Mayor Richard West has tarnished the name of our great city by instructing the city attorney to do discovery work for his stepbrother in Nahunta, Georgia. West acknowledged his wrongdoing, but blamed the city attorney for not advising him correctly. West then encouraged the firing of the attorney, but the attorney resigned and took a job in Charlottesville in June 2023. As mayor, he used city staff time and our money to pay for his personal business. Ethically, that is wrong.

At recent City Council meetings, West and Council member Amanda Newins have led an effort to get Councilman Don Carey to resign his council seat to run for mayor. Virginia Senate Bill 1157, passed in 2021, clearly states that “the election of its mayor, governing body, or school board at a May election shall, by ordinance, provide for the transition of such elections to the November general election date.” It further states that no term of members of council or school board shall be shortened that expires as of June 30, and shall continue in office until their successors have been elected at the November general election.

The problem is that the City Council and city attorney were negligent in changing the city charter to comply with state law. Instead, they choose to smear Carey’s reputation as a lawbreaker to hide their own incompetence. When that did not work, West and his acolytes filed suit on Aug. 28 in Circuit Court to remove his candidacy from the Nov. 5, election.

Carey is a bastion of honesty, and integrity and has a strong policy on transparency and accountability. Further, he is a family man, youth mentor through his REECH Foundation and a man of faith. He will not smear the good name of our beloved city, nor be a puppet for retired Congressman Randy Forbes. You may remember the joint letter in the previous election circulated by Rick West and Randy Forbes that smeared Councilwoman Ella Ward and council candidate Susan Vitale for failure to vote on one of their issues.

West and his acolytes on the council opposed citizens’ request to vote on changing the election system in Chesapeake from an at-large system to a single-member (ward) voting system. Chesapeake is the only large city in the commonwealth holding on to the at-large system, which by its very nature discriminates against minority voters. He is not concerned about equality in representation, but wants power and control over what happens in the city and affects our daily lives. Real estate and transportation industries have contributed $310,865 this year to his campaign. What is that about? I think you know.

On the other hand, he has not provided any leadership in providing a convocation and performing arts complex, affordable housing, nor any facility to graduate high school seniors or to accommodate our high school swimming teams.

Citizens of Chesapeake, it is time to vote for change and progress. We need new leadership if our city is to achieve progress and move Chesapeake to a better place to live, work, play, farm and serve all the people.

George F. Reed, Ph.D., is a retired educator, a U.S. Air Force veteran and president of G. and L. Associates Consulting in Chesapeake. He serves as secretary of the Chesapeake Juneteenth Foundation and is a board member of several nonprofit organizations.

In one scenario, low energy prices lead to a lot of slack. At the margin, people don’t need to be so careful about how they deploy their AIs. Right now, for instance, I don’t pay extra for using my current LLMs more. So I am willing to play around with them a lot without worrying about whether any single use is going to achieve some concrete useful end. The result is some silliness, some jokes and more indulgence of my random obsessions, in addition to help with my history and economics questions.

I call this the AI Future With Slack.

It is not clear how long the system can operate like this. As more institutions work with generative AI, demands on those services will increase. AI companies will have to invest more to meet the growing demand for computing power. AI services will also lose their initial venture-capital-funded runways and be forced to make a profit. Over the long term, each use of generative AI will cost a noticeable amount of money.

I call this the AI Future Without Slack.

Both AI usage and global economic growth will significantly boost the demand for energy, and thus energy prices. Using the vast computing powers of AI could mean significantly higher energy costs.

Of course, there are many different variables that figure into energy costs, ranging from the future of nuclear fusion, battery technologies and numerous regulatory decisions. Energy will continue to be relatively cheap for households (that is, voters) and will get relatively expensive for business-owned AIs.

To the extent there is a lot of slack, AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk to each other — as they already do — trade with each other, and come up with further alternatives we humans have not yet pondered. Evolutionary pressures within AI’s cultural worlds will determine which of these practices spread.

If you own some rights flowing to AI usage, you might just turn them on and let them “do their thing.” Many people may give their AIs initial instructions for their culture-building: “Take your inspiration from 1960s hippies,” for example, or “try some Victorian poetry.” But most of the work will be done by the AIs themselves. These productions might quickly become far more numerous than human-directed ones.

