“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? ~ Donald Trump
Wow. That’s harsh.
But it’s a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.
Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Well for one thing, it’s because of what’s on the welcome sign. You know, the one out on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, on the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The money lines go like this (I’ve taken the liberty of rendering a couple of archaic usages into modern English for the sake of clarity): “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your shithole countries. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…” And so on.
In other words, the welcome sign gives a special shout-out to the wretched refuse. And in the preceding sentence it bluntly states who’s not welcome: “Keep, ancient lands, your pompous, condescending elites.”
The welcome sign also gives a name to the statue — not the Statue of Liberty, but “Mother of Exiles.”
OK, the welcome sign is just a poem written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus. It has no official or legal standing. …
NASA ranks 2017 the second-hottest year on Earth
On Trend
NASA compared earth’s average global temperature from 2013 to 2017 to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980. Yellows, oranges, and reds show regions warmer than the baseline.
US scientists said today that 2017 was among the hottest years recorded on earth.
In their annual global temperature analysis, NASA scientists found 2017 to be the second-warmest year since record keeping began in 1880, second only to 2016. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also conducts global climate analysis, ranked it the third-warmest year, slightly less hot than 2016 and 2015.
The fact that 2017 came in so hot is especially significant because, unlike 2016, 2017 was not an El Niño year. El Niños are atmospheric patterns over the Pacific ocean that typically add significant heat to global average temperatures. In 2016, .12 degrees Celsius of that year’s record-breaking average temperature anomaly was due to El Niño. In 2017, none of the temperature anomaly could be attributed to that natural heat source.
So even an El Niño-free year on earth is now a record-breaking one.
“It really brings it home that the trends we’re seeing are independent of anything that’s happening in terms of variability in the Pacific,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA lab that conducted the analysis, told reporters on Jan. 18. …
Turn and face the strange: the 12 weirdest days from Trump’s first year
Covering the first year of the Trump presidency has been a wild and unpredictable ride. The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief David Smith charts the 12 oddest days.
From its first moments, the Trump presidency defied normal conventions. Witnesses reported that former president George W Bush left the scene of Trump’s inauguration speech remarking: “That was some weird shit.”
The “American Carnage” speech set the tone for a year of unmatched strangeness. Here, we review 12 defining days.
Sean Spicer’s debut, 21 January 2017
It was a whole new world: the Obamas had flown away, Donald Trump had been inaugurated and millions of women had marched in Washington and around the world. Cue Sean Spicer, striding to the White House podium in an outsized suit on a cold Saturday afternoon, roaring: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe.” The evidence from photos, crowd experts, TV ratings and the Washington Metro network said otherwise. Spicer also accused Senate Democrats of blocking the appointment of a new CIA director and savaged the media: “That’s what you guys should be writing and covering, instead of sowing division about tweets and false narratives.” He swept out, ignoring questions. Two weeks later, Melissa McCarthy performed her impression of Spicer on Saturday Night Live for the first time.
Travel ban chaos, 28 January 2017
Trump ran on a promise of “extreme vetting” and issued an executive order to restrict people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. When the day arrived, he told reporters: “It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over.” But in reality there was chaos, confusion and anger after scores of immigrants and refugees were kept off flights and stranded in airports. Even green card holders were being stopped in foreign airports as they tried to return from holidays, study or funerals overseas. There were mass protests at airports in Dallas, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Finally, a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, granted a temporary reprieve, touching off a legal battle that would run and run. …
The World Has Never Seen an Oil Spill Like This
A tanker that sank off the Chinese coast was carrying “condensate,” a mix of molecules with radically different properties than crude.
The Sanchi engulfed in flame on January 13.
Over the last two weeks, the maritime world has watched with horror as a tragedy has unfolded in the East China Sea. A massive Iranian tanker, the Sanchi, collided with a Chinese freighter carrying grain. Damaged and adrift, the tanker caught on fire, burned for more than a week, and sank. All 32 crew members are presumed dead.
