Daily Archives: February 21, 2021

opinion

By Marion Mass| Erie Times-News

The New York Times reports that there is unity of thought in certain circles about how the reach of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare) should be expanded.

Thats unsurprising. Parasitic, special interests will tend to think alike when it comes to sucking nutrition from a host.

The profiteers of Obamacare for example, gigantic health insurance companies and increasingly monopolistic, regional, health systems never lose sight of their objective of increasing profits or of the need to bend lawmakers in a direction that serves that objective.

When it comes to understanding this perverse feature of Americas healthcare economy, the public is decidedly not woke.

The complexity of the system deters most people from even thinking about where all the money is going.

Consider:

1.) The very design of the ACA, misnamed because of its emphasis on coverage not affordability and not care has produced a windfall for the alpha parasite among the special interests, the insurers represented by AHIP (Americas Health Insurance Plans), a lobbying organization known for the generous donation of its influence among politicians on both sides of the aisle.

2.) Also enjoying big increases in profit after implementation of the ACA were certain hospitals. Curiously enough, hospitals categorized as non-profit did quite well, sometimes at the expense of the indigent patients they claim to serve. By the way, the AHA (the American Hospital Association), is another of Washingtons heavyweight lobbyists.

Note to dozing America: there are CEOs among the nations top non-profit hospitals whose annual income is close to $20 million.

Feeling woke yet?

Most Americans view hospitals and the physicians who staff them as a single entity. Yet in recent years, there is a growing divide between the suits and the scrubs, the executive-administrative class on one hand and those who actually practice medicine on the other. With slightly more than half of Americas physicians now being hospital employees, few speak out against what theyre seeing and the direction in which things are headed. Hospitals like it that way; each year, they net an average of $2.4 million for each doctor they employ.

The AMA (American Medical Association) long ago ceased representing practicing physicians. Less than 15% of them are members, and the dues collected in 2018 were 10% of the AMAs $332 million in revenue. By developing other revenue streams, the AMA has made common cause with the parasitic coalition to survive.

Yes, everyone agrees with the platitude cited by the New York Times in its report: Americans deserve a stable health care market that provides access to high-quality care and affordable coverage for all.

But the ACA did nothing toward that end, nothing to reduce costs or the forces that drive them upward, a fact that is nothing if not monumentally awkward.

Will expanding the ACA change that?

Of course not.

Over the decades, our legislators have woven together legislation that relentlessly favors members of the parasitic coalition. The result? Consumers pay more for less time with a physician, assuming that they can meet with one.

The profiteering special interests that dominate the warped economy of heath care in America are already leaning on the new administration in Washington. Most people want transparency in the pricing of services. The entrenched special interests oppose it. Its their jam.

The same interests pursue consolidation in the direction of near-monopoly power. We shall see how well the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Beccera, lives up to his reputation by resisting their efforts and reversing damage that has already been done.

Perhaps Congress can reverse its headlong plunge to the bottom in public opinion polls by listening to different voices physicians who actually care for patients. Absent a change of influence, Congress will reverse that plunge to the bottom when pigs sprout wings.

America, whodo you trust to make the ground rules for a better system of health care a system defined by (1) easy access to medical care at (2) reasonable cost, and (3) relationships between physicians and patients that are unburdened by the sapping effects of an entire class of parasite?

Do you trust the business interests, like the million-dollar CEOs of the parasitic coalition?

Do you trust the politicians who look to the parasitic coalition for the funding to keep their jobs?

Or would you consider hearing what a grassroots movement of fed-up physicians, people who swore an oath to protect you, has to say?

Forget Utopia. Simple sanity will do.

Marion Mass, M.D. is a pediatrician, co-founder of Practicing Physicians of America, and leadership in the Free2Care organization. She's also a member of The Intelligencer/Bucks County Courier Times editorial board.

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Who should lead on the path to 'Utopia' in American healthcare? - GoErie.com

Though she rarely acted on stage after college, Diane Fridley Norman always knew how to put on a show.

Whether she was pitching a new advertising account or trying to bring a touring Guthrie production to a small town, Norman always made sure she left a lasting impression with her audience.

"Diane never went down the middle," said Chuck Kelly, Norman's longtime boss at Kerker Inc., a Minneapolis advertising agency now known as Preston Kelly. "She knew you had to make a statement in a way that was memorable. And Diane could be memorable."

Norman died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on Feb. 4. She was 71.

One of six children, Norman grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. Her childhood nickname was "Tooie," after a puppet on Kukla, Fran and Ollie, an early children's television show. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in theater from Purdue University in 1967.

After moving to the Twin Cities, she founded D.F. Norman & Associates in 1979. She worked with some of the most prominent arts organizations in the Twin Cities, including the Guthrie Theater, COMPAS and the Minnesota Dance Theatre.

In the early 1980s, when the Guthrie was trying to expand its touring schedule, Norman was tapped to develop a network of volunteers in three small Midwestern communities to bring "The Rainmaker" to town.

"These folks had never taken on anything of this scale or size, but Diane made it sound as simple as pie," recalled Christine Tschida, who coordinated the Guthrie's touring schedule at the time. "She charmed everyone."

A few years later, Norman joined the board of Artspace, which was then a modest advocacy organization that helped struggling artists find temporary studios. Norman and another board member, Catherine Jordan, persuaded the group to think bigger and plunge into the uncertain world of real estate development. Though its first five grant requests were rejected, Artspace eventually raised $5.2 million for its first artists' cooperative in St. Paul, which opened in 1990. Artspace now owns 52 properties in 24 states, providing homes for more than 2,500 artists.

"Artspace would not be what it is without Diane Norman's vision and drive," said Artspace President Kelley Lindquist, who joined the nonprofit organization in 1987 when he was the sole employee. "It has grown into a huge national organization, but it all started because of her."

In 1987, Norman joined the Kerker agency, where she became known for combining smart strategic thinking with clever theatrics in her client pitches. To win the business of a company that makes fishing lures, Norman assembled eight fishing boats, which she placed in a pond below her firm's sixth-floor window. When the client looked out the window, he saw a fleet of fishermen using his tackle, while assistants held up Burma Shave-style signs that told a short story about why Kerker should win the account.

