Wind subsidies are threatening nuclear power plants. Also, exploring solar’s hazardous waste. Maybe the answer will be… clean coal?
Here is an interesting map of where NFL team fans are, using Facebook data. Related, an animated recap of the NFL season.
A heartwarming use for 3D printers: giving a fingerless kid a chance to play catch.
Slate investigates the fluoride-IQ connection. Also, the whooping cough vaccine does work.
Jonathan Mahler explains why football won’t end up like boxing.
Microsoft tried to go non-transferrable with its Office 2013 licenses, before changing its mind. The belief that one of these days they are going to come up with some way to invalidate ownership of their software is one of the things pushing me towards Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
Is the future of tech commercials negative campaigning?
More attempts to retire the password.
As discussed before, I am a fan of napping at work. Err, employer-sanctioned napping, I mean. Here’s a desk for it.
Using cell phones to track traffic and creating weather stations. But maybe we’re relying too much on Big Data? There could be a danger if smartphones can tell people how we feel.
From US News, a look at our complicated relationship with the minimum wage. From the WSJ, how the minimum wage hurts young workers. Also, the minimum wage’s sexist roots. (No, that latter point isn’t a particularly good argument against raising the minimum wage, but it’s interesting all the same.)
Can the US replicate the German economic model? Or will we beat the Chinese with robots?
A German couple is fighting for political asylum because returning to Germany means they can’t homeschool. Hopefully, this is a German thing we will never replicate.
Maybe we can’t count on selling coal to China if they’re going with nuclear.
Companies are dropping spousal health coverage to cut costs. I actually had one of those, where as soon as I could get insurance through my employer, Clancy had to dump me from hers.
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Arapaho
Greetings from Callie, Arapaho, a red town in a red state known for growing red meat. And from Redstone, Arapaho (Aw-RAH-pah-hoe), a blue city with blue collar roots that's been feeling blue for quite some time.
Nothing written on this site should be taken as strictly true, though if the author were making it all up rest assured the main character and his life would be a lot less unremarkable.
Can the US replicate the German economic model?
As somebody noted, while the Germans have large industrial powerhouses like Siemens, their industrial output is basically geared toward making products where the end users are other industrial firms. We’re not talking about firms that produce large flat panel televisions, but the factory that’s assembling them in China may end up using the German firm’s products in the manufacturing process. People will say that Americans don’t make anything, but we’re so focused on large consumer firms making our end user items that we seem to miss out on what the Germans produce. Hence why people lament about iPhones being made in China, but not the automobiles, construction materials, buses, or aviation equipment that’s made or assembled here.
And FWIW, I suspect that they’ve lucked out by having their family businesses stay intact and small leaving them to be free of rent-seeking shareholders who wish to cash out ASAP with little interest in the long-term health of the firm.
Plus, from what my German friend has noted, the lack of working mothers in Germany ends up having the weird effect of reducing the labour supply, so some of the marginal men are more likely to find work. As I noted from a trip to Germany, you don’t see as many women in positions like train operator or bus driver when compared to the States, and I suspect that those differences are present through out their workforce.