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities and environmental groups have been trying to understand the environmental threat posed by the million barrels of hydrocarbons that the tanker was carrying. Because the Sanchi was not carrying crude oil, but rather condensate, a liquid by-product of natural gas and some kinds of oil production. According to Alex Hunt, a technical manager at the London-based International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, which assists with oil spills across the world, there has never been a condensate spill like this.
“It’s typical for us to attend approximately 20 shipping incidents a year and we’ve been doing this for 50 years,” Hunt says. “There have been other condensate spills, but this is the first condensate spill of this magnitude that we’ve dealt with, which gives you an impression of how rare cases like this are.” A 2016 Canadian environmental risk report on condensates also noted “the small size and low frequency of spills to marine water.”
While it might seem that all oil spills would at least be similar, in this case that is not true. Underground, crude is a liquid you can pump. Condensate, on the other hand, is a gas amid the heat and pressure down there. Bring it up to the surface and it condenses into liquid. This liquid is made of hydrocarbons like crude—and is sometimes classed as a form of it—but contains a different mix of molecules than other crude oils. …
The public really, really, really opposes current federal marijuana law
A new poll — from an anti-marijuana group — shows US politicians lag far behind the public’s views on marijuana.
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The overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to current federal marijuana law.
That’s the big takeaway from a new poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy and released by Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), the country’s most prominent anti-legalization group.
The poll took a unique approach to a legalization survey. Instead of asking people if they support legalization and giving them a binary yes-or-no choice, it asked 1,000 registered voters about several options for federal marijuana policy: keeping current policy (which prohibits possessing and using cannabis for any purpose), legalizing “physician-supervised medical use,” decriminalizing pot by removing criminal penalties for use and allowing medical use but prohibiting sales, and legalizing the commercial production, use, and sale of marijuana for recreational use.
Only 16 percent of Americans favored keeping the current policy. About 29 percent backed only medical legalization, 5 percent backed decriminalization, and 49 percent backed full legalization. The remaining 1 percent were not sure. …
This Monopoly Is Holding Back the Mortgage Market
Credit scores aren’t working the way they should.
But not for everyone
If you apply for a mortgage in the U.S., chances are your credit score will be generated by an algorithm better suited to the economy of the 1990s — part of an ossified system that could be denying millions of otherwise qualified Americans the opportunity to buy a home.
Regulators are considering an update. What’s really needed is a rethink.
Perhaps no number is more important to U.S. consumers than their credit score. It can determine everything from the size of the required deposit on a rental apartment to the interest rate on an auto loan. When they work well, credit scores grease the wheels of the economy by giving businesses a rough first sense of who might qualify for a loan or service.
In the mortgage market, however, credit scores aren’t doing their job properly. That’s because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled entities that guarantee most home loans, have for more than a decade required lenders to use only one score, known as Classic FICO. A product of Fair Isaac Corporation, the biggest player in the credit-scoring business, it was developed using consumer data from the late 1990s.
Much has changed in the availability and understanding of credit data since the 1990s, leaving Classic FICO in many ways outdated. …
H&M is learning a hard lesson on racism and diversity from South Africans
A Seat At The Table
It’s about more than window dressing.
South Africans are teaching H&M a tough lesson on the importance of diversity.
Just days after the Swedish chain was forced to temporarily close some of its South African stores after anti-racism protests, an NGO is demanding that H&M executives undergo “compulsory anti-racism and diversity training, so that there can be a change of attitude within the company around issues related to race.”
The Ahmed Kathrada foundation released a statement on Jan. 16 saying it had approached H&M’s South African offices and its global headquarters immediately after spotting the advert with a black child wearing a hoodie with the slogan “coolest monkey in the jungle.” The foundation says it wrote to H&M on Jan. 11 already, but only received a “a bland and automated response.”
