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Los Angeles International Airport dates, like Dodger Stadium and much else in Southern California, to the early 1960s. It was a pretty cool airport in 1962. Lately …
A few months ago, LAX decided to keep Uber and Lyft and the like from driving up to the terminals. Now you are supposed to take a shuttle bus to a parking lot, called LAXit, to get your ride. That sounds pretty simple, right? Well, for various reasons, it seems to take only slightly less time than Brexit itself.
And then last night, December 21st, one of the busiest travel days of the year:
BREAKING: At least three passenger buses on fire Saturday night at LAX Airport. More on KCAL at 9:30 p.m. https://t.co/GS5IeUEuHu
— CBS Los Angeles (@CBSLA) December 22, 2019
Nobody was hurt, evidently, but two shuttle buses in the LAXit parking lot were completely gutted by fire and a third badly damaged.
At this rate, when they finally finish the High Speed Rail in 2059, the first train will crash into the Golden Gate Bridge and sink it.
By the way, you may recall me boring you over the last decade+ with progress reports on the giant trench in the street near my house as the LA Department of Water & Power installed a new water main to replace the century old one built by William Mulholland in 1914 (see Chinatown for a fictionalized version) using mules and men with shovels. During the 7 years and 11 months from October 2008 to September 2016 that there was a 20 foot deep trench down the middle of the street, I managed not to drive into it.
Tonight I noticed that the LADWP is still working in a trench on the same street at Magnolia Blvd. (see Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie) about a mile or two away, a mere 11 years and 2 months after they started.
Arson? Sabotage?
'Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.'
Both. Governor Newsom is an agent of Chaos. He is also a vampire.
Bad Sneakers
“built by William Mulholland in 1914 (see Chinatown for a fictionalized version) using mules and men with shovels. ”
I am too lazy to search for pics of California, DuckDuckGo returned a page about water projects in NY state as a search result. A few men with shovels but no mules.
1906-1917: Building New York’s water supply
https://mashable.com/2016/05/07/building-new-york-water-supply/
Steam excavators were a mid 1800s type device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_shovel
Were the men low paid immigrants taking jobs away from real Americans?
The William Mulholland immigrant experience in brief:
William Mulholland was born in Belfast, County of Antrim, Ireland … educated at O’Connell School by the Christian Brothers… beaten by his father for receiving bad marks in school … off to sea. At 15, … British Merchant Navy… After nearly losing a leg in a logging accident … 1876 stowed away on a ship in New York bound for California … discovered in Panama … forced to leave the ship … Walked over 47 miles through jungle … arrived in Los Angeles in 1877.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland#Early_life
I think the Erie Canal 1817-1829 was built by men with shovels and mules.
Gradually, the rails were replaced by caterpillar tracks, the steam engine with a diesel and the cable operate winches with hydraulics. As the internal combustion diesel engines developed for road use, the technology spun back into railroads and excavators and supplanted steam. Steam engines required a lot of maintenance and hand labor - feed them with coal and water, empty the ashes, etc.
Remember this when people ask why we just don’t bury all electric lines.
Given the same rules, regulations and mind set of today I doubt the Golden Gate Bridge could have even been built. If somehow, approval had been obtained it wouldn’t have been completed until sometime in the Eisenhower Administration.
It's an amazing bridge. Even the artsy fartsy lighting scheme is inspiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn1YgTPE9Dg
they were not "government" regulations; they were the regulations imposed on ALL of the workers by the general contractor! If a worker did not want to abide by these regulations, he did not have a job. It was as simple as that. I believe that during the entire project, there was only ONE fatality.
There was a documentary on awhile ago about the construction of the Golden Gate bridge and all of these points were mentioned. It was a very good documentary.
Yup, it’s not just CA. My own little MD town has been resurfacing the same two mile stretch of road for four years.
“What do you do for work Daddy?”
“I work on Main Street”
Do Steve’s neighbors know how un-woke he is?
There should be a witness-protection program for people like us. Instead there’s something like the opposite.
Off this Topic, but
very much On regular iSteve Topics:
USA Today launches “in depth” (but not too much depth) report on home”owners” who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold.
Of course, those banks followed the government’s and media’s demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually “predatory lending”, so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.
If there is money left over from the sale, your heirs get it, but the basic part of the deal is that you have to repay what the bank gave you by selling the house. That was in the papers you signed.Replies: @International Jew, @MBlanc46
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
You could just say diversity and leave it at that.
Third world/low IQ immigration.
A large hole in the street is for 7 years is most impressive, even for a sinister state bureaucracy. The SF Valley’s nice climate works against you in this case. Little rain fall and almost no freezing temps. A hole in street that big left open for 7 years in Chicago would have grown into an abyss a 1/2 square mile in surface area.
But because Chicago refuses to be outdone, it does have its 300 or so miles of bikes lane set into the already narrow streets, roadway formerly meant for motor traffic. THAT is sensible infrastructure management!
The bike lanes don’t even necessarily run in the same direction as one-way streets, and one’s basic instinct is not to look in the opposite direction of vehicular traffic when when crossing. So you get walloped by a bike, instead.
I work in the Loop. Between the individuals walking the streets with the special oblivion that cell phone texting creates, and the impunity with which bicycle and scooter riders assume right-of-way against multi-ton vehicles, it’s amazing we’re not scooping bodies off the streets of downtown on a continuous basis.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-respond-to-car-in-water-off-lake-shore-drive/2187816/
https://abc7chicago.com/park-district-truck-slides-into-lake-michigan-near-oak-street-beach/5746525/Replies: @JMcG
Diversity’s ultimate meltdown.
All White : first rate engineering
All Asian: first rate engineering, plus a likely hefty dose of corruption.
Any other mix: all corruption, poor engineering, obligatory not noticing.
Sounds like the day your water main will be finished will be the day when we’ve won the war in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, do Angelinos draw the water out the trench with a shaduf (like the Ancient Egyptians), or are you people there more advanced, and you use an Archimedes Screw?
LA: If the typhus at City Hall don’t getcha, the cholera in Magnolia Blvd will.
iSteve Exclusive
Video of grateful Magnolia Blvd residents getting fresh clean water…
The funds for the well and handpump were raised by record sales of the charity single ‘We are the world’ by Africa for USA- a specially formed supergroup of African pop stars concerned at the plight of backward third-world California.
When I moved to CA many years ago one of the locals explained the state to me:
“The mountains are beautiful. Stay away from the valleys.”
I left the state after ten years there–do miss the mountains…. 😉
California is a case study on mass immigration given how nice it was just a few decades ago and where it’s now destined. I assume its past will be Memory Holed.
Where did most of the settlers of California come from in the 1800s during and after the Gold Rush? I’ve heard there were a lot from the MidWest and the South but I have no idea.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900's, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I've needled Steve about this in the past -- what one might call D. W. Griffith's Southern California* -- but our host doesn't seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan -- was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920's.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @RichardTaylor, @Flip, @Old Palo Altan
My understanding is that the majority of both migrations was midwestern in origin, with especially the northwest taking people primarily of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic descent. California probably received a larger relative proportion of Anglo-Irish (or Scots-Irish). Of course, rural and inland California was overwhelmed by Oklahomans in the 1930s, so its original population is not as much of a factor.
As far as the Civil War is concerned, the entire state stayed Union, but Southern California (like Arizona) was a hotbed of Southern sympathy, while Northern California was emphatically pro-Union. That is probably the first of the major intrastate north-south tensions, some of which Mr. Sailer has written about over the years.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @anonn
While I have no doubt the infrastructure is crumbling and the populace has no will nor skill to fix it, the bus fires seem to be something else.
the whole invention of those shuttles was a way to screw Uber–now your uber can drop off you somewhere that, as LAX put it, “most riders will be able to reach their airline within an hour”. Not reach the gate, not get through security. and no guarantee the shuttle bus gets you there in an hour, so people were having to use a taxi.
So as we know from the London uber debacle, the russian mafia is big into fleecing uber, but ya can’t fleece them if they go under. Maybe they are just telling the taxi union thugs they aren’t going to win? or perhaps it’s the taxis themselves?
Merry Christmas to all Happy Hanukkah to all and enjoy whatever winter holiday that does not offend you.
I once thought of a greeting card. White card stock with a white abstract design that wouldn’t offend Muslims or anyone else.
Inside embossed greeting. Happy Whatever Winter Holiday doesn’t offend you.
Bah, NYC has you beat as usual:
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding “to other projects” so now completion is scheduled for “some time in the 2020’s”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the “urgency” is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there’s no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I’m sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally “the whole fucking thing” broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.
http://storytrail.co/s3/uploads/video/poster/97/video_97_14628684164853914_poster.jpgReplies: @Lot
And property is still available around the metro station(s) in Omsk:
Eulogy For A Subway: Siberian City Decides To Bury Its Metro Once And For All
https://i.redd.it/5i32iussq8x11.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Omsk_Metro_deutsch.png
Now after years of having this enormous project on track to a final finish, De Blasio decided there were more important priorities and took money away from it. What would he do if one of the tunnels became inoperable? What could he do?
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous. And of course we have no safe way to dispose of the used fuel.
I suspect it is just a human failing that when we don't want to think about catastrophic disasters we downgrade their impact or even ignore them.
We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur, such as nuclear power plants -- and nuclear weapons too.
I hope nobody in New York City does anything further to delay their water tunnel #3 completion.Replies: @SafeNow, @Jack D, @David Davenport
You got off easy.
How long did it take to replace the eastern span of the SF Bay Bridge, and what was the multiple of the multi-$billion cost of doing that to the original cost of the entire span, including the western far-more-than-half?
It took about 7 years to erect a sound deflection wall for 8 blocks on the sides of the freeway in my Los Angeles neighborhood.
They’re just trying to save money for California’s NEW infrastructure project for the homeless:
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/3-billion-300-acre-megacity-envisioned-californias-record-homeless-theres-twist
When I moved to a small CA city a couple years ago, at a main intersection in the downtown they were constructing an apartment building which looked about half done. It wasn’t quite topped. It is four stories. They finally opened for leasing a couple months ago.
That building would have been up start to finish in a maximum of three months in Houston. You have to see how fast they do construction there to believe it. And they have the same Mexicans on the job working eight times faster than we do in CA. There is no way it is the workers.
The buses I’ve been on lately didn’t look very flammable.
‘Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.’
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
That’s how reverse mortgages work, and the deal is spelled out before you sign the papers. The bank gives you money (you didn’t mention that part), and then keeps giving you money (you didn’t mention that part either), and then when you die the bank gets to sell your house and pocket the portion of the proceeds that represents the amount of money they gave you plus interest.
If there is money left over from the sale, your heirs get it, but the basic part of the deal is that you have to repay what the bank gave you by selling the house. That was in the papers you signed.
There is a saying among union workers on such jobs; when anyone is seen to be doing very much, the word is “don’t kill the job,” that is, whatever you do, don’t finish it so the rich paychecks can continue.
By way of contrast, Hoover Dam was built in 5 years (1930 – 1935), and the contractor finished two years ahead of time and millions of dollars under budget.
The country has changed.
Steve, I don’t think that you are giving government employees enough credit for systematically pursuing perfectly rational goals. The objective of government jobs is not necessarily to produce things like public transportation systems, life sustaining infrastructure etc. In a fragmented, low social trust society it is all about taking care of yourself. The primary output of the system is well paying, good benefit, low stress, secure jobs with nice pensions at the end. Those workers would be perfectly happy noodling away at the water system in front of your house from when they join the DWP at age 21 until they retire on disability at 51, and then passing the job on to their kid.
Don’t think of it as a water pipe. Think of it as a medieval cathedral.
The Sunken Cathedral. All sorts of California skullduggery takes place underground. Like in Governor Newsom's Napa Valley wine caves.
This is what you call a public-private partnership.Replies: @Alfa158
Most infrastructure is bad by design in California. People can blame illegals, but it’s overwhelmingly White and Jewish Boomers who are responsible for it.
It’s not Hispanics filing Environmental Impact Studies and blocking infrastructure improvements via local councils. Hispanics do have an impact, or lack thereof, in that they could hold local governments accountable, like the middle class Whites of yesteryear, before they fled. But that interferes with their nightly four hours of video games and TV.
When the Boomers are ultimately relegated to their retirement homes, I wonder if Gen Z will say “Well, that’s the cost of progress”, much like the GSD, pre-Boomer generations.
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
Cascading failure in a complex system based on a large number of dependencies, you say?
This kind of problem can be seen regularly in IT.
Programs that we are told to not touch because it’s basically expensive to perform the analysis and rebuild it from scratch, and no-one would stump up the money anyway when its more profitable to rewrite the user interface in AnalScript or whatever is modern right now and pretend it does “AI”.
Would you rather have another Holocaust museum rather than a reliable water supply?
Exactly.
O/T…
Saw this the other day. The conservative kids are waking up to the Sailer Strategy, and they are approaching it with race realism and without the baggage of dumb libertarian bullshit.
It’s kind of embarrassing when a 22 year-old can articulate a more coherent political strategy than all of the conservative brain trust combined.
Highly recommended from a Gen Xer
How about the Oroville spillway fiasco in 2017? (1)
.
.
MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄
_________________
(1) https://www.powermag.com/oroville-dam-power-plant-may-reopen-this-week/
Nothing new. I remember that a freeway interchange (between the 10 and the 210 in Redlands) was under construction throughout my years in graduate school. (We were at UCLA at the same time—though I was in a south campus program.)
Altai this is a stunningly on target comment. The bolded section is about as clear and cogent as it gets.
