If they're planning to do it on their own dime and bring the gas in in trucks, it's going to be hard to stop them... on the other hand, there's no way in hell they can make money doing that, so tying them up in red tape until they realize it's a money-loser will probably stop them. If they do do the conversion, they'll end up shutting it down anyway, since there's no way for it to be profitable given the trucking costs.
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If they're planning to do it on their own dime and bring the gas in in trucks, it's going to be hard to stop them... on the other hand, there's no way in hell they can make money doing that, so tying them up in red tape until they realize it's a money-loser will probably stop them. If they do do the conversion, they'll end up shutting it down anyway, since there's no way for it to be profitable given the trucking costs.
This is mostly because the rail network was ripped out. Due to government-subsidized trucking. We used to have more than 4 times the rail network capacity. It's a sad story of short-term thinking.
What made the difference was containerized freight. Before that the railroads were going bankrupt and shutting down routes. Since then they have re-opened just about every abandoned route that makes sense and they can't keep up with demand. Between 1990 and 2000 the amount of freight moved by trains in the US went up close to 60%.
Containerized freight has also made it economical for Asian manufacturers to ship cargo to Europe first by shipping to the west coast of the US, put it on a train, then reloading it on a ship on the east coast. That's cheaper than shipping via ship all the way.
It's more a story infrastructure expansion not keeping up with demand than infrastructure getting torn apart.
Lucky_Man
Member
There is one among the leaders of the free world that may have (re)discovered an ugly solution - the orange one:
Trump and Bolton: Two fat heads with itchy trigger fingers and 120,000 troops
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
They are trying to push through a new pipeline to the plant. Trucking is supposed to be a temporary solution.
This is, unfortunately, untrue. There are plenty of abandoned routes which would make sense to reopen, but once the route has been sold off piecemeal to neighboring property owners and buildings have been built on top of it, it's HARD. The only ones which have been reopened are the "easy" ones where the right-of-way was kept intact. The ones where the ROW was broken up have almost never been reopened when it would make sense.
Even a few of the ones with significant retained ROW were not restored (the most notable being the "Pathway Across the Hudson", which was a primary freight rail route to New England), often because the route further onward had been ripped out. New England still has an unusually high percentage of freight moved by truck because there's no way for freight rail to cross the Hudson south of Albany.
Well, not really. I also know the history of containerization -- unfortunately, lots of valuable rail routes were completely destroyed, and the land sold off, well before that. Most of the really serious losses were in the 1950s and early 1960s when no effort was made to preserve the ROW of abandoned lines.
Since the mid-1970s, laws were enacted to give priority to various methods of "mothballing" lines rather than building on top of them, and the lines closed since *then* have mostly been reopened where useful. But there were some really major losses in the 1950s and 1960s which would be useful today, if you could reassemble the right-of-way and demolish the buildings built on top of it.
I don't think they have a chance in hell of getting a new pipeline built. We definitely need to work on this, but our local activists have been remarkably effective at stopping gas pipeline construction by finding all the holes in the EIRs.
There was a good radio interviewer who had funny taglines for his show who for a while was using "for all those space aliens out there coming to eat us, eat the Canadians first, they're the free range North Americans."
We aren't big meat eaters, but we aren't vegetarians either. We do try to eat as locally as possible and buy as much organic as possible. I've been trying to grow my own fruit. I have turn our quarter acre into an orchard, but I'm not very good at it.
I never wanted children so I didn't contribute that way.
Warmer rivers are not good for fish evolved to live in cold water. It's also an open invitation for invasive species to move in. The dams have already been hard on salmon.
The impact of warmer water from the Mekong is more of a problem than the Columbia. Many of the rivers of SE Asia empty into the South China Sea which is fairly shallow and I don't believe has many strong currents flowing through the main part of the sea. Pouring warmer water into the sea is going to have more of an impact than a warmer Columbia.
Along the west coast of North America, the continental shelf is almost at the coastline. Plus there is the strong tropical current flowing south to north just off the coast. Warmer water from the Columbia has a wide area to disperse into some fairly strong currents. The Pacific is being warmed a little, but natural variations in the tropical current are probably a bigger influence by an order of magnitude or more.
