Flutterby™! From 2021-02-01 to 2021-02-26

Local Facebook group, someone is giving away "two distressed bedside tables". What have you seen, tables? What have you seen?

[ related topics: Furniture ]

The thing about the Perl dot com hijack is that it underscores.just how crappy a mechanism renting domain names from registrars is for identity.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

My web host is super cheap, and only gives me 200Mbit/sec (although unlimited). Which is fine for a text-based blog. I just bought an album from Smithsonian Folkways, download is happening at 217KB/sec. Apparently they pay $4/month for their hosting too.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Parking Induces Driving, Study Says

"What Do Residential Lotteries Show Us About Transportation Choices?" was written by Adam Millard-Ball, Jeremy West, Nazanin Rezaeib, and Garima Desaib (from the Los Angeles and Santa Cruz representatives of the University of California system) and published by the Urban Studies journal. The methodology of the study required identifying and studying a randomized sample of human behavior, which the researchers found in, as explained by Andersen, "the free, site-specific lotteries that San Francisco uses to select who gets to live in the price-regulated homes of new apartment and condo buildings."

[ related topics: Andersen/Accenture Invention and Design Bay Area Theater & Plays Current Events California Culture Education Architecture Gambling Real Estate ]

Compare and contrast to all of the BLM protesters who were beaten, gassed, and detained for (depending on the jurisdiction) stepping on to or off of a sidewalk: ProPublica — The Insurrection: “Sense of Entitlement”: Rioters Faced Few Consequences Invading State Capitols. No Wonder They Turned to the U.S. Capitol Next.

But maskless protesters shoved their way past Idaho State Police troopers and security guards, broke through a glass door and demanded entry. They were confronted by House Speaker Scott Bedke, a Republican. He decided to let them in and fill the gallery.

“You guys are going to police yourselves up there, and you’re going to act like good citizens,” he told the invaders, according to a YouTube video of the incident.

“I just thought that, on balance, it would be better to let them go in and defuse it ... rather than risk anyone getting hurt or risk tearing up anything else,” Bedke said of the protesters in an interview last week. He said he talked to cooler heads in the crowd “who saw that it was a situation that had gotten out of control, and I think on some level they were very apologetic.”

[ related topics: Movies History Law Enforcement Video Real Estate Woodworking ]

It's kinda funny how representatives of two different departments can investigate the same gathering and come up with completely different facts. It's interesting that one of those investigators was a County Sheriff's Deputy, and he came up with a completely different account, an order of magnitude fewer people, and a completely different venue, than the multiple officials from the county code enforcement staff. It's almost like the County Sheriff's Deputies are so used to lying, and not being called out on their lies, that they don't care that their accounts will be directly contradicted by numerous credible witnesses.

Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy investigated for discrepancies in report on church

Atallah reported arriving at Spring Hills Church at 10:12 a.m., near the end of its hourlong Sunday morning 9:30 a.m. service, according to the record. During a 17-minute visit, which he wrote included speaking with church staff and performing a walkthrough of the expansive church campus, he noted seeing no more than 15 people, all wearing masks during a “small outdoor church gathering.” Everyone on the property was complying with the public health order, Atallah reported, and church services were nearly finished for the day.

That account contradicted a report by county code enforcement staff, which documented 130 people, many of whom were not wearing masks, attending the same, primarily indoor service, according to Tennis Wick, director of the county’s permit department. ...

[ related topics: Religion Health Current Events ]

64 people arrested, 2 women rescued during anti-human trafficking operation in Riverside County: Sheriff’s Dept.

<blckquote>Overall, 64 people were arrested, almost all of them on suspicion of soliciting prostitution. Two women believed to be victims of sex trafficking were rescued, officials said. ...

Extreme sympathies to the two women who likely snitched to save their own skins.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Mixed feelings: when the "pieces and ends" package of bacon that I bought because I needed to replenish my stash of cooking fat ends up being way too lean and giving almost no fat...

