Month: January 2025

Another note about the Pacific Palisades fire. You may have seen pictures of roads choked with cars and wondered why there wasn't better evacuation planning. Maybe there should have been, but here's what the Palisades looks like:

There just aren't very many ways out. Aside from tiny Bowdoin St., there's Sunset Boulevard running through the middle and Pacific Coast Highway to the south. That's pretty much it. In the event of a massive evacuation, there just aren't many options for moving a lot of people to safety.

But it's worth noting that, despite some apparent mistakes, they got everyone out. Not a single person died during the evacuation.

How do you get water up to high elevations in order to fight fires? Answer: build big water tanks even higher up. This is what Los Angeles does, and its network of tanks includes three million-gallon tanks near Pacific Palisades, site of the worst of LA's massive wildfires.

The tanks were all filled last week, but the Pacific Palisades fire was so big—enormously bigger than any previous fire in the area—that they ran out of water yesterday. Rick Caruso (yes, him again) is apoplectic:

Caruso, a former DWP commissioner, blasted the city for infrastructure that struggled to meet firefighting demands.

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said with exasperation. Through Tuesday night, he expressed similar criticism in a series of live interviews with local TV stations. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen.”

This got me curious. Before today, has Caruso ever mentioned anything about these tanks? Did he ever push for more of them, or for them to be bigger?

As near as I can tell, no. In fact, I can't find any evidence that anyone ever uttered a peep about the tanks or showed the slightest concern about them. After all, they've never run dry before and this is hardly the first fire to hit the Palisades. But now? Suddenly everyone is an expert in water tankology.

Politico reports on the politics of LA's enormous fires:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faced mounting criticism Wednesday for her handling of deadly wildfires that continued to rage across the region, taking blame from influential city figures as she traveled back from a trip to Africa.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post.... The prominent publisher’s condemnation came after moderate Democrat Rick Caruso, a real estate mogul who lost his mayoral bid to Bass in 2022, spent the morning making local TV appearances blasting Bass for traveling to Ghana, despite reports as early as last week about an impending wind storm.

I don't care one way or another about Karen Bass, but I sure am tired of this nonsense about politicians having to personally be there whenever a natural disaster breaks out in their neck of the woods. Both sides play this childish game and it's ridiculous. The LAFD doesn't need personal direction from Karen Bass to do its job, and if it did Bass is available 24/7 via the miracle of modern technology.

In this case the criticism is coming from Patrick Soon-Shiong, who's obviously trying to curry favor with Donald Trump, and Rick Caruso, who wishes he were mayor. What's the point of taking either of them seriously?

Here's another picture of a horse. It's from the same place as my Thanksgiving horse, but it's a different horse. It was very sociable, this horse.

In the American Time Use Survey, there are three big categories of time spent with non-family members (other than work): civic/religious activities, volunteering, and socializing.  Here's what that looks like over the past 20 years:

Time spent with others is fairly flat until 2010. Since then it's been declining rapidly, helped along by a big drop during the pandemic that we never recovered from. Today we spend less than hour per day in social activities, a drop of 25% since the beginning of the century.

Brandon Gill attended Dartmouth, where he headed the infamously conservative Dartmouth Review. After graduation he founded the D.C. Enquirer. He's married to Dinesh D'Souza's daughter. A couple of years ago he moved from New York to Texas in order to run for Congress. In November he won. He's young conservative royalty.

Where do conservatives come up with such a steady stream of these people? They're willing to pretend support for anything with no apparent embarrassment. It's remarkable.

This paper has been making the rounds lately:

Let's assume this is true. Los Angeles has roughly two million apartment units and adds about 10,000 new ones each year. If, through some herculean effort, LA managed to increase this by 20x, it would amount to 200,000 new units. This in turn would....

....reduce rents by about $50 per month. That's barely noticeable. It's less than 1% of the median household income.

This is why I think the prospect of bringing down rents in big cities is close to hopeless. Even a gargantuan construction boom would have only a tiny effect in the face of steady demand.

It may be true that cities like LA and New York need to build way more housing, but even if they do it won't make them much more affordable for young families that really, really want to live there. In places like this, ironically, the cost of housing is determined less by supply than by the very fact that so many people really, really want to live there.

I went out to buy some eggs this afternoon but my local Ralph's didn't have any. Not at any price. Bird flu is hitting hard here in California.

But then I went to my local Gelson's and picked up a dozen eggs for $6.49. Using the rule of thumb that everything at Gelson's is overpriced by about 25%, this suggests that eggs are currently going for about $5.20.

Is this expensive? Indeed so. But how expensive. In addition to bird flu, here in California all our eggs are cage-free by law, so they always cost more than most places. And it turns out the range of prices for eggs is pretty astounding. Here's what the USDA says they cost last week:

These are nationwide averages. The price reported monthly by the BLS is an average of all of these except for organic+free range and pasture raised. They don't say how this is weighted, but their November price was $3.65, which suggests no weighting at all. It's just a straight-up average of five different types. So if you're OK with regular old eggs, you're paying only a bit more than half the headline price that's reported by the BLS and picked up in news reports everywhere.

In North Carolina's Supreme Court race, Democrat Allison Riggs beat Republican Jefferson Griffin by 625 votes. Griffin demanded a recount, and Riggs expanded her lead to 734 votes.

So it's over? Riggs won? By no means:

Griffin has also filed election protests against 60,000 ballots in all 100 counties that could extend the race indefinitely. Among the ballots he challenged were those cast by Riggs’ own parents.... He is also challenging a state law that allows people who live overseas but have never resided in the state to cast a ballot if their parents are registered to vote here.... Then just 15 minutes before the State Board of Elections hearing on November 26, Griffin filed a motion seeking to disqualify one of the three Democratic board members.

Welcome to the world Donald Trump built. Never admit defeat no matter what.

The hell of it is that this race won't even affect control of the court. If Riggs wins, it will still have a 5-2 Republican majority. It's all even more pointless than it seems.

When I was out in the desert last week taking a picture of the Heart Nebula, I also did another test run of the Milky Way with my regular camera. To give you an idea of what I photographed, here's a diagram of our galaxy:

During the summer, Earth is pointed toward the galactic core at night. That's when you can take a picture of the bright core of the Milky Way. In winter, Earth is pointed toward the outside universe where there's not a lot to see. But as you can tell from the diagram, if you look toward the horizon in winter you can see the Perseus Arm, one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. It's not as bright as the core, and it's barely visible to the naked eye even under dark skies, but you can take a picture of it.

My method was the same as last month. I can't get my little mount to point precisely at the north pole, so I just aim it as close to Polaris as I can via eyeball and then set the altitude to 34° since that's the latitude around here. This time I set the camera for three-minute exposures, and that was a little too much. If you click on the picture you can see that the stars are a little streaky toward the top. In the future I'll stick to two minutes.