1. King Soopers workers in Colorado are on the verge of going on strike, shortly after the King Soopers-Safeway merge fell apart in the face of obvious anti-trust concerns.
3. In England, a major road is washed out by a landslide, leading to a fourteen mile detour. A private individual contracts with a farmer owning nearby land and in two weeks builds a substitute road and charges a toll. Thousands of cars a day willingly pay the toll and the man recovers his $150,000 equivalent investment and makes a modest profit in the three additional months it takes to fix the road. The government could have cited him for not seeking regulatory approval, but instead, lets it slide and has its own emergency vehicles use the road. The government could have done the same thing, but it didn't. One of the positive aspects of capitalism is that it allows individuals to act without a comparatively complex and bureaucratic process. The alternative is to find ways for government to be more nimble, something that Japan, for example, is quite good at in these situations.
4. Microsoft bans someone from its online service for truthfully putting his location data as "Fort Gay" in West Virginia, despite the fact that this was the name of his town, on the theory that it is offensive, even after he demonstrates that it is real place. It refuses to relent until the Mayor goes to the press to complain. Moral of the story: Corporate bureaucracies can be just as stupid as governmental bureaucracies.
5. The Colorado Department of Transportation is warning people that any texts asking individuals to “Pay your FastTrak Lane tolls” are scams, because Colorado does not collect fines or tolls by text. I've received some of these scam texts myself. But it still astounds me that prompt investigation and prosecution of these scammers using an electronic paper trail and following the places where they want you to send money isn't more effective. This seems like a problem that could be solved much more effectively given sufficient political will to do so, with a combination of specialized enforcement teams and possibly technological upgrades to the cell phone network. 6. A roughly 9.0 magnitude earthquake, of a type called a megathrust earthquake, struck in the year 1700, resulting in a tsunami to the Pacific Coast of North America from Vancouver to California. Its effects were also noted in Japan. Earthquakes like this happen every 300-600 years or so, and we're about due for another one.
7. New imaging of the geology under Yellowstone in the U.S. reveal that this mega-caldera is not currently anywhere near erupting in a mega explosion like the last time it occurred. Such an eruption would be a catastrophe affecting a large swath of North America and would have global climate implications.
8. Pollen issues in U.S. cities are, to a significant extent, a product of city planning policies to plan only male trees to replace those lost to Dutch Elm disease on the advice of a 1949 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
2 comments:
I see #5 getting worse before it gets better. Paper trails dead-end at crypto accounts (due to lack of regulation and/or deregulation) and at gift cards (by design). Big, big changes to the laws that currently benefit the wealthiest and most politically connected corps around the world are needed to address either. And doing that without waiting for beyond-the-horizon technology means adding significant friction to the legitimate uses of those channels.
Shoring up and securing the SMS network is a global telecommunications megaproject. SMS "security" and functionality are kind of the same thing, and the supporting hardware and code are nearly as baked in as the airline software system that is still running 1960s code and algorithms. I think a lot of people were (still are?) hoping IP and apps would organically obsolete SMS, but there is clearly still a product niche that nothing can do better, yet.
That's disappointing.
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