Here’s the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don’t have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it’s a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

It’s the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said… Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

Their numbers are declining, but it’s leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don’t toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham… which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

The entire history of the nation of Israel is basically proving the axiom that “hurt people hurt people,” but on a geopolitical scale.

Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.

Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.

Any time you see perovskite-based cells mentioned, you can assume for the time being that it’s just R&D. Perovskites are cool materials that open up a lot of neat possibilities, like cheaply inkjet-printing PV cells, but they have fundamental durability issues in the real world. When exposed to water, oxygen, and UV light, the perovskite crystals break down fairly rapidly.

That’s not to say that the tech can’t be made to work – at least one lab team has developed cells with longevity similar to silicon PVs – but somebody’s going to have to come up with an approach that solves for performance, longevity, and manufacturability all at once, and that hasn’t happened yet. I imagine that when they do, that will be front-and-center in the press release, rather than just an efficiency metric.

North County was previously where all the middle class white people went after fleeing the urban core. Then as more African American families moved in to get away from urban decay, the white population moved to suburbs south and west of the city. This isn’t civil rights history, either – it’s been an ongoing process as recently as the 90s. My (white) dad grew up in Blackjack, just a short ways from Ferguson, and his parents only moved out of the area around 1995. When the unrest around Michael Brown’s death kicked off, he turned on the evening news to see the supermarket where my grandmother used to buy groceries going up in flames.

This is actually becoming somewhat commonplace. For example, in many cutting-edge cancer therapies, blood is drawn from the patient, processed in tissue-culture suites on site to extract the patient’s immune cells and sensitize them to some marker expressed by their specific cancer cells, and then the modified immune cells are returned to the patient room and transfused back into their bodies. It’s not cheap per se but it’s something that most top-tier cancer centers can do, and to do the similar process of extracting stem cells, inducing them to transform into pancreatic islet cells, and transplanting those into the patient’s pancreas isn’t that big of a jump – and it’d be cheaper than a lifetime of insulin in any case. It also points the way towards treating other kinds of organ failure without the risk of rejection, too.

I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Absent Reagan, the Republican nominee would have been Bush Sr., and he likely would have won in the general – Carter was wildly unpopular due to persistent stagflation, the Iranian oil crisis, and the related hostage crisis. The GOP could have nominated an expired jar of mayonnaise and still won the election, and then done most of the same things anyway – Reagan was infamously more a charismatic figurehead than a technocrat, and visibly going senile in his second term. The conservative cabal moving the levers behind the scene would have been largely the same.

As ever, the Great Man theory of history tends to be more hagiography than fact, and it’s most informative to look at larger socio-cultural trends.

And like so many things in modern life, you can lay at least part of the blame on Reagan. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union in order to force them to accept longer hours, lower pay, and brutal shift schedules – look up “The Rattler” sometime, and then realize that the person directing traffic at airport that thousands of people are arriving and departing from every hour probably hasn’t slept for more than a couple hours in the last three days.

Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.

On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.

Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.

Ed Zitron has suggested that Altman is good at wooing VC capital and developing a cult of personality, but not particularly good at showing returns or even at staying focused on a task. I can easily believe that if you’re not the sort to fall in line with the corporate religion he’d promoted, that you’d find yourself being ostracized and subjected to abuse.

My suspicion/understanding of what went down is that the board wanted him out for funneling money to undisclosed side projects and failing to deliver on more central priorities, and then his personality cult revolted. Things may be turning against him internally, though, especially if successive iterations of their core product don’t live up to Altman’s techno-messianic predictions of its capabilities and/or financials sag to the point that having a job there ceases to guarantee entry into the Bay Area’s financial upper crust.

This is what’s actually meant by the “invisible hand.” They pushed prices past what the market was willing to bear, and lost sales as people made do without. Now they’re adjusting prices back down, because it makes more sense to accept a smaller margin and make it up in volume. It’s a textbook example of the demand curve in action.

When market-based systems work, they work fairly elegantly. It’s the cases where they break down that I get concerned with.

The Wikipedia article for these little monsters describes the males aggressively fighting over females mid-mating, to the point of killing some as they attempt to tear them away from one another, and then squeezing the eggs out of their dead bodies to fertilize them… Gonna guess it’s the same one.

If I recall, it’s between 3x and 10x as expensive to build buried lines versus overhead, tending more towards the high end of that number in existing built-out neighborhoods where there’s a lot of existing stuff in the right-of-way that needs to be removed or worked around somehow.

The real problem that folks have been bringing up is for-profit electric utilities ignoring line maintenance and instead just pocketing as profit the funds that should have paid for that work. Lots of folks in my area have noted that the utility used to regularly trim trees near the lines, but that work basically stopped after it merged into a larger regional power company. Even when people would call to report branches basically draped over the lines, the utility would ignore the issue.

For what it’s worth, I live in a relatively small pocket where power is provided by a county public utility, and the outages in our area were much less severe and power was restored to all but one or two people within a day. The utility board is far from perfect, but in this case they performed significantly better than their for-profit peer around us.

I’ve got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I’ve seen from “status symbol” card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I’ve ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that “low” rate you’d have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

Okay, body slams are out, but what about The People’s Elbow?