Crypto News: America is addicted to sanctions. Time for an intervention?

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Sanctions are tight.
Kitchens are White.
Corn is a fright.
Tech bros take flight.

I'll never forget the one Thanksgiving where I got sick after I inhaled the entire caramelized onion topping off my uncle's butternut squash casserole. I was 10 years old, and the sweet, salty, buttery crumbles that blanketed the dish were addictive. The remainder of my day was spent doubled over in the bathroom, regretting my choices. Too much of a good thing can turn bad, fast. Which brings me to this chart:

Some policymakers look at the rapid clip in which the US has grown to rely on sanctions and argue that such tools of coercion are Washington's version of a butternut squash casserole. But Hal Brands feels differently: "Sanctions can succeed by deterring future transgressions as well as by changing behavior to date," he writes, pointing to the war in Ukraine.

It's not as though sanctions are going to magically force Putin to hightail it out of Ukraine, but they could "give pause to governments that are thinking about emulating" Putin's actions, Hal argues. Think about China. If Xi Jinping could have it his way, he might already be mucking about Taiwan, setting fire to the international order as we know it. But he's not! And on top of that, Xi arguably "has done more than anybody else so far to restrain Putin, by telling his nominal 'friend' face-to-face not to use a nuke, lest he lose Beijing's support," Andreas Kluth writes. Sanctions — and the perceived economic threat they pose — probably have something to do with it.

This doesn't mean that moderation gets thrown out the window, though. "Effectiveness requires restraint," Hal writes: "If the US uses sanctions gratuitously, in relatively unimportant cases, it will be harder to convince key allies to come along on matters — mostly involving China — that matter more." Nobody wants to be the girl who gets sick on Thanksgiving.

There once was a chef named Thomas Straker:

Butter boy.

During Covid, Thomas started to make TikTok videos about compound butter. The internet, it seemed, had never encountered such beautiful butter. The videos of him scooping out mesmerizing quenelles were viewed more than 200 million times. This made Thomas very famous. Naturally, he got some banks and investors to fund a restaurant that goes by his last name: Straker's. Things were going well for Thomas, that is, until he posted a photo of the team of chefs he assembled:

Diversity row.

You see the issue here, right? "It's the Ken's at their mojo dojo Casa house," one Instagram user quipped (albeit not very grammatically). If you stare long enough at the image, it morphs into a scene straight out of a Jordan Peele film:

We live in a simulation. Illustration: Jessica Karl

Thomas proceeded to dig himself further into a hole by addressing his haters in an Instagram comment: "Honestly, people need to calm down," he wrote, saying "there is a shortage of chefs/hospitality workers ... if you feel so passionately please go and gather CV's of any chefs you think we're missing in the team." The trouble is, change needs to start long before hiring and staffing, Howard Chua-Eoan writes, pointing out that "traditional financing is difficult to come by for would-be restaurateurs who are women and minorities." Thomas's brigade of White men donning white aprons is a visual reflection of the "diversity deficit" that "haunts the industry," Howard says.

Thankfully, Thomas has since backtracked from his chill-out-dude stance, saying he is "very sorry" for his initial response and that he is "absolutely committed to ensuring diversity." This realization — White guys can't cook everything! — is much-needed progress.

Here's a fun question. Which would you say is more harrowing:

Alien spacecraft
Genetically modified corn

There's no right or wrong answer. After last Wednesday's congressional hearing on UFOs, your mind probably goes to aliens, and I don't blame you. Tyler Cowen says "the most serious claims from the hearings survived unscathed: those about inexplicable phenomena and possible national-security threats," which is concerning, to say the least. But if you were to read Amanda Little's latest column, you might be surprised how scary "smart corn" has become, and not just because it gets stuck in your teeth.

At less than 7 feet tall, the new genetically modified corn varietal — which the Department of Agriculture now says is safe for farmers to grow in the US — isn't as imposing as the original version, but it makes up for the lack of height in other, more terrifying ways. Scientists injected the corn plant with a "foreign gene" that allows it "to produce the same amount of fruit on much shorter, superstrength stalks," Amanda writes. The birth of mutant corn has some farmers hoping that the innovation will fix their climate woes. But "crops of the future won't just need one foreign gene to survive the manifold pressures of climate change, they'll need dozens. And that is a hard reality to swallow," she says. This type of human ingenuity is a Band-Aid that will only get us so far. Maybe we really do need the aliens after all.

Bonus Climate Reading:

Natural hydrogen is a mystery worth solving. — David Fickling
The offshore wind industry is flailing in a financial hurricane. — Liam Denning
It's way too hot for airplanes. — Mark Gongloff

Last month, Canada announced a new program that allows foreigners living in the US on H-1B visas to work for any employer in Canada for three years. It got more than 10,000 applications for the program in less than 48 hours. "This talent-poaching scheme is a model of creative policymaking, and should be causing alarm in Washington," Bloomberg's editorial board writes. Big Tech's Covid-induced hiring spree and sequential firing spree has caused at least 50,000 workers to lose their visas since last fall. "Facing this uncertainty, even H-1B workers who've kept their jobs are taking up Canada's offer to move there instead," the editors say. Given that the US forces Indian workers with advanced degrees to wait in queues of more than 150 years, it's no wonder they're opting to move next door, where the process takes as little as six months. Nobody needs a green card when they're dead.

While a large part of Wall Street seems to have shrugged off the whole recession question, the manufacturing world is still stuck in a doom loop, trying to decide whether we have a true economic crisis on our hands. "Is the industrial economy finding a bottom, just starting to slow or simply hitting a speed bump?" Brooke Sutherland asks. US factory activity has contracted for the ninth consecutive month in July, but earnings season has been abnormally chipper. The contrast between ugly benchmark data and upbeat individual company narratives adds yet another confounding wrinkle to the debate over the trajectory of the economy.