Aug 2021 - links, etc.

20210801 A Warning Ignored | by Jelani Cobb | The New York Review of Books What the US Could Learn About College Admissions from the USSR | by Anastasia Edel | The New York Review of Books The Color Line | by Annette Gordon-Reed | The New York Review of Books COVID Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t a MAGA Death Cult — It’s Worse Than That | by Tim Wise | Aug, 2021 | Medium...

August 30, 2021 · steve ulrich

climate models and precautionary measures

given the density of the news surrounding the IPCC report and the dire implications of a report that leaves little/nothing to question as to the state of things this nugget from NNT, et al was a wry bit of commentary. We have only one planet. This fact radically constrains the kinds of risks that are appropriate to take at a large scale. Even a risk with a very low probability becomes unacceptable when it affects all of us – there is no reversing mistakes of that magnitude....

August 9, 2021 · steve ulrich

minnesota failings

some personally interesting elements from this NY review of books essay by jelani cobb. “In 2019 Minneapolis ranked, according to US News & World Report, among the best places in the US to live, but it was also among the cities with the worst socioeconomic disparities between black and white residents, with a $47,000 gap separating the median household income of the two groups—shocking even for the United States. Seventy-six percent of whites in the area owned their homes; only a quarter of blacks did....

August 8, 2021 · steve ulrich

it's time to stop burning dead dinosaurs

impressive study. the top line, even battery powered cars plugged into dirty electrical grids are better than burning gas. Results show that even for cars registered today, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have by far the lowest life-cycle GHG emissions. As illustrated in the figure below, emissions over the lifetime of average medium-size BEVs registered today are already lower than comparable gasoline cars by 66%–69% in Europe, 60%–68% in the United States, 37%–45% in China, and 19%–34% in India....

July 22, 2021 · steve ulrich