“Don’t use your left hand for contact with others,” advises the U.S. Marine Corps in a new edition of the Iraq Culture Smart Card (very large pdf) which is distributed to military personnel in Iraq. “It is considered unclean.”
It seems late in the day for such niceties. Amid the daily brutality of the Iraq war, there is probably little to be gained by courtesy or to be lost by mere rudeness.
But the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity evidently thinks otherwise.
The MCIA has produced an updated Iraq Culture Smart Card, dated May 2006, which features rudimentary information on Iraqi customs, religion and language. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News and is available here (in a very large 22 MB PDF file).
Preempting all state regulation in the absence of federal action would leave a dangerous vacuum, further undermining public confidence in these technologies.
Surging energy demand and increasingly frequent extreme weather events are bringing new challenges to the forefront of electric grid planning, permitting, operations, and resilience.
We are encouraged that the Administration and Congress are recognizing the severity of the wildfire crisis and elevating it as a national priority. Yet the devil is in the details when it comes to making real-world progress.
Many of the projects that would deliver the energy to meet rising demand are in the interconnection queue, waiting to be built. AI can improve both the speed and the cost of connecting new projects to the grid.