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I assumed that the rooftop PV system would generate just enough power to fill annual domestic demand and that the surplus power generated in summer would be stored for re-use in the winter in Tesla batteries. The result was an across-the board generation cost of around $35/kWh. Clearly the Tesla battery storage option isn’t economically viable, or at least not under the scenario I chose.

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In the first study, researchers manipulated E. coli’s genes to make the bacteria reliably detect high glucose levels in urine–an indicator of diabetes. Once the glucose levels reach a certain threshold, the bacteria turn red. When the researchers tested these “bactosensors” in samples from 13 patients, the bacteria indicated problematically high glucose levels just as reliably as conventional urine dipsticks. The researchers hope that this same sort of bacterial genetic manipulation could help detect other diseases.

Progress! You can’t stop it.

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Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. (More accurate: ‘These usually have consequences the exact opposite of what was intended.’)

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. “For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

Saw that comin’.

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study led by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

Economics works even when you don’t want it to. Politicians need to learn that the world is not Burger King, and you can’t just wave a magic law and Have It Your Way.

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Los Angeles is the latest large city in recent years to lift its local wage floor well above the federal minimum of $7.25. Seattle and San Francisco are already implementing $15 minimums, which likewise have been proposed in New York City and Washington, D.C. Last year, Chicago passed legislation that will boost the minimum in stages to $13 an hour in 2019, a 58% increase over five years.

The biggest backers of these measures tend to be unions, who want to reduce the supply of labor by increasing its cost. Unions call for higher minimums in the name of helping the working poor, reducing inequality, increasing purchasing power and so forth. But a union’s primary objective is to protect its members, and Big Labor’s minimum-wage advocacy primarily is in the service of pricing nonunion workers out of the labor force. The average union worker in Los Angeles earns more than $27 an hour, a wage that is easier to command when people who will work for less are too expensive to employ thanks to a mandated minimum wage.

Yeah, unions — the workers’ friend.

Politicians like President Obama and civil-rights groups like the NAACP insist that the minimum wage is an effective antipoverty tool. But most minimum-wage earners do not hail from poor households, let alone head them. Rather, they tend to be teenagers or young adults working part time. The majority of poor families in the U.S. have no workers. What they need most is a job, not a raise.

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Hey, rules are for the little people, not the insiders.

For much of the past eight months, labor activists have argued against special considerations for business owners, such as restaurateurs, who said they would have trouble complying with the mandated pay increase.

But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economits, pulls back the curtain.

An irony that would be comical if its consequences weren’t so dire is that government’s power expands as voters demand that politicians protect them from being deceived and cheated in private markets. Ponder this strange fact: Politicians whose deceptions in elections are readily tolerated are asked by voters to police against possible deceptions by entrepreneurs in private markets. It’s like asking the brute who just robbed you at gunpoint to serve as your personal bodyguard. True, he’s got a gun and isn’t afraid to use it, but why would you trust him to wield his weapon in your interest rather in his own interest?

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One of DNAinfo’s first projects was also one of its most ambitious: a timeline of every murder within city limits. When the hyperlocal website launched its Chicago branch in late 2012, they hoped to raise the standards of local crime reporting. “The idea is to do old-school reporting in a new medium,” the Reader reported. “Knocking on doors. Shoe leather.”

…

DNAinfo’s murder timeline raised the bar for crime reporting in Chicago, but also raises some fundamental questions: Why should we tell isolated stories about violent crime? Do reports of shootings serve impoverished neighborhoods or illuminate institutional violence? What, to put it simply, is crime reporting for?

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As somebody who lives in the the flatlands over the mountains from Beverly Hills, I’m struck by how many people, such as this Guardian reporter, assume unthinkingly that Beverly Hills residents and immigrants are antonyms.

But the Census Bureau reports that 37.4% of the residents of Beverly Hills are foreign born.

I guess we’re all supposed to have been programmed to believe that immigrants are necessarily “huddled masses,” which doesn’t fit well in our heads with living large in Beverly Hills.

But if you grew up anywhere within 20 miles of Beverly Hills, you’d have started noticing the place filling up with immigrants right after OPEC raised oil prices in 1973. Persians and Arabs who had gotten rich back home — let’s not ask how — were appearing in large numbers by 40 years ago. Rodeo Drive leapt up into the stratosphere of luxury with some of the impetus coming from crazy shopkeepers like new immigrant Bijan of Beverly Hills.

