Took a walk down South Congress, cleaning up the electronics on the mower, made a nice fire in the fire pit, made some Perry’s Pork Chop Ramen. Snowy day today. Probably the most snow I have ever seen in Austin.

Hard to believe this is the discussion in Georgia today.

Strict absentee voting limits proposed after record Georgia turnout

From my Italian word of the day:

Italian Word of the Day: Vigliacco (coward)

From the NYT.

From Ipsos. What is going on in France?

COVID-19 vaccination intent is decreasing globally

This document is about a decade old now and seems almost prophetic. Very techie oriented but maybe worth a read if you are interested in the internals of Amazon, Google and the like. (And no, I’m not the “stevey” in the title).

Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant

From @ontologify on Twitter.

I have been thinking about solar panels and even battery storage lately. It ends up being a complicated game of costs and paybacks. This is odd because we don’t do this with other technologies. It bet my computer sits idle 99% of the time. Of course, that would not have been acceptable when computers were scarce.

My air conditioner has a similar problem. I only use it in the summer. Yet, nobody bemoans all that lost cooling potential sitting around idle all winter. We just accept a certain low level of efficiency.

With solar panels getting so cheap it occurs to me that maybe we just need more of them. Same with batteries. I suppose the real problem is that there is an alternative and comparisons are easy. Yet somewhere in the food chain, as solar prices keep plummeting, the notion of efficiency should go away, like it does for many technologies. Found and article in Quartz that talks about this.

It’s time to start wasting solar energy

A chart from the Bureau of labor statistics. Covid-19 led to a sharp rise in unemployment, and stimulus checks led to a sharp rebound. The bad news is we are still above the highest unemployment level of any modern recession. From Employment recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic