Women Doing Good Things

Nice Time: MacKenzie Scott Pissing Off Elon Musk With The Billions For The DEIs And Abortions by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Making right-wing chuds real mad is icing on the cake! Read on Substack

Billionaires are mostly despicable Montgomery-Burns type people. But then there’s MacKenzie Scott, one of the few ultra-rich who doesn’t deserve to get tarred and feathered in the coming revolution! She’s the third-wealthiest woman in the United States, 38th in the world, and has now given away $19.25 billion (with a B!) in 2,524 charitable gifts, with a focus on racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change.

She and her small team seek out nonprofits operating in communities facing high food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital. And then she gives away the money with no strings attached. Which is unusual in philanthropy! Also unusual, she’s pretty quiet about it. She has a web site that shows what she has donated to, but there’s no MacKenzie Scott ribbon cuttings, or buildings with her name on them when she drops a check. She donates, then she dips. And she plans to “keep at it until the safe is empty.”

Scott’s given to community centers, the ACLU, historically Black colleges and universities, food banks, Planned Parenthood, YMCAs, dance theaters, Native American groups, legal aid centers, to paying off medical debt, legal funds for transgender people. It is truly an inspiring list!

You may be wondering how she got there! Then-MacKenzie Tuttle went to Princeton and studied under Toni Morrison, then got a job working at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. Where, in 1993, she met Jeff Bezos, a 30-year-old with thinning hair. But she liked his laugh, and he liked that she was resourceful. “The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison,” he once said.

And even though she was just 23, MacKenzie was that kind of can-do woman! They married, and there would be no Amazon without her. They moved to Seattle, where she helped Jeff get the company off the ground from their garage. She wrote Amazon’s business plan, did the company’s accounting and toted its early orders to the UPS Store in their minivan, while also raising their four kids, and writing novels. She won an American Book Award for her first one, The Testing of Luther Albright, which she wrote in the bathroom for 10 years in between everything else she was doing.

All seemed happy in the Bezos marriage for 25 years, until 2019, when the National Enquirer tracked Jeff and his (also married) ladyfriend Lauren Sánchez “across five states and 40,000 miles, tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests.” They even somehow got his personal texts and shirtless bathroom photos, which seems potentially not legal. And then, according to Jeff, AMI content officer Dylan Howard tried to blackmail and extort him. (You may remember that creep from the Trump trial, as the broker of catching and killing tales of Trump’s affairs, or from catch/killing stories about Harvey Weinstein.)

And Jeff refused to play ball with the Enquirer. The story came out, and MacKenzie and Jeff announced their separation, as did Sánchez and her husband, Patrick Whitesell. And MacKenzie got 400 million Amazon shares in the divorce, which she has been selling and donating to charities ever since. But don’t worry, she’s still got about $32 billion left to make do with!

Anyway, now Bezos and Sánchez are reportedly getting married this weekend in Aspen. Mazel tov! Bezos been living flashy, with a $500 million yacht, buoyant fiancee, and apparently imposing his Trump-sympathies onto his newspaper.

And MacKenzie’s been living more quietly! She changed her last name to Scott, and married one of her children’s teachers (though they have since divorced). Otherwise, she’s been laying low, though she’s been known to sometimes gal-pal around with Melinda French Gates, Bill’s ex, who has pledged $1 billion over the next two years to US nonprofits working in women’s health. I’ll bet those two have a lot of fun!

All of this lady-giving mightily pisses off Elon Musk, who has a charitable foundation with zero employees, that for three years has failed to distribute even the 5 percent minimum required to be eligible for a tax deduction, putting him potentially in hot water with the IRS, OOPS.

Musk bitched in March that “super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse” could contribute to the decline of Western civilization, and more recently Xitted that Scott’s contributions were “concerning.” Which rather just draws more attention to those ladies’ good works, in contrast to what a shit person Elon is, unable to donate a wooden nickel unless it might benefit himself, somehow, and fucking over his exes in whatever way possible.

We call this “divorced dad energy” and he is rich in it for sure.

After his snotty comment, MacKenzie Scott gave away another $600 million, the end.

[Yield Giving/ Wired/ Vogue/ Medium/ New York Times archive link]

The “Mighty Mite”

Winter Wren

Zombie Trash

Owen’s List: Finding a Way to Recycle Zombie Trash

What started as a father-son weekend project turned into Ridwell, which aims to keep hard-to-recycle items out of landfills.

Edward Humes

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(Courtesy Ridwell)

The innocent question that changed Ryan Metzger’s life came the summer his son turned six. That’s when Owen asked about the ever-expanding bag of old batteries in the junk drawer.

“What’s going to happen to them, Dad?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do with them? We’re learning about recycling in school. Where do these get recycled?”

“Um,” Metzger said. “I don’t know.”

