Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 13, 2021)
A7 B USINESS THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2021 p DOW 35,499.85 +14.88 BRIEFING Hot real estate hits cheese market The unintended con- sequences of a hot U.S. real estate market have cascaded into an unlikely place: cheese. Soaring lumber prices earlier this year brought on by fierce homebuild- ing in North America has resulted in a dearth of wooden boxes that hold 640-pound blocks of cheese, which usually end up as shredded cheeses or cubes on party plat- ters. To compensate, the industry has produced more 500-pound barrels of cheese, a vehicle for more processed variet- ies like Kraft Singles and Velveeta. The flood of massive barrels in the market has resulted in the low- est prices for processed cheese in more than a year. On the Chicago Mer- cantile Exchange, cheese barrels traded at $1.3075 a pound at the beginning of August, the lowest since May 2020. p bendbulletin.com/business NASDAQ 14,816.26 +51.13 p S&P 500 4,460.83 +13.13 p 30-YR T-BOND 2.01% +.01 q CRUDE OIL $69.09 -.16 q q GOLD $1,749.00 -1.40 SILVER $23.11 -.36 Wendy’s to open delivery-only ghost kitchens Wendy’s is getting into the delivery business. The Ohio-based fast food chain plans to open 700 ghost kitchens in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the next five years. A Wendy’s spokes- person would not say where the kitchens will be located, but on an earnings call Wednesday morning, Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor said the move is intended to build a foothold in urban areas where Wendy’s has little market share. Ghost kitchens only prepare food for delivery orders, and don’t have a storefront or a dining room. Some ghost kitch- ens use their own de- livery service, whereas others rely on third-party delivery services like DoorDash and UberEats. — Bulletin wire reports EURO $1.1731 -.0008 OREGON | HEMP INDUSTRY Officials discuss new rules with growers BY GEORGE PLAVEN Capital Press SALEM — The Oregon De- partment of Agriculture is set to unveil new rules for hemp producers that will bring the state’s hemp program into compliance with the U.S. De- partment of Agriculture. Sunny Summers, cannabis policy coordinator for the state agriculture department, said the agency will release draft rules for public comment by no later than Sept. 1. Changes won’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2022, leaving the current rules intact through this fall’s harvest. “Everything that we’re talking about now will be for the new licensing year,” Summers said during a webinar Tuesday, hosted by the Oregon Industrial Hemp Farmers Association. Summers was one of three speakers invited to discuss House Bill 3000 with growers. The bill, signed by Gov. Kate Brown on July 19, has multiple components aimed at regu- lating cannabis products and cracking down on illegal mari- COVID-19 pandemic Growing number of venues requiring vaccine passports juana operations. Part of the legislation also granted the state new authori- ties — including the ability to conduct background checks — required by the USDA to gov- ern hemp production. See Hemp / A8 GOOGLE | ‘TIME CRYSTALS’ Discovery could be leap to quantum computers BY DALVIN BROWN The Washington Post Jobless claims near pandemic low The number of Amer- icans seeking unemploy- ment benefits fell for a third straight time last week, the latest sign that employers are laying off fewer people as they struggle to fill a record number of open jobs and meet a surge in consumer demand. Thursday’s report from the Labor Depart- ment showed that job- less claims fell to 375,000 from 387,000 the previ- ous week. The number of applications has fallen steadily since topping 900,000 in early January as the economy has in- creasingly reopened in the aftermath of the pan- demic recession. Filings for unemploy- ment benefits have tradi- tionally been seen as a re- al-time gauge of the job market’s health, but the measure’s reliability has deteriorated during the pandemic. In many states, the weekly figures have been inflated by fraud and by multiple filings from unemployed Ameri- cans as they navigate bu- reaucratic hurdles to try to obtain benefits. Those complications help explain why the pace of applications re- mains comparatively high. Before the pan- demic paralyzed the economy in March 2020, unemployment appli- cations were running at about 220,000 a week. q Frank Franklin II/AP file A security employee asks customers for proof of vaccination June 24 as they enter City Winery in New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that later this month, the city will begin requiring anyone dining indoors at a restaurant, working out a gym or grabbing cocktails at a bar to show proof they’ve been inoculated. Some privacy advocates fear the trend could habituate consumers to constant tracking BY MATT O’BRIEN • The Associated Press R eady to go out on the town before summer ends? In parts of the U.S., you might have to carry