When Businesses Gain the Right to Bigotry

It is a sad day already when “religious freedom” becomes a euphemism for “right to bigotry,” but that does not begin to explain why people are so horrified by Indiana’s new right-to-bigotry law. It is the effort to extend the right to bigotry to businesses that is at the heart of the law. The law as stated allows any business to work actively to chip away at the standing of gays, Muslims, or any other arbitrarily selected group or category of people, as a publicly declared objective of the business. It is a more corrosive effect than it might seem at first.

Consider the specific scenario mentioned most often by the law’s supporters, which is that florists and bakers shouldn’t be forced to sell their products to customers who might be planning a gay wedding. There is an obvious problem with this scenario: how does a business know what their customer’s event is? Even if the customer has a detailed story, the business is just taking the customer’s word for it. And if the customer doesn’t have much to say about their upcoming event, and is a man who “looks gay,” is this enough of an excuse for a florist to turn a customer away? Will there be florists who refuse to sell their larger floral arrangements to any man at all, lest they be secretly planning a gay wedding? It sounds ludicrous, yet if we are to take them at their word, this is exactly the scene that the most outspoken supporters of the Indiana right-to-bigotry law seem to be talking about when they say businesses shouldn’t have to answer for acts of discrimination.

It get worse. Now that businesses are allowed to advertise that they discriminate, how many religious extremists will look for these statements when they choose a supplier? Will extremist groups organize boycotts of businesses that refuse to take a vow of discrimination? In fact, we have seen boycotts just like this within the last year, so it is not so far-fetched to imagine extremist groups threatening whole towns with anti-gay or other equally arbitrary boycotts. It’s easy to see why most businesses say they don’t want to the “right to bigotry.”

All this trouble just because you start drawing lines between one kind of person and another? Well, yes, it is almost as simple as that. You can’t start to discriminate without also isolating yourself as part of the same process. The governor of Indiana, who as the leader of the state is obliged to stand up in public and defend his state’s new notion of the right to bigotry, must be feeling very isolated right now.

Saltines Without Trans Fats

For years, I ignored the little packet of saltines I got whenever I ate soup at a diner. I didn’t want to eat them because they were made with margarine, or to be more precise, partially hydrogenated soybean oil. This is a food ingredient made from a synthetic chemical, a trans fat, that for a quarter century has been linked to cell wall breakdown and inflammatory diseases generally. Now that dietary risk is fading as trans fats are phased out of the U.S. food supply. For the first time that I can remember, my diner crackers were made without any trans fat ingredients.

When the FDA announced the phase-out of trans fats, it said the change wouldn’t affect much of the food you eat. They intentionally exaggerated the progress that had already been made in order to downplay the impact of the policy change. In truth, nearly half of the food in restaurants would have to be reformulated slightly, a process that is still not so far along. But the transition has reached the packet of saltines, at least.

This Week in Bank Failures

Banca Privada d’Andorra is insolvent after all, regulators admitted. It will be resolved by putting its money-laundering assets into bankruptcy in what is called a bad bank, while the more sound assets are used to set up a new bank to carry on banking operations.

The deposit flight from banks in Greece last month was around €8 billion, reducing the nation’s bank deposits to the lowest in 10 years. That the banking system survived that degree of turmoil is a hopeful sign that the worst troubles there may have already happened.

Bank of America could be 25 percent more profitable if split into smaller companies, analysts believe.

Deutsche Bank revealed a plan to become more like a Wall Street bank, with fewer deposits and branches and more emphasis on its large institutional and international operations. The plan has received some political support.

Batteries and Cutting Trees

Chain saws are powered by batteries. This is a technology transition that is sure to surprise more than a few people. Chain saws cut through trees, so they need a lot of power, and for most of the history of the technology, they have been driven by internal combustion engines that burn gasoline. Battery-powered chain saws have been around for a few years, but as curiosities, not quite powerful enough for the ordinary user. As of last fall, if you went to a store to look for a chain saw, you would probably see two or three battery-powered chain saws off to the side, and you would probably wonder who used them.

This year, though, the battery-powered chain saws are in the middle of the display and account for more than half of unit sales. Incremental improvements in design give battery-powered chain saws the same cutting power as the average gasoline-powered chain saw, and the battery-powered units are quieter, easier to use, and a little less expensive.

You knew batteries were improving if you noticed longer battery life in your phone or increased range in your electric car. Apparently the improvements suddenly reached the point where gasoline can no longer hold its ground as a power source for chain saws.

That is not to say that gasoline-powered chain saws are about to disappear. Serious tree workers and emergency responders couldn’t even consider a tool that makes you plug it in to recharge after just a few minutes of cutting. But obviously, a far greater number of chain saws are sold to homeowners and facility managers who never have multiple trees to cut down all at once. Also, chain saws are durable, so it will take years for the new designs on store shelves to predominate in actual use. Still, it’s clear that the era of battery-powered chain saws has arrived.

A Low Peak for Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice usually goes up and down in March, hitting its peak for the year somewhere along the way. This year, the peak was in February, and that day was followed by more than a week of rapid decline. The decline was so rapid that a similar period of regrowth has barely begun to make up for it, and with March now winding down, it is unlikely that any ice growth to come will revisit the earlier peak.

The details of timing of the ups and downs of ice in March have little lasting significance, but this March is noteworthy because ice levels were already tracking near record lows in February before they made their precipitous decline. The result is the lowest peak for Arctic ice ever recorded, followed by ice levels at record lows during March. Ice only declines from April through August, and this year, it has what looks like a two-week head start. This makes low ice levels at the late summer minimum more likely than they would have been after a near-normal March.

The decline in Arctic sea ice is one of the most prominent indications of global climate change, with the most definitive being the slow melting of permafrost, the underground ice that previously held together the land areas of the Arctic. Ice loss is also leading to a change in global shipping, with shipping routes across the Arctic Ocean open for several weeks every summer in recent years.