We are occasionally reminded of the 2008 financial meltdown and its aftermath, and the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks, insurance companies and an automobile manufacturer or two. The massive bailout, $633 billion approximately, was paid out to 982 entities. $633 billion went into TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received $192 billion of that.
Of those recipients, 780 were obligated to pay back the money. The rest, totaling $29.9 billion, received direct subsidies for TARP’s housing programs.
The craft-beer business may have peaked. After a few decades of seemingly unending growth, a shake out has begun. The 101 North Brewing Company, after seven years, is the latest to cease operations. The brewery, located in Petaluma California a short drive up the road from Lagunitas (now 100% owned by Heineken) was too big to survive on its taproom alone and too small to leverage itself into the major beer distributors or taverns already crowded with craft-beer taps. Other brewers are scaling back and closing their brewpubs. Even Widmer Brothers, with the financial backing of Anheuser-Busch/InBev, has shuttered their restaurant. Those that have not already sold out to the giant beer manufacturers are in for a struggle.
Meanwhile, multi-national companies have lawyered up, fighting over accusations of false advertising and corporate espionage, stealing the secret recipes of the other’s beer-like products. (Anheuser-Busch once sold something they called “Bud Dry,” promoting its appeal as having no aftertaste!)
Scientists working with fossilized remains generally needed an entire limb or cranium to puzzle out the sex of a prehistoric mammals they examined. The shape or size of the fossil were the bases for determining gender.
As DNA testing advanced, researchers were able to determine sex from fossil fragments, even though usable DNA is not always available in twenty-thousand-year-old remnants. Better DNA testing, though, is confirming what visitors to natural-history museum have noticed: most fossilized specimens are male. Apparently it was a man’s world in prehistoric times. Were there many more male than female mammals in the ancient world? Not likely. Scientists have concluded that the preponderance of male fossilized remains is probably the result of reckless male behavior. Male mammoths, for example, especially young ones, were much more inclined to travel alone, away from the wisdom and protection of the herd, and more likely to get into some kind of fatal trouble. On their own, chances of getting stuck in a pit or encountering human hunters greatly increased. Meeting their demise in bogs or crevices or lakes is good for scientists as those death sites are good at preserving their remains.
Some things don’t change. As one paleontologist said, young males “were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits.”
Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is more than four hundred parts per million, a concentration greater than at any time in the last three and a half million years. Back then, mid-Pliocene, there was little ice at the earth’s poles and sea level was sixty feet higher.
Those who do not accept that humankind has passed the environmental tipping point place great hope in carbon capture and sequestration. CCS, in simple terms, means capturing CO2 and burying it deep underground where it cannot escape for many millennia. (Kinda like all the methane gas below rapidly-melting tundra.) Carbon-dioxide removal doesn’t just slow or stop the increase of CO2, it reduces it. Skeptics warn that forcing carbon underground will increase earthquake activity. (See fracking.)
When your plane takes off from LAX — Los Angeles International Airport — you swing out over the Pacific Ocean before banking into the general direction of your destination. Depending on your flight and on weather conditions, you may get a good view of breaking surf, downtown L.A. and Dodger Stadium. Between the end of the runway and the surf, you may notice remnants of abandoned streets. That used to be the prosperous town of Palisades del Rey, better known as Surfridge.
“I keep getting trouble with my wife — when we go shopping in the delicatessen, I’m the one that’s flexing the salamis to see what their tensile strength is because they’d make good wing spars!”
Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) — aka drones — are part of the twenty-first century world. We mostly think of them as a means to drop bombs on people or a the newest way to invade our privacy. Nigel Gifford has a better idea: use drones to deliver food to besieged people.
