News Digest

13 Dec 2021

Bike-Rack Bunco

Talk about a rack racket. According to Washington D.C.’s abc 7, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority was supposed to build two sheltered bike racks at a couple of Metro stations by December 2015. The original budget: $600,000 per rack. Which is already ridiculous for a small open structure. Well, it got more ridiculous. So far, Metro has spent almost $4 million — and the projects still aren’t finished.

Metro blames: quality control. “Numerous construction quality issues, including damage caused by a contractor repeatedly drilling into an underground duct bank, led to lengthy delays.” But the agency fired that contractor four years ago, and brought on another contractor who also, mysteriously, has quality control problems. “Quality control issues with contractors can take time to sort out,” the Metro spokesperson insists with a straight face, “but Metro determined it was more important to get the project done right rather than get it done quickly.” Well, geniuses, after five years, you got neither. Somebody’s crony is racking up millions.

Don’t Be a Blown Bee

The left is panicked about bees. They’ve been worried ever since the UN warned last year about a supposed global bee population decline (caused, of course, by climate change) that poses a “threat to global food security.” Now The [UK] Guardian reports: “Bees May Struggle in Winds Caused by Global Warming, Study Finds.” Because it’s gonna get super-windy, apparently. Due to Donald Trump.

According to University of Sussex research published in Animal Behaviour (one of my favorite Brit journals), wind speed affects bees’ “efficiency of foraging.” The researchers discovered this phenomenon by “luring” bees into a garden shed and aiming household fans at them at various intensities. “With no wind, the bees on average took nectar from 5.45 flowers during their 90-second time trial. When wind speeds were increased, this fell to an average of 3.73 flowers.”

From this, the researchers extrapolated doom. “Insect pollinators already face many pressures in the modern world, such as loss of habitat and exposure to pesticides, and a great many are in decline,” mourned University of Sussex biology professor Dave Goulson. “Coping with increasingly blustery weather under climate change may be the final straw for some.” Solution: don’t aim fans at them.

Car Envy

Get this cnn headline: “If You Drive an Expensive Car You’re Probably a Jerk, Scientists Say.” Ohhhh, scientists say. According to a new study in Journal of Transport & Health — one of my favorite journals — researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas found that the more expensive the car, the less likely the driver is to stop for pedestrians crossing the street.

There’s even a scientific formula for this: the odds of a driver slowing down for someone in the crosswalk decreases by 3 percent for every additional $1,000 his vehicle is worth. Got that? Researchers conclude that pricey car owners “felt a sense of superiority” and had little empathy for mere pedestrians.

cnn also cites a similar University of Helsinki study, based on a survey of 1,892 drivers, which found that men who are “argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable, and unempathetic” are “more drawn to high-status cars.”

The science is settled! If you doubt this, you’re anti-science, so shut up, jerk. You probably drive an expensive car. You probably take up more than one parking space. You probably make dweeb researchers puttering around in their weak-ass Priuses jealous as hell.

Electric Slide

Self-driving cars are the “we’re-gonna-colonize-Mars” fantasy of the auto world, pushed obsessively by the same people. But there are problems. Autonomous vehicles can’t “see” to navigate in bad weather. A little snow, and the self-driving becomes self-sliding. The cameras and lidar (pulsed laser that measures ranges) are rendered useless under inclement conditions like snow, sleet, hail, rain, or fog. In other words, what happens in the actual world.

Car and Driver magazine reports, “Autonomous Cars Struggle in Snow, but m.i.t. Has a Solution for That.” The fix from the m.i.t. whiz-kids: ground-penetrating radar, which can “scan the ground below the road” using electric pulses so the self-driving car knows where it is. That’s the idea, anyway. Yeah, it’s a little bulky (the radar is housed in a huge trailer-like contraption behind the vehicle), and yeah, the technology can’t detect “above-ground hazards such as pedestrians, other cars, and various other obstacles.” But someday it’ll drive itself to Mars, so stop nitpicking.

Big Sister Is Listening

Here’s a terrifying proposition: “[W]hat if a smart device, similar to the Amazon Alexa, could tell when your boss inadvertently left a female colleague out of an important decision, or made her feel that her perspective wasn’t valued?”

According to News@Northeastern, two Northeastern University associate professors, Christoph Riedl and Brooke Foucault Welles, have landed a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to study whether such an eavesdropping machine — which, thankfully, hasn’t been invented yet — could “catch implicit bias in the workplace.” Geez, Louise.

“The vision that we have,” says Riedl, is a smart device “that sits on the table and observes the human team members … working on a problem, and supports them … by ensuring equal inclusion of all team members.” Because Alexa-enforced “equal distribution of speaking time” makes for brilliant decisions, supposedly. Welles explains that at the end of a group deliberation, the device would produce “a report that says person A was really dominating the conversation.”

Person A would, of course, be A Man. See? No spying needed. I could have saved the Army lab $1.5 mil.

Unfriendly Skies

Leftists love “shaming” people in an attempt to control their behavior. The latest: “flying shame.” Environmentalist wacko groups like Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion want to guilt you into staying off planes. Because the aviation industry produces 2.4 percent of all “human-induced co₂ emissions,” which is bad. According to Bloomberg, flying shame really took off last September, when Greta “How Dare You?” Thunberg, the teen climate scold, took two weeks to sail across the Atlantic instead of flying to a UN Climate Summit in New York.

You probably haven’t heard this, but it was Greta’s mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, who actually launched the movement, flygskam in Swedish: flight shame. In 2017 Ernman and several Swedish celebrities penned a newspaper piece vowing to give up air travel to save the planet: “I den akuta klimatkrisen väljer vi nu bort flyget” — “In the acute climate crisis, we now opt out of flight.” Well, the rest of us opt in. Once the threat of the coronavirus passes, the planet will even more gladly ignore the obsessions of this very weird family.

According to professor Patricia MacCormack from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, “The only solution for climate change is letting the human race become extinct.” Her new book The Ahuman Manifesto, explains how mankind’s extinction could save the planet. MacCormack, a professor of something called continental philosophy, describes the book as joyful and optimistic, reports Cambridge [UK] News, because it describes a positive view for the future of the earth without human beings.

“The basic premise of the book is that … humanity has caused mass problems and one of them is creating this hierarchal world where white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied people are succeeding, and people of different races, genders, sexualities and those with disabilities are struggling to get that.” She wants to dismantle religion “and other overriding powers like the church of capitalism.”

Ending the human race, she says, is “not about our death so much as it’s about celebrating the tools that exist to care for a decelerating [depopulating] earth.” You first.

Bum.gov

Homeless encampments have gotten a bum rap. Until now. In the ultra-lib mecca of Austin, TX the vagrants living in a formerly empty lot are forming a government. As Fox 7 Austin puts it, “The homeless community … is organizing into their own town.” Their seven-member leadership committee has a priority: bringing in donations. Representative government, meet representative panhandling.

“It’s called Camp r.a.t.t., Responsible Adult Transition Town. For the homeless, run by the homeless,” explains committee secretary Cori Roberts (who, according to Austin’s kvue News, used to live under a bridge). Secretary Roberts lays out the governing structure for the r.a.t.t. population of 100: “We have donation and volunteer recruiters, we have maintenance and general labor recruiters, we have the web designer, and the media outreach, we have security, and then we have the treasurer/donation organizer.”

Camp r.a.t.t. wants “to show people that we’re not just criminals, drug addicts, slobs, bums off the street,” says Roberts. Well, that’s good. But nix any media outreach about cash that your r.a.t.t. treasurer is accumulating, or the compassionate libs running Austin will hit you up for taxes. Bum’s the word.