However, I must say I disagree about the medieval cathedral bit. Those were multi-generational projects but they were multi-generational projects for the exact opposite reason: those people believed in something transcendent and also believed in the future of their people–their children, their community, their nation, their civilization–and so worked to enrich their posterity with their work. A wholly different ethos than the “just-give-me-a-comfy-sinecure” one that dominates in our minoritarian, balkanized “society”.
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @Sparkon, @Peterike
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
Aqua Virgo: the only still functioning Roman Aqueduct of the Roman Empire
Virgo was used for about 500 years, then restored after 1000 years of disuse. Now used for multiple fountains and landscape watering.
In terms of continuous use without major restorations, it doesn’t look like any Roman aqueducts qualify other than perhaps the first section of one in Spain.
http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htmReplies: @Known Fact
“Arson? Sabotage?”
Both. Governor Newsom is an agent of Chaos. He is also a vampire.
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Will banks be able to ask, “English, motherf***er, do you understand it”, someday soon?
"Comprende Espanol, pendejo?"(sincerest apologies for the lack of a tilde in the word Espanol)
Alfa158 nails the “i’ve got mine” comfy sinecure in our balkanized diversitopia aspect of this phenomenon:
A couple of related factors:
— Massive increase in white-collar, “professional” parasites–lawyers, consultatants, planners, activists–glommed onto everything.
— Feminization of society, culture, institutions. Loss of male–“just do it”–mentality.
This–diversity, bureaucracy, parasitism, feminization–all dovetail and reinforce the “can’t do shit” atmosphere of our age.
Back when National Review was still reasonable it did a comparison of the New York City public school system, the New York City Catholic school system and the public state school system of the European Union
Among other things, the study found the NYC ( (7 million population ) public school system had more administrators than the European Union
With 380 million population.
The NYC Catholic schools were all independent of a diocese education department. Each school was administered by principals, clerks book keepers etc. No innovative new programs, just conformity to the state mandated curriculum and standard teaching methods materials and textbooks, no weekends wasted on endless teacher training taught by parasites who’d never set foot in a classroom.
Don’t think of it as a water pipe. Think of it as a medieval cathedral.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Hypnotoad666
“Don’t think of it as a water pipe. Think of it as a medieval cathedral.”
The Sunken Cathedral. All sorts of California skullduggery takes place underground. Like in Governor Newsom’s Napa Valley wine caves.
Don’t think of it as a water pipe. Think of it as a medieval cathedral.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Hypnotoad666
You forgot the private contractors who extract endless funds from endless work (and then the additional contracts for fixing the problems with the original work).
This is what you call a public-private partnership.
No serious person actually thought that there would be a bullet train from LA to Frisco. Too hard to get right of way for new track routes that are compatible with 200 mph trains. And if you did, the route would either need to hug the coastline or go over mountains. Trains really suck at mountain climbing because of their very poor power and braking force to mass ratios. Even a 200 mph train would have to crawl at 25 mph going up and down those mountains. It would have been fun though to have 200 mph trains blasting through Malibu.
Some analysts think that the whole project was a scheme to divert $20B. The project was to start spending some money at the cities on each end to prepare for the rest. It was rumored that the money has been diverted to cover operating deficits in the transit systems in LA and the Bay area. The rest of the money was siphoned off to pay back engineering and construction companies, non-governmental organizations, environmental consultants, marketing and advertising companies, law firms etc. who supported the election of the politicians involved.
I don't think there will ever be a truthful accounting for where all the money went.Replies: @Alden
Very well done, my friend….I lit innumerable bong hits listening to SD around 77-78-79. Can’t say as I paid attention to the lyrics all that closely though. lol
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
DC makes them both look efficient. Only fitting.
What more or less happened was that people did lose that knowledge, but the aqueducts still ran after 476. As long as nothing too disasterous happened, people could keep on living as they did under the Empire under late antiquity conditions. Essentially: living off the infastructure built in previous generations and not thinking about a day where they’d break and you’d need to know how to fix them. Sound familiar?
But this being the real world with real things happening, something bad did eventually happen: the Gothic Wars. After which, the aqueducts broken during the fighting were never repaired. Partly, because there was no incentive with Rome’s mass depopulation, but also partly because nobody knew how.
(On a greater level, literacy declined in the Dark Ages not least because it wasn’t perceived as necessary to attain a spot in the new aristocracy of decentralized, ruralized, militarized landlords. Much more important for your son to know how to handle a sword. This also happened in the surviving eastern remnant of the empire, albeit not nearly to the same extent. There were even occasional emperors who were illiterate.
As another example, Constantinople’s infamous walls, which broke the bodies and souls of many an invading army over the course of 1000 years, were built in late antiquity. It was one of the last great engineering achievements of the classical age of European civilization. A good thing they were there beforehand, though, because nobody would have had the resources to build them in the Dark Ages when the Sassanids and Arabs and Rus and all the rest came knocking…)
That Plague devastated the Middle East to Armenia and the borders of west Asia and Europe, the old Roman Empire. The de population was a big reason why the S Arabs and Vikings were able to invade and conquer so easily.
With no parents and teachers the surviving children grew up illiterate. The endless wars and invasions contributed of course.
Check it out it’s a very important but largely unknown part of the history of the European people’s.Replies: @nebulafox
I was involved in high end audio for a while and built several vacuum tube amps , preamps, FM tuner back ends, et al. Everyone always asked "but, where do you get the tubes?" At that time there were still feasible supply line to make new ones that were any good. But the market for new good tubes was just not quite big enough, and end users often willfully ignorant and would buy poorly made ones, and the supply line is now kaput. All the Litton machinery was bought up by the Chinese or by Ripoffchardson in LaFox, Illinois, and the cathode materials are no longer available. You can get something from Mallinckrodt that will sort of work, but not perform like the correct materials.
You can still build "a tube": artisinal manufacture of 1915 tech tubes is in fact a thing now, done by one transvestite character
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppj3gqUTt9E
who has some interesting content on YouTube (you can not make this stuff up!) , and high power large transmitting tubes are still a very feasible business, as are TWTs, photomultipliers, etc., but a good 6550....spoiled contractors say they can but at >$200 apiece in 1K quantity.
Vacuum tube circuits also require transformers and again, good luck getting good ones any more. Yes, it can be done but is a lot of work and many of the best ones are simply not reproducible. The very best were the product of one man who died decades ago and deliberately took as much of the technique to the grave as he could. A dumpster diver soyboy in Philadelphia saved a lot of the documents but the docs are wrong in a lot of cases, either on purpose or just revised in the engineering> production loop and corrections passed down orally or in other paperwork which is now lost.
Aircraft are lucky in one sense; the FAA requires a lot of data that is generally carefully warehoused and when the companies go broke you can sometimes get the data from those archives, but rarely in immense detail needed to actually start production.
But in general, foundry practices and even some types of machining have deteriorated in terms of what's feasibly done in many cases. You'd think anything that could be done on paper tape controlled hard tooling could be done with 5 axis CNC, but in some cases, not so.
However, I must say I disagree about the medieval cathedral bit. Those were multi-generational projects but they were multi-generational projects for the exact opposite reason: those people believed in something transcendent and also believed in the future of their people--their children, their community, their nation, their civilization--and so worked to enrich their posterity with their work. A wholly different ethos than the "just-give-me-a-comfy-sinecure" one that dominates in our minoritarian, balkanized "society".Replies: @Jack D, @Joe Stalin
I’m sure that there were make-work jobs in the medieval Church and state – guardian of the Holy Foreskin, warden of the King’s armor, etc. There were always distant relatives and loyal followers who needed to be rewarded. Bureaucracies were always corrupt and dysfunctional. When it took hundreds of years to build a cathedral it wasn’t entirely because it was all hand labor. There were all sorts of guilds and no one was allowed to step on the other guild’s turf. Funding was a problem before modern taxation and banking, etc.
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.
Mocking condescension isn’t the way to make friends across the aisle. Ok, Super Jew?Replies: @anon, @Mr. Anon
The inability of contemporary society to build things quickly and effectively is troubling and a sign of a failing society.
China can build things, but the quality isn’t there and things are falling apart quickly. Too much corruption there, but if that can be fixed, the Chinese may make it.
America is likely screwed.
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
If you believe that, my brother would like to talk to you about his lot across from the new state capitol in Willow. Which might be revived with the resale to Russia.
And property is still available around the metro station(s) in Omsk:
Eulogy For A Subway: Siberian City Decides To Bury Its Metro Once And For All
My LA neighborhood is built on sand. Which means the sidewalks sometimes cave in when it rains and the underlying sand washes away into the gutter.
There’s a section of sidewalk a block from me that caved in during the last rain in April. I called it in directly to the sidewalk repair people. Next day a sawhorse covered the hole. Sounds good no?
8 months later the hole’s still there. The sawhorse disappeared but the orange cone’s still there.
A theme Victor Davis Hanson returns to often, and for good reason. California has taken the many blessings our forefathers bequeathed us…….and proceeded to crap on them. And as of late – quite literally.
Alfa158 nails it. The point is not that anything actually gets built, expanded or repaired. The whole point is to spend the money.
Consider: The bureaucrats who administer various social programs like food stamps, HUD housing and the like don’t get rewarded by cutting the rolls. They get rewarded for expanding them. Hence the shrieks and screams over Trump’s “mean” proposal to cut food stamp rolls by about 2%.
Within my lifetime I can recall the common meme of the Unemployment Office Lady, with the looks and charm of a Margaret Hamilton character, badgering the applicant about how much job-seeking he had undertaken lately. You sure don’t see that anymore.
-- Massive increase in white-collar, "professional" parasites--lawyers, consultatants, planners, activists--glommed onto everything.
-- Feminization of society, culture, institutions. Loss of male--"just do it"--mentality.
This--diversity, bureaucracy, parasitism, feminization--all dovetail and reinforce the "can't do shit" atmosphere of our age.Replies: @Alden, @Clyde
Friends and I created a slogan for solving the homeless crisis. Construction, not counseling consulting and coordinating.
Back when National Review was still reasonable it did a comparison of the New York City public school system, the New York City Catholic school system and the public state school system of the European Union
Among other things, the study found the NYC ( (7 million population ) public school system had more administrators than the European Union
With 380 million population.
The NYC Catholic schools were all independent of a diocese education department. Each school was administered by principals, clerks book keepers etc. No innovative new programs, just conformity to the state mandated curriculum and standard teaching methods materials and textbooks, no weekends wasted on endless teacher training taught by parasites who’d never set foot in a classroom.
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
There’s a disaster movie story waiting to be written about that. I’m picturing a blizzard or hurricane knocking out the scape routes from Manhattan, and one of the tunnels freezing and collapsing.
It’s similar to the long delay on NYC’s Second Avenue Subway, which was scheduled to begin as far back as 1920, construction actually began in the 1970s, and still is not finished to this day (although a few sections opened in the last few years): https://infogalactic.com/info/Second_Avenue_Subway
The difference is that NYC’s water Tunnel #3 is delayed because no one feels any urgency—there hasn’t been a water crisis in NYC to make people demand it being finished.
In contrast, the Second Avenue Subway has been delayed because generations of rich folks on the Upper East Side (such as the late Jeffrey Epstein) have never wanted to give the common rabble ease of access to their neighborhood. UES richies used the promise of such a subway in 1920 and the 1940s to get the ugly elevated subway lines demolished, leaving the Upper East Side serviced by one very overcrowded subway line (4-5-6), that doesn’t go into the heart of the UES. But then made sure further construction on the line was delayed or blocked or abandoned.
However, I must say I disagree about the medieval cathedral bit. Those were multi-generational projects but they were multi-generational projects for the exact opposite reason: those people believed in something transcendent and also believed in the future of their people--their children, their community, their nation, their civilization--and so worked to enrich their posterity with their work. A wholly different ethos than the "just-give-me-a-comfy-sinecure" one that dominates in our minoritarian, balkanized "society".Replies: @Jack D, @Joe Stalin
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @Sparkon, @Peterike
You’re right. One reason the cathedrals have lasted so long is that only qualified experts were allowed to do the work. A big delayer was funding. A cathedral is a status symbol and a luxury. There was a lot of fund raising totally separate from regular church revenues.
Much of the building was really engineering and architectural research and development. The designers would want to do something splendid. But it couldn’t be done with existing technology. So it was delayed till some one figured out what to do. Bruneschilleni and the dome of Florence cathedral is an excellent example of this.
Flying buttresses, arched round ceiling supports instead of straight rafters. The concepts often came first, technology second.
From Thinking, Fast and Slow:
OT:
Muslim Police Officer, Hired To Promote Diversity, Ends Up Being Part Of Grooming Gang
The Roman drains under York still work – it must be true, I saw it on the telly.
One point of access is in the cellar of a pub. The telly people chucked in some dye and then their rowing boat out on the River Ouse spotted the dye emerging.
Calif. has a relaxed performance standard of “get it basically right.” (I wonder where this came from.) A quant friend puts this at 85%. Thus, because >85% of the buses are not on fire, this does not bother California. PG&E got wire maintenance basically right. >85% of streets have no homeless encampments or feces. And so on. Contagious across occupations and geography. America 2.0, one poster on another thread called it. Get used to it.
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
I remember reading that magazine article in the New Yorker quoted above more than 15 years ago. It was startling to realize that New York City ran the risk of going without water — with no backup plan — for years if something went wrong with one or both of their water tunnels.
Now after years of having this enormous project on track to a final finish, De Blasio decided there were more important priorities and took money away from it. What would he do if one of the tunnels became inoperable? What could he do?
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous. And of course we have no safe way to dispose of the used fuel.