To get the attention of Italian restaurant chain Buca di Beppo, Norman delivered the firm's pitch in the mouth of a suckling pig, which was hauled to the firm's offices in a little red wagon. "They thought it was fun," Kelly said. "They said, 'These are the kind of people we want to work with. They can express their creativity.'"

Norman loved traveling, including annual trips to New York with daughter Amanda Norman Hundley. Jordan said Norman's last trip involved seeing artist David Byrne in "American Utopia." "She said I can die happy now because I've seen David Byrne live," Jordan said.

In addition to Hundley, Norman is survived by daughter Jenny M.O. Norman and son Zachary W.F. Norman. A celebration of her life will be held this summer.

Jeff Meitrodt 612-673-4132

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Diane Fridley Norman, ad account executive and arts advocate, dies at 71 - Minneapolis Star Tribune

NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the now barren red planet.

While the agency has completed other missions to Mars, the $2.7 billion robotic explorer, named Perseverance, carries scientific tools that will bring advanced capabilities to the search for life beyond Earth. The rover, about the size of a car, can use its sophisticated cameras, lasers that can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks and ground-penetrating radar to identify the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that may have thrived on Mars when it was a planet full of flowing water.

Now the fun really starts, Lori Glaze, director of NASAs planetary science division, said during a news conference after the landing.

NASAs earlier missions showed that in the distant past some places were warm, wet and habitable. Now it is time to learn whether there were ever any microscopic inhabitants there.

Its an enormous undertaking thats in front of us, and it has enormous scientific potential to really be transformative, Kenneth Williford, a deputy project scientist on the mission said during a news conference on Wednesday. The question is, Was Mars ever a living planet?

Mars has been the focus of more and more interest from explorers on Earth. The United Arab Emirates and China both began orbiting the planet last month, joining an armada of European and American spacecraft already studying it from space. And private entrepreneurs are looking toward the neighboring world, with some such as Elon Musk imagining that one day perhaps humans could live there.

The rover will set in motion a NASA plan that is to be carried out over the next decade, and it could bring samples from Mars back to Earth, where scientists will have even more capabilities to find something signaling that our planet is not the only place where life has ever been found.

The mission will also try to make a small experimental helicopter, Ingenuity, take flight in the thin Martian atmosphere something never accomplished before. Successful tests of this Marscopter could point the way toward new methods for searching the surface of Mars and other worlds from their skies.

A successful test of the helicopter would be a true extraterrestrial Wright Brothers moment, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASAs associate administrator for science.

NASA has landed a series of rovers on Mars since the 1990s. Each has revolutionized human understanding of Mars.

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed in 2004, followed unmistakable signs of water that flowed several billion years ago. The Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012, quickly discovered that its location, the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, was once a freshwater lake, an environment that was clearly habitable even though it was not equipped to answer whether microbes once inhabited the lake.

Perseverance, by contrast, has the tools that can search for complex carbon-based molecules that could be the remnants of past microbes.

Were looking for lifelike shapes, and lifelike compositions, Dr. Williford said. Chemical compositions so the elements, the minerals, the molecules, the organic molecules that we know are associated with life were looking for all those things occurring together.

The setting for the missions studies is Jezero, a 30-mile-wide crater that was once a large lake filled by a river delta. The rover will crawl along the ancient delta, poring over its piles of sediments in search of those chemical signals of microbes that were extinguished as Mars turned cold and barren.

But Perseverance will most likely be unable to provide definitive proof of past life. Another part of its mission is to be the first step in a complicated robotic game of pick up sticks that will eventually bring some of the rocks back to Earth for scientists to study up close.

Perseverance will drill rock samples, seal them in tubes and then drop them onto the surface. A later rover, from the European Space Agency, will retrace Perseverances path in order to pick up the tubes and transfer them to a small rocket that will blast off to space. The samples will then be transferred to another spacecraft in orbit around Mars for the trip back to Earth, sometime in the early 2030s.

Perseverance was the third robotic visitor from Earth to arrive at the red planet this month. Last week, two other spacecraft, Hope from the United Arab Emirates and Tianwen-1 from China, entered orbit around Mars.

But NASAs spacecraft did not go into orbit first. Instead it zipped along a direct path to the surface.

At 3:48 p.m. Eastern time, controllers at the mission operations center at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, Calif., received word from Perseverance that it had entered the top of the Martian atmosphere at a speed of more than 12,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft was beginning the landing maneuvers that would bring it to a soft stop in just seven anxiety-drenched minutes.

All that anyone on Earth could do was watch and hope that Perseverance performed as designed.

Mars is currently 126 million miles from Earth. Radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, take more than 11 minutes to travel from there to here. That means that when the message announcing the start of the landing sequence reached Earth, the rover had already been on Mars for four minutes. The only uncertainty was whether it had safely arrived in one piece, or had crashed into many pieces, another human-made crater on the surface of Mars.

The atmosphere of NASAs operations center more sparsely filled than previous Mars landings because of precautions required by the coronavirus pandemic was mostly pensively quiet.

At 3:55 p.m. cheers erupted in the control room when Perseverance arrived on the surface.

As designed, the landing system set the rover down on a flat spot a bit more than a mile to the southeast of the river delta the scientists want to explore, near the boundary between two types of rocks, an area that could tell scientists a lot about the geologic history of the area.

This is a great place to be, said Kenneth Farley, the project scientist, said in the news conference after the landing.

Much of the surrounding terrain was more rugged. We found the parking lot and hit it, said Allen Chen, the lead of the engineering team that designed Perseverances landing.

Matt Wallace, deputy project manager on the rover, described the nagging worries of trying to execute the landing.

It consumes you, he said. It becomes part of you. And in some ways, its hard still to believe that we finished it and that were done.

The pandemic had made the task even more complicated as the rovers teams on Earth rushed last year to meet an unmovable launch date in July last when Earth and Mars were close enough. If they had missed that, the rover would have had to stay on Earth for another two years.