“It is of serious concern that your company published the advert without considering the historical context of how the word and image of a “monkey” has been used to racially demean black people for generations,” the letter read. The foundation is the legacy of Ahmed Kathrada, a tireless anti-apartheid activist who was jailed along with Nelson Mandela. …
Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs
Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative.
Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.
In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. We resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all around us.
As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient for whole social classes. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty – around 8 million people – are in working households. In the US, the average wage has stagnated for half a century.
As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.)
Work is increasingly precarious: more zero-hours or short-term contracts; more self-employed people with erratic incomes; more corporate “restructurings” for those still with actual jobs. As a source of sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. For many people, not just the very wealthy, work has become less important financially than inheriting money or owning a home. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.
6 Unpredictable Dangers Of Being An Atheist
Are you an atheist? If so, that’s totally cool. We don’t have any fake hundred-dollar bills to give you which reveal that “true wealth comes from the Lord” when they unravel. However, we do have some rough news: While a lot of people act like atheism is shunning the responsibility that comes with religion in order to waste time wearing black clothes and getting to third base with unmarried demons or whatever, it actually means taking up a few unforeseen hardships. For example …
#6. Everyone Thinks Atheists Are Immoral — Even Atheists
Let’s start with the fact that everyone apparently thinks atheists are the scum of the Earth, according to many surveys. I don’t particularly believe in God myself, so I’m just as disappointed by this news as anyone. And while I’d love to hold this up as an example of believers being jerks, those same polls show that even atheists hate and mistrust other atheists. Even we can’t wrap our heads around the idea of someone having a moral code without a higher power to enforce it.
To determine how this anti-atheist bias works, researchers asked 3,000 people in 13 countries the most reasonable question ever: “If there was a person who used to torture animals as a child, then they grew up and became a teacher who murdered a bunch of homeless dudes, would you figure this person was an atheist or religious?” I wish that was my joke, because it’s kind of awesome, but it’s not. That’s literally the question they asked. And across the whole study, people were twice as likely to suspect the killer of being an atheist. Even atheists believed the person was more likely to be an atheist. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure I had that teacher for art history.
In a second study which polled Canadians and Americans, participants were asked to imagine a hit-and-run driver fleeing after hitting a parked car, then later finding a wallet and stealing all the money. What a shitberg. They then asked participants if said shitberg was more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher. Your first inclination here might be to wonder why, in both this example and the previous one, all the shitbergs are teachers. Maybe people aren’t biased against atheists as much as they just hate teachers. The second takeaway here is that yes, people suspected the driver of being an atheist over a rapist. Over a goddamn rapist. Come on. …
The biggest threat to China’s long-term growth is its own government
The Waste Land
If you build it, GDP will grow
China’s private companies are the engines of its economy, generating seven-tenths of its GDP and employing 85% of its workforce. As such, the country’s long-term growth hinges on their success. But they’re coming up against a formidable opponent: their own government.
As its economy slows, China’s private companies increasingly find themselves pitted against state-owned firms in the scramble for scarcer resources. One such resource is financing. Thanks to their official imprimatur, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have long enjoyed easier access to credit than private companies. In 2016, industrial SOEs accounted for 80% of growth in corporate debt, compared with just under 60% in 2013, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca. That would be fine if SOEs were more profitable than private firms. But while private-sector profits rose 18% between 2011 and 2016, those at SOEs sunk 33%, according to Steil and Della Rocca.
In the last two years, as lending has tightened up somewhat, an even more destructive problem has emerged. State firms have been forcing their private suppliers to accept excessively drawn-out payment terms—in effect, sponging free loans off the private sector, says Thomas Gatley, analyst at GaveKalDragonomics, a research firm.
“The result is that private companies are forced to carry a fat cushion of working capital,” or money used to fund day-to-day operations, writes Gatley in a recent note. Meanwhile, SOEs “in aggregate enjoy the luxury of negative working capital,” which liberates them to make more investments. …
New blood test could help detect eight common cancers before they spread
Researchers believe CancerSEEK will save thousands of lives and hope it will be widely available in a few years.
