Prepare for Change

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/28/topaz-solar-power-plant/ "Solar power just hit one of its biggest milestones, in more ways than one. First Solar recently finished building Topaz , a 550-megawatt plant that represents the largest active solar farm on the planet. And we do mean large -- the installation's nine million solar panels cover 9.5 square miles of California's Carrizo Plain. It's an impressive feat that should power 160,000 homes on Pacific Gas and Electric's grid, although it won't be alone at the top for very long. First Solar's Desert Sunlight farm will match that capacity once its last solar cells go online, and SunPower's 579MW Solar Star is due to go live in 2015." Looking good.  Little maintenance.  No pollution. https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3824165,-120.0600113,5525m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/blogs/innovation/2014/11/19/disruptive-innovation/19287059/ " Disrupt is perhaps the most misused term in entrepreneurship. Successful new companies can indeed disrupt an industry. Amazon disrupted book retailing. Its ascent caused the failure of the incumbent Borders. Two conditions are required for disruption. First, a substantial fraction of the market must prefer the product or service of the new company. Second, the incumbents must be unable to respond and replicate. When those conditions are met, a new entrant can gain sufficient market share that existing firms fade into irrelevance. But disruption is rare, and it’s not required for entrepreneurial success." On the other hand... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/uber-taxi-app-fuels-montreal-toronto-fare-wars-1.2648878 "Cabbies in Montreal and Toronto want their cities to put the brakes on Uber, the popular car service app that taxi firms s...

http://www.treehugger.com/tiny-houses/modern-prefab-gets-closer-right-mix-quality-and-price-solo-40.html "Really, when you get right down to it, the Solo 40 is pretty much a 'Park Model' design, a legal definition of a house that is 15' wide and less than 540 square feet in Canada, 400 in the USA. This is a smart move; Altius has learned to max out the size, (it keeps getting cheaper per square foot) lose the high tech stuff like solar and keep it simple (parks have sewer, water and electric hookup) get rid of lofts and things that complicate construction and try and find the right balance between quality and price, which is really, really hard to do. (People are still going to complain IT'S $195 PER SQUARE FOOT!!! )" You still need storage space, though.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/17/hong-kong-protests-2014_n_6175464.html " HONG KONG (AP) — Workers in Hong Kong on Tuesday started clearing away barricades at one site of the student protest that has rocked the city for the last two months. The removal comes after a Hong Kong court granted a restraining order against the protesters last week requiring them to clear the area in front of a tower in the central part of Hong Kong as well a separate order against a second protest site Mong Kok brought by taxi and minibus operators. The workers could be seen cutting plastic ties holding the barricades together. Students, who have been protesting for greater democracy in the former British colony, did not resist. Some protesters had already moved their tents to other parts of the protest zone ahead of the clearance operation." Students are being peaceful. The government is being peaceful, after first attacking the protesters.  It looks like people are learni...

http://grist.org/list/map-walmart-stores-america/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=evergreen&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=update Walmart is an innovative and efficient company.  That is good. They also swallow whole small community businesses as they open up and take away customers from mom and pop stores that can't compete with Walmart's purchasing power.  So as small business owners shutter their doors, Walmart replaces them with minimum wage workers, and sucks the profit back to Arkansas.

258 square feet but still liveable.  But where is his computer work station?

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/blog/2014/09/d-c-s-first-shipping-container-apartments-are.html?ana=rss_wash_tabo&ana=rss_wash_tabo "Two months after breaking ground, if that’s even the right term, the District’s first residential building made entirely out of the giant metal boxes is finished in Brookland. Designed by Travis Price Architects, the three-story, four apartment unit development at 3305 Seventh St. NE was envisioned as a 'new, bold, ecological, recyclable kit of parts housing module, and to help make use of one of America's biggest problems: No exports of goods — 700,000 (and counting) sea containers left in our sea ports'." This is a good use of a cheap resource, but I wonder about sound inside.  How is it for noise insulation?  Waiting to hear.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/31/german_green_energy_revolution_backyard_windmills_solar_gas "The prize-winning utility, one of Germany's early pioneers in the field, is owned by the old medieval market town of Schwäbisch Hall, north of Stuttgart. Most of the utility's suppliers are private people, farmers, and small businesses, as well as ' energy co-ops ,' which are clean-energy facilities owned and collectively managed by a group of local investors. 'It's a complex work of art,' says van Bergen about Stadtwerke Schwäbisch Hall's daily managing of the county's energy supply. 'Local utilities and citizen-owned energy sources are just the right fit for Germany's Energiewende ,' he says, referring to the German term for the country's coordinated transition to clean energy. One of the crucial take-aways from Schwäbisch Hall -- and Germany's renewable energy revolution -- is that small can be big, and becom...