[ related topics: Food Food - Bacon ]

Styling: it is cool to fuck the empress. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=49272

COVID-19 fuels highest-ever annual Minnesota death count in 2020

A 15% increase in mortality from 2019 to 2020 demonstrates that the pandemic actually caused more deaths in Minnesota and wasn’t just a substitute cause for people who were likely to die anyway.

Fascinating look at E. coli and memory: RT Matthew Garrett @mjg59</a

My actual PhD may only have qualified me to complain about transphobia, but my first attempt at a PhD (I dropped out after 6 months) qualifies me to tell people to sit down every time someone talks about E. coli having memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260235

I'm just gonna steal the whole comment:

People love bringing up E. coli whenever this sort of thing comes up, but it's not a compelling argument. It generally refers to the observation that if you have a bacterium swimming towards something that's bad (ie, an increasing concentration of a toxic molecule), it'll tend to start swimming away. The obvious implication is that the bacterium has to remember that it's trying to swim away from something in order to keep doing so.

In reality, we've had an alternative explanation for about 20 years. The chemical receptors that respond to the molecules E. coli wants to get away from activate and generate a cascade that causes the flagella (the stranded "tail" molecules that allow them to swim) to start rotating in the opposite direction. This causes them to become tangled, and this results in the bacterium moving around randomly rather than making any progress in one direction. If it heads away from the noxious source, the receptors stop activating, the flagella start rotating in the correct direction, and it heads off in a straight line again.

But what about the memory? If the bacterium didn't remember what happened, isn't there a high chance that it would just end up doing the same thing again? Yes, but we don't need to bring RNA into this. One of the molecules involved in the cascade is activated by phosphorylation - once phosphorylated, its sensitivity changes. Over time, another molecule dephosphorylates it, but this altered sensitivity means the bacterium is more sensitive to the noxious molecule than it was previously and biases the bacterium to move away.

So "memory" in this case is actually just a modification of the gain in the response to a stimulus. Does it demonstrate that responses can be influenced by something that happened in the past without requiring a nervous system? Yup, absolutely. Is it something that gives us a better understanding of how rich long term memories are stored in the brain? Not really.

(Source: my first attempt at a PhD was working with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Bray who did a bunch of the computational modelling that demonstrated we didn't need anything overly complicated to understand what was going on here. Absolutely wonderful scientist, but I fell out with departmental IT staff over network security stuff. Ironic with hindsight. Also, this is my recollection from almost 20 years ago, so details may be inaccurate)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband History Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds

"We need to keep up with current technology and have looked to AT&T to supply us with fast Internet service," Epstein wrote in the open letter to AT&T's CEO. "Yet, although AT&T is advertising speeds up to 100Mbps for other neighborhoods, the fastest now available to us from AT&T is only 3Mbps. Your competitors now have speeds of over 200Mbps. Why is AT&T, a leading communications company, treating us so shabbily in North Hollywood?"

I saw a Tweet recently talking about how all of those "You Will" ads from the early '90s came true, and... yeah, despite AT&T: a lot of people were trying to build those things, and wondering when AT&T was going to deliver the services that we could put them on top of.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Net Culture Woodworking ]

Tara of ResearchBuzz tagged me, and yeah, this is kinda cool: Arizona DOT: Pokey-picker-upper tool gives maintenance crews a pick-me- up. Basically dangling a big ol' bar magnet off the front of maintenance trucks to pick up tire puncturing debris when they're driving on the shoulder.

[ related topics: Weblogs Machinery ]

University of Alaska — Fairbanks: Blue beads in the tundra:

Glass beads the size of blueberries found by archaeologists in a Brooks Range house pit might be the first European item ever to arrive in North America, predating the arrival of Columbus by a few decades.

Made in Venice, Italy, the tiny blue beads might have travelled more than 10,000 miles in the skin pockets of aboriginal adventurers to reach Bering Strait. There, someone ferried them across the ocean to Alaska.

[ related topics: Current Events Education Real Estate Alaska ]

I am not a Substack subscriber, so I haven't read One of the most controversial ideas in America is that children should have rights — Let's talk about homeschooling. but Jill Filipovic has a thread about her essay, and also points to Coronavirus home schooling highlights the religious right's education system influence.

