Stephan: Carbon jobs are withering away. and there is nothing the Trump administration can do to stop that. They can merely impede the transition and, in the process, inflict much pain and suffering on millions, so a tiny percentage can protect their invested infrastructure and milk it as long as possible.
Happily, the underlying trend remains committed to ending the carbon energy era. This struggle, and Trump's policies we can already see are going to be negative proofs of the Theorem of Wellbeing. They are less efficient, less productive, less pleasant to live under and ultimately they will be short lived. The carbon-corporate goal is being overwhelmed by the power of collective expressed intention. Good News.
The Silver State Solar Energy Center in Primm, Nevada
Credit: Erik Verdusoo/LV Review-Journal
President Trump may be focused on saving coal miners, but solar continues to be the hot spot in today’s jobs market.
Solar employment expanded last year 17 times faster than the total US economy, according to an International Renewable Energy Agency report published on Wednesday that cited data from the Solar Foundation.
Overall, more than 260,000 people work in the solar industry, up by 24% from 2015.
The solar business has benefited from the falling cost of solar energy and generous federal tax credits that make it more affordable for businesses and homeowners to install solar panels.
“It seems to be one of the few areas of high-paying, blue-collar jobs — and you don’t have to learn to code,” said Bryan Birsic, CEO of Wunder Capital, a fintech company that allows investors to help finance solar panel installations.
Awareness is also up as Americans concerned about climate change look for cleaner energy options. Elon Musk has helped add to the […]
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Aaron Rupar, - Think Progress
Stephan: I find it hard to believe that grown men and women can sit and listen to this kind of crap, and as a group not name it as vengeful bullying, and an extraordinary tax break for the uber-rich. But that doesn't happen and it is this lack of integrity that so outrages people across the spectrum. This is why the Congress is held in such low esteem.
And as a thought experiment try to imagine the ugly view of the world you would have to have to even propose a budget like this.
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney testifies on Capitol Hill on May 24 before the House Budget Committee hearing on President Trump’s fiscal 2018 federal budget.
Credit:: AP/Jacquelyn Martin
During a hearing about the $3.6 trillion in cuts to domestic programs included in President Trump’s proposed budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney made a case that the fiscal interests of the unborn should take precedence over the lives of present-day Americans — or at least those who rely on food stamps to eat or public schools to educate their children.
During a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) grilled Mulvaney about the budget’s 25 percent cut to food assistance for the poorest Americans.
“Mr. Mulvaney, at least 20 percent of people eligible for SNAP don’t even receive SNAP because of stigma and other reasons,” she said. “So there are more people who need SNAP benefits… And you have […]
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Matthew Yglesias, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This report says, "Construction costs in the United States are significantly higher than what Europeans pay, but when given the opportunity to look into the cause and ways to streamline costs, the GOP killed the investigation."
Based on what it does, not what it says I think its clear the Republican Party fundamentally places party and profit above country.
Transit construction
Credit: Peter Macdiarmid
Construction costs in the United States are significantly higher than what Europeans pay, but when given the opportunity to look into the cause and ways to streamline costs, the GOP killed the investigation. (emphasis added.)
Mass transit construction costs in the United States appear to be far higher than what European countries pay for comparable projects.
The Second Avenue Subway in New York City, for example, is being built at a cost of nearly $1.7 billion per kilometer while new subway lines are being built in Paris, Copenhagen, and Berlin for about $250 million per kilometer. It’s not entirely clear what accounts for those differences or what the United States can do to increase the cost-effectiveness of its tunneling. But one clue could come from studying what Los Angeles, the city that’s doing the most rail construction in the US these days, is doing to deliver lower-than-normal costs. They’ve also been publishing project management best practices to explain what they’ve gleaned.
Read the Full Article
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Stephan: It is my considered opinion that the charter school movement is not really about improved education. There may be a small percentage of people who still believe it is about better education but the outcome data already makes it clear that is usually not the case.
It is really about two things, profit, and the "christian" cult's passionate desire to pierce the wall separating church and state so that the public treasury pays for "christian" education that is anti-science, anti-woman, and suffused with the sense of self-righteous superiority and persecution so essential to any form of authoritarian fundamentalism. It is not a natural fit.
Here is a report covering how this trend is playing out in Michigan.
A hallway at the Cornerstone flagship campus showcasing the network’s guiding principles
Credit: Allie Gross / Chalkbeat
When prospective families arrived at Cornerstone Schools’ flagship campus on Nevada Street in Detroit last month, they were greeted by a staff primed to woo and sell.
Folding chairs had been placed in the tidy front entrance of the northeast Detroit school, and one by one, administrators stood up to speak about the rich culture and strong curriculum that parents and children had come to know and love since the religious school opened in 1991.
“You know, when you come in the fall, we’re going to have a team of parents waiting for you to teach you how to do things because there’s a way to do things. Just like when you go to a church or join a new group,” said Candace Brockman, the primary-school principal and soon to be K-8 leader, to the crowd of potential families.
In March, Cornerstone announced that starting next year, its flagship private Christian school would stop providing primary- and middle-school classes. Instead, […]
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Joshua Eaton, Investigative Reporter - Think Progress
Stephan: When you read books about living under an authoritarian national government one of the classic actions of such administrations is to control information. It's one thing to read about it, quite another to live under such policies. In the early 1980s I started going to the Soviet Union regularly, first for citizens diplomacy and an art exchange and, then, for business. At one point I was spending three or four months of year in the USSR, and continued to do so until 1994.
Being there one the strangest things to which I, as an American, had to adjust was the fact that there was no publicly available telephone book, nor functioning information operator. Not were there any acknowledged switchboards In hotels, each room's phone was a different number not an extension. If you wanted to get someone's telephone number they had to give it to you. And the idea of publicly available outcome data would have been unthinkable.
Authoritarian governments don't like citizens having access to performance and outcome data. Why? Because governments that have other priorities than social wellbeing don't want people to know how expensive, inefficient, and unproductive their policies actually are.
Therefore, as predictable as a train schedule Donald Trump's administration from the get go has been stripping policy outcome data from public databases. This report gives a good summary of what is happening.
This is an absolute crisis
Credit: Think Progress
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, thousands of government records that were previously public have gone offline—from a massive database of records on animal welfare at the Department of Agriculture to climate change data across the government.
The move has confirmed some of the worst fears of scientists who raced to back up government data on climate change ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Those efforts have archived terabytes worth of data on private servers. But government records on everything from labor violations to animal welfare are still at risk of being taken offline or destroyed altogether.
That’s why ThinkProgress is launching Disappearing Data, a project to recover government data that’s been taken offline.
We’ve already filed Freedom of Information Act requests for six disappeared websites. And we’ve already scored a victory: In response to requests by ThinkProgress and others, the Environmental Protection Agency posted Read the Full Article
