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The residential housing market is hot. Home prices are way up. So are steel prices. Lumber prices reached astronomical heights recently. Construction companies are at the mercy of shipping bottlenecks. But the top concern for a lot of construction companies is labor. Just getting enough people.
Brandy McCombs runs a construction business in Missouri. To attract workers, she pays about double the U.S. median wage. But that s not enough. She also needs to spread the word: The trades can pay well!
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There s a new eco-friendly alternative to toothpaste. It s not a paste; it s a tablet. But even if toothpaste tablets are good for the planet, will people try them? Sally Herships and Darian Woods over at The Indicator did some informal market research, and here is what they found.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Children are notoriously difficult when it comes to dental hygiene.
SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: I managed to finagle an invitation to Lerit Klemmer s 12th birthday party last Saturday in Brooklyn s Prospect Park. She is the daughter of some friends of mine, and she was there with her friends, Maya, Noah, and Deora. So I had the girls try these new toothpaste tablets I had just heard about, and not surprisingly, they were pretty tough customers.
The U.S. just backed calls by South Africa and India to waive intellectual property protection for COVID-19 vaccines, but that may not be enough to ramp up vaccine production.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. AILSA CHANG, HOST: There's a new eco-friendly alternative to toothpaste. It's not
DARIAN WOODS, HOST: Harry Pickernell is the chairman of the Chehalis Tribe in Washington State, but don t let that title fool you into thinking that he s just some kind of suit.
HARRY PICKERNELL: I m not the suit and tie kind of chairman. If I have a polo shirt on, I m dressed up.
WOODS: Yeah. It s got a collar. Talking to us, he just wears a red T-shirt. He says it reminds him of his grandchildren.
PICKERNELL: It s one of my favorite shirts that says Papa Bear on it with the old guy with a couple of his grandkids.
WOODS: Harry s always been this kind of family-first guy. He still lives close to where he grew up in Oakville, which is the small town that borders and overlaps with the Chehalis reservation. And as Harry grew up, there weren t that many jobs in the area. And since the mid-1990s, the tribe s revenue has been pretty dependent on one source, the Lucky Eagle Casino. So a few years ago, Harry s tribe was looking to find a broader range of ways to make money for the tri