Essess is doing drive-by thermal imaging in high density urban areas across the US, hoping to target possible building energy efficiency opportunities. Another company is using urban satellite imagery to choose the best rooftops for solar energy siting. Big Brother may be watching you… but at least occasionally he’s got the right idea.
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
When shared cars kill
Peer to peer carshare cars are killing people, because cars of any kind kill people… not because they’re shared. They’re big and heavy and fast, and they get operated in densely populated areas. Anybody who thought this wouldn’t come up when they started setting up these services was delusional. The thing I don’t really get is why on earth is the owner of the car liable for an accident involving it? Assuming the car didn’t spontaneously explode due to poor maintenance, I presume the death and destruction is a consequence of bad driving, texting, drinking, poor road engineering, etc. Just like all the other 40,000 people who get killed by cars in the US every year. The problem that needs to be fixed here isn’t intrinsic to car sharing, it’s a problem with the way we assign liability in automobile accidents.
The Neapolitan Mob’s Most Dangerous Family
A character sketch of Paolo di Lauro, one of the Neapolitan Camorra’s former leaders. Southern Italy it seems, like some parts of Mexico, operates with more than one quasi-state organization governing in parallel. A tacit negotiation between the official and unofficial systems, which sometimes erupts into violence — ironically, at those times when the so-called “criminal” organizations have become weak.
Carsharing saves city governments millions
Migrating city fleets to car-sharing has been able to reduce the size of those fleets by 50-75%, and increase vehicle utilization from 30 to 70%, which means way less in the way of city capital costs dedicated to cars. It also means a lot of policymakers getting much more familiar with the sharing economy.
Underneath Paris
There’s a secret society underneath Paris. Two thousand years worth of tunnels and passageways ready to explore.
Collusion tracks the trackers
There’s a cool experimental Mozilla plugin called Collusion which lets you see what other sites are being told about your web browsing habits as you surf around. Even with ad-blocking and do-not-track and a host of other privacy enhancing features turned on, the list of notified trackers grows pretty darned quickly!
A French-Canadian bicycle moving company
Tips on How to do a Bike Move from Déménagement Myette, a commercial bicycle moving company in Montreal. They have a whole fleet of extra wide Bikes at Work cargo trailers, that carry standard household appliances with ease! More than 1000 bike moves done since 2008.
How Google’s Driving Costs Misses the Train
A fun critique of the estimated driving costs that you get from Google Maps, from Alex Steffen. The costs of driving are largely (mostly?) systemic, and external to the individual, and predicated on an assumption of car ownership, and a mile-for-mile interchangeability between driving trips and walking/biking/transit trips, which is empirically wrong. People who don’t rely on cars for transportation do the same things in far fewer miles (3 to 9 times fewer, depending on the urban fabric they are embedded within).
The Corporate Surveillance State
A completely creeptastic article from the NY Times on how Target can figure out that your 16 year old daughter is pregnant before she’s willing to talk to you about it, based on what she’s buying and when. Big Brother isn’t a mustachioed Stalinist, he’s a mild-mannered statistician attending corporate board meetings and sending out personalized coupon books that purposefully camouflage just how much his computers know about you and your so-called “private life”.
Fourmile Creek Failure
Yesterday the Boulder Greenways Advisory Committee killed the Fourmile Creek Path because of objections from the NIMBYs living near the right-of-way. Separated off-street infrastructure that’s available year round is vital to getting kids on bikes, and seeing them as a real mode of transportation. Political will is essential to build for the future even when the nearby and present interests are opposed. Without some backbone here, we’re never going to get a transportation system that isn’t wholly dependent on fossil fuels, or streets that are built for human beings.