A7
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2021
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DOW
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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.
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30-YR T-BOND
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CRUDE OIL
$69.09 -.16
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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.
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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