I suspect it is just a human failing that when we don’t want to think about catastrophic disasters we downgrade their impact or even ignore them.
We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur, such as nuclear power plants — and nuclear weapons too.
I hope nobody in New York City does anything further to delay their water tunnel #3 completion.
Agreed. Admiral Nimitz’s concluding remarks regarding the disastrous drowning losses in the “Halsey Hurricane”: “It is foolish to be grudging about taking safety precautions for fear that the precautions might turn out to have been unnecessary... The time to take precautions is while still able to do so.”Replies: @Jim Don Bob
I suspect that the lack of urgency on the water tunnel is in part because it is not as dire as people make it out to be in the interest of getting funding for this multi-billion $ project (which probably has cost 10x what it should have cost). First of all , the older tunnels are bored straight thru bedrock in a non-seismic zone, so the risk of their collapse is remote. Probably 2,000 years from now when they (whoever they is) are exploring the ruins of out civilization, they will find these tunnels and water will still be pouring of them. 2nd, if something was to happen to one of the tunnels, the result would not be 4 million people with dry taps. Perhaps pressure would drop, perhaps there would be rotating shutoffs to various neighborhoods but they would find some way to quickly improvise a solution until the emergency repairs could be made.Replies: @notsaying, @Redneck farmer, @I Have Scinde
If you’re interested in the so called dark ages check out the Justinian Plague, 500 to about 650. It was far worse than the later medieval great plagues. There was not much written about it because so many died. Historians estimate as much as 70-80% in many areas.
That Plague devastated the Middle East to Armenia and the borders of west Asia and Europe, the old Roman Empire. The de population was a big reason why the S Arabs and Vikings were able to invade and conquer so easily.
With no parents and teachers the surviving children grew up illiterate. The endless wars and invasions contributed of course.
Check it out it’s a very important but largely unknown part of the history of the European people’s.
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
And to think we missed out on just this sort of farsighted leadership when Wilhelm dropped out of the Presidential race. A tragedy , I tell you.
Now after years of having this enormous project on track to a final finish, De Blasio decided there were more important priorities and took money away from it. What would he do if one of the tunnels became inoperable? What could he do?
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous. And of course we have no safe way to dispose of the used fuel.
I suspect it is just a human failing that when we don't want to think about catastrophic disasters we downgrade their impact or even ignore them.
We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur, such as nuclear power plants -- and nuclear weapons too.
I hope nobody in New York City does anything further to delay their water tunnel #3 completion.Replies: @SafeNow, @Jack D, @David Davenport
“We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur,…”
Agreed. Admiral Nimitz’s concluding remarks regarding the disastrous drowning losses in the “Halsey Hurricane”: “It is foolish to be grudging about taking safety precautions for fear that the precautions might turn out to have been unnecessary… The time to take precautions is while still able to do so.”
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @Sparkon, @Peterike
So building homesteads in savage-infested wilderness and whaling and working at enlightenment era trades and inventing modern science is nothing. Okay.
If FaceBorg is a Pentagon voluntary panopticon, is Instagram inefficient eugenics? Instagram Thots attempt to film video while driving: their video becomes a Michael Bay movie.
https://nypost.com/2019/12/21/3-women-killed-after-car-rear-ends-tractor-trailer-in-new-jersey-crash/
*Uchechukw Chukwuma — an anon asks, is that her name before or after the accident?
Now after years of having this enormous project on track to a final finish, De Blasio decided there were more important priorities and took money away from it. What would he do if one of the tunnels became inoperable? What could he do?
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous. And of course we have no safe way to dispose of the used fuel.
I suspect it is just a human failing that when we don't want to think about catastrophic disasters we downgrade their impact or even ignore them.
We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur, such as nuclear power plants -- and nuclear weapons too.
I hope nobody in New York City does anything further to delay their water tunnel #3 completion.Replies: @SafeNow, @Jack D, @David Davenport
I agree with you about nuclear power. If the Japanese, who are the Westernized civilization perhaps least affected by Current Year vibrancy, could not manage this stuff safely, what hope is there for the New Woke America to do this? ( I have to say that the Japanese have their own structural/cultural flaws which impair their decision making, just different ones than us.)
I suspect that the lack of urgency on the water tunnel is in part because it is not as dire as people make it out to be in the interest of getting funding for this multi-billion $ project (which probably has cost 10x what it should have cost). First of all , the older tunnels are bored straight thru bedrock in a non-seismic zone, so the risk of their collapse is remote. Probably 2,000 years from now when they (whoever they is) are exploring the ruins of out civilization, they will find these tunnels and water will still be pouring of them. 2nd, if something was to happen to one of the tunnels, the result would not be 4 million people with dry taps. Perhaps pressure would drop, perhaps there would be rotating shutoffs to various neighborhoods but they would find some way to quickly improvise a solution until the emergency repairs could be made.
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you're generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you're not generous - zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to "safely" operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Sparkon, @Jack D, @notsaying
I suspect that the lack of urgency on the water tunnel is in part because it is not as dire as people make it out to be in the interest of getting funding for this multi-billion $ project (which probably has cost 10x what it should have cost). First of all , the older tunnels are bored straight thru bedrock in a non-seismic zone, so the risk of their collapse is remote. Probably 2,000 years from now when they (whoever they is) are exploring the ruins of out civilization, they will find these tunnels and water will still be pouring of them. 2nd, if something was to happen to one of the tunnels, the result would not be 4 million people with dry taps. Perhaps pressure would drop, perhaps there would be rotating shutoffs to various neighborhoods but they would find some way to quickly improvise a solution until the emergency repairs could be made.Replies: @notsaying, @Redneck farmer, @I Have Scinde
I do not think there’s any kind of fix. That’s what I recall from the New Yorker article.
http://storytrail.co/s3/uploads/video/poster/97/video_97_14628684164853914_poster.jpgReplies: @Lot
I just looked into this for the same reason, to see if any Roman aqueducts are still being used as they were built for. I vaguely remember learning in school this was the case, but turns out not really.
Virgo was used for about 500 years, then restored after 1000 years of disuse. Now used for multiple fountains and landscape watering.
In terms of continuous use without major restorations, it doesn’t look like any Roman aqueducts qualify other than perhaps the first section of one in Spain.
http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiBfhFvJdvcReplies: @Anonymous
Steely Dan is up-to-date again
-- Massive increase in white-collar, "professional" parasites--lawyers, consultatants, planners, activists--glommed onto everything.
-- Feminization of society, culture, institutions. Loss of male--"just do it"--mentality.
This--diversity, bureaucracy, parasitism, feminization--all dovetail and reinforce the "can't do shit" atmosphere of our age.Replies: @Alden, @Clyde
Dittos on the feminization of society.
Interstate 29 in Sioux City has been under heavy construction since 2008. They claim the project is almost completed, local residents will believe it when they see it. To add injury to insult Sioux City put in extremely unpopular speed trap cameras along this stretch around the same to construction started. This isn’t unique to California.
https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/After-11-years-of-road-work-freeway-project-in-Sioux-City-nearly-over-565698482.html
Construction on New York City Water Tunnel #3 began in 1970 (planning began in 1954) and is expected to be completed in 2020 according to this outdated wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3
However, Mayor DeBlasio has diverted the funding "to other projects" so now completion is scheduled for "some time in the 2020's".
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/de-blasio-postpones-work-on-crucial-water-tunnel.html
The reason for all the "urgency" is that if something bad would happen to Tunnel #1 and #2 (say a collapse because they are 100 years old) half of NY would be without water. Because the tunnels are in use, there's no way to close them for inspection and all the original gate valves are corrode anyway:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/01/city-of-water
So an emergency replacement program was put in place due to this immediate crisis and a new tunnel was built in only 70 years. The end.
I'm sure that there came a time in Rome when aqueduct repairs began to take longer and longer and finally "the whole fucking thing" broke and there was nobody left who knew how to repair it and anyway they no longer had the money and organizational skills to do it.Replies: @El Dato, @Reg Cæsar, @nebulafox, @Reg Cæsar, @R.G. Camara, @notsaying, @kaganovitch, @prosa123
On a far smaller scale but of a rather ludicrous nature there’s New York’s ongoing sewer fiasco. Hundreds of homeowners north of Kennedy airport were horrified to find raw sewage in their basements, often several inches deep and with the stench rendering the houses nearly unliveable. The city admitted that a backed-up sewage pipe was the culprit, but said it was the fault of local residents for pouring cooking grease down sink drains – a physically impossible explanation. Finally, after massive criticism, city officials reluctantly admitted that cooking grease wasn’t the culprit, which they knew all along, it actually was an old pipe that had collapsed.
Operator error, ese
Similarly, after the Fall of the West, people continued to use imperial coinage. However, due to wear, new coins would still have to be minted.
These were in many instances copies of the old Roman coins, with the caveat that as the barbarians who minted them were often themselves quite illiterate the ‘writing’ on them was in a great many instances simply meaningless wavy lines that only looked like actual writing from a distance.
They knew official and real Roman coins were supposed to have this thing called writing on them, so they did the best they knew how to continue the tradition.
These are called ‘barbarous imitation’ coins.
[Remindful in a somewhat disturbing way of that movie called ‘Idiocracy.’]
"Fairy Tales for the Penguins" [about coins, not penguins]
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @Sparkon, @Peterike
Not exactly. Don’t forget or overlook cave paintings dating from up to 40,000 years ago in Indonesia, Spain, Russia, and France, among others. During that time, I suggest our spoken language was developing slowly but surely, along with human culture, until the time when men learned to make their marks as components of a written language about 5,100 years ago, which is just the blink of an eye in geologic terms. Before that, most human knowledge was passed on by word of mouth, which would have been a slow and uncertain process. Nevertheless, however long it took for their development, obviously Sumerian and Akkadian were fully developed languages before they were ever written down.
I suspect that the lack of urgency on the water tunnel is in part because it is not as dire as people make it out to be in the interest of getting funding for this multi-billion $ project (which probably has cost 10x what it should have cost). First of all , the older tunnels are bored straight thru bedrock in a non-seismic zone, so the risk of their collapse is remote. Probably 2,000 years from now when they (whoever they is) are exploring the ruins of out civilization, they will find these tunnels and water will still be pouring of them. 2nd, if something was to happen to one of the tunnels, the result would not be 4 million people with dry taps. Perhaps pressure would drop, perhaps there would be rotating shutoffs to various neighborhoods but they would find some way to quickly improvise a solution until the emergency repairs could be made.Replies: @notsaying, @Redneck farmer, @I Have Scinde
So Billy Joel should have named the song Miami 4017?
That Plague devastated the Middle East to Armenia and the borders of west Asia and Europe, the old Roman Empire. The de population was a big reason why the S Arabs and Vikings were able to invade and conquer so easily.
With no parents and teachers the surviving children grew up illiterate. The endless wars and invasions contributed of course.
Check it out it’s a very important but largely unknown part of the history of the European people’s.Replies: @nebulafox
I think Warren Treadgold makes a convincing point that the plague was what really doomed late antiquity, all the moreso because no ruler could have expected it. That shows in policy decisions of Justinian’s, especially concerning strategy in Italy when the Ostrogoths were at their breaking point early in the war. The plague also ravaged Sassanid Persia, which, when coupled with their ultimate defeat in the Great War and some unfortunate geography, led to wholesale conquest at the hands of the Arabs.
The last major outbreak of plague in Constantinople took place early on in Constantine V’s (underrated emperor-have a deep respect for him and his father, they helped keep the last remnant of European civilization going by the skin of their teeth during a very, very dark time in Western history) reign, which fortunately for the Romans happened to coincide with the downfall of the Umayyads. Apparently the city was so empty that to keep it-and thus the empire-going, he simply infused it wholesale with as many people in Greece he could find, including plenty of random Slavic migrants.
Meanwhile, do Angelinos draw the water out the trench with a shaduf (like the Ancient Egyptians), or are you people there more advanced, and you use an Archimedes Screw?
LA: If the typhus at City Hall don't getcha, the cholera in Magnolia Blvd will.Replies: @Steve Sailer
William Mulholland’s 1914 water main still works, so other than a few spectacular leaks now and then, the water situation at present is okay. The new one is intended to survive the next Big One, which Mulholland’s might not. It would be nice if they got the new one done before the Big One hits…
Years in the travel business taught me that set-day holidays (eg, Thanksgiving and Labor Day) are very predictable, while set-date ones (Christmas, Independence Day) vary depending on which day of the week it falls.
In the air travel business, you get straight time on the nastiest days of the year (usually T-Day – 1 is the worst), and time-and-a-half on the slowest. However, Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings can still be moderately busy, due to last-chance, last-minute travelers.
Christmas means nothing to Moslems, so they are more than happy to come in for the extra pay. T-Day and Fourth shifts attract other immigrants who haven’t grown up with those days off.
The Holocaust museum is more important because of the existential threat that the European people pose to Jews.
Saw this the other day. The conservative kids are waking up to the Sailer Strategy, and they are approaching it with race realism and without the baggage of dumb libertarian bullshit.
It's kind of embarrassing when a 22 year-old can articulate a more coherent political strategy than all of the conservative brain trust combined.
Highly recommended from a Gen Xer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzUbYXqpUJUReplies: @Danindc
That kid is smart, brave and charismatic. I have been a fan since the beginning. He is our last best hope.
The big issue that remains that is not in the quadrant at all is high trust/low trust.
If average folks believe they live in a low trust society (regardless of whether they are correct or not) they will game any system until it bleeds out....
Establishing trust has to be the first priority--that will have to be _earned_ by the politicians, by the mass media, by corporations, by non-profits, by religious institutions. Horrendous damage has been done by a generation of sociopaths who rule these institutions.
