Commentary

commentary

The Achilles’ Heel of Heat Pumps

they have a limitation that other types of heating equipment don’t have. That is, the heating capacity of most air source heat pumps decreases as the outdoor temperature goes down...If the heat pump can’t provide as much heat as the house needs

Then there’s something called lockout.

hat’s usually the kind that lets you avoid strip heat, but it only avoids the need for supplemental heat. You still need a plan for emergency heat.

the Achilles’ of heat pumps is getting set up improperly with electric resistance auxiliary heat

In your article you conclude with "the Achilles’ of heat pumps is getting set up improperly with electric resistance auxiliary heat". So I would have to assume that the 50% of you projects with electric resistance auxiliary heat must be in places with a design temperature lower than -15F. Otherwise wouldn't good design preclude the need for electric resistance or any backup heat? Even if a Cold Climate Heat Pump (CCHP) only produces 80% of its rated capacity at -15F, you can design for that or you can have a customer agree to allow a little lower indoor temperature on those really cold days. That's just a tradeoff and a good designer can quantify that.

You go on to further muddle the topic with "Then there’s something called lockout." and "You still need a plan for emergency heat." Your argument has some of the hallmarks of the fear mongering and upselling of backup systems so prevalent in the HVAC industry. Nobody ever talked about emergency heat in the bad old days of fossil fuel systems. Boilers broke, electricity went off, you had to call your service company.

I am very concerned this type of thinking will filter down to homeowners and property owners and we will end up with everybody using their heat pumps as glorified air conditioners with a little heat when its not too cold out. We will end up not even close to carbon neutral and our grandkids will pay the price.

Please, there is so much we all need to know and new habits we need to develop as we transition from full on/off fossil fuel systems to these complex and sophisticated VRF systems. Help us with the building science of that.

quotes on Israel/Palestine

Your speech sucked Joe. Biden 8/20/24:

Hate was on the march in America....Trump said, and I quote, “There are very fine people on both sides.” My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant... As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza...Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.

My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant. More plagiarism for Joe. Is it just lack of empathy or senility that makes an equivalence between 1,900 dead by a terrorist attack and 40,000 killed and an entire country devastated by an advanced democratic society. A society and government that portends to follow the rule of law while committing war crimes and turning a blind eye to settler violence by it own citizens; Israeli settlers who have murdered 500 Palestinians since Oct 7 (UN) and hundreds more dead, thousands displaced and property destroyed and taken over in the years of occupation and violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Hate is in the march in the Mideast. Who is your God Joe? That is the best you can do for the Palestinians who have lost 40,000 people, mostly women and children, killed by Israel with US weapons. Millions whose homes and hospitals and country were destroyed by our bombs. It is not enough. Gaza is your legacy. It is our legacy.

Is the democratic party doing any better? Will they do better? I watched them march out a 20 year old college kid who couldn't put a sentence together on Gaza. Democrats don't seem to get what we have done in support of war crimes. They are our war crimes. The democrats don't seem to notice and are not listening.

By Yuval Noah Harar WP May 13, 2024: will zionism survive the war?

If Netanyahu and his political allies cement their hold over Israel, it would spell the end of the historical bond between the Jewish people and ideas of universal justice, human rights, democracy and humanism. Judaism would instead make a covenant with bigotry, discrimination and violence.

Like the anti-Israel demonstrators around the world, the Netanyahu coalition believes in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.

Some people argue that the Netanyahu coalition’s extremism is the inevitable fruit of Zionism. Yet this is akin to arguing that patriotism inevitably leads to extremism ... In contrast, bigotry is a feeling of hate for foreigners and minorities, grounded in the conviction that we are superior to them.

Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism, identified bigotry as an existential danger to Zionism already more than a century ago... The duty of the Jews, Herzl wrote, is to support “liberality, tolerance, love of mankind. Only then is Zion truly Zion! …

ukraine

To me the US response to Ukraine has been bipartisanly scary. The only things we agree on are war and weapons. so I was glad to read a bit of sanity in mainstream media. In https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/17/opinion/us-military-aid-ukraine-guarantees-more-suffering-death "Never has the United States rushed so quickly to provide so much high-tech armament to a distant country already enveloped in war. Rather than sending diplomats in an urgent effort to reach an armistice and stop the bloodshed, the United States is fueling an already raging conflagration... If Russian President Vladimir Putin needed any more evidence for his conviction that the West wants to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, we are providing it...Every Russian weapon sent to Ukraine means horror. So does every American weapon."