It’s really hard to be aware of patterns that your ideology doesn’t encourage you to regard.

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Obviously, we don’t give one vote to one person — or at least not yet we don’t let anybody who sneaks into the country vote. But we typically count them for drawing up state legislator and House districts, which seems like an oversight from the Warren Court’s era of low immigration.

…

The court has never resolved whether voting districts should have the same number of people, or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places with large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally, including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants, children and prisoners. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic.

…

Also, there are several potential intermediate levels between counting everybody, whether here legally or illegally, and counting only eligible voters. For example, as Judge Posner suggests, you could count all voting age American citizens (including felons who have lost their voting rights since they are still our fellow American citizens). Or you could count legal immigrants as well.

The bottom line is that the current system of counting illegal immigrants is absurd, while other alternatives are least arguable.

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There is nothing new between the covers.

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

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But of course they can’t do anything special for Memorial Day.

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The mainstream media adjunct of the Democratic Party is not loosening its grip at ABC News or anywhere else among the mainstream media. It’s time for Stephanopoulos to go, if only to help them keep up the pretense that they are something other than what they are. ABC News, however, must not see it that way. I therefore appreciate the opportunity afforded by Stelter’s interview of Continetti to return to this illuminating story.

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Thanks to the folks at Esri and elsewhere, we now can explore the canyon’s sprawling geography of death. “Over the Edge 3D” is an interactive, comprehensive map of the landmark’s bloody legacy, inspired by the 2001 book Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. True to its name, the map can be viewed in 3D if you have Chromadepth glasses. But exploring it with no special gear is also depressingly gripping, like doing a scavenger hunt where all the “prizes” are helicopter accidents, drownings, heart failure, or being crushed by a falling mule.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Hah.

David Cole turns over a rock.

The NAACP’s sole weapon is fear. The organization gets its way because many businesses and public figures live in fear of being slapped with the label “racist.” But what, if anything, frightens the NAACP? No, it’s not your conservative blog or podcast, so don’t flatter yourself. The NAACP isn’t scared of you. The NAACP witch-hunters aren’t scared of anyone who tries to counter their fear tactics with logic and rationality, because they know that in the end fear always trumps reason.

However, there is one person who scares the bejesus out of the NAACP leadership, and he’s one of their own officials: an unstoppable, unkillable bugbear named Reverend Curtis Everette Gatewood. NAACP leaders cower in his presence. Gatewood dislikes Jews, Israel, immigrants, and non-Christians. He’s damned Hillary Clinton supporters to hell, applauded the Baltimore rioters, compared black moms who stop their sons from rioting to white slave masters, co-organized a protest meeting at which Obama was repeatedly called a “nigger,” and pledged the NAACP’s support to an organization that opposes the NAACP, hurls racist bile at Asian immigrants and Jews, and calls Martin Luther King an “uncle Tom.”

And yet the national NAACP can’t, or won’t, get rid of the guy.

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Mayor Bart De Wever of Antwerp has been threatened with death if he does not convert to Islam. His response? To hire a bodyguard.

But he’s the mayor, for crying out loud! You’d think he could send an armed police battalion to roust all the usual suspects out of certain culturally enriched neighborhoods. He could then make sure that they fully understood their status in his city, and keep them on their best behavior — or else.

But this is Europe we’re talking about, and that’s not how they do things in Modern Multicultural Belgium…

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The Fifth Amendment, which says that government may not take private property for public use without due compensation, was once interpreted to mean that government cannot take private property for private use at all and must pay compensation when it take it for public use. But over time it has come to be reinterpreted to mean that government can take property rights through regulation without compensation and it can take private property from one owner and give it to another private party with compensation.

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The demographic profile of Iranian Azerbaijan reveals the ethnic diversity of Iran. The country is not entirely Persian, as many outsiders believe. Turkic, Kurdish, and other non-Farsi languages are spoken by large minorities.

The recent turbulence in Mahabad began as such urban troubles often do, with an alleged abuse of power, a death, and rapid communication through the streets. According to the English-language web portal of the Kurdish newspaper Rudaw, which is professional and reliable, in the first week of May a Kurdish woman, Farinaz Khosrawani, aged 25, died after she fell, jumped, or was pushed from the fourth floor of the Tara Hotel in the city. Ostensibly, the victim, while employed at the hotel, sought to escape a rape attempt by an Iranian state official.

