Morning Ed: World {2018.09.20.Th}
[Wo1] I’m so tired of them just bringing back all the old shows from decades ago.
[Wo2] Eventually, the laws will bend the knee to the people. France introduces open-air urinals.
[Wo3] Greenland enthusiasts cry in lament.
[Wo4] How Mr Clean conquered Croatia.
[Wo5] A new book looks at the dark side of Tokyo.
[Wo6] Alaska just moved down our relocation list. You’d think if the Sam’s Club model could succeed anywhere, it would be there.
[Wo7] Uncovering Germany’s oldest library.
[Wo8] A look at Soviet housing projects, which were… maybe not that bad?
[Wo9] A tweetstorm on why Mexico is spelled with an X.
Wo9 – that was a good one. I wonder how Texas reversed this in its anglicized form.Report
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
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
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
Wo6: Key item in the linked article:
Live by extracting a commodity, die by extracting a commodity.Report
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
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
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
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
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
The article mentions that people were driving to Anchorage to stock up at Costco. I wonder if it also because Costco will just stay in more densely populated areas. Also known as where Will hates to live.Report
Well you have to be pretty crazy to live in fbx anyway…urm…ok..maybe rephrase that as alternatively sane. Sams closed here in Anchorage so it wasn’t like they just wanted out of fbx. Costco will go into fbx and likely do fine.
The article tried to tie the sams issue to gov race which is tenuous to me.Report
I like cities, too.Report