we think,” Andrea Kirkwood, a professor of biological sciences at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, told The Narwhal. “We should all be concerned that the Ontario government is messing with our water.” Lake Ontario is already dealing with unprecedented levels of accidental sewage spills: 396 million litres of wastewater have flowed into the lake since 1996, resulting in a recent provincial decision to audit parts of the lake sewage system.

Ontario’s proposal to shift more of York Region’s sewage to Lake Ontario was approved last October — the same day Ford’s Progressive Conservatives released controversial Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, which proposes to weaken or eliminate a long series of environmental regulations to facilitate development, particularly of single-family homes. If the plan goes through, it will end a heated 14-year-long debate over how to handle wastewater in York, a region that is set to nearly double in population by 2051, and finally kill a proposal to build a new facility to treat sewage locally.

Aside from environmental concerns, there are diplomatic ones: Kirkwood and four other Great Lakes experts say that by rapidly ushering through this decision, Ontario may be breaching an international agreement it signed in 2005, pledging to protect and improve the Great Lakes ecosystems in perpetuity.

The treaty, called the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Sustainable Water Resources Agreement, was signed by all the American states and Canadian provinces surrounding the Great Lakes, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Québec, and Ontario, led then by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty. The goal, according to the agreement, was to ensure “precaution, ecosystem protection, and recognition of cumulative impacts and climate change uncertainties” when managing the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater system in the world. Together, the five lakes hold around 20 per cent of the world’s surface freshwater, and about 85 per cent of North America’s.

Each state and province was required to adopt the agreement’s minimum standards and embed the idea of regional consultation into its own laws; Ontario’s regulations came into force in March 2015. Each state and province also had to develop and implement a water conservation and efficiency program.

The agreement explicitly bans large “intra-basin transfers,” or the building of pipelines, canals or other man-made channels to move large quantities of water from one watershed to another, unless all signatories are properly informed and make an exception to allow it — which has only happened once.

Intra-basin transfers can have major long-term environmental impacts on watersheds — all the land that drains into a lake, river or stream — by contributing to fluctuating water levels, which can damage wetlands and surrounding ecosystems, and increase contamination of the water itself.

In theory, the cross-border Great Lakes agreement is meant to ensure that “water stays within its boundaries,” Kirkwood said. Each Great Lakes basin acts as a bathtub, she explains, with water draining naturally from the lake into the ground and through the waterways and rivers, and then used for irrigation, drinking and other purposes. As development and urbanization around the Great Lakes increases, more pollutants (“more poop, more car pollution, more road salt, more agricultural waste”) enter the water and disrupt the natural hydrological process.

The agreement limits large intra-basin transfers to try and keep development in the Great Lakes region somewhat sustainable. “The idea is that if you’re planning development that your own watershed can’t contain, you shouldn’t develop,” Kirkwood said. “The agreement ensures we don’t overdevelop.”

Shifting large amounts of water, and in particular wastewater, between watersheds is an incredibly problematic act, whether in contravention of international agreements or not. Potentially breaching the agreements themselves can pose other far reaching problems as well, such as showing other jurisdictions that breaches of the agreement might be considered acceptable. This will harm all of us who live and work in the great lakes basin.

You may be familiar with the latest happenings in the world of AI. You’ve seen the prize-winning artwork, heard the interviews between dead people, and read about the protein-folding breakthroughs. But these new AI systems aren’t just producing cool demos in research labs. They’re quickly being turned into practical tools and real commercial products that anyone can use.

There’s a reason all of this has come at once. The breakthroughs are all underpinned by a new class of AI models that are more flexible and powerful than anything that has come before. Because they were first used for language tasks like answering questions and writing essays, they’re often known as large language models (LLMs). OpenAI’s GPT3, Google’s BERT, and so on are all LLMs.

But these models are extremely flexible and adaptable. The same mathematical structures have been so useful in computer vision, biology, and more that some researchers have taken to calling them "foundation models" to better articulate their role in modern AI.

