Michael Vlahos & Douglas Macgregor What is to be done? Can a corrupted US military be renewed? Pt.3 YouTube
Berlin Hotel’s Huge Aquarium Bursts, With 1,500 Fish Inside New York Times (see also Giant aquarium bursts in Germany, killing 1,500 tropical fish and spilling 1 million litres of water ABC Australia, hat tip Kevin W). BC: “Some engineering feats are more complicated than originally assumed.”
Some Twitter Power Users Try Business Casual on LinkedIn - WSJ $: “Some power users of Twitter are bringing the one-liners and hot takes to their professional network on LinkedIn. Or at least, they are trying to. Numerous Twitter users, celebrity and otherwise, say they are unenthused about what they view as turbulence after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Mr. Musk has overseen sweeping layoffs, revamped Twitter’s verification service and loosened content-moderation guidelines…”
Esquire: “No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated—and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers. In TheNew York Times’ own words, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” It adds that this data “reflects the previous week’s Sunday-to-Saturday sales period” and takes into account “numbers on millions of titles each week from tens of thousands of storefronts and online retailers as well as specialty and independent bookstores.”
The paper keeps its sources confidential, it argues, “to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists.” Its expressed goal is for “the lists to reflect what individual consumers are buying across the country instead of what is being bought in bulk by individuals or associated groups.”
But beyond these disclosures, the Times is not exactly forthcoming about how the sausage gets made. Laura B. McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University who teaches a course on the history of the best seller, compares The New York Times’ list to the original recipe for Coca-Cola: “We have a pretty good idea of what goes into it, but not the exact amount of each ingredient.”
The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller - Esquire
The case for buying less — and how to actually do it
Vox: Buying fewer unnecessary items is good for the planet, your wallet, and your brain. “This holiday season could be a scary time for some: Between inflation (prices have risen 8.2 percent in a year) and economic uncertainty pointing to a potential recession, in addition to ongoing pandemic recovery, it might not be the ideal moment to think about buying a bunch of crap. A 2019 survey by Ladder and OnePoll revealed that Americans spend an average of $18,000 per year on nonessential items, including streaming services and lattes, impulse Amazon finds, and unnecessary clothes.
Not only is this enough to buy a semester of in-state tuition for your soon-to-be-college kid, but it translates to lots of clutter you have to deal with as items become unnecessary with time. Household goods and services are responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, one study shows. It seems we are as aware as ever of this fact — since the pandemic, consumers want to reduce their unnecessary shopping behaviors.” [Shop your closets, basement, shed, dresser drawers. You will be surprised at the clothes, shoes an boots you will find to wear again.
Donate what you do not want or use – check into Habitat for Humanity ReStores in your area. Book exchanges and used book shops allow in kind exchanges so that you always have new-old books to read. Plant and seed exchanges are also plentiful and make gift giving and receiving a year round event, rather than just on the holidays.]
You’re Being Lied to About Electric Cars
MotorTrend, Jonny Lieberman – Science has repeatedly shown EVs are better for humans, despite the meme you just retweeted. “I’ve heard all the supposed arguments. It seems every time anything even tangentially related to electric cars is published, certain people feel compelled to share their own research. You’ve probably heard it all, too: A Prius is worse for the planet than a Hummer. EVs are coal-powered cars. Electric cars produce more CO2 than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Lithium mining is uniquely bad for the environment. Cobalt mining relies largely on slave labor, if not child slave labor. Actually, that last part is sadly true. But the rest? Lies.
And I’m not even going to get into the hypocrisy of posting anti-EV rhetoric from a lithium-ion-battery-powered phone or laptop. The first thing we should talk about is direct versus indirect emissions. Gas-powered vehicles have both direct and indirect emissions, while electric cars—I’m specifically talking about battery-powered vehicles, or BEVs, but we will just call them EVs—only have indirect emissions. How so? Both types of cars/trucks/SUVs are manufactured, and the process of building cars involves a global manufacturing effort that uses energy from all sorts of sources. This includes everything from the diesel fuel used to mine and transport metal to the electricity used to manufacture tires. A big knock on EVs is that because most battery production is centered in China, itself a notorious coal-burning country, battery-powered cars begin their service lives with more indirect emissions to their credit. The above is true.
If you take an ICE vehicle and an EV and lock them in a room, by the time the world ends the undriven electric car will have already resulted in more bad stuff than the undriven gas-powered car. But here’s the crazy part: Cars are driven. Wild, I know, but it’s true. The more EVs get driven, the cleaner they get. This last part would be especially true if the energy used to power EVs is itself CO2-free. But even if it’s not, EVs still lead to less emissions over time than cars that burn gasoline…”
LawFare Podcast: “Last week, Apple made an announcement about some new security features it would be offering to users. One of those features involves users’ ability to opt in to encryption for iPhone backups to iCloud. While this new feature will enhance data privacy and security for those users who choose to opt in, it may create additional challenges for law enforcement to obtain evidence in criminal investigations.
To discuss the implications and potential impact of this new security feature, Lawfare senior editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Riana Pfefferkorn, research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. They discussed the costs and benefits to users who may choose to opt in to this feature, how Apple’s choice to offer this feature plays into a broader conflict known as the Crypto Wars, and how this feature relates to another part of Apple’s announcement where it indicated that it would not be scanning all iPhones for child sexual abuse material before images were backed up to iCloud.”
Riana Pfefferkorn on End-to-End Encryption for iPhone Backups to iCloud LawFare Podcast