The pandemic struck and just about the worst time for this mission, Mr. Wallace said.

Various speakers during the news conference described the difficulties of adapting to the new working conditions, but the team made adjustments, and the mission stayed on schedule.

Plaudits rolled in.

About an hour after landing, I got a phone call from the president of the United States, Steve Jurczyk, the acting administrator of NASA, said. And his first words were, Congratulations, man.

The first few weeks will be spent testing out the equipment, turning on the instruments, making the first few short drives. Then NASA will turn its focus to testing its experimental helicopter.

Over the coming weeks, Perseverance will deploy the four-pound flying machine. If the Ingenuity helicopter works, it will be the first such flight in the atmosphere of another world in the solar system.

Flying on Mars is not a trivial endeavor. There is not much air there to push against to generate lift. At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earths. The lesser gravity one-third of Earths helps with getting airborne. But taking off from the surface of Mars is like flying through air as thin as that found at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth.

Ingenuity is the flying equivalent of Sojourner, NASAs first Martian rover, which landed on the red planet in 1997. Although it was the size of a microwave oven and just a demonstration of the basic technology, scientists could already see the benefits of driving to explore a variety of rocks and surface features, instead of sitting in one place like the earlier Viking landers.

With NASAs rover on the surface, space watchers will soon turn their eyes back toward Chinas Tianwen-1 mission. As it orbits Mars, the spacecraft is preparing for a rover landing of its own. In May or June, the missions lander and unnamed rover will try to set down in a basin called Utopia Planitia. If it succeeds, that explorer will study the ice composition of the region, potentially helping future astronauts understand what resources are available to them should they set off for the red planet.

View original post here:

NASAs Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life - The New York Times

In a Sundance Film Festival defined by the coronavirus pandemic, the New Frontier section devoted to experimental projects like virtual reality films and interactive performance art was also radically reimagined. The section is often one of Sundances most intensely physical experiences; in 2020, it included a series of VR films viewed while floating in a swimming pool. In 2021, during an entirely remote festival, it pushed for something different: making our own homes feel otherworldly.

Pared down to 14 projects, this years New Frontier focused on web art and social media alongside virtual and augmented reality experiences. The result was a show that felt intimate and intriguing and set a model for showcasing interactive art online.

Its tough to make a Zoom call feel profound, but Beyond the Breakdown comes close. Like Tinker, the experience involves only a few people, all of whom dial into a web-based video chat. The chat is moderated by a Siri-like voice bot (controlled largely by a human operator), and its devoted to answering a simple question: what should Earth look like in 2050?

My session of Beyond the Breakdown felt like an attempt to figure out the philosophical underpinnings of a better world, rather than predict the most plausible future or imagine the specifics of a utopia. That probably depends in part on the participants, but its helped by gentle prodding from the AI, which asks open-ended questions and chimes in with an occasional request to delve deeper. The whole experience benefits from its film festival context while it might take place on the same screen as all your normal work meetings, its got an unusual sense of playfulness and optimism.

Shopping Malls in Tehran is a tragic love story about the rich kids of Instagram or more specifically, the rich kids of Tehran, a group of wealthy teens and twentysomethings shopping and partying under the shadow of social instability in Iran. Like a social media feed, it plays out in reverse: from two lovers fatal car crash just before dawn, through late-night drives and fights with disappointed parents and a surreal trip into the desert, all told through a combination of live narration and posts on a fictitious Instagram account. Slowly, the story expands from the doomed couple to a history of Iranian politics, the global oil industry, and the eponymous Tehran shopping malls.

The piece was originally intended as an in-person performance, but the pandemic pushed it fully online, with Housely and Alipoor narrating the show alternately on a YouTube channel and in live Instagram broadcasts. The result perfectly channels the distraction of online social interaction as audiences juggle their phones and laptop browser tabs to keep up with the show.

Tinker puts a twist on immersive VR theater, a genre where live actors play characters in virtual reality experiences, like Tender Claws The Under Presents. The Oculus Quest project is about an affable inventor in a cozy late-90s house. A handful of audience members join the scene. Most are invisible spectators, but one plays the mans grandchild who can take Polaroids, assemble toys, draw on walls with crayons, and talk to their grandfather over two decades worth of vignettes.

If youre the participant, the acting is pretty simple; youre not literally pretending to be a toddler or a teenager. But it blends the feeling of having a personal conversation about your family with the understanding that youre playing to an audience and want to make your scene at least a little entertaining. And the setting is a great sandbox of toys that encourage engaging with the environment and actor. Its a worthwhile followup to projects like the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival experience Draw Me Close or the 2020 Sundance installation Scarecrow with no physical contact but a more spontaneous feel.

The physical world is dying. Machines have made human effort obsolete, and the only future is a virtual environment that approximates their old reality. The problem? None of the uploaded souls can agree on what reality was. While musing about their last days on Earth, they argue about whether a river is actually a road, whether an apartments stairs should lead to anything, and whether a tree belongs in the middle of a living room.

To Miss the Ending is a melancholy, unsettling VR experience. Animated in jittering neon voxels that reflect the stories being told in voiceover, it turns a familiar dystopian science fiction conceit into a series of personal and bittersweet reflections on living to see the end of the world.

4 Feet High VR is the bigger, more ambitious followup to another Sundance project from 2018. Its a series of short VR films about Juana, a teenager in Argentina whos navigating sex and romance after showing up at a new school. Juana uses a wheelchair, and the film is shot so were level with her height. But its unique cinematography is just a small part of the appeal. Its a sweetly funny coming-of-age story about being young, awkward, passionate, and relentlessly sure that you can change a hostile world by having fun. The film would still be compelling without VR, but its 360-degree video completely shuts out reality and pushes you into Juanas world something that, during a year without movie theaters, traditional film simply cant do.

