With the arrival of Peak Oil, the curtain has closed on Act 1 of the drama Petroleum Man. What will happen in Act 2? Chekhov said, "If there's a gun on the wall at the beginning of the play, by the end it must go off." In the world's nuclear arsenal are many guns on the wall. If life copies art, will there be an Act 3 in which the players, having learned their lesson the hard way, live sustainably? To explore these and other questions... FTW's Act 2 Blog. Read, comment, take heart! Orkin
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
Trump's plan for Social Security will help baby boomers in the short term and cut benefits for anyone younger
Judy Shelton Returns with a Bold Plan to Restore Gold
NYC ending controversial debit card program for migrants
Police Warn Public After 40 Monkeys Escape Research Lab
The controversial post-election episode of "Saturday Night Live" got a lot of people talking — including Elon Musk
Donald Trump has promised a closed border and mass deportations. Those affected are taking action now
Ukraine hoped to force Russia to pick between 2 fronts. Putin chose both.
Meet the new Trump administration staffers who will shape key US policies
The World’s Largest Unconnected Populations
China Is Drilling a 10,000-Meter (32,808 ft) Hole In the Earth:
Saturday, November 09, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
More of the best writing from around the web on why Trump won
Germany's cabinet approves draft law on voluntary military service
World's most polluted cities
The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) cautions that FSA, an inorganic fluoride compound, has dire health consequences for any worker that comes into contact with it. Breathing its fumes causes severe lung damage or death and an accidental splash on bare skin will lead to burning and excruciating pain. Fortunately, it can be contained in high-density cross-linked polyethylene storage tanks.
It is in such tanks that fluorosilicic acid has for the past half century been transported from Florida fertilizer factories to water reservoirs throughout the United States. Once there, it is drip fed into drinking water.
What Trump might do on Day One of his presidency
New York City, an area not known for wildfires, has been under a drought watch after the driest October on record, which increases risk of fires, Mayor Eric Adams said on social media.
Canvassing for Kamala
Going door-to-door in Pennsylvania felt intense and hopeful, but after Trump’s victory in the state a few encounters kept floating back.
Dispatches
A Dark Reminder of What American Society Has Been and Could Be Again
In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election.
NYC under air quality alert, grilling ban as smoke blankets tri-state
Friday, November 08, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
Trump did well in deep-blue states, a sign of his broadening appeal
What Trump's win means for retail giants like Walmart, Target, and Costco
What a second Trump term means for Intel
Trump campaign quietly distances itself from RFK Jr after new vaccine safety comments
House election results
The lawyer behind Senate Bill 8, Texas’s abortion-bounty law, is closely allied with Trump and recently represented him before the Supreme Court. Project 2025 outlines a plan for formal federal surveillance of pregnancy. This is what so many young men, straight men who want women to bear their children, voted for. The fight is now peer-to-peer, between men in favor of reproductive servitude and women who refuse.
This year won’t just be the hottest on record—it could be the first to surpass the 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold laid out in the Paris climate accord.
The computing power underlying AI tools like chatbots requires massive amounts of water for liquid cooling systems that absorb and dissipate the heat generated by computer servers. Data centers should install rainwater catchments to supply their water needs, write Justin Talbot Zorn and Bettina Warburg, a policy advisor and AI researcher, respectively.
Do More Than Half of Americans Read Below 6th-Grade Level?
We can all learn something from JD Vance’s Venmo, old blog
Thursday, November 07, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
Trump 2.0: Who would be in the running for top jobs in Trump's second administration?
Donald Trump’s Revenge
The former President will return to the White House older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before.
What Trump’s win means for the world’s most pressing problems
What Trump has promised to do on ‘day one’ as president
What the election results could mean for your retirement account
Will Trump enact Project 2025? Here’s what’s in it.
What Trump’s win means for the world’s most pressing problems
Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach Victory Celebration
Trump's win could lead companies to push up prices. Here's why.
Trump’s return to power raises serious questions about the media’s credibility
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
Trump 2.0: Who would be in the running for top jobs in Trump's second administration?
The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War
Voting technology is more secure than it’s ever been. This is the result of a shift in American voting procedures more than two decades in the making: Most people now vote by machines that efficiently scan paper ballots. Or they use touch screens and other forms of direct-recording electronic machines (“DREs”), which also generate backup paper records. Those physical paper trails are an election safeguard—ballots are verifiable, auditable and recountable, as I wrote on Saturday.
In October, amateur mathematician Luke Durant discovered a new prime number, and it’s 41 million digits long. Yup, the number has 41,024,230 digits (for comparison, the approximate number of total atoms in the observable universe is only about 80 digits long). A prime number is a number that can be divided only by itself and 1; so 3, 7, 13, 17, and 19 are all primes, whereas 15 is not.
How he did it: Prime number hunters use a computing trick devised by 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered that multiplying 2 by itself some number of times (2^n) and then subtracting 1, you sometimes get a prime number. Durant assembled a global supercomputer across 17 countries by buying processing time from various cloud GPU providers to crunch through larger and larger iterations of the Mersenne calculation, churning through about 12 times as many numbers as every other computer involved in the Mersenne prime search combined.
Ukraine says it attacked North Korean troops for the first time
Masking Returns
Looking to Move Abroad From the US? Here’s How
Specialists that help Americans move to places like Portugal and Spain are busier than ever. Blame election stress.
A robot retrieves the first melted fuel from Fukushima nuclear reactor
U.S.
Trump sues CBS News over 60 Minutes interview with Harris; network says suit is "completely without merit"
Betting it all on fluoride: Trump takes a risky final gamble to let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health
Monday, November 04, 2024
From Jenna Orkin
Bird flu was detected in a pig, and it could be a tipping point threatening more human transmission
Gun death rates in some U.S. states comparable to conflict zones, study finds
China built a $50 billion military stronghold in the South China Sea
Trump, Harris campaign in the West as polls show tie just 5 days out
How Pro-Trump Activists Hijacked Georgia’s Election Board
The Economic Philosophy of Donald Harris
What Nate Silver Has Said About Donald Trump's Chances
Harris takes slim lead over Trump in final Iowa Poll before 2024 election
Last New York Times/Siena poll of the 7 battleground states released: See the results
Disputes in South China Sea could disrupt trade lanes, lead to war, experts say