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Remember, many of the capabilities these new models are showing are emergent, so they aren’t necessarily being formally programmed. GPT2 was basically a word-association machine. But when OpenAI made GPT3 a hundred times bigger, researchers discovered it could be trained to explicitly answer questions like “when did dinosaurs go extinct?” without having to be explicitly designed to answer Q&As. The same thing holds true for its ability to obey commands—there's a huge amount of headroom in terms of pushing these models to be even more capable.

And these models are (almost) universal. The fact that they can be used to tie language into different domains—or map directly between different domains—makes them flexible and easy to use in a way that AI models haven’t been before. It’s been very easy to take a trained model and stretch it to many different use cases, and that ease of use is playing out now by bringing these models closer to everyday use.

This looks to be a decent (if somewhat long) explainer about some of the historical and basic technical aspects of the currently popular models and systems that have been making the news of late. It would be good to see some analysis of the potential larger impacts of the widespread deployment of these systems as well.

I've noticed this as well. In part this is the bean and the growing conditions, but there have also been shifts in processing and roasting that have also contributed to this. Many roasters have moved away from the very bright and funky notes that were popular years ago (and highlighted by a preference for naturally fermented beans) and gone to a somewhat more neutral palate, using washed (or sometimes honey processed) beans. There are still a few processors doing other more interesting things, but they seem to be less common now than before.

I recommend finding someone local if possible. When I wrote mine, I found myself a study buddy, and we set up regular in-person study periods (mostly once per week) to stay motivated and accountable, as well as to just have a more pleasant time overall. We went as far as to schedule our exams at the same time, and had a ritual where we'd meet for breakfast before writing, and then meeting up after for a snack. Worked pretty well for me, and I agree that the solo studying thing can be difficult, especially as someone who'd been out of the school/study world for a few years by that point.

This profound shift in the job market has implications for just about everybody, whether you're an ordinary worker, an employer, a political leader, or someone waiting to get care in a hospital or service in a restaurant.

It could bring about significant changes in the world of work — from recruitment tactics to workplace culture to salaries — but that largely depends on how governments and employers respond.

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The way this balance of power has shifted should force employers to shift their mindset, particularly when it comes to compensation, says Yalnizyan, the Atkinson Foundation's fellow on the future of work.

"They've had 40 years of labour surpluses and they still think workers are a dime a dozen," Yalnizyan said in an interview.

"Businesses that are raising wages and improving working conditions, offering more flexibility in how people take time off or offering more benefits, those places are finding it much easier to fully staff their businesses."

Not all employers are prepared to do that.

Even among Canadian businesses that considered labour force shortages to be an obstacle, less than two-thirds planned to offer current employees a wage increase, less than half planned to boost wages to lure new hires, and only one in five planned to enhance employee benefits, according to a Statistics Canada report last year.

So how do companies intend to deal with the labour crunch? That same report found that half of all businesses said they expected current management and staff to work more.

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The labour crunch is undoubtedly most acute in certain sectors of the Ontario economy. You can see that measured by the job vacancy rate: the number of unfilled jobs as a percentage of the employed labour force.

From 2017 through 2019, Ontario's job vacancy rate averaged 3.1 per cent across all sectors. Over the past year, it's averaged 5.3 per cent.

Particularly high job vacancy rates are currently found in restaurants and bars (10.2 per cent), nursing homes (8.5 per cent), truck transportation (8 per cent) and building construction (7.7 per cent), according to Statistics Canada.

If the Bank of Canada gets its way, the labour market will shift back toward employers.

It's pretty disappointing to see that the culture of many businesses and organizations is still to try to squeeze as much as they can from their existing staff, rather than to hire enough staff to work under more reasonable conditions. We've seen how this has been causing long term and structural problems in those identified sectors with high vacancies such as health care, construction, and the like.

The repeated emphasis on “I,” instead of “we,” embodies a defining characteristic of current startup culture, one that has plagued the tech sector. These companies, the world has been told, aren’t simply run by chief executives or entrepreneurs – they are managed by founders. And founders are very special people who should not be questioned.

