Month: July 2021

There's more controversy over California's Bullet Train to Nowhere™! The proximate issue is whether the train should be powered by overhead electric lines, like every other high-speed train in the world, or whether we should consider powering it via batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Either of these, you see, would save money because we wouldn't have to build all the electrical lines. And that would get us ever closer to—

The bullet train project is attempting to build a 171-mile operating segment between Bakersfield and Merced for $22.8 billion, which would consume nearly all of the existing funds for the project through 2030. The project is short $80 billion to execute the original vision of a 220-mph train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which voters approved by passing Proposition 1A in 2008.

Oh, right. This whole thing is literally a nit compared to the vast funding gap that nobody has the slightest idea how to fill. But if we all clap our hands loudly enough, somehow everything will be OK.

Noted without comment:

New Zealand suspends travel bubble with Australia

The quarantine-free travel corridor will close for eight weeks as a delta outbreak that began in Sydney imperils the nation’s earlier success in containing the pandemic.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Every once in a while I like to take a look back at my predictions from 2012. Here's one of them:

The fact of climate change will become undeniable. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.

Hmmm. Not bad! The predictions were for 2024, and this year's world-gone-mad weather might well be the starting point of a change in outlook even among wingnut Republicans. We'll see.

I was slogging through some old photos last night looking for something else when I ran across a set of Milky Way pictures that I took a few years ago up in northern California. I tried stacking them at the time, but had little success.

However, I now have better stacking tools and better noise-reduction tools, and it struck me that I should give these images another try. The sky, after all, was easily the best and clearest I've ever had. So here it is. As you can see, the clear sky made far more stars visible than in other Milky Way photos I've taken, which is either good or bad depending on your personal preference. In either case, the core is very nicely rendered and the tail looks fairly good too.

I will be experimenting with a whole new region for night photography in a couple of weeks. We'll see how it works out.

This is bad:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced new legislation today that aims to finally hold tech companies responsible for allowing misinformation about vaccines and other health issues to spread online.

The bill, called the Health Misinformation Act and co-sponsored by Sen. Ray Luján (D-NM), would create an exception to the landmark internet law Section 230, which has always shielded tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter from being sued over almost any of the content people post on their platforms.

Klobuchar’s bill would change that — but only when a social media platform’s algorithm promotes health misinformation related to an “existing public health emergency.” The legislation tasks the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to define health misinformation in these scenarios.

I'm not a fan of Facebook, but that's because of its endlessly dishonest approach to user privacy. At the same time, though, I have to admit that the American public doesn't agree with me. As near as I can tell, the vast majority of Facebook users would be willing to sell every intimate detail of their lives to Facebook in return for $1 off their next purchase from iTunes.

But content is a whole different thing. My guideline here is simple: If you're willing to allow Fox News to do something, then you should be willing to allow Facebook (or Google or Twitter) to do it. If Facebook wants to allow its users to spread vaccine disinformation, that's their right. And the rest of us have the right to fight back against that. We can pressure Facebook, we can boycott Facebook, and we can make Mark Zuckerberg persona non grata in polite company. What's more, President Biden can express any opinion he wants about Facebook. Ditto for every yahoo in Congress.

But government regulation? Forget it. And Amy Klobuchar should forget it too unless she's willing to suggest the same treatment for books, magazines, letters to the editor at the New York Times, and soapbox speeches on the Washington mall.

I have no problem with any kind of (legal) private action against Facebook. I also have no problem with things like antitrust investigations against Facebook. But can't we all agree that the government should stay very far away from any kind of content-based regulation of anyone?

Just a quick observation about the congressional investigation of the 1/6 insurrection: it doesn't matter where it's held or who's on the committee. Regardless of whether it's held in the Senate or the House; or whether it's bipartisan or not; the end result was always going to be separate reports. There would be a majority report from the Democrats and a minority report from the Republicans.

So ignore all the fake drama. In a few months we'll get two reports just like we were always going to get. Fox News will spend 90% of its time on three or four paragraphs from the minority report while the rest of us who don't live in Murdochville will read the majority report and, once again, be shocked at what the Republican Party has become.

Note to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: If you want to run for president in 2024—and we all know you do—maybe you should cut out the "Don't Fauci My Florida" crap and listen to the guy instead:

And for those who like to point out that the death rate from COVID-19 is lower than it used to be, that's true. But here's a rerun of the list of "long COVID" nasties that can affect you even if you survive:

• Loss of smell or taste
• Depression or anxiety
• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Tiredness or fatigue
• Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
• Chest or stomach pain
• Erectile dysfunction
• Headache
• Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
• Joint or muscle pain
• Pins-and-needles feeling
• Diarrhea
• Sleep problems
• Dizziness on standing (lightheadedness)
• Change in smell or taste
• Changes in period cycles
• Blood clots
• Strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome
• Multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions
• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS)

A higher infection rate is no joke. Even if COVID-19 doesn't kill you, it can still make your life pretty miserable.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Many of the wildfires in northern California are started by sparks from PG&E transmission lines crossing national forests. The law says that PG&E is supposed to clear the land around these lines, but for years they didn't bother and even today they aren't keeping up. Today, however, they announced that they were taking more serious action:

PG&E Corp. said Wednesday that it plans to bury 10,000 miles of power lines to reduce wildfire risk throughout Northern California at an estimated cost of up to $20 billion, reversing its earlier stance that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

....“We know that we have long argued that undergrounding was too expensive,” Chief Executive Patti Poppe said. “This is where we say it’s too expensive not to underground. Lives are on the line.”

That's 10,000 miles out of a total of 20,000 miles of high-voltage lines. It's a good start, though PG&E hasn't announced their schedule for finishing the work.

It's also probably cost effective work, since PG&E has been losing so much money to lawsuits that $20 billion is a pretty good investment for them.