Wednesday, February 13th, 2019
Stephan: This map gives one a sense of the size of the American economy, but also how each state compares to an entire nation. I found it fascinating.
According to the map, California, the largest state economy in the US, had a GDP of $2.75 trillion in 2017, which is comparable to the entire economic output of the United Kingdom. And if we look at world GDP figures from last year, California was the fifth biggest economy, behind the US, China, Japan and Germany, and slightly ahead of the UK.
It really does put into perspective how gargantuan the US economy is, especially when you consider the fact that the GDP of Texas, the second-biggest state economy, is similar to Canada’s. In fact, four US states — California, Texas, New York and Florida — have economies that rank among the top 20 in the world.
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Wednesday, February 13th, 2019
Stephan: Water is destiny, and this is just the beginning.
A man collects water from the municipal water supply in West Bengal, India, on March 25, 2018.
Credit: Saikat Paul/Pacific Press/Lightrocket/Getty
My friend Mark Oats, a farmer in Australia, recently sent this note to me:
Last night I looked through the Bureau of Meteorology App at the monthly rainfall figures for January, and temperatures.
The region around Byron Lismore has had 1.6 percent of average rainfall for January and is 2.6C degrees warmer than average. 98.4 percent less rain than normal. Virtually nothing — and hence the people, plant, animal and food pressures growing.
Then looking further afield across all capital cities and major regions. … Everywhere is down on average rainfall, except just one area — North Queensland — and that is only due to some late January flooding rains.
Melbourne 9.7 percent of normal rainfall. Adelaide 0 percent. Perth 43.1 percent. Hobart 0.8 percent. Sydney 47.7 percent. Brisbane 17.9 percent of normal rainfall.
After North Queensland, the next best is Western Sydney and Wollongong at around 70 percent of average normal rainfall — all […]
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Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
Nicola Davis, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: There is so much we do not know about the other beings with whom we inhabit the earth, and we are doing them and ourselves so much damage out of greed and ignorance. Who knew bees could count?
Honeybees can learn to add and subtract, according to research showing that while the insects have tiny brains, they are still surprisingly clever.
Researchers behind the study have previously found that honeybees can apparently understand the concept of zero, and learn to correctly indicate which of two groups of objects is the smaller.
But now they say insects can learn to carry out exact numerical calculations such as adding and subtracting a given number.
“Their brain can manage a long-term rule and applying that to a mathematical problem to come up with a correct answer,” said Dr Adrian Dyer, co-author of the research from RMIT University in Australia. “That is a different type of number processing to spontaneous quantity judgments.”
If the team are right, the insects are in good company. While it was once thought that only humans could manage such calculations, the authors note recent research has revealed a veritable menagerie of creatures can keep track of numbers or even add or subtract.
“[There was] evidence that other primates could do it and then an African grey parrot, Alex, […]
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Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
Stephan: I am extremely concerned about the collapse of the bees specifically, and the insect ecosystem generally because humanity's survival depends on the wellbeing of insects. The greed and stupidity of the Trump administration, the Republican Congress, and the corporations that own them is doing untold damage to these little beings.
But, in spite of all that, small bits of good news do emerge and this story is one example. It also describes how Western Virginia coal miners may finally have an offramp.
Members of the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective inspect one of their apiaries. The collective teaches displaced coal miners in West Virginia how to keep bees as a way to supplement their income.
Credit: Kevin Johnson
Just like his grandfather and father before him, James Scyphers spent almost two decades mining coal in West Virginia.
“These were the best jobs in the area; we depended on ’em,” he recalls.
But mining jobs started disappearing, declining from 132,000 in 1990 to 53,000 in 2018, devastating the area’s economy. In a state that now has the lowest labor-force participation rate in the nation, the long-term decline of coal mining has left West Virginia residents without new options to make a living.
Scyphers was fortunate to find a construction job, but it paid two-thirds less than what he earned underground. He often took odd jobs to make ends meet. One of those odd jobs included building hives and tending bees for the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective.
“I wish this group had been here 30 years ago,” he says. “Our region needs it.”
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Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
Anna Lee and Nathaniel Cary and Mike Ellis, - Greenville News (South Carolina)
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned by the growing trend of police thuggery, whether it is civil forfeiture, as this report discusses, or violence, or death. Consider this from Atlantic Magazine: "Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic. Together, these individuals lost 57,375 years to police violence in 2015 and 54,754 to police violence in 2016. Young people and people of color were disproportionately affected: 52 percent of all the years of life lost were lost by nonwhite, non-Hispanic ethnic groups. Whites also tended to be killed by police at older ages than African Americans and Hispanics—though this is partly because in the general population, whites are older on average than the other groups."
More people are killed in the United States by law enforcement in a year than the entire population of all the countries of Europe Consider this from VOX, "Police officers in the US shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, according to the
FBI’s very limited data — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.
We have a serious problem in this country, and it rarely even gets mentioned let along properly discussed.
In South Carolina, civil forfeiture targets black people’s money most of all, exclusive investigative data shows.
When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana.
So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it.
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When Eamon Cools-Lartigue was driving on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, deputies stopped him for speeding. The Atlanta businessman wasn’t criminally charged in the April 2016 incident. Deputies discovered $29,000 in his car, though, and decided to take it.
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When Brandy Cooke dropped her friend off at a Myrtle Beach sports bar as a favor, drug enforcement agents swarmed her in the parking lot and found $4,670 in the car.
Her friend was wanted in a drug distribution case, but Cooke wasn’t involved. She had no drugs and was never charged in the 2014 bust. Agents seized her money anyway.
She worked as a waitress and carried cash because she didn’t have a checking account. She spent more than a year trying to get her money back.
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The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail examined these cases and every other court […]
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