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Every Sunday I do my ironing. I have to wear reasonably "smart" clothes to work four days a week and on Friday we're allowed to dress down. Every Sunday night, depending on how tired I am, I try to iron four shirts and a pair of trousers.

It has always occurred to me that ironing clothes is a waste of time and energy. It serves no purpose other than to adhere to a social convention. If I were putting Lean Six Sigma onto my life, I think it would probably come under the category of "necessary waste" since it is there to comply with the law (an unwritten social law enforced by the Central Scrutinizer) which adds no value to the value stream.

I just found a calculation I did about three years ago to work out the impact to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions that ironing clothes causes.

I used official UK government statistics on the proportion of electricity generated by fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide gas produced.

I have no idea if these links are still valid.

Carbon Dioxide (Equivalent) Emissions from Electricity Generation (2013)

Historical elctricity data: 1920 to 2013

For my calculations. my electrical iron is rated at 2kW and I estimated the heater to be operational 50% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to iron a single item, and I do 5 at a time.

To cut a long story short, I calculated that in the UK, given 2013 electricity generation data, 1 million of me doing my ironing would produce about 244.5 Te of carbon dioxide gas.

Here's my data:

Constants
Seconds per Minute    60
kcal/joule 0.000239005736
1 billion 1000000000
Seconds per Hour 3600
1 million 1000000

Iron Power (W)    2000
Time to Iron (mins)    5
Time Heating (%) 50
Energy per Item (J) 300000
Energy per Item (kcal) 71.7017208

MtCO2e 178.5
Energy Supplied (Gwh) 304155

CO2(kg) 178500000000
Energy Supplied (J) 1.094958E+018
Mass of CO2/unit energy (kg/J)    1.63019951450193E-07

CO2e(kg) per item ironed     0.048905985435058

CO2e(kg) per million items ironed 48905.9854350578
CO2(Te) per million items ironed 48.9059854350578

Items/person/week 5
1 Million People (Te)    244.529927175289

Thousands of 'Second Life' Bunnies Are Going to Starve to Death This Saturday

Any bunny who is Everlasting will continue to function, as he or she does now: without cost.
Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours.

"Hibernate" is a very kind word for it, considering that these bunnies are unlikely to ever be revived. In essence, every mortal rabbit in Second Life is going to starve to death on Saturday morning.

Cloud Computing wins Preakness Stakes, dashing Always Dreaming's chances for Triple Crown

I deleted these Seth Rich submissions and threw them here with some updates.

takyon writes:

The Washington Post reports:

The family of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich refuted Fox News reports that he had leaked work e-mails to WikiLeaks before he was fatally shot last year in the District.

The reports, which gained traction on social media, said an FBI forensics examination showed Rich transferred 44,053 DNC e-mails and 17,761 attachments to a now-deceased WikiLeaks director.

[...] Several federal and local law enforcement authorities also said Tuesday they were not aware that Rich sent any DNC information to WikiLeaks. "There is nothing that we can find that any of this is accurate," said Dustin Sternbeck, the chief spokesman for D.C police, which is leading the investigation into Rich's death.

[...] The allegations were reported by Fox News, including WTTG-TV, the District's Fox News affiliate. The reports cited a private investigator, Rod Wheeler, who Fox said was hired by the family and had previously worked for D.C. police. He also has been an on-air contributor to the Fox-5 news station. Fox also cited an unnamed federal official who said Rich had transferred thousands of emails to a WikiLeaks director. Fox's source asserts those emails were transferred between January 2015 and May 2016.

Also at MarketWatch, Fox News, and Washingtonian. Original Fox 5 DC story which now includes details of Wheeler backtracking on his claims multiple times during the week:

On Wednesday, just before our newscast, Wheeler responded to our requests via a telephone conversation, where he now backtracks his position and Wheeler characterizes his on-the-record and on-camera statements as "miscommunication."

And here is a reddit thread about some new "evidence".

-----

butthurt writes:

—Fox News (archive link)

—BuzzFeed News

—CNN Money

—Haaretz

additional coverage:

• Media Matters for America
• Infowars
• Heavy
• Washington Times (earlier story from 1 May)
• Breitbart News
• Breitbart News
• Breitbart News
• Washington Times
• The Guardian
• Mic
• Newsweek
• The Independent
• Right Wing Watch
• 1011 News
• The Week

• previous story:
  WikiLeaks Announces $20k Bounty For Murderer(s) of DNC Staffer

-----

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

Too much going on in the world. Can't get anything done.

Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprise Foe: Legal Immigrants

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.

Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.

Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.

What follows are the stories of four immigrants in Maryland who oppose sanctuary status — people whose voices have rarely been heard in the long debate over how to fix the nation’s immigration system.

Some supporters of sanctuary had dismissed them as white-collar professionals whose personal struggles could not compare with those of undocumented people now facing possible deportation.