With a lot of slack, expect more movies and video, which consume a lot of computational energy. With less slack, text and poetry will be relatively cheaper and thus more plentiful.

In other words: In the not-too-distant future, what kind of culture the world produces could depend on the price of electricity.

It remains to be seen how much humans will be interested. Perhaps some AI productions will fascinate us, but most are likely to bore us, just as few people sit around listening to whale songs. But even if the AI culture skeptics are largely correct, the sheer volume will make an impact, especially when combined with evolutionary refinement and more human-directed efforts.

With high energy prices, AI production will more likely fit into popular culture modes, if only to pay the bills. With lower energy prices, there will be more room for the avant-garde, for better or worse. Perhaps we would learn a lot more about the possibilities for 12-tone rows in music.

A weirder scenario is that AIs bid for the cultural products of humans, perhaps paying with crypto. But will they be able to tolerate our incessant noodling and narcissism? There might even be a columnist or two who makes a living writing for AIs, if only to give them a better idea of what we humans are thinking.

The possibilities are limitless, and we are just beginning to wrap our minds around them. The truth is, we are on the verge of one of the most significant cultural revolutions the world has ever seen.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

Compact and powerful, Hurricane Andrew slammed into south Florida, obliterating houses and leaving 65 people dead. In the days that followed, our response to the disaster was a textbook case of failure, with a breakdown in communication and coordination at all levels of government. Nobody, from the White House down, had any inkling what was going on. Peg Maloy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s spokesperson at the time, put it best: “Something is wrong. Nobody knows where it’s breaking down. I’d like to know myself.”

The result of our failed government response was, as always, human suffering, with the affected communities left to fend for themselves. The town of Homestead was a devastated landscape, littered with dead animals, the smell of human waste hanging in the air. Dade County’s Emergency Management director, Kate Hale, said during a televised news conference: “Where in the hell is the cavalry on this one?”

The bad news is that, when it comes to responding to catastrophes, little has changed in the decades since that hot August morning some three decades ago. While some agencies (the Federal Emergency Management Agency is a notable example) have improved their capabilities and their processes, as a nation we have made no progress in our readiness for major disasters.

This was clearly shown 13 years later in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and, most recently, by our national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when a clumsy federal bureaucracy and its various components, from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, failed to take an ownership stake in the crisis. Instead, they pointed at each other and dithered, while the virus spread rapidly across the nation.

Although it’s true that the COVID-19 disaster unfolded in a polarized political climate, its failures cannot be attributed to partisanship. The causes of our national failure arose out of incompetence. The partisan divisions that emerged were the result of that incompetence, not its cause. Meanwhile, the absence of a cohesive national plan leaves us vulnerable.

Catastrophes overwhelm us, affecting everyone in the same way at the same time. They ignore political boundaries, sowing chaos and demanding information and resources way beyond what is immediately available. Many people, even some crisis management professionals, think the challenges are just too great. They believe that planning for catastrophes is wasted effort; an exercise in futility. They are wrong.

Planning (i.e., what must happen and who is on the hook to do it) enables coordination, and, with effective coordination, nothing is impossible. Only national executive leadership can build the plan that establishes accountability across all levels of government, that connects to the private sector and deploys the resources and solutions needed to address widespread and urgent human suffering.

Now is the time for us to stop the dithering and the finger-pointing and to start reconfiguring ourselves to confront the unknown in a complex environment. With the national nominating conventions over and the candidates engaged in an eight-week sprint to Election Day, this is a critical opportunity to elevate this issue. Preparing the nation for the inevitable next catastrophe — whether it be a natural disaster, pandemic or terrorist attack — is a fundamental responsibility of the federal government. The president owns this issue, and we should not let the candidates off the hook.

How many more failures must we be forced to endure before we get the plan we need? The voters deserve to know.

Kelly McKinney is the assistant vice president of emergency management and enterprise resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He is a former deputy commissioner for the New York City Office of Emergency Management and the author of “Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them.” McKinney wrote this for the Chicago Tribune. 

Cruise companies are questionable business partners. Virtually all large cruise ships are foreign registered to avoid U.S. taxes and labor laws, while taking full advantage of the infrastructure, emergency services and other amenities of the port cities they visit. The industry spends millions each year lobbying to prevent meaningful federal, state and local regulatory controls on their activities. Largely self-monitored, cruise lines repeatedly fail at voluntary compliance with existing regulations.

