Archive for August, 2018
Stacking Concrete Blocks Is a Surprisingly Efficient Way to Store Energy
August 19th, 2018I like to follow these relatively low-tech methods of energy storage, even though they don’t seem to catch on. It’s interesting to see a modern take on old ideas. The Energy Vault (below) is a similar concept to the Ares, which stores energy by moving a mass up a hill on rails. The Energy Vault, […]
Venezuela, Gallery: Stacks of Nearly Worthless Cash Required to Buy Common Items
August 17th, 2018I’ve been teaching my children about inflation, fiat currencies and the end result of the scam. This photo gallery is excellent for that purpose. Via: Reuters: Jittery Venezuelans on Friday rushed to shops and formed long lines in preparation for a monetary overhaul that will remove five zeros from prices in response to hyperinflation that […]
Uncle Sam Wants You: Treasury Depends More on Domestic Bond Buyers
August 17th, 2018Mmm hmm. Keep in mind, the Fed can simply monetize the debt, if enough suckers/bond buyers can’t be found. This is similar to check kiting, but since it involves trillions of dollars, they came up with a more innocuous sounding term for the practice: Open Market Operations. Via: Wall Street Journal: The U.S. government has […]
Jeff Bezos Is Gobbling Up The Swamp
August 17th, 2018Via: Vanity Fair: The controversy involves a plan to move all of the Defense Department’s data—classified and unclassified—on to the cloud. The information is currently strewn across some 400 centers, and the Pentagon’s top brass believes that consolidating it into one cloud-based system, the way the CIA did in 2013, will make it more secure […]
The San Onofre Nuclear Plant Is a ‘Fukushima Waiting to Happen’
August 17th, 2018Via: San Diego Union Tribune: Southern California Edison is keeping 3.6 million pounds of lethal radioactive waste at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear plant in San Clemente. The waste poses a significant threat to the health, safety and economic vitality of the region’s more than 8 million residents. But Edison’s plan for storing it is […]
Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet
August 17th, 2018Via: Reason: A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into […]
Turkey’s Lira Weakens More than 6 Percent on Threat of More U.S. Sanctions
August 17th, 2018Via: Reuters: Turkey’s battered lira weakened more than 6 percent against the dollar on Friday, after a U.S. warning that Ankara should expect more economic sanctions unless it hands over the detained American evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson. It has lost nearly 40 percent of its value against the dollar this year, hit by both the […]
The One About a Russian Satellite “Raising Alarm” with U.S.
August 16th, 2018Just a few stories for context about this Russian satellite situation: Mystery Russian Satellite’s Behaviour Raises Alarm in U.S.: A mysterious Russian satellite displaying “very abnormal behaviour” has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official. “We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” […]
Inflation: Venezuela Will Cut Five Zeros from Currency
August 16th, 2018Ah yes, ye ole Zimbucks solution: Via: WRAL: Faced with nearly incomprehensible inflation — 32,714 percent as of Wednesday — Venezuelan officials thought they had a solution: They changed the color of the bank notes and increased their denomination. Then they said they would lop off three zeros. And when that didn’t seem enough, they […]
Pennsylvania Report Details Decades of Sexual Abuse by Priests
August 14th, 2018Via: Reuters: Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused thousands of children over a 70-year period and silenced victims through “the weaponization of faith” and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops, the state attorney general said on Tuesday. An 884-page report made public by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro after a two-year investigation contained […]
