Latest Posts by dotmpotter - Page 8
Power-pylons that look like looming giants
Choi + Shine, an architecture firm, has proposed modifying Iceland’s existing power-transmission pylons to turn them into looming giants whose arms are poised to reflect their positions – pylons ascending a hill will be posed as though they were scaling its slopes.
The designers claim that it can be made cost-effective through clever engineering, and that the resulting aesthetic experience will be monumental. I agree with the latter statement and am unqualified to assess the former, though Iceland has a weird and cool relationship with power, as it is ia carbon-neutral country whose electricity comes from geothermal sources.
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I like cancelled plans. And empty bookstores. I like rainy days and thunderstorms. And quiet coffee shops. I like messy beds and over-worn pajamas. Most of all, I like the small joys that a simple life brings.
Unknown (via wordsnquotes)
Car accidents aren't accidents
The use of the term “accident” gives cops and courts the cover to excuse murder. In a brutal editorial, Hsi-Pei Liao talks about his daughter, who was killed by a driver when she was three. The driver got a ticket for failure to yeild and failure to use due care, and those tickets were eventually thrown out by a DMV judge who considered the case for 47 seconds.
I was nearly killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver when I was 21, who was caught and then given a $1,000 fine and a six month license suspension (when he hit me, he was already driving without a license, having had his license pulled for a previous DUI). The Ontario prosecutor didn’t give me notice of the hearing and I wasn’t allowed to testify or give a victim impact statement.
Big city cops, especially the NYPD and SFPD, are notorious for excusing people who kill with their cars, especially when the victims are cyclists. An activist group called Families for Safe Streets is campaigning to replace the term “accident” – which implies that the incident was a kind of unpredictable, unavoidable effect of the universe’s uncooperative inanimate objects – with “crash.”
In New York City, they campaigned for the Right of Way Law, which came into effect in June 2014, which allows “police to bring a misdemeanor charge if a driver kills or seriously injures someone who has the right of way in a crosswalk or a bike lane.” It’s pretty amazing that a new law was needed for this – but even more amazing was the city bus drivers’ campaign against the law, because they didn’t want to “criminalize accidents.”
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When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.
(via ociz)
Walmart heirs' net worth exceeds that of population of a city the size of Phoenix #1yrago
It’s grown 6,700% since 1983, to $144.7B in 2013 – greater than the net worth of 1,782,020 average Americans.
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Facebook UK made £105M in 2014, paid £35M in bonuses, and will pay £4,327 in tax
Which is a notable improvement on its tax bill for 2013, which was £0 on earnings of £223m.
The company says it made an accounting loss of £28.5m in the UK for 2014. Facebook says that it “compliant with UK tax law” and adds that its employees usually choose to pay tax on their income rather than availing themselves of the kinds of tax dodges Facebook itself uses. Meanwhile, UK-based companies pay tax, as do their employees, meaning they have less income from which to return dividends to their investors, making UK-based business less profitable and less attractive.
The UK Tory chancellor, George Osborne, has announced swingeing cuts to tax credits for the UK’s working poor, who are at record levels, with many children living in food poverty, because the country allegedly can’t afford to top up the accounts of working people who are literally starving.
George Osborne has repeatedly cut corporate tax rates.
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The UK has become the first country in the world to be placed under investigation by the United Nations for violating the human rights of people with disabilities amid fears that thousands may have died as a consequence of controversial welfare reforms and austerity-driven cuts to benefits and care budgets.
UN inspectors are expected to arrive in the country within days to begin collecting evidence to determine whether the British government has committed “systematic and grave violations” of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Robot Guides Soybean Plant To Light
by Karin Heineman, Inside Science
What happens when you combine a soybean plant with a robot?
You get a soybot!
Developed by researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, they’re on-the-go micro gardens that help indoor plants seek out light.
“They’re equipped with two sensors that measure light conditions, they move continually in the direction of the brighter light,” said Shannon McMullen, a sociologist at Purdue. Learn more and see a video below.
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FBI chief: It’s ‘unacceptable’ that Guardian has better data on police violence | See full article
The head of the FBI has said it is “ridiculous [and] embarrassing” that the federal government has no better information on police shootings than databases compiled by the Guardian US and the Washington Post.
“It is unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the UK are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between [US] police and civilians,” said James Comey, the FBI director.
