5,000 in first wave of union support in Occupy Wall Street

Alexander Higgins has more.

Solar Decathlon 2011. University of Hawaii

Built in a gourd shape with a heat pump system.

Occupy Wall Street – We Are the 99% – Jeremy Gilchrist

It’s hard to say where it went wrong Decades before me and this song Through the banksters and the wars You know I just can’t take it anymore

There’s a rising on Wall Street I am you and you are me We are the 99%’ers On the right side of love and history

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I think we got an Occupy movement

Los Angeles welcomed Obama on Monday in a dress rehearsal for Saturday

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement. – Arlo Guthrie

Clay Claiborne on WL [...]

Another good reason to leave Bank of America

Bank of America to charge $5 monthly fee for debit card purchases

Meanwhile, here in the real world in Cedar City UT, the bank I use, the State Bank of Southern Utah, pays interest on their free checking accounts with no minimum balance required, doesn’t charge for debit card transactions, has never taken a [...]

Solar Decathlon 2011. Tongji University, China

Made from six shipping containers. Interior is super-configurable.

Driverless tractors and trucks are coming. Goodbye jobs

Google has been experimenting with driverless cars. It seems plausible that truck drivers may soon be losing jobs to robot vehicles. The same trend is happening in agriculture too with autonomous farm equipment. ReadWriteWeb isn’t sure if this is a good thing. Neither am I. But it is inevitable.

The Google car is extraordinary. [...]

Polizeros podcast tonight

Concluding our three-part discussion of solutions.

Foreign Policy reforms:

A resurgent Peace Corps so that practical things can again be done by people who don’t carry guns, ending wars and occupations that don’t address core interests, realistic “future threat” and “core interest” assessments, not always reaching for the bigger hammer as soon as possible.

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The Occupy Wall Street non-agenda

Doug Henwood wonders what the agenda is, if any.

Certainly the location of the protest is a statement, but when it comes to words, there’s a strange silence—or prolixity, which in this case, amounts to pretty much the same thing. Why can’t they say something like this? “These gangsters have too much money. They wrecked [...]

Solyndra violated loan terms but still got more federal money

The U.S. Department of Energy learned in December that Solyndra was violating its federal loan deal, but the agency changed the loan terms to allow the solar company to continue receiving taxpayer funds, federal officials confirmed Wednesday.

Sheesh, hand me a clothespin, because this is getting really stinky. Sure, loans often get re-negotiated. But Solyndra [...]