More than 271,000 Long Island homes and businesses are still without power this morning, according to PSEG-Long Island, which continues its work to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of customers knocked out by Tropical Storm Isaias Tuesday.

The power companys online outage map, depicting active outages, customers affected, repair status and estimated restoration times, shows nearly 5,000 customers in Riverhead and across the North Fork were still without power as of 6:30 this morning. The numbers were actually up from the outages reported online by PSEG-LI at 4 p.m. yesterday.

The map shows 271,352 affected customers as of 6:32 a.m. PSEG-LI said in a press release issued at 10 oclock last night that number had shrunk to about 160,000.

The map reflects everything that is happening, so it will continue to change as the crews work on the system. Many times as they restore power we need to take additional outages to safely restore the power, PSEG-LI spokesperson Elizabeth Flagler said in an email last night in response to an inquiry about the fluctuations.

PSEG-LI said in a press release last night it estimates 85% of customers will be restored by end of day Friday.

More than 2,000 line workers, tree trimmers and other personnel are working around the clock, in 16-hour shifts and will continue to do so until every customer is restored, PSEG-LI said in the press release.

Riverhead Highway Superintendent George Woodson said this morning that the only trees and large limbs still blocking roads or travel lanes on town roads are those tangled up or resting on power lines. Highway crews have to wait for PSEG-LI crews to arrive in order to clear those conditions, he said.

There are still a few spots across town where trees and large limbs are down with power lines involved and the town is waiting for PSEG-LI crews to address the situation.

In last nights press release, the company reiterated that the breakdown in customer communications during and after the storm Tuesday did not affect PSEG-LI restoration efforts.

We have still been able to assess the full extent of the damage and dispatch crews to the impacted areas, the company said in the press release.

PSEG Long Island understands how critical it is to share accurate and timely information with our customers. We have overcome many of the issues with Verizon that affected our call center operations yesterday, and we are working diligently to improve all of our systems to fully resolve these issues, PSEG-LI said.

The company urged customers to use its automated voice response system whenever possible by calling 1-800-490 0075.

Yesterday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he had directed the State Department of Public Service to investigate what he called the failed storm response of several utilities, including PSEG-LI and Verizon.

PSEG-LI also announced the opening of four drive-through distributions of ice and water, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., or until supplies run out, at the following locations:

We need your help.Now more than ever, the survival of quality local journalism depends on your support. Our community faces unprecedented economic disruption, and the future of many small businesses are under threat, including our own. It takes time and resources to provide this service. We are a small family-owned operation, and we will do everything in our power to keep it going. But today more than ever before, we will depend on your support to continue. Support RiverheadLOCAL today. You rely on us to stay informed and we depend on you to make our work possible.

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Isaias update: outages, restoration progress and lingering road closures - RiverheadLOCAL

San Diego is giving developers new incentives to construct housing for middle-income residents like nurses and firefighters, just as a new report shows other efforts to address the citys housing crisis might be starting to pay off.

The City Council last week approved the long-awaited middle-income density bonus, which aims to help developers focus on San Diego residents who dont earn enough to afford luxury housing but who make too much to qualify for subsidized housing.

These are important people to the fabric of our city were talking about teachers, police officers, firefighters and nurses, Councilwoman Vivian Moreno said. We need to make sure we have housing opportunities in the communities where they live and work.

Meanwhile, the citys third annual housing inventory report shows an increase in the number of projects where construction began in 2019 and a spike in the number of subsidized low-income units built last year.

Despite that good news, the report shows San Diego is still far behind the number of units that need to be constructed annually to meet local demand for housing.

There also was a decrease in 2019 in the number of projects that got final approval for future construction and a drop in the number of subsidized housing units that were either preserved or rehabilitated.

The middle-income density bonus defines middle income as households making up to 120 percent of the areas median income, which rose to $92,700 this spring.

It also stacks the incentive on top of a separate program approved in 2016 to encourage developers to build housing for low-income residents.

Without the stacking, some developers might have opted for the middle-income incentive instead of the low-income one. Under the adopted policy, developers who want to use the middle-income incentive must use both incentives.