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This is fascinating.

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In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more — but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia.

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Under the direction of Latha Venkataraman, associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, researchers have designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, they have developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs. Venkataraman’s group is the first to develop a single-molecule diode that may have real-world technological applications for nanoscale devices. Their paper, “Single-Molecule Diodes with High On-Off Ratios through Environmental Control,” is published May 25 in Nature Nanotechnology.

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So why would more Americans not drive diesels? From the European perspective, it would suit the driving style of the States perfectly, with lots of relaxed muscle available at low rpms to cruise vast interstate networks that are the envy of the world. Better mileage means fewer fill-ups, and the on-paper improvements in fuel economy would, overnight, take the US fleet one massive step toward President Obama’s targeted 54.5 mpg national average by 2025. Simply stated, diesel should “work” in the US.

1. Diesel fuel is sufficiently more expensive than gasoline that the added mileage doesn’t save you anything.

But with more diesel purchasers, the laws of the marketplace would kick in, bringing prices into greater alignment.

Fine. You first. I knew an early adopter once. He died.

2. Gasoline is everywhere, diesel not so much.

Ask me a hard one.

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The following news story concerns a Somali man in Arizona who forced a young girl to “marry” him, and then locked her up and assaulted her when she resisted the arrangement. Because the “groom” had cut a deal with the girl’s parents — presumably involving money — the media reports refer to the young woman’s predicament as an “arranged marriage”.

In his commentary, Vlad points out that the correct terminology for these nuptials is “forced marriage”, since the girl was dragged into unholy matrimony against her will. Furthermore, to be forcibly confined and compelled to commit sexual acts under the threat of violence is to be a slave — a sexual slave, as has been the lot of so many women in Islamic cultures over the past 1400 years.

If political correctness were not in control of our public discourse, the word slavery would be prominently featured in all these news stories.

By the way — this incident has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

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And only in America can these same media megaphone-mouths complain about “the media” without realizing that for all intents and purposes, they are the media.

…

At least one victim was a member of the larger and better-organized Bandidos gang. His name was Manuel Isaac Rodriguez, so I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that like George Zimmerman, he was one of those “white Hispanics.” The only shooting fatality that was allegedly “unaffiliated” with an organized biker gang was Jesus Delgado Rodriguez—again, I’ll presume he was a “white Hispanic.”

…

That’s right—even by a low estimate, cops killed four presumably white gang members. And yet no whites rioted. To my knowledge, the last group of reckless arsonists who tried to burn Waco down was the ATF in 1993.

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Today, nearly 5 percent of Americans have Asian ancestry, tracing to countries from India to Japan. The Pew Research Center reports that they are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

They are overrepresented in fields like medicine, engineering and computer science. In Silicon Valley, they hold half of the tech jobs. For immigrants once associated with menial or subservient work, the transformation has been titanic.

But some things have stayed the same—such as the representation of Asian-Americans at Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university. In 1992, they made up 19.1 percent of the undergraduate student body. In 2013, they made up 18 percent.

…

Today, according to a survey by The Harvard Crimson, Asian-American freshmen had higher SAT scores than any other ethnic group. It’s not enough for them to be as good as everyone else: To get in, they have to be considerably better.

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“If you’re talking premium liquor, you expect premium glass and ice too,” says Andrew Bohrer, a longtime Seattle bartender and co-founder of the Washington State Bartender’s Guild.

I am not making this up.

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You’re looking at a world of gameplay, of simulated war, fought by an army of paintball enthusiasts who spend their weekends shooting one another with gelatin shells of colored dye. Paintball is an industry of equipment suppliers who rely on amateurs to design and build the playing fields. Typically, a few friends with a Bobcat construct a combat stage by incorporating whatever materials remain on the land from its previous use, and whatever can be salvaged nearby. Old agricultural machines, remnants of fallen buildings, shipping containers, cable spools, loading pallets, railroad ties, junked cars, concrete fittings, PVC pipes, obsolete communication towers: The detritus of an industrial century is pushed to the urban margins to create apocalyptic playgrounds. Collectively, these sites represent a range of military conflicts at home and abroad, past, present and future.

