Ecotricity: A More Solar Friendly Electricity Retailer in New Zealand
January 25th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Do you live in New Zealand?
Do you have a grid-tie solar power system?
and/or
Do you own an electric car?
Check out Ecotricity.
Time-of-use tariffs mean that the price of your electricity drops dramatically at night, in other words, when your solar system isn’t generating power.
Do you own and electric car?
With Ecotricity, you can charge it at night when the rates drop.
There are other scenarios where Ecotricity makes sense. I have a solar power customer who runs a lot of space heating in the winter at night. While her 4KW solar system helps out during the day, her bill gets shot to hell running those heaters at night. This is an example of no-brainer case to move to Ecotricity.
While it’s common for companies to offer “night” rates, Ecotricity is the only retailer offering solar plans with seven different import tariffs to most of NZ.
If Ecotricity isn’t available where you are in NZ, let me know. I have a contact at Ecotricity who really gets things done. This is not the normal, “Hamish is on holiday in Aussie for the next two months” sort of company that we’re all used to in NZ. (No offense meant to any Hamishes out there.) These guys are very serious about offering a good alternative to the more established retailers.
Harvard Is Trying to Build an AI as Fast as the Human Brain
January 25th, 2016Via: Wired UK:
Harvard University has been awarded $28 million (£19m) to investigate why brains are so much better at learning and retaining information than artificial intelligence. The award, from the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA), could help make AI systems faster, smarter and more like human brains.
While many computers have a comparable storage capacity, their ability to recognise patterns and learn information does not match the human brain. But a better understanding of how neurons are connected could help develop more complex artificial intelligence.
Blizzard Senate Antics: Senate Leader Surprises Lawmakers with New ISIS War Powers Request
January 25th, 2016Via: DefenseOne:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered members a snow-weekend surprise late Wednesday night: Quietly teeing up a debate on the legal underpinning for the fight against ISIS.
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The AUMF put forward by McConnell would not restrict the president’s use of ground troops, nor have any limits related to time or geography.
“The Pentagon Has No Clue How Many Weapons It Has Lost to ISIS”
January 25th, 2016Lost. *wink*
None of this is by design. Oh no. Shit happens.
They forgot to mention the stacks of cash: 2011: $6.7 Billion In Cash Missing in Iraq
Via: Mother Jones:
For more than a decade, the United States has supplied huge quantities of weapons and military hardware to the Iraqi government—and a large chunk of that equipment has disappeared and landed in the hands of ISIS fighters and members of Iranian-backed Shiite militias responsible for massacring civilians. Everything from M-16s and bullets to Humvees and tanks have been lost. But neither the US nor Iraqi governments can say how much US-supplied materiel has been diverted to militant groups or how it’s ending up there.
Losing weapons to extremists and insurgents has long been a problem for the US military and the Iraqi army, but it became more urgent after ISIS seized chunks of Iraq in 2014, overrunning Iraqi troops and sweeping up their weapons. With that equipment, ISIS solidified its hold on its captured territory and drew the United States back into Iraq. Still, the Pentagon has not been able to monitor the loss of its weapons and other supplies to ISIS. “The bottom line is that the US military does not have a means to track equipment that has been taken from the Government of Iraq by ISIL,” Commander Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, wrote in an email to Mother Jones, using the government’s preferred acronym for ISIS.
More Babies Are Being Born with Organs Outside Their Bodies, and Experts Have No Idea Why
January 25th, 2016Related? Pesticides in Paradise: Hawaii’s Spike in Birth Defects Puts Focus on GM Crops:
At a Starbucks just outside Honolulu, Sidney Johnson, a pediatric surgeon at the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children who oversees all children born in Hawaii with major birth defects and operates on many, says he’s been thinking about pesticides a lot lately. The reason: he’s noticed that the number of babies born here with their abdominal organs outside, a rare condition known as gastroschisis, has grown from three a year in the 1980s to about a dozen now.
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Via: Washington Post:
When Brooke gave birth, she wasn’t able to hold her newborn daughter against her, feel the baby’s tiny chest rise and fall as it issued its first, tremendous wail.
Instead, she got only a brief glimpse of her child, Anna, before the little girl was whisked away into surgery.
What she saw was disquieting: Her infant daughter’s intestines protruded outside her body, dark and slick and alien-looking. It would take a nerve-wracking operation and weeks in the intensive care unit until her internal organs were back were they belonged and baby Anna could finally come home, Brooke wrote for the CDC (the post does not give her last name).
Anna was born with gastroschisis, a rare birth defect that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said has become worryingly more common in recent years, particularly for young African American mothers.
In a report published Friday, the public health agency said that it found 30 percent more cases of the disease between 2006 and 2012 than it did from 1995 to 2005. Among African American mothers who were younger than 20, the number of babies born with the disease jumped 263 percent.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts
January 24th, 2016This is what Soviet-style systems do. The U.S. Government is the enabler via the student loan scam.
Via: The Atlantic:
Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats.
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One adjunct teacher, JJ, posting a comment online, calculated his/her pay as an adjunct as $65 per student per semester, adding up to the princely sum of $2,000, noting that “each student paid $45,000 in tuition and took about 4 classes a semester.… I think their parents would be rather upset to learn that only $65 of the $45,000 went to pay one professor for an entire semester.”
“Zika Virus”: El Salvador Asks Women Not to Get Pregnant Until 2018
January 23rd, 2016Via: Washington Post:
The rapid spread of the Zika virus has prompted Latin American governments to urge women not to get pregnant for up to two years, an extraordinary precaution aimed at avoiding birth defects believed to be linked to the mosquito-borne illness.
What until recently was a seemingly routine public health problem for countries that are home to a certain type of mosquito has morphed into a potentially culture-shaping phenomenon in which the populations of several nations have been asked to delay procreation. The World Health Organization says at least 20 countries or territories in the region, including Barbados and Bolivia, Guadeloupe and Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Panama, have registered transmission of the virus.
The Story Behind National Reconnaissance Office’s Octopus Logo
January 21st, 2016Never mind the nauseating gibberish in the release from NRO. I thought this commentary was comedy gold.
Via: Muckrock:
The logo was widely lampooned as emblematic of the intelligence community’s tone-deafness to public sentiment. Incidentally, an octopus enveloping the planet also so happens to be the logo of SPECTRE, the international criminal syndicate that James Bond is always thwarting. So there’s that.
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As for the question of “why a giant octopus,” the NRO offers up these two clunky paragraphs, written with all the verve of a ninth-grader who only made it two-thirds of the way through the book.
Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
January 20th, 2016Via: California Institute of Technology:
Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.
The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.
“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”
Oil Breaks Below $27, Down Over 5%
January 20th, 2016S&P500 October 2014 low is taken out intraday.
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S&P500 leaning over, real ugly. Through all recent weekly supports now.
If anyone at the PPT is awake at the switch… This is it.
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USO bids $8
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This move is nuts.
Crude Oil Feb 16 (CLG16.NYM) -NY Mercantile
$26.86 Down $1.60(5.62%) 11:07AM EST
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Via: Reuters:
Oil futures extended their decline on Wednesday, with U.S. crude touching its lowest since 2003, as a global supply glut bumped up against bearish financial news that sparked deeper worries over demand.