At least Elizabeth Warren is providing a counter narrative that escalating this war "does not help Ukraine, does not help the people of the United States, and does not make the world any safer."

Even Killer Kissinger had it more right back when he said "if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them."

city feed mask mandate

Continuing the mask mandate in your stores until when? because it is 'safer' is problematic. It undermines public health arguably as much as the antivaxers do. A society works when people agree to be governed. Wear your own mask but stop being so extremist.

rollout math

In rough number MA has 6 million people needing 12 million shots. Getting it done by July 1 means we have to give 2 million shots a month or ~66,000 each day, working 7 days a week. It has taken us 2 weeks to get 67,0176 shots done. At that rate it will take 7 years to vaccinate MA. Baker blames the feds but he has ~200,000 doses sitting around. Ramp up, exhaust your supply, be ready for more, demand more. This isn't going to happen in that little booth in the back of CVS. We will need to rent storefronts and gyms, staff them and get real on the logistics. Who is doing the math?

breaking up big tech

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/google-facebook-mergers-acquisitions-antitrust.html?searchResultPosition=1

"Google has aquired at least 270 companies." Its a cool graphic. Look over the names. "Google appears to have bought its way to monopoly"

"Facebook has aquired 92 companies" and then shut down 39 of them. Some were aquired for to buy the talent with some "designed to eliminate future competitors". All of them are to harvest our data then create products guaranteed to modify our behavior to sell to the likes of the trump campaign.

"According to the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, federal agencies are supposed to block any merger whose effect “may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.” Yet of the more than 350 mergers completed by Facebook or Google, none threatened a reduction of competition sufficient to block it, at least according to the federal agencies. As with a basketball referee who never calls a foul, the question is whether the players have really been faultless — or whether the referee is missing something."

quotes from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/google-facebook-mergers-acquisitions-antitrust.html?searchResultPosition=1

gmo crispr seeds

https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-tomato-mutant-future-of-food/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunday/dan-barber-seed-companies.html?searchResultPosition=1

quotes

• HERE’S A SIMPLER question: What about flavor? When I asked Harry Klee if he had tasted any of the jointless 8059 tomatoes he’s growing, he laughed and said he hadn’t bothered. “We know that Florida 8059 by itself doesn’t really have too much taste to begin with.” A better-tasting tomato always plays second fiddle to market economics. The majority of tomatoes grown in Florida, for example, go to the food service industry—“to the McDonald’s and Subways,” Klee says. “The sad reality,” Klee says, “is that industry is not really committed to making a better-tasting tomato.” Klee loves to talk about taste—he heads a group that identified about two dozen genetic regions related to exceptional tomato flavor. “We know exactly how to give you a sweeter tomato that will taste better,” he says. But those tomatoes are not as economically attractive to producers. “The growers won’t accept it.”

“What if I could give you a Brandywine that had high lycopene, longer shelf life, and was a more compact plant?” Klee asked me. “I could do all of those today, with knocking out genes and genome editing. And I could give you something that was virtually identical to Brandywine that was half as tall and had fruit that didn’t soften in less than a day, and were deep, deep red with high lycopene." ...outrageous” licensing fees for the gene-editing technology. “So your heirloom tomato idea would never be financially lucrative enough to pay the requisite licensing fees.”

The tens of thousands of rows surrounding me owed their brigade-like uniformity to the operating instructions embedded in the seed. That uniformity allows for large-scale monoculture, which in turn determines the size and model of the combine tractor needed to efficiently harvest such a load. (“Six hundred horsepower — needs a half-mile just to turn her around,” joked the farmer sitting next to me.) Satellite information, beamed into the tractor’s computer, makes it possible to farm such an expanse with scientific precision.

The type of seed also dictates the fertilizer, pesticide and fungicide regimen, sold by the same company as part of the package, requiring a particular planter and sprayer (40 feet and 140 feet wide, respectively) and producing a per-acre yield that is startling, and startlingly easy to predict.

