“Obama’s new energy secretary, Steven Chu, has just stated that ‘we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California’. Immediately following our workshop, a state-wide water state of emergency is declared.
http://www.vimeo.com/3195518
http://www.flickr.com/gp/92494461@N00/6161Hi
Chu’s warning about ‘no more federal water’ contains an irony: The Central Valley Irrigation Project, which enabled Caifornia’s agriculture to flourish, was authorised in 1935 as an infrastrucure project to beat the Great Depression. Eighty five years later, the state’s dependence on long-distance irrigation is a structural impediment to sustainable water and agriculture. Now Obama promises to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure - to beat the depression.
“I was recently asked to do a guest blog post on Scott Kelby’s site. I had free reign to talk about anything I wanted to talk about. I took it as an opportunity to get off my arse and make something that was new and fresh for me. I decided I would do a video”
Red states consume more porn?: “According to a new Harvard Business School study, eight of the top ten states in terms of online porn consumption were ones where McCain won in the presidential election. Professor Benjamin Edelman analyzed anonymised credit cards receipts from a large online porn company. Based on their limited data, the largest consumer is Utah. Other interesting possible correlations emerged too that Edelman outlines in his paper, ‘Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?‘ published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. From New Scientist:
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,’ bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement ‘AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.’
‘One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,’ Edelman says.