Morning Ed: World {2018.09.20.Th}

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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13 Responses

  1. Kolohe says:

    Wo9 – that was a good one. I wonder how Texas reversed this in its anglicized form.Report

  2. Kolohe says:

    Wo3 – Mercator is far better for practical navigation. I wonder if they still use it for close in zoom levels, though most of the time it doesn’t make a difference (except, like the article says, at high lattitudes)Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kolohe says:

      I noticed it yesterday after I had zoomed out enough to see the whole state of Arizona, so I would think use Mercator at high zoom levels, the switch over as you zoom out.

      I’d have to play with it while looking at Alaska to be sure.Report

  3. fillyjonk says:

    Wo4: the “Byzantine blood” thing tells me that English isn’t the only language with dog-whistles. (And also: man, we never really solved the problems that led up to WWI, did we?)Report

  4. Richard Hershberger says:

    Wo6: Key item in the linked article:

    …the economy has sunk amid a drop in oil prices and production.

    Live by extracting a commodity, die by extracting a commodity.Report

    • Kolohe in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

      I think its more accurate to say the state’s fiscal picture is less rosy due to the decline in oil and oil production.

      AK unemployment is always between 6 to 8 percent and hasn’t tracked that much with either oil prices and just weakly with national employment trends.

      My guess is that there’s an unusually high amount of seasonal employment and people just move out when jobs aren’t there and move in when they are.

      It also seems that a lot of the floor on the unemployment rate is due to a high level of unemployment and underemployment among Alaska Natives*.

      *Which is not to dismiss it as not being a serious problem, but it is a significantly intractable and pervasive problem throughout North America – and something oil probably can’t fix on its own (otherwise it would have)Report

      • greginak in reply to Kolohe says:

        This is all true. Also many oil field workers live out of state so they sometimes go to work in different oil patches when it drys up here or their unemployment isnt’ captured in Ak stats.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Kolohe says:

        There was an interesting article about a town in Alaska that is shut from the word for a good section of the year. The article was in the Times. There is a small tunnel that gets shut down for large parts of the winter and this connects the town to main roads. What main the town strange is that the Army built a high-rise apartment in the town at some point. Everyone lived in this high-rise during the winter. It almost felt like something out of SF fiction. The town’s main economy came during the summer with tourists on cruises. The top two levels of the building were used as a B&B because it was also good for whaling views.Report

        • greginak in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          That town is Whittier. It’s about an hour south of Anchorage. It isn’t cut off during the winter. The tunnel out of town is open all year round. It is a terrible place though.

          It was built as a port during ww2. It had two good points for the military: a good port, duh, and lots of bad overcast weather which made it very difficult to attack by air. Made perfect sense for a military port during a war. But there is very little land and the aforementioned crappy weather. You only go to whittier to head out to prince william sound or to come off the water to head to anchorage.Report

  5. greginak says:

    WO5. The Sam’s model did succeed, just when done by Costco. At least Anchorage has always had costco. It’s also a bonus they treat their workers better. As i remember Costco agreed to take over the Fbx sams building within a week of sam’s ditching it. The transition is rough but it does point out something that few Bush residents like to admit which is how dependent and important cities and the rest of the world are to their Bush lifestyle.Report