Today, an estimated 470 million smallholder farmers and supply chain actors across developing countries lose an average of 15 percent of their income to food spoilage. Spoilage limits how much of their harvest they can sell, and in times of surplus the risk of spoilage may prompt farmers not to harvest at all to spare themselves the hard labor required for diminishing returns. Another consequence is that the inputs – including labor, water, seed, fertilizer – and their environmental costs are lost along with the product. Over time, these losses compound, land yield drops due to mismanagement, and the overall ecosystem is affected. Food waste, spoilage, and loss are recognized globally as urgent problems. Yet, they are solvable and even preventable.

Solving for food spoilage would feed 1 billion more people by 2050 – many of them across Sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity is greatest. But it would mean more than just more food for more people – addressing spoilage would also increase nutritional security, build greater resilience within food systems, and improve farmers’ livelihoods. And it would create benefits to the local ecosystems, ensuring that scarce resource inputs such as crop land, freshwater and fertilizer yield useable calories rather than waste, which has both positive nutrition and ecologic impacts.
Source: Rockefeller Foundation

Apeel started up to address the problem by thinking of a natural way to preserve food – they use materials that exist in the peels, seeds, and pulp of all fruits and vegetables to create a protective layer that seals moisture in and keeps oxygen out. The layer is essentially tasteless, odourless, and plant-based protection. That means produce stays fresh, nutritious, and delicious twice as long. It also means less produce goes to waste throughout the supply chain—from grower to retailer to consumers at home. The second order effects of this monumental: reduces pollution from transport, reduced pressure on arable land, and less urgency to use up the ingredients.
Source: Apeel

The yield curve is usually upward sloping, where a higher fixed rate of return is earned from lending money for longer periods of time. Shorter-term yields tend to represent what investors believe will happen to central bank policies in the near future. Longer-dated maturities represent investors’ best guess at where inflation, growth and interest rates are headed over the medium to long term.

However, when an economy is slowing, and inflation expectations decline, yields on 10- and 30-year bonds typically fall towards those of shorter maturities, such as three-month and two-year notes as bond buyers bet there is less need for central banks to raise borrowing costs in the future; instead they may need to encourage spending.

This so-called flattening in the yield curve can at some point become a recessionary signal, in particular if the curve becomes downward-sloping or inverted, as happened last week. An “inversion” of the yield curve has preceded every US recession for the past half century. 

There are two possible explanations for this predictive power. One is that trading in the $23tn US government bond market serves as a kind of early warning system, identifying approaching dangers that individual forecasters struggle to spot. The other is that shifts in the shape of the yield curve play an active role in triggering downturns by undermining confidence in the economy.

Source

It’s a 10 part piece. Here’s a snippet from the first:

…I was peculiarly well-situated to smell a rat in the late Nineties when I began reading about a furor brewing in the United Kingdom over an European Union directive mandating the removal of lead from gasoline (or petrol as the British know it) in the year 2000. Strangely, the same desperate claims to save lead were being resurrected. Makers of the lead additive were placing alarmist full-page ads in newspapers, filled with the same untruths that had terrified me as a boy twenty years earlier. Government ministers and MPs were up in arms, citing these very falsehoods, some going so far as to urge withdrawal from the European community. Even the traditionally staid Rolls Royce Owners Club were moved to march (actually, drive) on the Houses of Parliament in protest.

How could this be? We’d had the same discussion in America two decades previous, as well as the benefit of the intervening years to learn the truth: the removal of lead from gasoline had hurt no one – other than the makers of the additive – and helped everyone, with American blood lead levels falling an average of 90 percent. It was, if anything, one of the great public health triumphs of the modern world and had been almost entirely painless. Was no one paying attention? Had our information society somehow failed to transmit this vital data tidbit across the pond? Was there no one in all of Europe to correct them? 

Didn’t they have a phone? Were there, perhaps, larger forces of disinformation in motion?

What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today. Translated into 16 languages and a mini-best-seller in France, it remains a piece of history its star players would prefer we forgot.

Jamie Kitman. A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies. Jalopnik

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.

The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal.

But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them.

– John Williams in Augustus