Read the original post:

The best of the 2021 Sundance Film Festivals New Frontier - The Verge

Electrical outages affecting some four million Texans over the past week are raising tough questions about the states power system, which operates somewhat like a rogue nation within the U.S. The winter storm that broke the grid may prove to be the event that forces the state to reform its grid management practices to better anticipate extreme weather events and also to end its isolation and connect to other multistate power grids around the country. So says Jim Rossi, a Vanderbilt University legal scholar who studies the structure of energy markets and is an expert on the tension between state and federal powers over U.S. energy utilities.

Texas is rich in fossil fuels, renewable power and political power, so for many decades it has run its own power grid, freeing it from federal oversight. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a nonprofit corporation, manages the network of electrical suppliers, called the Texas Interconnection, which serves 90 percent of the state. ERCOT and Texas have resisted invitations and outright appeals to connect with the nations two other power grids: the Eastern Connection, which links suppliers and customers east of the Rockies, and the Western Connection, which links power west of the Rockies.

Scientific American spoke with Rossi to learn more about Texass longstanding intransigence and why Texans may soon see fit to start making connections with out-of-state gridsin part because Texas might even profit from the move.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What do you see as the primary factors behind the failure this week of Texass power grid?

The most obvious factor, of course, is the extreme weather conditions. That said, this was not an unpredictable event. Utilities throughout the country are in a position nowadays where they can foresee and plan for these kinds of events. And utilities have a duty to provide reliable service to their customers, and customers expect this reliability even during a winter storm.

Some analysts say that the actions of ERCOT paved the way for a blackout disaster like this by maintaining the grids isolation from interstate power pools and even the nations two other massive grids. Do you agree?

To a degree, yes. I think another way we might understand it is: What price are Texans willing to pay to keep the Texas Interconnection grid independent? Maybe for some Texans that is more than what theyve gone through already. For others there is going to be a backlash.

There is some truth to the idea that if Texas had a [smooth] connection to the wholesale electricity market, and thus could buy and sell power to utilities outside of Texas, that the impact of extreme weather events would not be as significant. You can look at El Paso and Beaumont, cities [near Texass borders] that are not part of ERCOT and instead have connected their power grid with those in other states. The storms impact on those cities electrical power was relatively minimal. That said, Texas would be connecting to the Southwest Power Pool, which includes some states that also were affected by this storm and experienced rolling brownouts, such as Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

What factors have enabled isolationist energy policies in Texas to persist over the years?

The state has a longstanding history of political independence, with powerful players such as Lyndon Johnson, Sam Raeburn, George Bush and Rick Perry. The state exerts a significant political influence in the nation. Its our countrys largest energy-producing state. And the state consumes a lot of energy, including a great deal of natural gas. All that allows the state to operate very independently.

Could the power failures in Texas over the past week provoke any significant change in how the state manages its grid in the near future? Could this event represent a turning point?

I think it can and likely will. Were likely to see reform on two fronts. The first one is that its in the interest of Texas to reform ERCOT. It might come in the shape of reforms on governance and accountability. Weve already seen Texas Governor Greg Abbott call for such reforms. And reforms related to reliability of service, winterization of the grid and maintaining reserve margins for power generators.

The second front is related to planning and adaptation to extreme weather. The current power failure in Texas is the snow-and-ice version of a hurricane in the Northeast or Southeast. However, the situation in Texas is somewhat worse. A hurricane does not usually affect an entire state, whereas the power loss in Texas is affecting every county. So, adaptation to extreme weather would involve better preparing the states power system for both winter and summer events.

Oil and gas transmission, power transactions and other aspects of the nations two other grids are regulated by an independent agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Do you see a role for FERC in the future of Texass power grid?

Its not beyond FERCs power to intervene. And FERC has alluded to its willingness to assert jurisdiction over interstate wholesale sales of energy in some of its previous orders related to the Texas grid. So I think theres an issue of how long can Texas remain isolated?

Why is Texas not subject to FERC regulations?

The Texas Interconnection was started after the Federal Power Act of 1935. The Texas Interconnection was designed to expand and interconnect Texas grid to help with rural electrification. It was bottom-up effort. What came of that was Texas wanted to retain independence from federal jurisdiction over operation of its grid. I think the way that worked out both in terms of history and politics was Texas didnt allow for synchronous flow of energy outside the state. It kept the flow of power intrastate. Its not just a big energy consumption state but also a huge energy production state. Its able then to have more control over the way the grid operates and remain independent from the federal energy market. In the 1970s, ERCOT was created to more formally manage and operate the Texas grid.

In some ways that has let Texas be a really interesting experiment in operation of electricity markets. Some say its a utopia. It controls both wholesale and retail sales of power, without federal regulatory oversight. That has been praised because Texas doesnt have to worry about any tension between federal and state jurisdictions. Some blame that tension for the power system failures in California with its market policies. But in Texas youve got one regulator, one person that you can point finger at. In some ways you can see that as a more effective approach.

Some commentators have suggested that Texass growing share of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, underlies this past weeks grid failure, but others have quickly pointed out that renewables are not the dominant power source in the state. What is your perspective?

I agree that the renewables claim is factually bogus. In the wintertime, renewables comprise about 8 percent of the energy in the ERCOT-managed grid, and thats primarily from wind sources. Its true that some wind turbines are frozen or were frozen. But the failure this week has been primarily a failure in natural gas generation. There are a bunch of reasons. First of all, Texas is heavily dependent on natural gas. Its a big natural gas production state as well as consumption state, but it doesnt need a lot of storage for the natural gas, because production facilities are in-state. In many other states, natural gas is imported from Pennsylvania, Texas or other states and stored in tanks for later use. Most of Texas is very dependent on real-time production of gas. And the gas production infrastructure, as well as the electric power infrastructure, has been hobbled by freezing. Also, the states gas production requires electricity supplied by the states grid for its operations. So when you shut down the grid, you shut down gas production, and it becomes a house of cards. Heavy dependence on natural gas, along with the lack of natural gas storage, has really put the state in a difficult position here.

A big issue that looms after disasters like this is proposals for a national supergrid to connect all the nations grids, including that of Texas, and thus stabilize markets and transmission for buyers and sellers. But theres local resistance among suppliers and others. Does the power disaster in Texas change the outlook for a national supergrid?

