Daily Shaarli
February 11, 2022
Germany is adding greater risk to its playgrounds. Some of its climbing structures are now three stories high. And who is requesting this?
Insurance companies. They want kids to grow up "risk competent." Ironically, "safety" culture is stunting kids' risk assessing abilities, in their estimation.
"This is fantastic progress in understanding childhood as the right time for children to learn to recognize and mitigate risk," says Gever Tulley.
Tulley should know. He's founder of the San Francisco Brightworks School author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do). //
Perhaps out of fear of just that kind of thing, one school district—Richland, Washington— just plain got rid of its swings, arguing that "swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment."
That's only because all of the merry-go-rounds, and see-saws, and monkey bars have already been uprooted.
Thus does American childhood remain, for the most part, a mulch-chip, no-slip, primary-colored plastic safe space. Or, as a German insurance exec might put it, a risk-ignorance breeding ground.
Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars.
There have been three main hypotheses for how Mars might have lost its atmosphere: It’s possible that Mars’ atmosphere was eroded by solar wind, that much of the atmosphere was torn away by a cataclysmic impact, or that the low gravity of the planet allowed atmosphere to blow off and dissipate over time. These conditions are not mutually exclusive, and it’s possible that all three of them played a part, but NASA believes it has found sufficient evidence to assign a primary cause. The culprit? Solar wind — particularly the types of energetic blasts emitted by the sun during periods of unrest.
Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.
Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections. //
The outsize private grants in 2020, however, were not covered by transparency laws governing federal spending.
The Capital Research Center, a conservative group that describes its study of election 2020 as “exposing how one billionaire privatized a presidential election,” estimates that in Georgia, the Zuckerberg-aligned center gave $5.06 per capita in counties that went for Biden and 98 cents in counties that went for Trump.
In Pennsylvania, another swing state, the group estimates that the center gave $3.11 per capita in counties that went for Biden, while Trump counties received 57 cents per capita. In Arizona, the group says, the breakdown was $5.83 for Biden counties and $1.29 for Trump counties. //
The private funding on its own is not as problematic as the appearance it creates, based on the originator of the money, said Ilya Shapiro, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute.
“If just one group is providing the money, it has the look of being tainted,” Shapiro said. “Part of election integrity is the perception.”
I actually had an interesting conversation with Elon Musk about this. The question was, what would it take to build a self-sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars? It would take one million metric tons of stuff, propellant, the 3D printers, the stock for the 3D printers, food, agriculture, domes, wherever you're gonna live, all of it, to get to the point where you could have all that on Mars and those people could then survive without intervention from Earth. So one million metric tons, if you think about that, it takes a very large rocket and a whole sort of sophisticated spacecraft. The Curiosity mission was what, a couple billion dollar mission to get to Mars? And that Rover was one ton. That's the challenge we're talking about, sending one million Perseverances or Curiosities worth of mass to Mars. It's an enormous challenge. //
Right now we're focused on stepping one foot on Mars and then 10 and then a hundred, slowly building up to have a permanent human presence. There's no physics reason preventing us from inhabiting Mars, it's a matter of technology and engineering and patience, and most importantly, money. But there's no reason why we can't eventually be on Mars. Humanity will have a presence on Mars. Well, I'm not going.
The truth is, solar flares as large as the one that caused the 1859 Carrington Event happen fairly regularly. Since we started monitoring the Sun’s solar cycle, we’ve gotten lucky on a number of occasions — CMEs that would have hit us even harder than 1859 have merely glanced us due to a non-ideal trajectory. Meanwhile, the United States’ grid is more vulnerable to such events than ever before — our transformer grid is, on average, nearly 40 years old, high-voltage power lines are carrying far more energy than they used to on a day-to-day basis, and there’s virtually no way to quickly repair the damage such a storm would cause.