Here are some recipes for non-toxic household cleaners. Toxic household cleaners are one of those things I put in the “toxic, and not necessary” category which there is just no reason to tolerate. Not all members of my household are sold on this idea though, and if I am being completely honest I probably do less than my fair share of the household cleaning so it is not that easy to take the moral high ground. Also some think I’m just cheap. Which I can’t really deny.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
real Americans for Trump
subsidizing Uber as an alternative to transit
A suburb of Orlando plans to subsidize 20% of all Uber rides, and 25% of ones that begin or end at a train station. It kind of makes sense that a small city with no previous investment in transit would choose to do this. There is no capital investment required, so they could just set a budget and stop the program for the year if they exceed it. They seem to think it will also help with road building and maintenance costs. I don’t quite get that – you assume people take trips because they need to get from point A to point B, and changing the economics of what vehicles they choose may not affect overall demand or reduce wear and tear. It might even increase demand if people take trips they would not have previously. It could drastically reduce the amount of space needed for parking, and that space and expense could be repurposed for something else. It could definitely cut down on drunk driving. They mention that it could hurt the poor, but I think all you need there is a hotline with operators who can book calls and arrange payment for people who don’t have an internet connection. It could provide jobs for laid-off taxi dispatchers.
Greyhound in the 21st Century
Here’s an interesting article in The Dallas Morning News on Greyhound’s technology strategy.
The 101-year-old company stands at a nexus these days. Uber, car-sharing services and autonomous vehicles will likely thoroughly rearrange ground transportation over the next decade. And young millennials continue their migration to downtown areas — sometimes without cars…
Now Greyhound sells at least 60 percent of its tickets through mobile digital devices like cellphones and tablets, Leach said. And over the next few years, the company wants to become part of a loose urban-mobility network built around ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles…
Despite their Old World aura, buses are a solid part of the modern transportation industry, and Greyhound is still the largest player, with an estimated 31.2 percent share of the market.
Well, if by “Old World” you mean Europe, they have had an efficient inter-city train system for about 50 years. We don’t have that in the U.S. for at least two reasons. First, because we have an enormous investment in a highway system that benefits the auto, oil and finance industries. That system is not optimal by any stretch of the imagination, but now that we’ve built it, we are stuck maintaining it and it would be extremely difficult to abandon it in favor of a better system like an efficient inter-city train network. There isn’t enough money to do both at the same tie. Second, the current approach is further entrenched by our federal political system which gives disproportionate votes and funds to the empty spaces between cities.
Now, if you’re a bus service, you benefit from that sunk investment in the highway system because you don’t have to pay anything near its true cost. Your customers are paying those costs in taxes and blood, but your prices appear cheap to them. Add in a few perks like wireless and clean comfortable seats, and your service becomes a near optimal way to navigate a very suboptimal transportation system.
collateral damage
Trump and Cruz are openly talking about indiscriminate killing of civilians abroad. Which is illegal. You’re not supposed to talk about it. There are really no perfect options when it comes to terrorism. Option 1 would be to only collect information abroad, then play defense at the border and within our own borders. You could argue that is sort of what the U.S. was doing before 9/11. It’s not hard for people to point to pictures of a smoking hole in Manhattan and make a case that is not good enough. Option 2 is scorched earth attacks against entire civilian populations anywhere we think a few enemies may be hiding. This is clearly illegal, although it has happened on a large scale in most wars. That is what Trump and Cruz are advocating. In the middle is pursuing “targeted” attacks abroad, destroying a few houses or groups of people that we think may contain our targets, usually with permission of the government of the host country. This (let’s call it Option 1.5) is the path Obama has chosen. How targeted is it really? Here’s a Guardian article from 2014 arguing that the United States has killed about 27 innocent people for every enemy killed. Most disturbingly, this includes many children. I personally like the idea of doing a really good job with #1. But I think Obama has made some tough choices and I respect that. Let’s not pretend that the more violent options are ever for the benefit of the people in the countries where they are carried out, though. They are about sacrificing the lives of a certain number of (mostly non-white, non-Christian, non-English speaking) civilians abroad, whose lives our government implicitly decides are worth less than the lives of civilians at home (although let’s remember that civilians at home are subject to mass death from gun violence, suicide, motor vehicle violence and lack of health care, which we don’t factor into this equation). I’ll give Trump and Cruz some small credit for saying what they mean and meaning what they say on this one. Listen carefully to what they say, and vote accordingly.
