memfree

I don’t know what percentage is in parking lots versus in buildings, but once you leave the south, those pools are IN BUILDINGS in the strip malls so they can generate revenue year round. Note the article shows examples of inside pools, and that works better for harsher weather.

If Kristi Noem had any morals or sense of remorse, she’d just curl up and die.

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter

The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

The article is mostly about a lack dense housing in the sunbelt. Two chunks:

By rigidly defining what a community is allowed to look like, suburban zoning has done more than simply shape the physical form of our cities. It has also made it all but impossible for many communities to adapt and grow, as human societies always have, which has created severe distortions in housing markets.

and

There’s no shortage of wonky policy ideas about how to fix housing in the US — and they go far beyond just zoning codes (you don’t want to hear me get started on building codes or impact fees). We will also need a society-wide paradigm shift beyond policy: The financial and real estate industries will need to relearn models for supporting incremental densification, which, experts consistently told me, have fallen by the wayside since the entrenchment of sprawl and restrictive zoning.

Personally, I’d like to see more towns where there’s dense housing within walking distance of the mega strip mall… though some of those strips are too big for realistic pedestrian commuting.

… there are still large hurdles to overcome before tidal energy can be adopted more widely, such as dealing with regulatory issues, potential environmental effects and conflicts with other ocean users.

I was wondering about that. What happens to the weather, animal habitats, and everything if you slow tides and currents with a larger number of these things? Still gotta be better than burning fossil fuels.

It’s very hard to take what is essentially a wind turbine normally found on land and put it under water, said Fraser Johnson, operations and maintenance manager at MeyGen. The record-setting turbine should keep going for at least another year before it needs to come out of the water for maintenance, he added.

With a sample size of ONE (okay, maybe four) that projection seems optimistic, but I’m hoping he’s correct.