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Monday, January 13, 2020

Links - 13th January 2020 (2)

France’s failed solar roadway - "In 2016, France put forth an audacious plan to build 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of solar highways composed of photovoltaic panels. They believed that the completed roadway would be able to one day power up to 5 million homes. The French government invested €5 million to test out the concept... The project seemed to be doomed from the start. This region in Normandy, France is not known for its abundance of sunshine. Usually, a city in Normandy only has 44 days of strong sunlight. Since the opening of the road, panels have routinely come loose or broken into pieces. In May 2018, 90 meters (300 feet) of the roadway had to be destroyed. It was quickly apparent that the solar panels couldn't withstand the wear and tear of sustained traffic or the forces of nature. In a report from the Global Construction Review, it was found that engineers didn't take into account the damage that would be caused by thunderstorms, leaf mold, and huge tractors that would be using the road. In the first few months, the highest amount of energy generated from the roadway hit only half their stated goal at around 150,000kWh before falling to 78,000 in 2018 and finally 38,000 in early 2019... The idea for solar roadways has been met with a great deal of skepticism from many experts in the renewable field. They've routinely been found to be too expensive and inefficient... While the resin coating was able to stop the panels from being crushed, it created so much extra noise that the locals had to lower the speed limit to 70 km/h (43 mph). The roadway has been described as degraded, and "pale with its ragged joints. . . solar panels that peel off the road and the many splinters that enamel resin protecting photovoltaic cells.""
I remember all the gushing about solar roads when they started. It should be mandatory to do a followup on all starry-eyed articles about some promising technology or innovation

Men with psychopathic traits are more desirable to women - "men with psychopathic traits tend to have more sexual partners, are more likely to act on their sexual fantasies, are more open to short-term sexual affairs, and have sex at earlier ages. "For instance, clinicians and psychologists working in prison settings have long known that inmates with more psychopathic features tenaciously try (i.e., are preoccupied with sex) and often succeed (i.e., must offer some attractive qualities, even if faked) at seducing prison staff, including clinical staff supposedly equipped with the tools to not be subverted by manipulation and charm that psychopathic men deploy"... some psychopathic traits help men mimic the qualities that women look for in a mate. This sexual exploitation hypothesis, as the researchers call it, could help explain why psychopathy evolved in humans... Desirability ratings from women were most strongly associated with psychopathic lifestyle traits, including disinhibition, lack of responsibility and having a sensation-seeking orientation... ". . . one possibility is that they make men seem more interesting, exciting, and fun to engage with in conversations. Men exhibiting these traits may be effectively signaling that they are exciting partners and women may be responding with a preference for those traits in a short-term dating context."
This is evidence that women look for bad boys (and this is revealed preferences, not going by what women claim they want)

Opinion: Housing should be affordable, period - "the wealthier a city gets, the more expensive its housing becomes. A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) study found that economic growth and immigration strongly influence demand for housing. When they exist together with slow housing supply, the problem compounds even further. Opportunistic investors – both domestic and foreign – seize an investment opportunity and prices climb higher still... price is a function of supply and demand. Making home-buying easier, by easing mortgage eligibility requirements for example, can increase demand; but unless supply keeps up, prices rise even higher. The federal government has therefore made deliberate investments in housing supply. Yet, residential real estate represents a staggering 7.5 per cent of the Canadian economy, compared with 4.9 per cent in the United States and 4.1 per cent in the United Kingdom; even Australia’s debt-fuelled housing boom comprises only 5.9 per cent of gross domestic product... Canadians spend 50 per cent more on real estate transaction costs (broker fees, land-transfer taxes and legal costs) than we do on research and development. In comparison, our American friends spend 25 per cent more on research and development than they do on real estate transactions... Counterintuitively, if we focus housing programs only on helping people buy homes, we make it harder for people to afford places to live. If more people can afford to spend more to buy houses, prices increase. And higher-priced housing leads to higher rents... The debate about the mortgage stress test is in some ways therefore an indulgence for wealthier people. If we give people the ability to borrow more money, they bid up house prices and the homeless and underhoused suffer even more. As a result, the gap between rich and poor widens further."

