The Ultimate Short Term Greed (US Politics)

NYT: Trump Repeals Key Greenhouse Gas Finding, Erasing EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

This is beyond moronic. If there is evil in this world, it is embodied by Trump and his acolytes.

On my brother’s recommendation I downloaded & listened to Althea Raj’s podcast It’s Political (today’s edition) about the Liberal Alberta oil pipeline/environment rollback perfidy. She handled it really well.

How-To Geek: The 1st and 2nd Gen Nest Thermostat Are Dead

  • Google cut cloud support for original Nest thermostats, disabling the app and remote control.
  • They still work manually as basic thermostats, but smart features and integrations are gone.
  • Google emailed a discounted upgrade: 4th-gen Nest Learning Thermostat for $149.99 (regular $279.99).

They’ve been “Doctorow’ed”!

My life these days seems to primarily consist of recharging my Apple product batteries, and recharging myself with coffee. 🔋 ☕️

I listened to Core Intuition 26.1: Mess Everything Up tonight while making dinner. So great. Maybe Manton and Daniel would consider doing a month end podcast? That’d be nice.

Our solar panels have done surprisingly well with almost no significant degradation over 16 years. (We got the first few panels on in 2009, and then added panels each of the next two years until we reached our full complement.)

Hoping to be in Cardiff this spring for a week or more, and maybe a bus trip up the west side of Wales. Really looking forward to it!

It’s getting hard to find my way through the thicket of Trump craziness and distractions to get to the meat of other significant political events.

TIL that making an appointment with someone who uses the Ethiopian calendar could be a challenge: twelve 30-day months plus a 5- or 6-day kicker. Year zero was 7 or 8 years after the Gregorian started. Finally, it uses 12-hour days starting at 6am “our time”.

For far more details, see Wikipedia!

Once again Drafts broke when the annual subscription auto-renewed. I like the app when it is working, but this has been going on for years and it is so tiresome!

I just bought a graphic novel by Chris Ware after listening to an interesting interview with him on CBC’s Bookends this morning. (I’ll put a link to the interview in tonight’s Eclectic Articles post.)

Looking ahead, how long after people start buying autonomous cars before they’ll be asking to be able to send them to pick up lattés at the Starbucks drive through? 😄

We’re beating plowshares into swords, For those tired old men That we elected King.

This is end Of the innocence.

Somewhere back there in the dust, That same small town in each of us.

Jammed Mechanism

The mechanism we have in place to deal with our most difficult societal issues is for the government to review them and then to take a stand, and pass enabling legislation.

The federal Liberals seem completely paralyzed from making any decision that anyone might object to. It’s a complete leadership vacuum.

I wish I could edit with my voice. It would have to be more accurate than Siri is today, but it would be terrific.

e.g. “Change ‘That was a disaster!’ to ‘In my opinion, overcoming the impression left on undecided voters may be insurmountable.’”