Interesting Links for 13-01-2018

[andrewducker]

The Widow, the Bank, and the $8 Billion Verdict

(tags: banking death law money )

From Russia With Blood: 14 Suspected Hits On British Soil That The Government Ignored

(tags: uk Russia murder )

Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because addresses don't work

(tags: africa maps location web )

A brief translation of today's Facebook news from Facebook speak to English (tl;dr "Fuck you, pay us")

(tags: Facebook advertising )

Engineer says he quit Google after order to stop pro-diversity posts

(tags: google diversity )

Mothers who regret having children are speaking up like never before

(tags: parenting motherhood mother children women happiness )

The Clarke Gap (A useful metric for technology)

(tags: magic Technology ux ArthurCClarke )

The company that runs Britain is near to collapse. Watch and worry

(tags: UK business fail )

'The desire to have a child never goes away': The Involuntarily Childless

(tags: children mother fatherhood society motherhood sadness )

Introducing the world's toughest snail

(tags: snails awesome ocean )

_Why_ Haiti is a shithole

(tags: empire racism history )

Women get prominent media jobs in wake of misconduct ousters

(tags: women media jobs equality )

Friends came to Netflix and everyone is shocked at the homophobia, transphobia and misogyny

What currently acceptable tv shows will look awful in twenty years?
(tags: tv friends bigotry history )

Delivering mail in Kabul’s nameless streets

(tags: Afghanistan mail )

In the 1880s Norwegians experienced racism in America

(tags: usa norway racism history )

"The question we came to dread: ‘Are you going for a second child?’"

(tags: children life questions )

Germany's Emerging Coalition Backs Off Delaying 2020 Climate Targets

(tags: globalwarming Germany politics GoodNews )

Comments

Norwegian

[agoodwinsmith]

My father's mother was Norwegian, born in North Dakota in 1900. Her family moved to northern Alberta when she was eight (free land[1]). She only spoke Norwegian when she arrived, and she was beaten in school if she used Norwegian at any time on school grounds (even during recess). This English-only approach was used against every child - Ukrainian, Polish, Doukhobor, etc etc[2]. When she married my grandfather, my great-grandmother made her life hideous. My Dad still "jokingly" (quotes because delivered like a jest, but not a jest) calls himself a half-breed. None of her children learned Norwegian, and none of her daughters cook Norwegian foods.

[1] - deliberate effort of Canadian authorities to spread European settlers across the Prairies. People were given "free land" they could only keep if they "proved" it - brought it under cultivation. Her family took a quarter section for each male person in the family (women could not own land).
[2] - you can tell when a group of people started arriving in Canada by how much of the original language the children and grandchildren know. Up to the 60's, it would have been zero.[3]
[3] - but, of course, up to the 60's numbers of people from those groups would also have been zero, so there's also that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komagata_Maru_incident

Germany's cleft stick

[nojay]

The German coalition isn't exactly backing off delaying the 2020 climate targets. They can't realistically be met at all, not without blackouts and periods of insufficient generating capacity by shutting down coal and lignite-fired power stations which still produce about half of all Germany's electricity demands. The rise in renewables production in Germany at great expense has been balanced by the loss of non-carbon nuclear capacity, with all of that shut down by 2023 (Germany just lost 1.2GW of non-carbon nuclear power last week when a BWR was shut down permanently on government orders). They need to increase their rate of buildout of renewables just to match that total loss of nuclear capacity, never mind compensate for reductions in coal and lignite burning as well.

Germany might be able to fudge it by racing to burn gas in new-build combined-cycle gas turbine sets, the way Britain has replaced most of its coal-fired capacity over they past couple of decades but that still results in a lot of CO2 ending up in the atmosphere (about half that of coal and lignite per GWh) and they'd have to source more gas, probably from Russia to produce that power.