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Sports March 19, 2019

Mike Trout To Finalize $430 Million Contract With Los Angeles Angels

Mike Trout and the Los Angeles Angels are finalizing a $430 million contract, the largest in professional sports history. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Jonah Keri of The Athletic.



MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

To potential news now of the biggest contract in baseball history. Now, if you’re having a flashback moment, that might be because not even three weeks ago, we reported that star outfielder Bryce Harper was signing a $330 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies. Alas, Bryce Harper’s record deal may not stand long because today we learned that LA Angels star Mike Trout is finalizing a deal to stay with that team for another 12 years and to earn $430 million over that time. To talk about what may become the latest largest contract in baseball history, we are joined by Jonah Keri of the website The Athletic. Welcome.

JONAH KERI: Thank you for having me.

KELLY: What makes Mike Trout worth $430 million?

KERI: Well, the short version is if you’re a baseball historian, you’re probably familiar with a gentleman named Willie Mays. Willie Mays is one of the two or three greatest players of all time, and Mike Trout is essentially Willie Mays. When you look at their statistics, for the first seven full years of their careers, pretty much identical – offensively, defensively, base running. That’s how great he is. And Trout is also quite young relatively speaking to be so accomplished. He’s just in his late 20s right now, should have many more years of productivity. So you’re talking about the greatest player of his era. Right now, he’s got the same numbers as one of the greatest players of all time. And he’s young, so there’s room to project much more. That’s why he’s making the money that he’s going to make.

KELLY: Yeah. I was reading Sports Illustrated had a profile of him last year, and they called him the best individual asset baseball has – for years, its undisputed best player; sounds like you would agree.

KERI: No doubt. He’s actually won several MVP awards, but you could argue that he should have been the most valuable player six of the seven years that he’s played in the league. That is really, really hard to do.

KELLY: However, I’ll push back at you and ask this – can any player be worth that much, particularly one who, by the end of this 12-year contract, is going to be pushing 40?

KERI: Well, this is where people might get angry at me, but I would argue that Mike Trout is underpaid at $430 million.

KELLY: OK. Make the case.

KERI: Well, there you go. Professional athletics, listen; it’s not the same as fighting fires or teaching school, certainly, but if you look at supply and demand, how many people on Earth can do what Mike Trout can do? One. Mike Trout is the only guy.

KELLY: Let me channel my inner skeptic here, though, because no matter how great you are, you can’t win the World Series by yourself. Does paying so much money to one player maybe take away from possibility to sign other valuable players to fill out the roster?

KERI: It gives you an idea of the immense cash cow that is baseball. So if a team says, woe is us, we can’t spend money, we have an expensive outfielder – that is hooey and applesauce. It ain’t true. You can go out and get as many pitchers as you want, as many second baseman as you want. You could fill your roster with all kinds of superstar players to complement the Trout and still be left with a profit.

KELLY: Big picture – what is going on in baseball with, you know, the all-time record deal that Bryce Harper just signed getting overtaken within just weeks?

KERI: Yeah. It’s kind of a coincidence. Harper and Trout came into the major leagues at roughly the same time, along with Manny Machado, by the way, who also signed a tremendously large contract this offseason. And so all these guys happen…

KELLY: A mere $300 million, as I remember.

KERI: Exactly. So when you’ve got players coming up on free agency, that’s when they get paid. It’s a little bit different than other sports where if you are in the NFL or the NBA, especially the NFL, you get paid a lot of money right off. In baseball, your salary is kind of suppressed for the first six years of your career. In some ways, you’re even more underpaid to that point. So it’s only when you get to cash in on free agency or near free agency that the big contracts come in. This year, you had Harper and Machado both coming out and Trout being two years away from free agency being the talk of baseball. Everybody said here’s Harper. What’s going to happen with Trout? We know what happened with Mike Trout. He’s $430 million richer.

KELLY: Thank you, Jonah.

KERI: Thank you.

KELLY: Jonah Keri writes about baseball for the website The Athletic.

