Tuesday, August 15th, 2017
HIBA BAROUD, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Vanderbilt University - Salon/The Conversation
Stephan: If you have travelled to Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Seoul recently you know how shabby America's infrastructure has become. We seem to have bottomless pots of money for endless war and the military-industrial section of our economy, but woefully inadequate funds to maintain our roads, bridges, tunnels, terminals and airports. Here's some data.
Credit: AP
How does infrastructure in the U.S. compare to that of the rest of the world? It depends on who you ask.
On the last two report cards from the American Society of Civil Engineers, U.S. infrastructure scored a D+. This year’s report urged the government and private sector to increase spending by US$2 trillion within the next 10 years, in order to improve not only the physical infrastructure, but the country’s economy overall.
Meanwhile, the country’s international rank in overall infrastructure quality jumped from 25th to 12th place out of 138 countries, according to the
World Economic Forum.
The quality of infrastructure systems can be measured in different ways – including efficiency, safety and how much money is being invested. As a researcher in risk and resilience of infrastructure systems, I know that infrastructure assessment is far too complex to boil down into one metric. For instance, while the U.S. ranks second in road infrastructure spending, it falls in the 60th place for road safety, due to the high rate of deaths from road […]
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Tuesday, August 15th, 2017
MEGAN GEUSS, - ars TECHNICA
Stephan: There are so many exciting things occurring around the world as other nations work to exit the carbon energy era while Trump and his zombie minions here in the U.S. are trying to re-invigorate fossil fuels. Here's a novel idea they are trying in Denmark.
Credit: Nissan
A year-long trial in Denmark is showing that utilities can use parked electric vehicles (EVs) as spare batteries, and those EVs can earn quite a bit of money for their owners from the utilities.
In an interview with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Nissan Europe’s director of energy services, Francisco Carranza, said that a fleet of 10 Nissan e-NV200 vans has earned €1,300 ($1,530) over the year.
Electricity grids around the world are facing an era of rapid change as more electric vehicles hit the road and as grid supply changes. For grid managers, sometimes small amounts of power are necessary to regulate current frequency and keep the grid working. At the same time, if a lot of electric vehicles draw power from the grid concurrently (for example, when they’re parked at home at night, or when they’re parked at work during the day), that threatens to change how grid operators plan to meet demand, as well.
Researchers and grid managers have theorized that vehicle-to-grid connections could help solve some of these problems. By installing […]
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Tuesday, August 15th, 2017
Patrick Gillespie and Tal Kopan, - CNN Money
Stephan: As I have said in these pages over and over Republican economic policies are always inferior, because they are always based on assisting the greed of special interests, instead of fostering wellbeing. I really don't know how anyone who has gotten past mastering the multiplication table can become deluded by Republican social policies. They are always more expensive, less effective, less productive, and less pleasant to live under.
In a report published Thursday, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School said the immigration plan, dubbed the RAISE Act, would result in 4.6 million lost jobs by the year 2040. It also found that the U.S. economy would be 2% smaller than it would be under the current immigration policy during that time. (emphasis added)
Last week, Trump threw his support behind the RAISE Act, a bill crafted by Republican Senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton. The proposal seeks to cut legal immigration to the U.S. by 50% within a decade.
“If you have fewer workers, we will have less economic growth,” said Kimberly Burham, a managing director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research team at UPenn.
Economists say the U.S. economy depends on foreign workers to grow the labor force and maintain growth. Since 2000, Baby Boomers have been retiring at a much faster pace than the U.S. job market has been growing, according to data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve and Labor Department.
There were 27 million foreign-born workers in the United States last year, government […]
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Tuesday, August 15th, 2017
Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, Host and Executive Producer and Broadcast News Producer and Weekly Co-host at Democracy Now! - truthout
Stephan: Surprise, surprise.
Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions
It’s been six months since Attorney General Jeff Sessions was sworn in as head of the Department of Justice. In that time, Sessions has managed to undo nearly every aspect of Obama’s civil rights legacy. We look at how Sessions is using the Justice Department to roll back decades of progress on civil rights, voting rights, LGBT rights and police reform. We speak with Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She is the former head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.
TRANSCRIPT:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Wednesday marked six months since Attorney General Jeff Sessions was sworn in as head of the Department of Justice. In the last half-year, Sessions has wasted no time undoing nearly every aspect of Obama’s civil rights legacy, from voting rights to affirmative action to police reform and LGBT rights. Under Sessions, the Justice Department has reinstituted the use of private prisons, reignited the so-called war on drugs and indicated it will no longer address systemic police abuses. […]
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Monday, August 14th, 2017
Betsy McKay, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: In all the blather about Obamacare, Trumpcare, yadda...yadda... none of the essential issues concerning the failure of the illness profit model are being addressed. There are now large parts of America in which what passes for healthcare is second world at best. This trend is getting worse and worse, and as a country we are not addressing it, which means a growing number of rural Americans are watching their healthcare opportunities vanish like a fog.
The ambulance entrance doors are chained shut at Mercy Westside Hospital, which opened in 1949 as West Side District Hospital, and is in dilapidated and vandalized condition while up for sale in Taft, California.
Credit: David McNew
MCMINNVILLE, TENNESSE —Whitney Brown was in labor with her first baby when suddenly she couldn’t breathe.
Convulsions shook her body. Ms. Brown’s blood pressure and oxygen levels dropped, and the baby’s heart rate plunged. Nurses at Saint Thomas River Park Hospital called obstetrician Dawnmarie Riley, who minutes later burst into the operating room in such a rush her hospital scrubs were inside out.
Dr. Riley delivered the baby girl in an emergency caesarean section, and Ms. Brown was taken to intensive care. Doctors at River Park, the only hospital in a central Tennessee county of 40,000 people, didn’t know what had caused Ms. Brown’s seizure. But they knew one thing: The 28-year-old woman needed more than they could provide.
What followed was a race to save Ms. Brown, a high-risk medical […]
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