It is as if the seed is a toy that comes with a mile-long list of component parts you’re required to purchase to make it function properly.

We think that the behemoths of agribusiness known as Big Food control the food system from up high — distribution, processing and the marketplace muscling everything into position. But really it is the seed that determines the system, not the other way around.

The seeds in my palm optimized the farm for large-scale machinery and chemical regimens; they reduced the need for labor; they elbowed out the competition (formally known as biodiversity). In other words, seeds are a blueprint for how we eat.

We should be alarmed by the current architects.

Organic growing reduces the use of harmful chemicals, improves the soil’s ability to sequester carbon and retain water, and strengthens biodiversity. As the climate grows more severe and unpredictable, we will need seeds adapted to this kind of farming, and to their environments — precisely what a centralized, chemical-driven industry is not built to provide.

these companies saw seeds as part of a profitable package: They made herbicides and pesticides, and then engineered the seeds to produce crops that could survive that drench of chemicals. The same seed companies that now control more than 60 percent of seed sales also sell more than 60 percent of the pesticides. Not a bad business.

post to Miles

I like seeds. If you grow heirlooms you can save the seeds from the best plants. Not so with hybrid or gmo. You might be able to with crispr. I am not against science but more against big corp. Changing the "operating instructions embedded in the seed" the way that big corp does "allows for large-scale monoculture... determines the size and model of the combine tractor...dictates the fertilizer, pesticide and fungicide regimen, sold by the same company as part of the package, requiring a particular planter and sprayer". "They made herbicides and pesticides, and then engineered the seeds to produce crops that could survive that drench of chemicals. The same seed companies that now control more than 60 percent of seed sales also sell more than 60 percent of the pesticides."

"Organic growing reduces the use of harmful chemicals, improves the soil’s ability to sequester carbon and retain water, and strengthens biodiversity. As the climate grows more severe and unpredictable, we will need seeds adapted to this kind of farming". Science like CRISPR could "give you a Brandywine that had high lycopene, longer shelf life, and was a more compact plant with knocking out genes and genome editing... something that was virtually identical to Brandywine that was half as tall and had fruit that didn’t soften in less than a day, and were deep, deep red with high lycopene." Except that the business model is built on "outrageous licensing fees for the gene-editing technology." The "heirloom tomato idea would never be financially lucrative enough to pay the requisite licensing fees." If that is the case I say fuck monsanto and big ag and all their proponents. We need a better model.

quotes from: https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-tomato-mutant-future-of-food/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunday/dan-barber-seed-companies.html?searchResultPosition=1

the Valedictorians Project

https://apps.bostonglobe.com/magazine/graphics/2019/01/17/valedictorians/?p1=ValHeader

quotes

• Others switched tracks after struggling in introductory science classes — painful decisions that effectively closed the door on some of the city’s most lucrative careers.
• Rahman nevertheless became a standout student, taking a number of STEM-related Advanced Placement courses to prepare for the pre-med track ahead.
• “The issue was the content and the pace,” said Rahman, who was also working part time at the CVS where his father was the head cashier. In high school chemistry, “we wouldn’t move to the next section until everyone understood the chapter we were on.” In college, he said, there was no waiting. “We were expected to learn two to three chapters a week.”
• Although the district has made major investments in STEM education in recent years — such as securing a $25 million commitment from GE and opening the $73 million Dearborn STEM Academy in Roxbury — Grandson said the district needs to work more closely with area colleges to ensure its graduates are ready for classes ahead.
• Five of the eight exam school valedictorians from 2005 to 2007 interviewed by the Globe attended Harvard University. By comparison, just three of the more than 80 non-exam BPS valedictorians interviewed by the Globe attended Ivy League schools, none of them Harvard. S
• Funded by the private Boston Foundation, Success Boston linked the city and its public school system with colleges and universities, nonprofit groups, and the business community, which pledged to create more career-relevant jobs and internships for city students. The school district promised more rigorous instruction for all students, including a doubling of college-level Advanced Placement courses and enhanced academic support for students. Menino said the improvements would give “our young people the quality educational experience they deserve.”
• Data show that at non-exam schools the number of Advanced Placement courses rose from 71 in the 2007-08 academic year to 128 in 2015-16, district figures show. Unfortunately, after the initial gains of Success Boston and other initiatives, improvements in the graduation rate leveled off, far below the 70 percent Menino had vowed.
• Today, the effort, called the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, is replicated across the University of Texas at Austin, making Texas a leader in finding ways to help first-generation students succeed.