The cruise passenger’s ticket is essentially a loss-leader. Once aboard, vacationers are tempted to splurge on onboard shopping, dining and gambling. In early 2024, Princess lobbyists, including Wagner, pressed the Virginia legislature for a bill to allow onboard gambling in Virginia waters (HB1478). The purpose? To maximize dollars spent on board while minimizing dollars spent in localities. Praised by Wagner, who said gambling permission would “roll out the welcome mat” for cruise companies in Virginia, the 2024 bill was defeated. However, it is sure to reappear in the near future.

A recent study, “The Economics of Cruise Tourism in Key West: Behind the Cruise Industry’s Propaganda Veil,” concludes that passengers spend roughly 20-70% fewer dollars ashore than the industry contends; that port fees paid to local governments are smaller than the industry claims; and that cruise passengers spend far less per visit than “stayover” tourists do. We have found no independent evidence to corroborate Wagner’s claim that U.S. cruise tourism converts into future longer-term visits.

The Key West study also noted that cruise lines often require fees from onshore tour operators and retail establishments wanting to do business with cruise line passengers. This “pay-to-play” practice is not mentioned in industry-commissioned reports, such as the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA) study Wagner references.

Mega cruise ships are like floating cities that generate power and discharge waste on a scale far exceeding that of other vessels. A 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that during a weeklong cruise, a ship carrying 3,000 passengers and crew generates approximately 210,000 gallons of sewage; 1 million gallons of gray water; 130 gallons of hazardous materials; up to 8 tons of solid waste; and 25,000 gallons of oily bilge water. The cruise industry is notorious for violating existing pollution regulations. Princess Cruise Lines, which Wagner represents, received the largest ever maritime fine ($40 million in 2016) for felony convictions stemming from deliberate vessel pollution, with corporate-level knowledge. It also violated its probation as recently as 2022 and was fined $20 million.

Environmental concerns include atmospheric pollution and ocean acidification, toxic discharges from open loop exhaust scrubbers (currently banned in 120 ports), and wastewater discharges. Fine particles, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides found in cruise ship exhaust can cause asthma, emphysema and cancer.

Cruise ship waste streams and accidental pollution incidents are increasing in proportion to the burgeoning growth of the industry. Public health and environmental issues are serious and complex; for more detailed information, please visit Protect-Virginia.org.

Cruise companies constantly seek new markets for global expansion, and once established they fight vigorously to maintain and increase their presence. Communities pushing back against this exploitation include Key West, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; Juneau and Sitka, Alaska; Seattle; Monterey Bay, California; Bar Harbor, Maine; Venice, Italy; Barcelona, Spain; Amsterdam; Marseilles, France; and Bergen, Norway. Each tells the same story: that their citizens had little input in the initial decision to bring in large cruise ships and little recourse after the fact, and that the cruise industry has brought them to the breaking point.

Virginians have an obligation not to take at face value cruise industry claims such as those put forward by Wagner. We should closely examine attempts to expand large cruise ship traffic in our waters with an eye toward negative environmental and cultural impacts as well as tax and labor issues. Under such scrutiny, we think the scale will tip toward utmost protection of our fragile ecosystems and coastal communities.

Angier Brock, Robert Hodson, Jacques van Montfrans and Elizabeth Wilkins, all of Yorktown, are members of the Protect Virginia Steering Committee. They wrote this on behalf of the organization.

This advice was worthless for violent crashes. Starting in 1968 the federal government required the installation of seat belts, and later combination seat-and-shoulder belts, in all cars sold in the United States. No auto-safety devices have saved more lives. But in some states, especially in Virginia, seat belt use is on the decline. And the results are deadly.

As The Virginian-Press and Daily Press recently reported, a new state report showed car accidents in Virginia declined by 4% between 2017 and 2022, but traffic deaths rose 19% to 5,300. The report blamed the increased deaths on “an escalation of risky driving behaviors,” mainly speeding, and the failure to wear seat belts. A shocking 37% of those killed were unbuckled. While 91.9% of auto occupants wear seat belts nationwide, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Virginia ranks dead last of all states at 75.6%, down 10% from 2019.