Were increasingly going to see more interconnection of the grid. This might be an example of how it becomes necessary. And just thinking about this, Texas may have a lot to gain here, because its a huge state now with the production, not only of gas, but growing with the production of wind. To the extent wind supply in Texas becomes a resource they want to exportwell, you cant just take the wind resource and put it in a pipeline. It has to be transmitted over interstate wires. That creates a political interest group in the state that now might want to see Texas more interconnected with other states. I think thats the direction were going to move in as we see a growth in renewables.

And with the emphasis on infrastructure and the political impetus behind the Green New Deal, were likely to see states wanting to accept federal funding. You may see the federal government holding out carrots in terms of funding, the way it did with interstate highways. Were also more likely to see states cooperating among themselves in terms of regional bottom-up efforts to hopefully try to manage these programs on a regional basis.

Continued here:

Massive Power Failure Could Finally Cause Texas to Connect with the Nation's Power Grids - Scientific American

Todd Rundgren is to release a live recording of his 1973 classic album A Wizard, True Star!. The new version will be released on rainbow swirl coloured vinyl through Cleopatra Records on March 5.

The new live version A Wizard, A True Star... Live! was recorded 2009 in Akron Ohio. The special concert was orriginally released on crystal clear DVD and CD last year and now has been pressed on deluxe rainbow swirl vinyl (which you can see below) and comes in a gorgeous gatefold jacket featuring images from Todd Rundgrens truly epic multi-media concert event - a front-to-back recreation ofA Wizard, A True Star!.

Released in 1973, A Wizard, A True Star! was Rundgren's fourth solo album. Produced, engineered, and almost entirely performed by Rundgren, he envisioned the record as a hallucinogenic-inspired "flight plan" with all the tracks segueing seamlessly into each other.

The album, which mixes prog, psychedelia, bubblegum pop, show tunes and soul music, highlighted a move towards proggier music from Rundgren who was growing increasingly influenced by the likes of Zappa, Yes and the prog fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra. He would form his progressive rock side project Utopia the same year.

Get A Wizard, A True Star... Live!.

Todd Rundgren: A Wizard, A True Star... Live!

LP1 SIDE A1. International Feel2. Never Never Land3. Tic Tic Tic It Wears Off4. You Need Your Head5. Rock and Roll Pussy6. Dogfight Giggle7. You Don't Have To Camp Around8. Flamingo

LP1 SIDE B1. Zen Archer2. Just Another Onionhead-Da Da Dali3. Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel4. Does Anybody Love You

LP2 SIDE A1. Medley: I'm So Proud/Ooo Baby Baby/La La Means I Love You/Cool Jerk2. Hungry for Love3. I Don't Want to Tie You Down

LP2 SIDE B1. Is It My Name2. When the Shit Hits the Fan/Sunset Blvd3. Le Feel Internacionale4. Just One Victory

CD

1. International Feel2. Never Never Land3. Tic Tic Tic It Wears Off4. You Need Your Head5. Rock And Roll Pussy6. Dogfight Giggle7. You Don't Have To Camp Around8. Flamingo9. Zen Archer10. Just Another Onionhead - Da Da Dali11. Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel12. Does Anybody Love You?13. Medley: I'm So Proud, Ooh Baby Baby14. Medley: La La Means I Love You, Cool Jerk15. Hungry For Love16. I Don't Want To Tie You Down17. Is It My Name?18. When The Shit Hits The Fan - Sunset Blvd19. Le Feel Internacionale20. Just One Victory

Read the rest here:

Todd Rundgren to release vinyl live version of A Wizard, A True Star! - Louder

I love this game. I love my job. I love sitting in my little basement office watching soccer, thinking and writing about soccer and lets be honest tweeting about soccer (or the six pandemic words I hate) all winter long.

Champions League and Europa League weekdays are nice, especially with more and more Americans and Canadians involved. Coffee and European soccer on weekend mornings is part of my households routine. Its a wonderful life. Its a soccer utopia. Its not enough for me.

I miss Major League Soccer. Transfer rumors, coaching changes and schedule announcements can only keep me going for so long. I need the real thing. I need games. The wait is two months, as of Wednesday. Two months. An eternity in pandemic days. The only consolation is that the Concacaf Champions League chops 10 days off our wait.

While we wait, we dream. We hypothesize. We speculate. We overreact. We assume. We imagine what April 17 and the 2021 season hell, life itself might bring. Anything could happen. Clearly anything. Im choosing to think about anything in a strictly positive way.

Heres something Im looking forward to seeing in 2021 from all 27 teams in MLS, in 50-ish words or less. As a W name, I feel for those who always bring up the back. Reverse alphabetical order, here we go!

NOTE: This column is meant to bring hope to every last one of us, no matter who you support. Our friends, family and neighbors in Texas need more than hope right now. The players of Austin FC, the Houston Dynamo and Dash and FC Dallas are living it, too, and raising money to help people who are without electricity, heat, food and shelter. Consider donating if youre able.

A Designated Player No. 10. Someday, Tommy Scoops (@tombogert) will tweet: Deal is done. Caps have their man. When will that be? No idea. Who will that be? No idea. I do know I want to see Deiber Caicedo and Cristian Dajome running off Lucas Cavallini in front of a Reynoso or Zelarayan type.

First of all, Im looking forward to seeing how Torontos longstanding (and, in parts, aging) roster adapts to Chris Armas desire to press. Just in terms of pure swag, though, I want to see if Richie Laryea has another leap in his game. Let the man cook.

I really want to see if they hit on Remi Walter (d-mid) and Nicolas Isimat-Mirin (center back). Theres a lot riding on that. What I want most, however, is 2,000-plus minutes from Alan Pulido. Hes a double-double, Best XI presence if he can avoid injury (and Tata Martinos gaze) and play enough minutes.

I spend too much time around Anders Aarhus (Extratime producer, Seattle native and Sounders supporter). Thats why I am not writing about life without Jordan Morris (for now), Nico Lodeiros engine at age 31 or the next test for Brian Schmetzer. Two names: Shandon Hopeau and Ethan Dobbelaere. Give the Homegrown wingers a chance, Schmetz!