To see our updated count of police killings in the United States in 2015, visit the Counted database. You can also follow the project on Facebook and Twitter.
Our count as of this afternoon:
This is on Bloomberg, this is not about the people who do things out of an ideal for the greater good but out of self interest. Once those fuckers are captured, as they are the ones calling the shots, progress can happen fast. Potentially!
“We are not facing a future without work. We are facing a future without jobs.“
READ MORE: Jobs, Work, and Universal Basic Income
Stephen Hawking: robots could give us all material abundance, unless rich people hoard all the wealth
In a Reddit AMA, the eminent physicist warns that while increasing automation could give us a world of “luxurious leisure,” that “most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”
Paging Thomas Piketty, your ride is here.
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Wyoming's Ag-Gag law makes it a crime to gather evidence of crime
With this year’s “ag-gag” law, Wyoming has made it a crime to gather evidence of agricultural wrongdoing, from illegal pollution to animal cruelty, even from public land – and also prohibits regulators from acting on information gathered in violation of the law.
Many public interest groups are challenging the law. A similar – but less Draconian – law in Idaho was struck down this year as unconstitutional.
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Setting up any business is a challenge but in Ethiopia those range from daily operating headaches such as on-off internet to even more fundamental business challenges
“The internet goes out a couple of times a week — when that happens, there is not much we can do but rely on phone lines to take orders,” said Feleg Tsegaye, manager of Deliver Addis.
But he also believes the Horn of Africa nation — the second most populous on the continent — offers enormous opportunities.
Tsegaye was born and brought up in the US but moved to Ethiopia, the homeland of his parents, hoping to tap into a still largely untapped but swiftly growing market he believes is one of the most promising on the continent.
“The IT sector is still in its infancy — typically in these markets there is a way to transfer money very quickly and very easily, but here that doesn’t exist quite yet,” he added.
“Once you have a way for entrepreneurs to make money through technology, I think you are going to see that change very quickly.”
With a growth rate of nearly 10 per cent a year over the past decade, according to the World Bank, Ethiopia has attracted entrepreneurs eager to take their cut of a market with over 94 million potential consumers.
The Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa now has three “start-up incubators”, some supported by foreign investors, to help Ethiopian entrepreneurs launch their own business.
Both were filled at the same time with the same water, only one had oysters.
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
A forty hour work week is considered full time.
It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
Apple yanks drone-strike-tracking app from App Store
The app, Metadata+, was created by Josh Begley, research editor for The Intercept; Begley changed its name from Drones+ after it was rejected as “objectionable” by Apple five times.
At the time, an Apple employee told Begley that the app would never be approved if it focused on US drone strikes, but would have a chance if he “broadened his topic” because “there are certain concepts that we decide not to move forward with, and this is one.”
Metadata+ never the word “drone” – this may be how it snuck past the Apple censorship board. But seven months later, Apple has unceremoniously yanked it.
Apple: a giant corporation that gets to decide which journalism you’re allowed to access with apps on your device, and whose lawyersrepeatedly told the US government that changing this situation should be a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
Ecosystems work great – they just fail miserably. The important part of a benevolent dictatorship isn’t the “benevolent” – it’s the “dictatorship.”
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Poverty is a tax on cognition
In an outstanding lecture at the London School of Economics, Macarthur “genius award” recipient Sendhil Mullainathan explains his research on the psychology of scarcity, a subject that he’s also written an excellent book about.
Mullainathan begins by establishing the idea that your cognition is limited – you can only think about a limited number of things at one time, and when the number of things you have to pay attention to goes beyond a certain threshold, you start making errors. Then he explains how poor people have a lot more things they have to pay attention to. In the UK, we make fun of politicians for being so out of touch that they don’t know the price of a pint of milk – but poor people have to keep track of the price of everything they require. There’s no room for error. Spend too much on the milk and you can’t afford the bread.
That’s just one of the many taxes on the cognitive load of poor people. David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules details another: figuring out what rich people are thinking. Poor people who piss off rich people face reprisals far beyond those that rich people can expect from each other or from poor people.
