I like Visual Capitalist but they have gotten (understandably) funny about having their graphics reproduced.  So you will have to click on the link below. But it does include sortable tables which are fun to look at too.

The idea is to combine a “livability” score with an “affordability” score.  Both pretty subjective.  But what stands out is the big American cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) are the worst value.  Honolulu and San Diego score high on livability but are expensive (checks out).

There is a cluster along the main diagonal which says lots of smaller American cities are more or less equally livable, but trade cost for livability.  I notice Albuquerque is mentioned, and is low on cost but low on livability but still scores well.  An outlier, surprisingly similar to Houston.

What I find a bit strange is Tulsa, OK is the winner for US cities.  Not sure what to make of that.

Quality of Life vs. Cost in 99 Cities Across the Americas

In Texas, electricity was cheaper but our power bills were much higher, especially in the summer.  In New Mexico, our house is a bit smaller and the weather milder, so our consumption is much lower.  I was curious how much it cost to charge an EV like ours (Tesla Model 3 with a 75 kWh battery).  It’s a little complicated because there are three tiers of rates with different summer and non-summer rates.

We have solar so it’s a different story for us but if we were using PNM power we would almost certainly be in the upper tier in the summer ($0.1994661/kWh) and the lower tier in the non-summer ($0.0896783/kWh).  So a fill-up from 0% to 100% would be:

Summer: ($0.1994661 x 75) = $14.96

Non-Summer: ($0.0896783 x 75) = $6.73

Or course gas prices fluctuate and have been high for some time.  But a similar vehicle with, say a 16 gallon tank would cost $64 at $4 a gallon.  Gas would have to be under $1 a gallon to compete with even the expensive summer charging.

I always thought this was a big advantage of EVs but you don’t hear about it much.  Plus there are no oil changes, radiator flushes, transmission fluid, spark plugs, etc to maintain.

This has been covered in the world press for several years.  It does seem odd that hundreds of high ranking US defense and security officials keep having these strange health incidents, always while travelling overseas.  From Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Havana Syndrome: The History Behind the Mystery

Upshot: hybrids pollute 6x more than advertised.  From Clean Technia.

Still Smoking: The PHEV Emissions Scandal Continues

From The Conversation.

Americans want electric cars – they just can’t find them

It’s good to see people pushing back on the likes of Flock Cameras.  But this is a much bigger issue.

Surveillance has been privatized.  Things only the FBI used to be able to do, and then only with a warrant, are done routinely, millions of times a day in the US by private companies. An entire industry has emerged to support these private surveillance networks, which are really built to serve law enforcement, at least for now.

Stricter personal data privacy laws, similar to what Europe has, would go a long way to solving the problem.  What we have in the US today is, sadly, a surveillance/ police state unlike anything in history.

The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State

A few days ago I watched the cryptocurrency documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.  It’s not a hard hitting expose or even very informative, in the sense that you won’t learn much about the history or technical details of, say, Bitcoin.  This threw me off at first.  But it is very watchable and even entertaining.

It’s really about the groups of people that rally around things like cryptocurrency and how they believe things that, well, maybe shouldn’t be believed.  It also seems the film was completed at a time when cryptocurrency was still in its relative infancy, not yet adopted by the mainstream.  If it doesn’t engage you, you may want to hang in there until the end. There is a “payoff” that (I think) is worth waiting for.

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

So now it’s half a million voters.  This is all a direct result of the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act.  Will this get fixed by the election?  Seems like a simple database update.  Or they could let people with unmatched addresses vote.  We will see if anything at all happens.  Everyone involved in this need to spend serious time in jail.

Texas sued for failing to process more than 500,000 voter registrations

On a related note.

Judge chastises Justice Department lawyers after hundreds of trees cut down at D.C. golf course

Basic maintenance is being cancelled at state parks all around the country.  It appears that this money is being redirected to Trump’s Washington DC projects.

US Interior cancels maintenance, programming at national parks, including several New Mexico sites