Opinion: Canada’s housing market – built on faulty assumptions – is falling down on affordability - "there’s the assumption that home ownership is inherently more stable than rental. Yes, baby boomers lived that experience, enjoying stability and an uplift in value that turned homes into nest eggs later in life. But it’s unlikely that these circumstances will materialize now, given the high cost of housing today in relation to wages. Rental housing, meanwhile, is only unstable because we have not focused on delivering rental as a real, long-term housing choice. In cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, high-quality, purpose-built rental housing has been a low priority over the past several decades and left to the market to figure out. Real-estate investors, meanwhile, buy units because of low vacancy and high demand, and then rent them out according to what the market can deliver, thus stoking this commodification cycle... we can look to western European cities such as Vienna and Amsterdam, which require all new development to have a three-way split of social housing, affordable and rent-controlled housing, and market or ownership housing. With that simple switch in policy, these cities are genuinely making housing more accessible."

Lack of zoning has paid off for Houston - "Houston has remained on the sidelines of the latest national financial crisis. Our housing prices haven't plunged, just as they didn't soar as the national housing bubble inflated. Our prices remained modest, if you believe the conventional wisdom, because we have a secret ingredient: plenty of land.An abundance of open space by itself, though, may not be what protected us. Texas, after all, experienced an ugly real estate implosion in the late 1980s.In a report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas' Houston branch, senior economist Bill Gilmer found another reason Houston has been shielded from the country's real estate crisis: the lack of zoning... From an economic perspective, zoning laws work as a constriction of supply, which played a role in rising housing prices in other parts of the country."It raises the price of new-home construction," Gilmer said. "Those supply restrictions began the process of price increases."Speculators finish the job, inflating the housing bubble with demand for mortgage securities that encourage ever-riskier lending practices.As housing demand has increased, cities with tight zoning laws saw a steep rise in prices because of limited supply.Rising prices ultimately extinguish demand, as we're now seeing with the collapse of the mortgage market...  In Houston, however, demand was met with new construction rather than rising prices. As a result, when the real estate bubble burst, the effects on Houston were less severe than elsewhere"

I want to walk. But Houston won't let me. - HoustonChronicle.com - "In Houston everything is distant: manners, camaraderie, tolerance, respect for differences, lack of driver education, charity, sincere friendship, solidarity, honor, dignity, sense of humor, conversations, solidarity. I can keep going for pages and pages. The famous Southern hospitality is like unicorns.But for now I will focus on one thing: In Houston, walking is far away. IN MY 40 and a few years, I've lived in ten cities of Europe and America. Nowhere else have I ever experienced such fear when walking in the street. I don't mean that I'm afraid of the people who I meet on the sidewalk. I mean that walking in Houston is a horrific adventure, a pleasure endangered.Our public spaces don't make it easy for people to walk. There are parks, it is true, but you have to take a car to go walking in the park. There are walking paths, here and there, but you have to think where those routes are and what neighborhoods they serve. In my neighborhood there are not even sidewalks. The bar nearest to my house roughly 100 yards away. But to have a beer there, I have to drive four blocks, get onto an avenue, make a U-turn. If I'm lucky and there's no traffic, it takes me about twenty minutes to drive there. Walking would take half as much time — but I'd be risking my life... WE LIVE in a city suffering a pandemic of obesity. And we have many other problems too: hypertension, stress, loneliness, depression, lack of communication between people. It occurs to me (my ideas!) that many of these problems could be solved if people walked more."
A lack of regulation isn't uniformly good

How the 404 Error Created the World Wide Web - "Before Berners-Lee came along, hypertext systems typically made sure that every link led somewhere. All new links would be added to a centralized database of documents and links. If the link's target was changed or deleted, the database had to update the link accordingly. Keeping the hyperlinks consistent was very helpful for the user. It was also easy enough to do when all the data resided on a single computer or small network. But in a large network of computers, you'd need one central authority where all documents and links would be registered. There wasn't a database in existence that could handle continuously updating every single link the world over."

Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits - "To make a good biscuit, “you want a flour made from a soft wheat,” he says. “It has less gluten protein and the gluten is weaker, which allows the chemical leavening—the baking powder—to generate carbon dioxide and make it rise up in the oven.” It turns out that in most of the U.S., commonly available flours are made from hard wheats, which serve a different purpose. “Hard wheats are higher in gluten protein, and when they’re turned into a dough, the dough is very strong and elastic and can trap carbon dioxide,” says Phillips. If you want to make bread, you want a hard wheat. Northern biscuits suck because they are made with bread flour. At first, this information felt like a huge relief. I just had to buy the right flour. I’m great at buying things! Unfortunately, the problem was a little more complicated. According to Sarah Simmons, a chef from South Carolina who has owned food businesses in both New York and the South, finding soft wheat flour north of Washington, D.C., is tricky even for pros. “Northerners don’t have it. I couldn’t get it commercially, even”"

UPDATE: Krispy Kreme reverses course, allows Minnesota student resale service - "An enterprising Minnesota college student who drove to Iowa every weekend to buy hundreds of Krispy Kreme doughnuts that he then sold to his own customers in the Twin Cities area is now being supported by the company after it initially ordered him to stop.Jayson Gonzalez, 21, of Champlin, Minnesota, would drive 270 miles to a Krispy Kreme store in Clive, Iowa, pack his car with up to 100 boxes, each carrying 12 doughnuts, then drive back up north to deliver them to customers in Minneapolis-St. Paul.He charged $17 to $20 per box. He said some of his customers spent nearly $100 each time. Gonzalez said he did not receive a discount from the store in Iowa where he bought the doughnuts... There have been no Krispy Kreme stores in Minnesota for 11 years."

Which town council got how much in CIPC funds? - "Funds disbursed through the Community Improvement Projects Committee (CIPC) amounted to $25 million last year, distributed among the 15 People’s Action Party town councils. The year before, CIPC grants totalled close to $42 million, checks with the financial reports of town councils showed.In those two years, the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council (AHTC), led by Workers’ Party MPs, did not get any CIPC funding. The year before, in 2016, it received $316,000. It is unclear if that amount was for the ramp that is now the bone of contention between the WP and grassroots leaders.These figures were obtained from the reports of all 16 town councils which listed the funding under “payment from Citizens’ Consultative Committee” or “CIPC Grant”... The CIPC issue is part of the opposition’s bigger complaint made over the years that CCCs are usurping the powers of MPs by, for example, presenting government bursaries to students or denying the opposition the use of community centres... A parallel issue concerning CIPC funds had also been used by WP as political ammunition in the campaign run-up to the 2015 general elections. Then-WP chief Low Thia Khiang claimed that the previously PAP-run Punggol East Town Council was in deficit before it came under WP’s charge at the ward’s 2013 by-election. The argument was over a stated deficit of more than $280,000 in the town council’s financial statements when the council funds were handed over to WP. The PAP refuted that claim, saying that the same report also showed an amount of $303,372 claimable as reimbursement from the CCC, which would have put the town council in net surplus. WP’s Pritam Singh put the CIPC issue back in the spotlight again on 15 Oct when he complained about the CCC’s tardiness over the town council’s proposal that CIPC funds be used to build a ramp in Bedok Reservoir Road. He said that it took seven years before the project was completed... The lack of CIPC funding means that opposition town councils will have to use more of their own surpluses to fund improvement projects, Mr Singh wrote in a subsequent Facebook post: “Doing so invariably eats into (town council) surpluses that can be used for other needs/purposes, while PAP Town Councils can rely on CIPC funding and/or keep their surpluses intact or tap on a lesser amount compared to opposition wards.”"

One Million Cannibal Ants Trapped in Soviet Nuclear Bunker Have Escaped - "A "colony" of up to one million cannibal ants trapped in a nuclear bunker for years have escaped, scientists in Poland have said.The ants, which had no food source other than their dead nestmates, were first discovered in 2013 were found to be solely made up of worker ants meaning they could not reproduce—how their numbers grew so large was a mystery. In a study published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, researchers have now studied the colony to understand how it functioned—and installed an escape route to see if its members would leave their home given the option.The team, led by Wojciech Czechowski, from the Museum and Institute of Zoology and the Polish Academy of Sciences, were carrying out a survey of bats living in an abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker when they came across the wood ants living in an ammunition bunker where nuclear weapons were once kept. The ants had no access to the outside world and appeared to have come from a nest above that was positioned over a ventilation pipe. When the ants fell down the pipe, they were entombed in the bunker. However, after returning to the site two years later, scientists found the colony was not only still there, but that it had grown in numbers. This was despite there being no obvious food source, no heat and no light. A population estimate suggested there were hundreds of thousands, if not one million ants living in the bunker."
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