Once a project maximizes the low-income incentive, which allows for a 50 percent spike in the number of units a developer can build, the project can then use the new moderate-income incentive for an additional 25 percent increase in units.

This new program will spur more housing for working San Diegans who want to live near transit and job centers Mayor Kevin Faulconer said. As we continue to implement reforms, were making it easier to build and incentivizing the production of housing for those with low or moderate income.

Middle-income housing is arguably the citys most glaring need. The citys Regional Housing Needs Assessment called for 15,462 middle-income units to be built from 2010 to 2020, but only 34 had been constructed through 2019.

Thats bad news from 2019, but the citys third annual housing inventory also included some significant progress last year.

The number of housing projects that began construction last year was 5,221, significantly more than 3,895 in 2018 and slightly more than 5,020 in 2017.

The neighborhoods most responsible for the strong numbers are downtown, with 910 new units; Mission Valley, with 493, and Kearny Mesa, with 442.

The numbers were even more impressive for subsidized low-income projects, where 940 units were constructed in 2019. Thats more than double the subsidized units built in 2018 and about 50 percent more than 2017.

Faulconer said some of the credit should go to legislation he has promoted in recent years.

Now were starting to see promising progress with affordable housing production doubling in the city as builders take advantage of the new opportunities we created with our housing reforms, he said.

Those efforts have included eliminating parking requirements for new housing near transit, fee waivers, allowing ground-floor housing in commercial areas, looser rules for mixed-use projects and incentives for granny flats.

The new 15-page inventory report also has some bad news, particularly regarding the citys efforts to meet state housing goals and local demand.

City officials say the number of units built each year will need to triple for San Diego to meet a state-mandated goal of 108,000 new housing units by 2029.

Meeting the state-mandated target will require an average production of 13,500 units per year, which is much more than the 4,100 average units built in the city each year since 2010.

Additional bad news is that the number of housing projects approved during 2019 for future construction dropped to 3,835 last year. The number of units approved in 2018 was 5,914 in 2018 and 5,865 in 2017.

There also was a drop in 2019 in the number of subsidized low-income units that the city either rehabilitated or lengthened the number of years the units would remain subsidized.

The number of subsidized units preserved or rehabilitated last year was 707, down from nearly 1,200 in 2018 and just over 1,000 in 2017.

Scarcity of open land is a key hurdle San Diego faces in solving the citys housing crisis.

The citys second annual housing inventory report, released last year, said the number of housing units built in San Diego in the 1970s decade was more than 100,000, followed by about 90,000 in the 1980s.

But as the city ran out of large, empty tracts of land, that dipped sharply to about 50,000 in each of the next two decades, and has slowed even further since 2010.

Because of that long pattern of slowing construction, 80 percent of the citys housing stock was built more than 30 years ago, that report said.

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San Diego OKs middle-income incentive as new analysis shows some progress on local housing crisis - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Each day this week, the Giants have been able to spend some time together on the field. After such a long layoff, the initial reaction to even the slightest resemblance to actual football must have been met with joy and elation. And as they go through their walkthroughs events that Joe Judge said doesnt look tempo-wise anything like what you would expect practice to look like there has been a deep sigh of relief to be back.

But coupled with that pleasure is undoubtedly a sense of terror. Because while each day on the field is a step forward, it is also another box on the calendar that gets crossed off before the Giants are scheduled to open their season. In about five-and-a-half weeks theyll be facing the Steelers in a game that counts.

They are, in other words, a team currently moving in slow motion with a season that is fast approaching.

The Giants have been focusing on the very basics at this point calling plays, breaking huddles, recognizing formations and its all new. Judge even noted that second-year quarterback Daniel Jones is beginning from ground zero in the new system and trying to find a rhythm with receivers even those he has worked with in the past and spent time with during unsanctioned practices in the offseason.

Were going to work obviously at a much slower pace, a much more controlled pace, Judge said in a virtual newsconference on Wednesday. The fundamentals that we are teaching, were giving them a chance to walk through them at a slow pace.

Agility drills, when the players are broken up into three groups to allow for social distancing, are about the only time they can go full speed. Often those drills are designed to emphasize whatever lessons were taught in the previous days walkthrough.