(SOUNDBITE OF J RICK’S “SHORT”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health March 19, 2019

'Mother Jones' Investigation Takes A Look At The World Of Drug Treatment Programs

NPR’s Ailsa Chang talks with Mother Jones reporter Julia Lurie about the loosely regulated rehab industry, and how it shuffles people in and out of treatment programs and cashes in on insurance money.



AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Naturally a parent whose child is addicted to opioids would want them in rehab and would want their insurance to cover them for as long as it takes. But for Becki Sarnicky’s son Nick, what seemed like the best way to help him wasn’t.

BECKI SARNICKY: He went through more rehabs than I can count. And I could tell something wasn’t right.

CHANG: It turns out a so-called patient broker was making money off her son, shopping him to different rehab centers, putting him up in hotels in between, supplying him with drugs. Nick was in four rehabs in five weeks, racking up more than $100,000 in insurance charges in that time.

SARNICKY: At one point, I called my insurance. And I asked them to stop paying for the rehab because it wasn’t helping him. It was – he was getting worse every time he went away.

CHANG: Nick died of an overdose in 2017. He was 23. Becki Sarnicky wants more people to know this is happening, which is why she told her story to reporter Julia Lurie for the Mother Jones podcast and magazine. For nine months, Lurie investigated the loosely regulated, lucrative world of addiction treatment.

Welcome.

JULIA LURIE: Thank you so much.

CHANG: So unfortunately, you found in your reporting that Nick’s story is not at all unusual. Can you first explain how these patient brokers work? How do they find and make money off addicts?

LURIE: Sure, absolutely. So there’s this whole sort of cottage industry that’s developed in the murkier parts of the rehab world, where brokers will find people in Facebook support groups, at meetings like Narcotics Anonymous meetings or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Sometimes, they’ll just find people on the streets in, say, Southern California or Palm Beach. And they’ll offer perks – say, free rent at a sober home or a few nights at a hotel between rehabs, sometimes even cash.

CHANG: And then at the back end, the broker gets a cut of the insurance money that was paid to the rehab center. That’s how they make money.

LURIE: Yes, exactly. So it’s very easy for patients to then fall into this cycle where they go to rehab for a few days or weeks, you know, as long as insurance will cover it. The rehab collects insurance money. The broker will get a cut of that. The patient will leave and relapse, sometimes with drugs or money that the broker has given them. And then the patient goes back to rehab. And that just happens over and over and over again without the patient ever really getting better.

CHANG: I’m sure there are a lot of people thinking, this has to be illegal, right?

LURIE: Yes. And in fact, it is illegal. Just late last year, Congress passed legislation that prohibits people, namely rehabs or patient brokers, from giving or receiving perks for patients. That said, it’s relatively new legislation. And also, it’s a federal law, so it’s up to federal authorities to really enforce it.

CHANG: Right.

LURIE: So there’s sort of a slow and steady move towards regulating this field and for enforcing those regulations. But in the meantime, you have a lot of patient brokering going on.

CHANG: Not every rehab center, obviously, participates in these kinds of practices. But for those that do, I was amazed reading in your story how little oversight there has been over this industry. I mean, you mentioned California, for example. A counselor just needs to complete nine hours of orientation, and then they’re employable as a rehab counselor.

LURIE: Right, exactly. You know, often, drug policy experts will point out that the basic rules of medicine don’t really seem to apply to addiction treatment. You know, many rehabs don’t employ a single licensed doctor.

CHANG: That’s amazing.

LURIE: Yeah, right. Imagine going into any clinic or hospital and them saying, you know, we don’t have any doctors or nurses on staff here.

CHANG: Right. I mean, how did it even get like that in the first place? Why don’t the rules of medicine apply to addiction treatment?