This isn’t unique to cash-poverty. Mullainathan asks his audience to recall what life is like when they’re “time poor” – on a deadline or otherwise overburdened. This scarcity can focus your attention, yes: we’ve all had miraculous work-sprints to meet a deadline. But it does so at the expense of thoughtful attention to longer-term (but equally important) priorities: that’s why we stress-eat, skip the gym when our workload is spiking, and miss our kids’ sports’ games when the pressure is on at work.
The experimental literature shows startling parallels between the two conditions: time scarcity and cash scarcity. This leads to a series of policy proscriptions that are brilliant (for example, when we create means-tested benefits that require poor people to go through difficult bureaucratic processes, we’re taxing their scarcest and most precious resource). He also recounts how this parallel is useful in creating an empathic link between rich and powerful people like hedge fund managers and the poorest people alive.
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What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.” I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow.
Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue
Well! This is interesting.
(via jillianpms)
Oh my god this is exactly what I try to explain to my husband and he never gets it.
(via magesmagesmages)
And even if you have a good partner who is supportive, it doesn’t help as much as you might think. This sort of thing is baked into the cultural expectations of being female.
(via gothiccharmschool)
UK Chancellor: I must cut tax benefits for working poor to help them
George Osborne, born to a titled millionaire, has explained that he is cutting the tax-credits that let the working poor survive, despite the Tory party’s election promise not to do any such thing – because it will reduce the deficit and therefore save them from the cuts that the country would have to pay in the future in order to pay down those debts.
Osborne did not moot the possibility of taxing the country’s billionaires, including the “non-doms” who get to pretend that they live in an offshore tax-haven and duck their taxes. He also neglected to mention that countries are not companies, and that having a national bank and your own mint means that national debts are completely unlike the debts taken on by firms or households.
Osborne also didn’t mention the possibility of taxing the companies that pretend that their profits are made in tax-havens and that all their UK income must be remitted to an offshore firm in nonsensical trademark licenses.
Finally, Osborne didn’t mention the situation in which people working full-time jobs (or piecing together a full-time living from zero-hours contracts) can’t afford to pay for rent and food for their families and require benefits to remain solvent enough to show up for work each day, meaning that the firms paying the sub-survival wages are getting a massive tax subsidy in the form of a fed and housed workforce that comes at tax-payers’ expense.
Instead, Osborne explained that he would make the poorest workers in the UK even poorer, for their own benefit.
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UK top government official: human rights no longer a "top priority"
Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office – the country’s most senior Foreign Office official – told MPs that his department had sidelined human rights work in favour of global trade agreements (the same agreements that allow sovereign wealth funds from the world’s most brutal, oppressive states to buy huge swathes of the UK’s public institutions at knock-down prices in the Tories’ great sell-off of public assets).
It’s called the “prosperity agenda” – promoting business at the expense of human rights. For example, Chancellor George Osborne just conducted a trade-mission to China where he didn’t raise human rights issues at all, because “we have different political systems.”
It used to be that globalists argued for liberalised trade with criminal states because it would somehow lift their populations out of forced labour, mass incarceration and totalising surveillance. Now that these values have been exported to the “free” world, the pretense of a human rights agenda for global trade has been abandoned. Now we’re told thatthe spice must flow because it will make the country rich (just don’t look too hard at who in the country is getting rich).
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I always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.
Bill Gates
New 3-D Printer Produces Delicate Soft Objects
A new method of depositing drops of soft materials in a gel could be a new way to print squishy three-dimensional products like living tissue, soft robots and flexible electronics.
In the technique created by University of Florida researchers, a computer-controlled hollow tip precisely embeds fluid droplets of silicone, hydrogel, colloids or living cells inside a granular medium bath the consistency of hand sanitizer. After using the method to make tiny complex soft structures like delicate jellyfish, a tubular knot and a gel version of the nested shapes called Russian dolls, the group says they might have created a new era for engineering.
Keep reading
When the big Blue Marble photograph was first seen, there was this idea that it was going to change people’s view of ecology and everyone was going to become an environmentalist because of it. It was a big deal to see that image and now it’s just become so commonplace that no one even thinks about how incredible it is to look down on Earth from that perspective or just the technology it takes to create that image.
In the space of 40 years, we’ve come from this very primitive satellite that was taking photographs and scanning the pictures one line at a time, which took hours, to being able to just go online. It’s changed people’s perspective on space. People don’t think about distance anymore. It’s almost as if the geographic distance has evaporated.