Establishing trust may take generations, or may never happen at all.
Here is a really funny example of California infra gone crazy due to white liberals running it, this is a bridge over nothing and connecting nothing right now, eventually the so called HSR was supposed to go over it I suppose. This picture is taken while driving slightly north of Fresno on CA 99 which was full of potholes this summer, this is not a joke!
Couple of years down the road I fully imagine that this orphan bridge will be the roof for more homeless and drug addict people.
https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20131016__joecolla1.jpg?w=600
Known at the time as the Governor Jerry Brown memorial Interchange.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
There’s a section of sidewalk a block from me that caved in during the last rain in April. I called it in directly to the sidewalk repair people. Next day a sawhorse covered the hole. Sounds good no?
8 months later the hole’s still there. The sawhorse disappeared but the orange cone’s still there.Replies: @Anonymous
How well does a sand foundation absorb earthquakes, compared to other foundations?
It’s a fascinating phenomenon to observe that a great many things that were once manufactured cannot be feasibly made any longer. The knowledge of how to do it has been lost and the infrastructure and supply chain of necessary materials is lost, and restarting the machine becomes orders of magnitude too expensive.
I was involved in high end audio for a while and built several vacuum tube amps , preamps, FM tuner back ends, et al. Everyone always asked “but, where do you get the tubes?” At that time there were still feasible supply line to make new ones that were any good. But the market for new good tubes was just not quite big enough, and end users often willfully ignorant and would buy poorly made ones, and the supply line is now kaput. All the Litton machinery was bought up by the Chinese or by Ripoffchardson in LaFox, Illinois, and the cathode materials are no longer available. You can get something from Mallinckrodt that will sort of work, but not perform like the correct materials.
You can still build “a tube”: artisinal manufacture of 1915 tech tubes is in fact a thing now, done by one transvestite character
who has some interesting content on YouTube (you can not make this stuff up!) , and high power large transmitting tubes are still a very feasible business, as are TWTs, photomultipliers, etc., but a good 6550….spoiled contractors say they can but at >$200 apiece in 1K quantity.
Vacuum tube circuits also require transformers and again, good luck getting good ones any more. Yes, it can be done but is a lot of work and many of the best ones are simply not reproducible. The very best were the product of one man who died decades ago and deliberately took as much of the technique to the grave as he could. A dumpster diver soyboy in Philadelphia saved a lot of the documents but the docs are wrong in a lot of cases, either on purpose or just revised in the engineering> production loop and corrections passed down orally or in other paperwork which is now lost.
Aircraft are lucky in one sense; the FAA requires a lot of data that is generally carefully warehoused and when the companies go broke you can sometimes get the data from those archives, but rarely in immense detail needed to actually start production.
But in general, foundry practices and even some types of machining have deteriorated in terms of what’s feasibly done in many cases. You’d think anything that could be done on paper tape controlled hard tooling could be done with 5 axis CNC, but in some cases, not so.
Welcome to the Third World!
Agreed. Admiral Nimitz’s concluding remarks regarding the disastrous drowning losses in the “Halsey Hurricane”: “It is foolish to be grudging about taking safety precautions for fear that the precautions might turn out to have been unnecessary... The time to take precautions is while still able to do so.”Replies: @Jim Don Bob
This is just one reason why today’s navy has a class of ships named Nimitz, but none named Halsey. Bull was a good nickname for him.
*Uchechukw Chukwuma -- an anon asks, is that her name before or after the accident?Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome
His favorite band: Chumbawamba – Tubthumping (Official Video)
What really happened is that the US had one brief shining moment (OK a century) from say 1865 to 1965 when we were actually capable of getting shit done and now we have fallen back into the usual historical pattern. Remember that modern humans have been around for at least 50,000 years and for maybe 40,000 out of those 50,000 absolutely nothing got done.Replies: @Alden, @J.Ross, @Sparkon, @Peterike
“I’m sure that there were make-work jobs in the medieval Church and state – guardian of the Holy Foreskin”
Mocking condescension isn’t the way to make friends across the aisle. Ok, Super Jew?
In the air travel business, you get straight time on the nastiest days of the year (usually T-Day - 1 is the worst), and time-and-a-half on the slowest. However, Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings can still be moderately busy, due to last-chance, last-minute travelers.
Christmas means nothing to Moslems, so they are more than happy to come in for the extra pay. T-Day and Fourth shifts attract other immigrants who haven't grown up with those days off.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
One Christmas Day I had to fly from New York City to Los Angeles for an emergency. (My sister was dying and I got the call the day before.) My area of the plane was filled with Hasidic Jews.
What boggles my mind about LAX is they don’t have a people mover tram, but force everyone to use the same hyper-congested street loop all traffic has to use just to get from one part of the airport to another. The horseshoe layout of the terminals and the offsite locations of the rental car lots, parking lots, etc., would make a people mover a natural fit. It’s a solution that airports with less than half the annual passenger traffic of LAX have figured out. Supposedly LAX is supposed to have a tram by 2023, knock on wood. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminals_of_Los_Angeles_International_Airport#LAX_Train)
I left California years ago, and generally avoid LAX like the plague now in favor of Long Beach for trips to the LA area. I made the mistake earlier this year of giving LAX one more chance, figuring I’d save an hour on the freeway on the way to a wedding in Santa Barbara. At best, I wound up giving that hour back just getting to the rental car lot and dealing with the wait there.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/08/f5/0b/08f50ba56c78bb854b8417068a07d9c6.jpgThe upper levels were literally grafted on to the existing airport facilities in the '80s. The roadway was double-decked, the terminal buildings were triple-storied (first-floor arrivals, second-floor departures, third-floor security checkpoints), and above-ground concourses were built to allow (relatively) easier access to the gates for departing passengers.The above picture was taken around 1962. Here's a map from 1984. The ovals are still present, but they have now sprouted unwieldy add-ons:
https://live.staticflickr.com/1610/24328157255_929c21f79d_b.jpgTerminal 1 and the Tom Bradley International Terminal opened in the months leading up to the '84 Games.And now an aerial from 2019. Of the original six ovals, five are still discernible. Only Terminal 2 has been replaced outright:
https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/styles/hero/public/images/2019-01/LAX%20Aerial%20View.jpgThe third-floor security-checkpoint areas were adequate in the '80s. Today they're a bottleneck.Before 9/11, airport security was pretty easy to deal with. Some airports restricted airside access to ticketed passengers only; some let anyone go through. You emptied your pockets into a basket, put your carry-on bag on the conveyor belt, and walked through the scanner. Sometimes the machine would beep and a rent-a-cop would give you a cursory once-over with a hand scanner. Then you would retrieve your pocket change, grab your bag, and hustle over to the gate. The whole process took no more than thirty seconds.Here is a video from 1995 showing "beefed-up security" at the Miami airport. Note the lack of congestion around the checkpoints:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l8WwG7iNAA#t=0m40sLike LAX, MIA dates from the earliest epoch of the jet era and all of its newer construction has been bolted onto the older structures. There are parts of MIA where you walk on terrazzo flooring that was installed in 1959. In the oldest part of the airport, most of the ancient ticket counters have been replaced, along with the terrazzo flooring adjacent to the counters, but no effort has been made to match the newer flooring with the older one. A sharp line in the floor separates the old sickly-yellowish terrazzo from the new bright-white one. It looks awful. But that part of the terminal services only a few budget airlines, so no one cares.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Counterpoint: The Eastern section of the Bay Bridge replacement took about ten years to complete and is actually a rare example of an improvement in infrastructure. In fairness, the original Bay Bridge was kind of homely (reminded me of New Jersey) so it was not that difficult to improve upon.
It’s an amazing bridge. Even the artsy fartsy lighting scheme is inspiring.
By way of contrast, Hoover Dam was built in 5 years (1930 - 1935), and the contractor finished two years ahead of time and millions of dollars under budget.
The country has changed.Replies: @International Jew
Millions, pfft. Millions would be rounding error on a project like that today.
Where did most of the settlers of California come from in the 1800s during and after the Gold Rush? I've heard there were a lot from the MidWest and the South but I have no idea.Replies: @David Davenport, @I Have Scinde
Where did most of the settlers of California come from in the 1800s during and after the Gold Rush? I’ve heard there were a lot from the MidWest and the South but I have no idea.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900’s, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I’ve needled Steve about this in the past — what one might call D. W. Griffith’s Southern California* — but our host doesn’t seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan — was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920’s.
My Texan and before that St Louis relations all went to the LA area, as did many of their friends and family. Someone should do a study of the St Louis to Texas to southern California syndrome. I'm talking about well-off people who didn't need to move anywhere, but who recognised new opportunities for money-making. One who came from Texas to Los Angeles precisely at my own grandparent's bidding (they had grown up together) did particularly well - his name was Conrad Hilton.
If there is money left over from the sale, your heirs get it, but the basic part of the deal is that you have to repay what the bank gave you by selling the house. That was in the papers you signed.Replies: @International Jew, @MBlanc46
I think AlmostMissouri understands all that. You’ve misunderstood him if you take his comment as praise for USA Today.
You want to read about public infrastructure fiasco Norcal style, read about the new Transbay Terminal project in San Francisco.
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
Ancient coins are fake and gay.
“Fairy Tales for the Penguins” [about coins, not penguins]
Now after years of having this enormous project on track to a final finish, De Blasio decided there were more important priorities and took money away from it. What would he do if one of the tunnels became inoperable? What could he do?
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous. And of course we have no safe way to dispose of the used fuel.
I suspect it is just a human failing that when we don't want to think about catastrophic disasters we downgrade their impact or even ignore them.
We should try to minimize getting ourselves into situations where catastrophic disasters can occur, such as nuclear power plants -- and nuclear weapons too.
I hope nobody in New York City does anything further to delay their water tunnel #3 completion.Replies: @SafeNow, @Jack D, @David Davenport
This makes me think, oddly enough, of nuclear power. It keeps coming up as a solution in connection with replacing some of our carbon-based power that is causing global warming. But when you think of how poorly our officials and others in charge handle making decisions that involve risk management, trusting the lives and health of millions of people to safely live near lots more nuclear power plants is just too dangerous….
//////////////
Watts Bar Nuclear Plant
With the addition of the first new commercial nuclear reactor brought online in the United States in the 21st century, Watts Bar now has the two newest nuclear units in the nation. Commercial operation of Watts Bar Unit 2 was declared in October 2016, while Unit 1 began operation in 1996.
The plant is located on 1,700 acres on the northern end of the Chickamauga Reservoir near Spring City, in East Tennessee. Each unit produces about 1,150 megawatts of electricity—enough to service 650,000 homes—without creating any carbon emissions…
https://www.tva.gov/Energy/Our-Power-System/Nuclear/Watts-Bar-Nuclear-Plant
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
In contrast, the Second Avenue Subway has been delayed because generations of rich folks on the Upper East Side (such as the late Jeffrey Epstein) have never wanted to give the common rabble ease of access to their neighborhood. UES richies used the promise of such a subway in 1920 and the 1940s to get the ugly elevated subway lines demolished, leaving the Upper East Side serviced by one very overcrowded subway line (4-5-6), that doesn’t go into the heart of the UES. But then made sure further construction on the line was delayed or blocked or abandoned.
The Second Avenue Subway could have gotten built in the early 1970’s, except for some very dubious money-shuffling. Federal funds had become available, and to qualify all the city had to do was match a relatively small amount of the federal money using some of its own funds it already had allocated for that purpose. These allocated city funds were a tiny percentage of the federal money they would allow the city to receive. It looked for all the world as if the work was just about to start.
Of course that didn’t happen. Because of some fare collection shortfalls the subway fare would have to be raised by five cents. A trivial amount to be sure, but the mayor, Abraham Beame, was worried about the opposition a fare increase would engender. Using a very dubious but somehow legal scheme known thereafter as the Beame Shuffle, he used the funds set aside for the Second Avenue Subway construction to cover the existing subway’s operating deficits and avoid the fare increase.
With the city’s money skimmed off, it could no longer qualify for the vastly greater amount of federal money. The Second Avenue Subway never got built, except for a few useless test segments, and within a short period of time the subway fare had to go up, by more than the five cents Beame had tried to stave off.
But because Chicago refuses to be outdone, it does have its 300 or so miles of bikes lane set into the already narrow streets, roadway formerly meant for motor traffic. THAT is sensible infrastructure management!Replies: @MBlanc46, @Kaz, @Up2Drew, @mmack
Those idiot bike lanes might not be the most ridiculous transit project in the city’s history, but they’re on the short list.
FIFY
If there is money left over from the sale, your heirs get it, but the basic part of the deal is that you have to repay what the bank gave you by selling the house. That was in the papers you signed.Replies: @International Jew, @MBlanc46
Yeah, but when it’s PoC, papers are racist.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900's, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I've needled Steve about this in the past -- what one might call D. W. Griffith's Southern California* -- but our host doesn't seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan -- was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920's.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @RichardTaylor, @Flip, @Old Palo Altan
Los Angeles is surprisingly football-oriented in part because there is a rail line from East Texas and Arkansas where they really love football. So a lot of sharecroppers came out to L.A. in the first half of the 20th Century and brought their football passion with them.
A stadium in the Westwood/Brentwood/Pico area could be home to both UCLA and an NFL team. The location would be adjacent to campus, I-10, and I-405. Beach attractions and LAX would be conveniently close by.
If LA is football oriented, why is this obvious economic winner suppressed in favor of options that place stadiums in dangerous, crime ridden areas that keep potential fans away?