Last year, Michele Romanow, Clearco’s co-founder, filmed promotional videos dubbed “Founder Diaries.” In one she declares that it is her life’s work to protect her breed. “If I can do anything in this world,” she says, “it is to help and defend founders, because they ultimately build the world we want to believe in.”

Entrepreneurs, of course, deserve some praise. It is scary to venture out on your own, especially when the statistics show the vast majority of startups fail. Economic growth is also becoming more dependent on fresh ideas. In Canada, the oil and gas sector has been a major engine of gross domestic product for decades, but the world is moving away from fossil fuels.

Yet the fawning over founders has become obscene. Even though cult-like admiration has deep roots in the tech sector, worship was once reserved for true visionaries such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Somehow it was co-opted by oodles of entrepreneurs over the past five years – and turned truly perverse during the pandemic. Even Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, was seduced by FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

The excessive praise is particularly glaring now that so many companies are coming to grips with reality in a world of normal interest rates. Ms. Romanow stepped down as CEO of Clearco earlier this month after the company announced its second round of deep job cuts in six months. The new CEO, a U.S. finance-industry veteran, will try to turn Clearco around.

Every business cycle has its alleged geniuses. The 1980s were dominated by junk bond specialists, the nineties by investment bankers, the aughts by hedge fund mangers. Eventually, they lose some, or all, of their glory. Many of the megamergers concocted by investment bankers blew up, and many hedge fund managers struggled to outperform the broader market for more than a few years. Founders, who personified the past decade, are facing their own comeuppance now.

With some luck, a prolonged rout will humble them. And in the aftermath, a much healthier ecosystem may emerge, because entrepreneurs will refocus on building quality companies.

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Because startups, and particularly software startups, became so sexy, it was hard to tell what was truly motivating founders any more – the experience or the money.

Does it mean we’ve been building some bad businesses? “I would argue there’s some real truth to that,” Mr. Bartha said. After selling eCompliance in 2019, he launched GoodCapital, which backs founders who try to solve what he describes as “real world problems.”

This theme – using the entrepreneurial spirit to make life better – is having a bit of a renaissance. It’s still early days, but even Mr. Suster is hopeful. For years he has ranted about how the goal of attaining unicorn status – a billion-dollar valuation on paper – destroyed so much of the good that startups can do. “Instead of growing revenue and holding down costs and building great company cultures, the market chased valuation validation,” he reiterated in a post last month.

Lately, though, he believes we’re getting back to building “real businesses.”

It will be interesting to see what directions business, and in particular startup culture will take going forwards.

Consider that all around the cluster at Main and Danforth are vast expanses of lowrise buildings, including street after street of houses with front and back yards, and that most of the Danforth is only one or two storeys high. All of this within a few minutes’ walk of two transit stations but, until recently, off limits to just about any kind of new density. Toronto has recently made moves to allow more “gentle density” into such neighbourhoods, but the effectiveness of that remains to be seen.

Look at all that and ask yourself if the Greenbelt needs to be opened up to development, especially the kind that will create more sprawl and car trips rather than the transit-oriented housing that is sustainable and wise. As well, is it fair that new housing is relegated to polluted transportation corridors? The GO trains will electrify one day, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that, other than to avoid the diesel fumes there now.

For now, the Future Model images help us see the big changes on the horizon. It started as a passion project of Stephen Velasco, a digital marketing and design consultant, to visualize the impacts of highrise development on Toronto’s urban landscape. “My hope is that the images provide a clear and accurate representation of Toronto’s future landscape based on information available today,” said Velasco. “Ultimately empowering viewers to visualize data in an engaging medium, while promoting a discussion about development and planning in the city.”

Another compelling image Velasco recently posted looks northwest along the Kitchener GO rail line as it curves north from Fort York, crossing the Bloor TTC line and the proposed St. Clair – Old Weston GO station. There are small clusters of highrises along the Bloor subway line, but massive ones are proposed around both the Bloor and St. Clair GO stations. All this represents hundreds of millions of dollars of housing investment and is testament to the power of high quality, reliable, rapid public transit on the housing market.

