Maybe once in the past year have I managed to have someone buy my cans and bottles for basically nothing. Probably 80 percent of the people redeeming where I go are homeless, so it's no mystery to me why they're homeless.
Blogger together with comment threads on Google+ (which could be embedded in more places than just Blogger) were supposed to be the magic elixer between personal sites and a feed that promotes discoverability.
Sometimes I think Google has killed G+ just as there was a reason to give it a second look, but I suppose they know how unlikely is a revival of G+. They have got a successful social network in the form of YouTube, even though YouTube comment threads often make Facebook look like the Promised Land.
I've been using a Blackberry Z10. I relay my Gmail to a remote Unix pay-for account, and only receive from there; I only send mail from a VM on my VPN'd home computer.
This phone does phone calls, SMS, and I use the built-in browser on private mode. There's NOTHING Google on this phone, and I sign into nothing.
I do feel like I'm not part of the game any more, but I'm not part of the game any more!
You can use a standard email client hooked to Gmail to stop Google from getting your browsing data.
You can relay your Gmail to another account with read-only access, replying from a VM with only email use (I do this on my phone). Or, only get/send your email from a VM that does nothing else.
Because it seems like there's two issues here: Google gaining intel from your email itself, and Google gaining intel from your browsing data, gained from your use of Gmail in a browser. What I've suggested addresses browsing data.
Truck traffic in LA is by far the problem, not so much the car traffic (though that is horrible, based on the population).
Ships come into Long Beach, the containers are offloaded, the trucks begin a lumbering journey to points East. Belching all the way.
I'm not making up the claim. California rules put in place over ten years ago had trucks retrofitted or whatever, and this change to TRUCKS ONLY was like removing 30 MILLION cars from California roads. There are not 30 million trucks in California, though sometimes it appears so.
The ports of LA and LB handle something like 40% of the US-China trade.
There are "clean trucks" requirements, but that can be enforced only in the immediate vicinity of the port. I don't
have a source but there have been reports that the clean trucks shuttle back and forth between the port and nearby places where the cargo can be transferred to other trucks.
Don’t forget that in 2015 the NAFTA requirements that allow Mexican trucks on US roads were fully put into effect so now we’ve got heavily polluting Mexican trucks on Southern California roads now.
Is there a quota on that ? If not, I predict this will follow the same pattern it took in Western Europe, where low-cost of labor Eastern Europe companies are slowly taking over long distance trucking. The limiter of the rate of change is the number of available EE long-distance drivers, which the companies hiring have vacuumed clean.
I got on the 710 once heading south and it was a whole different world in which it felt like there was an unbreakable chain of trucks. It also felt extremely dangerous since they really didn't care about breaking that chain to let you into a lane if you needed to exit.
Any citation on that? The article itself says the peak of pollution isn't as high, just the longevity. The article also mentions climate change modifying weather patterns which could be a contributor. As someone who lived in LA you're always preying for rain to wash out ash or smog from nearby fires (which seem more common) or pollution and precipitation has been rarer over the past few years.
No doubt reducing pollution (and trucks have been a huge contributor) will help, but since you mentioned Long Beach, boats have very few regulations and burn giant amounts of the lowest-quality fuel.
An addition, a bunch of recent studies I've seen over the past few years show that up to 30% of the air pollution on the west coast comes from Asia.
It just seems like something that should be addressed on multiple fronts and with things objectively getting worse, every bit helps.
Trucks and shops are definitley one of the biggest problems for riverside. These are the biggest source of pm2.5 precursors because the wind patterns basically funnel all of the LA basin atmosphere out there and the pollution transforms over the 24-36 hr journey.
I used to work for air pollution regulators. I don’t have the citations but I’ve seen the presentations.