LURIE: Until very recently, addiction was understood as a moral failing. So it was something that, you know, you did wrong. And you should maybe go to prison or maybe go to a beachy place off the grid, where you can get, quote, unquote, “clean” and then return to your normal life. It’s only very recently that we’ve come to appreciate that addiction is a disease. And, you know, I think that’s happened for a lot of reasons. Our understanding of the brain is a lot better, certainly. The face of addiction has changed as well. You know, the opioid epidemic is…

CHANG: Wider.

LURIE: …A far wider…

CHANG: Yeah.

LURIE: …Drug problem than previous drug epidemics in this country. So, you know, now we’re in this position where we have a historic drug epidemic, and we have this soaring demand for evidence-based treatment. But addiction is really siloed outside of the medical world.

CHANG: So what do you see could be the solution? How do you revamp the industry when it comes to the opioid epidemic?

LURIE: Well, that is a – that’s, like, the million-dollar question (laughter). I think that it’s going to take a lot of things happening simultaneously. I do think that you need higher standards for rehabs. I do think that if you’re going to be a rehab, you should probably have to have a licensed doctor on staff. You should probably have higher regulatory requirements than, like, nail technicians or barbershops, which is not the case currently in a lot of places.

One pretty critical thing that is needed right now is a place where users and their family members and loved ones can go and check out a given rehab. What are the complaints that have been filed against this place? What kind of staff does it have? Some sort of database like that – that would go a very, very long way.

CHANG: Julia Lurie is a reporter for Mother Jones. Her piece on the rehab industry is in the current issue of the magazine. Thank you very much for joining us.

LURIE: Thank you for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF UOU’S “HANAUTA”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Entertainment March 19, 2019

Alt.Latino's SXSW 2019 Wrap-Up

The Cuban band Cimafunk performs onstage for NPR’s Alt.Latino showcase during SXSW 2019.

Hutton Supancic/Getty Images for SXSW


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Hutton Supancic/Getty Images for SXSW

I struggled to balance the conflicting emotions of enjoying the musical celebration that is the annual SXSW Festival with the pain of the devastating loss of life in Friday’s terrorist attack in New Zealand. It was an emotional push and pull that I kept completely to myself.

But as I reflected back on the week of interviews and performances I was reminded that many of the musicians I cover on this beat often include messages in their music about respect and dignity for people who are different. They lend their musical gifts to movements that fight for social justice in their home countries. And as I reported on NPR’s All Things Considered, sometimes they put themselves in danger by refusing to be silenced.

It was a reminder that what happens in Austin every year can be much more than a bunch of bands looking for their next big break. It’s really a celebration of the freedom of expression. For some bands, the members are indeed looking for their next big break so they can carry their messages of social justice and inclusion even further.

I left Austin grieving but also comforted by the fact that music can indeed challenge and change the world we live in. I’m thankful that it’s my job to help spread that healing energy. Join AltLatino contributors Marisa Arbona- Ruiz and Catalina Maria Johnson and I this week as we retrace which bands gave us joy and also inspired us.

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Business March 18, 2019

The Cost Of Student Debt

student debt

Getting a higher education degree — whether it’s an Associate’s, a Bachelor’s, or something else — increases your earning potential over your life. But going to school is expensive, and Americans have more than $1.5 trillion worth of outstanding student debt. That debt isn’t exclusively held by the students: people over 60 are the fastest-growing segment of student loan borrowers, as parents and grandparents are increasingly taking out loans to help their kids and grandkids go to college.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP and author of “The Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money,” joins to talk student debt and look at how parents and grandparents can talk to their kids about college without sacrificing their own financial futures.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts and NPR One.

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Health March 18, 2019

Why The Promise Of Electronic Health Records Has Gone Unfulfilled

The reality of electronic medical records has yet to live up to the promise.

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A decade ago, the U.S. government claimed that ditching paper medical charts for electronic records would make health care better, safer and cheaper.

Ten years and $36 billion later, the digital revolution has gone awry, an investigation by Kaiser Health News and Fortune magazine has found.

Veteran reporters Fred Schulte of KHN and Erika Fry of Fortune spent months digging into what has happened as a result. (You can read the cover story here.)