He knew where to get batteries, of course. And there were always instructions on correctly using them. But instructions on what to do when they died? Not so much. That’s why he fell into the habit of stuffing dead batteries into a drawer filled with all the other small, disused stuff that the family wasn’t sure what to do with.

“It’s heavy, Dad.” Owen waved the bag of batteries around.

It was pretty full, Metzger had to admit. Detritus from flashlights and old toys, smoke alarms and remote controls, with a crusty one that came out of an old toothbrush, these batteries were one of many types of problematic garbage. They had no obvious final resting place, much like garden chemicals, old phones, light bulbs, car parts, cooking grease … a ton of stuff, really, now that Metzger thought about it. You weren’t supposed to put any of that in the recycling bin. But you couldn’t put it with the landfill-bound trash, either, although that’s what many people ended up doing out of desperation or not caring or habit — or assuming (incorrectly) it would all somehow get properly sorted out by this impenetrable, mysterious entity called the waste management system.

“There’s got to be a place for old batteries,” Metzger assured his son. “Let’s find out.”

It took three phone calls to find a business near their Seattle home that would take their old batteries and ensure that they were actually recycled instead of just dumped somewhere.

Father and son decided to drive to this battery recycler so that Owen could make the delivery. On impulse, they asked a few neighbors if they had stashes of old batteries, too. Several did, so Ryan and Owen took those as well.

Owen was so delighted by this accomplishment that he and his father decided to make a regular project out of hauling one different type of problem trash every weekend to the right recycler, offering to do the same for neighbors in their Queen Anne section of Seattle. So they started gathering bent clothes hangers one weekend, burned-out light bulbs the next, and then plastic bags, wraps, pouches, bubble wrap, and Styrofoam, none of which plays well with community recycling programs. Demand kept expanding block by block as word got around about his little father-and-son project. Soon he had to create a subscriber email group to track it all, with a message going out each week on what sort of trash would be picked up next and when to leave it outside for pickup. They dubbed this “Owen’s List.”

Around this time, grateful subscribers to Owen’s List who had long felt guilty about their secret trashiness started offering the duo money. A few suggested they charge for the service. “I’d gladly give up a couple lattes a month in exchange for you taking care of this,” one neighbor said. “I bet a lot of people would.”

Could that be true? Could their father-and-son hobby become a business that would let him leave his tech job behind and do something to help save the world? Seattle residents took pride in living in one of America’s greenest cities, but would they really pay extra every month to change their trashy habits and help Owen’s List patch a gaping hole in the waste and recycling system?

Metzger renamed the service Ridwell, to better explain its mission at a glance, and then set out to find out. (snip-MORE)

It’s Always Something.

How much fossil carbon is stored in our stuff?

Ellen Phiddian December 21, 2024

Human-made materials – the “technosphere” – are a deep store of fossil carbon – and possibly a ticking time bomb.

That’s according to a fascinating new study published in Cell Reports Sustainability.

“We have no idea of how much carbon has been accumulated in the technosphere, how long it stays and what might happen to it once it is released,” says co-author Professor Klaus Hubaeck, a researcher at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

The researchers found that the technosphere accumulated 8.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon from 1995-2019.

Were all this carbon to be burned and sent into the atmosphere, it would be equivalent to 30 billion tonnes of CO₂. The world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere over that period were roughly 770 billion tonnes.

“Carbon is used as a feedstock everywhere in our daily items, even the laptop I type on, and we were wondering if there is a potential time bomb of all that carbon contributing further to climate heating as it gets released to the atmosphere,” Hubaeck tells Cosmos over email.

Human-made materials are often made from fossil carbon sources like oil and gas. Plastics, for instance, are 74% fossil carbon on average. When these items reach end of life, the carbon makes its way back into the environment via dumping – or into the atmosphere via combustion.

The researchers calculated the amount of fossil carbon stored in the technosphere in the year 2011, using economic data to judge how much was flowing in and out of various industries.

They found that most of this carbon was going into rubber and plastic (30%), while 24% was put in bitumen, and 16% in machinery and equipment.

They found that 9% of extracted fossil carbon was stored in the technosphere in 2011, or about 0.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon.

The team extrapolated these findings to a 25-year time period (1995-2019), which told them that 8.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon had been accumulated.

Hubaeck says that the technosphere is nearing the stage where it stores more carbon than the natural world.

“We are not far from that turning point. Indeed, the accumulated fossil carbon is in the same order of magnitude, and indeed already higher than that stored in animals.”

What happens to all of this carbon? The researchers estimate that 3.7 billion tonnes of fossil carbon was disposed of over this time period: 1.2 billion tonnes sent to landfill, 1.2 billion tonnes incinerated and sent into the atmosphere, 1.1 billion tonnes recycled, and the rest littered.