I believe that a lot of kids are going to come out of lockdown much further ahead of where they'd been if they'd gone to school, and I've seen some instances of amazing home schooling, but I've also seen some ... less amazing.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama Writing Civil Liberties Education ]

Dave Sak on Facebook:

It’s too bad Bear is dead because I heard the government is having a hard time figuring out how to deliver 100 million doses to stadium parking lots across the country.

[ related topics: moron ]

Mood.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Fantastic visualization of the smart phone tracking data of people going from the Trump rally to the Capitol storming

It is an indictment of Finder and Apple's UI design team that all of Apple's tools, iMovie, Music, etc, want to manage my media for me rather than using it in place where I put it.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Music User Interface Journalism and Media Graphic Design ]

I was born in Frankfurt am Main, because my father was serving in US Military Intelligence. There's a story about how my mom and grandfather and I went to Berlin, but my Dad couldn't go because he was known to the East Germans. And when The Wall came down, my Dad watched on TV, tears on his face.

The utter paranoia fostered on both sides for the sake of building internal nationalism was pretty amazing, going down to the Marin Headlands and visiting the Nike Missile installation, and listening to the docents reminisce about being late teens or twenty-somethings being on duty and believing that it was actually a possibility that there'd be a Soviet invasion.

My parents had enough Eastern European friends when I was growing up that I'm not sure I want to revisit these stories, but occasionally it's good to be reminded. So The Guardian talking about a new TV series... I at least found it worth a read: Deutschland 89: 'We filmed it in the Stasi's old HQ – it's a horror museum'

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies tolkien Invention and Design Bay Area Art & Culture Television Pop Culture ]

Abraham Piper on Tik Tok - bowling with Sisyphus, a cool little ramble on Camus, existentialism, and finding meaning in human existence through games.

[ related topics: Games Graphics Video ]

Thinking about how often I use the site:example.com specifiers on Google searches to get past the LinkedIn/FB/etc spam results, because Google's notion of search results has been so polluted by the lack of domain specific identifiers.

[ related topics: Spam History Monty Python ]

Just gonna say it: Rancho Cordova sounds like a Buick branded El Camino.

Robot Chicken is my Star Wars canon now. Fight me.

[ related topics: Star Wars Robotics Food Space & Astronomy Birds Aviation - Helicopters ]

Interesting little counter to the "broken windows" theory: CityLab — Stephen Lurie: There’s No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood

Most serious urban violence is concentrated among less than 1 percent of a city’s population. So why are we still criminalizing whole areas?

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

RT Sir Fox @DemonBob_Badman

I want to emphasize that gender reveal parties have a higher body count and property damage value total than antifa since all of my lifetime.

Man killed after cannon explodes at baby shower

[ related topics: Archival ]

Mark VandeWettering has been playing around with some temperature and humidity sensors, which he's described on Facebook, and I'm intrigued.

Nooelec NESDR Smart v4 Bundle - Premium RTL-SDR w/Aluminum Enclosure, 0.5PPM TCXO, SMA Input & 3 Antennas. RTL2832U & R820T2-Based Software Defined Radio.

Ambient Weather F007TH Wireless Thermo-Hygrometer for WS-07, WS-08, WS-10, WS-11, WS-110, WS-70 Weather Stations.

Reception is done via rtl_433M, and Mark says:

To send the data to my MQTT server, I just run rtl_433 -F json and then pipe it to mosquitto_pub. Then I have a nodered server which can subscribe to the mqtt data and send it to my influxdb server, which grafana can graph for me.

[ related topics: Books Wireless Software Engineering Global Warming ]

Metadata is totally a thing. Also, don't point your cameras anywhere you don't want entirely public, because even if nefarious entities can't tap the images themselves, metatdata is totally a thing.

Your Security Cameras Could Be Snitching On You

Security researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing detailed their findings in a new paper, "Your Privilege Gives Your Privacy Away: An Analysis of a Home Security Camera Service." They published it Monday at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, taking place from July 6 to 9.