Another (final?) year of Wondo. Im not sure well every truly appreciate Chris Wondolowski, the player, the person or the soccer story. He is, in my mind, a first-ballot National Soccer Hall of Famer. I know others dont share my thoughts on the HOFs mission. Well have to talk it out when MLSs all-time scorer is eligible.

Bobby Wood in MLS, as reported by The Athletics Sam Stejskal. I just want to see, you know? Weve followed Woods career in Germany and watched him with the national team for a decade now. Hes one of the realest Extratime interviews weve ever done. He got paid by Hamburg, and now its time to play again.

This is going to sound boring two new fullbacks. The Timbers believe 23-year-old Argentine left back Claudio Bravo has the potential to be best-in-class at his position in MLS. Mexican right back Jose Van Rankin has more than 200 games in Liga MX. Apart from that, this is a settled team. Get well, Sebastian.

Who takes Brenden Aaronsons minutes? As I type this, Im watching the Union homegrown buzz around for Salzburg in the Europa League. Will it be Anthony Fontana? He is the obvious depth-chart choice and an instant goal off the bench and in the starting lineup in 2020 (6 G in 509 minutes). Or will Ernst Tanner make a signing?

Can Oscar Pareja top Year 1? My instinct is to say, Yes, of course, but its also hard to replicate (let alone improve upon) what amounted to career years for so many guys. Plus, theres no MLS Is Back tournament to build momentum. But really Pato. Same concept as Wood, but slightly different profile. With Daryl Dike out on loan, there are minutes to be had.

Gerhard Struber. I dont really count the playoff match as a true introduction. It didnt get a ton of hype at the time, but we get to watch the development of one of the games up-and-coming managers in real time. We get to see Red Bulls get back to their pressing roots. Oh, and Caden Clark. Watching him every week is going to be fun while it lasts.

What work gets done between now and the end of the transfer window? Alex Ring is gone, so is Ronald Matarrita. They sold Joe Scally. What happens next will tell us about their ambitions. Are they MLS Cup contenders, working behind the scenes to reload? Or is this it and might a drop to mid-table be coming? Is Extratime making much ado about nothing?

Is playoff Tajon Buchanan the real Tajon Buchanan? I got a kick out of the young Canadian getting under Nanis skin during the Revs playoff win. Id get an even bigger kick out of it if those swashbuckling attacks and cheeky defensive moments carry over to 2021 and become the norm. Overlapping Carles Gil is a good job to have, if he can keep it.

What does second gear look like? For most of the second half of 2020, Nashville insisted they were more than a near-impenetrable wall. They insisted they could control games with possession. They insisted they could create from open play. They started to do it. They nearly knocked out the MLS Cup champions. The test in 2021 is determining whether that leap was a bug or feature.

Djordje Mihailovic. Montreal wanted him, and thats a good start. It never seemed like the Fire placed full faith in their homegrown midfielder. In many ways, thats understandable. One word: injuries. The MLS I want to watch doesnt give up on young players. It finds the right situation for them to shine. Is this the right situation for Mihailovic?

Youd think the rumors around a playoff club/MLS Cup contender without a cut-and-dry starting striker would be stronger. Not so in Minnesota! Yes, Bebelo Reynoso is marvelous, but Kevin Molino is gone and the only pure forward on the roster is Foster Langsdorf. So what am I looking forward to? Seeing who Adrian Heath and Co. decide to sign and roll with in 2021.

Phil Neville, club manager? Gonzalo Higuain, franchise player? Blaise Matuidi, still got it? Matias Pellegrini, bust or slow acclimation process? So many questions, so many unknowns, so much to look forward to as Inter Miami officially become, as I wrote earlier this offseason, David Beckhams team.

Im looking forward to a better, happier, more productive Javier Hernandez. The man admittedly hit rock bottom in 2020. His personal life crumbled, and so did his soccer life. Does Chicharito still have it? Hell have to prove it. He gets a pass for 2020, but its a one-time pass. The Galaxy need him to deliver, and he seems intent on doing it.

A full season of Carlos Vela (with kid gloves). Bob Bradley is going to be careful with Vela, and I appreciate that. LAFC and MLS missed his quality in 2020. His presence alone changes games and the league. Its easy to take that 2019 season for granted, but I am well aware we may not see that sort of consistently blinding brilliance again. Best to appreciate every single moment as long as Vela is capable of delivering.

Ariel Lassiter or Christian Ramirez? What about Maxi Urruti? Fafa Picault? Mateo Bajamich? Tyler Pasher? The Dynamo have Darwin Quintero, on his day as special a player asthere is in MLS, but after that its pretty open when it comes to their attack. Who will win Tab Ramos favor? Can he get enough out of his roster to make the playoffs? Thats his job.

What does Hernan Losada see when he looks at this roster? We dont know Losada yet. We know of him. We know, in general terms, what he did at Beerschot. We know his reputation in Belgium was as a young, passionate, tactically astute manager who got more from his team than could rightfully be expected. Can he do the same with D.C.? How will he decide to go about it? Big questions.

Ricardo Pepi. David Gass is driving the hype train. Im just along for the ride. Pepi scored a playoff goal as a 17-year-old and got a couple more in the regular season as Luchi Gonzalez eased him into the first team. So whats the next step? How much time can he take from Franco Jara? Is 1,500 minutes and 10 starts greedy or just right?

(Id have said Paxton Pomykals return, but lets all agree to stay as silent as possible until he builds up a run of games and form. No need to rush him.)

I kept myself to two stadium openings, which isnt to say the good people of Cincinnati shouldnt be ecstatic, too. Its just that the blue and orange side of soccer in Ohio didnt have to fight for their teams very existence. When Crew fans walk into that shiny new stadium, theyll carry the past on their shoulders, scars included. You cant move concrete, but you can hang championship banners on it.

