Had some snacks at the hotel on the trip to Tempe.  Was looking for a way to close the open bags.  If only there were some sort of clip.  Then I saw the answer (literally) staring me in the face.

Andrew Yang has been warning about this sort of thing.

Some photos from a trip to ASU in Tempe, AZ

I have often wondered about these sorts of hacks.  Funny, but kinda scary too.

Man Uses 99 Smartphones to Fool Google Maps and Create a Fake Traffic Jam

got 99 problems, but actual traffic ain’t one.

From the Atlantic:

How Capitalism Broke Young Adulthood

Boomers have socialism. Why not Millennials?

My daughter was looking at hotels in Cancun, and they were cheap. Really cheap.  I remembered and article I read about a seaweed bloom, and also remembered a jellyfish problem in Florida from a few years back.  Both related to environmental pollution.  Turns out there has been a huge problem with seaweed in the gulf and it’s beaches.

Tourism in Cancun is way down, even with the Mexican governments attempts to remediate the problem and the Tourism industry’s attempt to brush it aside.  When you think about the problems of large scale pollution you think about toxic events or even weather disasters, but these sorts of environmental problems seem to be the more frequent and costly ones.

This is being connected to bad agricultural practices in South America, much like the Dead Zone coming from the Mississippi River every year.  I hold out hope that now that big money is being lost by large corporations, something may change.  Fron FSU:

Massive Seaweed Bloom Affects Florida’s Beaches

From the Boston Globe:

Cancun has a nasty seaweed problem, and tourists are staying away

One of my regrets from my undergraduate days at Boston University is that I didn’t take Howard Zinn’s history class.  An interview with Cornell West on Howard Zinn ten years after his death.  From Boston Review of Books.

Missing Zinn

On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie.

Looks like the electric busses I heard about a few months back (Electric Busses in Austin) are here.  Glad to see Austin stepping up to this new clean tech.

CapMetro’s brand new electric buses hit the road in Austin

I remember a court case from a long time ago about a wealthy Texan who used some oilfield pipe for fencing for exotic animals on his ranch.  The pipes were radioactive and harmed or killed his animals. Or so I remember it.  A quick Google turns up Texas High Court Will Hear $24M James McAllen Farm Contamination Suit After All. This goes back to 1992, and it seems issues with radioactivity in the oil and gas industry have been known for much longer.  What seems to be happening today is the massive dumping of radioactive waste from fracking, well, just about everywhere.  From Rolling Stone:

America’s Radioactive Secret

Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America

For the record, I am a happy, if not enthusiastic Tesla Model 3 owner.  I also know a few other Tesla owners who have had similar positive experiences.  Ran across this article in Electrek.  It seems the famous Parnas Tape of a recent White House meeting contains lots of off the cuff discussion about Tesla, literally almost none of it even close to factual. I do worry about the larger picture, about where our leaders get the information they use to make decisions.

Listen to Trump’s dinner guests talk complete nonsense about Tesla and EVs