"Once considered a luxury item, these cameras are now commonplace in homes worldwide," Gareth Tyson, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the study authors, said in a prepared statement. "As they become more ubiquitous, it is important to continue to study their activities and potential privacy risks."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Privacy Invention and Design Bioinformatics Current Events Education Conferences ]

California Development & Planning Report: How SB 35 and AB 1763 Pushed Through An Affordable Housing Project

[ related topics: California Culture Real Estate ]

The basics of vaccination have been around for millenia, and it's always cool to read histories of when it gets rediscovered: How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox — In the early 1700s, Onesimus shared a revolutionary way to prevent smallpox.

[ related topics: Current Events Race ]

Some good notions on ways to structure events so that the Q&A section is less awful: RT Eve Tuck @tuckeve

I was just asked by a colleague how I facilitate Q & A sessions—I guess the word is out that I am very deliberate about how an academic Q & A should go after a talk or panel. I think of this as an Indigenous feminist approach to facilitating academic Q & A. 1/

8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories

I never hear much about nature or dinosaurs or things like that. Maybe you should call your show Newsy things Considered, since I don't get to hear about all the things. Or please talk more about dinosaurs and cool things.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

CNN: Leading baby food manufacturers knowingly sold products with high levels of toxic metals, a congressional investigation found

Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and MercuryStaff Report — Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer PolicyCommittee on Oversight and Reform — U.S. House of RepresentativesFebruary 4, 2021

[ related topics: Health Food Consumerism and advertising Economics Real Estate ]

RT Pavel A. Samsonov @PavelASamsonov

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN

is an anagram of

INEXPERIENCED GUESSER

RT konnaire ☻ @konnaire

DATA-DRIVEN DESIGN

is an anagram of

GAS-RIDDEN DEVIANT

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Twitter thread about the security disaster that is FootfallCam, and the social disaster that is the parent company, Meta Research.

Researcher hacks over 35 tech firms in novel supply chain attack

Birsan soon realized, should a dependency package used by an application exist in both a public open-source repository and your private build, the public package would get priority and be pulled instead -- without needing any action from the developer.

In some cases, as with PyPI packages, the researcher noticed that the package with the higher version would be prioritized regardless of wherever it was located.

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/hmemcpy/status/1359478493386592267

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Interesting: This came up on a Facebook ad or somesuch, but I've been mumbling for quite a while about how residential solar doesn't make a lot of sense because every installation is heavily custom, where larger-scale commercial is easier to engineer and gets economies of scale.

Scout Incentives is leasing commercial roof space, and parking lot shade.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Photovoltaics ]

Your random browsing through the encyclopedia moment: Schiehallion experiment

The Schiehallion experiment was an 18th-century experiment to determine the mean density of the Earth. Funded by a grant from the Royal Society, it was conducted in the summer of 1774 around the Scottish mountain of Schiehallion, Perthshire. The experiment involved measuring the tiny deflection of the vertical due to the gravitational attraction of a nearby mountain. Schiehallion was considered the ideal location after a search for candidate mountains, thanks to its isolation and almost symmetrical shape.

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Watching someone try to use SourceTree and Finder to manage a git repo, and thinking about how GUI interfaces are a time/attention tax on those of us who've figured out how to use the command-line while we try to help people using the dumbed down abstraction version.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Black CA couple lowballed by $500K in home appraisal, believe race was a factor

"We had a conversation with one of our white friends, and she said 'No problem. I'll be Tenisha. I'll bring over some pictures of my family,'" Austin said. "She made our home look like it belonged to her."

The home appraised for $1,482,000, or roughly $500,000 more than it appraised for just weeks prior.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Sociology Race ]

Charlene is making a candle holder

M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity

Watched this last night. Really enjoyed it. A lot of effort into contextualizing Escher's work, some fantastic animation and cross-cutting to help show the progression between various stages of his vision for individual works, and for the corpus.

Clearly funded by someone or someones who are holding Escher's work and want to make sure their collections keep value (Probably Nash), but done so with a real appreciation for the vision.