Incremental progress. Snore, but seriously. The Rapids have been building and improving steadily. Bit by bit, piece by piece the roster is deep and talented. Do they have a Vela, Higuain or [fill-in-the-blank big-name or big-price-tag star]? No, they dont. Incremental progress. In 2020, it was a playoff appearance. In 2021? Why cant they push into the Wests top four?

A fresh slate. Extratime has become a FC Cincinnati podcast. Thats how much news theyve made, both good and not so good. What the club needs most is a fresh slate. They cant escape their baggage from two rough years in MLS, but they can look at the table and see themselves even with everybody else. Add Brenner, maybe Lucho Acosta and a new stadium to the mix, and why cant 2021 be the year they turn it around?

Fewer brain farts. Lets just say that when it came to decision making and make-or-break moments the Fire were gassy. Too much? Fine. Chicago didnt get that much credit for it, but they controlled games in 2020. They just didnt finish them. What could this team, now recruiting from every corner of the globe, do with a little focus?

The first home match at Q2 Stadium. Ive been to a lot of firsts for expansion teams. First games. First home games. Stadium openings. Theyre all special, but theres nothing like walking into the building youll call home for the first time. The Q2 is Austin FCs home. The first look feels like a dream come true.

Can George Bello be the next Reggie Cannon? MLS starter >International success > Europe. I would say Bryan Reynolds, but Reynolds rise and sale was truly meteoric. Meanwhile, Bello quietly became a starter for Atlanta United in 2020 at 19, and in 2021 hes got an opportunity to take an even bigger leap under a manager who knows what it takes to make the jump to Europe.

..

Feel free to drop a dose of positivity in my Twitter (@andrew_wiebe) mentions. Id love to hear what youre excited about in 2021. Stick to MLS and your club, or take it way beyond our little soccer world!

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MLS 2021 season: One thing to look forward to for every club | Andrew Wiebe - MLSsoccer.com

Sussexes retreat

SIR The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are to be congratulated on the success of their retreat from the public eye.

The newspapers are full of it. We look forward to hearing details of their further retreat into privacy on March 4.

Brian SlaterEllesmere, Shropshire

SIR How can this young woman talk about her life as a royal? She didnt exactly put much into the role.

Sandra HancockStarcross, Devon

SIR If the Sussexes second child is born in America, it would be eligible to stand as president. Fingers crossed, we might get our 13 colonies back.

David GuessLetchworth, Hertfordshire

SIR Jan Etherington (Comment, February 18) writes as if she believes all moths are the enemies of her clothes.

In fact, of the 2,500 or so species found in Britain, only two the common clothes moth and the case-bearing clothes moth are a danger to natural fibres.

Most moths, like butterflies, are beautiful and harmless, and their caterpillars are strictly vegetarian.

Paul WinstanleyBraintree, Essex

SIR Having read accounts, by three daughters and a granddaughter, of the 9th Lord Hawkes despondency at the birth of yet another daughter by three of them and a granddaughter, will we be hearing from the rest of the family?

Jo-Ann RogersAlsager, Staffordshire

SIR Many years ago, the Prideaux boys sat in front of the Hawke girls in church. We could only muster four.

Julian PrideauxCoggeshall, Essex

SIR With five sisters and 10 female first cousins, my brother the 11th Lord Hawke almost had a death wish.

Every summer we went with our nanny to a boarding house in Westward Ho! One year he swung on a gas pipe and broke it, on another he sleepwalked out of a first-floor window and, on yet another, having been sent to his bedroom, he set fire to the curtains.

The 9th Lord Hawke may not have been blessed with a male heir, but he probably had a more tranquil life.

Nichola ForbesAlford, Aberdeenshire

SIR In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia. In 2021 the British Medical Association has called for the near-elimination of Covid before any significant easing of restrictions (report, February 19).

What kind of cloud-cuckoo-land do these guys inhabit? We already live with reduced, tolerated exposure to other infectious killer diseases. We must learn to do the same with Covid.

Stuart AshtonWhitley Bay, Northumberland

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Letters: The Union with Scotland is safe, even without a new Cabinet minister - Telegraph.co.uk

The five teaching unions of the Nation met with the Minister of Education, Nicols Trotta, and agreed on the wage claim: floor is 29%. The number jumps from the projection of the Minister of Economy, Martn Guzmn, on the inflation of the year despite the jump to 4% in January. With optimism, the teachers predict to close even higher in number.

In a joint scheme, all sectors are listened to. It is a negotiation process, Summarized Nicols Trotta, who led the virtual meeting from Palacio Sarmiento. On the other side of the screen they sat CTERA, UDA, CEA, SADOP and AMET.

The meeting had as a backdrop a meeting alone between Alberto Fernndez, Sonia Alesso (leader of Ctera), Roberto Baradel (Suteba) and the national deputy Hugo Yasky. It was at the Rosada and it lasted half an hour. We have a direct arrival with the President, was the Chicana from the national union. The photo did not like in the corridors of Education.

A simple statement from Ctera detailed that they spoke about lthe serious situation that the teachers of Chubut are going through; the National Vaccination Plan for education workers; the Law of Educational Financing; and the formation of the Economic and Social Council . On one side was the joint negotiation.

Where they did talk about numbers was at the platform meeting between Trotta and the union leaders. The number is closer to 35% than 29%, they pointed to Chronicle from the union halls. At another union table they were more cautious: We want it to be at least 2 or 3 points above 29%. Next week a new meeting will begin to put an end to the joint novel.

Our objective is to strengthen the instance of the parity that not only understands the salary aspect but also allows us to rethink the direction of the school in Argentina, said Trotta.

After the meeting, the head of Pizzurno shot that there is not only the starting salary of the teachers in Argentina, which for us is very important, but also strengthen the teaching incentive, which is the other component and whose amount in 2020 was doubled .

Last year the parties met four times. It was in February when the initial minimum teacher salary was set at 23,000 pesos, with a second tranche amounting to 25,000 pesos as of July 1 of the same year , detailed Education.

The agreement reached the payment of a extraordinary lump sum of $ 4,840. In July, the continuation of the payment of an exceptional amount FONID extraordinary sum COVID 19 was agreed and the working conditions were agreed with a view to returning to classrooms in person.