Researchers have said a groundbreaking new blood test that can detect eight common types of cancer before they spread will save countless lives.
They said “liquid biopsy” – developed in the US – would be a game-changer in the fight against cancer, and hoped it could be widely available within a few years.
The test was able to detect tumours about 70% of the time on average in more than 1,000 patients with early-stage cancer. Crucially, it did so before the cancers had spread, giving patients the best chance of beating the disease.
It works by looking for mutated DNA that dying cells shed into the blood, and protein biomarkers associated with bowel, breast, liver, lung, oesophageal, ovarian, pancreatic and stomach cancer.
Professor Peter Gibbs, from the Walter and Eliza Institute in Melbourne, who has worked on the test, dubbed CancerSEEK, said he thought it would save thousands of lives. He hoped it would become widely available, and affordable, before too long. …
Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America
Corporate goliaths are taking over the U.S. economy. Yet small breweries are thriving. Why?
A tasting at Brooklyn Brewery, in New York.
The monopolies are coming. In almost every economic sector, including television, books, music, groceries, pharmacies, and advertising, a handful of companies control a prodigious share of the market.
The beer industry has been one of the worst offenders. The refreshing simplicity of Blue Moon, the vanilla smoothness of Boddingtons, the classic brightness of a Pilsner Urquell, and the bourbon-barrel stouts of Goose Island—all are owned by two companies: Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. As recently as 2012, this duopoly controlled nearly 90 percent of beer production.
This sort of industry consolidation troubles economists. Research has found that the existence of corporate behemoths stamps out innovation and hurts workers. Indeed, between 2002 and 2007, employment at breweries actually declined in the midst of an economic expansion.
But in the last decade, something strange and extraordinary has happened. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of brewery establishments expanded by a factor of six, and the number of brewery workers grew by 120 percent. Yes, a 200-year-old industry has sextupled its establishments and more than doubled its workforce in less than a decade. Even more incredibly, this has happened during a time when U.S. beer consumption declined. …
‘Portlandia’ Is Ending, And Portlanders Are OK With That
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen star in the eighth and final season of Portlandia, which premiered Thursday.
There was a time when saying you lived in Portland, Ore., would get a response like, “That’s above California, right?” Now, people not only know where the city is but also inevitably ask, “Is it just like the show?”
IFC’s Portlandia, which begins its eighth and final season on Thursday, put Portland on the map as the capital of earnest urbanism at a time when words like “artisanal” and “locavore” were sweeping the nation. It was an image Portlanders embraced, then struggled with.
The “Dream of the ’90s” sketch in the first episode coined the phrase that would define the show’s take on Portland. It’s a conversation between co-creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, intercut with a surreal music video featuring circus performers and hipster types.
Armisen asks Brownstein, “Remember when people were content to be unambitious, sleep till 11 and just hang out with their friends? When you had no occupations whatsoever, maybe working a couple hours a week at a coffee shop?”
“Right,” Brownstein answers. “I thought that died out a long time ago.”
“Not in Portland,” Armisen says. “Portland is a city where young people go to retire.” …
That Fleet Of Electric Cars The LAPD Paid At Least $2.9 Million For? It’s Barely Touched Them
In June of 2016, BMW announced it won a contract to supply the Los Angeles Police Department with 100 electric cars—a multi-million-dollar program the chief said “made sense for taxpayers and for the environment.” Hah. The LAPD has barely used them.
Both the local and LAPD leadership talked boldly in 2016 about greener practices and technologies, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti telling the Los Angeles Times we “should be thinking green in everything we do.” The LA Times reported that the BMW i3 fleet, made up of 100 cars on lease by LAPD, would cost about $1.4 million over three years—$387 a month per car, according to the story. An additional $1.5 million went into infrastructure investment for electric cars.