That tropical current drives the weather for North America west of the Rockies. The current goes and stalls out in the Aleutians where it mixes with water coming through the Aleutians from the Arctic and it creates some of the wildest weather in the world. It is also where a lot of American fishing is done because fish thrive in that environment. The water evaporating off the ocean there turns into storms and brings most of the moisture to western North America.
I'm probably more guilty of rambling than you are.
There was a good radio interviewer who had funny taglines for his show who for a while was using "for all those space aliens out there coming to eat us, eat the Canadians first, they're the free range North Americans."
We aren't big meat eaters, but we aren't vegetarians either. We do try to eat as locally as possible and buy as much organic as possible. I've been trying to grow my own fruit. I have turn our quarter acre into an orchard, but I'm not very good at it.
I never wanted children so I didn't contribute that way.
Warmer rivers are not good for fish evolved to live in cold water. It's also an open invitation for invasive species to move in. The dams have already been hard on salmon.
The impact of warmer water from the Mekong is more of a problem than the Columbia. Many of the rivers of SE Asia empty into the South China Sea which is fairly shallow and I don't believe has many strong currents flowing through the main part of the sea. Pouring warmer water into the sea is going to have more of an impact than a warmer Columbia.
Along the west coast of North America, the continental shelf is almost at the coastline. Plus there is the strong tropical current flowing south to north just off the coast. Warmer water from the Columbia has a wide area to disperse into some fairly strong currents. The Pacific is being warmed a little, but natural variations in the tropical current are probably a bigger influence by an order of magnitude or more.
That tropical current drives the weather for North America west of the Rockies. The current goes and stalls out in the Aleutians where it mixes with water coming through the Aleutians from the Arctic and it creates some of the wildest weather in the world. It is also where a lot of American fishing is done because fish thrive in that environment. The water evaporating off the ocean there turns into storms and brings most of the moisture to western North America.
I'm probably more guilty of rambling than you are.
Both of you, ramble on and thrive, whether reproductive or not. (Vucan symbol needed here All I can do: V.) But I mumble on.
nuclearfusion
Member
A brief synopsis of the energy input into agriculture:
Agriculture and Energy Consumption | FoodPrint
Agriculture and Energy Consumption | FoodPrint
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Cows burp more than they fart, and of course that's not part of the fossil fuel input I was referencing.
BTW, JRP -- problem solved, gas peaker plan is dead. No gas peakers.
New plan is datacenters + solar farms.
Plans in motion to convert Cayuga Power Plant to data center
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Thanks for the heads up, great news, though I do hope they incorporate some battery storage. Seems as if a data center would require such anyway. Hopefully there is no holdup from NYPA.
Putin will doubtless go down in history as the premier counter espionage figure. Not only did he probably determine the outcome of the last presidential election in the U.S., but he has now determined who are traitors to mother Russia based on evidence to be provided by William Barr.
Normally I avoid such bold assertions, especially the latter, since there is enough manufactured paranoia mixed with real fears, but new evidence emerges daily.
On the first point. Obviously there are many factors determining Hillary’s loss and many, including herself, are more important determinants than the many factors leading to the shift of a mere 14,000 or so votes in a few key states. Also more powerful is Comey’s bumbling interventions. But when there are many factors, some incidental forces may be crucial. We now know from court filings that Paul Manafort gave Russian operatives information on private campaign polling and crucially in states where those 14,000 votes were to be found.
When on a knife edge, local perturbations become causal, future historians may conclude.
On the second point about Trump’s recent memorandum weaponizing with classified documents his war on Mueller, my paranoia has become real fear along with notice our intelligence services have the same concerns.
Potential Clash Over Secrets Looms Between Justice Dept. and C.I.A.
The specific individual referenced may already be blown. There has been one report a highly placed Russian intelligence official was hooded and removed from a meeting with his peers in Moscow. (Hooded because they feared his hand to hand combat skill.)
We must always remember and repeat what really happened. Here is a good summary of what initiated our Russian probe.
Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation
A stretch for relevance here, but the markets will eventually go even more haywire when the proverbial hits the fan at the top. If you thought Nixon's dirty tricks over the top, stay tuned for the 2019-2020 campaigns.
Normally I avoid such bold assertions, especially the latter, since there is enough manufactured paranoia mixed with real fears, but new evidence emerges daily.
On the first point. Obviously there are many factors determining Hillary’s loss and many, including herself, are more important determinants than the many factors leading to the shift of a mere 14,000 or so votes in a few key states. Also more powerful is Comey’s bumbling interventions. But when there are many factors, some incidental forces may be crucial. We now know from court filings that Paul Manafort gave Russian operatives information on private campaign polling and crucially in states where those 14,000 votes were to be found.
When on a knife edge, local perturbations become causal, future historians may conclude.
On the second point about Trump’s recent memorandum weaponizing with classified documents his war on Mueller, my paranoia has become real fear along with notice our intelligence services have the same concerns.
Potential Clash Over Secrets Looms Between Justice Dept. and C.I.A.
The specific individual referenced may already be blown. There has been one report a highly placed Russian intelligence official was hooded and removed from a meeting with his peers in Moscow. (Hooded because they feared his hand to hand combat skill.)
We must always remember and repeat what really happened. Here is a good summary of what initiated our Russian probe.
Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation
A stretch for relevance here, but the markets will eventually go even more haywire when the proverbial hits the fan at the top. If you thought Nixon's dirty tricks over the top, stay tuned for the 2019-2020 campaigns.
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lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
It is exactly what it looks like. Nothing more and nothing less.
As for Putin, he must be fond of jujitsu as he is using our ever growing corrupt core momentum against us. We are becoming a sad shadow of what this nation once was. There was a time when this type of crap was getting close to the fan and the justice department went to work on how to best protect the democracy while removing the cancer (first Agnew then Nixon) and now the JD is being put to work on the cancer's hit list. (Yes, I know the FBI had been used by a previous administration for the same purposes). And the Senate just lines up behind the cancer for fear of being primary'd.
Very strange days indeed and Prof you are not being hyperbolic. It is exactly what it looks like.
As for Putin, he must be fond of jujitsu as he is using our ever growing corrupt core momentum against us. We are becoming a sad shadow of what this nation once was. There was a time when this type of crap was getting close to the fan and the justice department went to work on how to best protect the democracy while removing the cancer (first Agnew then Nixon) and now the JD is being put to work on the cancer's hit list. (Yes, I know the FBI had been used by a previous administration for the same purposes). And the Senate just lines up behind the cancer for fear of being primary'd.
Very strange days indeed and Prof you are not being hyperbolic. It is exactly what it looks like.
It isn't just Russia doing the manipulation. I heard on NPR yesterday about a study done on the EU elections and social media manipulation. He said tracking down who was behind all the extreme right social media traffic was difficult, but he was able to run most of it in Spain to two people operating independently. One was a pensioner living on one of Spain's outer islands and the other was a young kid also living in Spain.
The grassroots have taken a page from the Russians and run with it.
Modern technology has exposed a flaw in democracy. For those of us who grew up before the internet was a big thing, news outlets were limited. There were always fringe magazines and newspapers, but you had to seek them out. When I was at Boeing, there was a machinist's union strike and the American Socialist Party was distributing a newsprint flyer with their "news" and one circulated our office (I was on the engineering side and we weren't all that affected by the strike). I found it a fascinating bit of propaganda. The fact I knew the source and someone had to make the effort to print them up limited the scope of the impact this sort of literature could have.
Most of the news we were exposed to was produced by professional journalists who worked under a code of ethics. There was always spin on the news, but anybody running wild with a story and making things up would be caught and crucified by the rest of the news media, so the news stayed in a relatively narrow band. Because everything was vetted for accuracy, we believed that, at minimum, the broad strokes of the news were accurate. Details were often wrong, but the core story was correct.
The ways the news got things wrong was brought home to me when I was in high school and there was a high profile kidnapping in my home town. This being the Los Angeles media market, it was the lead story on all the news for weeks. My parents knew the girl's grandparents, so they got the details of the story directly from the family. The local news could never get the city right.