All of which raises a question for many Virginians: Why in the world aren’t you buckling your seat belt?

Excuses for not buckling vary, national polls show. Some people say seat belts are uncomfortable. Others want to show their independence from federal regulations. Still others say they are safe drivers and don’t need to use seat belts. They are wrong.

The facts on seat-belt use are clear.

“Buckling up helps keep you safe and secure inside your vehicle, whereas not buckling up can result in being totally ejected from the vehicle in a crash, which is almost always deadly,” the NHTSA says. “Air bags are not enough to protect you; in fact, the force of an air bag can seriously injure or even kill you if you’re not buckled up.”

The agency estimates about 50% of the 25,420 passenger vehicle occupants killed nationwide in 2022 weren’t wearing seat belts. Many would have survived if belted. Drivers and passengers who buckle up are 50% less likely to be moderately injured in a crash.

Virginia law requires that all front-seat occupants of motor vehicles wear seat belts, and anyone under 18 be restrained wherever they sit. One flaw in Virginia’s law is that adults aren’t required to use back-seat seat belts. Yet “among rear seat occupants, seat belt use can reduce the risk for death by 60%,” says the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

Other states also are facing increased deaths of unbelted drivers and passengers. In North Carolina, nearly 400 of 1,200 people killed in car crashes last year were unbuckled. “It’s just depressing to see the number of people who aren’t engaged in that very simple behavior of buckling a seat belt,” said a North Carolina state auto safety official.

I once wrote about auto safety as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and frequently spoke with Nader. I first called him at the phone in the lobby of his Washington, D.C., boarding house. This was so long ago that when I asked to speak to “Ralph,” whoever answered the phone said, “Ralph who?” Nearly 60 years after Nader’s groundbreaking book, seat belts and shoulder harnesses have saved more than 400,000 lives in the United States.

Most Americans use seat belts, and this is no time to slip back. Today not buckling seat belts when riding in a vehicle is like riding naked. Nobody wants to see it. You should be wearing a seat belt — every time.

Ronald G. Shafer of Williamsburg is a former Washington political features editor at the Wall Street Journal and the author of “A Half Naked George Washington. And Other True Tales From History,” a book of his Washington Post articles scheduled to be published on Amazon in early September.

That’s why more of Virginia’s congressional delegation needs to support the bipartisan Main Street Tax Certainty Act.

Without it, many of Virginia’s small businesses will be hit with a 20% tax hike overnight. And with inflation driving up the cost of everything from raw materials to wages, a 20% tax hike could put some Main Street businesses out of business.

In 2017, Congress passed a law that included a provision allowing small businesses to deduct 20% of business income from their federal taxes. This really helped local businesses throughout the commonwealth.

This federal tax deduction allows small businesses to deduct up to 20% of their qualified business income. Small businesses use those dollars to invest in their employees and business operations, and those tax savings have protected them against inflation, hiring shortages and supply chain disruptions.

Congress, though, set this deduction to expire in 2025.

That’s why Virginia’s small business owners are asking their members of Congress to pass the Main Street Tax Certainty Act.

Small business owners need stability. They don’t have it right now, and that creates uncertainty. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index rose 2.2 points in July to 93.7, the highest reading in more than two years, but it was still the 31st consecutive month that the index was below the 50-year average.

By passing the Main Street Tax Certainty Act, Congress can stop the cycle of uncertainty caused by temporary extensions. Right now, small business owners don’t have the certainty and confidence they need to make big investments. They simply don’t know if the 20% small-business deduction will be part of the equation after 2025.

Until they have that clarity, they can’t do all the things they want to do — all the things they need to do — to grow their businesses, create jobs and support their communities.

The Main Street Tax Certainty Act enjoys the support of both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan support of anything is rare these days in Washington.

But of the 11 U.S. representatives from Virginia, only four have signed on as cosponsors of the bill: Ben Cline, Bob Good, Jennifer Kiggans and Robert Wittman. Neither of our U.S. senators is on board. That’s not good enough for the small business owners who sent them to Washington.

Virginia’s economy is built on its small businesses. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses account for 99.5% of all businesses in the commonwealth. And while big business grabs most of the headlines, more than 45% of Virginians who work for a small business.

Small businesses help our economy by creating jobs, sponsoring local charities and civic organizations, and providing goods and services you won’t find at chain stores. Virginia needs small businesses to maintain a strong and diverse economy, but small businesses operate on notoriously thin profit margins. Inflation already is taking a toll on many of Virginia’s small businesses. They can’t afford a 20% tax hike. For some businesses, that could be the tipping point, the thing that decides it’s time to close up, and we can’t afford to lose our small businesses.

That’s why we need our entire congressional delegation to make the small business deduction permanent by supporting the Main Street Tax Certainty Act. We need to tell our elected leaders what Main Street means to Virginia’s economy and remind them that by helping small businesses, they’ll help everyone.

Julia Hammond of Richmond is the Virginia director of the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s leading small business association.

The scenes outside of the high school were chaotic and heartbreaking. Dozens, maybe hundreds of emergency vehicles swarmed the scene — sheriff’s deputies, EMTs, firefighters and even county game wardens responded. With traffic blocked by police more than a mile away from the school, panicked parents and grandparents simply parked their cars on the side of the road and started walking or running to reach their children instead.

The stories were as horrific as they were inevitable. Without more being done to prevent school shootings in Georgia and beyond, it feels like we’re just waiting for the next one to happen and praying it’s not where we live.

We don’t truly know whether this terrible new normal for our kids is a result of the increasingly lax gun laws that our leaders keep passing or a lack of security in schools. Is it because of the rising levels of anxiety in teens or a failure to keep guns away from people having a serious mental health crisis? Is it all of those things together? Maybe. But lawmakers in the state are not looking deeper to find out.

That’s especially perplexing because it often seems like there is no issue too large or too small for the Georgia General Assembly to study and debate. If a topic is complex, or lawmakers don’t know exactly what a bill or law should look like, they often create a study committee to gather more information. This year, House study committees are reviewing credit card fees and excise taxes, consumer protections in the tree safety industry, and changes to laws for navigable streams.

But since I have been covering the Legislature, there has never been a study committee to look at how to comprehensively address school shootings and, if I can make an easy prediction, at this rate there never will be.

That’s because a study committee would surely tell GOP leaders something they don’t want to hear — that along with the millions of dollars they already spent to upgrade security at schools and the requirements they put in place for active shooter drills for all students (including kindergartners), the only way to prevent school shootings is to also consider gun restrictions in some form or fashion.

Lawmakers have proved themselves acutely aware of other potential harms to children in schools and have been ready to act accordingly.

When conservatives feared that some white children could be made to feel sad or guilty depending on how a teacher presented a topic such as slavery, the House and Senate passed a bill that detailed which topics teachers could introduce and even specified the kinds of questions they were allowed to answer.

When a transgender college student in Pennsylvania swam in a women’s swim meet, GOP lawmakers moved to ban all transgender kids from participating on Georgia school teams different from their gender at birth. Last week, a new Senate study committee held a public hearing to find out what more should be done on that issue.

But when four people were killed in a Barrow County school on Wednesday by a boy from their own community, the most leaders could offer were thoughts and prayers.

Speaking for myself, I am thinking and praying deeply for the children and families affected. I am also profoundly grateful to the school resource officer who stopped the shooter and certainly prevented more carnage in the process.

But I know we would not need so many thoughts and prayers if lawmakers would take action and do more to save our students’ lives, no matter the politics.

As of now, they’re just failing them, one school shooting at a time.

Patricia Murphy is an opinion columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The surge of inflation that has hammered household budgets since 2021 was not random. It’s largely the result of policy choices made or promoted by the Biden-Harris administration.

It’s clear, from the details Vice President Kamala Harris has released about her proposed economic platform, that she has no intention of reversing the disastrous legacy of Bidenomics. Indeed, she has even more dangerous plans waiting in the wings.

In 2021 and 2022, President Joe Biden approved trillions of dollars’ worth of inflationary spending and tax credits, with Harris twice casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate.

The bills included enormous slush funds for state governments, welfare expansions that reduced the labor supply and weakened supply chains, and costly subsidies for “green” energy and electric vehicles.

Not content with the legislative spending spree, Biden caused another $700 billion in deficit increases through administrative changes.

