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Hitch is a new on-demand ride-sharing app that hopes to compete on price by using a smart logistics engine to maximize the number of passengers it can get in a car. It differentiates itself from the rest of the pack by making more efficient use of all the seats in a car, which lowers the cost for users when compared to other services out there. Read More
Google Drive, and the apps in it—Docs, Sheets, and Slides—are great for people looking for a simple Office suite. It's free, makes collaboration easy, and pretty much anyone can use it. But if you're used to something more traditional, like Microsoft Office, you may be hesitant to use it. Here's how to make Google Drive work more like the desktop suites you're used to.
    
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Congress is debating whether to give the president the authority to fast-track a massive free trade agreement -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- between the U.S., Canada, and 10 nations from the Asia-Pacific region. The nations involved in the talks account for nearly 40 percent of the world's GDP and 26 percent of the world's trade, but weekday evening television news broadcasts have largely ignored the topic.
Wash. Post's Wonkblog: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is A "Giant Free Trade Deal Covering Everything From Financial Services To Telecommunications To Sanitary Standards For Food." From The Washington Post's Wonkblog:
Basically, [TPP] is a giant free trade deal between the U.S., Canada, and 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region that's been under negotiation for nearly a decade now (it began as an agreement between Singapore, Chile, New Zealand and Brunei before the U.S. took the lead in 2009). It's expected to eliminate tariffs on goods and services, tear down a host of non-tariff barriers and harmonize all sorts of regulations when it's finished early next year.
[...]
The countries currently party to the agreement -- currently including Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, most critically Japan and potentially Korea -- are some of the U.S.' biggest and fastest-growing commercial partners, accounting for $1.5 trillion worth of trade in goods in 2012 and $242 billion worth of services in 2011. They're responsible for 40 percent of the world's GDP and 26 percent of the world's trade.
[...]
The treaty has 29 chapters, dealing with everything from financial services to telecommunications to sanitary standards for food. [The Washington Post, Wonkblog, 12/11/13]
United States Trade Representative: Trans-Pacific Partnership "Most Significant Trade Negotiation In A Generation." According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the Trans-Pacific Partnership is "the most significant trade negotiation in a generation." As of 2012, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would join twelve member states along the Pacific Rim, representing nearly 800 million citizens, and 39 percent of global GDP. [Office of the United States Trade Representative, 12/10/13]
Obama: Completing Trade Negotiations Is A Priority. President Obama has made the successful completion of negotiations between TPP members, as well as unrelated negotiations on a similar trade pact between the United States and European Union, a central focus of his second-term policy agenda. On January 28, the president highlighted the importance of ongoing negotiations in his State of the Union address:
THE PRESIDENT: Over the past five years, my administration has made more loans to small business owners than any other. And when ninety-eight percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment, and open new markets to new goods stamped "Made in the USA." China and Europe aren't standing on the sidelines. Neither should we. [The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 1/28/14]
Congress Is Currently Debating A Bill That Would Grant The President Expedited Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). According to a January 30 Reuters article, President Obama is at odds with Democratic and Republican lawmakers in both houses of Congress concerning reauthorizing a procedure called the "trade promotion authority" (TPA). The TPA is a formal legal authority granted to the president by Congress, which allows the White House to fast-track international treaty negotiations with foreign partners, bypassing most congressional review:
A bill before the House and Senate would grant the White House power to submit free trade deals to Congress for an up-or-down vote without amendments, something that would give trading partners peace of mind but that raises hackles among some lawmakers.
Add to that the genuine mistrust among some Democrats about the impact of trade deals on local jobs and industry and environmental standards, and it's a volatile mix.
With two major free trade deals hanging in the balance, the U.S. administration now faces even more pressure to win over skeptics on both sides of politics to pass trade promotion authority (TPA) as the electoral clock ticks down. [Reuters, 1/30/14]
Over The Past Six Months, Network Evening News Shows Have Completely Ignored The TPP. A Media Matters transcript search of CBS Evening News with Scott Pelly, ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from August 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014 found no mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. TPP received one mention on PBS' Newshour, when Doug Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that approving the TPP would improve relations with Asian nations.
Cable Networks Largely Overlook Trade Negotiations. During the same six-month period, the three largest cable networks -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox News -- covered the ongoing negotiations 33 times during their evening programming. The overwhelming majority of these mentions (32) originated on MSNBC and aired during The Ed Show.