Finally, the last joint meeting of 2020 was in November, where the national minimum teacher salary was raised to 27,500 pesos as of December 1, 2020.

The City of Buenos Aires will have the first joint meeting of the year on Monday. The teachers closely follow the negotiation of the Nation since it is what marks us, said Alejandra Bonato -UTE union secretary- before Phase 5 by FM Milenium.

We are going to return to the classroom without even a hint of salary recomposition, added the leader, who summarized: We lost around 40 salary points. We want it to be above inflation .

From Ademys a Buenos Aires union that carries out a 72-hour strike it also demands a larger budget for infrastructure. On Monday, February 22, the debate between the 17 Buenos Aires teaching unions and the Minister of Education, Soledad Acua, will begin.

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Larticle Teacher salary: the 35% utopia and the picture of discord est apparu en premier sur Agence SEO.

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Teacher salary: the 35% utopia and the picture of discord - Explica

Indias recent skirmish with Twitter is not an isolated case where a government has locked horns with US tech giants that have acquired a larger-than-life presence across the world. Nowhere have the arguments on big tech been more intense than in the US, where the last two general elections in 2016 and 2020 have seen strong charges of political manipulation by social media companies.

The story is not just about the oversized role of social media companies in elections. It envelops a range of domestic and international issues including the concentration of economic power, individual rights against the state as well as the corporation, disinformation, the rise of digital geopolitics, and global digital governance.

While China has come up with clear answers, for good or bad, to the new digital questions, liberal societies around the world are struggling to address the challenges to democratic forms of governance that emerged with the modern industrial society.

No one country or corporation in the free world can credibly preach to others on the right path to digital salvation. Democratic forces need to consult each other and collaborate in developing new norms for managing the digital world.

In the US, both the left and right are demanding that digital behemoths like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter are brought under greater control if not broken up. The US has had a long political tradition of breaking monopolies going back to the progressive politics at the turn of the 20th century that targeted the concentration of power in the oil, rail road, and steel industries. In December, the US government filed a lawsuit against Facebook for anti-competitive practices in more than 40 states. Google and Amazon are also under legal scrutiny.

The current digital giants, however, are not easily amenable to political attack. They are bigger than the biggest we have known. They donate massively to political campaigns in the US and have an enormous influence on the legislative process in Washington. That makes the domestic battles against big tech in the US that much more interesting.

As the US takes a close look at the anti-competitive practices of the tech giants, Europe is not far behind. Last December, the European Commission proposed new rules to promote competition and fairness in digital markets. The EU is likely to approve a Digital Markets Act next year.

The war is playing out in multiple other theatres. In Australia, the government is staring down a threat from Google to shut a developed nation of 25 million people out of its popular search engine. The provocation? Canberra has decreed that Google must work out an arrangement with Australian newspapers to pay for the use of their content.

Google worries, rightly, that this will set a precedent for other governments and will undermine its revenues. Many governments in the developed world are cheering for Canberra. So is Microsoft, which is offering its Bing search engine as a more sensible alternative to Australia.

For more than two decades, governments across the world were happy to buy into the claim that the tech companies will lead us to a world of innovation and plenty. Legal and financial concessions from governments at various levels allowed tech companies to rapidly gain ground and commercial muscle and dominate peoples lives. But governments are now questioning the sharp business practices of the tech giants.

Let us highlight three issues here labour rights, taxes and politics. While the tech giants have created a lot of new wealth, some of them have sharply squeezed the labour. Amazon is the most notorious. There are new efforts to unionise Amazon employees, but the company has been good at crushing these challenges in the past. In California, trade unions are battling against the success of Uber and Lyft to turn employees into contract workers to deny them multiple benefits.

Digital giants have been aggressive tax evaders. But Caesar is demanding his due now. Joe Biden, who has outlined a progressive platform, has promised to get big tech to pay their share of taxes in the US. His Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is under pressure from Americas G-7 partners to work out the rules for taxes on US digital giants operating in other geographies.

On the political front, when Twitter and Facebook shut down President Donald Trumps accounts, there was celebration among liberals. But social media companies are unlikely to always find themselves on the winning side in other democracies. The context and issues are inevitably different and applying the same tactics against political targets will backfire, as Twitter discovered in Delhi.

If India raised Twitters differential treatment of the riots in Washington and Delhi, European leaders raised important questions about social medias actions against Trump. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke for many Europeans when she called it problematic.

The European Commissioner for internal markets, Thierry Breton, expanded on the issues involved. The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on an elected President of the worlds most powerful nation without any checks and balances displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organised in the digital space, he warned.

The answer, Breton insists, lies in laying down a clear set of obligations and responsibilities for the digital giants; he promises that the EUs proposed Digital Services Act will do that. The moves in Brussels are in part about restoring the primacy of elected governments. They are also about building digital sovereignty that will let Europe make its own choices based on its own values.

Even as it claims digital sovereignty, Europe has offered to open talks with the Biden administration on the full range of digital issues that have emerged. The idea that the worlds democracies must get together to discuss global digital governance is gaining ground. Delhi is likely to be part of some of the initial conversations.

The promised utopia of a digital domain free from states and borders was always a chimaera. The digital holiday is over and the state is back. States, at least the strong ones, whether authoritarian or democratic, were not simply going to cede their right to govern to technology companies.

Reports that Twitter, after some initial defiance, has complied with much of the Indian governments demands, points to an easily forgotten reality. Twitter, like all other big tech companies, is a commercial beast and will live or die by its bottom line. Large states have the power to change that calculus.

As governments push back against big tech, a new challenge presents itself reining in the growing power of the state in the digital age. The answer lies in democracies modernising their laws to protect freedoms in the era of technological transformation. Twitter is of little help in this urgent but demanding domestic political battle.

This article first appeared in the print edition on February 16, 2021 under the title New digital question and answers. The writer is director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express

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Democracies must modernise their laws to protect freedoms in the era of technological transformation - The Indian Express