What a terrible headline!
I suggest: “In a city enhanced with crows, idiots try to chase them away with lasers.”
Source: A California City Is Overrun by Crows. Could a Laser Be the Answer? – The New York Times
Category: Policy
2021-12-19 06:44
Just like cell phones trained us to accept downtime that wireline customers the second half of last century would have considered outrageous, smart grids will too—as I said in 2017: What cell phones teach us about the power grid.
“… when the grid is unavailable, appliances and management software will collude to conserve electricity while trying to keep users comfortable and preserve food in the fridge or the charge on a laptop.”
Source: https://wolfliving.tumblr.com/post/670902474742317056/off-the-grid-iot
2021-12-11 08:36
“The safety and well-being of our employees and partners is our top priority right now,” Richard Rocha, an Amazon spokesman…
I’m curious to know: Was their safety and well-being was the top priority a few hours earlier, when the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch?
Here are a few related questions:
- Does Amazon have a plan for moving everyone in the building to shelter if a tornado warning is issued?
- Have they tested that plan?
- How long does it take to move people from the most distant parts of the building to shelter?
- Does someone have the job of monitoring for a tornado warning?
Source: Deaths Confirmed After Tornado Hits Amazon Warehouse in Illinois – The New York Times
2021-09-30 05:37
In the latest issue of the agricultural-economics journal “Duh!”
Climate change is a known long-term risk to crops like coffee, chocolate and wine grapes that require specific conditions to thrive.
Source: Coffee bean price spike just a taste of what’s to come with climate change | Coffee | The Guardian
2021-08-16 15:35
Bemused by people surprised re Afghanistan. This outcome widely forecast; anybody with two clues to rub together saw it coming 20 years ago. Last chance for anything different: when Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq rather than spend money and attention in Afghanistan.
2021-06-30 06:14
Edward Snowden came up with a great title for his blog: “Continuing Ed.” It follows on very nicely from his book “Permanent Record.”
“What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
Source: Conspiracy: Theory and Practice – Continuing Ed — with Edward Snowden
2021-06-22 06:57
Gee, a few banks are being every so slightly less cruel to poor people!
An increasing number of banks are introducing services including grace periods and small short-term loans that provide less-punitive alternatives
Source: Banks Slowly Offer Alternatives to Overdraft Fees, a Bane of Struggling Spenders
2021-05-31 06:44
I wish the NYT would quit referring to voter-suppression measures as “strict” voting laws.
2021-02-19 15:01
“There are windmills in northern Canada. In Norway. At the Antarctic research stations. If Texas’s windmills shut down during the storm, it’s not because we don’t know how to make cold-weather windmills – it’s because allowing windmills to fail in cold weather was profitable.” — Cory Doctorow
2021-02-03 11:05
It is perpetually tempting to imagine letting the red states (whose voters imagine that they are getting the short end of the stick, when in fact they are vastly subsidized) go their own way. Tempting, but both impossible and harmful.
Much better, as cogently explained here by @interfluidity, is to build things up in the red states, so that their citizens perceive that they have an economic and political stake in the United States.
“The only way to mitigate this tendency towards corrosive crisis is to ensure that differences of interest between larger and smaller states are generally modest.”