Welcome back, Shit Givers.

And I’m back!

Apologies for the delivery delay today. I was on a submarine. Read to the bottom for a pic.

Action Step update: You’ve been fighting for heat protections for food workers. And this week, the Biden administration announced new rules doing just that. Fuck yeah. I love ya’ll.

Have an Action Step to recommend? Send it to questions@importantnotimportant.com, and we’ll put it through our vetting process!

This Week: Manchin wields a dirty pen; Our new COVID rules; Fighting for expanded telehealth; 200 million climate migrants; Even more trolls

Do Better Better

Expectation setting. It’s everything.

Let’s talk about about venture capital.

The model (of which I’m part of in a variety of capacities, to be fully transparent) proudly relies on using an informational advantage to find outlier investment opportunities led by generational leaders in underserved, outsized markets, and then funding a minority of those, while fully expecting -- again, proudly -- the majority to fail, and hoping 3-4% skyrocket and pay for all the rest.

It’s tried and true.

Buying online ads isn’t very different. Twenty-plus years of data says a 2% click rate is average. Eek out anything higher and you’re promoted to VP.

Baseball’s the same. Going one for three lifetime gets you in the Hall of Fame. Two for three? A hundred and twenty years of data says it’s impossible.

But government -- in no way a perfect beast, I get it -- is held to entirely different standards.

The aforementioned mostly west coast captains of innovation are relentlessly reliable in their often flagrant criticisms of government appropriations (which, again, aren’t perfect).

But some context is helpful.

Some long-term thinking -- to the past, and future -- is helpful.

Apple and Tesla have both benefited from government dollars. So did the microchips in the device you’re reading this on, and the GPS that fuels Uber, among so many other examples.

Some holistic consideration, some cooperation among a more inclusive gathering of minds to identify outlier investment opportunities led by generational leaders in underserved, outsized markets -- is helpful.

For example, if the goal of an investment is to identify future profits, shouldn’t the government be allowed to operate with even remotely similar expectations as Silicon Valley?

What if the goal was to get it right even half the time (as opposed to, say, 3%), but along the way build safety nets for historically marginalized peoples, not just because we’re indebted to them, but because 5% of doctors are Black, and even fewer nurses, contributing to a greater loss of life among those peoples?

So if loss of life is a proven and measurable hit to GDP (it is), shouldn’t we be investing in wellness and basic, robust, and exciting new public health infrastructure to avoid unnecessary loss of life, to raise up those leaders and markets?

Wouldn’t finding generational leaders in huge, untapped markets be easier if more of those young people had clean air, food, and water? If their parents had health care and childcare and paid time off, to read to them, and more?

It’s easy to criticize government spending when you don’t need it, or worse, when you refuse to see how you’ve benefited from it, or worse, when you’re not the one benefiting from it, this time.

It’s even easier to criticize overly bureaucratic government spending, but it’s essential we empathize when it comes under fire from every direction, with about zero self-awareness, making the institutions and actors behind them slower, and more protective, with a million forms and levels of approval required for any distribution.

Standards matter. Expectations matter. But context, matters, too. We can Do Better Better.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

You spill the Joe, you make some more

Understand this: It’s been a couple weeks, let’s get an update on possible federal climate policy.

As was (truly) inevitable, and predicted here, instead of getting Senator Joe Manchin on board with progressive proposals, he’s just...writing it, now.

Documented in HEATED, Popular Information, and The New York Times, “the powerful West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate energy panel and earned half a million dollars last year from coal production, is preparing to remake President Biden’s climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry”.

As 200 million humans are projected to migrate due to climate by 2050; as UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned about our “catastrophic pathway”; as the US drought expands to Texas, Oklahoma, and more, the House version of the reconciliation bill has birthed from Ways and Means committee while senators continue to plead with Manchin (and Sinema) behind mostly closed doors -- while deadlines to vote on the infrastructure bill and the debt ceiling are colliding on Monday.

More to come on federal action.

There’s good news: State action continues to impress, as Illinois dropped a climate, jobs, and justice bill that joins a dozen other states and commits to net-zero emissions, in “a model for how diverse stakeholders can reach consensus.”