your COVID-19 vaccine card or a digital copy to get into restaurants, bars, nightclubs and outdoor music festivals. After resisting the divisive concept of vaccine passports through most of the pandemic, a fast-growing number of pri- vate venues and some local officials are now requiring proof of immunization in public settings to reduce the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus — and to assuage wary cus- tomers. It’s unlikely the U.S. will adopt a na- tional mandate like the one in France, which on Monday began requiring peo- ple to show a QR code proving they have a special virus pass before they can enjoy restaurants and cafes or travel across the country. But enough venues are starting to ask for digital passes to worry some privacy “I’m a firm believer in the right for people to choose whether or not they get the vaccine. But it’s my business and I have to make decisions based on what will protect my staff, business and customers.” — Tami Montgomery, owner of Dru’s Bar in Memphis, Tennessee, which started asking for paper vaccine cards along with photo identification Thursday. advocates, who fear the trend could habit- uate consumers to constant tracking. Who’s asking for vaccine passports? New York City set the tone last week when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city will soon require proof of COVID-19 vaccination for anyone who wants to dine indoors at a restaurant, see a performance or go to the gym. But a growing number of private ven- ues, from Broadway theaters to music clubs in Minneapolis and Milwaukee, have established their own similar rules for patrons. See Passports / A8 OREGON | FARMING Scorching heat challenges pear growers BY GEORGE PLAVEN Capital Press HOOD RIVER — Just as another scorching heat wave arrived in Oregon, pear harvest was getting underway in the Columbia Gorge. Crews began picking Bart- lett pears in the early morning hours Wednesday at Tamura Orchards, about 10 miles south of Hood River. By 11 a.m., the temperature had already risen to 90 degrees, bringing the day to an early halt. Lesley Tamura, a fourth-gen- eration grower and vice pres- ident of the family farm, said they do not send workers to pick fruit when the thermom- eter hits 90 — let alone tri- ple digits, which was forecast through the weekend. “We don’t want to put them in any danger,” she said. On the other hand, Tamura said time is of the essence. Ta- mura Orchards grows fresh pears for Diamond Fruit Growers, a local co-op and packing house, which gives its members seven days to finish picking Bartlett pears. See Pears / A8 Tamura Orchards via Capital Press Pears are harvested at Tamura Orchards near Hood River. Time crystals sound like majestic objects from science fiction movies that unlock passageways to alternate uni- verses. In the Marvel universe, “time stones” gives wielders control over the past, present, and future. While that remains a fantasy, scientists have successfully cre- ated micro-scale time crystals for years — not for powering intergalactic spaceships, but for energizing ultrapowerful com- puters. “Time crystals are like a rest stop on the road to building a quantum computer,” said Nor- man Yao, a molecular physicist at the University of California, Berkley. It’s an area of interest for Google, which, along with physicists at Stanford and Princeton universities, claim to have developed a “scalable ap- proach” to time crystal creation using the company’s Sycamore quantum computer. In a paper published last month on the research-sharing platform Arxviv.org, a team of over 100 scientists describe how they set up an array of 20 quantum particles, or qubits, to serve as a time crystal. During experiments, they applied al- gorithms that spun the qubits upward and downward, gen- erating a controllable reaction that could be sustained “for in- finitely long times,” according to the paper. Time crystals are scientific oddities made of atoms ar- ranged in a repeating pattern in space. This design enables them to shapeshift over time without losing energy or over- heating. Since time crystals continuously evolve and don’t seem to require much energy input, they may be useful for quantum computers, which rely on extremely fragile qubits that are prone to decay. Quantum computing is weighed down by hard-to-con- trol qubits, which are error prone and often die. Time crys- tals might introduce a better method for sustaining quantum computing, according to Yao, who published a blueprint for making time crystals in 2017. “Time crystals are a weighted benchmark, showing that your system has the requi- site level of control,” Yao said. The scientists involved in the Google’s research say they can’t discuss their findings as they undergo peer review. However, the work tackles an area where physicists have long hoped for a breakthrough. “The consequence is amaz- ing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” Roderich Moessner, a co-author on the Google paper, told Quanta Magazine. See Crystals / A8
