On Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country’s solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%.
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Last year the average renewable mix was 33%, reports Agora Energiewende, a German clean energy think tank...
The last time a major Political Party broke apart was in the early 1850s when the Whig Party collapsed because of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was an effort by Party leaders to settle the various controversies between North and South with a classic set of tradeoffs. The Compromise was made possible by the death of President Zachary Taylor on 9 July 1850.
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As we argued in our last post the Republican Party in the House seems very likely to split into two factions as the result of the 2016 elections. Many Republican voters (enough to make Donald Trump the nominee) are angry at the Republican “Establishment” for not stopping President Obama on a variety of issues...
Thus, when a campus is embroiled in protests (speech) over bigotry or disinvited speakers, the real censorship happens by ripping the debate away from the substance of marginalized students’ concerns and focusing instead on “free speech”—that is, on the sensitivities of those who would rather not have to think about their capacity to hurt or offend. But an intellectually honest free-speech advocate wouldn’t cry censorship; they’d instead address the substance of the speech being censored or marginalized, and argue for why that speech deserves to be heard on a college campus in the first place.
In a move that environmental campaigners had sought for years (as had I), the Environmental Protection Agency has issued final rules that could substantially cut emissions of heat-trapping methane, smog-forming volatile organic compounds and toxic air pollutants such as benzene from new, rebuilt or modified oil and gas wells and other infrastructure and operations.
The agency also took an overdue step to clarify how to curb emissions of methane from the hundreds of thousands of wells, compressors and other leaky parts of the nation’s sprawling oil and gas industry, issuing an “Information Collection Request” requiring companies, among other things, to describe the types of technologies that could be used to reduce emissions. Existing systems are the source of 90 percent of emissions, so getting moving on this front is essential; it’s also often profitable, as we wrote in 2009.*
First, he points out that the Band-Aid didn't cost $629; it was actually just $7. The other $622 was the cost of seeing the doctor and using the emergency department itself.
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"The remainder of the charge," he writes, "was associated with the use of the facility and staff. We staff the emergency department 24-hours a day, every day of the year, and stand ready to treat whoever walks through our door, be it a gunshot victim or a patient with a stroke."
Murphy is explaining something called a "facility fee," the base price of setting foot inside an emergency room. It's something akin to the cover charge you'd pay for going out to a nightclub.
"It's the fixed price, and that's just what you're going to have to pay," says Renee Hsia, a professor at University of California San Francisco who studies emergency billing.
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Hsia says the thing that infuriates her is how common bills like this are; she sees them all the time. The amount is almost impossible to predict, because facility fees vary widely and hospitals rarely make the numbers public. One of her studies on ER bills for common procedures showed that prices can vary from as little to $15 to as much as $17,797. And a lot of that depends on the given hospital's facility fees.
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"Facility fees are very arbitrary," she says. "There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, which can be really frustrating. There are some places where the basic facility fee can be over $1,000."
I asked the communications department at Western Connecticut Health Network to explain to me how facility fees are set at Danbury Hospital, where Colette was seen. Do they count up the number of new purchases they'd need plus the cost of physician salaries, and come up with a number? Did they look at historical trends about how many patients they might see?
Western Connecticut Health Network never answered my question. Instead, four days after my inquiry, they reversed Bird's bill entirely...
As financial products become more diverse, complex, and widespread, and more people join the middle class, fighting the world’s financial illiteracy will become even more of a priority. Practical and accessible education programs should be offered to the millions of people whose economic well-being would improve if they only knew more about managing their incomes and savings, however meager they may be.
If people, now, can't answer basic questions, how much can we reasonably expect in a world where finance is increasingly complex? Assuming it's richer, at least, we should be able to afford those extra training classes. But should we bother? (And will it matter? How much longer will money, as currently practiced, still exist? 200 or 300 years?)
Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last.
So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting.
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With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives, and governors.
But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority.
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With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running.
Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates.
The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.
The article goes on to describe another system (Majority Judgment) which takes a lot more of this information into account,
There are two other changes in the political culture that I think will make a return to parties especially difficult. One is the way we've come to embrace neutral administration. Rosenblum describes the historical roots of anti-partisanship, which kind of gets at this idea. But now several generations of Americans have grown up with a fairly extensive administrative state and with a Hatch Act that regulates political activity among federal employees.
For people under 40, we've also only ever known a political world with another layer of post-Watergate sunshine reforms. We expect that official party organizations will be neutral in nomination contests and can't accept that the rules might be designed to favor certain types of candidates because the party thinks that's how it can achieve its main goal: winning political office.
If the broad cultural expectation is that broad participation and neutral administration are necessary to make something legitimate, then, as much as it pains to me to say it, those ought to be taken into consideration in how party politics works. This could be a good opportunity to reform the election system, including nominations, in ways that are badly needed. Some uniformity across states and some updated technology would serve us well.