It takes some imagination to read these free-form interpretations of castles, spaceships, and Islamic villages. But for the 9 million players that use them, all that’s needed is the symbolic form, a suggestion of meaning. Over the years, the sites take on new complexities, as buildings are layered with patchwork repairs and surfaces acquire an abstract expressionist patina of exploded pigment. They hold the memories of battles won and lost, testifying to the power of personal narrative. We were here then. That’s where I caught them. Authentic hauntings.

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Apparently Black Lives Matter, but Yellow Lives Don’t.

Read it. (autoplay video)

Solar energy is the future. The problem is, it’s been the future for a long time. And while progress has been made, using the sun as a primary source of power hasn’t really broken through.

One possible breakthrough, however, is becoming clearer—literally. The engineers at Ubiquitous Energy are developing solar panels that are completely transparent and as thin as a laminate. They can do this by creating see-through solar cells that absorb only the invisible parts of the solar spectrum—ultraviolet and infrared radiation.

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The Open Source Seed Initiative wants to make carrot seeds more like software. That may seem like an odd project, but consider this: It’s currently possible to patent plants with certain traits, whether they are created through traditional breeding or biotech modification. Worried that the trend of increasingly vague, aggressively enforced patents was discouraging innovation, a group of scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison got together in 2012 with the goal of producing and distributing seeds outside of the conventional intellectual property framework—much in the same way that the open source Linux operating system exists in parallel with Microsoft Windows and iOS, or the anyone-can-edit resource Wikipedia competes with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The situation is so bad that if a farmer buys seed from, say, Monsanto and raises a crop, that farmer cann0t use that seed to plant another crop because Monsanto can (and will) sue his ass off for patent infringement. Patent and copyright are relics of statism past that need to be excised from our polity if we don’t want progress to come grinding to a halt.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Now, there‘s a scary thought.

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In the May 11 issue of Finance and Commerce, Matt Kramer, a local Chamber of Commerce representative lobbying for additional public transit and transportation spending (currently being debated at the Minnesota Legislature) is quoted as saying “Every person who is riding transit is one less person in the car in front of us.”

This is a fascinating quote. First is the use of “us.” So the Chamber of Commerce (probably correctly) identifies riding transit as something someone else does (since “we” are still in the car) and goes on to imply that it benefits us because there will be fewer cars. (Actually he says fewer people per car, but I think he meant fewer cars, not that it would reduce carpooling.) And I suppose he could mean he rides the bus, and the car in front has fewer people (or there were fewer cars in front), but I don’t think that’s what he meant, since the arguments in the legislature are mostly about building and operating new facilities — such as LRT lines or freeway BRT, rather than supporting existing buses driving in traffic.

‘Get those proles in their POS cars off our roads and out of our way!’ is a key building block in the ‘progressive’ program — not that they’ll ever admit it.

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His father, Dr. Wiener, worked at Johns Hopkins in the Baltimore ‘hood, so it’s not implausible to wonder if the Wieners were guilty of the the now much denounced practice of “white flight.” As we all know, when white people leave cities due to black criminality, they are actually causing, using their White Privilege Time Machine, the black criminality they reacted to.

…

But having engaged in white flight is a psychologically fraught topic for white liberals, especially for white liberal Jews who are in the business of telling everybody else how to remember the past, so it tends to lead to issues that may ramify in indirect fashions.

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Modern biotechnology could put dairy farms out of business. And not just dairy, but lots of other farms as well, including those that produce meat, leather, and even staple starches. In fact, the amount of land devoted to agriculture could shrink by 80 percent in the next few decades.

Modern agribusiness has converted traditional farming into something that resembles a factory without walls or a roof as it is possible to get. It’s only a matter of time and technology  before they close the circle.

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As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.

The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.

Have you ever wondered how come people who want the world to return to how it was before 1900 (except for bicycles instead of horses) are called ‘progressives’? Wouldn’t ‘regressives’ be a better term?

Portable Folding Kayak. Well, you never know when you might need one….

TGX Tactical Flask.

Electric Boot Dryer.

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By now, I hope our readers are collecting a library of necessary books on Islam in all its stunted unvarying horror. It is imperative to know the truth — even if learning it makes you miserable at first — in order for your children and our culture to survive.

Thus, we have Edward Cline’s newest offering on Islam. This latest one, A Handbook on Islam, is so new it contains Bosch Fawstin’s prize-winning illustration.

