Tuesday, August 14th, 2018
Nathanael Johnson, - Grist
Stephan: I don't go into grocery stores very often because my wife grows most of our food. About every six weeks we go to the mainland and visit Costco, and Trader Joe's where we buy protein, oils, citrus, flour, and organic cleaning materials. But I went into our local supermarket the other day, and was stunned at the prices. Twelve ninety five for a pound of garlic. Over four dollars for a head of organic lettuce. It made me think a lot about food, access to food, and price. I'm not the only one.
Credit: Grist / Armin Staudt / EyeEm / Fridholm, Jakob / Douglas Sacha / Getty
Chris Sayer pushed his way through avocado branches and grasped a denuded limb. It was stained black, as if someone had ladled tar over its bark. In February, the temperature had dropped below freezing for three hours, killing the limb. The thick leaves had shriveled and fallen away, exposing the green avocados, which then burned in the sun. Sayer estimated he’d lost one out of every 20 avocados on his farm in Ventura, just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, but he counts himself lucky.
“If that freeze was one degree colder, or one hour longer, we would have had major damage,” he said.
Avocado trees start to die when the temperature falls below 28 degrees or rises above 100 degrees. If the weather turns cold and clammy during the short period in the spring when the flowers bloom, bees won’t take to the air and fruits won’t develop. The trees also die if water runs […]
1 Comment
Tuesday, August 14th, 2018
David Dayen, - Huffington Post
Stephan: I have argued for publicly owned banks for years because when you look at the outcome data it is clear that having public banks is a positive proof of the Theorem of Wellbeing. Here's the story.
Pedestrian signals can be seen outside of a Citibank branch in New York, October 6, 2008. Citigroup said it is suing Wachovia and Wells Fargo and is seeking more than $60 billion in damages over Wells Fargo’s competing bid for Wachovia.
Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson
Trinity Tran is a powerful speaker. Addressing a rally in downtown Los Angeles for New York congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 33-year-old activist and organizer thundered, “We are witnessing the emergence of a solution, from profit and greed to collective prosperity. We can empower our community from the ground up. It’s time to take our power back.”
Tran’s organization, Public Bank LA, is leading the revival of an idea that had largely been discarded until the financial crisis. In November, Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity to approve a public bank for the city. If the measure passes, it would become the first government-owned bank developed in the United States since 1919.
No Comments
Tuesday, August 14th, 2018
James Hitchings-Hales, - The Local (Denmark)
Stephan: Here is good news, but it leaves you with a disconcerting challenge. We can't we, why don't we do something like this, it could eliminate hunger in the United States? It is a question of culture. Denmark is a society oriented towards fostering wellbeing. The United States is a society oriented toward enriching a small percentage of people by increasing their profits.
A Danish refrigerator.
Credir: Thomas Lekfeldt/Ritzau Scanpix
Danes living in apartments have reduced food waste by 24 percent per person and Danish households have reduced food waste by an average of eight percent per person over the past six years, according to new figures from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency.
Total food waste reduction by Danish households amounts to 14,000 tonnes between 2011 and 2017, the agency, part of the Ministry of Environment and Food, wrote on its website.
The figures show that Danish households had a total food wastage of 261,000 tonnes in 2011-12, a figure that was reduced to 247,000 tonnes in 2017.
And when it comes to people living in apartments in Denmark, the report shows that they have reduced their food waste by an average of 24 percent per person over the past six years. However, there was no decline in food waste among those living in detached houses.
Apartment dwellers currently throw out one and a half kilograms of edible food per household per week, according to the […]
No Comments
Tuesday, August 14th, 2018
Walter Einenkel , Staff Writer - Daily Kos
Stephan: We have endless billions to spend on the technologies of the military; why is it do you think that we can't develop a technology for safe voting that protects our democracy? Remember the story I ran in July about the hackers convention? Well, it was worse than originally reported.
As this story describes America's current voting technology can be manipulated by an 11-year-old in 10 minutes. Given that our 2016 national election was almost certainly manipulated in several ways by Russia, what I would consider an act of war, how is that still possible?
Voting machines
The second annual DEFCON Voting Village took place over a weekend at the end of July in Las Vegas, during the 29th annual DEFCON security convention. Computer experts and hackers meet annually to discuss and show off the latest and greatest computer security systems and practices. The Voting Village allow hackers to work on various “in use” and “not in use” voting machines, and see if and how they can hack them. It has been known for some time that our computer voting across the country is woefully lacking in state-of-the-art security, mostly because of a lack of financing and upgrading of our elections system. There’s a lot of money in elections—just not in the machines that count the votes.
BuzzFeed News explains that a dummy election was held using the machines, and then hackers were given the chance to monkey with the results. The basic idea in hacking these machines is to offer up opportunities for improvements in security. If you know the vulnerabilities in your machines, you can hopefully fix […]
No Comments
Monday, August 13th, 2018
Tim O’Shea, - the doctor within
Stephan: Here is a very provocative essay that makes, to my mind, some very important points. A society cannot fix what it will not admit is true. And only we can make that truth different.
Aldous Huxley’s inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe glimpsed by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all bonds, all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand – in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched infinite rawness.
Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated.
It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in […]
2 Comments
