NYMag.com Jan 2018 There is power in a union. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not. If you want a two-sentence explanation for why the Midwest is turning red (and thus, why Donald Trump is president), you could do worse than that. With its financial contributions …
Feynman technique for improved learning, teaching, communication
The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success. In fact, he created a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else. It’s called the Feynman Technique and it will help you learn anything faster and with greater understanding. Best of all, …
Planting a flag for hope. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be livestreamed
In These Times, Jan 2018 …Our society as a whole can only guarantee its future security through social and physical investments. Investing in the stock market achieves the opposite; it expands the wealth and power of Wall Street, which likes tight budgets and low levels of public spending. When we instead put people to work building public infrastructure, when we …
Democracy is at Stake in Supreme Court Cases on Partisan Redistricting
The Supreme Court has the chance to strike a blow across the nation to protect an essential pillar of democracy by ruling against districts designed to amplify the voice of the chosen and virtually silence the outsiders. January 23, 2018 by Roger Bybee in The Progressive “Chief Justice Roberts’s complaint rings eerily of the same “alternative facts” and “fake news” ploys used by the …
How One Lawmaker Is Breaking the Bipartisan Barrier on Climate Change
Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo of South Florida represents one of the U.S. regions most vulnerable to sea level rise. Now, he’s breaking with GOP orthodoxy to help build a bipartisan coalition in the House to influence climate legislation. By Katherine Bagley, 18 Jan 2018 In the three years since Representative Carlos Curbelo joined Congress, he has emerged as one of …
Maintenance: Fungi help concrete to self-heal cracks
CC BY 2.0 Rick Researchers are looking to fungi to help provide a fix for crumbling infrastructure, with promising results. A quick look around at the masses of concrete used to construct buildings, roads, bridges, sidewalks, and other infrastructure reveals that it doesn’t take that long before cracks begin to appear, which if unchecked can go on to compromise the integrity …
Don’t focus on happiness, focus on meaning
Excerpt from an interview with Jordan Peterson – Don’t focus on happiness https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/jordan-peterson-self-help-author-12-steps-interview if we are all monsters, how are we to be saved? The first thing is to understand how our worldview evolves. Crucial to this is a 20-year-old experiment on inattention – the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment. This involved recording two teams of basketball players and playing back the game …
RE100 electricity purchases going up: Corporations purchased a record 5.4 gigawatts of clean power in 2017 through PPAs
January 23rd, 2018 by Joshua S Hill on Clean Technica Corporations around the world signed a record volume of Power Purchase Agreements in 2017, amounting to 5.4 gigawatts of clean energy by 43 companies across 10 different countries, which is an impressive 25% increase over 2016. A new comprehensive analysis of corporate clean energy procurement published this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) found …
Study in the Nature Climate Change journal suggests a 40 percent tax on beef would only reduce beef consumption by 15 percent.
By Michael von Massow and John Cranfield, Would a Beef Tax Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Jan 2018 The Conversation Will taxing meat products based on their carbon footprint reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve public health? The answer is maybe, but not notably—and it will come with significant costs. A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change advocates applying taxes to the consumption of …