Media Matters conducted a Nexis search of transcripts of evening (defined as 5 p.m. through 11 p.m.) weekday programs on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and network broadcast news (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS) from August 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014. We identified and reviewed all segments that included any of the following keywords: pacific partnership or trans-pacific or tpp or trans-pacific partnership or transpacific partnership.
The following programs were included in the data: PBS Newshour, World News with Diane Sawyer, Evening News (CBS), Nightly News with Brian Williams, The Situation Room, Crossfire, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360, Piers Morgan Live, The Five, Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox Report with Shepard Smith, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, The Kelly File, The Ed Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, All In with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. For shows that air re-runs, only the first airing was included in data retrieval.
Media Matters included all segments that mentioned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (or "TPP") by name, regardless of the substance or tone of the commentary. We did not include teasers or clips of news events, or re-broadcasts of news packages that were already counted on their initial broadcast in the 5 p.m.-11 p.m. window.
This is fucking hot!
The World Music Awards has unleashed an explosive megamix visual for the Robin Skouteris mix and it’s absolute fire. Watch it below via YouTube and check the track listing, it’s a very long list.
Robin Skouteris on Facebook
Based on “PopLove 2″.
Artists, songs & videos included in this Mashup Video Mix:
Ariana Grande – Right There
Asaf Avidan – One day/ Reckoning Song (Wankelmut Remix)
Austin Mahone – What About Love
Avicii & Aloe Blacc – Wake Me Up
Avril Lavigne – Here’s To Never Growing Up
Baauer – Harlem Shake
Beyoncé – Haunted
Beyoncé feat. Jay Z – Drunk in Love
Beyoncé – XO
Bingo Players – Get Up (Rattle)
Britney Spears – Work Bitch
Bruno Mars – Locked Out Of Heaven
Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding – I Need Your Love
Capital Cities – Safe & Sound
Celine Dion – Loved Me Back To Life
Cher – Woman’s World
Daft Punk feat Pharrell & Nile Rodgers – Lose Yourself to Dance
Daft Punk feat. Pharrell & Nile Rodgers – Get Lucky
David Guetta feat. Ne-Yo & Akon – Play Hard
Demi Lovato – Let It Go
Drake – Started From The Bottom
Drake – Worst Behavior
Eminem & Rihanna – Monster
Enrique Iglesias – Heart Attack
Fall Out Boy – My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)
Gary Barlow – Let Me Go
Han Geng – Clown Mask
Icona Pop – I Love It
Iggy Azelia – Bounce
Iggy Azelia – Work
Imagine Dragons – Radioactive
Jason Derulo – Talk Dirty
Jay Z feat. Justin Timberlake – Holy Grail
Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull – Live It Up
Jessie J – Wild
John Newman – Love Me Again
Justin Timberlake – Suit & Tie
Kanye West – Bound 2
Katy Perry – Roar
Katy Perry – Roar (Cazzette Remix)
Ke$ha – Crazy Kids
Ke$ha – Crazy Kids (Mayeda Remix)
Kylie Minogue – Skirt
Lady Gaga – Applause
Lady Gaga – Do What You Want
Lady Gaga O2 ArtPop UK Commercial
Lana Del Rey – Summetime Sadness
Laura Pausini & Kylie Minogue – Limpido
Letta – King Of Wishful Thinking
Linkin Park & Steve Aoki – A Light That Never Comes
Lorde – Royals
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Can’t Hold Us
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Thrift Shop
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Thrift Shop (Bombs Away & Komes Remix)
Mariah Carey feat. Miguel – #Beautiful
Martin Garrix – Animals
Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball
Namie Amuro – Big Boys Cry
Naughty Boy feat. Sam Smith – La La La
One Direction – Story Of My Life
OneRepublic – Lose Myself
P!nk feat. Nate Ruess – Just Give Me A Reason
Pet Shop Boys – Vocal
Pharrell Williams – Happy
Pitbull – Don’t Stop The Party
Pitbull feat. Christina Aguilera – Feel This Moment
Pitbull feat. Ke$ha – Timber
Priyanka Chopra feat. Pitbull – Exotic
PSY – Gentleman
RedFoo – Let’s Get Ridiculous
Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines
Sakis Rouvas – Tora
Selena Gomez – Come And Get It
Shakira feat. Rihanna – Can’t Remember to Forget You
Showtek feat. We Are Loud & Sonny Wilson – Booyah
Stromae – Papaoutai
Tal feat. Flo Rida – Danse
Taylor Swift – 22
Vitaa feat. Maitre Gims – Game Over
Will.i.am & Justin Bieber – #ThatPower
Will.i.am. & Britney Spears – Scream & Shout
Ylvis – The Fox (What Does The Fox Say?)
