Chicago has finally gotten up to 21°C for the first time since December 1st. My screens are back in, my dog got some good walks, and my apartment is fresher.
I just hope it's like this on Monday.
It's unclear whether Arizona State Representative Bob Thorpe (R) thinks legislators there are in danger, or he just wants to sell body armor. Either way, he seems to have figured out how to realize dystopia:
State Rep. Bob Thorpe (R) sent an email on Thursday to all Arizona House and Senate members, inviting them to attend an event this coming Wednesday at the capitol, where someone from a company called Arizona Tactical is scheduled to educate lawmakers about the protective vests it sells.
In his email, Thorpe said he has been researching body armor in the wake of the Tucson, Ariz. shooting that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and led her to step down from Congress. He suggested the vests could be worn at public events like town halls and parades. “Just like our police and DPS (Department of Public Safety) officers, you typically wear the vest under a shirt or top, which conceals their use,” Thorpe wrote, adding that the company would cut the lawmakers a deal and offer the vests at the same price law enforcement officials pay.
So, arming everyone makes everyone safer—except that for some reason public officials need to wear body armor, because they might get shot. How about arming legislators? Yeah, no problem there:
State Sen. Lori Klein (R), now gone from the legislature, made headlines in July 2011 when she pointed a loaded gun at a journalist during an interview in the Senate lounge. The reporter, The Arizona Republic’s Richard Ruelas, wrote at the time: “She showed off the laser sighting by pointing the red beam at the reporter’s chest. The gun has no safety, she said, but there was no need to worry.”
Maybe we'll get lucky and the presentation really is just a way for Rep. Thorpe to skim something off the top. Petty corruption I can deal with. A heavily-armed society I cannot.
Instead of a bunch of stoplights and crosswalks—and a bunch of accidents involving pedestrians—the village of Poyndon, 20 km north of Manchester, created shared space at its busiest crossroads:
Now, a year after construction wrapped up, a video called "Poynton Regenerated" makes the case that the shared space scheme maintains a smooth flow of traffic while simultaneously making the village center a more attractive and safer place for pedestrians, leading to increased economic activity downtown.
In the "Regenerating Poynton" video, several people who admit to having been skeptical of the plan say that after it was put in place, they came to see it as a dramatic improvement. A local city councilor says that the main street no longer seems like a dying place, as it had for years before the change. Some 88 percent of businesses in the area are reporting an increase in foot traffic, and real estate agents say they're seeing new interest in buying property in the area.
Here's the video:
Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months:
And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent.
ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6 cents per kilowatt-hour with the ICC and have told the commission they expect forthcoming transmission charges to be about another 0.95 cents per kilowatt-hour. That will make the ComEd "price to compare" cited by competing suppliers when marketing their offerings about 5.55 cents.
That said, between the new Integrys rate that hit me on my last electricity bill, and moving to the cloud, my March bill was only 54% of my average bill from 2009 to 2012. So ComEd is lowering rates too? Good. It'll still be higher than Integrys.
First, TPM on why the FAA closed contract towers and how this is in fact the fault of the very people complaining about them:
Sequestration is hitting the Department of Transportation like almost every other cabinet-level department. But unlike other departments, most of its employees work for one agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — and most of that agency’s employees are air traffic controllers.
Because of that, sequestration is forcing FAA to furlough employees, institute a hiring freeze and shutter 149 contractor-operated air-traffic control towers around the country.
It’s that last effect that makes members of Congress, particularly Republicans, so nervous. And since, percentage-wise, contractors are facing larger cuts than other other FAA activities and operations, they’re claiming that the cuts are designed to create a political headache for members of Congress — not to comply with sequestration’s spending cut requirements or safety provisions elsewhere in federal law.
The Chicago area had two important closures, at Waukegan and Gary, the two closest lakefront towers. There are now no air traffic control towers observing Lake Michigan south of Racine, Wisconsin. Republicans are whinging about ATC tower closures because it's a visible effect of the sequester, and people might ask embarrassing questions.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Samoa Air has started charging passengers by weight:
IT’S an issue that has often been proposed in the darker corners of the world’s aviation forums. And now Samoa Air has decided to become the world's first airline to charge passengers according to their weight. No matter if you're a skinny 6'8 (203cm), a muscular 6'0 or a chubby 5'3: if you weigh a lot, you pay a lot. Flyers declare their weight (including luggage) when booking their tickets and pay an amount per kilo. The per-kilo price depends on the length of the flight. Scales at check-in should ensure that passengers have not misrepresented their size.
Since airplanes use fuel based on weight and distance, this makes a lot of sense—particularly when you understand that most Samoans have BMIs over 30.
Wrapping up my day, reading irrelevancies and trivia online, I had occasion to Google one of my favorite lines, "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."
I am horrified and saddened to report that the first site in the search results was "No Fear Shakespeare," to which I refuse to link out of love for the English language. Orwell was right, as always:
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Orwell wrote that in 1946, before my own mother was born. He was right about so much it scares me. (So was Huxley*.)
By the way, the second result on the list also made me shake my head sadly. Click through if you must.
* I forgot Brave New World came out in 1932. That, to me, makes it scarier.
In honor of the new year, here's a round-up of today's unexpected news items:
Updates as the situation warrants.
Paul Krugman takes a quiet moment to meditate on the economy:
If you think the problem is that wages are too high, your solution is that we need to meaner to workers — cut off their unemployment insurance, make them hungry by cutting off food stamps, so they have no alternative to do whatever it takes to get jobs, and wages fall. If you think the problem is the zero lower bound on interest rates, you think that this kind of solution wouldn’t just be cruel, it would make the economy worse, both because cutting workers’ incomes would reduce demand and because deflation would increase the burden of debt.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the problem lies in a shortfall of demand due to the zero lower bound, you believe that government borrowing needn’t drive up rates, because it puts unemployed resources to work; that monetary expansion won’t be inflationary, because the money will just sit there; and that fiscal austerity will be strongly contractionary.
I leave the adjudication of these competing claims as an exercise for readers.
After four years of a depressed economy, and what appears to be the economic hobbling of the entire Mediterranean, there might be some evidence to support one of these views.
Not only does my time evaporate into multiple projects these days, but the number of context switches I've experienced over the past few days hurts. Here's today's timesheet:
Yeah, but I shoot with this hand. I worked from home Wednesday so that I could jam on some documentation. How'd that work out?
Blogging, by the way, helps me switch contexts. I think.