E-scooters

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry--Thomas Paine


Something really weird happened yesterday when I sent the blog. All sorts of stuff didn't get sent, stuff got deleted. Every time I try to do something just a little out of my habit, I get wacked.

Is there a better metaphor for a society's divisiveness than the fact that groups are willing to go to the Supreme Court over how we count people?

Reaping the whirlwind: Race has become a flashpoint in the growing dispute between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a quartet of liberal freshmen lawmakers, again pitting Democratic members against each other in starkly personal terms.(wsj)

“In a world full of people looking to impose their concepts of justice on others, it’s refreshing to revisit Adam Smith’s thinking.” Vernon  Smith goes on to write on Smith in the WSJ:

"Smith thought society improved itself by controlling certain hurtful actions, rather than by trying to achieve some utopian benefit through collective action. History is littered with examples of unintended consequences and grandiose failures stemming from the latter approach. Smith’s preferred approach relied on people’s natural impulses to better themselves, risking only their own resources to do so. He opposed slavery, colonialism, empire, mercantilism and taxation without representation at a time when such views were considered radical. These ideas inspired the American Experiment, launched the same year Smith’s second book was published."

Scientists in Finland found "practically no anthropogenic [man-made] climate change" after a series of studies. “During the last hundred years the temperature increased about 0.1°C because of carbon dioxide. The human contribution was about 0.01°C”, the Finnish researchers bluntly state in one among a series of papers. This has been collaborated by a team at Kobe University in Japan, which has furthered the Finnish researchers' theory: "New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an 'umbrella effect'," the just published study has found, a summary of which has been released in the journal Science Daily. The findings are hugely significant given this 'umbrella effect' — an entirely natural occurrence — could be the prime driver of climate warming, and not man-made factors.

So there is more than one explanation of something we don't understand? 

Academics studying the ruined Philistine city of Ashkelon have discovered that DNA evidence suggests the Philistines may have been descended from ancient Greeks who never went home after the Trojan war. They were wine-makers, expert potters and architects, wide-ranging and curious navigators and world-leading smelters of metal. 
But bad things happen to your reputation and your history when your enemy writes well.

Nuclear started to provided a small share of US electric power in 1957, but its share never rose above 1% until 1968. By 1977, nuclear’s share of electricity rose above 10% for the first time and rose above 20% in 1990 for the first time and hit an all-time peak of 21.8% in 2001. Over the last 30 years, nuclear’s share of US electric power has been fairly stable in a range between about 19% and 21.5%. Solar never contributed to US electricity generation until 1984, but its share never exceeded 1% until 2017 and its share in 2018 was 1.6%

On this day in 1943, one of the greatest clashes of armor in military history was fought as the German offensive against the Russian fortification at Kursk, a Russian railway and industrial center, was stopped in a devastating battle, marking the turning point in the Eastern front in the Russians’ favor.

                            E-scooters

E-scooters are confounding city leaders, and you know how they love the illusion of control. But it has the look of an emergent social/technologic event.

Cheap, widely available and easily unlocked with a smartphone app, e-scooters have become wildly popular overnight. A trip to Austin, Texas--where the land is flat and the weather dry--shows scooters as one of the distinctive qualities of the town.

"It's happened very quickly and a bit of an anarchic way," admitted French Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne in May. "It's effectively been the law of the jungle."

Over the course of a year, a total of 13 operators piled into the Paris market, putting 20,000 scooters on the streets in a chaotic free-for-all that left legislators at a loss in a country normally known for its rigorous rules and regulations. T(he French regulations eventually knocked a number of companies out.)

This practical and fun form of transport, seen from Boston to Bangkok, has posed major regulatory problems, with city officials worldwide taking different approaches, from laissez-faire in Paris to a virtual blanket ban in London.

Estimate of the world market for electric scooters in 2025.

 "Any city in the world that has been working on its transportation policy, even 18 months ago, wasn't anticipating this tsunami," said Joel Hazan, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group.

"It has been the fastest rollout in the history of mobility services and the quickest wave to spread across the world. It's basically gone global over the past two years."