Were getting some group time where we work multiple positions together, whether that be a quarterback with receivers or tight ends next to tackles talking about different block combinations, Judge said. A great deal of this is being run on air. On defense theyre lined up across from trash cans or maybe coaches posing as players to give us a sense of a formation that they can line up and make checks against.

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Remember: Five-and-a-half weeks. Tick tock, tick tock.

For Jones, Judge said, the most important part of this phase of training camp is actually being on the field and in the huddle with teammates, no matter how slow the action is.

With a quarterback its such a mental game, its really the grasping and the understanding, Judge said. If it was somebodys second year in the same offense, youd want to see their command of that offense on the field. For Daniel, to be fair, this is a new offense. Its a new system, new scheme for him. Hes had a limited number of walkthroughs of actually being on the field and able to do this. At this point Im just looking to see his progress day by day and not compare him to where he was last year Its important for everyone to understand that were starting completely over right now and weve got to start from ground zero.

Despite the lack of full-speed football that is undoubtedly driving Judge bananasyou may recall his introductory newsconference when he promised to add physicality and even full tackling to Giants training camp practices but now must adapt to these pandemic-modified rules and paces the head coach said he is pleased by what he has so far seen from the team.

We have a lot of guys who have already reached out to coaches on their own for extra help, weve had players in meeting rooms doing extra together, and you can see the things you want to go ahead and breed within your culture coming together already, Judge said. Thats important. Now that has to sustain over the test of time. A few days together doesnt solve all of the problems. But as far as the starting point, Im very pleased with that and the direction that were going.

There is an urgency to improve, there is an urgency to learn, he said.

With five-and-a-half weeks, thered better be.

Sam Beal was supposed to be one of the possibilities to replace DeAndre Baker at starting cornerback this season. Now the Giants have to replace Beal.The third-year corner became the third Giants player to opt out of the upcoming season due to concerns about the coronavirus, according to the leagues transaction wire. Beal, selected in the 2018 supplemental draft, was entering his third NFL season but had played in just six games due to various injuries.

With Baker on the commissioners exempt list and facing eight felony charges in Florida, the Giants were hoping Beal might be able to step in as a starter opposite free agent pickup James Bradberry. Now that job will be up for grabs among Corey Ballentine, Grant Haley and Montre Hartage, 2020 draft choices Darnay Holmes (fourth round) and Chris Williamson (seventh),and perhaps second-year pro Julian Love.The Giants could also add a veteran free agent at the position, but that will require nearly a week of COVIDtesting and quarantine before any such player can be on the field with the Giants.

NFL players have until 4 pm on Thursday to opt out of the season. Beal is the third to take advantage of that option, following LT Nate Solder and WR DaMari Scott.

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and has been the Giants beat writer since 2008.

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Training camp is slow motion in progress for Giants - Newsday

The COVID-19 crisis has been a brutal reminder that, for all of our wealth and technological mastery, we are still vulnerable to catastrophic tail risks. To ensure future prosperity, we must adopt a growth strategy that places collective risks front and center, rather than treating them as an afterthought.

CAMBRIDGE It is always worth remembering that in the grand sweep of history, we are the fortunate ones. Thomas Hobbess description of life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short was apt for most of human history. Not anymore. Famines and hunger have become rarer, living standards for most people have risen, and extreme poverty has been reduced substantially over the past few decades. Average life expectancy at birth even in the least healthy parts of the world is above 60 years, whereas a British person born in the 1820s would have expected to live to around 40.

But, these fantastic improvements have been accompanied by catastrophic risks. Even if COVID-19 has shaken us from our complacency, we have yet to grapple with the dangers still facing us.

The improvements of the past 200 years are the fruits of industrialization, made possible by our acquisition of knowledge and mastery of technology. But this process involved trade-offs. Driven by the desire for wealth, firms and governments sought to reduce costs and boost productivity and profits, which led to disruptions that sometimes left hundreds of millions of people impoverished and unemployed.

For decades, workers in mines and factories were brutally coerced to eke out ever more output, until they managed to organize and secure some political power for themselves. And, of course, the early industrial age encouraged slavery and the quest for access to natural resources, which led to massive wars and brutal forms of imperialist rule.

