- Read: Shipping containers have lowered the cost of handling ocean-freight by 99 percent, but they fall off ships all the time (and increasingly so, due to climate chaos), which leads to some weird stuff floating around.
- Listen: George Monbriot on why and how we need to change our food systems
- Read: As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces An ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’ — this story surprised me, as the Mormons (who dominate Utah politics) were famously good at managing water. It seems that THAT culture has been replaced by excess growth and water use. The GSL drying up, like the Aral and Salton “Seas,” exposes toxic dust but also shows the magnitude of excess use — a vision that we do not — but should — have of disappearing groundwater. More: Paul Krugman agrees with me and makes the (obvious, but important) point that there’s no chance of addressing climate chaos if Utah can’t even save the GSL.
- Read: How San Francisco Became a Failed City (but may be coming back from the edge of woke-stupid?): “…these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.” Fuck.
- Read: How crypto giant Binance became a hub for hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers (and that $2.3 billion is MAYBE 0.1% of the volumes banks launder, so keep that in mind…). Related: Hackers switch to email-fraud (e.g., sending a fake invoice from a “trusted” email).
- Read: Constant bargain hunting makes us value all the wrong things about shopping (like the value of the item itself).
- Read: Cities need to absorb water to reduce flood damage
- Read: Conservative (US) judges are “mining” linguistics databases to justify their opinions by selecting past uses of words
- Listen: Steve Levitt discusses his failure to understand geo-engineering but also the many troubles of the IPCC and other climate-related programs
- Read: Writers describe how they revise (and revise and revise)
H/T to ED