[ related topics: Animation Movies Work, productivity and environment ]

LAPD investigating report of George Floyd ‘Valentine’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles Police Department has launched an internal investigation after an officer reported that a photo of George Floyd with the words “You take my breath away” in a Valentine-like format was circulated among officers.

Yeah, I'm not sure there's anything left to salvage in the policing profession.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture ]

RT Mike Piccolo @mfpiccolo

The grifter: My 8 year old niece

The prize: Playing virtual hooky permanently (School Zoom calls)

The marks: My sister, my brother in law, the teacher, the school’s computer teacher, the principle and Zoom's support team

The con: How she pulled it off… thread

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music ]

Electricity retailer Griddy’s unusual plea to Texas customers: Leave now before you get a big bill

Its 29,000 customers are fully exposed to wholesale power markets that soared Monday.

[ related topics: Cool Science Economics ]

Sunset

[ related topics: Photography ]

As the problems unfold in Texas, exposing the deep systemic issues with the isolated power grid there, some unscrupulous politicians are lying about the root causes (presumably for economic gain): No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages

[ related topics: Economics ]

I realize that a certain sort of person likes "the shiny", but why did we end up with Slack, the buggy abomination of UI fail, over IRC? How did we let that happen? (Probably the same people who think Clubhouse is a good idea...)

[ related topics: User Interface ]

In an era where "literally" came to mean "figuratively", Rush Limbaugh made "I am not making this up" mean "I am totally pulling this bullshit out of my ass". May his impact on culture fade quickly.

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture ]

Today in "duh" news: Interview: California Freeway Expansion Projects Induce Travel, and Underestimate Impacts of Additional Driving — UC Davis scholars Susan Handy, Jamey Volker, and Amy Lee created a online Induced Travel Calculator tool to project how road expansion projects would increase driving

The authors created a publicly-accessible online tool, an Induced Travel Calculator, to estimate how much driving a highway expansion project in California will induce. Anyone can input the number of planned new roadway lane miles and the calculator will estimate the new driving anticipated to result. For example, in the L.A. region, each new lane-mile can be anticipated to induce an additional 8.6 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per year. City Observatory recently calibrated the calculator for a freeway expansion proposed in Portland, Oregon. City Observatory notes that greenhouse gas emissions relate directly to VMT (generally, 1,000 miles driven produces ~0.466 tons of greenhouse gases), so the calculator can be used to estimate climate change impacts of roadway expansions.

Last year they published Induced Vehicle Travel in the Environmental Review Process,

[ related topics: Invention and Design Astronomy Current Events California Culture Currency Flowers Global Warming ]

Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López & Ilias Pasidis & Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal, 2020. Congestion in highways when tolls and railroads matter: Evidence from European cities, Working Papers wpdea2011, Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona.

Abstract: Using data from the 545 largest European cities, we study whether the expansion of their highway capacity provides a solution to the problem of traffic congestion. Our results confirm that in the long run, and in line with the ’fundamental law of highway congestion’, the expansion in cities of lane kilometers causes an increase in vehicle traffic that does not solve urban congestion. We disentangle the increase in traffic due to the increases in coverage and in capacity. We further introduce road pricing and public transit policies in order to test whether they moderate congestion. Our findings confirm that the induced demand is considerably smaller in cities with road pricing schemes, and that congestion decreases with the expansion of public transportation.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Economics Public Transportation ]

I have trouble believing that any plastic sealed packaged Hamantaschen could possibly be any good, but this commercial for them is amazing: https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1362136280004513795

Yet another casualty of the gender wars: Police say expectant father in N.Y. killed by exploding gender reveal device

Christopher Pekny, 28, was assembling a device for his child’s gender reveal party in the Catskills town of Liberty when it exploded just before noon Sunday, state police said.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Academic Achievement of Children in Same- and Different-Sex-Parented Families: A Population-Level Analysis of Linked Administrative Data From the Netherlands

