Link Banana

You may have heard Mr. McCain’s unavoidable claim that the federal government “wasted” $3 million on a study of bear DNA. It turns out he’s misconstruing the study — and the amount of money:

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project. […]

“There’s never been any information about the status of this population. We didn’t know what was going on — until this study,” Kendall said.

This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain’s ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana’s three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.

(via NYTimes)

This account of Vernon, CA — an industrial powerhouse in the Los Angeles area — was hard for me to believe. But if it’s in The Economist it must be true.

Vernon caters so diligently to the needs of businesses because it does not have to balance their demands with those of residents. Only about 90 people live in Vernon, many of them cops and fire-fighters. Most rent their homes from the city for a pittance—a one-bedroom flat costs $147 per month. They are the city’s electorate and, in theory, the pool from which mayors and local politicians are drawn.

It does not sound like a recipe for a functioning democracy, because it isn’t. The mayor has held power for 34 years. Contested elections are almost unknown. The last was in 2006, when three outsiders moved into a house just before the deadline and petitioned to stand for city offices. Their electricity was abruptly cut off and their home declared unfit for habitation. The outsiders got ten votes out of 68 cast. That was a surprise: they had expected just eight. Bill Schneider of the Chamber of Commerce says the shenanigans during the election worried him—because of the risk that another regime might take over. “What outsiders miss is that the damn place works well,” says Lonnie Kane, who runs a clothing firm with his wife, Karen.

Who knew electronic waste could be compelling? Jon Mooallem fascinating and wide-ranging piece about what happens after cellphones are thrown away, in this weeks New York Times Magazine, did it for me. I’ll call it compelling.

As with most environmental issues, then, no option for getting rid of a phone is free of trade-offs, and nothing is as simple as we’d wish. But the truth is, few of America’s phones are turned in for “recycling” in the first place. (It’s unclear how few. The figure of less than 1 percent, put forward in a groundbreaking report on phone recycling by the nonprofit Inform five years ago, is still repeated. ReCellular estimates that it’s more like 10 percent now.) While a phone’s small size may give even normally conscientious consumers a dispensation to slip it into the trash, there seems to be a more typical solution, what ABI Research estimates nearly half of Americans do: stick the thing in a desk drawer and leave it there.

Mitsubishi has built a tower 573 feet (173m) tall that serves no other purpose than testing the really fast elevators that are needed for really tall buildings. I can’t decide if it’s a massive waste of material or a necessary cost of building land-use-efficient building. Have an opinion?

(via Boing Boing)