🐻 GO BRUINS 🐻
But any time the VA even rents a couple of its 495 acres to a school or whatever the vets have a fit.
Putting new stadiums in crime ridden black ghettos is part of urban renewal or whatever its called now. The liberals hope the stadiums will save blacks from themselves.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
Sure it was something but pre-Civil War very large scale projects were rare, as much for financial reasons as technological ones. The Eric Canal (built in only 8 years with government borrowing) was one but it was basically just a big long ditch with some locks.
This is what you call a public-private partnership.Replies: @Alfa158
Yep, don’t want to leave them out. The California high speed choo-choo train fiasco was also partly due to that.
No serious person actually thought that there would be a bullet train from LA to Frisco. Too hard to get right of way for new track routes that are compatible with 200 mph trains. And if you did, the route would either need to hug the coastline or go over mountains. Trains really suck at mountain climbing because of their very poor power and braking force to mass ratios. Even a 200 mph train would have to crawl at 25 mph going up and down those mountains. It would have been fun though to have 200 mph trains blasting through Malibu.
Some analysts think that the whole project was a scheme to divert $20B. The project was to start spending some money at the cities on each end to prepare for the rest. It was rumored that the money has been diverted to cover operating deficits in the transit systems in LA and the Bay area. The rest of the money was siphoned off to pay back engineering and construction companies, non-governmental organizations, environmental consultants, marketing and advertising companies, law firms etc. who supported the election of the politicians involved.
I don’t think there will ever be a truthful accounting for where all the money went.
Poorly. During earthquakes sand tends to turn to quicksand – the vibration turns the sand from a solid to a liquid and everything on top sinks into the liquid.
How long did it take to replace the eastern span of the SF Bay Bridge, and what was the multiple of the multi-$billion cost of doing that to the original cost of the entire span, including the western far-more-than-half?Replies: @Alden
The new Bay Bridge, including the lighting was manufactured in China and put together here.
It took about 7 years to erect a sound deflection wall for 8 blocks on the sides of the freeway in my Los Angeles neighborhood.
But because Chicago refuses to be outdone, it does have its 300 or so miles of bikes lane set into the already narrow streets, roadway formerly meant for motor traffic. THAT is sensible infrastructure management!Replies: @MBlanc46, @Kaz, @Up2Drew, @mmack
I’m not against the idea of bike lanes, but sounds like something that isn’t usable 6 months out of the year considering the weather..
Simple physics tells me that it is more sensible to have bicyclists share the sidewalk with pedestrians, rather than the roads with motor vehicles, but heck what do I know?
You really know the history of that era. Thanks for the information.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900's, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I've needled Steve about this in the past -- what one might call D. W. Griffith's Southern California* -- but our host doesn't seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan -- was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920's.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @RichardTaylor, @Flip, @Old Palo Altan
Ah, so that’s why the Beach boys were singing about beautiful blonde girls in Southern California. Although, I guess they came from all over once Hollywood was established.
No serious person actually thought that there would be a bullet train from LA to Frisco. Too hard to get right of way for new track routes that are compatible with 200 mph trains. And if you did, the route would either need to hug the coastline or go over mountains. Trains really suck at mountain climbing because of their very poor power and braking force to mass ratios. Even a 200 mph train would have to crawl at 25 mph going up and down those mountains. It would have been fun though to have 200 mph trains blasting through Malibu.
Some analysts think that the whole project was a scheme to divert $20B. The project was to start spending some money at the cities on each end to prepare for the rest. It was rumored that the money has been diverted to cover operating deficits in the transit systems in LA and the Bay area. The rest of the money was siphoned off to pay back engineering and construction companies, non-governmental organizations, environmental consultants, marketing and advertising companies, law firms etc. who supported the election of the politicians involved.
I don't think there will ever be a truthful accounting for where all the money went.Replies: @Alden
Southwest Airlines if you book in advance is only about $110 round trip LA to SF free baggage too. Less than Amtrak less than 800 miles worth of gas. No wear and tear on your car.
That's four Uber rides at a minimum, easily bringing that $110 cost to $250-300 (depending how far you live from LAX, Long Beach, or Burbank airport, and how far your SF hotel/destination is from SFO).Replies: @Alden
Looks like the buses were propane powered. Whether the fire was caused by a propane issue is not said, but though propane is generally a safe fuel, stupidity in maintenance can cause leaks. I will be monitoring propane industry magazine sites for any update on this. I have owned and worked on LP Gas powered vehicles and like propane a lot but it does demand common sense in maintaining. if sabotage or stupidity was involved, it would be important to know.
White men have been banned from working at LAX. What does one expect with an all affirmative action workforce?
In the news Friday night it was taking more than an hour & 1/2 to get from the freeway off ramp to the terminals because of holiday traffic.Replies: @Anonymous
A common argument against transit is that allows criminals access to your neighborhood. But roads do the same thing.
Retarding traffic retards crime. Replacing all the major thoroughfares in Chicago with bicycle-only lanes would make the North Side the safest urban district in the land.
Remember, white people, and only white people, ride bikes. What do you have against white people? Bike lanes are our friend!
I don’t know where you are, but in New York area a great amount of bike traffic is Hispanic and Chinese. But that’s for work. Agreed, only white people ride bikes for (1) exercise or (2) saving the world via their (imaginary) carbon footprint.Replies: @Jack D
Before the advent of the automobile in the latter 19th and early 20th century, the big thing being pushed to replace the horse for personal transit in the 1880's & 90's was the bicycle. They were even looking at constructing paved roads between the major cities just for bike traffic.
Of course, the internal combustion engine was developed which resulted in the automobile and motorbike, and the plain bicycle got largely left to the wayside.
Great comments by the kid.
The big issue that remains that is not in the quadrant at all is high trust/low trust.
If average folks believe they live in a low trust society (regardless of whether they are correct or not) they will game any system until it bleeds out….
Establishing trust has to be the first priority–that will have to be _earned_ by the politicians, by the mass media, by corporations, by non-profits, by religious institutions. Horrendous damage has been done by a generation of sociopaths who rule these institutions.
Establishing trust may take generations, or may never happen at all.
Mocking condescension isn’t the way to make friends across the aisle. Ok, Super Jew?Replies: @anon, @Mr. Anon
That whole mohel infant penis thing? wrong wrong wrong.
https://i.postimg.cc/SNypr5b9/IMG-3730.jpgCouple of years down the road I fully imagine that this orphan bridge will be the roof for more homeless and drug addict people.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @indocon
California has a long history of this. The San Jose “Freeway to Nowhere”, from 1976:
Known at the time as the Governor Jerry Brown memorial Interchange.
I once drove out of my way to take a look at that. Was it ever finished?Replies: @Mr. Anon
They’re actually really interesting. They’re hard lefties, and true believers in every tried and failed nonsense, but they write the most literate and interesting liner notes in pop music (it helps that they’re really pseudo-academics pretending to be pop stars), their worst stuff is often at least experimental, and some of their music is both good and historically interesting. They have an album of old English rebel music going back to the Diggers. I really like Salt Fare North Sea, which is about the utterly joyless life of a North Sea sailor (cf The World At War with Lawrence Olivier, I forget which episode, but they couldn’t even expect dry bedsheets), and inspired by Churchill squashing a rescue effort during WWII because it might have given away the “rescue” of Norway’s King Haakon. Also Amnesia, which is about voting for a party that betrays you, and is therefore perfectly applicable across the ideological spectrum.
I don't follow bands much anymore but I thank you for your recommendations. I disagree with John Johnson's criticism of your comment. I am glad you made it.
Mocking condescension isn’t the way to make friends across the aisle. Ok, Super Jew?Replies: @anon, @Mr. Anon
He really can’t hide his contempt, can he? Not even a little.
Where did most of the settlers of California come from in the 1800s during and after the Gold Rush? I've heard there were a lot from the MidWest and the South but I have no idea.Replies: @David Davenport, @I Have Scinde
An old joke: Along the Oregon/California trail was a sign directing people to Oregon. Those who could read followed the Oregon Trail. Those who could not followed the California Trail.
My understanding is that the majority of both migrations was midwestern in origin, with especially the northwest taking people primarily of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic descent. California probably received a larger relative proportion of Anglo-Irish (or Scots-Irish). Of course, rural and inland California was overwhelmed by Oklahomans in the 1930s, so its original population is not as much of a factor.
As far as the Civil War is concerned, the entire state stayed Union, but Southern California (like Arizona) was a hotbed of Southern sympathy, while Northern California was emphatically pro-Union. That is probably the first of the major intrastate north-south tensions, some of which Mr. Sailer has written about over the years.
It was such a "hotbed" of pro-slavery activism that, for the early part of the war, it was successfully garrisoned by 1 (one) Army officer. This was still the frontier. People who moved here did so in order to make a new life for themselves.
In the end California's entire contribution to the Civil War was simply mining gold and paying taxes; we did raise a company that went out and occupied a small part of Arizona.
One of the problems with the study of history is that we over-emphasize wars since they're great reading. What actually happened to So. Cal. in the Civil War is much less romantic: a bunch of people in the letter to the editor demographic wrote letters to the editor; a few pro-slavery malcontents went back to where they came from; some tiny military units were raised to relieve the general US Army from the burden of patrolling the overland trade routes.
I suspect that the lack of urgency on the water tunnel is in part because it is not as dire as people make it out to be in the interest of getting funding for this multi-billion $ project (which probably has cost 10x what it should have cost). First of all , the older tunnels are bored straight thru bedrock in a non-seismic zone, so the risk of their collapse is remote. Probably 2,000 years from now when they (whoever they is) are exploring the ruins of out civilization, they will find these tunnels and water will still be pouring of them. 2nd, if something was to happen to one of the tunnels, the result would not be 4 million people with dry taps. Perhaps pressure would drop, perhaps there would be rotating shutoffs to various neighborhoods but they would find some way to quickly improvise a solution until the emergency repairs could be made.Replies: @notsaying, @Redneck farmer, @I Have Scinde
“I agree with you about nuclear power. If the Japanese, who are the Westernized civilization perhaps least affected by Current Year vibrancy, could not manage this stuff safely, what hope is there for the New Woke America to do this? ( I have to say that the Japanese have their own structural/cultural flaws which impair their decision making, just different ones than us.)”
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you’re generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you’re not generous – zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to “safely” operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.
Fatal error--future generations will find this out the hard way...
Tell us please when TEPCO will recover the coria from the three melted-down nuclear reactors at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi, or when and how TEPCO will stop the flow of subsurface spring water running down from the inland mountains, streaming under the crippled power plant, and flowing on out to the Pacific Ocean.
Until that happens, the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukushima will continue to poison the planet.
Meanwhile, for reasons that aren't clear, insect populations all over the planet are disappearing, and may be dying off. It used to be in the U.S. Midwest that a road trip would result in the windshield and front end of the car getting covered with splattered insects. A halo of flying insects would converge on any light at night, but now for some reason, most of those insects seem to have disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenonhttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/fukushima-radiation-still-poisoning-insects
Of course, for a long time already, we've been dousing insects and plants with all manner of insecticides and herbicides, including the widely used, reputably carcinogenic herbicide RoundUp.
Whatever the case, the theory of so-called beneficial radiation hormesis may not apply to insects. Hell, it may not apply to humans either, at least to those of us who already get our dose of beneficial radiation from the Sun.
In California, only the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant remains in action. During the approval and construction process for that plant, some claim that PG&E covered up its knowledge of the extensive Hosgri Fault system lying under and around Diablo Canyon.
Yes there are people trying to keep us safe against nuclear but the forces protecting us are no match against machine and human error, which can be controlled but not eliminated -- ever. For terrorism there are also people out there trying to protect us but they cannot do so every time and eventually, inevitably, they will fail someday.
To say that the nuclear power disaster in Japan was a "natural" disaster is to ignore the known risks of locating the plants by the ocean in a place subject to tsunamis. Now I see just today that the Japanese government is thinking of releasing stored and still radioactive water. What kind of a solution is that for this problem? A very poor one, to say the least, yet it will probably happen because there's nothing else better to be done.
I think your faith in safely run nuclear power plants is misplaced. One day the good luck will run out and we will be mostly helpless to stop a terrible event from happening here or somewhere else in the world.
https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-gov%27t-proposes-fukushima-water-release-to-sea-or-airReplies: @A123
They’re actually really interesting. They’re hard lefties, and true believers in every tried and failed nonsense, but they write the most literate and interesting liner notes in pop music
Who gives a fudge about some pop leftist band? They are a dime a dozen.
Plug your garbage somewhere else.
maybe US Air Force still uses B-52 bombers not because they’re somewhat cost efficient and still relatively useful for basic bombing, but because Air Force knows, they couldn’t design and build a new general purpose bomber fleet without it costing 1 trillion dollars and being a fiasco. it’s possible Air Force could not build new ICBMs if they had to, which they might in a few decades. those Minutemans are OLD, and Peacekeeper never went into real service.
America has a lot of stuff built 50 or 100 years ago that they’re not able to improve on at all despite 20 trillion dollar GDP. commercial nuclear reactors, various highways, tunnels, railways, and bridges. certain water systems, skyscrapers, airports, and stadiums seem beyond improvement or reproduction even with tech 50 years later and 100 times the budget. it somehow costs 3 million dollars to build 1 mile of highway and 12 billion dollars to build 1 fission reactor that puts out 1 GW. and that takes over 10 years to build.
currently, America can’t get into space, and all their funded space launch programs for human spaceflight are a huge fiasco. ULA Space Launch System has now been funded with 30 billion or so, and it will NEVER fly. NASA still does an AWESOME job for unmanned space missions, but they are now garbage at human missions. without SpaceX, which was TOTALLY random and serendipitous, they would be SOL.
