The other striking aspect for me is how, as has often been the case, those most affected are the poorest.
Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London.
The same was the case in industrial cities during the industrial revolution. The poor factory workers lived close to the factories, and their kids grew up breathing the smoke. The wealthy owners moved to the outer suburbs (often upwind) where the air was clear.
There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.
Urban air pollution is insidious. Unlike the dreadful smogs of previous generations that lead to things like the Clean Air Act and the banning of open fires in urban areas, today's is invisible, and so doesn't create the same political problems. In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarentee an angry pushback.
There are still cruise ships that dock, and they have been a big issue for local kids. They use a lot of power while docked. I believe the solution is to hook them up to the grid, but that requires that they and the dock both have the facilities.
There is a dock in the Greenwich area, and another one further down the Thames estuary.
Here in NYC shore power for cruise ships has been a multi-decade effort. The Manhattan terminal still has no shore power system because it requires an entirely new electrical substation. The Brooklyn one (in proximity to a poor neighborhood) had a system installed some years ago (with an eight figure price tag), but which ships were seemingly not bothering to use. They’ve since mandated that ships actually use it, if they have the capability, and I think they have some kind of incentives for the cruise lines to retrofit their ships for it.
> There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.
That part can also be explained because asthma drug is used as masking agent when taking steroids and other PEDS, which is quite common at this level.
Lest anyone take this seriously, these assertions are confidently-misinformed, conspiracy-minded thinking.
No asthma medications whatsoever have utility as a chemical masking agent, nor are there any plausible mechanisms for that to happen.
Beta agonists (mostly clenbuterol) have been abused independently in the past as a way to cut weight in weightlifting/cycling/etc., since they theoretically provide a marginal boost to overall metabolism - but the effects are marginal. They're de facto useless as a general PED.
Widespread doping in high-level sports is absolutely commonplace, and it's very easy to not get caught - but asthma medications have absolutely nothing to do with that.
The article you gave, they only state the principle of PEDS evasion tactics, some used a fake dick when it's time to urinate, some used compound modified, but it can't possibly tell every single way that scientists found to avoid detection.
Froom is an actual athlete that got caught, that speak louder.
Beside i heard it too in completely unrelated sport circle, running (sprint) and boxing from athlètes competing.
> There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.
You can get asthma just from breathing really hard too much. Especially in cold climate. Due to this it is really common with endurance athletes.
> Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor.
Wait, what? There are no container docks in London. The nearest container port serving London is Tilbury, near the coast. Occasionally a single cruise ship moors in the Pool of London against the HMS Belfast, but that's happening only one this month, for 12 hours on April 7, according to the Tower Bridge lift schedule: https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/lift-times
Cruise ships certainly used to moore up in the Greenwich stretch of the river at the and a few years ago there was quite a lot of coverage of the issue around it. Cruise ships require a lot of power while docked, and unless they connect to the grid they used to create a lot of air quality issues.
Still it's 3 to 4 cruise ships a month according to that article and, while probably hugely dirty, I would be surprised if the asthma rates of kids in affluent Greenwich and Blackheath are among "the highest in London" because of this.
It's a big issue there but it's very localised to that specific area (which is itself in the bottom 25% of areas in the UK). They are like having a whole load of idling lorries sat near your house all at the same time, normally for several days at a time. And all of that is on top of the general level of pollution from being in the centre of London. I'm going from a documentary and a couple of article from a few years ago, which I should try and find.
Hopefully with all the work on both improving the fuel used, and providing grid hookups so they can turn their engines off, that will have made a big difference. Hopefully the effects of the congestion charges have made a big difference too. A lot of the kids featured in the documentary had a really crap life because of it all.
Please pardon my pedantry but this is by definition what poor is : having less means to escape material woes. Rich people are the ones that can elect to live in healthy areas.
In many cities a lot of rich people live in the city centre. London is an example. Take a look at house prices and rents in Westminster or the City, or even adjoining areas. The only poor people there are the ones in social housing who are a minority.
Yes, but if the air pollution we're talking about is invisible then why would the rich elect for less exposure? Some might look at air quality data, but I suspect what is really going on is they seek out quiet. Noise pollution is the thing people really hate and avoiding that will likely lead to getting better air quality too.
Generally the pollution comes together with other indesirable effects. Stench, noise, etc.
The rich don't need to understand that roads or ships generate deadly air pollution. They don't like living next to a highway or a container terminal, full stop. They do however love living next to a park or a lake.
In fact, so do poor people. But they can't afford it.
Exactly. The rich don't actively avoid air pollution, not really.
A very significant and underestimated source of pollution is burning of wood. BBQ, fireplaces and stove, even expensive modern 'ecodesign' heating solutions that burn wood: these all cause massive and dangerous air pollution. And it is often, in my country at least, somewhat of a luxury thing. As soon as you get out of the poorest of area's, you smell the burning of wood which can cause more than 50 percent of total pollution locally, even rivaling the effects of smoking.