But even if the folks in LA are thinking about ways to be green, the practice part seems to be where they’re missing the point. An investigation by CBS Los Angeles found the cars, meant to be used for non-emergency purposes like outreach and police business instead of patrols or chases, haven’t really been used at all. …
TL;DR
I can’t stop looking at this wonderfully bad Google Photos panorama stitch
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Most times, technology fails and we get frustrated. Sometimes, technology fails in a spectacularly adorable way. Such is the case with this Google Photos panorama image that the software automatically stitched together for Reddit user MalletsDarker, which placed a photo of his friend majestically behind two different photos of snow and trees.
MalletsDarker shared the source images that Google Photos had combined together as a panorama, a feature that the software will automatically offer to you if it notices the images were taken near one another. He took three pictures: one with two friends, one of the snowy landscape, and one of the trees in a distance. In the photo of his friend, Google Photos managed to wipe out one person in the shot, artfully cropping her from the helmet down and replacing her with more trees and snow. The end result is reminiscent of Screaming Cowboy, Canadian edition. …
Los Angeles advert for graphic designer draws surprise attention
Los Angeles advert for graphic designer draws surprise attention
Eye-catching childlike advert has prompted a series of applications in a similar style.
The city of Los Angeles has made a splash on social media with its advert for a graphic designer that looks like it was created by a child using Microsoft Paint.
https://t.co/rVbTTIAFBR pic.twitter.com/At6GOD6MP5
— CityLosAngeles-Jobs (@Citylajobs) January 18, 2018
—
(@ambientaxion) January 19, 2018
(@ambientaxion) hire me pic.twitter.com/vK8Jouk5mq
— Dennis Dean (@___abcdennis) January 19, 2018
Cozmo, the mascot of MSL soccer franchise LA Galaxy, threw his hat into the ring, pointing to some previous efforts in a similar style.
i like #soccer.
hockey is #cool.
free tickets are #awesome.RT this #fantastic tweet & ur entered to win 2tix #LAKingsNight@BaileyLAKings pic.twitter.com/un22YwRgkD
— Cozmo LA Galaxy (@CozmoLAGalaxy) April 28, 2017
And award-winning designers have pitched in to show their credentials for the role.
Very true. Award hanging next to Billy Penn. I'd say I'm overqualified for LA… pic.twitter.com/S5uELRn3vy
— Andrew Dahl (@Adahlio) January 19, 2018
…
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Marelyn Arevalo is afraid. The 22-year-old paralegal has lived in the Boston area since she was 5, when her parents brought her to the United States from their native El Salvador. But thanks to a recent move by the Trump administration, her family could be torn apart and forced to return to a violent country they barely know.
Like more than 220,000 other Salvadorans, Arevalo and her parents have been allowed to live and work in the U.S. because they qualify for Temporary Protected Status. The U.S. started offering TPS to Salvadorans in 2001 after devastating earthquakes made it too dangerous for them to return home. Congress is currently considering a plan to allow at least some families like the Arevalos to stay in the U.S., but the proposal is reportedly what prompted Trump’s comment about the U.S. accepting too many immigrants from “shithole” countries. Now it’s unclear if Trump would approve any TPS fix.
Immigrants aren’t the only ones affected by Trump’s decision: More than 193,000 kids have been born in the U.S. to Salvadoran parents with TPS, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Arevalo has three younger siblings who are U.S. citizens, and now the family faces two options: They can split up, or move together to a country where gang violence has caused one of the world’s highest murder rates. Arevalo doesn’t want to go back to El Salvador.
“There’s no future for us,” she said. “There is the chance that I’ll come home and my parents or my siblings could be shot dead. The whole time I’ve been in the U.S., I’ve never had to feel that fear.”
Arevalo works at an immigration law office in East Boston, an area with a large Salvadoran population and one of the highest concentrations of TPS recipients in the country. VICE News visited Arevalo there as she and her family faced their uncertain future after the announcement.
When President Donald Trump questioned climate change in a tweet about the cold snap that hit the east coast in December, few were surprised. Donald Trump has a long history of climate denial, and the presidency has done nothing to change that.