Here are five takeaways from the investigation.

Patient harm: Electronic health records have created a host of risks to patient safety. Alarming reports of deaths, serious injuries and near misses — thousands of them — tied to software glitches, user errors or other system flaws have piled up for years in government and private repositories. Yet no central database exists to compile and study these incidents to improve safety.

Signs of fraud: Federal officials say the software can be misused to overcharge, a practice known as “upcoding.” And some doctors and health systems are alleged to have overstated their use of the new technology, a potentially enormous fraud against Medicare and Medicaid likely to take years to unravel. Two software-makers have paid a total of more than $200 million to settle fraud allegations.

Gaps in interoperability: Proponents of electronic health records expected a seamless system so patients could share computerized medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the United States. That has yet to materialize, largely because officials allowed hundreds of competing firms to sell medical-records software unable to exchange information among one another.

Doctor burnout: Many doctors say they spend half their day or more clicking pull-down menus and typing rather than interacting with patients. An emergency room doctor can be saddled with making up to 4,000 mouse clicks per shift. This has fueled concerns about doctor burnout, which a January report by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Massachusetts Medical Society and two other organizations called a “public health crisis.”

Web of secrets: Entrenched policies continue to keep software failures out of public view. Vendors of electronic health records have imposed contractual “gag clauses” that discourage buyers from speaking out about safety issues and disastrous software installations — and some hospitals fight to withhold records from injured patients or their families.

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service supported by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Entertainment March 18, 2019

Popping In For a Pint And Tune At The Cobblestone In Dublin

Dublin’s Cobblestone Bar

Kimberly Junod/WXPN


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Ask anyone in Dublin to recommend a pub with traditional Irish music, and you’re likely to hear about The Cobblestone. For our last World Cafe dispatch from Ireland, we pop into the cozy spot in Smithfield and can immediately see why this place is beloved by locals, tourists and musicians from far and wide. It’s warm and welcoming with a big, long bar filled with people leaning over each other and laughing and clinking glasses. And at the front of the room there are about a dozen musicians packed into this little nook — it’s a jigsaw puzzle of fiddles and guitars and pints resting precariously between elbows on tables.

Tom Mulligan, who has owned the pub for 30 years, says,”Conversation is the greatest thing that was ever invented.” Mulligan hopes people talk to each other as much as they listen to the music at The Cobblestone. He also tells the story of that time Steve Martin popped by to play some banjo and left on his private jet. Come along for a pint, in the player.

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Sports March 18, 2019

Minnesota High School Basketball Game Has A Fantastic Finish

After a last-second basket, Albany fans stormed the court. The referees conferred and it was determined the basket didn’t count, and Albany had lost. That’s when Melrose fans stormed the court.



STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning. I’m Steve Inskeep with congratulations to two Minnesota high school basketball teams because fans of both thought they’d won the same game. Albany made a last-second basket to seemingly win. Its students stormed the floor. Then referees conferred. The last-second shot was actually a just-after-the-last-second shot, a buzzer beater that did not beat the buzzer. Albany had actually lost. So their fans retreated. And fans for the other team, Melrose, stormed the court instead. It’s MORNING EDITION.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business March 17, 2019

Why Are So Many Farmers Markets Failing? Because The Market Is Saturated

Nationwide, there are too few farmers to populate market stalls and too few customers filling their canvas bags with fresh produce at each market.

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When the Nipomo Certified Farmers’ Market started in 2005, shoppers were eager to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as pastured meats and eggs, directly from farmers in central California.

But the market was small — an average of 16 vendors set up tables every Sunday — making it harder for farmers to sell enough produce to make attending worthwhile.

“The market in Santa Maria is 7 miles in one direction [from Nipomo], and the market in Arroyo Grande is 7 miles in the other direction. Both are bigger markets, so shoppers often went to those markets instead,” explains market manager and farmer Glenn Johnson.

