Wirecutter has a new review of the latest in robot vacuums. You can spend a lot on a fancy one, but the good news is you can get a very functional one for around $200.
https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-robot-vacuum/
There is something weird about this post, and try as I might I can’t figure out what it is.
This post discusses a variety of philosophical topics including Sartre, “existential dread”, and “optimistic nihilism”, and the simulation hypothesis.
The Philosophy of “Optimistic Nihilism,” Or How to Find Purpose in a Meaningless Universe
this private think tank report on the future of transportation claims to have used a system dynamics approach and to have reached some radical conclusions, like the collapse of private car ownership, the oil industry, and major decreases in the cost of getting around within a decade or so. The buzz phrase is “transportation as a service”.
Here is a new (to me) online tool for estimating one’s life span. Somewhat of a morbid topic sure but useful for financial planning purposes if nothing else.
here are a couple internet startups of note in the shared parking and household/business cleaning arenas. Certainly these have all been done before, but there is room for improved reliability and payment options.
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/parking-network-airgarage-wins-phoenix-smart-city-hack/508031/
https://www.axios.com/cleaning-is-a-profitable-business-for-these-two-startups-2502432673.html
some candidates for Federal Reserve chairman are being mentioned, and the good news is that all appear to have some central banking experience, and none are actually against central banking or espousing weird conspiracy theories!
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/next-fed-chair-yellen-successor-by-jeffrey-frankel-2017-10
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-fed-appointments-by-eswar-prasad-2017-10
I’m at a disadvantage traveling and trying to post on my phone, so my posts may be short for awhile.
So just what is/was Uranium One? According to Lawfare.com, almost nothing. It was a business transaction between a Russian government-linked company and a Canadian company owning U.S. uranium mines. Such transactions have to be reviewed by a panel including many U.S. government agencies, which seems like a good idea. The State Department, overseen by Hillary Clinton at the time is one of the many departments involved. The transaction was reviewed and approved by the book. And seriously, that’s all. To suggest otherwise is propaganda, not professional journalism based on facts and logic. We seem to live in a country now where even educated people don’t realize there is a difference.
https://lawfareblog.com/unpacking-uranium-one-hype-and-law
just in case you want to make broken glass themed candy for Halloween, here is how you can do that.
http://eatthedead.com/2017/10/27/halloween-recipe-glass-shard-skull-cake/
The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health has released a “landmark study” on health and economic effects of pollution worldwide. You can read it after going through a free but somewhat annoying registration process. There is also a pretty good summary in this Guardian article.
I find the results disturbing. Among them are that pollution causes an estimated 9 million premature deaths worldwide each year, with over 90% in low-income and middle-income countries. The Guardian article has a good Infographic showing that this is significantly more than deaths caused by other major causes like smoking, AIDS, and road deaths. (Although, you could think of smoking as a form of intentional pollution, and I believe tobacco countries are still up to their old immoral marketing tricks in developing countries. I also see a link between pollution and road deaths, with land use patterns and lifestyles centered around motor vehicles being the root cause of both, again with immoral practices by the auto, fossil fuel, and construction industries playing a role.) Other statistics are that pollution reduces GDP in low- and middle-income countries by 2% per year and global economic output by around 6% per year. (I don’t quite get how those last two statistics go together – even though the health impacts are primarily in lower-income countries, that somehow affects the economies of higher-income countries disproportionately? I guess maybe because people in higher-income countries spend money on medical care to partially offset the effects of pollution, while people in the poorer countries just die? But don’t we add medical spending to GDP, even though we should consider some of it a cost to society rather than a benefit?) One implication here is that the idea of accepting pollution for a period of time while your country develops may not be a very good strategy, even thinking in hard-nosed economic terms and neglecting the moral dimensions of allowing your people to suffer in exchange for the supposed longer-term gain.
They make a few more links I find interesting (not in a fun way). One is that we don’t really know how much of health care spending is offsetting the effects of pollution, because there is a lot we don’t know about links between pollution and health. And this is not just heart attacks, cancer, and asthma we are talking about, there are disturbing concerns about impacts on the fertility and intelligence of our species from both the small number of everyday chemicals we have good information on and the enormous and growing number we don’t. Finally, there are the somewhat obvious links between fossil fuel pollution and climate change.
Here is where I should probably draw some link to the Trump administration’s immoral policies to actually increase pollution. But it’s so obvious I’m not sure it even needs to be said. He is clearly one of the evil lizard people who eats babies and puppies and is trying to kill us all off as quickly as possible.
This surprising study from Germany raises the possibility that a catastrophic loss of insects is occurring and that it could lead to ecological collapse.
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of this decline is based on the abundance of single species or taxonomic groups only, rather than changes in insect biomass which is more relevant for ecological functioning. Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.
I knew about the frogs, elephants, tigers, bees, and loss of larger animal species and biomass in general, but I hadn’t really heard this idea that insects are disappearing. I can see a silver lining to this – I can’t really create elephant or tiger habitat around my house, and frog habitat is a little tough, but insects – I can actually help the little guys. On a larger scale, there is the question of green infrastructure – can we deliberately design habitats in cities, larger reserves, and corridors connecting them to support as much ecological function as we can? I think so, but I don’t think our public officials, engineers, urban planners, scientists, and others in a position to do this are tuned into the issue or even very open to hearing about it.