INMHO faulty initaitives from the top down is at the heart of why we fail our students. Success Boston represents one example of a faulty initiative. Menino's push to double Advanced Placement courses compounded the exam school balkanization of the district high schools by pulling out the chosen students and teachers within district schools leaving regular classes with even less than they had before. Besides it was an unmitigated failure for the chosen with AP scores averaging around 2/5. Nobody got college credit, nobody was any more ready for college. This linking of "city and its public school system with colleges and universities" was a sham. True linking would have sent our aspiring valedictorians to our tax exempt universities for free college level coursework. High school was over by 1:40. There was plenty of time.

Success Boston represents one example of a faulty top down initiative. Menino's push to double Advanced Placement courses compounded the exam school balkanization of the district high schools by pulling out the chosen students and teachers within district schools leaving regular classes with even less than they had before. It was an failure for the chosen with AP scores averaging around 2/5. Nobody got college credit, nobody was any more ready for college. This linking of "city and its public school system with colleges and universities" was a sham. True linking would have sent our aspiring valedictorians to our tax exempt universities for free college level coursework. High school was over by 1:40. There was plenty of time.

At the heart of the problem was an administration that gauged success as the amount of compliance to their faulty initiatives. This was the measure of a teacher's success and in turn it was a measure of student's success. ex: OK so now we have the Socratic Seminar intiative. You just sit in a circle and chat. Actually you don't have to read the material first. You don't have to read at all. OR we have a new consultant on how kids must set up there notebooks. 'Now students, carefully copy from the board'. OR the 'main idea' intitative to improve MCAS scores. Teachers who complied were lauded. Students who complied were inducted into the National Honor Society. Aside from an endlessly honed personal narrative nobody learned how to read or write. It would be good to be able to.

Starting around 2005 with the court challenge by special education advocates for inclusion, schools of education and urban administrations embraced special education methodology as the appropriate methodology for all subjects for all urban non-exam school students. That methodology was flawed, not only for kids with special needs but also for all city kids. As put into practice, content didn't matter, reading became optional. It was a disservice to all the kids and created a generation of ditrict school valedictorians unable to read a textbook or a book, parse a word problem, apply a mathematical relationship to a problem they haven't seen before, or write a paper. It wasn't the kid's fault. Somebody should sue the city.

A big part of the problem in Boston education is the role played by organizations like the Boston Foundation and the Boston Globe. Globe editorials from the beginning of the century have cast the problem as a problem of unionized teachers. The administration generally got a free pass and hardly any reporting was in depth. Rather, the Globe parroted the Boston Foundation's anti-union rhetoric and advocacy for charter or pilot schools. Without any real education leadership in the city, the void was filled by collaborations between Harvard Business School and Boston to train administrators, by a myriad of consultants with their test prep products and teacher evaluation tools and a whole slew of consultants to run teacher professional development. It is their failure that is at the heart of it. Empower teachers. Empower students.

John Bolton's worldview according to the world

Carol Hills disappointing reporting on John Bolton points to problems at The World. Here we get a two perspectives on Bolton but little to illuminate our understanding. There is no historical perspective or questioning on Bolton's track record on manipulating the American public on WMD's and his role in pushing America into a massive war on false pretexts. Instead we phrases like 'not subtle', 'advancing American interests' and 'impressive tactician' from a Bush staffer, balanced by an anonymous guy in Iran. I listened. I was lulled. But then it bothered me. Maybe your quest for interesting 'stories that matter' you become more storytellers and entertainers than reporters, kind of like 'On Point' with good music. No longer and important source for news with a global perspective, you seem now to be just another optional outlet for infotainment. Too bad. So sad:)

Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble

Yes, it’s driven by greed — but the mania for cryptocurrency could wind up building something much more important than wealth.

