The Anthropocene In Two Pie Charts

All the mammals in the world today weigh more than five times as much as ten thousand years ago. 

1greenblogger | ecologue

1greenblogger | visualcapitalist

Cattle alone (416 megatons) weigh more than twice as much as all of the mammals on earth before humans domesticated animals, and releases 12,283 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases during the collective animals’ life span.*

Most of the rest of the world’s livestock animals are, like cattle, ruminants; they and their compartmentalized stomachs belch and excrete methane, whose wiggly molecules are 80 times more powerful at bouncing heat back to earth rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere.

Our pets are small in number, but mighty in impact: cats and dogs contribute almost another megaton of greenhouse gases every year, in large part because they eat a fifth of the world’s meat and fish (and a third of the food from animal sources) in the US — more, per capita, than many humans. 

In short: the livestock we breed is a huge contributor to human impacts on earth.

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* Approximately 42 percent of a cow or steer is edible (pdf, p. 11); 416 megatons of cattle yields 173 megatons of meat; beef production is responsible for 71 kg of CO2-eq per kilogram.

I Hope They Never Find Him

I saw a pulmonologist at the Post-Covid Recovery Clinic at Rutgers in February. When I made my $40 copay, I forgot to tell the hospital to submit the bill under my wife’s policy; I’d lost my own health insurance because I was too sick to work. (Thankfully — I could still be covered.)

The insurance company paid the bill by accident. Or rather, they paid $176, the amount they apparently considered appropriate for a 20-minute telehealth appointment with a medical resident and his supervisor. A few weeks later, they realized their mistake, called the hospital, and asked for their money back. 

The hospital got in touch with me: you owe us $842 dollars. Their price for the appointment, including the copay, was — IS — $882 dollars, if you’re paying the bill without insurance company mediation.

I asked them to rebill under the correct policy. They did. 

— Insurance company: that policy expired.

— Hospital billing office calls me back: your policy expired.

— Me: no, it didn’t. It’s current.

— Billing office: the insurance company says it expired.

— Me: …

— Me: … 

— Me: … what policy identification number was it billed under?

— Billing office gives me the number. It checks out.

— Me. That’s the ID number for the current policy. It’s not expired.

— Billing office: Oh. Well … you need to appeal the denial with the insurance company.

At this point, I should have gotten my butt in gear immediately. But I was already negotiating with the insurance company over several other issues.

• I’d been trying for months to get reimbursed for appointments with an out-of-network therapist. The therapist made a mistake on the bill, the insurance company rejected it. My job: find out from the insurance company what had to be on the bill; explain it to the therapist; get the bill from her; fill out a new claim form; send it to the insurance company.

• Another doctor’s office, another $40 copay. And then they ran my credit card for another $127. Why? “the insurance company says you have a deductible.” The doctor was in network. There was no deductible. I had to contact the insurance company and get them to pay the bill — and then get the doctor’s billing office to refund me the money. (I still have to check my bank statements and see if that money ever came back.)

• Long Covid messed up my vision; things double and blur, my eyes snap in and out of focus, the more tired I am, the worse it gets. The folks at the Long Covid clinic sent me to an occupational therapist who sent me to a neuro-optometrist who did a bunch of tests and prescribed glasses that helped … some … but it cost me $2,000 out of pocket. Insurance company: nah. 

And in the middle of trying to work through all of that, I had some kind of allergic reaction. I still don’t know what triggered it. 

My neck was so puffed up I felt like a toad trying to look big and unappetizing, my ankles and fingers were swollen, and I was short of breath; then I started having chest pain. The GP sent me to the ER, where they checked my blood pressure, listened to my heart, drew blood, looked worried … and repeated the procedure every hour or so. Eventually they found me a bed so they could keep waking me up all night for  more blood draws and more blood pressure readings. 

(I hate that cuff on the blood pressure machine. It’s so tight it makes my fingers tingle, every time.)

Morning. Someone brings breakfast for the lady in the bed next to me; I realize it’s been 24 hours since I called the GP. Could I possibly get some coffee? Nope: no food or drink until they can get me in for a nuclear stress test. Noon rolls around. 3 pm, the resident on the floor says I can have ice chips. 

Reader, I cheated. I let the ice melt and then gulped the water down.

