Archive for June, 2017
Tesla’s Vice President of Solar Products: Competitors Are, “Kind of Fucked”
June 7th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — The quote in the title is referring to Tesla’s new solar roofing products, but as someone who sells more conventional solar products, the same can be said about the storage sector. I recently wrote: The storage industry needs to deal with the Tesla reality and […]
Life Inside the ‘Coffin Cubicles’ of Hong Kong
June 7th, 2017EG emailed, “I finally found a future retirement home for teachers like me as well as other cogs in the machine!” Via: Guardian: Photographer Benny Lam has documented the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, recording the lives of these hidden communities. Research Credit: EG
Cost to Keep Each Prisoner Locked Up in California Per Year: $75,560
June 6th, 2017Madness. Via: Los Angeles Times: Gov. Jerry Brown’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate […]
Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election
June 6th, 2017Via: The Intercept: Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided […]
London Bridge Terrorist Attack
June 4th, 2017Update: Brother On Police Payroll Via: Daily Mail: The brother of the man behind the brutal massacre of seven people in the London Bridge terror attack had actually been paid by police to fight extremism, despite it going on within his own home. Saad Butt, 29, brother of murderer Khuram, 27, was involved in the […]
SpaceX Successfully Launches Used Dragon Cargo Ship, Then Lands First-Stage Booster
June 3rd, 2017Via: space.com: For the first time in the history of commercial spaceflight, a used spacecraft has blasted off on a mission to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). After lightning strikes delayed the launch on Thursday (June 1), lingering storm clouds parted just enough for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to safely lift off […]
Almost Half of Americans Die Nearly Broke
June 3rd, 2017Via: USA Today: Americans aren’t known for being great savers. In a recent GoBankingRates study, 69% of adults admitted to having less than $1,000 in the bank, while 34% said they actually don’t have any savings at all. But apparently, this collective lack of savings doesn’t get all that much better with age. A study […]
Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of “Smart Fools”?
June 2nd, 2017Via: Scientific American: Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you […]
Why Jails Are Booming
June 2nd, 2017Via: The Atlantic: A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative examines the reasons behind this explosive growth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not driven by crime. Crime rates nationwide have dropped over the past few decades, as have conviction rates in court. So then why do jails keep swelling? It basically comes down to two things, […]
U.S. Ranked 114th out of 163 Countries Surveyed on Global Peace Index
June 1st, 2017Via: Newsweek: The United States has plummeted on a global ranking of countries based on levels of corruption, violent crime, racism and respect for human rights. The Global Peace Index 2017, issued annually by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP), shows the U.S declining 11 places in the global rankings to 114th out of […]
