“California governor Jerry Brown wants to impose the state’s first-ever tax on drinking water, tacked onto monthly bills.”
Read more: http://blog.independent.org/2018/06/07/drinking-water-tax-the-last-straw-for-californians/
“The first step is for Americans to learn from the successfully affordable and accessible cities of the world. Ironically, these successful cities are typically more market-based in their planning decisions than the supposedly hyper-capitalist US.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-unbearable-truth-about-infrastructure-and-urban-sprawl/
“Reports indicate that the group was caught trying to harness the lab’s supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency.”
“Because of government offensives that toppled narco kingpins in recent years, Mexico’s drug cartels have splintered and are eager for new sources of revenue. Now, their increasingly dominant role as fuel thieves pits two of the country’s biggest industries – narcotics and oil – against one another. A May 2017 study, commissioned by the national energy regulator and obtained by Reuters via a freedom of information request, found that thieves, between 2009 and 2016, had tapped pipelines roughly every 1.4 kms (0.86 mi) along Pemex’s approximately 14,000 km pipeline network.”
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mexico-violence-oil/
“Exploiting a crucial competitive advantage and motivated by profit and a desire to learn the technology, students around the world are launching cryptocurrency mining operations right from their dorm rooms.”
Read more: https://qz.com/1160667/the-secret-lives-of-students-who-mine-cryptocurrency-in-their-dorm-rooms/
“Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, made a fortune in the hotel and real estate businesses, and he’s pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an enterprise that will create inflatable habitats designed for life beyond Earth. He entered into an agreement with NASA to provide a report on how ventures like his could help NASA get back to the moon, and even Mars, faster and cheaper. The catch? It needs to be worth his while. Bigelow is applying to the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there.”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101195299
“‘Overview’ is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.”
“China’s smog has been so bad lately that entire cities were shut down last week because of pollution that can be seen from space. The conditions change quickly, as can be seen by these totally different photos of the same skyscraper taken only 10 days apart in Shenyang in Liaoning province. Monday was a particular smoggy day in Shenyang, and a Reuters photographer snapped this photo that shows everything but a massive TV screen obscured by the pollution. It highlights the fact that the toxic cloud covers just about everything.”
“The demand for ivory has nothing whatsoever to do with poaching. There is a ‘rapacious’ demand for pork, too, on the part of ‘Asians,’ and everyone else for that matter, and yet the pig does not face ‘extinction by poaching’ or from any other source. The same is true for steaks and cows, wings and chickens, etc. There is also ‘a rapacious Asian demand for’ things like cement for building, wood for chopsticks, steel for ships, etc., etc. And, yet, miraculously, there is no shortage, let alone total disappearance of, any of these things. No, if we want to ferret out the source of the plight of the elephant, we must look at an institution that has played havoc with more, far more, than merely the elephant.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/walter-e-block/that-sexist-walter-block/
“A government minister in Tanzania has called for a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy against poachers in a radical measure to curb the mass slaughter of elephants. Khamis Kagasheki’s proposal for perpetrators of the illicit ivory trade to be executed ‘on the spot’ divided opinion, with some conservationists backing it as a necessary deterrent but others warning that it would lead to an escalation of violence. Tanzania is said to have lost half its elephants in the past three years. Ivory has been dubbed the ‘white gold of jihad’ by activists who say it is funding armed rebel groups including al-Shabaab, the militia behind the siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that left at least 67 people dead.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/08/shoot-elephant-poachers-tanzania-ivory