The most notable of these has been the repeated (and repeatedly unlawful) attempt to erase student loan debts, which transfers the obligation to taxpayers. Unsurprisingly, Harris has been a strong supporter of this scheme.

Not only have families struggled to deal with rising prices, but they face an additional burden: higher interest rates imposed by the combination of federal deficits and Federal Reserve actions to fight inflation. The median monthly payment on a new home mortgage has more than doubled since 2021.

When it comes to addressing high prices and costly housing, Harris has announced plans that would be not just ineffective, but counterproductive.

For example, giving $25,000 of taxpayer money toward the down payment on a new home would inject more demand into the market and escalate bidding wars, leading to higher prices.

The proposal to impose federal limits on rental housing — which Biden originally put forward — would cause property owners to pull some units off the market and reduce incentives to build. That would reduce the supply of housing and drive prices higher still.

Similarly, the Harris push to stop “price gouging” at grocery stores would wreak havoc on an industry with an average profit margin of just more than 1%.

One aspect of the Biden agenda that has (thankfully) not come to pass is an array of tax hikes proposed in his annual budgets.

Yet even here, Harris wants to carry the torch of Bidenomics forward.

If she follows the Biden plan in full, the total tax bill would be an eye-watering $5 trillion. Not only would that mean shrinking the private sector for the sake of increasing Washington’s control over the economy, but the taxes in question would be especially destructive.

Raising the corporate tax from 21% to 28% would place U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage against those based in most of the developed world. This picture is even worse when you factor in state-level corporate taxes — bringing the true corporate tax range in the U.S. to between 25.8% and 32.3%, depending on the state.

The nations of the European Union, hardly a low-tax haven, have an average corporate tax of 21%. Even communist China only levies a 25% tax on businesses.

Boosting taxes on capital gains to 44.6% would dramatically reduce the incentive to invest in new and growing businesses, leading to less job creation and slower wage growth.

Most troubling of all is the push for taxing “wealth.”

Not only would this be flatly unconstitutional, but it would also ignore worldwide evidence that such taxes cause tremendous economic damage for the sake of relatively little revenue. Most developed countries that have imposed such a tax have since repealed them as a result.

The legacy of Bidenomics is higher prices, corrupt handouts to political allies, and driving the federal government towards bankruptcy.

Kamalanomics appears to be more of the same, along with the potential of tax increases that would cripple economic growth.

Is that really the path Americans want to take?

David Ditch is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.

Simply put, zero waste means producing little or no waste. Communities can work toward zero waste by refusing, reducing, reusing, repairing, repurposing, recycling and composting. It is time to rethink our waste habits and be more mindful.

Refusing and reducing is the No. 1 way to cut back on waste in our landfills. Refuse an item if you don’t need it, such as skipping the straw or plastic utensils. Before you purchase an item, consider if you really need it. When you do purchase, select items with minimal packaging and be sure they are compostable or recyclable.

Reuse items whenever possible. Get in the habit of opting for reusable water bottles, travel mugs, utensils, metal straws and reusable grocery totes. Investing in reusable and durable products will decrease the need for new ones. Use these products to their full extent by fixing broken or malfunctioning items. Not only is repairing broken items good for the environment, in many instances it can also save you money.

Repurpose items before you toss them. Check the internet for creative ideas. If repurposing is not viable, then donate unwanted items that are still in workable condition to local organizations or post the item on your neighborhood’s FaceBook free swap page.

Recycling is the last step in the zero-waste hierarchy. Recycling saves natural resources, reduces the amount of waste in landfills, saves energy, prevents pollution and creates jobs. However, it is very important to recycle correctly. Never put plastic bags of any kind in your recycling cart as they get stuck in the sorting machines at the recycling center. The recycling can’s lid is embossed with allowed items. Currently, this includes the following (clean and rinsed) in Virginia Beach:

• Paper: newspaper; magazines; junk mail; paperback books; flattened, unwaxed, clean and dry cardboard and chipboard (no greasy pizza boxes)
• Plastics No. 1-7: plastic bottles and jugs (“check for the neck”); water bottles; soap bottles; detergent bottles; milk jugs
• Food and juice cartons: milk; juice; protein drinks; wine cartons; soup cartons
• Glass bottles and jars: all colors of glass beverage and food containers
• Cans: aluminum cans, tin cans and steel cans

The average household produces 650 pounds of organic trash a year. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more food reaches landfills than any other single material, constituting 24% of municipal solid waste. Composting at home using food scraps from your kitchen and dry leaves can reduce your trash by at least 50%. And buying foods with little or no packaging reduces it even more. Reduce organic material in your trash more by mulch mowing or composting your yard clippings.