There is something odd about Monterey Park, CA. It seems even Angelinos have no idea where it is, even though I grew up only 10 miles from Los Angeles city hall and 5 miles from Dodger Stadium. When we had the issues with Tieman I tried to calm things a bit when I noticed he had taught in literally the city next door and even he couldn't get the name of Monterey Park right, calling it Monterey Heights (which was old name of the town, changed in the 1920s).
Anyway, the local news got the core highlights right. She was a young girl who had been kidnapped from a prominent family. The news got where she was from wrong, her exact age, and some other details, but the overall story was correct.
When the first Gulf War happened, I watched the coverage on the CBC out of Vancouver, BC because I thought they gave a much more balanced coverage. The US coverage was always waving the flag, but they did get the core facts right.
During the 90s this began to change. People without training in how to distinguish a factual story from opinion, most will get them confused. This is especially true for those who don't have an advanced education. The new conservative media empires took advantage of this and package opinion as news. First with talk radio programs like Rush Limbaugh, and then with Fox News.
They were able to mold public opinion among those who would listen to them, but critically they also got those who wouldn't believe their stuff to distrust all news sources. The political world became a zone where fact and opinion became muddied and conservative talking points controlled the narratives in politics.
This fracturing of the norms was done with discipline by right wing media. Rodger Ailes had meetings every morning where he drilled that day's talking points into the heads of every on air personality. It was all done to help Republicans win.
But the fractures continued and the news media became very balkanized. With the internet, the bar for getting into the news business was lowered dramatically. It opened the door for some serious, good journalism like fivethirtyeight.com but it also opened the door for any extremist with a little bit of skill with video editing to create some pretty serious looking work that was factually BS. For example one video making the rounds in the EU elections put up by extremist right wing anti-immigrant types show a group of angry immigrants tearing apart a police car in a riot. It's a clip from an old movie. It never happened.
The Russians have also been able to weaponize this to their advantage, setting up a center in St Petersburg to chum the waters and destabilize democracies.
The upside in all this is the Millennials seem to be more immune to this type of reality manipulation than older generations. They grew up in this swamp and probably got burned with online reality manipulation in jr high when they could check the reality with their peers. That sort of fact checking can be done when the warping is about someone you know in real life. It's impossible to do with someone you never met thousands of miles away, but people who have been burned tend to learn that the online world can be manipulated and tend to be less willing to accept anything at face value.
To those who grew up in a world where all the news they saw had some vetting, and anything they knew about people they had met was usually through real person contact, getting sucked into a vortex of lies is easier. Especially people who have locked themselves into a self imposed ghetto of news from a limited number of sources. These days you can get multiple outlets telling the same, false story. There are almost always other outlets explaining how the story is false and why, but you need to seek those sources out.
Out time is a crossroads. The younger generations are less likely to believe in this reality manipulation that's going on, but they aren't in power and don't have much interest in it yet. Though the failures of the Boomers and Gen Xers in this realm have encouraged some to jump into the political arena at a younger age than they might have done otherwise.
The facts remain that the bulk of voters are currently GenX and Boomers and they are more manipulated by thee reality games. Whether democracy is going to fail or not before the population wakes up to how badly reality is being manipulated is the choice point of our time. It's playing out in the US, but also in many parts of Europe too.
Established democracies have a lot of institutions that are helping stem the tide, but they are being pushed to the brink.
The grassroots have taken a page from the Russians and run with it.
Modern technology has exposed a flaw in democracy. For those of us who grew up before the internet was a big thing, news outlets were limited. There were always fringe magazines and newspapers, but you had to seek them out. When I was at Boeing, there was a machinist's union strike and the American Socialist Party was distributing a newsprint flyer with their "news" and one circulated our office (I was on the engineering side and we weren't all that affected by the strike). I found it a fascinating bit of propaganda. The fact I knew the source and someone had to make the effort to print them up limited the scope of the impact this sort of literature could have.
