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Tag: Scandal

  • Signs of economic times

    Apartment close to public transportation

    A former deputy director of Caltrain had had a secret apartment built inside Burlingame train station, discovered by Caltrain 2022. Based on photos, it looks comfy, but about 40000 dollars of public funds were used and the historic building is not his property. Another apartment was found 2019 in Millbrae train station (8000 dollars were used on that), with another defendant was mentioned in connection to that case. Imagine, apartments for under 50k in San Francisco Bay Area! And close to commute!

    While housing prices are crashing and you can find a condominium for under 300k in Bay Area if you are not picky about the commute, and right now Zillow advertises plenty of up to $1300 rentals in Bay Area. How many of these are actual apartments instead of shared housing is unclear, but right now it seems that the main constraint to housing is not the availability of units but of cash to rent or buy.

    Pretend-to-Work companies

    I thought WeWork which officially rented office space with amenities to startups and individual who wanted a workspace not at home was close to this, at least for some people who lacked self-discipline to work without bosses, but in China (the People’s Republic), there are now actual pretend-to-work companies, where people can for a small pay pretend to be office workers the whole day.

    China is presumed to have high unemployment rate (official statistics are unreliable or missing) and there are social pressures for people to work. By paying for pretend-to-work day, people can LARP working in corporation, pretend to others that they are working, or just have an airconditioned space with computer terminal in which to spend time, like an internet cafe.

  • Hot Statistics

    Everyone knows the Hockey Stick model of global temperature changes in our measurement record. Late 20th and early 21st century average temperatures have increased in a worrisome manner resulting in many UN climate summits and VIPs flying around in their private jets. Now, according to a recent Freedom of Information request to UK’s Met Office, over 100 of the 302 weather stations listed as supplying temperature averages do not exist. The Met Office declined to tell “how or where the alleged ‘data’ were derived” for these over 100 sites that do not exist.

    This is not just UK issue, NOAA has been claimed to fabricate data for over 30% of their reporting sites by taking the averages of the surrounding stations to represent a defunct, or a ‘ghost’ station, although the numbers at least are labeled as estimates. In UK, some closed weather stations ‘continue’ with similar reported estimated monthly data.

    Unreliable measurements from the actually existing weather stations are another large problem. Nearly 8 out of 10 Met Office sites are rated in junk classes with error margins ranging from 2C to up to 5C, or unsuitable for climate data reporting. The default classification for Met Office weather stations is 1, “unless manually adjusted” so there may be more unreliable data sources.

    The disproportionate closure of rural weather stations compared to the urban ones has further skewed the average temperatures, because urban environments tend to generate heat islands, so loss of rural stations will increase the average temperature of the remaining measurements.

    While unreliability of measurement data was discussed in terms of Net Zero in The Daily Sceptic, I wonder about its effects on near term weather forecasts. Maybe the invented data is also being fed into models predicting daily weather?

    Muhos, Finland, in February