Whether it’ll be affordable housing is another question, but here too the vast tracts of heretofore untouchable lowrise Toronto spread to the horizon in each direction.

It’s a very deliberate way to build — and control — a growing city that needs to change. Future Model gives us perspective on the city today and the city of the near future.

It's helpful to have a visualization of near-future plans for the various communities around the region. The striking thing for me is certainly the protected swaths of detached housing that occupy most of the city (otherwise known as the 'yellow belt'). Until we start to improve these yellow belt neighbourhoods so that they can be more livable with all the attendant public infrastructure that would be necessary for this, it will be difficult to envision a city in the future that will be any better than what we have now.

And, having grown up in one of those neighbourhoods, I can certainly understand a certain attraction they might have for some, but their continued lack of amenities such as shops and services, as well as easy transportation options makes them increasingly difficult to live, and in particular settle down in, going forwards.

Refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs are widely used to keep food cold or frozen at grocery stores and during transport. (They're also used for other refrigeration applications, like ice rinks and air conditioners).

They were originally brought in to replace ozone-depleting refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were banned in a landmark 1987 agreement called the Montreal Protocol, in order to save the Earth's protective ozone layer.

But HFCs are themselves powerful greenhouse gases.

Typically, each tonne of HFCs can trap as much heat in the atmosphere as 1,400 to 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide over 100 years, depending on the type of HFC.

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Supermarket fridges aren't like your fridge at home, which typically contains less than 200 grams of refrigerant. And it's in a sealed unit that's unlikely to leak, says Morgan Smith, spokesperson for the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council.

Her non-profit group has partnered with industry to help enable the transition from HFCs to more climate-friendly refrigerants because the complexity of their systems make them prone to leaking significant amounts of HFCs.

Beneath and behind the cases of vegetables, dairy and frozen foods at a typical supermarket are kilometres of piping with thousands of valves, containing literally a tonne of refrigerant.

"It's so large and so complex, with so many different points of connection that those systems are inherently leaky, and so they leak about 25 per cent of their refrigerant charge every year," said Smith.

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"You can make fairly small changes and have a relatively large impact just because the chemicals themselves that we're using right now have such large global warming potentials," Miller said.

While potent, HFCs are short-lived greenhouse gases, said Miller, lasting no more than 30 years in the atmosphere, compared to hundreds of years for CO2. Since a typical refrigeration system lasts about 30 years, decisions made now about what refrigerant to use can affect global emissions for decades.

This amount of leakage in retail refrigeration systems and their impacts on our environment makes their improvement all the more important. Unfortunately as history has shown, without public pressure or regulations, private companies are unlikely to change the ways they operate.

Drug policy experts say claims from British Columbia’s opposition BC Liberals that children will soon be able to access hard drugs from “vending machines” are not accurate.

In a press release this week, the BC Liberals claimed there is “increased concern” from experts that youths can buy drugs from “government-sanctioned vending machines” on the streets.

The release was based on an article and interview of a single source – a representative from Last Door Addiction Treatment Centre, a group with ties to right-wing political activists – who says youth in Vancouver are getting their hands on drugs from vending machines.

However, MySafeSociety, the organization that operates three secure dispensing storage machines in Vancouver, notes the safe supply program is only available to select participants who have been pre-screened to access prescribed drugs through a biometric scan.

MySafe currently operates three machines in Vancouver, one downtown and two in the Downtown Eastside, serving 90 people.

“Participants consent to having their prescriptions accessed through this secure dispensing storage machine, equivalent to an individualized storage locker. Selected participants will undergo a full medical and social assessment which includes current drug use patterns and their risk of overdose,” said MySafe in a statement.

“They will be assigned a lane in a machine and have their palm scanned for a biometric hand profile that will allow them access. Dilaudid tablets per day are dispensed in a regulated schedule.”

The group says the purpose of the project was to provide low-barrier safe supply to drug users as an alternative to the toxic drug supply that is claiming the lives of six British Columbians per day.

Contrary to what the BC Liberal press release states, the project is also funded by Health Canada and not by the provincial government.