ULA was still charging Washington DC something totally ridiculous for each launch, like 200 million dollars, for 1980 level technology. and it was bottom of the barrel level service for 2020.
America has a lot of stuff built 50 or 100 years ago that they're not able to improve on at all despite 20 trillion dollar GDP. commercial nuclear reactors, various highways, tunnels, railways, and bridges. certain water systems, skyscrapers, airports, and stadiums seem beyond improvement or reproduction even with tech 50 years later and 100 times the budget. it somehow costs 3 million dollars to build 1 mile of highway and 12 billion dollars to build 1 fission reactor that puts out 1 GW. and that takes over 10 years to build.
currently, America can't get into space, and all their funded space launch programs for human spaceflight are a huge fiasco. ULA Space Launch System has now been funded with 30 billion or so, and it will NEVER fly. NASA still does an AWESOME job for unmanned space missions, but they are now garbage at human missions. without SpaceX, which was TOTALLY random and serendipitous, they would be SOL.
ULA was still charging Washington DC something totally ridiculous for each launch, like 200 million dollars, for 1980 level technology. and it was bottom of the barrel level service for 2020.Replies: @anon
currently, America can’t get into space, and all their funded space launch programs for human spaceflight are a huge fiasco.
Nah. Read this:
https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-capsule-oft-landing-success.html
The clock / timing error between the Atlas 5 and the Boeing capsule is not going to be a difficult fix.
This is the first US man-rated capsule to land on dirt rather than water. Boeing’s capsule is intended to be used for 10 missions, rather than only 1 as was done in the 60’s and 70’s. Sure, it looks a whole lot like the Apollo capsule, but form follows function.
Launches should cost a whole lot less than what the Russians have been charging us, and Boeing / SpaceX manned vehicles are not 1960’s designs like the Russians are using.
Sure, there’s lotsa problems just in California alone. But. Aerospace isn’t one of them, mostly. Mostly….
Meanwhile the Chinese keep rolling on….
“Los Angeles International Airport [has] a parking lot called LAXit.”
If the airport needs money, maybe they could license this copyrighted parking-lot name for an over-the-counter laxative. Ad jingles suggest themselves: “LAXit unpacks it!”
Growing up in NYC in the 50s and 60s I used to drive by a massive construction project known as Bruckner Boulevard. It was under construction for years and years. Noted NYT architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable titled her collection of essays “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?”. Well worth the read if you’re a NYC architecture buff.
I left California years ago, and generally avoid LAX like the plague now in favor of Long Beach for trips to the LA area. I made the mistake earlier this year of giving LAX one more chance, figuring I'd save an hour on the freeway on the way to a wedding in Santa Barbara. At best, I wound up giving that hour back just getting to the rental car lot and dealing with the wait there.Replies: @Stan Adams
LAX is an unholy Frankenstein of an airport. Most of the original ’60s buildings are still there, buried under decades’ worth of piecemeal additions and superficial facelifts.
From the early ’60s to the early ’80s, all of the terminals at LAX were one-story structures – the ticket counters and the baggage carousels were on the same floor of the same building. Both arriving and departing passengers used the same one-level roadway. The oval-shaped aircraft-boarding areas were connected to the main terminal buildings by underground tunnels:
The upper levels were literally grafted on to the existing airport facilities in the ’80s. The roadway was double-decked, the terminal buildings were triple-storied (first-floor arrivals, second-floor departures, third-floor security checkpoints), and above-ground concourses were built to allow (relatively) easier access to the gates for departing passengers.
The above picture was taken around 1962. Here’s a map from 1984. The ovals are still present, but they have now sprouted unwieldy add-ons:
Terminal 1 and the Tom Bradley International Terminal opened in the months leading up to the ’84 Games.
And now an aerial from 2019. Of the original six ovals, five are still discernible. Only Terminal 2 has been replaced outright:
The third-floor security-checkpoint areas were adequate in the ’80s. Today they’re a bottleneck.
Before 9/11, airport security was pretty easy to deal with. Some airports restricted airside access to ticketed passengers only; some let anyone go through. You emptied your pockets into a basket, put your carry-on bag on the conveyor belt, and walked through the scanner. Sometimes the machine would beep and a rent-a-cop would give you a cursory once-over with a hand scanner. Then you would retrieve your pocket change, grab your bag, and hustle over to the gate. The whole process took no more than thirty seconds.
Here is a video from 1995 showing “beefed-up security” at the Miami airport. Note the lack of congestion around the checkpoints:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l8WwG7iNAA#t=0m40s
Like LAX, MIA dates from the earliest epoch of the jet era and all of its newer construction has been bolted onto the older structures. There are parts of MIA where you walk on terrazzo flooring that was installed in 1959. In the oldest part of the airport, most of the ancient ticket counters have been replaced, along with the terrazzo flooring adjacent to the counters, but no effort has been made to match the newer flooring with the older one. A sharp line in the floor separates the old sickly-yellowish terrazzo from the new bright-white one. It looks awful. But that part of the terminal services only a few budget airlines, so no one cares.
My understanding is that the majority of both migrations was midwestern in origin, with especially the northwest taking people primarily of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic descent. California probably received a larger relative proportion of Anglo-Irish (or Scots-Irish). Of course, rural and inland California was overwhelmed by Oklahomans in the 1930s, so its original population is not as much of a factor.
As far as the Civil War is concerned, the entire state stayed Union, but Southern California (like Arizona) was a hotbed of Southern sympathy, while Northern California was emphatically pro-Union. That is probably the first of the major intrastate north-south tensions, some of which Mr. Sailer has written about over the years.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @anonn
Fascinating, thanks. Amazing how culture follows a population, as if we weren’t blank slates.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/08/f5/0b/08f50ba56c78bb854b8417068a07d9c6.jpgThe upper levels were literally grafted on to the existing airport facilities in the '80s. The roadway was double-decked, the terminal buildings were triple-storied (first-floor arrivals, second-floor departures, third-floor security checkpoints), and above-ground concourses were built to allow (relatively) easier access to the gates for departing passengers.The above picture was taken around 1962. Here's a map from 1984. The ovals are still present, but they have now sprouted unwieldy add-ons:
https://live.staticflickr.com/1610/24328157255_929c21f79d_b.jpgTerminal 1 and the Tom Bradley International Terminal opened in the months leading up to the '84 Games.And now an aerial from 2019. Of the original six ovals, five are still discernible. Only Terminal 2 has been replaced outright:
https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/styles/hero/public/images/2019-01/LAX%20Aerial%20View.jpgThe third-floor security-checkpoint areas were adequate in the '80s. Today they're a bottleneck.Before 9/11, airport security was pretty easy to deal with. Some airports restricted airside access to ticketed passengers only; some let anyone go through. You emptied your pockets into a basket, put your carry-on bag on the conveyor belt, and walked through the scanner. Sometimes the machine would beep and a rent-a-cop would give you a cursory once-over with a hand scanner. Then you would retrieve your pocket change, grab your bag, and hustle over to the gate. The whole process took no more than thirty seconds.Here is a video from 1995 showing "beefed-up security" at the Miami airport. Note the lack of congestion around the checkpoints:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l8WwG7iNAA#t=0m40sLike LAX, MIA dates from the earliest epoch of the jet era and all of its newer construction has been bolted onto the older structures. There are parts of MIA where you walk on terrazzo flooring that was installed in 1959. In the oldest part of the airport, most of the ancient ticket counters have been replaced, along with the terrazzo flooring adjacent to the counters, but no effort has been made to match the newer flooring with the older one. A sharp line in the floor separates the old sickly-yellowish terrazzo from the new bright-white one. It looks awful. But that part of the terminal services only a few budget airlines, so no one cares.Replies: @Steve Sailer
They’ve been talking about adding another runway at LAX, although more flights presumably would stress out the roadways and terminals even more.
It seems like since LAX, successful hub airports like DFW and Denver go way out of town and build on a vast scale. In contrast, LAX was built in an era of luxury air travel, with passengers in suits and ties, and there wasn’t much of an Asia market.
LAX is evidence you don’t really need to have a great airport to do a lot of business if you are in the right place. The only weather that could shut down LAX is fog, but nowadays they have giant beacon lamps to cut through the fog.
Airport design advanced more rapidly in the '60s than in any other decade before or since. Compare LAX to Tampa (1971), the first airport to feature a monorail. Atlanta (1980) was heavily influenced by Tampa, and Denver (1995) is very similar to Atlanta. (Both Atlanta and Denver use underground trains to shuttle passengers to and from the gates.) Pittsburgh (1992), which also uses an underground train, was the first American airport to include a full-scale shopping mall.
DFW (1974) was originally designed to minimize the walking distance from curb to gate. (At one time it boasted one of the shortest such average distances of any major airport in the world.) The numerous terminals were semi-circular so that the gates could be positioned close to the ticket counters. But then deregulation came and the airlines began switching to a hub-and-spoke system, and DFW's seeming strength became something of a liability. But the airport prospered nonetheless:
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/architecture/2014/01/11/architecture-d-fw-airport-a-no-nonsense-monument-hits-middle-age/
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
very much On regular iSteve Topics:USA Today launches "in depth" (but not too much depth) report on home"owners" who sold their homes to banks in reverse mortgages who are now discovering—or their heirs are discovering—that they no longer own what they sold. Of course, those banks followed the government's and media's demand that they increase lending to the melanin-enriched, but now it turns out that lending to the melanin-enriched was actually "predatory lending", so the banks will have to forgive the loans, give back the property and make up the loss by taking more money from less melanin-enriched sources.Replies: @Bill H, @Redneck farmer, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri, @Almost Missouri
Forgot the link:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
It’s a train wreck in the winter because much of those bicycle lanes are sectioned off with permanent delineators. Plows can’t reach that pavement.
Simple physics tells me that it is more sensible to have bicyclists share the sidewalk with pedestrians, rather than the roads with motor vehicles, but heck what do I know?
The elevated train is the black honor student’s preferred method of transit. After all, it’s free when you jump the turnstile.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900's, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I've needled Steve about this in the past -- what one might call D. W. Griffith's Southern California* -- but our host doesn't seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan -- was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920's.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @RichardTaylor, @Flip, @Old Palo Altan
I’ve always read that LA was settled by Midwesterners. Texas was settled by Southerners which is why they have a southern accent and Californians don’t.
Landlocked airports designed in the late ’50s and early ’60s, such as LAX (1962) and MIA (1959), have never fully overcome the limitations of their design. MIA in particular was considered obsolete after less than a decade. But plans to build a massive “jetport” in the Everglades were scuttled by environmental concerns. The existing airport has had to suffice.
Airport design advanced more rapidly in the ’60s than in any other decade before or since. Compare LAX to Tampa (1971), the first airport to feature a monorail. Atlanta (1980) was heavily influenced by Tampa, and Denver (1995) is very similar to Atlanta. (Both Atlanta and Denver use underground trains to shuttle passengers to and from the gates.) Pittsburgh (1992), which also uses an underground train, was the first American airport to include a full-scale shopping mall.
DFW (1974) was originally designed to minimize the walking distance from curb to gate. (At one time it boasted one of the shortest such average distances of any major airport in the world.) The numerous terminals were semi-circular so that the gates could be positioned close to the ticket counters. But then deregulation came and the airlines began switching to a hub-and-spoke system, and DFW’s seeming strength became something of a liability. But the airport prospered nonetheless:
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/architecture/2014/01/11/architecture-d-fw-airport-a-no-nonsense-monument-hits-middle-age/
If there is an earthquake, it will be bad. Solid clay is most earthquake resistant. Many coastal areas are just a few inches of soil on sand.
We don’t need any more traffic in Westwood Brentwood. The only place it could be built is the VA hospital campus. Entrance from Sunset, Wilshire and Ohio gates locked on game days. Keep the traffic away from the streets and on the freeway.
But any time the VA even rents a couple of its 495 acres to a school or whatever the vets have a fit.
Putting new stadiums in crime ridden black ghettos is part of urban renewal or whatever its called now. The liberals hope the stadiums will save blacks from themselves.
Tell me: just how bad was the damage on Tigertail in the recent fire? My mother's best friend lived there from birth to death, a span of over ninety years. Beautiful Spanish colonial - I'd hate to think it's gone.Replies: @Alden
I thought seven or eight months was a long time to have a 20-foot-deep trench in my street.* What exactly are they doing in there? We have multi-racial road and utility crews – white, Mexican, black – and while they seem to have a lot of laughs, they don’t take any ten years to lay pipe.
*During which period, I would sometimes bring out Cokes, popsicles, tea, etc. It was one of our hottest summers. A number of years after that, there was a crew of guys a half-mile away building a pump station or some such on formerly open space. They had to clear some trees, some of them nice ones. Somehow a bunch of damned ligustrums got left. Being a busybody, I stopped and went up to the foreman-looking-fellow and said, hey, could you do me a favor and cut the ligustrums while you’re at it? He looked at me and said, hey, you’re the lady that gave us popsicles! A couple weeks later, the ligustrums were gone.
That’s the first thing I thought, propane. Propane tanks accelerate forest fires. Reason so many people died in the October 2017 Napa fire was their own propane tanks that just exploded one by one up the mountain.
White men have been banned from working at LAX. What does one expect with an all affirmative action workforce?
In the news Friday night it was taking more than an hour & 1/2 to get from the freeway off ramp to the terminals because of holiday traffic.