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Uh, because she’s a statist lying Democrat weasel who was appointed by a statist lying Democrat weasel primarily because she was black and female?

That’s just a guess, you understand, but it fits the available evidence.

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New ball bearings developed by Coo Space solve that problem in an ingenious new way. Instead of forcing balls apart with a cage or retainer, Coo Space puts small divots in the track the balls roll over. These divots subtly speed up and slow down the balls just so, and the end result is balls that will never clash, even with no cage. That means 10 times less friction than traditional bearings and no need to ever lube them up. Win win!

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One of the more striking aspects of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s recently flurry of interviews is his repeated distinction between Jews and “whites.” I wanted to come up with a picture of Matthew White with a black person to see if system of categorization makes much sense, but while Weiner gets his picture taken frequently, he does not get his picture taken with blacks or other nonwhites very much at all. The only black I could find him photographed with is film critic Elvis Mitchell below. For comparison sake, above is Weiner with George Lucas, who is primarily of British ancestry.

Sounds as if he really is a Wiener after all.

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Special for Roy, the barbecue boy.

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Judging from current trends, we can expect to hear, sometime in the next five years, than he has blown himself up in Ramadi or Fallujah.

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Think it’s hard to find a place to charge your smartphone at the airport? Try finding a power outlet in the ocean.

Imagine you’re a robotic Navy mini-sub whose batteries are running low after a long mission monitoring, say, traffic around Chinese artificial islands in the South Pacific. Currently, you’d have to recharge at a land base or a surface ship. The former keeps you close to friendly shores while the latter gives away your presence. But if Navy program manager Mike Wardlaw makes it work, sometime in the early 2020s the Navy will start deploying unmanned, underwater pods where robots can recharge undetected — and securely upload the intelligence they’ve gathered to Navy networks.

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Hey, what do you know — the top three, and five of the top seven, are in Texas.

San Marcos, Texas, for example, grew at a whopping 7.9 percent rate, from 54,567 residents in 2013 to 58,892 in 2014. It’s been the fastest growing city for three consecutive years.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for that.

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No doubt soon to be an app on the Apple Watch.

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In the following video, you’ll see a young man executed for making war against the Islamic State. His crime was to attack the IS with an RPG, so he is being executed by RPG. As the translator points out, this summary punishment is administered according to the sharia doctrine of qisas, the Islamic version of “an eye for an eye”.

If any civilized country did this, the outcry would ring around the world. Muslims? Eh, not so much.

Peggy Noonan nails it.

Readers know of the phenomenon at college campuses regarding charges of “microaggressions” and “triggers.” It’s been going on for a while and is part of a growing censorship movement in which professors, administrators and others are accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, gender bias and ethnocentric thinking, among other things. Connected is the rejection or harassment of commencement and other campus speakers who are not politically correct. I hate that phrase, but it just won’t stop being current.

Kirsten Powers goes into much of this in her book, “The Silencing.” Anyway, quite a bunch of little Marats and Robespierres we’re bringing up.

But I was taken aback by a piece a few weeks ago in the Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University. I can’t shake it, though believe me I’ve tried. I won’t name the four undergraduate authors, because 30 years from now their children will be on Google, and because everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot.

Yet theirs is a significant and growing form of idiocy that deserves greater response.

We need a good long Depression to bring these people back to reality — or subtract them from the gene pool. I’m good with it either way.

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In 2016, insurance premiums could go through the roof as big insurers across the country apply for large rate increases for their ACA plans. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, the state’s biggest insurer, wants to raise rates 36.3 percent on average. New Mexico (at a truly eye-popping 51.6 percent), Maryland, and Oregon are seeing similar big numbers. Even in states where insurers are requesting more moderate increases, the percentages are still high enough to give one pause (Michigan’s Blue Care Network, for example, wants a 10 percent bump). Only in Maine has a state’s main insurer signaled its intent to keep rates flat for 2016.

That’s why they called it the Affordable Care Act, because laws are always titled the opposite of the effect that they have.

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Yes it’s true: Rubio isn’t rich, like Hillary Clinton and so many others in politics. He has made his money honestly, practicing law, earning a salary from public service and publishing a couple of books. No $300,000 speaking fees for Marco. And unlike Harry Reid, he hasn’t gotten wealthy on corrupt real estate deals. Somehow, the Post spins this into a negative.

He’s a politician — how dare he spend his own money!