Been reading about voles online after reading about it in a book I’ve been reading. I was curious about them, mainly because I wanted to know if the ones I find at camp were field mice versus moles. I better brace myself for a shit ton of social media advertising going forward by exterminators.
Doesn’t seem really necessary for county to contract out to build out solar for government uses
I was reading a county legislator’s post the other day, and he was highlighting what another county was doing with a contract to a privately owned solar farm to provide renewable energy to county office buildings at a fixed price. While it seemed like a good idea in principal, it seemed also an wasteful example of government privatization.
So much of cost of solar these days isn’t the equipment, but of the labor to install solar panels and make the electrical connections up to code. But the thing is county governments already employ workers in Department of Public Works that have strong backs and are familiar with building maintenance and repairs. They can probably mount panels, including custom fabrication of any kind of stand or bracket the county would need for a solar installation. Moreover, county governments inevitably have small fleet of electricians on the payroll to fix common electrical problems in county buildings, and are fully qualified to make the connections between solar panels and the buildings’ existing electrical infrastructure. For design of system, they can contract out, but they don’t need to rely on external help when county employees can do it cheaper.
The county might be hesitant to plunk down a bunch of money for panels and electrical interconnection equipment, but they can bond them, especially if they have clear evidence of the savings in the out-years. By the county buying equipment directly, installing it and maintaining it in-house, this will make solar much more profitable for county in future. Why pay a separate electrician, when the county’s own staff can be dispatched to fix any problems with their panels? With so much of the cost of solar being labor these days, using county labor for solar panels on county buildings, it makes sense for county to purchase panels and supporting equipment themselves as a tax-exempt entity, and use existing labor in-house to install and maintain the system.
The account has been his way to honor some of the nearly 600,000 people who have died in the U.S.
Even back in March 2020, Goldstein knew something was wrong. The communications specialist's home city of Boston was hit early and harshly from virus. As the death toll climbed and businesses shut down, he started to feel overwhelmed. How could a virus kill so many and yet he knew so few of its victims? Who were the people who had passed away from COVID, and what were their stories?
In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission in accordance with one's moral obligations. Deciding what (if anything) counts as "morally obligatory" is a principal concern of ethics.
Philosophers refer to people who have moral responsibility for an action as moral agents. Agents have the capability to reflect upon their situation, to form intentions about how they will act, and then to carry out that action. The notion of free will has become an important issue in the debate on whether individuals are ever morally responsible for their actions and, if so, in what sense. Incompatibilists regard determinism as at odds with free will, whereas compatibilists think the two can coexist.
Moral responsibility does not necessarily equate to legal responsibility. A person is legally responsible for an event when a legal system is liable to penalise that person for that event. Although it may often be the case that when a person is morally responsible for an act, they are also legally responsible for it, the two states do not always coincide.