Learn more about composting from Virginia Beach Master Gardeners at their Fall Garden Festival on Sept. 28 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at the AREC at 1444 Diamond Springs Rd.

Want to help beautify your city? Join us at the International Coastal Cleanup event on Sept. 21 from 9 a.m.-12 p.m. at Beach Garden Park. Information at parkeventsvb.com.

Spread the word about Zero Waste Awareness Week. Encourage your friends and family to stop and think before they throw something in the trash. Check the City of Virginia Beach Waste Management Division website and social media page for more ideas toward zero waste at virginiabeach.gov/wastemgt and share them.

Maury Hill serves as chair of the Virginia Beach Clean Community Commission. Terry Ann Stevens serves as vice chair. 

Backers of the Medication Affordability and Patent Integrity Act (S2780) aim to achieve this goal by changing the requirements for patenting new drugs. But if the bill becomes law, it will do no such thing. Instead, it will hurt American innovation and derail future research into life-saving therapies.

The bill is based on an erroneous premise: that pharmaceutical companies routinely hoodwink the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), exploiting gaps in oversight to prolong patent protections and delay generic competition.

But our current patent system already includes robust safeguards to prevent deception. Legal precedent makes patents unenforceable if an applicant is found to have deliberately misrepresented or withheld information from the USPTO.

Given this deterrent, the proposed bill appears to be a solution in search of a problem, but it’s worse than redundant. It would actively threaten the development of new treatments.

S2780 would impose major new disclosure requirements on drugmakers, requiring them to provide all the information they share with the FDA to the USPTO. But these agencies serve different purposes and have different expertise. Submitting FDA-appropriate medical information to the USPTO is akin to asking a cardiologist to review an attorney’s work.

Patent examiners are skilled at assessing novelty, but unlike FDA scientists, are not equipped to parse clinical trial data. Flooding the USPTO with this information won’t lead to better patents. It will just overwhelm the agency and lead to bureaucratic paralysis.

This is particularly concerning given the USPTO’s current backlog. On average, it already takes more than two years from the time a patent application is submitted until a final decision on patentability is reached. Nearly 800,000 patent applications are currently waiting to be examined.

More alarmingly, the proposed bill risks exposing confidential proprietary information. The drug approval process necessarily involves sharing sensitive data with the FDA. But requiring broader dissemination raises the risk that competitors — both domestic and foreign — will be able to obtain valuable trade secrets. In an era of intense global competition in biotechnology, it would be short-sighted to give away America’s edge.

Supporters of the bill argue that requiring this level of disclosure will prevent drug patents on processes that should be considered obvious because they rely on already-existing knowledge. But this view misunderstands how drug development works. It can require years of research and significant investment to find a new use for an existing medicine, and such breakthroughs are far from obvious.

Moreover, new drug indications that incorporate previous knowledge can be extremely valuable to patients and the healthcare system. For instance, a drug initially developed for one condition might show surprising efficacy against an unrelated disease.

For example, raloxifene, initially developed to treat osteoporosis, was later found to reduce the risk of breast cancer. Tamoxifen, developed to treat metastatic breast cancer, was discovered to treat bipolar disorder. Discouraging patents for these new uses could leave promising avenues of research unexplored.

Moreover, by singling out pharmaceutical patents for special treatment, the proposed bill threatens innovation far beyond the drug industry. From green energy to artificial intelligence, huge swathes of our economy rely on consistent and predictable patents. Having a set of rules unique to one industry would create a patchwork system of protection. The effect would be chilling, causing companies in other sectors to lose confidence in the system.

The U.S. leads the world in pharmaceutical innovation precisely because we’ve struck a careful balance between rewarding invention and promoting competition. S2780 risks upsetting that balance, potentially driving research and development overseas to countries with more favorable intellectual property regimes.

Kristen Osenga is the Austin E. Owen Research Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law.