awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner
It somehow became an article of faith on the right that Obama is ‘the most extreme President in American history.’ Although when they say that, I think what they really mean is, ‘He’s black.’
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| — | BILL MAHER, Real Time (via inothernews) |
On this day 75 years ago, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to the public for the first time. To mark the anniversary, publisher Aperture is reissuing Richard Misrach’s 2001 book “Golden Gate,” from which these gorgeous photographs are taken.
We are actually in a classic depression. A depression is when nobody wants to spend. Everybody wants to pay down their debt at the same time. Everybody is trying to pull back, either because they got too far into debt, or because if they’re a corporation, they can’t sell because consumers are pulling back. The thing about an economy is that it fits together. My spending is your income. Your spending is my income, so if we all pull back at the same time, we’re in a depression. The way to get out of it is for somebody to spend so that people can pay down their debt, so that we don’t have a depression. So that we have a chance to work out of whatever excesses we had in the past, and that somebody has to be the government.
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| — | Paul Krugman (via ericmortensen) |
During the latter half of the twentieth century, global sea level rose by about 1.8 millimetres per year, according to data from tide gauges. The combined contribution from heating of the oceans, which makes the water expand, along with melting of ice caps and glaciers, is estimated to be 1.1 millimetres per year, which leaves some 0.7 millimetres per year unaccounted for. This gap has been considered an important missing piece of the puzzle in estimates for past and current sea-level changes and for projections of future rises.It now seems that the effects of human water use on land could fill that gap. A team of researchers reports in Nature Geoscience that land-based water storage could account for 0.77 millimetres per year, or 42%, of the observed sea-level rise between 1961 and 2003. Of that amount, the extraction of groundwater for irrigation and home and industrial use, with subsequent run-off to rivers and eventually to the oceans, represents the bulk of the contribution.
