"Vanity-URLs" is just a feature, usually a requirement for SSO. I cannot see that that would cause any different treatment of data related to your use.
I don't like corporations in politics. Successful businesses have done a lot of good, but they need to stay out of politics. (Read: And as long as they are in politics the unions have to be, too.)
There needs to be a balance between the powers of employers, employees and government (as a regulator and moderator between the other two parties). I think any reasonable comparison of this power balance between the US and other successful democracies would show that employers have more power in the US than most places.
I believe the US system of political clientelism has been especially unfavorable for US workers since the mid-nineties. Globalization has taken away their bargaining power, and politics have been taken over by business interests.
I think this shift in the power structure is the major reason for the continued worsening of inequality-measures (e.g GINI-coefficient) in the US, to a level now only comparable to third world and less democratic countries.
All gasoline cars are running 100% on oil and that is never going to change. Electrical cars are using a mix of electricity sources, some not as good as others, but with each renewable energy source added to the grid, every electrical car, also the older ones, are getting a bit cleaner. Add to that the ability to steer the charging of the cars (at least partially) synced to grid load, they can help stabilizing the grid and make renewable sources easier to integrate.
Just like gasoline cars then. Gasoline cars use just as much electricity as EVs, as refining of oil to gasoline requires substantial amount of electricity.
With all the extra energy needs of gasoline cars for tankers, building and maintenance of gas stations, I think the world would need a lot less electricity production if everybody went electric rather than ICE.
The author seems to have predicted an attack from liberalist Brits.
However, what the article describes is real and the Nordics run circles around most countries when it comes to work/life balance and gender equality. In sum quality of life for the wast majority is way higher than the average Brit or American. But I guess you are in the top 5% and care less about the 95%?
You are presuming quite a lot from my short post :)
And you've clearly didn't read that book if you think author claims quality of life in Scandinavia is low :)
I have skimmed the book and it presents a skewed picture and is selective about its 'facts'. And some of it is about how the economies are not 'sufficiently' libertarian, which is part of the point.
In Norway, there is a max price on child care which makes it affordable and the best option for most people. The government subsidizes somewhere around two thirds of the costs. I guess labour costs are 70%+ in most cases. There are both public and privately run child care centers/kindergardens. The privately run are subsidized on more or less equal terms as the publicly run, and the norms for employee density and other minimum quality requirements are the same. About one third of the employees are pre-school teachers (three years of higher ed), the rest are either skilled (there is a child worker professional vocation ed you can take) or unskilled. I don't think there are many cases where employees can not afford to have their own kids in child care. In my municipality parents of all children in child care are surveyed every year and the reports from the survey are public. My guess is that the whole thing is more or less funded by the increased taxes paid by keeping a larger part of the population working. (I could also mention that parents share about a year of paid leave for each birth so most kids are around one year old when they start in child care.)
makes a lot of sense to subsidize childcare heavily, it's one of the most pro growth policies one can come up with - let's people actually work and not worry about what to do with the kids. Norway is oil rich, though, so not clear how relevant this is for US
Land owners can generally chop down trees as they wish; with some exceptions, which mostly don't apply in these photos.
I think there are three main reasons for the increase in woodland: 1. Less cultivated land; including less land used for grazing (eg. by sheep). 2. Other sources of heating (mostly electricity, some oil, and still some wood, but usually not taken from just outside the door; there is very little use of gas in Norway). 3. Milder climate has raised the tree line. Which of these is most significant probably varies.
In Oslo, Norway, a city with abundant supply of fresh water, the water use per citizen is about 42 gallons per day. This includes industrial use and leaks from pipes. The city wants to further reduce this to less than 35 gallons per person. These numbers are not particularly low in Europe.
243 gallons is quite a lot in comparison to these numbers.
I agree, comparing is probably unfair, but still, 5-6 times higher water consumption is quite a lot and I found the numbers interesting. Actually, most poor people living in deserts around the world use a fraction of the water we use in Oslo.
Population is Oslo is increasing, and the city wants to keep the cost of treating waste water down, and one way is to reduce fresh water use.
I don't think your comparison was unfair. It's impressive that LV has managed to manage\recycle their water as much as they have but to me it is shocking that they still somehow consume 5-6 times as much per capita as Oslo (and, according to some basic searching, much of the EU). Not wanting to turn this into the usual EU\US back-and-forth, but ... man how is it possible to use that much water?
If you're dividing the whole county's water consumption by the county's population to get a usage-per-capita figure, that's going to be incredibly distorted by the Las Vegas strip (hotels [luxury showers and toilets that actually flush], pools, fountains, etc) and related (golf courses). These don't contribute to the denominator, but contribute enormously to the consumption. (If golf and the hotels consume 14% together, that would increase the per-capita consumption by 16%.)
I guess it'd depend on how this is counted. If it is simply "total volume of gallons of water consumed divided by permanently resident population" then your suggestion probably explains the bulk of it. I would have hoped that it'd be measured slightly smarter however.
OkCupid has (or had, at least, haven't visited in a while) a pretty decent approach to ad blockers. They detect that you block ads and (after explaining that ads are a big part of the revenue of their service, for which you currently pay nada ...) offer you an option to pay a small sum not to have to see ads (or you can turn ads back on).