Soon after, an orderly appears to wheelchair me to the test, but it was another two and a half hours before I could eat. 

The upshot: my heart is fine. They have no idea what’s wrong with me, but I’m not going to drop dead of a heart attack, so … I can go home.

Eventually I persuaded my GP to give me antibiotics. (I’ve ridden in this rodeo before.) I started to recover. Slowly. Many, many weeks of slow recovery, punctuated by functional capacity testing that left me even worse off.

Remember that bill I mentioned a few paragraphs upstream? It’s in collection now.

Since February, I’ve seen several other doctor in the same system as the Long Covid clinic. The billing office, instead of crediting those copays toward those visits, applied them to the bill for February. So in their minds, I’ve paid them $440.

Between my copay and the $176 insurance forked over, they called the bill settled for $216.

I’ve already paid $264 more than that. But they sent the bill to collection to scrape another $442 out of me. As much again as I’ve already paid. More than four times what the insurance company will pay.

Oh, and those other copays? The ones that they credited to this bill? Now I’m fielding phone calls about those. 

======================

On average, health insurers deny 17 percent of claims. United Healthcare, the biggest health insurance company in the United States, rejects claims a third of the time.

During the three-year tenure of the CEO who was assassinated two days ago, profits soared from 12 billion to 16 billion. 

I’m not proud of it — but yeah, I’m rooting for the guy who shot that CEO and hoping he manages to disappear forever. 

If Car Insurance Were Disability Insurance

Insurer [let’s call the company Mutual Farm]: Explain the nature of the car accident, the resulting damage to your car, and a detailed explanation of what makes it so that you cannot drive it in any situation. Arrange for reports from the police and your mechanic to be sent to us directly. Provide contact information for the police officers and anyone else you have consulted about the damage to your car.

The form is twenty-seven pages long (but page nine is only for signatures; pages ten through twenty-six contain fraud warnings for each state; you have to sign again on page twenty-seven to acknowledge the consequences of providing fraudulent information. It is emailed to the Car Owner as a PDF (neither searchable nor editable) to be printed and filled out by hand. There is insufficient space after every question to provide the requested information.

Car Owner submits requested documentation, with seven attached pages providing answers to all of the questions.

Eight weeks later …

MF: We have more questions. We tried to call the police. We only make one phone call, this is our policy. They have not called back.

P: We called the number they gave us three different times. No one ever picks up the phone.

Mechanic: The car is totaled.

MF: We need a complete description of all disabled systems with the OBD-II codes resulting from the scan.

M: The scanner doesn’t give any meaningful data. The engine can technically turn over, but the frame is cracked, the chassis is bent, the oil pan has a hole, and there’s leaking coolant.

MF: What’s the maximum speed you could drive the car in an emergency?

M: That would be a terrible idea. It would be dangerous.

MF: How far could the car be driven?

M: It can’t be driven, it is dangerously broken.

MF: But you just said the engine runs. So the car works.

M: Technically… yes, but the car needs all kinds of repairs to the body before it’s safe to drive it.

MF: We will need the details on that from the body shop.

O: Pays to have car towed to body shop.

Repair shops are governed by state law; body shops are governed by federal law.

MF: You’re going to have to submit a new claim to our body-shop division. Here’s the form you have to fill out.

It’s thirty-two pages long, and is effectively the same as the form you filled out in the first place, but the questions are phrased differently and are posed in different order. You have to fill it out by hand again, attach seven typed pages with the same information as last time, but in a different sequence and referring to different page and question numbers.

MF: *crickets* 

Owner calls MF to find out why no action has been taken. 

MF: We have not received the form.

Owner resubmits. Two more weeks go by.

MF: It went to the repair shop division. We found it and now the body shop division has it.

Auto Body Specialist: We can try to straighten out the bent chassis, but it might get broken in the process; the frame would have to be replaced because the cracks can’t be fixed; and the oil pan has to be replaced. Those alone would cost $12,452 in parts, plus labor and oil. We would have to check the entire engine for damage because it was hot when the oil leaked out, and we would need to inspect the cooling system to figure out where it is leaking and determine what repairs are needed.

Six weeks later (three and a half months after you filed the claim). You’re exhausted and broke from walking to the supermarket and Ubering to work. There is public transit, but the trip (a 35 minute drive) would take four hours on three buses and a train.

