The Offline Report

Maybe our lousy power grid unites us. If too many people run their own standalone rooftop solar plus home battery system, the grid infrastructure may fray from neglect : Solar advocates are worried other utilities will follow SMUD’s lead, in part because the utility industry has traditionally been hostile to rooftop solar power . Public utilities such as SMUD, which is governed by an elected board, don’t have a profit motive. But like their privately owned counterparts, they’ve long argued rooftop solar creates an unfair “cost shift” from customers who can afford rooftop systems to customers who can’t. The more homes go solar, the argument goes, the more rates will have to rise for everyone else to pay the costs of running the grid — a notion disputed by the solar industry, which says rooftop solar lowers grid costs. Why did so much of the media declare California unlivable this year when fewer people died in fires than in previous years? Maybe because PG&E preemptively brought...

  Every time a home or any fire fuel burns, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The culture is slowly catching onto the counter-intuitive fact that tiny fire embers coupled with small twigs start more fires than do large old-growth trees. This was illustrated for the slacker general public in 2003 via the infamous tie-breaking challenge from "Survivor: Cook Islands": A later, more serious 60 Minutes segment from 2017 called "In the Path of Fire" reported the specific small measures that made an enormous difference determining which homes withstood fires unscathed . It took well over a year to distribute the information through the confusion silo that is Facebook before "embers" were reported on more widely in mainstream media. We Californians and other fire-prone state residents need to repeatedly spread this information. The L.A. Times this week reported the state legislature just stripped a program that funded loans to fire-proof homes : Meanwhile, t...

I've been tutoring high school AP English students and notice they all fear writing a sentence in front of me. I'm trying to internally time-travel back to the age I was when I first cleared the fear-hurdle of committing something to a paper that could be handed in to a despotic teacher. The writer George Orwell said totalitarianism was deadly to literature . "Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer.” I had the scariest teachers in sixth grade who criticized what we handed in as not what was assigned. They would rant in front of the entire class. I was criticized for an assignment my parents had actually helped me write, probably the only time they helped me with my homework. The above pullquote is from Masha Gessen's New Yorker arti...

This weekend, the late Christopher Hitchens cured my writer's block. For various reasons I won't explain in this post, I've been binging on Hitchens print and video media lately. In his essay on becoming an American citizen , Hitchens includes this passage: "As soon as I got my green card, immigration officers started saying 'welcome home' when I passed through. Moreover, as one who is incompetent to do anything save writing and speaking, I stood under the great roof of the First Amendment and did not have to think (as I once had to think) of the libel laws and the other grand and petty restraints that oppress my craft in the country of my birth. " I'd been suddenly concerned about libel laws after viewing Carol Cadwalladr's riveting TED talk on her blockbuster report for The Guardian on information that already was common knowledge or available, that of Cambridge Analytica downloading, even selling user data after Facebook had promised to...

Part of the reason humans go so crazy for cats is their perceived dignity and elegance. But humans love birds. Will these collars catch on ? This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The late Edmund Morris' new biography on Thomas Edison is electrifying, no pun intended. I finished a fifth of it before I reached the cash register it was so hard to put down. Particularly interesting is his early home-schooled education in civil engineering, among a set of very well-balanced cross section of subjects. Here is a comment Morris made on C-Span as he was researching the biography, marveling at Edison's imaginativeness : "So, this guy was talking to Edison about this subject and Edison said, if this theory is correct and we are indeed all composed - all matter consists of atoms. He said, I suppose it be possible for me to take a few atoms of myself and transfer those atoms to a rose. And then I could retrieve those atoms and put them back into myself and thereby acquire some of the sensibility of a rose." -------------------------------- Further Reading: An Inventor’s Life That Was Incandescent Any Way You Look at It:     nytimes.com This w...

Saturday, Nov 30, 2019 Oct 14, 2019: Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save the Lives of Millions, But It Will Kill Some People First | The complicated ethics of Elon Musk’s grand autonomous vehicle experiment.    bloomberg.com Oct 20, 2019: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam | Blame Silicon Valley hype—and the limits of AI:     economist.com Oct 20, 2019: How to hide a billion dollars - A guide for kleptocrats worried by foreign prosecutors:     economist.com Wednesday, Nov 27, 2019 "This limitation also reminds Alphaville of something that has been bugging us over the past decade or so — the lack of discussion of what we’ve lost from the transition of owning content, to streaming it."    ftalphaville.com “'Not only can you not fire Mark Zuckerberg, you can’t fire his kids or his kid’s kids.'”    nytimes.com "t has become evident over the last few years that the wealthiest individuals in Europe and America,...

Just three years ago, in this era of nonexistant current events caching, a firefighter died Christmas day fighting a weeks-long wildfire and hardly anyone noticed. That was before people had quit Facebook kaleidoscope and re-joined the real world. Since that time, Californians have adapted somewhat, ironing out alert techniques, running practice evacuations in towns with narrow roads, and clearing brush to create a defensible space within 100 feet of homes and buildings. This frees up firefighters from the duty of saving people to actually dousing flames or cutting fire breaks. It's only November 2nd, though, and we're holding our breath in the back of our minds as we breath through the day, dutifully carrying on business as usual so as not to abet panic contagion. This year because our statewide power company PG&E decided to preemptively prevent fire with planned power grid blackouts, the drama is amplified. Also, thanks to uber-environmentalist and 360.org founder Bill M...