Most of my neighbors have company owned tanks because they are cheap and lazy. I bought a used “conning tower” tank and had it buried and plumbed and that’s why I pay a fair bit less a gallon than they do. I don’t have the fill pump yet because I’m going to have to run the tank dry to have it installed. Then I intend to build one last hot rod with a propane tank so I can have a year of fuel stashed away. New light duty propane vehicles are not in these last couple of years, the only current certified vehicles are school buses. I’m thinking a square body Chevy with an analog LS6-get rid of the electronics and run a Impco mixer on a 4bbl aftermarket manifold and a distributor on a circle track front cover or go EDIS. Anyone have any thoughts? I already have a pile of Impco stuff and a tank off a Schwann truck in the shed.
But because Chicago refuses to be outdone, it does have its 300 or so miles of bikes lane set into the already narrow streets, roadway formerly meant for motor traffic. THAT is sensible infrastructure management!Replies: @MBlanc46, @Kaz, @Up2Drew, @mmack
Absolutely agree, as a Chicago resident. The bike lanes are lunacy, in large part because there wasn’t additional room available for bike lanes, they just carved them out of the previous overcrowded existing asphalt downtown.
The bike lanes don’t even necessarily run in the same direction as one-way streets, and one’s basic instinct is not to look in the opposite direction of vehicular traffic when when crossing. So you get walloped by a bike, instead.
I work in the Loop. Between the individuals walking the streets with the special oblivion that cell phone texting creates, and the impunity with which bicycle and scooter riders assume right-of-way against multi-ton vehicles, it’s amazing we’re not scooping bodies off the streets of downtown on a continuous basis.
Thank you for your reply, but I have to ask what’s the good of a big-one-proof water main if by California neglecting infrastructure maintenance of dams, the latter potentially aren’t?
I refer to your analysis and commentaries re: Oroville….and dam failures in general…
https://www.takimag.com/article/undocumented_irrigation_steve_sailer/
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-a-dam-collapse-looks-like/
Missing link from my earlier comment #8:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
Apparently Ron’s last software update prevents commenters from commenting on their own comments, so unfortunately, this will appear way late in the thread.
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you're generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you're not generous - zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to "safely" operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Sparkon, @Jack D, @notsaying
Yep–nuclear power in the US was designed and built by white men who thought there would be white male technicians monitoring and maintaining it in perpetuity.
Fatal error–future generations will find this out the hard way…
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you're generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you're not generous - zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to "safely" operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Sparkon, @Jack D, @notsaying
Really? You sound like a shill for the nuclear power industry, those “too cheap to meter” people.
Tell us please when TEPCO will recover the coria from the three melted-down nuclear reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi, or when and how TEPCO will stop the flow of subsurface spring water running down from the inland mountains, streaming under the crippled power plant, and flowing on out to the Pacific Ocean.
Until that happens, the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukushima will continue to poison the planet.
Meanwhile, for reasons that aren’t clear, insect populations all over the planet are disappearing, and may be dying off. It used to be in the U.S. Midwest that a road trip would result in the windshield and front end of the car getting covered with splattered insects. A halo of flying insects would converge on any light at night, but now for some reason, most of those insects seem to have disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/fukushima-radiation-still-poisoning-insects
Of course, for a long time already, we’ve been dousing insects and plants with all manner of insecticides and herbicides, including the widely used, reputably carcinogenic herbicide RoundUp.
Whatever the case, the theory of so-called beneficial radiation hormesis may not apply to insects. Hell, it may not apply to humans either, at least to those of us who already get our dose of beneficial radiation from the Sun.
In California, only the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant remains in action. During the approval and construction process for that plant, some claim that PG&E covered up its knowledge of the extensive Hosgri Fault system lying under and around Diablo Canyon.
I thought “Idiocracy” was a comedy when I saw it over a decade ago. Who knew that it was a documentary of the future?
There WERE regulations that were in effect when the Golden Gate bridge was being built. But
they were not “government” regulations; they were the regulations imposed on ALL of the workers by the general contractor! If a worker did not want to abide by these regulations, he did not have a job. It was as simple as that. I believe that during the entire project, there was only ONE fatality.
There was a documentary on awhile ago about the construction of the Golden Gate bridge and all of these points were mentioned. It was a very good documentary.
Idiot bike lanes are the most ridiculous transit project in any city’s history.
FIFY
https://i.postimg.cc/SNypr5b9/IMG-3730.jpgCouple of years down the road I fully imagine that this orphan bridge will be the roof for more homeless and drug addict people.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @indocon
Very interesting, did not know that before. You can see Jerry Brown’s wrench in the wheel of CA’s progress showed up as back as 1976. Good thing that this interchange was finally completed, it is used by tens of thousands of commuters today.
https://mashable.com/2016/05/07/building-new-york-water-supply/Steam excavators were a mid 1800s type device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_shovelWere the men low paid immigrants taking jobs away from real Americans? The William Mulholland immigrant experience in brief:William Mulholland was born in Belfast, County of Antrim, Ireland ... educated at O'Connell School by the Christian Brothers... beaten by his father for receiving bad marks in school ... off to sea. At 15, ... British Merchant Navy... After nearly losing a leg in a logging accident ... 1876 stowed away on a ship in New York bound for California ... discovered in Panama ... forced to leave the ship ... Walked over 47 miles through jungle ... arrived in Los Angeles in 1877. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland#Early_lifeI think the Erie Canal 1817-1829 was built by men with shovels and mules.Replies: @Jack D
Before the 1930s, most power equipment on a construction site would be steam powered (and cable operated) and often temporary rails would be laid for it to run on. In effect these things were steam locomotives with power accessories and the technology was a spin off from railroad development (and itself useful for building new railroads. Railroads were the driving force of the 19th century economy the way automobiles were the drivers of the 20th.
Gradually, the rails were replaced by caterpillar tracks, the steam engine with a diesel and the cable operate winches with hydraulics. As the internal combustion diesel engines developed for road use, the technology spun back into railroads and excavators and supplanted steam. Steam engines required a lot of maintenance and hand labor – feed them with coal and water, empty the ashes, etc.
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you're generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you're not generous - zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to "safely" operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Sparkon, @Jack D, @notsaying
Deaths are not the only standard. As a result of the Fukushima disaster, 80 square miles of valuable land became uninhabitable. 50,000 people lost their homes. The resulting cleanup will cost countless billions and will take many decades. There is no possible conventional power plant accident that would have those kind of ramifications.
The accident was completely foreseeable – the only question was when it would happen. They built these reactors virtually on the beach in a known tsunami zone. They put the emergency generators down in the basement. The American reactors that were similarly sited have now been shut down but this is closing the barn door after the horse is gone. Who knows what other reactors have DIFFERENT (and currently improperly evaluated) risks that will lead to a different failure mode – on a known or unknown earthquake fault, design flaw, etc. These accidents are always the result of multiple cascading failures and not just one thing.
I am well aware of who watches US nuclear plants. It could not be otherwise. People of high intelligence would go nuts with the boredom of that job, watching day after day for anomalies that should never come if everything is working as it should, gauges whose needles never seem to move. It’s like watching paint dry. The problem (as we saw at Three Mile Island) is that when the anomalies do occur, the people who are there are not equipped to diagnose and deal with the issues in real time and get overloaded with information, are mislead by false indicator lights, stymied by stuck valves, etc. They are like the 3rd world pilots who fly their planes every day as long as everything is working but when something goes wrong the amount of time they need to figure it out is greater than the amount of time they have left before the plane goes into a unrecoverable dive.
“Remember, white people, and only white people, ride bikes.”
I don’t know where you are, but in New York area a great amount of bike traffic is Hispanic and Chinese. But that’s for work. Agreed, only white people ride bikes for (1) exercise or (2) saving the world via their (imaginary) carbon footprint.
This is similar to what happened with Uber. Someone has reinvented the wheel (literally in this case) by ignoring the law. Very soon after motorized vehicles were invented, laws were enacted to cope with them because they were so much faster and more dangerous than previous vehicles. Anything with a motor had to have registration plates, the driver had to be licensed and insured, etc. The electric bike manufacturers get around this by the simple expedient of ignoring the law.
Meanwhile in Russia:
The Kerch strait bridge is both rail and road traffic, and economically ties Crimea to the Russian mainland by literally going around Ukrainian zones of control. Again, it's impressive what can be done with enough brain power, man power and cultural unity. The US could do stuff like that, except that infighting is more important to our elites than benefiting the larger society.
The ones who know how to read are not a dime a dozen. Chumba is made of leftists who decided to try to use pop music to propagandize. Your normal pop tart is (and this goes as well for the actors) a human-shaped nothing who wants to be famous and agrees to mouth phrases they do not understand.
Regarding American westward re-settlement during the 19th Century: I think the general tendency was to move from east of the Mississippi to west along lines of latitude. Los Angeles, which was much smaller than San Francisco in the 1900's, had a reputation for drawing new citizens from former Confederate states. Some of their descendants voted for Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for President.
I've needled Steve about this in the past -- what one might call D. W. Griffith's Southern California* -- but our host doesn't seem interested.
* For example, the Ku Klux Klan, more accurately labeled the second Klan -- was active and rather popular in Los Angeles in the 1920's.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @RichardTaylor, @Flip, @Old Palo Altan
My New England and New York relations who went to California all went to San Francisco and its environs.
My Texan and before that St Louis relations all went to the LA area, as did many of their friends and family. Someone should do a study of the St Louis to Texas to southern California syndrome. I’m talking about well-off people who didn’t need to move anywhere, but who recognised new opportunities for money-making. One who came from Texas to Los Angeles precisely at my own grandparent’s bidding (they had grown up together) did particularly well – his name was Conrad Hilton.
https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20131016__joecolla1.jpg?w=600
Known at the time as the Governor Jerry Brown memorial Interchange.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Thanks for the memories.
I once drove out of my way to take a look at that. Was it ever finished?
But any time the VA even rents a couple of its 495 acres to a school or whatever the vets have a fit.
Putting new stadiums in crime ridden black ghettos is part of urban renewal or whatever its called now. The liberals hope the stadiums will save blacks from themselves.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
You live in/near Brentwood?
Tell me: just how bad was the damage on Tigertail in the recent fire? My mother’s best friend lived there from birth to death, a span of over ninety years. Beautiful Spanish colonial – I’d hate to think it’s gone.
Wow! Reminds me of the Hutchinson River Bridge in the Bronx, a piddling little drawbridge 400 feet long and two lanes wide in each direction which would open for the occasional boat or barge to pass under. Took six years to refurbish. SIX!!!! Something about “labor problems?”
My God, the misunderstanding of nuclear power is astounding.
The Japanese had a mishandling of nuclear power on a tsunami that killed >10,000 people. A massive, tragic, natural disaster, that utterly destroyed several built-in layers of safety mechanisms. How many people died due to the nuclear emergency that followed? If you're generous in attributing deaths to it, one person died as a result of the nuclear meltdown. If you're not generous - zero. How many people die in other types of electrical generating plants? How could anyone with a straight face claim it is not managed safely with that impressive display? If a coal or natural gas plant destroyed by a tsunami had resulted in one death eight years later, would you consider such a plant hazardous and unfit for Woke or diverse populations?
Let me tell you this, as well. Almost all nuclear reactors in the U.S. are watched over by college dropouts or people who never went to college. And the U.S. have had zero civilian nuclear deaths, and only one military (a misguided attempt by the U.S. Army, of all things). If they can keep nuclear energy safe, just about anyone can.
Mr. D, I highly recommend you stick to matters legal. Random unsubstantiated declarations of who is capable to "safely" operate nuclear power are clearly not your forte.Replies: @Justvisiting, @Sparkon, @Jack D, @notsaying
I think the reason the world has not seen more nuclear power and nuclear weapons accidents is mostly due to sheer good. I’d say the same about why America hasn’t had another big terror attack — mostly good luck.
Yes there are people trying to keep us safe against nuclear but the forces protecting us are no match against machine and human error, which can be controlled but not eliminated — ever. For terrorism there are also people out there trying to protect us but they cannot do so every time and eventually, inevitably, they will fail someday.
To say that the nuclear power disaster in Japan was a “natural” disaster is to ignore the known risks of locating the plants by the ocean in a place subject to tsunamis. Now I see just today that the Japanese government is thinking of releasing stored and still radioactive water. What kind of a solution is that for this problem? A very poor one, to say the least, yet it will probably happen because there’s nothing else better to be done.
I think your faith in safely run nuclear power plants is misplaced. One day the good luck will run out and we will be mostly helpless to stop a terrible event from happening here or somewhere else in the world.
https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-gov%27t-proposes-fukushima-water-release-to-sea-or-air
Inherently safe options exist as proven technology. Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] ran a "Lifter" Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor [LFTR] for ~20,000 hours at pilot scale. Not only does this technology produce minimal waste, it can actually destroy nuclear waste produced by the current U235 reactors. (1)
All of the pilot project documentation still exists as public record and is being used by India and China. Due to Obama's fecklessness, the U.S. is actually helping China. (2)LFTR development in the domestic U.S. remains paralyzed by the Wind/Solar investor class, DNC elite families (Gore, Kerry, Biden, Clinton).
MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄
_________________
(1) https://energyfromthorium.com/msrp/
(2) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542526/china-details-next-gen-nuclear-reactor-program/
Don’t forget Dulles, which is outside of The Beltway. JFK is similar to LAX I think. JFK and LaGuardia are within the NYC limits and Newark is just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. I am surprised that there haven’t been more air collisions. By the way, pilots HATE LaG because of all the gyrations they have to do in order to land (I hear that Lindbergh in San Diego also sucks for pilots).
