Also on today’s menu:
Wayne King: Give Bobby A Break
Gerry Kennedy: Right Again
Environmental Damage From EV Batteries
Senate Bill 263, which would extend the Granite Advantage Health Care Program for two years, cleared the House, 193-166, on May 18, surviving amidst more than 25 proposed amendments that would change the expanded Medicaid benefits or incorporate unrelated bills that the House had passed but the Senate killed.
The House Finance Committee will review the bill’s sunset clause to consider making the extended benefits permanent before the House takes final action.
The Granite Advantage Health Care Program covers the state’s “working poor” who make too much money to qualify for regular Medicaid services but not enough to afford individual or family health care plans. Although 70 percent of the approximately 70,000 participants already work, and others are in the program so they can return to work, opponents of the program sought to include a work requirement. Many of the proposed amendments would have allowed community service to substitute for work.
Wayne King: Give Bobby A Break
Former senator and 1994 Democratic nominee for governor Wayne King, who calls himself a “recovering politician”, weighed in on free speech in his Anamaki Chronicles:
Justice Louis Brandeis said that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” ... that the remedy for incorrect or false speech is more speech, not less.
For example, time after time I have heard RFK [Jr.]’s position on vaccines characterized as “vaccine denial” yet a more careful search of the record — which is not easy because he has been silenced so thoroughly — is not that he opposes them but that we are not taking sufficient steps to ensure their safety and provide alternative pathways to those who object to them. This is hardly a position that qualifies as far outside of the mainstream.
Yet, instead of encouraging a rigorous debate on the entire range of his positions he was effectively shunned by the mainstream media, and banned from twitter and other social media. The result was that the very entities that should have been standing up for free speech were complicit in denying all of us — both those who agree and disagree — the opportunity to participate in a rigorous debate that would be far more likely to lead us to what can be considered “currently accepted truth” in an atmosphere where the ground seemingly changes on a daily basis.
Gerry Kennedy: Right Again
Gerry Kennedy of Alton, the chief executive officer of Observatory Holdings — a company that conducts risk analyses for insurers — has been predicting a “cyber hurricane” in which the effect of cyberattacks overwhelms the insurance industry and tanks the economy. Now a New Jersey appeals court has told a group of insurers who were relying on a war exclusion to avoid paying a portion of a $1.4 billion insurance claim to Merck for a NotPetya cyberattack that the “hostile/warlike action” exclusion in the company’s all-risks property policies does not apply.
Kennedy has been calling for a tightening of the wording of insurance exclusions and the offering of special cyber policies, but the industry has been resisting. Merck’s appeal ruling is likely to lead to similar payouts by insurers who did not listen.
The June 2017 NotPetya malware attack that infected Ukrainian accounting software and worked its way into the systems of organizations worldwide resulted in billions of dollars of damage to businesses in 65 countries.
Insurers will take note and make sure their clients have proper security controls in place to avoid unwittingly passing on malware to other unwitting customers if they want insurance protection.
The non-affirmative wording is a cancer that just presented in the Merck and Mondelez lawsuits. This cancer of mistrust that this attempted insurance denial has hurt the industry in the eyes of the policyholders. We predicted vehemently that these insurance carriers would lose these lawsuits because of the contempt it showcased by these companies to their paymasters, the policyholders. This is just the beginning as the ambiguities that are not addressed are insolvency level issues due to the systemic nature of IT and OT infiltration and exfiltration events. We warned the Life insurance companies that their definitions of “Death” needed to be addressed and I was replied with derision and contempt and outright hostility by senior management! Well we “nailed” the Merck & Mondelez outcomes!
— Gerry Kennedy
Environmental Damage From EV Batteries
An Indonesian firm, Harita Group, and a Chinese firm, Lygend Resources, have spent more than $1 billion on a processing facility that uses acid-leaching technology to convert low-grade laterite nickel ore into a higher-grade material suitable for batteries as the demand for electric vehicles increases. EVs, lauded as a way to combat climate change, need to overcome a major challenge: the environmental impact of the mining operations necessary to manufacture the batteries.
Much of the nickel in EV batteries used by Tesla, Hyundai, and Ford comes from Indonesia by way of battery manufacturers in China. Along with Australia, Indonesia has the largest nickel reserves left on Earth. The global demand for nickel is forecast to be 52 percent higher in 2030 than in 2020, and Indonesia is likely to provide more than two-thirds of that supply.
The question is what to do with the roughly 4 million metric tons of toxic waste produced by acid-leaching process every year — enough, according to the Washington Post, to fill 1,667 Olympic-size swimming pools. The companies’ original solution was to pump the waste into the ocean, but public pressure eliminated that avenue. Instead, the company said it would store the waste on land, drying out the acidic slurry before dumping it back into the mining pit, and then treating the residue water in a tailings pond. Since the nickel mine added its acid-leaching refinery two years ago, the waterways have turned dark red.
There are fears that the technology, using acid under conditions of intense heat and pressure to remove nickel from raw ore, will harm Indonesia, which has frequent earthquakes, heavy rainfall, and landslides that can make it especially treacherous to transport and store hazardous waste.
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Tom, Have you ever done an article about “Free Staters”?