The Nest Energy Services, as they’re calling the new features, will be available to customers of a handful of NRG Energy subsidiaries, including National Grid, Green Mountain Energy, Reliant and more. The most ambitious component is a pair of opt-in energy-saving programs that kick in when demand for energy is at its highest. When these periods roll around, Nest owners can rack up extra savings by letting the thermostat intelligently decrease their household’s energy needs. And it’s not just the homeowner who benefits: Nest’s new features are also intended to serve another class of customers entirely: the utility companies.
This month, Glenn Duncan, owner of Duncan’s Outdoor Store in Bay City, Mich., said he received a letter from GE Capital Retail Bank in which the lender said it had made “the difficult decision” to stop providing financing services to his store. Other gun dealers have received similar notices.
nycgov:
Today Mayor Bloomberg announced the expansion of the City’s recycling program to include for the first time the recycling of all rigid plastics including toys, hangers, shampoo bottles, coffee cups and food containers.
The expansion is part of the City’s Solid Waste Management Plan and is…
Good news on the NYC recycling front.
Donations continue… x2
This year I promised myself to donate whatever I could to any good cause my friends supported and asked me to contribute to. Here is the list of causes, in chronological order of giving. It’s a two-fer today with #’s 8 and 9…
1. Songwriting Works
2. Milton - new album fundraiser
3. Team Sam Cancer fund
4. Esther’s Artic Trek for MS
5. Ryan’s Nursing School in Ecuador
6. Brooklyn Bridge Park Junior Committee Event
7. American Cancer Society
8. Kids Walk for Kids With Cancer - Team Toby
9. Leukemia & Lymphoma Society - Team In Training Run
… the cycle is the same, something horrible happens, we all watch it happen in real time and feel terrible and want to know who were the perpetrators, what are the circumstances, and why did it happen? We get some inkling and have a discussion of what the implications are for policy, what we might do to prevent something from this happening again in the future. When it’s guns, when the killer is a shooter, the answer is —- nothing. We are told “this just happens.” But if it gets put in a special category called terrorism, then the answer is, everything must be done, no cost should be spared, no legal precedent should stand in the way. Once it gets put in the terrorism bucket, we must do everything in our power. No one ever says “people are going to die from terrorism, that’s just the way it is.” And if it’s in the gun bucket, “yeah, 30,000 people are going to die every year from guns, that’s just the way it is.” Why is that the case? In the last 30 years, there have been 30,000 to 40,000 gun deaths in the United States per year, more than 900,000 people. In the last 40 years since 1970, there have been about 3,400 terror-related deaths, depending how you define terror according to the integrated united states security data base. A million gun fatalities in the 33 years since 1980 versus 3,400 terror fatalities since 1970 …
“I am simply unable to comprehend how assault weapons and large capacity magazines have a role in your vision,” he said. “The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established. Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.”
“One only has to look at the makeup of the 75-member board of directors, dominated by manufacturing interests, to confirm my point. The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners.”
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Inequality and New York’s Subway [article]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a8e4b269c07d105f0fa181cc27654d91/tumblr_mlnskvsKDM1qa0uujo1_500.png)