Well, in much of the “USA”, ATM machines will be likelier to ask,
“Comprende Espanol, pendejo?”
(sincerest apologies for the lack of a tilde in the word Espanol)
Chumbawamba — I remember them from a few years ago, their one hit song “Tubthumping” mentioned by Hippopotamusdrome was really good. They played it live over that year’s New Years Eve TV shows from Times Square. I wish I could hear it again live this year too. I can hear the words “I get knocked down but I get up again” in my head right now.
I don’t follow bands much anymore but I thank you for your recommendations. I disagree with John Johnson’s criticism of your comment. I am glad you made it.
But because Chicago refuses to be outdone, it does have its 300 or so miles of bikes lane set into the already narrow streets, roadway formerly meant for motor traffic. THAT is sensible infrastructure management!Replies: @MBlanc46, @Kaz, @Up2Drew, @mmack
And the task of salting down the lakefront bike paths saw a Park District truck slide into Da Lake dis month:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-respond-to-car-in-water-off-lake-shore-drive/2187816/
https://abc7chicago.com/park-district-truck-slides-into-lake-michigan-near-oak-street-beach/5746525/
Good point, but factor in the cost of Uber or taxi to and from the airport on both ends, if you fly instead of driving.
That’s four Uber rides at a minimum, easily bringing that $110 cost to $250-300 (depending how far you live from LAX, Long Beach, or Burbank airport, and how far your SF hotel/destination is from SFO).
This time I took the city bus to LAX. A friend was going to take me. But Friday there was something in the news that it was taking an hour and 1/2 from the freeway off ramp to the terminals. I didn’t want him to go through such an ordeal in and out so I took the bus. 35 cents senior student fare I think about 75 cents adult.
Virgo was used for about 500 years, then restored after 1000 years of disuse. Now used for multiple fountains and landscape watering.
In terms of continuous use without major restorations, it doesn’t look like any Roman aqueducts qualify other than perhaps the first section of one in Spain.
http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htmReplies: @Known Fact
Calling Ozone Park NY’s dreary racetrack “Aqueduct” has never ceased to puzzle and amuse me
My understanding is that the majority of both migrations was midwestern in origin, with especially the northwest taking people primarily of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic descent. California probably received a larger relative proportion of Anglo-Irish (or Scots-Irish). Of course, rural and inland California was overwhelmed by Oklahomans in the 1930s, so its original population is not as much of a factor.
As far as the Civil War is concerned, the entire state stayed Union, but Southern California (like Arizona) was a hotbed of Southern sympathy, while Northern California was emphatically pro-Union. That is probably the first of the major intrastate north-south tensions, some of which Mr. Sailer has written about over the years.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @anonn
Misleading re: the civil war. In 1860, there were only 10k people in LA County as a whole – and back then LA County included Ventura, Orange, and parts of San Bernardino Counties as well. Of the non-Indian residents, most were still Californios (mestizo colonists from Mexico). A tiny handful of people, around 50, left to volunteer for the Confederacy.
It was such a “hotbed” of pro-slavery activism that, for the early part of the war, it was successfully garrisoned by 1 (one) Army officer. This was still the frontier. People who moved here did so in order to make a new life for themselves.
In the end California’s entire contribution to the Civil War was simply mining gold and paying taxes; we did raise a company that went out and occupied a small part of Arizona.
One of the problems with the study of history is that we over-emphasize wars since they’re great reading. What actually happened to So. Cal. in the Civil War is much less romantic: a bunch of people in the letter to the editor demographic wrote letters to the editor; a few pro-slavery malcontents went back to where they came from; some tiny military units were raised to relieve the general US Army from the burden of patrolling the overland trade routes.
Tesla makes buses now?
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/18/reverse-mortgages-leave-families-battling-property-after-death/2597369001/
Apparently Ron's last software update prevents commenters from commenting on their own comments, so unfortunately, this will appear way late in the thread.Replies: @Known Fact
You can’t comment on your own comment at Unz anymore? Hasn’t he heard Dorothy Parker explain that “Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”
Texas has its share of Germans as well.
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1209068939868876805?s=20Replies: @anon
Impressive what can be done with proper engineering and full backing of a government that actually wants things done right the first time. The Kerch strait isn’t that deep, so bridge building is straight forward. The Germans during WW II built a kind of long cable driven rig, it probably looked like a really big amusement park ride with some sightseeing gondolas on it. Such a system could not transfer much of anything, but did get people across and back.
The Kerch strait bridge is both rail and road traffic, and economically ties Crimea to the Russian mainland by literally going around Ukrainian zones of control. Again, it’s impressive what can be done with enough brain power, man power and cultural unity. The US could do stuff like that, except that infighting is more important to our elites than benefiting the larger society.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-respond-to-car-in-water-off-lake-shore-drive/2187816/
https://abc7chicago.com/park-district-truck-slides-into-lake-michigan-near-oak-street-beach/5746525/Replies: @JMcG
A crane drove off a pier in the Galapagos lately, sinking a fuel barge and causing an oil spill in one of the most ecologically significant places on earth. Apparently not significant enough to be careful though.
I once drove out of my way to take a look at that. Was it ever finished?Replies: @Mr. Anon
It was eventually. I remember it happening after Deukmajian became governor, but I might be mistaken – it might have happened while Governor Moonbeam was still in office.
Yes there are people trying to keep us safe against nuclear but the forces protecting us are no match against machine and human error, which can be controlled but not eliminated -- ever. For terrorism there are also people out there trying to protect us but they cannot do so every time and eventually, inevitably, they will fail someday.
To say that the nuclear power disaster in Japan was a "natural" disaster is to ignore the known risks of locating the plants by the ocean in a place subject to tsunamis. Now I see just today that the Japanese government is thinking of releasing stored and still radioactive water. What kind of a solution is that for this problem? A very poor one, to say the least, yet it will probably happen because there's nothing else better to be done.
I think your faith in safely run nuclear power plants is misplaced. One day the good luck will run out and we will be mostly helpless to stop a terrible event from happening here or somewhere else in the world.
https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-gov%27t-proposes-fukushima-water-release-to-sea-or-airReplies: @A123
The current fleet of nuclear reactors are based on U235, because they also produce Plutonium. The Cold War option, not the best & safe one.
Inherently safe options exist as proven technology. Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] ran a “Lifter” Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor [LFTR] for ~20,000 hours at pilot scale. Not only does this technology produce minimal waste, it can actually destroy nuclear waste produced by the current U235 reactors. (1)
All of the pilot project documentation still exists as public record and is being used by India and China. Due to Obama’s fecklessness, the U.S. is actually helping China. (2)
LFTR development in the domestic U.S. remains paralyzed by the Wind/Solar investor class, DNC elite families (Gore, Kerry, Biden, Clinton).
MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄
_________________
(1) https://energyfromthorium.com/msrp/
(2) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542526/china-details-next-gen-nuclear-reactor-program/
I don’t know where you are, but in New York area a great amount of bike traffic is Hispanic and Chinese. But that’s for work. Agreed, only white people ride bikes for (1) exercise or (2) saving the world via their (imaginary) carbon footprint.Replies: @Jack D
The GrubHub drivers are not really riding bikes, they are driving illegal electric motorcycles in the bike lane.
This is similar to what happened with Uber. Someone has reinvented the wheel (literally in this case) by ignoring the law. Very soon after motorized vehicles were invented, laws were enacted to cope with them because they were so much faster and more dangerous than previous vehicles. Anything with a motor had to have registration plates, the driver had to be licensed and insured, etc. The electric bike manufacturers get around this by the simple expedient of ignoring the law.
Your vision almost came into being for a time.
Before the advent of the automobile in the latter 19th and early 20th century, the big thing being pushed to replace the horse for personal transit in the 1880’s & 90’s was the bicycle. They were even looking at constructing paved roads between the major cities just for bike traffic.
Of course, the internal combustion engine was developed which resulted in the automobile and motorbike, and the plain bicycle got largely left to the wayside.
The velocipede, as it was then known, was a big deal since it made heretofore unexpected demands for production technique, rubber tires, and metallurgy. It also was a boon to gunmakers both because it improved steelmaking (Reynolds 531 is still the thing to use for shotgun barrels) and created a demand for effective small handguns for dispatching attacking canines, which might or might not have been rabid, and if they were and bit you, you were doomed to a very painful inevitable certain death.
That in turn inspired the Sullivan Law in NYC. Italians were more velocipede oriented than Irish, purportedly, and since any prudent wheelman carried a revolver (they even made a special cartridge called the .22 Velo Dog) it gave them an excuse to jail any Italian not imprudent enough not to pack his trusty dog-dispaching bulldog wheelgun.
Early automobiles might have been internal combustion, steam, or electric, of course, but by WWI and the invention of the electric starter, electrics and steam died out. But bicycle technology greatly improved prospects for making both successful automobiles, and some other form of transportation that a couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton pursued for a while.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Bicycle_two_1886.jpg/800px-Bicycle_two_1886.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/Velocipedes.png/800px-Velocipedes.png
Tell me: just how bad was the damage on Tigertail in the recent fire? My mother's best friend lived there from birth to death, a span of over ninety years. Beautiful Spanish colonial - I'd hate to think it's gone.Replies: @Alden
Near Brentwood, but sorry I don’t know much about the fire damage.
That's four Uber rides at a minimum, easily bringing that $110 cost to $250-300 (depending how far you live from LAX, Long Beach, or Burbank airport, and how far your SF hotel/destination is from SFO).Replies: @Alden
Friends usually drive me to the airport. I’m only 8 miles. There’s a bus stop 3 blocks away that goes right to the airport, makes pretty good time before 4/pm. SFO has BART subway to different stops near hotels downtown San Francisco. And San Mateo San Francisco BART isn’t like the East Bay BART full of black thugs.
This time I took the city bus to LAX. A friend was going to take me. But Friday there was something in the news that it was taking an hour and 1/2 from the freeway off ramp to the terminals. I didn’t want him to go through such an ordeal in and out so I took the bus. 35 cents senior student fare I think about 75 cents adult.
Monday spent 45 minutes waiting for a shuttle bus to the terminals at LAX. I believe the airport didn’t buy any new shuttle buses to service their far away outposts.
Merry Christmas to all Happy Hanukkah to all and enjoy whatever winter holiday that does not offend you.
I once thought of a greeting card. White card stock with a white abstract design that wouldn’t offend Muslims or anyone else.
Inside embossed greeting. Happy Whatever Winter Holiday doesn’t offend you.
White men have been banned from working at LAX. What does one expect with an all affirmative action workforce?
In the news Friday night it was taking more than an hour & 1/2 to get from the freeway off ramp to the terminals because of holiday traffic.Replies: @Anonymous
Burying propane tanks is a good idea. It isn’t that expensive. If you have a million dollar house,$25K for a big tank, burial, a wet leg pump for filling tanks and a small propane gen set seems reasonable to me.
Most of my neighbors have company owned tanks because they are cheap and lazy. I bought a used “conning tower” tank and had it buried and plumbed and that’s why I pay a fair bit less a gallon than they do. I don’t have the fill pump yet because I’m going to have to run the tank dry to have it installed. Then I intend to build one last hot rod with a propane tank so I can have a year of fuel stashed away. New light duty propane vehicles are not in these last couple of years, the only current certified vehicles are school buses. I’m thinking a square body Chevy with an analog LS6-get rid of the electronics and run a Impco mixer on a 4bbl aftermarket manifold and a distributor on a circle track front cover or go EDIS. Anyone have any thoughts? I already have a pile of Impco stuff and a tank off a Schwann truck in the shed.
That in turn inspired the Sullivan Law in NYC. Italians were more velocipede oriented than Irish, purportedly, and since any prudent wheelman carried a revolver (they even made a special cartridge called the .22 Velo Dog) it gave them an excuse to jail any Italian not imprudent enough not to pack his trusty dog-dispaching bulldog wheelgun.
Early automobiles might have been internal combustion, steam, or electric, of course, but by WWI and the invention of the electric starter, electrics and steam died out. But bicycle technology greatly improved prospects for making both successful automobiles, and some other form of transportation that a couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton pursued for a while.Replies: @S
Thanks for the intriguing history surrounding the bicycle (ie velocipede). I had not been aware of the specially developed anti-canine Velo dog guns and ammunition, though it makes sense. One has to be prepared for all comers when cycling!
The velocipede/bicycle is very much an unheralded major component of the technological transition from the horse and buggy to the automobile, motorbike, and as you allude, even the airplane.
If oil had not been quite so easily accessible and economical, it makes for a fascinating ‘what if’ alternative history regarding the bike.
As things were actually developing, sans all that oil, with the creation of the ‘safety’ bicycle (ie the modern bicycle) in the latter 19th century, and their economic mass production resulting in the ‘bicycle craze’ of the 1890’s, the 20th century could well have evolved into ‘the century of the bicycle’ instead of ‘the century of the automobile’.
Alas, we’ll never know.
Some examples of velocipedes in Washington DC (1886) and from a German encyclopedia (1887):
Yes, and Czechs.
Not trying to be all Corvinusy with a reflexive contradiction, but it depends on the pilot. Some like LGA (and DCA), its fun hand flying the airplane a little bit and keeping your skills sharp. It takes some skill to arrive at a certain place at the right altitude and the right airspeed. The pilots that don’t like flying more challenging approaches (and by “more challenging”, I mean “only slightly more challenging – for example the river visual to 13 at LaGarbage requires a slightly more than 90 degree turn typically at 3,300 feet…BFD) tend to be the pilots without a lot of confidence in their skills or that have gotten overly dependent on automation.
It’s OK to be Happy.