The Guardian: How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down

For the people who sell it, the way coffee looks has long been as important as how it tastes. Until the late 19th century, beans were prized for their size, colour and symmetry. Nespresso applied a similar approach to its capsules: they started rather plain, in greys and golds, but evolved into a full spectrum. Red means decaffeinated, with darker purples and greys for the stronger, more intense flavours. “You are trying to give people visual clues about the origins of the product,” said Spence. “People prefer the taste of things when they think they have made a choice about it.” The Nespresso system made every customer feel like a connoisseur: you had to make a choice every time you put a capsule in the machine, even if it was just between black or purple. [...]

One crucial factor behind Nespresso’s rise, unmentioned by Gaillard, was timing. In 1998, Starbucks arrived in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe from 2001. (Although not in Italy, which somehow held out until 2018.) Previously it had been difficult to get a decent coffee anywhere outside Italy. At Starbucks, you could enjoy Italian-style coffee, which is to say freshly made and with frothy milk, marketed with Italian-style language. According to the historian of consumption, Jonathan Morris, Nespresso capitalised on these new tastes: “When customers started to ask how they could have [Starbucks-style coffee] at home, Nespresso was the best-placed product to take advantage of that.” Between its Fortissio and Vivalto pods, it had the cod-Italian ready to go, too. [...]

Unlike plastic, used by many of Nespresso’s rivals, aluminium is 100% recyclable, but there is a big difference between offering recycling facilities and getting consumers to use them. Nespresso says its global recycling rate is 30%, and that 91% of its users have access to one of its 100,000 collection points around the world. But some experts have suggested that just 5% of Nespresso pods are recycled. Even if Nespresso’s figure is accurate, with a conservative estimate of 14bn capsules being sold each year, and 0.9 grams of aluminium per capsule, that means 12,600 tonnes of Nespresso aluminium end up in landfill annually, enough for 60 Statues of Liberty.

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Politico: ‘Hating Joe Biden doesn’t juice up their base’: Key swing state slips away from Trump

It’s a very big problem in a swing state that’s central to his Rust Belt path to victory. Four years ago, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to carry Pennsylvania, in part by winning older and suburban voters, as well as blue-collar white workers in ancestrally Democratic areas. Now, with less than 100 days till Election Day, surveys show those voters are eyeing something different yet again. [...]

“Joe Biden — his party is not in power — so just by definition, he’s the candidate of change. That’s a huge advantage,” said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. “No matter what Hillary Clinton did with her campaign schedule, she was running after eight years of a Democratic president. So when you’re running after eight years of your party, you are not the change candidate.”

Democratic elected officials, party leaders and strategists in Pennsylvania said that Biden is ahead because of Trump’s mishandling of Covid-19 — which is particularly risky to seniors — as well as his broken campaign promises to workers about spending big on infrastructure and rewriting trade deals to benefit them. They believe voters like Biden because he is known as someone who can work across the aisle to solve the nation’s problems. [...]

In a call with reporters last month, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien touted the fact that Republicans have registered more voters than Democrats in Pennsylvania — about five times as many — since 2016. The team said it is working to identify first-time or infrequent voters who support Trump, something it successfully did in 2016.

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VICE: Donald Trump Is Getting Less Popular by the Day

Fifty-two percent of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of the protests, while just 36 percent approve. Even among older Americans, who were most likely to approve of Trump’s response, a clear majority (54 percent) disapproves. (Nineteen percent of respondents overall said the presence of federal agents “doesn’t have much effect one way or the other.”)

Trump gets similarly bad marks on relations with Russia (36 percent approval, 63 percent disapproval) and his handling of the pandemic (34 percent approval, 66 percent disapproval), the issue that’s dominated American life since March and which could decide the election.

On all three topics, the only groups more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the issue than not is white voters without college degrees and Trump’s fellow Republicans. According to Ipsos, 64 percent of Republicans said the presence of federal troops made the situation better, as did 42 percent of white voters without college degrees.

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The Guardian: 'A chain of stupidity': the Skripal case and the decline of Russia's spy agencies

Paradoxically, this low-level corruption made Russia one of the most open societies in the world. Corruption was the friend of investigative journalism, and the enemy of government–military secrets.[...]

The attacks ignored a more interesting truth: that spying was no longer the monopoly of nation states. “Now it belongs to anyone who has the brains, the spunk and the technological ability,” Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a security and defence thinktank, told the New York Times, adding, “We are witnessing a blurring of distinctions.” [...]

Suvorov likened his old organisation’s failings to a nasty, cancer-like illness. It was eating up Russia’s entire body politic. This disease had affected spying, technology and rocket production, he told me. It explained the abysmal roads, the dying villages. The country was literally disintegrating. Suvorov used the word “raspad”: collapse or breakdown. The situation was akin to the Titanic, he said with the rich looking to flee in a lifeboat.

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BBC4 Analysis: Behavioural Science and the Pandemic

There were two narratives that emerged in the week before we locked down on 23rd March that could go some way to explaining why the UK was relatively slow to lockdown. One was the idea of “herd immunity” - that the virus was always going to spread throughout the population to some extent, and that should be allowed to happen to build up immunity.

That theory may have been based on a misunderstanding of how this particular virus behaved.

The second narrative was based on the idea of “behavioural fatigue”. This centred around the notion that the public will only tolerate a lockdown for so long so it was crucial to wait for the right moment to initiate it. Go too soon, and you might find that people would not comply later on.

It turns out that this theory was also wrong. And based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human behaviour.

Despite photos of packed parks, crammed beaches and VE day conga lines, on the whole the British public complied beyond most people’s expectations.

So what informed the government’s decision making?In this programme we ask, what is “behavioural fatigue”, where did it come from, how much influence did it have on the UK’s late lockdown, and where does Nudge theory fit into the narrative?

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