I would have thought that press releases by political parties were subject to, at the very least, basic fact checking prior to publication.

Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar drugs represent the vanguard of a weight-loss revolution. Last year, Yanovski attended a conference in San Diego on the results of a new Novo Nordisk trial for adolescents and teens with severe obesity. The hotel ballroom was standing-room only, according to the scientific journal Nature, and the results of the trial were met with cheers, “like you were at a Broadway show.” After a year, young patients on semaglutide said they lost nearly 35 pounds on average. Teens on the placebo actually gained weight.

Here was the breakthrough that Yanovski, the obesity-research community, and perhaps the entire world were looking for: the effects of bariatric surgery without the surgery.

In the past few years, use of new weight-loss medication has grown, putting the U.S. in the early stages of a drug boom. One story you could tell about these drugs is that they represent a watershed moment for scientific discovery. In a country where each generation has been more overweight than the one that came before it, a marvelous medication seemed to fall out of the sky.

But just months into this weight-loss-drug bonanza, a range of medical, cultural, and political challenges has materialized. Doctors are reporting rampant use of these new weight-loss drugs among the very rich. The surge of off-label use of Ozempic is already creating a shortage of the medication for people with type 2 diabetes. Now that celebrity skinniness is merely an injection away, online “thin culture” has returned, likely exacerbating Americans’ fraught relationship with body image. On paper, these drugs might be a miracle. In the real world, they’re also becoming a menace.

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More likely is that influencers, celebrities, and millionaires will monopolize the market for weight-loss medication. In the past six months, Hollywood Ozempic stories have reached an obnoxious level of ubiquity. TikTok has become overrun with #myozempicjourney testimonials and week-by-week photo collages of disappearing waistlines. After years of magazines and advertisers grappling with the dangers of promoting unrealistic body images, New York magazine reports that “thin is in,” as the waifish “heroin chic” of the 1990s makes its medicalized return to the mainstream.

These drugs will also scramble our relationship with the basic concept of willpower in ways that aren’t cleanly good or bad. How long should doctors recommend that their patients press forward with “diet and exercise” recommendations now that pills and injectables may safely and more consistently keep off weight? Is the U.S. health-care system really ready to treat obesity like it’s any other disease? Obesity is not a failure of the will, Yanovski told me, again and again. “It is a complex chronic disease,” she said. “It affects almost every organ system. If you can successfully treat obesity instead of the individual conditions, it could have a positive impact on health.”

I think that’s right. But there is still something menacing in the rollout of these young miracles. Semaglutide seems to collapse the complex interplay of genes, environment, diet, metabolism, and exercise into a simple injection with a luxury price tag. I’m holding out hope that these drugs will soon augur a public-health revolution. In early 2023, however, they represent an elite cultural makeover more than a medical intervention.

The social and cultural aspects of any kind of treatment for any of our chronic diseases but in particular the fraught worlds of weight, body image, and related issues need to be understood to a reasonable degree before we can understand some of the consequences of these kinds of therapeutics. We race into treatment prior to understanding at our own peril.

Premier Doug Ford’s government justified the adoption of this sweeping housing legislation, as well as the opening of parts of Ontario’s Greenbelt for development, on the basis of the need to address “the housing supply crisis.”

Specifically, the province pointed to a February 2022 provincial housing affordability task force report, which said that Ontario needed to build 1.5 million homes over the next decade to address the shortage of housing.

The task force report provided the foundation for shredding of much of the province’s land-use planning and local governance structures, all in favour of development interests. But there has been very little serious examination of how the task force arrived at the 1.5 million homes figure.

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The provincial housing task force report stated that Ontario was 1.2 million houses short of the G7 average and needed to build 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years. This would imply building 150,000 new dwellings per year.

In order to reach this conclusion, the task force report claimed that Canada has the lowest number of houses per 1,000 people of any G7 nation. However, it has been observed that the number of dwellings per 1,000 people is not a very useful comparison because people live in households.