These excesses were neither an aberration nor inevitable. Many have since been corrected through the market economy, labor-relations reforms, state regulation, and new (often democratic) institutions. But other significant unintended consequences of industrialization have yet to be addressed, because no organized political constituency emerged to address them. The most pressing concern is catastrophic global risks, the most obvious being anthropogenic climate change a prime example of how a process of enrichment can create an existential threat.

A second, somewhat related problem is biodiversity loss. The estimated rate of species extinction today is anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times that of the pre-industrial era, yet there is still very little recognition of the risks created by such a radical destabilization of nature.

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The third global risk is nuclear war. Splitting the atom exemplifies both our mastery over nature and the potential for profound misuse of science and technology. Though nuclear technology has many peaceful applications (and may have a short-term role to play in addressing climate change), its most important consequence has been to inaugurate an era of mutually assured destruction. As with climate change and biodiversity loss, we still do not appreciate the risks that nuclear technology poses to humanity; in fact, countries that have nuclear arsenals are now rebuilding and expanding them.

A fourth major risk is artificial intelligence, which could lead to technologies that we cannot control. In addition to the risk that superintelligent algorithms wipe out humanity, AI also has the potential to be deployed as an instrument of surveillance and repression, paving the way to a new kind of serfdom. And governments are already developing AI and autonomous weapons that could be put to all kinds of nefarious uses, especially if they end up in the wrong hands.

Though no one can deny these risks, most peoples first instinct is to discount steeply the likelihood of a catastrophic scenario. But this is misguided. During the twentieth century, the world came close to nuclear war on multiple occasions. Because we were lucky, we now assume retrospectively that the risk was never as high as it seemed.

But consider the counterfactual scenario. Where would we be today if all-out nuclear war had not been averted by the actions of Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, a lone Second Captain who, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urged restraint when the other commanders aboard his Soviet nuclear B-59 submarine mistakenly believed they were under attack by the United States? We certainly wouldnt be reading books about the supposed decline in violence over time.

On the other hand, those who do recognize the dangers posed by climate change and AI too often jump to the conclusion that economic growth itself is the problem. They argue that reducing emissions, preserving nature, and preventing the misuse of technology requires a deceleration or reversal of production, investment, and innovation.

But pulling back from growth and technological progress is neither realistic nor advisable. The world is still a long way from ending poverty, and what people in both rich and poor countries need most right now are good jobs that leverage technology in the interest of workers themselves. Without secure employment and income growth, US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will not be the last right-wing demagogues to threaten established democracies.

The only responsible option is to forge a new growth strategy that emphasizes the kind of technological innovation needed to address global threats. The goal should be to create a regulatory environment that encourages firms and entrepreneurs to develop the technologies we actually need, rather than those that merely increase profits and market share for a narrow few. And, of course, we need a much greater focus on shared prosperity, so that we do not repeat the errors of the last four decades, when growth became decoupled from most peoples lived experience (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world).

Although our track record in combating climate change is poor, we can embrace the fact that once-costly forms of renewable energy are now competitive with fossil fuels. This did not happen because we turned our back on technology. Rather, it is the outcome of technological advances brought about by a regulated market economy in which firms responded to carbon pricing (especially in Europe), subsidies, and consumer demand.

The same recipe can work against other catastrophic risks. The first step is to acknowledge that these risks are real. Only then can we get on with the business of building better institutions and re-empowering the state to shape market outcomes with humanitys shared interests in mind.

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Minding the Perils of Progress by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

Igor Stravinskys 1951 The Rakes Progress, his only full-length opera, manages to the both accessible and thorny all at once. Its Neoclassical musical vocabulary is winkingly Mozartian and its libretto by celebrated poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman uses richly ironic verse to sift and infer a narrative arc from William Hogarths series of eight paintings-cum-engravings that detail the rise and ruin of fictitious English spendthrift Tom Rakewell in Georgian London. But even for a new listener, this masterpiece yields its greatest pleasures when its arch aesthetic and absurdist philosophical underpinnings are embraced, interrogated and decoded. And the iconic 1975 production from the Glyndebourne Festival, restaged in 2010, is available for streaming through Sunday, showing that making sense of The Rakes Progress is both easier and more rewarding than it might sound.