Abstract: Although numerous studies have examined how children raised in same-sex-parented families fare relative to children in different-sex-parented families, this body of work suffers from major methodological shortcomings. By leveraging linked administrative data from several population registers from the Netherlands covering the 2006–2018 period (n = 1,454,577), we overcome most methodological limitations affecting earlier research. The unique features of the data include complete population coverage, reliable identification of same-sex-parented families, a large number of children in same-sex-parented families (n = 3,006), multiple objective and verifiable educational outcomes, and detailed measures of family dynamics over children's entire life courses. The results indicate that children in same-sex-parented families outperform children in different-sex-parented families on multiple indicators of academic performance, including standardized tests scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment. Such advantages extend to both male and female children, and are more pronounced among children in female than male same-sex-parented families. These findings challenge deficit models of same-sex parenting.

https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-8994569

Via Medical Xpress: Children with same-sex parents do better at school than their peers

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Theater & Plays Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Education ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

A14 upgrade: 'Rare' Roman penis carving found in Cambridgeshire.

I like how "Rare" is in quotes. Like the Romans weren't drawing dicks on every stone they came across.

[ related topics: Quotes Sexual Culture Current Events Monty Python ]

PsyPost: New psychology study shows how erect nipples can alter perceptions of women

New research suggests that men — but not women — perceive nipple erection in women as a signal of sexual arousal. But the study, published in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, found that both genders project positive emotions onto women with visibly erect nipples, compared to the same women without visibly erect nipples.

APA PsycNet: The point of nipple erection 1: The experience and projection of perceived emotional states while viewing women with and without erect nipples.

To determine whether female nipple erection is perceived as a sign of sexual arousal or interest, male and female participants were asked to rate photos of real women with and without salient nipple erection on a series of 16 emotional and physiological states, including positive, negative, and sexually aroused states. Nipple erection salience was rated by independent raters, and faces in photos were obscured to prevent discerning emotional states from facial cues. Men clearly projected more sexy and positive emotions onto the stimuli when the stimuli displayed erect nipples. Whereas women did project more positive emotions with erect nipples, they did not differ in their expression of sexy. We also observed that men’s self-ratings of sexy and positive emotions were the same as their ratings of the stimuli. Women, however, reported significantly less sexy and positive emotions for themselves relative to the stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000244

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design Television Civil Liberties Databases ]

StreetsBlog NYC: OPINION: It’s Time to End NYPD’s Current Role in Crash Investigations

There is a history of bias toward drivers by the NYPD and many crashes are not investigated. Some crash victims don’t even get a two-page report. Often, the NYPD blames the victims, only to later be forced to correct the record and show they did nothing wrong.

To prevent these crashes and lack of justice from happening to others, I strongly support moving the Collision Investigation Squad to the Department of Transportation, the lead agency in implementing Vision Zero. DOT must conduct a timely, detailed, systematic analysis at every crash site to understand what engineering and road design features could have prevented the crash or lessened its often devastating impact. But improving the investigation process is only one step. DOT must then take actionable steps after each serious crash to prevent more carnage on our streets.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Graphic Design Bicycling ]

Wow. I'm searching for "unicode disclosure triangle", and Google isn't even trying to keep the malware links off the first page.

When the freakin' Wall Street Journal suggests that maybe giving free reign to the energy producers to run with zero margins and no disaster planning was a good idea... Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation

The EIA data shows how much electricity each utility or retail provider sold to residents in a given year and how much customers paid for it. The Journal calculated separate annual statewide rates for utilities and retailers by adding up all of the revenue each type of provider received and dividing it by the kilowatt-hours of electricity it sold.

From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.

[ related topics: Cool Science Television Economics Energy Monitoring ]

Tracking the Petaluma Creamery’s Owner’s History of Code Violations

Okay, Saskatchewan is not the world in general, but maybe "I can say 'no' to the normal social obligations and stay the fuck home" isn't all that bad for mental health after all? Many assumed suicides would spike in 2020. So far, the data tells a different story

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

Cute article on the Windows XP background image. I have, of course, driven past this any number of times, but never seen the then and now so nicely lined up: I found the Bay Area hill in Windows XP's iconic wallpaper

[ related topics: Microsoft History California Culture ]