Do you have data on how much wood burning contributes to air pollution compared to, say, burning fossil fuels? On the surface, your comment sounds like more rhetoric trying to shift the blame from the companies to the consumer, an unfortunately common problem that is getting us nowhere in correcting environmental problems. That said, if there is data displaying this discrepancy, I'll happily change my mind.
In this case it's not communication, it's using the school buses as power supply
From the article:
> V2X technology, which lets vehicles feed power back into the grid, is currently concentrated among a small number of US companies. Some are focused exclusively on commercial or residential applications, while others cover multiple segments.
Indeed. I wasn't very clear but my point was that other quasi authoritative sources describe it as a communications/coordination standard, whereas this is talking from a power delivery perspective.
I love how closely this matches how GDS built flows work, not just the visuals. The careful step by step pacing, the direct wording, it's all absolutely spot on.
I feel like a portion of it is the way that many/most companies have been captured by their finance departments. Everything is accounting. The CFO in many organisations has become the most powerful exec, and many CEOs seem to come up through the CFO role.
Outside of places like Meta, who are printing money at a ridiculous rate, finance acts as a break on any long-term or big bets. There can be no risk taking.
I feel like this is one of Google's problems now. Once upon a time they were willing to take big swings with their piles of cash, now it's all about revenue maximisation at the low level. I forget which change it was, but they started charging for something, or limiting quotas on something, and the email contained the phrase "in line with industry norms", and I just thought that was very tellings. Back in the early 2000s Google was constantly defying and upturning "industry norms", now they are just like everyone else, squeezing every last drop from the smallest stones. Getting rid of the previously grandfathered in free Google Workspaces was a good example. I find it hard to imagine that the cost of those even registers in their accounts compared with everything else.
Sounds all too similar to General Electric, pre-Jack Welsh...vs. General-Electric, post-Jack Welch.
The first prioritized engineering 'most everything that a modern nation might need. The latter prioritized only engineering its own financial statements.
Both did very well...at least at their top priorities.
I've always appreciated Ada's approach to arrays. You can create array types and specify both the type of the values and of the index. If zero based makes sense for your use, use that, if something else makes sense use that.
e.g.
type Index is range 1 .. 5;
type My_Int_Array is
array (Index) of My_Int;
It made life pretty nice when working in SPARK if you defined suitable range types for indexes. The proof steps were generally much easier and frequently automatically handled.
Many BASIC dialects had this too, which could make some code a bit easier to read e.g.
DIM X(5 TO 10) AS INTEGER
I recall in one program I made the array indices (-1 TO 0) so I could alternate indexing them with the NOT operator (in QuickBASIC there were only bitwise logical operators).
On the other hand, if you receive an unconstrained array argument (such as S : String, which is an array (Positive range <>) of Character underneath), you are expected to access its elements like this:
S (S'First), S (S'First + 1), S (S'First + 2), …, S (S'Last)
If you write S (1) etc. instead, the code is less general and will only work for subarrays that start at the first element of the underlying array.
So effectively, indexing is zero-based for most code.
I think lower..higher index ranges for arrays were used in Algol-68, PL/1, and Pascal long before Ada
At least in standard Pascal arrays with different index ranges were of different incompatible types, so it was hard to write reusable code, like sort or binary search. The solution was either parameterized types or proprietary language extensions
I moved across country and left all my friends behind at the age of 9, The Sign was a hard watch. I was those kids. I can still remember my reaction to being told we were moving (I would have been about 8).
Bluey is a certified work of perfection. My kids have stopped watching it now. I'm tempted to watch them all from the start by myself.
In the UK Craigslist was never really a thing. eBay is too complex for many of the things people sell.
My wife sells a lot of our old stuff on marketplace. It's quick and simple to do, and there is a huge market. It's all small stuff that no one will pay shipping for, but if you are local and can pop round it's absolutely fine. Things like kids toys, books, mostly low value stuff. We've got rid of knackered old furniture for free on there because it meant someone else would take it away.
It has the advantage of market size. A lot of people are still on FB for things other than marketplace, so it's an obvious place to look when you want to buy something second hand. It's also easy to share your listings on FB.
It's frustrating. They have completely stomped every other marketplace in the UK. Things like Gumtree are ghost-towns in comparison.
I don't use it but my wife has sold loads of stuff that we no longer need. In that sense it's fantastic, it's made local selling very easy, but I really wish it was almost anyone but FB.
Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London.
The same was the case in industrial cities during the industrial revolution. The poor factory workers lived close to the factories, and their kids grew up breathing the smoke. The wealthy owners moved to the outer suburbs (often upwind) where the air was clear.
There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.
Urban air pollution is insidious. Unlike the dreadful smogs of previous generations that lead to things like the Clean Air Act and the banning of open fires in urban areas, today's is invisible, and so doesn't create the same political problems. In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarentee an angry pushback.