By STEVEN JOHNSON JAN. 16, 2018

"Right now, the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain...If you think the internet is not working in its current incarnation, you can’t change the system through think-pieces and F.C.C. regulations alone. You need new code."

"You should own your digital identity — which could include everything from your date of birth to your friend networks to your purchasing history — and you should be free to lend parts of that identity out to services as you see fit. Given that identity was not baked into the original internet protocols, and given the difficulty of managing a distributed database in the days before Bitcoin ...was a practical impossibility. Now it is an attainable goal...." Hay ... new identity systems uPort, Blockstack and Solid"

"Brad Burnham, suggests a scenario revolving around ... a coordination platform between drivers and passengers " instead of a platform that takes all the marbles "..The blockchain world proposes ... adding another “basic layer” to the stack. Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: I am here and would like to go there. A distributed ledger might record all its users’ past trips, credit cards, favorite locations — all the metadata that services like Uber or Amazon use to encourage lock-in. Call it, for the sake of argument, the Transit protocol. The standards for sending a Transit request out onto the internet would be entirely open; anyone who wanted to build an app to respond to that request would be free to do so. Cities could build Transit apps that allowed taxi drivers to field requests. But so could bike-share collectives, or rickshaw drivers. Developers could create shared marketplace apps where all the potential vehicles using Transit could vie for your business. When you walked out on the sidewalk and tried to get a ride, you wouldn’t have to place your allegiance with a single provider before hailing. You would simply announce that you were standing at 67th and Madison and needed to get to Union Square. And then you’d get a flurry of competing offers. You could even theoretically get an offer from the M.T.A., which could build a service to remind Transit users that it might be much cheaper and faster just to jump on the 6 train.

How would Transit reach critical mass when Uber and Lyft already dominate the ride-sharing market? This is where the tokens come in. Early adopters of Transit would be rewarded with Transit tokens, which could themselves be used to purchase Transit services or be traded on exchanges for traditional currency. As in the Bitcoin model, tokens would be doled out less generously as Transit grew more popular. In the early days, a developer who built an iPhone app that uses Transit might see a windfall of tokens; Uber drivers who started using Transit as a second option for finding passengers could collect tokens as a reward for embracing the system; adventurous consumers would be rewarded with tokens for using Transit in its early days, when there are fewer drivers available compared with the existing proprietary networks like Uber or Lyft.

As Transit began to take off, it would attract speculators, who would put a monetary price on the token and drive even more interest in the protocol by inflating its value, which in turn would attract more developers, drivers and customers. If the whole system ends up working as its advocates believe, the result is a more competitive but at the same time more equitable marketplace. Instead of all the economic value being captured by the one or two large corporations that dominate the market, the economic value is distributed across a much wider group: the early developers of Transit, the app creators who make the protocol work in a consumer-friendly form, the early-adopter drivers and passengers, the first wave of speculators. Token economies introduce a strange new set of elements that do not fit the traditional models: instead of creating value by owning something, as in the shareholder equity model, people create value by improving the underlying protocol, either by helping to maintain the ledger (as in Bitcoin mining), or by writing apps atop it, or simply by using the service. The lines between founders, investors and customers are far blurrier than in traditional corporate models; all the incentives are explicitly designed to steer away from winner-take-all outcomes. And yet at the same time, the whole system depends on an initial speculative phase in which outsiders are betting on the token to rise in value."

Kevin O’Leary (of Shraktank) interview

"In capitalism, either you believe in the intrinsic concept about the pursuit of wealth and why it’s good for you, or you don’t. I never question it. I never even think for a second that it was not the right path. To me there is darkness and light. Capitalism is the light. Socialism is the darkness. Nothing could ever change my mind about that. "

This is really what we are dealing with from all the members of the oligarchy and their hangers-on

boston racism image vs reality globe

I applaud the Spotlight team's series on race in Boston. After reading today's segment "Lost on Campus, as Colleges look Abroad" I was struck by its failure to make a solid connection to the other topics in the series. Almost no reference was made to the city of Boston in which 75% of the students are Blacks and Latinos and nothing at all was mentioned of what benefits the citizens of Boston gain in exchange for having so much of its property tax exempt.