Zedd feat. Foxes – Clarity
+ Speeding Around The World in Under 5 minutes (Time Lapse video by Kien Lam)
Winter is coming. And for a lot of people, especially kids, that means chapped cheeks. Over at One Good Thing By Jillee, there's a DIY solution to make your own, natural chapstick for cheeks, since the store-bought chapsticks for lips won't do much for your cheeks. It's not too difficult either:
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The Rollie Eggmaster is a “vertical grill”. What this means is that you crack an egg down into this thing and put a stick in the liquid egg, and then you pull it out and it’s an egg popsicle. Which doesn’t sound that delicious, but boy, when you look at that egg popsicle, it…
…hmm, okay.
"There was a line that I deleted from the movie that will come back if I do a second movie. Newt explained that the Kaiju are not carbon based organisms like humans, they are silicon based. The only part I left of his explanation is that they have a hive mentality, meaning that if you 'drift' with a Kaiju brain, you are drifting with every Kaiju alive," he told Bleeding Cool. "Depending on the duration of the drift the information might be complete or incomplete, but the Kaiju know everything the human drifts with them knows. That’s as much as I can tell you without spoiling the sequel. Well, that’s providing there is a sequel – if there isn’t one, I promise, I’ll spill the beans."
We're not sure how any of this even remotely constitutes a spoiler or being close to a spoiler -- all the drifting stuff in "Pacific Rim" didn't make much sense -- or how the silicon factor plays in, but perhaps it will make much more sense if/when he reveals where the sequel would have gone. And while Del Toro has admitted that his friend and filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu helped him cut ten minutes out of the movie, don't expect a longer version on the eventual DVD.
"This is my director’s cut. There will not be an extended cut right now, we’re not planning on it, but there will be deleted scenes and they were deleted for a reason," he said, adding that he'll be recording the commentary soon but that this DVD extras as a whole might be leaner, because the "DVD and Blu-ray market is shrinking so we can’t be as extravagant as we were with other discs in the past."
But will some of that content include the alternate closing scenes to the movie that he shot? As Del Toro tells Badass Digest, he filmed three different scenarios for the concluding moments with Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi. "When I was working on the movie we had three or four different versions of the relationship between Charlie and Rinko because I wanted to see if I could make a story about two people liking each other without having to end in a kiss," he explained. "So when I shot the ending we shot three versions. I’ve never done this before, but instinctively I thought we should do three versions. We did one version where they kiss and it almost felt weird. They’re good friends, they’re pals, good colleagues."
So why did he hold off on the smooch? "But the thing that stayed in the movie is the hint that there may be a love story one day, but it’s not there yet," he teased. Maybe in the sequel perhaps...if it gets made.
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Let's try this shit again, the video is now unlisted by their agency for whatever reason, but OP when into stalker mode after watching Pacific Rim (omg at dem Mechs)
jerquant!
If you liked the Oscar-nominated fracking exposé “Gasland” by Josh Fox, you’ll love the sequel Gasland, Part II, which is being broadcast on HBO Monday night.
I think it’s a better movie, more entertaining and even more compelling in making a case that we are headed on a bridge to nowhere — a metaphorical gangplank — with our hydraulic fracturing feeding frenzy.
Future generations living in a climate-ruined world will be stunned that we drilled hundreds of thousands of fracking and reinjection wells:
Perhaps you have been persuaded fracking is a good idea by the multi-million-dollar industry campaign for fracking and against Fox — which includes backing a counter-documentary by two anti-science filmmaker’s best known for a film smearing Al Gore. If so, I’d urge you to read the Propublica exposé in Scientific American, “Are Fracking Wastewater Wells Poisoning the Ground beneath Our Feet?”
After fracking — injecting a generally toxic brew into the earth to release natural gas (or oil) — wastewater wells are used to reinject the resulting brine deep underground. Here’s the bad news:
There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
… in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn’t always work.
“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
… A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.
The documentary does explore the climate impacts of methane leaks from fracking (see below). And it also presents the clean energy solutions that we can use instead of fracking, such as the recent Stanford study that New York State can eliminate fossil fuels from its energy mix entirely by 2050.