⚡️ Action Step: We’re almost there. Use Call4Climate to hold your reps’ feet to the fire. Every. Single. Call. Counts.

COVID

Shots, shots, shots

Understand this: Let’s have a top-line look at the vaccination party.

Per our friends at Our World in Data:

• 44.1% of the global population has received at least 1 dose of a COVID vaccine
• ...for 6+ billion doses (not people) total
• ...at a rate of almost 28 million doses per day
• ...but only 2.2% of folks in low-income countries have received at least 1 dose
• ...leaving about 4.3 billion humans without any shots to-date, full stop.

Unsplash

In the US:

• 63% of Americans (212m) have received at least 1 dose
• ......including over 76% of adults
• ...while 54% of all Americans (182m) are fully vaxxed
• Boosters were approved (in some combination) by the FDA, CDC, and CDC director for Americans over 65, folks over 50 with an underlying health condition, and folks whose job puts them at increased risk of exposure

Great. Aside from the predictable and still devastating global inequity on display, where’s that put the US?

Well, we’re still not doing anywhere near enough rapid testing to manage outbreaks -- tests most of the rest of the Global North either get for free or for dirt-cheap.

The Atlantic’s superb trifecta of Katherine J. Wu, Ed Yong, and Sarah Zhang came together this week to explain six guidelines going forward:

1. Vaccines are (correctly) acting like, and should be seen like, a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch
2. The % of vaccinated folks matters, but who they are and how they cluster goes a long way, too
3. Once we protected older people, the math on who was in the most danger changed. And it’ll keep changing until everyone can get a shot.
4. Cases among vaccinated people matter so much less than the percentage of those actually getting sick
5. Rare shit happens more frequently when the N is “everyone on Earth”
6. Worst case scenario re: mutations will keep changing, because viruses just want to have fun/spread, and will keep doing so, but shots, masks, and distancing can make the whole thing a hell of a lot easier to manage

I recommend reading the entire article.

In other COVID catch-up news:

• Pfizer dropped a press release with some data around their kids vaxx trial. It’s great news! But it’s also just a press release. More to come.
• COVID isn’t the only thing that can send you to the hospital, and your hospital might be full, so be careful out there
• Despite the pandemic, over half of US states have rolled back public health powers in the last year
• And 24 GOP state attorneys general said they’ll fight to “the gates of hell” and prob sue Biden & co over vaccine requirements

⚡️ Action Step: With hospitals getting crushed, resources are still very much in need. The National Governors Association put together an online hub for businesses and other orgs with supplies or services to connect with state officials regarding critical needs.

If you’re a state official or business/org that can help, check it out here.

Medicine & Biotech

Ring ring, it’s your prostate exam calling

Understand this: 15% of Americans live in rural America, and are more than usual 1) old, 2) sick and 3) underserved.

One pandemic-proven way to help? Telehealth. From The New York Times:

“Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was distributing nearly $20 million to strengthen telehealth services — usually medical appointments that take place by video or phone... (as) part of a broader push to address the long-neglected health care infrastructure in those areas.”

Including:

• $4 million to bring primary, acute and behavioral health care directly to patients via telehealth in 11 states
• $4.3 million to help specialists provide training and support to primary care providers in underserved areas via “tele-mentoring”

What it means: FaceTime appointments won’t get it done on their own. Enormous cross-state regulatory hurdles remain deeply embedded in our healthcare system, and insurers remain skeptical (at best) that they can keep raking in that sweet, sweet cash.

⚡️ Action Step: The American Medical Association slipped into Congress’s DM’s (fine, they sent them a real letter) this month advocating for permanent telehealth access and infrastructure (among others). It’s proven, and equitable.

Contact your reps here to insist those things are part of the upcoming reconciliation bill.

Job of the Week

Get electric, woogy-woogy-woogy

Front-end Developer, Radiator Labs (Brooklyn)

Radiator Labs is a Brooklyn-based energy management and electrification platform for radiator-heated buildings working to solve a 100-year-old problem: the lack of comfort and efficiency in buildings with steam heat.

Come build appealing UI/UX designs and dashboards to allow us and our customers to understand and interact with building heating data in real-time.

Apply here.