The decision to host the market on Sundays also proved detrimental. Many of the farmers participated in six or more additional markets each week and wanted Sundays to rest, says Johnson.

In 2018, with attendance down and just five vendors signed on to sell produce, organizers of the Nipomo Certified Farmers’ Market decided to shut down the event at the end of last season.

Nationwide, the number of farmers markets increased from 2,000 in 1994 to more than 8,600 in 2019, which led to a major problem: There are too few farmers to populate the market stalls and too few customers filling their canvas bags with fresh produce at each market. Reports of farmers markets closing have affected communities from Norco, Calif., to Reno, Nev., to Allouez, Wis.

Markets in big cities are hurting too. The Copley Square Farmers Market in Boston reported a 50 percent drop in attendance in 2017. In Oregon, where 62 new markets opened but 32 closed, the researchers of one multiyear study concluded, “The increasing popularity of the markets is in direct contrast with their surprisingly high failure rate.”

Diane Eggert, executive director of the Farmers Market Federation of NY, received numerous reports of closings; she believes the problem is one of pure mathematics.

“There are way too many markets,” she says. “The markets have started cannibalizing both customers and farmers from other markets to keep going.”

Eggert also points to myriad other options that consumers have for accessing fresh foods, including community-supported agriculture and home delivery options from companies such as Amazon, Instacart or Blue Apron that might be more convenient than shopping at a Saturday morning market.

The farmers market in downtown Manteno, Ill., couldn’t compete with larger markets, according to Sarah Marion, president and CEO of the Manteno Chamber of Commerce.

Organizers kept the market going for more than a decade. In 2014, when the number of farmers and customers began to decline, the Chamber of Commerce changed the market’s location and switched from Thursday to Tuesday evenings in hopes of reviving the market. Its efforts failed, and Manteno hosted its last market in the summer of 2018.

“At the end, we had two farm vendors, and the customers would tell us, ‘There are only two farm vendors, so we stopped coming,’ ” Marion recalls.

Like other market managers, Marion cites fierce competition among local farmers markets.

Just 10 miles south of Manteno, the Kankakee Farmers’ Market is still going strong. Peggy Mayer, executive director of the Kankakee Development Corporation, believes the success is due in part to the longevity of the market.

“Some farmers aren’t willing to take a chance on a new market,” Mayer says. “Our market has been around for 25 years; we have a track record in the community. This is a market where [farmers] know they’re going to sell out.”

The market, which is held on Saturday mornings from May through October, attracts up to 50 vendors each week. Many of the farmers have tried participating in other markets, but most aren’t producing enough food to serve multiple locations, according to Mayer.

Marion believes that customers are drawn to bigger markets for more variety and one-stop shopping (and farmers benefit from selling all of their harvest through one large market). Still, smaller markets continue popping up, often in close proximity to other smaller markets.

Eggert says that communities, often hyperfocused on improving access to fresh, locally grown foods and caught up in the excitement of a new neighborhood amenity, fail to think through the logistics: There are too few farmers and too few customers to make multiple markets viable. Rather than packing up their tents, smaller struggling markets could combine forces with each other to create a single, stronger farmers market.

Before setting up farmers markets in every available park, public square and church parking lot, Eggert encourages would-be organizers to consider if the demand for fresh foods is being met through existing markets and whether it makes sense to partner with a neighboring community to establish a market.

“Farmers markets are a key source of local food, but we’d like to see communities working together,” says Eggert. “If five communities partnered on one market instead of starting five different markets, that one market would be a more exciting venue for customers and a more profitable market for farmers. We don’t need more markets — we need stronger and more viable markets.”

Jodi Helmer is a North Carolina journalist and beekeeper who frequently writes about food and farming.

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Sports March 16, 2019

Peter Kaiser Takes First In Iditarod — Marking A Win For Alaskan Natives

Peter Kaiser and his team of dogs take off at the start of the Iditarod race.