If one considers the opportunities for non-exam high school students, the race percentages are wider and the patterns are even more stark. It is an embarrassment how little we offer our students in this supposedly world-class city. Sure there are programs like the one that brings Harvard students into the schools to help fill out college applications, advising young students that it is just fine to take on enormous debt that you will never be able to repay. Some students even do get accepted to private colleges but often find themselves not ready for college level work, with grade point averages that cause a revocation of their aid packages, freezing their college records until they pay off a loan that is virtually unpayable.

One could argue that it is not the colleges fault, the students are just not prepared to succeed in college. And it is true. As a high school teacher in a non-exam high school I struggled with my failure to deliver for my students. And yes, overall the Boston Public Schools are doing a terrible job. Of the very small percentage of its students who do go on to college something like 75% of them need to be in at least one remedial class charged at the regular class rate. We cannot depend on higher education to remediate our poorly prepared high schools students.

What we need is some synergy between our schools and our world class education institutions. Instead of a very mediocre AP program that tracks our kids and and pulls our best teachers out of regular classrooms, Boston High school students should be able to take a class in in an area college. Chemistry 101, sociology or a freshman seminar, let them dip their toe in the water, experience vibrant campus life and what you actually need to know and do to succeed in college. Wow, this is what a real lab looks like! Make it free. Organize study groups and tutoring. Offer college credit if they succeed.

Improve our teachers in a similar way. Replace consultant driven, in-house, low quality professional development with opportunities that inspire teachers with seminars at universities run by top researches and professors in each of the fields of study.

And when our kids do get accepted at a local college, start right then surrounding them with programs that extend through the summer insuring that when they do take the Accuplacers in the fall that they all are ready for college level work without remedial courses.

Instead of our local colleges quibbling over and not even paying their 'payments in lieu of taxes' let us disrupt that relationship and put in place programs that will truly make us a world class city.

black-and-latino-students-fail-make-gains-boston-latin-despite-expanded-test-preparation

In "Diversity gap at Boston Latin proving stubborn" or as described in the online url: 'black_and_latino_students_fail_make_gains_boston_latin_despite_expanded_test_preparation' there are a number of glaring failures of reporting. It is not that a "disparity in diversity became a concern last year"; it is an issue that has been festering since the collapse of the Exam School Initiative over ten years ago. Framing the issue as a "golden opportunity" not taken advantage of is imprecise. Failing to question the premise of having a test program targeted at kids with high test scores does little to challenge our education leaders. Maybe the Globe needs to rock the 'meritocracy'. Mayor Walsh, when will it the right time to talk about 'policies to increase opportunities for people of color'? This has been going on for 17 years, "We've got to take time to build this" rings false, Mike Contompasis.

There are models out there of successful programs. Berklee's City Music, UMB's PCEP are getting the job done. Bottom line: this a BPS problem and we need BPS to fix it. Exam school opportunities for the top, hardest working students in every K-8, elementary and middle school in Boston have to start earlier and continue longer if we are to succeed for our kids.

Mr. McKenna -- I'm consdiering your letter regarding Boston Latin for publication. However, I'm ignorant of "UMB's PCEP." Can you tell me what that is, and what those letters stand for? Yours, Jon Garelick

Hi Jon,

Sorry about the acronyms especially since its ungooglable, getting this down from 400 to 200 words required some tricks.

UMASS Boston has a number of pre-collegiate programs. Probably the most well known is the Talented and Gifted (TAG) Latino Program. The one I am most familiar with was for high school kids who didn't have the high enough SAT scores for admission. We would bother the program office to get our kids in; I was teaching at West Roxbury High, this was almost 10 years ago. It may have morphed to the Admission Guaranteed Program that is now happening at the Burke, Dorchester and South Boston.

It was way longer than 2 weeks, and it wasn't test prep. It was more like a the classic freshman seminar, taught by professors with lots of reading and writing, lasting 6 weeks the summer before the start of classes. You may know that 70% of Boston non-exam school students admitted to college end up in one or more remedial classes (you pay tuition but they don't count). One year I got seven of my students into the program, all of them passed the Accuplacer, skipping remedial classes, 5 of them successfully finished freshman year and continued as sophomores.