I: We can’t make a determination on your claim without a complete estimate.

O: Pays the body shop for seven hours of labor to check the engine and the cooling system.

S: The car is totalled. It will require $17,952 in parts to repair, plus labor.

I: What’s the labor cost? We can’t make a determination without full information.

S: That depends on how long the repairs take.

I: Give us an estimate. The maximum pay-out will be the amount of the estimate minus 10 percent because we can.

Two weeks later …

S: It will take three mechanics seventeen hours to straighten the chassis, one mechanic thirty-seven hours to disassemble the entire car from the frame and two mechanics an additional twelve hours to attach a new frame. Two hours to inspect the cooling system, two or more hours to repair whatever is leaking; ninety minutes to replace the oil pan.* Additional parts and additional labor may be needed, depending on what the detailed inspection reveals.

I: Our independent mechanic read your notes and says you should be able to straighten the chassis in four hours and weld the cracked frame in three. Plus the engine still runs. Is there anything preventing the car owner from turning it on?

S: The engine turns on, but if anyone drives it, they would get hurt when the frame or chassis eventually break completely. 

Seven months after Owner filed the claim.

I: Your car works fine. There is no evidence in your claim to the contrary. We’re unable to provide insurance for this incident. You can appeal this decision within the next 180 days. It is your responsibility to assemble all the documentation and submit it to us in a single package, along with a letter explaining why our denial of your claim was in error.

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*I made up these numbers. But I didn’t make up how hard it is to get disability insurance, even though in terms of numbers and costs, fake disability claims are a tiny fraction of all insurance fraud.

graphic: 1greenblogger | data: CAIF

 More than 60 percent of disability claims are denied, even though less than one percent are fraudulent. 

Across the rest of the insurance industry, widespread fraud and cost the industry and the US government $308.6 billion in 2020:

• 10 percent of property claims are fraudulent
• 3 to 10 percent of health insurance claims involve fraud (but insurers deny 15 percent of claims)
• more than a third of people admit they filed false claims for car and home repairs
• 20 percent of people lie on applications to get cheaper car insurance, and 30 percent to cut home and property insurance
• 16 percent of workers compensation claims involve fraud (pdf, page 18)
• 20 percent of life insurance policies are revoked because insurers find lies on applications (pdf, page 33)

For perspective: private insurance companies collect more than $1 trillion in premiums every year. That’s twelve zeroes. $1,000,000,000,000. More than the gross national product of Switzerland.

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update: 1:05 pm ET, 12/4/24

On Not Endorsing a Presidential Candidate

Back in September, Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post), told William Lewis (Post CEO and publisher) not to endorse anyone for president.

Lewis didn’t mention this to the paper’s Opinion editors, but when they sent him their endorsement of Kamala Harris, he killed it.

The Washington Post Guild, which represents journalists and other staff, asked readers to write a letter. So I did.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I’ve subscribed to the Post for several years, and before that, I read as many of your articles that I could access. Your coverage of US and world news is solid, informative, and important.

I am writing today about Jeff Bezos’s terrible decision to stop the Post from endorsing a candidate for president. 

We are just days away from an election that will have grave consequences if Donald Trump wins. He has made it clear that he intends to weaponize the government against his personal enemies, deport legal and illegal immigrants, end protections for people who are not gender-conforming (many of whom were born that way), make health care more expensive and harder to access, cut abortion and birth control, limit the freedom of the press (ahem!), censor teachers, eliminate support for people who are disabled, increase defense spending, reduce taxes on billionaires while increasing them on lower-income people, and reduce voting rights. And more. For most Americans, life under his agenda would be poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in the words of Thomas Hobbes.

It’s hard to believe, but J. D. Vance is worse. Trump lies, acts on impulse, and rejects science, and is just plain mean, because he is a deeply insecure narcissist. Vance parrots and doubles down on Trump’s spite, malevolence, and vulgarity, knowingly and deliberately, in the pursuit of power. Vance knows he can manipulate Trump to advance his own agenda of making the US a theocracy governed by the ideas of ultra-conservative, patriarchal, white-supremacist Christianity.

Bezos’s interference in the editorial freedom of the people who produce the paper he owns sets a very dangerous precendent. We’ve seen the damage Elon Musk (the only person in the US wealthier than Bezos) has done in politicizing Twitter. Neither man serves in goverment, but their wealth affords them great power in national affairs. This is very worrisome. I hope you will be able to persuade Bezos that this was a terrible decision.