Courtesy of John Wallace


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Courtesy of John Wallace

Snow whipped past Peter Kaiser and his eight-dog team as they passed under the famous Burled Arch at the end of the grueling, 1,000-mile Iditarod sled dog race, cinching a first place win.

After racing for miles in inky darkness across the Alaska wildnerness, Kaiser was greeted in Nome, Alaska by bright lights, cameras, and cheering fans chanting “Way to go Pete!”

It was the 31-year-old’s tenth time competing in the Iditarod, but his first time winning the championship — making him the first musher of Yup’ik descent to ever win the race.

Just after his finish at 3:39 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Kaiser raised both arms in a double-fist pump celebration.

Peter Kaiser celebrates his first-place victory at the finish line of the Iditarod race.

Courtesy of John Wallace


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Courtesy of John Wallace

“Honestly, I’ve heard this from many different people that have won, but it hasn’t sunk in,” he told NPR’s Melissa Block. “Like, you actually have to think about it pretty hard and you’re like, ‘oh man, I actually won this.'”

Kaiser managed to edge out the defending champion, Joar Leifseth Ulsom, by 12 minutes. His winning time was nine days, 12 hours, 39 minutes and six seconds.

“We just got some trail that the team really likes and we didn’t see much of that this race,” Kaiser told Alaska Public Media. “My team really likes hard, fast trails where they can go fast, and that was probably the best type of trail for that kind of race, so when they got on that they really wanted to roar.”

His win is a point of pride for his hometown of Bethel, Alaska which is situated in the Yukon Delta. The delta is where the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers empty into the Bering Sea on the western end of the state — and is the traditional land of Yup’ik people.

“It’s about time somebody wins from Kuskokwim,” Bethel resident Nelson Alexie told KYUK’s Anna Rose MacArthur.

Over the course of the race, Kaiser’s supporters — many of whom were from the same area as him — cheered him on and followed his race through his website and Facebook page. One native, Evon Waska, spoke in the Yup’ik language about the significance of the win for Alaskan natives.

“We Yup’ik people, are very proud,” he told KYUK.

Unlike other competitors, who hail from prominent mushing families, Kaiser doesn’t come from a dynasty of champion mushers.

“We kind of have our own little mushing story but it’s not quite as mainstream as some of the others,” Kaiser said.

Though Kaiser is Alaskan on his mother’s side, it was his father, Ron Kaiser, originally from Kansas, who introduced him to mushing. His father had a dog team and started mushing in the late 70s — but never competed at a high level.

At first, Kaiser mushed for fun, but after graduating high school and trying out college, he decided he wanted to make a career out of racing. In the winters, he trains and races, and in the summer he works seasonal jobs. He owns a total of 40 dogs at his kennel, which require attention, care and training all year round.

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Of Kaiser’s eight-dog team — Morrow, Lucy, Frieda, Sky, Zuma, Pronto, Charlie and Arbor — Morrow and Lucy were his two lead dogs that pushed the team across the finish. Kaiser said he thinks the dogs know they accomplished something special.

“They have an idea of when teams are in front of them on the trail or not,” he said. “They’re real spunky right now and probably ready to go for another run, but they’re going to get some good time off.”

In the past, his best finishes had been a fifth place spot in the 2018, 2016 and 2012 races. His prize for winning this year’s race includes $50,000 and a new truck. He is also planning to take some time to enjoy himself.

Some dogs on Peter Kaiser’s sled team howl before the start of the Iditarod race.

Courtesy of John Wallace


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Courtesy of John Wallace

His secret for success this year? He’s not quite sure — he said there are a variety of factors that may have helped him triumph.

“I can’t put my finger on one thing in particular, but I guess we have a whole year to kind of figure out what we did right.”

Kaiser regularly pays attention to the small details that contribute to a win. He jots down extremely precise details about his dogs and various races in many notebooks that he regularly studies to enhance his performance.

One big factor is the snow itself. The record for the fastest winning time in the Iditarod is a time of eight days, three hours, 40 minutes and 13 seconds by Mitch Seavey in 2o17. By comparison, this year’s race was a little slow — partially due to how the warmer weather over the past two years has impacted the snow.

