Voltage low, disconnect relay
Adapting to Less Daylight in Alaska | Our Lighting Solutions
With the strange winter season we've been having here, we talk about keeping chickens, our solar system issue, what lights we have found to be tried-and-true, and how we have acclimated to less sun during the shortest days of the year.
I guess if you live off-grid in Alaska during the winter, you really want to have a lot of good flashlights and back-up sources of lighting, especially if your inverter fails.
This Evening Waiting For The Bus
When the Body Attacks the Mind
Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy. “It’s a breakthrough,” Heather Van Mater, a pediatric rheumatologist at Duke who has cared for Sasha, told me. She and her colleagues treat people who, just 10 years ago, might have been given up for lost and locked away. “We can make them better,” Van Mater said. “It’s unbelievably rewarding.”
While each of these autoimmune conditions is rare, the field of autoimmune neurology is expanding, and may force a reexamination of mental illness generally. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system.
Make NYC’s Trains & Buses Free | The Indypendent
Imagine a transit system where there are no turnstiles, where the police presence is minimal because cops aren’t lurking around to enforce fares. Picture a subway and bus network that is free, open and functional because those who profit most from it pay for it.
Lawmakers in Kansas City, Missouri took a step in just this direction earlier in December, passing a bill that directed the city’s manager to set aside $8 million a year to cover the fare of $1.50 for every rider. It is expected to save frequent bus users in the city of 490,000 people about $1,000 a year.
Tweeting his admiration, New York City Councilmember Brad Lander (D-Park Slope) called the step “visionary,” adding in parentheses that it “might take NYC a while, but this really is where we all need to aim.”
The push for free mass transit is part of a large democratic socialist (or social-democratic) resurgence — Medicare for All, free public college, a Green New Deal — in which demands for free, universally available public goods are rising and finding receptive ears.
Here in New York, we already have an example of free public transit: the Staten Island Ferry. In 1997, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani lifted the ferry’s already minimal 50-cent charge as a gesture of gratitude to the city’s only majority-white borough, whose voters had helped nudge him to a narrow victory four years earlier.
I think there is even a better case for making transit free in upstate cities -- they collect so little revenue from it -- it's almost a moot point. If you could have faster boarding and exiting from the buses, the savings of not collecting and processing fare payments would mean the whole system would actually be cheaper for taxpayers to operate.