Thank you for your consideration.

The Guild suggests a (less inflammatory) sample letter, but if you’d like to use or adapt any portion of what I wrote, please feel free.

Visualizing Data, or Making it Muddier?

Back in August, the New York Times published a graphic that visualizes the experiences that Harris, Trump, Vance, and Walz would bring to the White House. 

It bothered me, and I’ve been looking at it again and again, changing the font size, the screen orientation and brightness, and trying to see how the candidates’ education, service, and work experience compare. But it seems impossible: even when I zoom down to tiny, swaths of it run off the edges of the screen.

I started wondering if the goal was not to compare the candidates, but to obfuscate the stark differences among them. So finally I took the data and made a new chart. You can see all of it at the same time, and instead of the Times’ beige, grayish pink, and light blue, I used some bolder colors, and linked public service, military service, and elected office with different shades of blue.

Data New York Times | Visualization 1greenblogger

Harris and Walz’s columns are dominated by state and national elected offices; Trump’s forty years as a businessman stand out in sharp contrast. But the real outlier is Vance, who served as a senator for only eighteen months before getting tapped as VP canditate.

Vance’s four-year stint as a Marine combat correspondent is by far his longest work commitment. From 2013 to 2023, he hopscotched across the country for jobs with seven different employers: clerkships, a job in corporate litigation, and posts at a biotech start-up, Mithril Capital, Revolution, and Narya, which he co-founded with funding from Peter Thiel. He also started two non-profit organizations, both of which fizzled, and published a mean-spirited memoir.

Vance’s lack of fitness for the presidency is proven by his inability or unwillingness to hold a job for any length of time, his inexperience in leadership, his caustic insults on those with whom he disagrees, and his proven failure in leading non-profit organizations. 

Is it possible that Trump has chosen a VP candidate even more dangerous than himself? Or is Vance proof of how dangerous Trump is?

***

The Times simplifies Walz’s timeline by placing him at Chadron State College from 1982 to 1989. But he left Nebraska in 1984, studied at the University of Houston, worked a factory job building tanning beds in Jonesboro, and went back to Chadron State in 1987, graduating two years later. I include these details for Walz rather than following the Times’ breakdown. 

Walz’s data is a little tricky: his years in the National Guard overlap with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, doctoral coursework, and his full-time job as a teacher ( and Gay-Straight Alliance advisor and football coach). I slightly compressed his years teaching and studying to incorporate his military service without lengthening his overall career. 

Some Metacognition

I started keeping a log of activity and fatigue levels several days ago, and it got me thinking.

The idea was to see if any patterns emerge so maybe I can organize my life a little bettter. Turns out the answer is always the same: stuff happens. Before Long Covid, I’d roll with that Stuff and just keep moving, but now, Stuff Happens means something else doesn’t happen, and probably I still end up so exhausted I’m shaking. Pacing, ha ha.

Well, anyway, I ended up with some insights into how my brain works, and how it … doesn’t.

from “On Fire,” K. C. Greene

For my whole ADHD life, my brain has been like a ping pong ball catapult capable (look! alliteration!) of firing hundreds of rounds a minute. I was pretty good at catching some of the good ideas and making notes about things to think about later while swatting away or dodging everything else.

Turns out cognitive processing speed is much slower in people with Long Covid than in those who never got infected, or did, but recovered. The idea that slowed processing underlies everything wrong with my brain seems completely plausible.

Because I can’t multi-task any more.

Coming up with words — and spelling them! — while operationalizing syntactic rules of a language to form coherent sentences, working simultaneously bottom-up, top-down, front-to-back and back-to front, requires heavy-duty multi-tasking. 

Writing, same deal. It’s just a little less stressful because no one is watching while I struggle. Instead, I spend, well, sometimes hours, googling words and phrases to try to find the word I want. (“Plausible,” for instance.) Sequencing ideas and making sentences coherent, with brevity and maybe even wit, feels like hauling boulders.

Putting leftovers in a bowl and then in the microwave, food I’m not eating back in the fridge, and empty containers in the dishwasher? Multi-tasking. Before Covid Me wouldn’t even have remembered thinking about it; Long Covid Me gets wires crossed. (BCM? LCM? Hmmm.)

