Saturday, May 24, 2014

Memorial Day Weekend Reads

A few stories you can read on this extended holiday weekend:

The Case for Reparations - Ta-Nehisi Coates.  In case you hear somebody say something ridiculous like that black people are advantaged because of affirmative action.

Science Standards Divide a State Built on Oil and Coal - New York Times

The Dos Equis Guy Has Nothing on the Inventor of the Banana Slicer - Slate

Gaius Publius: "Erring on the Side of Least Drama" - Why Climate Scientists are Inherently Conservative - naked capitalism.  Uh oh.

California's Drought Isn't Making Food Cost More.  Here's Why - NPR.  Irrigation.  A real race to the bottom.

They're Here: Lake Flies Have Emerged - Wired. Gross.

Nazi pork and popularity: How Hitler's roads won German hearts and minds - VoxEU.  Infrastructure investment leads to the Holocaust?

'Pink Slime' Makes Comeback as Beef Prices Spike - Wall Street Journal.  Ok in my book.  See also, 5 food additives more disgusting than 'pink slime' - Marketwatch. Google Castoreum.

This Happened Twice Before, and Each Time Stocks Crashed - Wolf Richter.  The chart is disconcerting.

A libertarian utopia - Aeon.  Isn't libertarian society an oxymoronic concept?

The Effluent Society - Texas Monthly. I was well into the civil engineering program in college before I realized that city water wasn't recycled waste water.  I still drank city water, and I assumed that's why they added the chlorine.  As far as I was concerned (and it is true), well water on the farm was recycled waste water (well-diluted), since the leach field lets it percolate down to the aquifer.  Recycled waste water, meeting SDWA requirements, doesn't bother me a bit.

Everything is broken - Medium. "It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.
Computers, and computing, are broken." Yikes.

Rogue Element - The New Yorker. Crazy

I didn't realize that for more than two years I've been in the older half of the country's population:

NYT

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