It puts space in front of us as thing that we operate in but no longer think about. I think that’s why people get so frustrated in their cars when they want to get someplace quickly, because they’re so used to thinking distance doesn’t exist. We’ve become spatial animals, we’ve become people that really track ourselves everywhere we go. When you go for a run, you’ve got your little Nike thing hooked to your cell phone. When you’re on Twitter you can use its place location wherever you’re tweeting from.
An interview with John Hessler, a cartography expert at the Library of Congress and one of the people behind the new book, Map: Exploring The World.
[Maps: Left: A Map of Vesuvius (1832) by John Auldjo. Right: Hurricane Katrina Flooding Estimated Depths and Extent (2005) (University of Otago, NOAA)]
We often take our surroundings for granted. This is an excellent piece that outlines some of the problems and proposes a cool way to keep our forests going.
My house is covered with solar panels, and I drove the first hybrid electric Ford in Vermont and on and on and on. I try not to fool myself with that’s how we’re going to win this fight. Global warming is a structural and systemic issue, that’s where it comes from, the structures and systems. So changing those is what’s key. As individuals, we’re relatively powerless against climate change. That’s why the most important thing an individual can do is not be an individual, which means joining with other people in this battle.
Bill McKibben, author, activist and co-founder of 350.org, arguing that the collective nature of our climate crisis requires a collective response. In essence, recycling, commuting by bike or electric vehicle, using cloth bags and unplugging our phone chargers are all fine and good, but they aren’t going to get the job done. Why? Because our economies run largely on fossil fuel energy (i.e. coal, oil and natural gas) and need to be decarbonized in order to ensure we all have a future to look forward to. The quote comes from a recent interview with economic researcher Chris Martenson for his website, ‘Peak Prosperity’. The whole interview is worth a listen and share.
Photo: Some of the more than 300,000 strong ‘People’s Climate March’ last year in New York City. (Source: UN)
Infographic: Current pledges by countries to #ActOnClimate and transition to low carbon economies currently exceed the 2°C (3.6°F) threshold beyond which climate science shows catastrophic consequences for people, planet and economies. Long story short, we need to up our ambition and urgency. The COP21 negotiations in Paris this fall are critical to secure a deal to get us on the path to a climate-smart, globally sustainable future. (Source: Climate Interactive) Related:
‘Limited progress seen even as more nations step up on climate’ (New York Times)
‘How your brain tricks you into thinking you are greener than you actually are’ (Washington Post)
Dr. William Rees: ‘Climate change is one symptom’ (YouTube)
‘Systems thinking’ (Wikipedia)
‘Shell abandons Alaska Arctic oil drilling’ (Guardian)
"To survive, I had to grow a skin as thick as a cast-iron pot and this is now almost impenetrable. I am not convinced this was a positive modification to my character, but it is definitely an important survival adaptation for a woman conservationist in East Gippsland.
So why continue to be in this front line situation in constant conflict, having to justify your beliefs to a hostile public on radio interviews and in the papers?
It’s not my idea of pleasant country living. I’d like nothing better than to get on with my plans to breed Clydesdales, grow walnuts, work on the eco-tourism business, weave baskets from willow and honeysuckle and weed the carrot bed.
It is my sense of injustice, my own convictions and determination that keep me in there. Sometimes I wish I was as apathetic and ill-informed as the general population seems to be. But once you become aware of the injustices being done, the lies being told, the legalised vandalism being paid for by our taxes, you can never allow yourself the luxury of putting the blinkers on.
Though sometimes I wish I could.”
- Jill Redwood, forest campaigner and conservationist in East Gippsland for over 30 years, writing in Women and Migrants associated with the Timber Industry in East Gippsland (2000)
An Urbanizing Planet
The video, entitled An Urbanizing Planet, takes viewers on a stunning satellite-viewed tour around our planet. By combining more than 10 datasets, and using GIS processing software and 3D graphic applications, the video shows not only where urbanization will be most extensive, but also how the majority of the expansion will occur in areas adjacent to biodiversity hotspots.
The video was produced to present the framework of a new book Global Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities — A Global Assessment. The scientific foundation of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook project, the book presents the world’s first assessment of how global urbanization and urban growth impact biodiversity and ecosystems. It builds on contributions by more than 200 scientists worldwide.
How To Build More Resilient Cities