What did cause a stir, however, was one particular response to the President’s tweet authored by Jersey Shore cast member Vinny Guadagnino. “I think climate change is more complex than global warming will make it hotter. It has to do with disruptions of atmospheric conditions, ocean patterns, jet streams and shit like that,” he wrote.
The online reaction was mixed. Many praised the reality TV star, whereas others joked at the perceived absurdity of having a Jersey Shore cast member school the President on climate change. And Vinny pushed back on that, too. “I get the joke but why does having a summer shore house automatically make u stupid?” he tweeted. After all, this wasn’t the first time Vinny had spoken out about climate change online.
Regardless of the reason behind people’s interest in Vinny’s tweet, his concerns over global warming are real and they got the world’s attention. So, we asked Vinny if he’d be willing to come to VICE HQ and interview chemist and climate expert Bhawani Venkataraman — with the help of some of our viewers.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Robert Reich discusses food policy and inequality with author Michael Pollan.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Senator Cory Booker lays into Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for “forgetting” a racially-charged remark President Trump said behind closed doors.
As Congress works to pass immigration reform, the Trump administration tries to curb legal pathways to citizenship like the visa lottery and chain migration.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Only the Late Show, for some weird reason, had access to the cameras corroborate porn star Stormy Daniels’ story.
Stephen recaps the only award show that doesn’t have awards. Or a show.
White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly fired up his president with comments about the impossibility of following through on Trump’s campaign promises.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Women speaking out has finally led to men speaking about how unfair it was that the women got to speak in the first place.
All the evidence points to yes, Trump is racist, but can we really be sure? Let’s spend the next three years discussing.
In search of “economic anxiety,” Sam found a whole group of working class people who have been ignored by the media…and all of society.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at how despite controlling all three branches of government, Republicans are still facing a possible shutdown over an immigration impasse created entirely by President Trump.
Seth takes a closer look at how Republicans still face the looming possibility of a government shutdown because President Trump rejected a bipartisan deal to solve an immigration impasse he created.
THANKS to HBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Being gluten free used to be a luxury only reserved for those who are intolerant to gluten. With this cutting edge gluten educational video, you can become gluten intolerant too, whether or not you’re actually intolerant to gluten. In the new age, if you’re not living gluten free, you’re getting left behind. Here’s your chance to jump on the new age conscious band wagon!
Our friend Courtney Gilmour tells us why prosthetic limbs cost so much in Canada.
THANKS to The Comedy Network and The Beaverton for making this program available on YouTube.
大きな箱に乗りたいまる。Maru wants to get on the large box!
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me commentary on a daring and cheeky gibbon vs a couple of tigers.
Max just isn’t sure if the peep. This was the only time he seen it.
Being goofy with Max to keep him busy and occupied.
FINALLY . . .
Powering Puerto Rico with solar microgrids
During the weeks following Hurricane Maria, the category 4 storm that wiped out Puerto Rico’s electrical grid, dozens of messages flooded the email server at HOMER Energy. The Boulder-based company is the industry leader when it comes to optimizing the design of microgrids, small electrical units that can generate power separate from the main grid, with the use of renewable resources like solar or wind. Everyone reached out to HOMER with the same basic question: How can we help the people living without power in Puerto Rico?
Four months after the hurricane, large parts of the island are still without power. Reports from December estimate the electrical grid is operating at less than 70 percent of its capacity. In rural communities on the outskirts of the grid, it could take almost two years to restore power.
In response, the team at HOMER coordinated with nonprofit organizations and solar companies on the island to provide their microgrid expertise and advice on how to better rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. HOMER sent solar integration expert Alison Mason to the island, where she provided on-the-ground solar support and witnessed firsthand the aftermath of the hurricane.
“There seems to be a natural consensus that solar is going to play a big role in Puerto Rico’s recovery and there are so many factors that make that possible,” Mason says. “This really is the silver lining behind Hurricane Maria.” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?