Food & Water

Nourish them

Understand this: Earlier, I casually mentioned 200 million humans who could be on the move thanks to climate change in the next few decades.

That number comes from a new report from Groundswell, and chalks the historic swell up to “water scarcity, decreasing crop productivity and rising sea levels”, among others.

But upon closer look, the estimation doesn’t actually include cross-border migration, or account for extreme weather events.

To be clear, two things may very well be true: we need to take every action we can to prevent further warming, but we’re also probably not on track for long-term, worst-case scenarios anymore.

But future is more ever-more inclusive.

The future is now:

“Thousands of migrants were crowded under a bridge outside the border community of Del Rio on Thursday, part of a massive surge in migration across the Rio Grande this week that has overwhelmed the authorities and caused significant delays in processing the arrivals.

[...] The vast majority of those who arrived appeared to be fleeing Haiti, the Caribbean country still reeling from a series of natural disasters and the assassination in July of its president, Jovenel Moïse, local officials said.”

We can, and have to Do Better Better, for those forced from their homes now, and the many to come.

⚡️ Action Step: As always, our friends at World Central Kitchen are busting their asses across the globe -- including under that bridge in Del Rio -- to feed those in need. Volunteer or donate here.

The Human-Machine Interface

You’ve been disinformed

Re: trolls: Let’s get to it. From MIT:

“In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms....according to an internal company report.

[...] Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.

“Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach,” wrote the report’s author, Jeff Allen, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook.”

Where do we go from here?

When Facebook -- arguably the most impactful and far-reaching information platform in the history of the galaxy -- keeps burying the bad news, fighting off watchdogs, and providing the pipelines for dangerous disinformation, like Exxon before them?

Forgetting, for the briefest of moments, who most measurably benefits from these internal decisions -- take a step back.

Forget even the prospects of so-called stolen elections, and attempted coups.

Facebook and its verticals like WhatsApp have contributed to hate crimes and genocide across the world. Fossil fuel propaganda starts in schools and lives in your timelines. We’re still in the middle of a fucking pandemic.

When your scale is the entire world, lives are always at stake.

One proposed solution: Pre-emptive explainers, and partnerships to support them. Recently tested across Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom, these type of fact-checks provided “significant” gains in factual accuracy among participants.

Who wants to get Facebook on board?

⚡️ Action Step: INI isn’t just about curating the news and powerful Action Steps. I want to help you think better.

Charlie Warzel did a fantastic job last week asking, basically, “what the hell do we do about Facebook?” You’d benefit from reading the piece, here. I certainly did.

The Round Up

Meet 50 Latinas innovating our food system

80% of California’s water goes to agriculture. Can we make drip irrigation way more affordable?

Our newest weapon against wildfires? Goats!

The US-China Cold War is racist and killing our science game

The EPA is coming for hydrofluorocarbons. Huge news.

Re: COVID passes:

• They sort of worked in France?
• They’re being expanded in Italy
• And in the UK, they’re secretly storing your facial data via a very sketchy contract

(Sigh) A crazy popular app for churches is an anti-vaxx cesspool

Pepsi’s big partnership with Beyond Meat is coming down the pipe

A fifth of London schools are susceptible to flooding

Babies ingesting ridiculous levels of microplastics

Zero Day hacks are out of control. Why?

Iron Man-like bionics center established at MIT

Flood insurance is finally going up. Way up.

Important Jobs

Every week, we share Featured roles from Important Jobs right here in the newsletter.

Hiring and want to get your open role in front of our community? Submit a Featured role for free here.

• VP, Engineering Manager, BlocPower
• Senior Manager of Operations, GiveDirectly
• Chief Product Officer, Climate AI
• Software Engineer, Emitwise

Browse 40+ open roles, or list your own for free at ImportantJobs.com.

Important Pod Guests - In The News

Dr. Sian Proctor WENT TO SPACE as the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft, and then came home safe and sound

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is busy AF (yay!) and departing her co-hosting duties at How To Save A Planet

And finally, you really, really, really need to spend 4 minutes watching Dr. Leah Stokes testify to Congress on this pivotal moment in history. What a hero.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit. Have a great weekend.

-- Quinn

PS: As promised…

USS Montpelier