Covered this week; This island’s “water microgrid” is saving its aquifer from tourists… Maybe your nocturnal ways aren’t that big of a problem… Self-driving cars are delusional tech optimism rooted in greed, sorry… Living off the grid, here’s how… Another Oakland A’s Stadium proposal run up the flag pole… The Village Voice shutters the doors after 63 years… The retail apocalypse in pictures…
August 27, 2018
Bluewater’s system also has broader applications for any community struggling with access to clean water. “We’re in a vicious cycle now where we have a problem with contamination or lack of access to drinking water globally,” Jacobson says. “But the solution for many consumers today is they go out and buy bottled water instead.” That, he says, perpetuates the use of plastics, which often end up in landfill or in bodies of water, where they further contribute to contamination. “What we try to do is tackle it by saying if you can trust your tap water or water source, you don’t have to buy bottled water, and you can contribute to more sustainable water use.”
A lack of potable water is one of the largest dilemmas on Earth, so trade-offs aside, this is a very important development.
August 28, 2018
“The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?”
For so many years… decades, I’ve taken heat for my nocturnal ways. I’m not ready for bed until 3 am or so typically… and if I have my druthers, I like waking up around 9:30 or 10 am… what’s to say? It works for me… so after all these years of reading newspapers… finally a story for me, I feel vindicated.
August 29, 2018
Rideshare driving has worked out pretty well for me… as I’ve said, you don’t make enough to make a living, but if you do it to supplement another income, it can be a formidable source of extra dollars that can put you over the top… for that reason, I’d hate to see it end. The conventional wisdom on driving rideshare is that human drivers are just a stand-in… place fillers, there until the day that self-driving cars take over… but the rhetoric has always seemed overblown to me… like there’s no way this technology can be as close as they report it to be, at least in a safe form that passengers, or society for that matter will accept and adopt. There’s a sort of zen to giving 20 rides on a Saturday night in Chicago… the sheer number of obstacles put in your path getting that done can amaze. Anyway, this is a great article on the topic. What actually ends up coming to pass and when, remains to be seen.
“Our intelligence comes from social existence. We call somebody smart who can look in our eye, and we can trade understanding. If you’re on the highway, you can see far ahead. You could see far behind. If you’re an experienced driver, there are many ways that you see a car as another person, in a way. You can read that car. Self-driving cars do proximity around your own vehicle, and don’t really look very far ahead. They’re following rules like playing chess. An experienced good driver has these capabilities that I don’t believe any time soon will be duplicated in a self-driving car.”
August 30, 2018
Stories like this are infinitely interesting… pioneers really, folks willing to make the commitment, put in the work, make mistakes and learn from them. Enjoy.
“In the far corner of the front yard of a large house in Florida, an RV rests, shaded by trees as clothing on a nearby line sways in the breeze. In this RV, Nat Geo explorer Thomas Henry Culhane lives with his wife, Enas Culhane, almost entirely off the grid.”
August 31, 2018
Why do I read a website sub-titled “The Obsessive Study of Athletics Aesthetics”? Well, because the Oakland A’s have been my second favorite team since around 1988 when I was living out there and took advantage of insanely cheap season ticket packages ($540 for 81 home games). Canseco (since proven out as a dipshit), McGwire, Dave Henderson, Steve Ontiveros and funny enough, the highest paid Athletic that year was Carney Lansford who pulled down a whopping million three, which is practically the minimum wage in the Majors now in 2018… Anyway, the desire to move out of the Coliseum (a truly dismal place to play and watch baseball) existed even back then for the A’s… and now, 30 years later, they’re still there… and still dreaming. One way or another, this is a cool read on yet another proposal…
Mark Anderson began tweeting some graphics of a ballpark he was hoping the Oakland Athletics might someday build (if they ever leave the Coliseum). At first I thought it was just for fun, but after speaking with Mark, I realized the proposal was more than just some pipe dream (though it may ultimately end up being just that). But he went from dream to almost-reality with this, and I asked him if he’d share a pretty incredible story about his vision for the new home of the A’s.
September 1, 2018
Village Voice, the iconic New York City alt-weekly that began publication in 1955, announced that it would cease production Friday, nearly a year after the Voice ended its print edition and moved to digital-only.
A fantastic 63-year run… very sad that a way couldn’t have been found to keep it going… Luckily, we’ll still have the Archive. It hasn’t been solidified yet what permanent form that will take, but there’s some versions popping up here and there…
September 2, 2018
“These places defined a very uniquely American experience,” says photographer Jesse Rieser. “There were a couple of years where that could have been a meeting place for you and your peers, a place to try to flirt with girls and fail miserably, or head to the arcade–or whatever it was. It was this 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s experience that a lot of people shared around the country.”