“On the one hand, you can consider it as a form of carbon sequestration if this fossil carbon ends up sequestered in landfill, but on the other hand, it poses an environmental hazard, and if you burn it, you increase carbon emissions,” says co-author Dr Franco Ruzzenenti, also from the University of Groningen.

This means it is very important to make sure the waste is being processed properly, according to the researchers. They say that product lifetimes and recycling rates need to increase, and landfill and waste discharges need to be minimised.

“It’s best to avoid or reduce the throughput in the first place,” says Hubaeck.

“Certainly in rich countries, we have too much stuff (whereas the Global South still needs to catch up), we should question the amount of durable products and (inefficient) infrastructure we produce.

“Shifting to bio-based carbon also has environmental impacts, land requirements, biodiversity, and impacts on food prices.”

The researchers say that circular economy strategies are important for reducing the amount of waste as well, alongside managing waste better after disposal.

Noshing and Reading

I made green chips in order to avoid salty and sweet treats for a while. Maybe I’ll post about that, but in the meantime, here is a bit about observing Yule. Solstice is my favorite night of the year, mostly because Winter is my favorite season, though so short. I am not pagan, but I love reading about Solstice and Yule. Maybe you’ll like this, too.

Re-post: Celebration Today ~ Yule

So I had a morning full of errands

and just got home. I decided to eat one of the donuts I bought while out (there was a sale! As the shoppe will be closed until 1/5. Yay…) Anyway, the 1st page I open online every day is the NASA APOD, and here is what they put up today. Such a wonderful thing to see when I sit down to break my fast with a forbidden food and tea!! and relax a little reading blogs. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2024 December 21
A Year in Sunsets
Image Credit & Copyright:Wael Omar

(I don’t get why WP won’t accept these photos. I thought it was my puter, but I have a new one, and the pic is still not here. It’s a quick click, and a really nice page today, so please go see it. After all, SPACE-X’s photos are likely to be poor, if they even do this for us.)

“Fearsome Forest Hawk”

Click through to see and hear.

American Goshawk

When Tropical Cyclones Collide…

This Is What Happens When Tropical Cyclones Collide

December 19, 2024 Imma Perfetto

A satellite image of the earth taken over the indian ocean, showing central and western australia and parts of indonesia outlined in yellow. Over the ocean are 2 tropical cyclones in close proximity, — The tropical cyclones Seroja and Odette came together in the Indian Ocean north-west of Australia in April 2021. After the two cyclones merged, TC Seroja abruptly changed course by 90 degrees. Credit: Provided by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), JAXA P-Tree System

In April 2021, tropical cyclones Seroja and Odette clashed in the southeastern Indian Ocean, just north-west of Australia, before finally merging completely.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology describes this interaction as rare: “Seroja produc[ed] torrential rainfall and devastating floods in parts of Indonesia and Timor Leste. Later, it interacted with Tropical Cyclone Odette via the Fujiwara effect, a phenomenon rarely observed in the Australian region. Finally, it strengthened into a category 3 tropical cyclone producing a severe impact in the Mid-West region of Western Australia, unusually far south for a coastal crossing of a Severe Tropical Cyclone.”

These types of convergences are one of the most extreme interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere on Earth. But with the number and intensity of tropical cyclones increasing because of global warming, understanding their impacts has become more important than ever.

“Seroja first of all stalled the smaller cyclone Odette and then merged with it 3 days later,” says Oliver Wurl of the University of Oldenburg in Germany. After the cyclones merged, Seroja abruptly changed course by 90 degrees.

The whole encounter lasted for about a week.

“This chain of events not only influenced weather patterns but also triggered a previously unobserved interaction with the ocean underneath,” says Wurl.

In a new report in in the journal Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography, Wurl and colleague Jens Meyerjürgens analysed the encounter between the 2 relatively weak tropical cyclones and found effects that have only been observed with much stronger systems.

They did this by combining satellite data, measurements of the upper ocean, such as salinity and water temperatures obtained from ARGO floats and autonomous drifters, and numerical modelling.

The researchers found that sea-surface temperatures dropped by 3°C in the aftermath of the merge due to cold water upwelling towards the sea surface from depths of 200m.

Given cyclones’ intensity as a Category 1 on the Hurricane Scale, this cooling effect and depth of upwelling was “exceptionally high” – on the scale observed in Category 4 or 5 hurricanes.

“As a result of the interactions of a cyclone with the ocean and the upwelling of cold, deep water, the ocean absorbs additional heat from the air and then transports it to higher latitudes – a crucial process that influences the climate worldwide,” explains Wurl.

The researchers conclude that the simultaneous formation and interaction between tropical cyclones could increase in the future with global warming and, with it, the extreme thermodynamic responses of the upper ocean.

The Ultramarine project – focussing on research and innovation in our marine environments – is supported by Minderoo Foundation.