Jesse Aguirre’s workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day’s agenda. Around the circle stand graduates from Silicon Valley’s top companies and the nation’s top universities. Aguirre, who is 26, did not finish high school and has so far spent most of his adulthood in prison; Slack is his first full-time employer. But in the few years he has been writing code, he has cultivated what is perhaps the most useful skill in any software engineer’s arsenal: the ability to figure things out on his own.
Those ass-backwards highway naming conventions … 🚗
The NY 9-suffixes violate the naming convention that New York uses for most state highways — east west highways are odd numbers like NY 5 or NY 7, while north-south highways are even numbers like NY 8, NY 10, NY 22, etc.
The US highways use the opposite system that New York uses, because our state is ass backwards at least when it comes to numbering highways. Virtually every other state uses the federal convention, not the New York convention for numbering highways.
US 2 and US 20 is are east-west highway, while US 9 and US 11 is a north-south highway. Interstate 90 is east-west while Interstate 87 is North South.
The new all electric city buses (well excluding the seasonally uses diesel cabin heaters) that CDTA has bought use 488 KWh battery packs to provide roughly 200 miles of range in city traffic for a 10 or 12 hours of operating service. City buses are heavy, they do a lot of stop and go driving, they burn a lot of energy. Diesel buses get 3.5 mpg or burn roughly 55 gallons of diesel for a 200 mile day.
The thing about it is that 400 kWh a day (save 88 kWh to avoid over depletion) or two megawatt hours worth of electricity for a five day service week is an incredible amount of energy when you’re trying to get it from any renewable source. A week operating a single bus is equivalent to burning one ton of coal or the output of 9,000 250 watt solar panels operating for one hour, assuming a real world output of 200 watts on the panels. The energy math of powering a whole urban fleet of buses on solar power or even wind is pretty insane when you think of all the other energy demands of the economy.
I do think electrifying the bus fleet makes environmental sense and provides long term cost savings and flexibility. It is more energy efficient to use electric motors and batteries in city buses as diesel motors pale in efficiency to large power plants and energy efficient electric motors. But the idea that electric buses are going to be powered by renewable anytime soon is pretty silly in my book.
A retired New York police officer has revealed the police department’s Transit District 34 in Brooklyn encouraged officers to arrest black and Latino men in exchange for rewards. The testimony is part of a discrimination lawsuit filed by Sgt. Edwin Raymond and three other officers, who say they were forced to apprehend more black and Latino men than other racial and ethnic groups. The former officer Pierre Maximilien also said Asian, Jewish and white people — who were referred to as “soft targets” — were not to be cuffed and that all officers in that district were required to fill a “collar quota.” Maximilien retired in 2015 after being retaliated against for not following these orders.
A national political action committee is targeting two Upstate district attorneys for their stance on New York's new bail rules.
The ads are being promoted on Facebook apparently funded by an organization called Real Justice PAC. The targets are the prosecutors in Erie and Albany counties, John Flynn and David Soares, who are both Democrats.
According to the PAC's website, its goals is to elect county prosecutors with platforms focused on ending discriminatory policing, ending cash bail, and rolling back practices that lead to mass incarceration. The digital ads accuse the DAs of leading the charge to roll back the state's elimination of cash bail for most crimes by "using fear-mongering tactics based on lies and racist rhetoric."