tingilinde

the happiest states

If the US doesn't do well in happy country rankings, how about comparing the states?

As always the metrics are suspect, but NJ does well for emotional health and physical well-being.

 

 

read this

Greg noted a piece on front line medical workers.  

A must read.

 

 

ge to get out of the coal business

It's been a disaster for them and their shareholders.

 

life aboard a slave ship

A damning document 

a tip of the hat to Sukie

And the larger site on the slave trade referenced.

 

clowns

clowns - dangerous clowns all the way down.

snip

...

Newman already has spent more than three months detailed to the global media agency as its chief of staff, which meant that Granito — an undergraduate at the University of Michigan as recently as this spring — had been in charge of the health department's personnel while playing a role in shaping policies in the middle of a pandemic.

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a tip of the hat to Jim

 

 

common cold, flu or covid?

Covid-19 is likely to start ramping up in a month or less along with the common cold and the flu.  Sorting them out will be important, but poor testing and magical thinking could make the season much worse.  A high level guide to sorting them out.

Basically it could be a mess.  Get your flu shots.  The bright side is if enough people distance and wear masks, the flu and common cold season should be better than normal - potentially much better.

 

 

 

climate change and california

A NY Times piece on the current and future challenges.

 

 

a conversation with gordon bell and carver mead

nina totenberg's tribute to ruth bader ginsburg

Friends for fifty years.  

important elections

For 200,000 dead Americans, we don't need to question what was the most important election of their lives. It was the last one.  For those who won't die from COVID-19 in the next six months or so the most important election is on the third of November.

 

people do strange things chapter 327156

Flights to nowhere in a pandemic

 

predatory capitalism

Cory Doctorow with a tale from our golden age of predatory capitalism,

 

a new standard of care

A dramatic dentist - on several fronts.

The sort of person Trump might admire.  The headline is click-baity, but still...

 

 

 

dark skies at the roof of the world

The India-China border is an interesting place to do astronomy.  (via The New Yorker)

snip

...

In 2006, when Tundup was seventeen, a team from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (I.I.A.) arrived in Merak with a strange and lofty purpose. They wanted to build the world’s largest solar telescope there, in a village with no power and no phones, and which was reachable only by some of the highest motorable mountain passes in the world. To start, they installed the smaller pilot instrument that Tundup helps manage. The telescope was fabricated and tested in Nanjing, with the aid of the I.I.A.’s Chinese colleagues, before arriving at its home just outside the western limits of Tibet.

Today, the telescope’s readings are decoded by researchers in South India, but the device itself is supervised by young men and women from Merak. “This has been our philosophy,” G. C. Anupama, the dean of the I.I.A., which has its headquarters in Bangalore, said. “And it has a twofold advantage. Local people have pride in being involved in scientific activity—we’re not leaving them isolated—and then, in situations like today, they keep the observatories running. The data is still coming in. The science is not affected.”

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the coming american climate migration

It will certainly happen and further separate rich from poor.

snip

...

Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in The Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.

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