There are things in common between this program and others like Berklee's City Music. They happen off-site at the institution; the kids get a taste of how the other half lives. They make a strong commitment to the kids. UMASS Boston continued with programs after the start of classes, City Music gives kids a private lesson one afternoon an ensemble on Saturday and then a six week summer program. None of them are based upon test prep;.

I can imagine what Boston middle schoolers would think if they were exposed to the Black Box Theatre, the Art and Sculpture Studios, the extensive sports and music programs that are the best that the Latin Alumni Association can buy. Perhaps they could imagine themselves succeeding at Latin.

off point by Tom Ashbrook on Ulysses S. Grant

In the midst of the Native American protest over the Dakota pipeline, it is appalling to me how 'off point' a radio host could be. Ashbrook, in what is becoming a WBUR tradition, panders to his guests, is ill informed on his topic and oblivious to his topic's relation to life today in this country.

Ulysses S Grant called native Americans 'wards of the nation' who do not 'harmonize well with others' and should be placed on reservations. His 'permanent peace' was more like cultural genocide. He presided over the massacre of the buffalo and agressive milatry action against Native Americans. His Indian Appropriations Act ended treaty making,

Meanwhile 140 people get arrested in North Dakota many placed in dog kennels, get fired upon by sound cannons and tear gas. All this in response to a peaceful protest.

Failing to make any connection at all is irresponsible journalism.

My son and a co-worker came in during the broadcast. 'Why don't you just turn it off' they said. I find myself doing that more and more often.

Nonsolar users bear burden of net metering

THE SOLAR ENERGY BOOM in Massachusetts has been exciting and there is little debate over whether further expansion is important. We are strong supporters of solar energy, but only at the right price for the state’s businesses, municipalities, and residents, including low-income customers. It is they — not utilities — who are shouldering the high cost of electricity produced by solar power. Share Tweet 29 Comments As the conversation about how to finance the future of solar energy in Massachusetts continues, it is important to set the record straight about what maintaining the status quo — or raising the net metering cap — means for utility customers statewide, as well as what it means for solar developers. CONTINUE READING BELOW ▼ Net metering – one of the state’s solar incentives – rewards solar energy owners or developers by paying them for the power they produce at the same rate they would pay if these owners and developers were consuming electricity from the grid. This rate includes payment for benefits and services that solar developments do not provide. In addition, when solar sites produce more than they consume, they don’t have to pay for services such as the use of the wires and poles operated and maintained by the utility and financed by utility customers. For large solar projects, these reimbursements far exceed the value they bring to the electric system. As a result, Massachusetts pays more per kilowatt-hour of solar energy than anywhere else in the nation, and about twice as much as neighboring New England states. This leaves utility customers who do not have solar with a grossly inequitable share of the burden of Massachusetts’ overpriced solar energy. Given this structure and steep subsidies, it is no surprise that developers are feverishly pushing for an increase of the net-metering cap. The Net Metering Task Force, on which we served, estimated that nonsolar customers will pay nearly $4 billion between now and 2020 if current policies remain in place. That is unfair and unsustainable. We support the creation of new policies that continue to promote the expansion of solar energy in Massachusetts without forcing nonsolar customers to subsidize millions of dollars in profits for developers. In the meantime, we believe that raising the cap is not needed to ensure the ongoing development of solar power installations. This is evidenced by the applications — for systems of various sizes — that National Grid continues to receive even after meeting its cap. The cap does not apply to residential projects or those that produce electricity to be used exclusively on site. In addition, net metering is not the only incentive for solar. Let’s not rush to strap customers with paying for additional subsidies for the solar power industry before we shine some sunlight on the real costs and benefits of solar for everyone in the state. Bob Rio is senior vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts. Amy Rabinowitz is deputy general counsel for National Grid. Camilo Serna is vice president of strategic planning and policy for Eversource.

