10 Weekend Reads

Superbugs; They’re here.

In 2013 some 23,000 died from drug resistant bacteria in the US with the numbers increasing rapidly Mis-use of antibiotics in humans, massive misuse in feed animals with some 70% of antibiotics used (poundage) in this country being feed to feed animals to promote growth. General lack of awareness and lack of data are all contributing. There is no systematic gathering of data, since hospitals aren’t required to report deaths and from personal experience hospitals don’t follow good, basic, cheap/free proper procedures. I’m not a microbiologist but I had microbiologists working for me.

Dangerous bacteria are on track to kill millions
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-superbugs-are-bad-2015-8#ixzz3iDwdLK1e

CNN calls the top on Trump once again.

As for Erickson, Trump called him a “total loser” who “has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event.”

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/08/politics/donald-trump-cnn-megyn-kelly-comment/

Some non-profit pissant disinvites Trump and you think it means something. ROFL.

You people in the media have no idea what you have done in league with the GOP Media Machine to create an electorate of seething, hate-fulled white men.

You treat Trump comments as “bad” but give equal weight to Republican spin over Democratic science-based fact.

From Rob Rinehart’s “How I Gave Up AC”:

“Most power in the US is generated by burning coal, immediately squandering 67% of its energy, then run through a steam turbine, losing another 50%, then sent across transmission lines, losing another 5%, then to charge a DC device like a cell phone another 20% is lost in conversion. This means for 100 watts of coal or oil burned my phone gets a mere 25.”

If burning coal ‘squanders’ 67% of coal’s energy, then the combustion efficiency is (1 minus 0.67) or 33 percent. Let’s do the math: (0.33 x 0.50 x 0.95 x 0.80) = 12.5 percent, not 25 percent.

But 12.5% efficiency is ludicrously low. Steam turbines by themselves (as a component) are around 90 percent efficient, while overall power plant efficiency can approach 50 percent with the newest generation of high temperature, high pressure steam turbines. The average power plant is around 33% efficient, limited by the theoretical Carnot efficiency. 100 percent efficiency is thermodynamically impossible without access to a cooling reservoir at absolute zero.

Think of how much innumeracy costs our economy!

In order to make G+ work well, Google needed to convince everyone that all they needed was ONE email account funneling into G+ circles and stuff. But many Google users have multiple accounts under a variety of pseudonym names, which doesn’t work well with G+ and ONE identity!

Many may recall that Google tried to convince people that they only needed ONE Gmail about by plastering prompts all over GMail to this effect. It obviously didn’t work.

Many of us have multiple Gmail accounts. One for work stuff, one for job hunting maybe, one or more for personal use, one for a home biz, one for online purchases, etc. One email account doesn’t work for most people in today’s world.

I refused to be shoehorned into one account and therefore, chose not to register for G+. Which meant that I could not participate in a lot of the Google ecosystem. For instance, I could not rate or post comments about apps on Google Play unless I used a G+ account. So I never posted anything. [shrug].

i always thought technology always created jobs, but destroyed more it created, of why would any business invest it it? i recall that when i was going to school and in my first CS class, that one of the impetus for computerization was that to run a major bank, or to have social security as the country grew, that just to run those would take close to a million clerks to do. with computerization, you could do it with a lot less workers. also consider this, back in the 60s, GM had about 300,000 workers, producing about 5 million cars a year. now GM has about 70,000 workers producing closer to 7-8 million cars a year. so when exactly didnt technology reduce the number of workers? and why would business invest it in if it didnt? and i suspect that part pf the reason business hasnt been investing in its business, is because its labor costs are low, and dont seem to have any need to invest because their sales arent growing much at all. usually they are actually shinking

USA exceptionalism. Having to ‘splain irony!!

Trump irony, the Megyn flap overshadows Trump ironic observation on “single payer”.

Trump said, with a hint of irony which went right over the numb media squads, ‘single payer works but the USA is different’.

Yes, USA is different. the irony is USA difference is the plundering of US taxpayer funded common goods by the .01% running federal money through the war profiteers and FIRE so they get their skim and add nothing!

Let’s all talk “blood and Megyn rather than the irony of single payer being vetoed by the exploiting class.