SL 608

~ Laura

We are feasting on “Orange is the New Black” this week. I’m watch season one again with Steve and then watching episdoes from season two when he’s not around. Last night, I caught the episode with Lorna Morello’s back story. So, so sad.

Megan McArdle writes about the problems of curbing dirty energy consumption world-wide. Renewable energy has to become a lot cheaper before developing countries make a switch.

Shifting tides in Wales reveal ancient footprints.

“After a long period in which women moved actively into the work force, the job participation of women has dropped sharply in recent years, particularly among the middle-aged.”

Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “SL 608”

  1. Confession time: My husband and I were watching S2 of OITNB together. Slowly. One ep a night. One night, I said fuck it, and after he went to bed, I stayed up and watched the rest of the series. Then for the next few nights I pretended I hadn’t seen it.

    The funny thing is that so he wouldn’t know I had watched it, I couldn’t use Netflix, so I downloaded it elsewhere and watched on my laptop. When I lie, I lie hardcore.

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    1. Wow–it sounds like cheat-watching Orange is the New Black is an epidemic.

      Time for a NYT trend piece!

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  2. The NYT sob story on job participation for middle aged women would have been more convincing if they’d just left out the bar graph on the right, which shows men across all ages groups are the ones truly screwed in this recession and recovery.

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  3. And then there’s this on renewables:

    Do you remember when Dr. Evil was going to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000?

    This is what we are facing today in Solar – the Dr. Evil ultimatum. The cost to get Solar to coal parity is going to be laughably tiny.

    The cost sounds like a lot of money to old people, or to people who haven’t thought it through, or to people who do not know how large world GDP is today and how much we spend on energy already.

    But the cost is tiny, and China laughed when they found out the cost.

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-laughed-when-it-saw-how-cheap-solar-could-be-2014-6

    The long and the short of it is that the author argues the cost to China of finding out whether solar costs could go down below the cost of coal was $10 billion over 8-10 years, beginning in the early 2000s. Not even peanuts.

    Building it out will cost more, of course, but the question is, compared to what? For China, the up-front costs of new coal plants plus the cost of the pollution are probably above the costs of solar already, and within a very few years — three or four — new capacity in solar will be as cheap to build as coal.

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