It is disingenuous of our utility companies blame our high electric bills on solar energy. Our bills have been high for years. Our energy has been derived from non-renewable fossil fuels and nuclear power sold to us by a different power conglomerate every few years. Solar is a threat to their business model. Now every electricity user with a south facing roof can become a producer.up every few years. to claim that as a result of net net metering "Massachusetts pays more per kilowatt-hour of solar energy than anywhere else in the nation" Massachusetts electric costs were high even before net metering, so what is the intent of the utilities in blaming it on solar?

Hazards tied to medical records rush

Subsidies given for computerizing, but no reporting required when errors cause harm

By Christopher Rowland | GLOBE STAFF JULY 20, 2014

One job that might be appropriate for governments is the creation of standards.

Bay State's big selloff

re: Bay State's big selloff by Richard Gillispie Boston Globe Op-Ed 7/27/7

Richard Gillespie has found an interesting crease in the social fabric through which to slip in a rationale for privatization. While corporations can jettison their responsibilities to their workers and retirees, the public sector depends on a more ponderous political process.

From a capitalist perspective there is a lot of value in our communities. The wealth is spread evenly, the difference in wages and benefits between our lowest paid state workers and our highest paid public officials is no where near the differences seen in the private sector between workers' and stockholders' earnings; an enticing amount of fat poised to move up the food chain and into executives/stockholders coffers. Yet, this even distribution is what gives our communities their strength. Our public workers can become part of the fabric of our society with the economic power to contribute to their communities.

Despite our federal government's mission of making the world safe for privatization, there is nothing democratic or free or even American in this value. Corporations are not citizens, we are the citizens. Selling off our communities so that we can re-apply for our jobs at lower pay and worse benefits is not the solution.

Tim McKenna
12 Parley Vale
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
tim@sitebuilt.net
617 524 0938(h)
857 498 2574(m)

next target: the prevailing wage law

next target: the prevailing wage law Next target: the prevailing wage law - The Boston Globe

Perhaps we should just take eveybody's job away, let them get real hungry then bring them into a big arena. The field could be separated into two sections, 13% of the people could go in the union section, the other 87% in the other. Crumbs could be thrown down from the skyboxes with more crumbs going to the union section. People could then compete against each other by fighting for the crumbs thrown down from the skyboxes. The people cry out for more crumbs. The jumbotron responds: "Reduce the union section if you want more crumbs for yourself". We could then force the winners to have to give some of their crumbs to the losers. The jumbotron would declare that was because of taxes: "reduce taxes keep more of your crumbs". The people are outraged. Allow them to vote on the way out of the arena. Maybe you could sell chances on a seat in the skyboxes too.

Ah efficiency and discipline, the core values of privatization. Free market efficiency might get the job done for $25/hr or even $15/hr but what does that get society? Do we have strong communities where people can own a home, send their kids to college, save for retirement?

Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

author of

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) Paperback – August 11, 2015

Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.

In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.

Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.

First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.

Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xvii

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162804#sthash.Gw4Sb34D.dpuf

Grenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviii

So, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162804#sthash.Gw4Sb34D.dpuf

letters

polkadog

Polka Dog Bakery
42 South St, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

Polka Dog Bakery
Boston Fish Pier Boston, MA 02210

Dear Rob Van Sickle and Deb Suchman,

Today, I walked into the Jamaica Plain store to pick up my order. Happily, Ulysses followed me in. The store was empty except for two employees. The tall person in black boots was there. I knew from past experience that he would take exception to Ulysses not being on a leash so I told Ulysses to go back outside and wait for me. After I shopped, on my way out, the tall employee in black boots said that Ulysses couldn't wait outside for me unleashed. Knowing he didn't own the sidewalk, I said, OK call the cops. He said OK I will. I said, You just lost my family as a customer.

Peri and I have been customers since the day you opened. All of 94 pound Ulysses and Mabibi's food comes from you. We like to support local stores. You used to be nice, knew Ulysses by name, and didn't mind if he wandered around the store sniffing treats. He never touched anything and never bothered anyone.

An autocratic pet store is almost as bad as CVS putting deodorant behind lock and key. Both tear at the fabric of a community and force us to shop online. Too bad.

cc Peri McKenna

Sincerely,
Timothy McKenna
12 Parley Vale, Jamaica Plain, A 02130
mckenna.tim@gmail.com
(857)498-2574