But the film’s primary focus is the immediate impact on water and people:
Fox makes a very compelling case. As the New York Times TV reviewer explains, the movie “paints a convincing picture: homeowners at the mercy of the oil and gas industry wait while government agencies make tentative moves toward regulation that eventually come to nothing or are reversed.”
The review makes clear that while “there are questions, large and small, that can nag at you”:
Most of Mr. Fox’s material isn’t open to question, however. Recordings of a gas industry conference at which public relations managers are told to study the Army’s counterinsurgency manual — because “we are dealing with an insurgency” when it comes to protesters and angry homeowners — are both hilarious and horrifying. Mr. Fox’s account of the Pennsylvania government’s hiring of a private company to monitor fracking protesters, an episode not widely covered outside the state, is particularly valuable.
It’s hard to take issue with Mr. Fox’s resigned conclusion that economic and political forces will soon spread fracking around the world, no matter how harmful critics say it may be to the environment and our health.
I’m not entirely sure Fox is completely resigned to that conclusion. I was able to interview him last month and he is committed to spreading the word, fighting this fracked future, and pushing clean energy alternatives.
The movie also covers methane leakage in the context of global warming. Recent research continues to vindicate those who have warned that fracking has a high leakage rate of methane, which is up to 105 times as effective at trapping heat than CO2 over a 20-year period. See my January post, “Bridge To Nowhere? NOAA Confirms High Methane Leakage Rate Up To 9% From Gas Fields, Gutting Climate Benefit.” See also the the recent Christian science Monitor piece “Methane leaks of shale gas may undermine its climate benefits,” which explains “If methane leak rates are more than 3 percent of output, fracking of shale gas formations may be boosting greenhouse gas emissions rather than lowering them.”
What is so frustrating about the frenzy to frack is that even ignoring the leakage issue, we must stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure the middle of this decade to have a realistic chance of crossing climate tipping points that will ruin our children’s future.
To get beyond all the hand-waving analysis asserting “gas is better than coal for the climate,” you need a comprehensive energy and climate model — and an emissions or temperature target.
If your goal is 2°C or 3.6°F total warming, then we’ve just about finished building every hydrocarbon-burning power plant we can. That is the conclusion of two of the (very few) groups that have such models — the International Energy Agency and Climate Interactive, which has done climate and energy modeling for everyone from the State Department and the Chinese government.
Climate Interactive used their En-ROADS global energy model to explore “the goal of the Copenhagen Accord – to limit temperature increase to 2°C is still in reach.” They found:
Even if the world also has sustained success eliminating deforestation, reducing emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gasses and improving energy efficiency, new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure can’t occur much beyond 2015 in order to maintain a 50% chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C in 2100. Having a higher probability of achieving the 2°C goal or keeping these even odds of meeting the goal but delaying the end of the era of fossil fuel investment would require additional measures such as shutting down already-constructed fossil-fuel-using infrastructure before the end of its useful lifetime, further reducing energy demand, or achieving so called negative emissions, where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered.
In this thought experiment using the global energy system model En-ROADS, there is no new investment in fossil fuel using infrastructure after 2015, but the long lifetime of the existing infrastructure means that fossil fuel use continues well into the century.
The concept of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” was pushed by the American Gas Association as far back as 1981. It’s the longest bridge in history!
Averting catastrophic warming means it makes little sense to invest tens of billions of dollars in gas infrastructure and gas-fired power plants over the next few years — unless you plan to shut it down within two decades.
This is very similar to the conclusion that the IEA reached with its energy model.
The IEA made clear that natural gas isn’t the “solution” if your goal is staying far from 7°F warming — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. It must be noted that even that IEA gas scenario, which results in too much warning, assumes that not only does global oil consumption peak around 2020 — but so does coal! So if one or both of those peaks don’t happen — and they wouldn’t without a high price of carbon and aggressively clean energy deployment starting now — then the Golden Age of Gas is just the “devastating” scenario laid out in last years’s World Bank report, a “world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”
And remember, neither the IEA nor En-ROADS models the impact of methane leakage.
Tragically, just about the time we wake up to the reality that fracking isn’t the solution to climate change, we’re probably going to wake up and find that we’ve poisoned billions of gallons of water — much of which will be in regions of the country that are turning into a permanent Dust Bowl thanks to climate change.
Or we could wake up now and start getting off fossil fuels immediately. A very good wake up call is Gasland, Part II. You can see it on HBO Monday.
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