But anyone who thought their journeys were easy, these immigrants said, has never walked in their shoes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/legal-immigrants-who-oppose-illegal-immigration.html?_r=2

Please, click the link, and read their stories.

I was reading this article and thought it might be a good submission as a follow up to the post about Comey's firing.

I held back, as I thought it might already be referenced in the comments. As such, I went back and, as I was reading through the comments, came across this gem from VLM:

Could someone explain the Russia conspiracy theory?

It seems to be anointed queen in waiting lost because she sucked and the electorate hates her although the elites love her, therefore someone is to blame, and it can't be her and it can't be the D party leadership, so obviously it was gremlins or space aliens or ... I know, Russians!

Is there anything to it beyond "argh matey here be tinfoil internet pirate hats"

This got me thinking about the various ways in which we (Americans) have allowed ourselves to be divided, and discussion has devolved into demonization and wacky conspiracy theories.

I posted the following as a response (with minor changes) to VLM:

Regardless of whether the outcome would have been the same, the Russians continue to use active measures (as they have for decades) to influence public opinion in countries of interest for them. This includes the US, UK, France, much of the former Soviet bloc and FSM (okay, FSB) knows where else.

The rise of social media and the ridiculous conspiracy theories^* of the right in the US have primed the public to accept fake news (that is, lies intended to pollute public discourse) as long as it comports with their existing biases. That, and demonizing political opponents has weakened our political system and allowed folks like the Russians to muddy the waters and make it more difficult for us to work together to address the issues we all face.

It's appropriate that we all stand together to identify and understand how our public discourse and political system are being affected by those who wish to weaken, destabilize and/or harm the US.

^*Partial list of right-wing conspiracy theories. Feel free to add any left-wing ones you think appropriate.
Pizzagate
Birtherism
Jade Helm
Common Core will turn your kids gay
Agenda 21
Sharia Law coming to your town
Plans for firearms confiscation
FEMA Concentration Camps
Clinton death squads

I posit that by promoting bald-faced lies as truth and attempting to discredit those with whom we disagree, we open ourselves up to just the sort of stuff that Russia has been trying (and with the expansion of news bubbles, aided by social media, being more successful) to do for decades.

I chose not to submit the Reuters article, as it seemed to be more of a piece with the Comey firing article. What's more, even though many sources were cited, the core source(s) were anonymous. I'm sure that if there's truth to the allegations, we'll hear more about it soon.

All the same, it seems appropriate for the US to examine the role of external actors on its political and information ecosystems.

Just because the folks attempting to sway public opinion with lies are doing so at the expense of your political enemies, they are not your friends, and should not be defended or given a pass on their interference in our system.

Such actors are a threat to our national interests and should be treated as such by all of us.

I guess the question becomes, are you an American first, or a [Republican|Democrat|Libertarian|Alt-Right|Communist|Socialist|Whatever] first?

I'm an American. And my fellow Americans (regardless of political stripe) are valued members of my society. Let's work together to make our country successful for all of us. Doing so will benefit society as a whole, socially, economically and politically.

Men-only island set for UNESCO World Heritage status

A Japanese island where women are not allowed to set foot has been recommended for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Okinoshima in south-western Japan is deemed so sacred that only men are allowed to visit, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reports. Even then, visitors are not allowed to bring back any souvenirs to the mainland, not even a blade of grass, the paper says. It has been recommended for World Heritage status by an advisory panel, with a final decision to be made at a UNESCO meeting in July.

The home to the Munakata Taisha Okitsumiya shrine, which honours a goddess of the sea, Okinoshima was the site of rituals for the safety of ships, and successful exchanges with the people of the Korean Peninsula and China between the fourth and ninth centuries, the Japan Times says.

wut about the kawaii goddess? Do she count?

New World Order Government cultural organization enforces gender norms on a Japanese island with a for real goddess on it, leading to a disastrous series of events. I'm sure somebody could write a 25 episode anime with that premise.

The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist

He was Denis Cuspert, a German rapper turned ISIS pitchman, whose growing influence as an online recruiter for violent jihadists had put him on the radar of counter-terrorism authorities on two continents.

In Germany, Cuspert went by the rap name Deso Dogg. In Syria, he was known as Abu Talha al-Almani. He praised Osama bin Laden in a song, threatened former President Barack Obama with a throat-cutting gesture and appeared in propaganda videos, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.

Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake. She fled back to the US, where she was immediately arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities. She pleaded guilty to making false statements involving international terrorism and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. She was released last summer.

FBI employee married ISIS fighter she was asked to investigate

Prosecutors describe her actions as deserving of "severe punishment," but she was sentenced to just two years in prison. According to an analysis by Fordham University, Americans who are prosecuted for ISIS-related cases received on average 13.5 years in prison.

Quick! WRITE THE SCRIPT! Call Lionsgate!

Unblur!

Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!