“On fire,” continued

The ballista keeps on launching. (“The Money Keeps Rolling In” from Evita ping-pongs to mind; nah, it doesn’t scan.) A news headline pisses me off (that’s its job now?), there’s a fawn in the neighbors’ yard, my mom sends a text (or five), a social media post gets me thinking, one of the dogs wants attention. Occasionally, the actual phone actually rings. So many decisions, so many ping-pongs to forget.

I try to write everything down. Seriously, everything. Yesterday Catherine noticed on her way out the door that the garbage truck hadn’t come yet and asked me to bring the can to the curb. I didn’t write it down, or do it immediately, and I didn’t think about it again until I heard the truck pulling away. Damn.

Last night, I made a note: “calendar the things.” This morning: What things? Uh-oh.

Alternatively, my mind latches onto some idea and won’t let go and … well, it’s interesting, and it’s important, but I need to spend my energy on other things, but I start looking things up and writing things down and looking up words and suddenly it’s two hours later and I have a headache and look, that almost-full cup of coffee is stone cold and I forgot to eat breakfast again. 

Sometimes forgetting seems like the less disruptive dysfunction.

Cooking is harder than laundry, also because thinking, slow thinking. I keep wondering why the physical demands of doing the laundry don’t take more out of me and why cooking hits me so hard, harder than it seems standing with peripheral neuropathy should be.

Slowed cognitive processing. I might follow a recipe or make it up as I go along; either way, I’m chopping and stirring, measuring carefully or eyeballing, trying not to forget anything, and still batting away ping-pong balls.

My big accomplishment the other day: I soaked a cup and a half of brown rice, drained it, measured water, started the stove, brought the pot to a boil, turned it down, cooked the rice until the water was gone, left it for a few more minutes, and then stirred it. Ye gods. If I ever *thought* about cooking rice before, it was 45 years ago. Now: so many steps. So many timers (an unexpected bonus of Apple watch). 

If I forget I’m doing laundry, maybe stuff gets a little wrinkled. I did laundry last weekend and there are still sheets and pillowcases in the living room. I’ll get to them, eventually.

If I forget I’m cooking? Things burn.

“On fire” concludes

JD Vance’s Words are Weapons

I listened, repeatedly, to JD’s convo about “the postmenopausal female,” so you don’t have to.

The most disturbing part of Vance’s exchange with Eric Weinstein, in my mind: neither man displays any interest in what the two women — Usha Vance, Esq., and her mother, Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri (whom I am naming in part because neither is named in the clip) — wanted or needed. 

The child is also unnamed: Vance calls Ewen, his oldest son, “this baby” and “our son.”

Weinstein says that providing free child care is “the whole purpose of a postmenopausal female.” 

Unlike “woman,” which refers specifically to a human, “female” is also used for animals. Long-horned beetles, t-rexes, dolphins, gorillas, and more. Referring to people of color, and especially women of color, in animal terms has a long history. I’m not surprised — Vance has made, and endorsed, plenty of racist statements — but I’m still dismayed.

Vance clearly says “yes” after the host finishes saying the words. His response comes almost on top of the word “female,” but in plenty of time after “post-menopausal,” which Weinstein fumbles, and which can only refer to a woman, and before Weinstein finishes the sentence with “in theory.” 

Weinstein goes on to say that free child care is “a weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” Vance starts to speak, pauses to interject “yeah,” and continues.

Weinstein uses singular “they” to refer to Provost Chilukuri. Hang on — the ossified right thinks using “they” in place of “she” or, preferably, “he” opens the door to gay and trans rights, which they find pornographic. Ooops.

Vance’s idea that prioritizing earning power over everything else is “hyper-liberalized” and “a consequence of fundamental liberalism” that has “abandon[ed] … Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market-oriented way of thinking” is almost risible in its foundational wrong-ness. This describes, quite precisely, the Republican Party line since Reagan. 

The speed and vocal register of Vance’s speech suggest gravitas, especially in contrast to Trump’s jumpy, meandering tirades. But listening over and over again made me see just how repetitive and imprecise Vance’s speech really is. He uses big words and learned phrases to gesture casually at concepts, rather than carefully staking claims and providing evidence to develop arguments. Vance’s words are projectiles, designed — deployed — to destroy, not to build.