“Anytime you get fresh snow and drifting snow and warmer temperatures, you’re going to have a slower race,” Kaiser explained. “So the pace of the race is really more dictated by trail conditions and weather than dog teams.”

Peter Kaiser and his team of dogs crossed the finish line just past 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

Courtesy of John Wallace


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Courtesy of John Wallace

It’s too soon to tell whether Kaiser is kicking off an Iditarod dynasty for his six-year old son and 1-year-old daughter.

But, his son Ari took to the dogs from an early age — making puppy-like howling sounds — and likes to mush with the family’s retired racing dogs. Since his son only weighs about 45 pounds, his sled team is a lot smaller than Kaiser’s — it’s comprised of one dog, instead of eight.

About a week before Kaiser left to race the Iditarod, his son went on a dog sledding exursion of his own — bringing his baby sister, Aylee, along for the ride.

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Business March 16, 2019

With Planes Grounded, Boeing Considers Its Next Steps

The FAA has ordered airlines to stop flying certain Boeing models after two crashes. Boeing is still making the planes but they’re not going to customers and a bottleneck may be brewing.



MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Boeing’s 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes were grounded this week. The company continues to manufacture them, but the planes are not going to airlines. And Boeing remains in limbo as the company figures out its next steps. NPR’s Daniella Cheslow reports.

DANIELLA CHESLOW, BYLINE: Boeing gets nearly a third of its sales from the 737 Max. But now, those planes are grounded, and it’s threatening Boeing’s financial future. Jon Ostrower is a veteran aviation reporter and editor of the site The Air Current.

JON OSTROWER: This is Boeing’s cash cow. The enterprise cannot survive without the 737. It needs this program to be successful.

CHESLOW: The 737 Max is the fastest-selling plane in Boeing’s history. It’s a fuel-efficient, single-aisle plane that competes directly with a similar model made by Europe’s Airbus. And Boeing has more than 5,000 orders of them. Boeing will continue to make the planes at a rate of 52 a month out of a plant in Renton, Wash. But the manufacturer is pausing delivery of the planes to airlines. It will have to find a place to store these planes and deal with a financial hit. Ostrower says Boeing has some insulation. Airlines usually pay about 40 percent of the cost of the plane upfront before delivery.

OSTROWER: That goes to pay for parts, labor, all through the supply chain everything Boeing buys to put, you know, the quarter-million parts in a 737 together.

CHESLOW: That buys Boeing some breathing room, and it keeps business flowing to all the companies making its components. But it can’t go on forever.

OSTROWER: There’s a time limit on that. How long can that be sustainable without essentially that remaining 60 percent?

CHESLOW: Aerospace analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu at Jefferies investment bank says Boeing’s fix will likely include additional pilot training and a software update. She told CNBC it will cause a two-month delay at $500 million a month.

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SHEILA KAHYAOGLU: So a billion dollars in total would be pushed out to next year. It might be hard to make up.

CHESLOW: For perspective, last year Boeing’s revenue topped $100 billion. It can absorb a fair amount of losses, but there are other costs. Airlines can demand reimbursement for grounded planes. Families of victims will likely sue Boeing. Erik Bernstein, a crisis management expert, says Boeing has fumbled this moment. After two crashes in five months, he says the company should have taken the initiative to ground its own planes.

ERIK BERNSTEIN: Boeing instead said it’s not an issue, it’s not an issue. And then that’s been contradicted immediately by governments around the world who say, oh, yes it is.

CHESLOW: Boeing didn’t reply to an NPR request for comment about that. In the U.S. government, lawmakers are taking a closer look at the nation’s top exporter. The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on aviation safety. Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio chairs the House Transportation Committee. He says he will conduct a, quote, “rigorous investigation” into how the Federal Aviation Administration decided to certify the plane to fly. Daniella Cheslow, NPR News, Washington.

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