The opera is practically in Glyndebournes DNAthespian and festival co-founder Carl Ebert served as the director of the first-ever Rakes Progress at the Venice Biennale and mentored John Cox, whose production is seen here in a pristine 2010 revival. However, its greatest innovation is its stage design, executed entirely and meticulously by English artist David Hockney, which sources the visual world of the opera entirely from Hogarths prints.

Working within a limited color palette of black, white, red, blue and green, Hockney renders every set, costume and prop using the bold and crosshatched lines of the etchings. And when the stage is populated, both the prints and the lore that the composer and librettists cast onto them come alive. The effect augments the elegant restlessness of the score (so energetically and precisely given voice here by conductor Vladimir Jurowski) and answers back to the librettos sarcastic philosophizing. The bold lines both affirm and challenge the operas backwards-looking aestheticthey are immediate, clever, eminently modern and visually striking.

SEE ALSO:Dueling Divas: Rene Fleming and Anna Netrebko Perform for Online Audiences

The singers uniformly rise to meet the challenge of inhabiting the operas spaces and times, with Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu leading the pack as the titular rake. His Tom, sensitively acted and sung with cleanly drawn Mozartian ardor and ringing high notes for the entirety of the marathon role, reads as a reluctant but abstruse libertine from the first scene. It only takes the intervention of Nick Shadow, a stand-in for the devil posing as a valet, to tempt Tom to London and away from the angelic Anne Trulove in pursuit of an inheritance. Bass Matthew Rose as Nick, though sometimes a bit pedantic in his villainy, is equal parts devilish and demonic in his persuasion with a voice both suave and forceful.

While Tom is gradually corrupted by the profligate immorality of London, Anne waits patiently at her fathers country home before finding the resolve in herself to track down Tom and rescue him from peril. Its the operas most famous moment and a glorious showcase for soprano Miah Persson whose cool, pliant voice spins silky musical filaments out of the scene. Anne departs, and upon arrival in London, she is devastated to learn that Tom has renounced her and instead taken an illustrious but mercurial bearded-lady sideshow performer, Baba the Turk, as a wife. Elena Manistinas vinegary tone somewhat undercuts the imperiousness that can make Baba such a scene-stealing role, though her sound remains resonant and she wields her beard with style.

Ultimately manipulated into his most irresponsible behavior by Nick, Tom ends up destitute, then hospitalized in the famous Bedlam asylum as Anne looks on, mournful and powerless. But right as the curtain falls on his pitiful death, the characters spring to life again to deliver the pieces moral directly to the audience: For idle hands and hearts and minds, the devil finds a work to do. Its a philosophy that invites criticism; its a little Puritanical for one and two, it doesnt resonate as well in times of tedious self-quarantine. But such critiques, asked by both by the creators and the audience, remain firmly within the spirit of the piece and make The Rakes Progress the provocative and progressive classic that it is. As is always mysteriously the case with an opera now approaching 70, the old has never felt so new.

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David Hockneys Artistic Staging of The Rakes Progress Dazzles Even On-Screen - Observer

Rains came to parts of southern Colorado helping green some pastures but leaving some alfalfa worse off.

Bill Meyer, Director of the Mountain Region Field Office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, tells Colorado Ag Today more rain is needed across most of the state.

MEYER: Drought is ongoing. We only had 23% of the acreage rated good, 1% excellent compared to the 5 year average of 48% good and 9% excellent. Barley producers have just started their harvest with 2% of their acreage harvested compared to 8% on average. Corn, 16% is in the dough state compared to 6% on average. Dry beans are 61% blooming compared to 61% on average and our Sorghum 26% of the crop is headed compared to 38% on average.

The details of the weekly crop progress and condition report are found at USDA-NASS.

The U.S. Drought Monitor shows 83.7 percent of the state is experiencing moderate drought or worse conditions (D1-D4). Thats an increase from 74.0 percent the previous week. The area experiencing extreme drought or worse conditions (D3-D4) is at 26.6 percent, a decrease from 31.8 percent previous week.

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Crop Progress - AG INFORMATION NETWORK OF THE WEST - AGInfo Ag Information Network Of The West