Romney vs. Trump
Here we have the last Republican nominee sagavely attacking the current front runner. It suggests to me that Republican leaders are worried the general election may be a lost cause. Maybe it is time for a rational pro-growth, pro-business party to emerge and leave the intolerant fringe behind. A rational pro-growth, pro-business party could embrace policies like clean elections, a universal health care system that takes the burden off employers, investment in education rather than prisons, a rational guest worker program, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Donald Trump is not a real Fascist, he just plays one on TV
I have been thinking that Trump is basically a psychopath, someone without normal human emotions or morals, who nonetheless has a very keen sense of how to manipulate other peoples’ emotions and morals for his own gain. This sounds bad, and it is. But the silver lining, if it is true, is that although he is appealing to some very ugly impulses in a certain segment of the public now, he would become more moderate if he were elected and had to appeal to the full range of the people. However, it turns out that people said the same thing about Hitler in 1922.
the man’s intellectual property rights
The founder of the Creative Commons license committed suicide after being threatened with 95 years in prison over a copyright violation. The article goes through some of the arguments against standard copyright.
‘Open access’ is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made freely available to the world at the time of publication, and that access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database. Academic authors do not usually write for profit; rather, their work aims to augment the common store of knowledge. What’s more, since the government often funds their research, it’s not a stretch to claim that the fruits of that research should belong to the public. So why should this material be subject to the same access restrictions as a mystery bestseller or a Hollywood film? As with many other inexplicable policies, the blame belongs to a vestigial middleman.
When a university professor finishes a research project, she typically records her results in an academic paper, which she submits for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These journals—the reputable ones, at least—operate via volunteers, with authors, editors, and peer reviewers all working for free. Nobody gets paid, or expects to get paid, except the publisher. In exchange for the publisher’s services, which include coordinating the publication and peer-review processes, formatting, and distribution, the author concedes the copyright to her article in perpetuity. It’s a simple trade: the academic publisher assumes the financial risk of preparing and distributing an esoteric work for which there’s a limited audience and in exchange retains all the profits that might come from its sale.
In commercial trade publishing, publishers realise profit by selling a book for a relatively low price to a wide audience. Since no wide audience exists for academic papers, academic publishers realise profit by selling them at high prices to the few entities who can’t do without them—libraries and scholars, mostly—which renders these papers functionally inaccessible to the casual or impoverished user.
self-driving cars
Here’s an interesting TED talk on self-driving cars. They are going to save a lot of lives. I think arguments against them like this one on NPR are ignorant at best and immoral at worst. If you can save a million lives a year and you choose not to do it, you are instantly one of history’s mass murderers. Even if there is some bizarre special case someone can cite where a computer might kill someone and a person might not, that’s going to be extremely rare.
Sander-nomics
This analysis of Bernie Sanders’s economic plan by Gerald Friedman at University of Massachussetts-Amherst has made quite a splash, suggesting it could lead to massive improvements in economic growth, unemployment, inequality, and productivity, all while investing heavily for the future in infrastructure, education, and climate change readiness. Bill Moyers.com has a long roundup of the criticism and support from all sides, finally concluding that it is actually plausible using standard, even conservative principles of economics. To me, even if it is only partially true, it just shows how unbelievably badly our economy has been managed over the past few decades, and how unready for the future we actually are.
Meanwhile, the Trump economic plan just doesn’t remotely add up using any known principles of arithmetic.