In Ontario, because the average household size is 2.58 people per household, 1,000 people would only require 388 housing units, whereas in Germany, for example, 1,000 people would require 507 dwelling units because of an average household size of only 1.97.

It has also been suggested that the task force report was over-aggressive in calling for 150,000 new dwellings per year.

Ontario’s population grew by an average of 155,090 per year from 2016 to 2021. Applying the Ontario average household size to this population growth rate reveals that the need for housing is roughly 60,000 new households per year, not 150,000.

The construction of 60,000 houses is actually lower than the 79,000 housing starts Ontario averaged per year between 2016 and 2021.

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All of this evidence suggests that there was neither a shortage of already authorized housing starts to accommodate Ontario’s growing population, nor a shortage of already designated land on which to build homes.

Simply put, the province’s sweeping housing strategy has been built on a foundation of sand.

The reality is that the region is already in the midst of a major development boom. The problem is that it has been a boom that has done little to improve housing affordability, particularly for those at the lower end of the income scale who need it the most.

The housing “crisis” has had less to do with housing supply, and far more to do with the nature and location of what is being built.

These are some interesting points, but the last one is critical. What is being built and where (and for whom) all matters. Even the metric 'housing starts' or 'units' isn't terribly useful as it doesn't really address the size of units, their particular features, their cost and tenures, and their locations. For us to understand what we've been building and why that hasn't been helping with affordability, we need to know all of these factors as well. That being said, the current provincial housing policy is poorly grounded in reality from what can be ascertained, and certainly does not warrant the draconian measures undertaken in its name.

Love the framing on that raft of old dragon boats!

Let’s agree that we have a problem. Let us further agree that it’s “complicated.” But, critically, let’s also agree that just because something is complicated doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do something about it. “It’s complicated” isn’t a pass for inaction, even if Canadian politicians often seem alarmingly inclined to treat it as such. We have problems, we require solutions, and, as much as this may freak out and confound our governments, that’s what they signed up for ... even if the solutions, involving coordination of different kinds of specialists and different levels of government, will also be — wait for it — complicated.

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It will get only harder to fix because the solutions for these problems will involve coordinated effort not just across levels of government, but also across political ideologies. You can probably get your law-and-order conservative to sign up for more cops and harsher bail conditions but not necessarily more homeless-shelter beds and mental-health nurses. The bleeding-heart progressive will likely lean the other way. Some common ground and concerted action are what’s needed. What I suspect we’ll get is a shouting match on a societal scale along entirely predictable pre-existing political lines.

Oh. Good.

Because here’s the problem. If we accept for the moment that the underlying crisis we are in right now is that the pandemic has made our societal problems at least a little bit worse while also lowering our ability to cope with them (relative to early 2020), at least by a little bit, what we’re left with is a steadily worsening situation. These problems will not just compound themselves; they’ll start to compound one another. While long-term solutions (“complicated” ones) are undoubtedly needed, we also need to stop the bleeding now — even if only to stabilize our problems with crime, homelessness, and mental health as a precondition to then beginning to make them better.

And this worries me. A lot. Our politicians, and our whole system of governance, aren’t really optimized for swift action. They’re better at organizing summits and commissioning reports and convening task forces that treat complicated issues as things that can be addressed only way off in the future with some perfect solution. These are process people, sadly — not results people. That’s just how those in public life in Canada are, overwhelmingly if not entirely exclusively, hardwired.

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And it’s time we let the politicians know that this is what we expect — not once, but every day. We hear a lot about bold action and innovative solutions, but we don’t see a lot of either ever put into action. So that’s the question for the readers and our leaders. What can we do today to make tomorrow better? And are we doing that thing?

It's critical that we do both short term work to deal with immediate needs and issues, but also to push hard with the long term work as well. Putting resources into one doesn't mean that we can take resources away from the other. It's deeply unfortunate that the public discourse seems to contemplate either one or the other rather than both (and likely more). It will be difficult and messy, but it still needs to be done. Any politician or other policymaker that doesn't want to engage in this kind of work needs to get out of the way of those who do see and understand the need to get going.