Most of the news we were exposed to was produced by professional journalists who worked under a code of ethics. There was always spin on the news, but anybody running wild with a story and making things up would be caught and crucified by the rest of the news media, so the news stayed in a relatively narrow band. Because everything was vetted for accuracy, we believed that, at minimum, the broad strokes of the news were accurate. Details were often wrong, but the core story was correct.
The ways the news got things wrong was brought home to me when I was in high school and there was a high profile kidnapping in my home town. This being the Los Angeles media market, it was the lead story on all the news for weeks. My parents knew the girl's grandparents, so they got the details of the story directly from the family. The local news could never get the city right.
There is something odd about Monterey Park, CA. It seems even Angelinos have no idea where it is, even though I grew up only 10 miles from Los Angeles city hall and 5 miles from Dodger Stadium. When we had the issues with Tieman I tried to calm things a bit when I noticed he had taught in literally the city next door and even he couldn't get the name of Monterey Park right, calling it Monterey Heights (which was old name of the town, changed in the 1920s).
Anyway, the local news got the core highlights right. She was a young girl who had been kidnapped from a prominent family. The news got where she was from wrong, her exact age, and some other details, but the overall story was correct.
When the first Gulf War happened, I watched the coverage on the CBC out of Vancouver, BC because I thought they gave a much more balanced coverage. The US coverage was always waving the flag, but they did get the core facts right.
During the 90s this began to change. People without training in how to distinguish a factual story from opinion, most will get them confused. This is especially true for those who don't have an advanced education. The new conservative media empires took advantage of this and package opinion as news. First with talk radio programs like Rush Limbaugh, and then with Fox News.
They were able to mold public opinion among those who would listen to them, but critically they also got those who wouldn't believe their stuff to distrust all news sources. The political world became a zone where fact and opinion became muddied and conservative talking points controlled the narratives in politics.
This fracturing of the norms was done with discipline by right wing media. Rodger Ailes had meetings every morning where he drilled that day's talking points into the heads of every on air personality. It was all done to help Republicans win.
But the fractures continued and the news media became very balkanized. With the internet, the bar for getting into the news business was lowered dramatically. It opened the door for some serious, good journalism like fivethirtyeight.com but it also opened the door for any extremist with a little bit of skill with video editing to create some pretty serious looking work that was factually BS. For example one video making the rounds in the EU elections put up by extremist right wing anti-immigrant types show a group of angry immigrants tearing apart a police car in a riot. It's a clip from an old movie. It never happened.
The Russians have also been able to weaponize this to their advantage, setting up a center in St Petersburg to chum the waters and destabilize democracies.
The upside in all this is the Millennials seem to be more immune to this type of reality manipulation than older generations. They grew up in this swamp and probably got burned with online reality manipulation in jr high when they could check the reality with their peers. That sort of fact checking can be done when the warping is about someone you know in real life. It's impossible to do with someone you never met thousands of miles away, but people who have been burned tend to learn that the online world can be manipulated and tend to be less willing to accept anything at face value.
To those who grew up in a world where all the news they saw had some vetting, and anything they knew about people they had met was usually through real person contact, getting sucked into a vortex of lies is easier. Especially people who have locked themselves into a self imposed ghetto of news from a limited number of sources. These days you can get multiple outlets telling the same, false story. There are almost always other outlets explaining how the story is false and why, but you need to seek those sources out.
Out time is a crossroads. The younger generations are less likely to believe in this reality manipulation that's going on, but they aren't in power and don't have much interest in it yet. Though the failures of the Boomers and Gen Xers in this realm have encouraged some to jump into the political arena at a younger age than they might have done otherwise.
The facts remain that the bulk of voters are currently GenX and Boomers and they are more manipulated by thee reality games. Whether democracy is going to fail or not before the population wakes up to how badly reality is being manipulated is the choice point of our time. It's playing out in the US, but also in many parts of Europe too.
Established democracies have a lot of institutions that are helping stem the tide, but they are being pushed to the brink.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
One of the institutions is the Justice Department. The second is the Senate. Let's hope Tutor the Turtle's efforts on the courts does not start providing fruit or we are in for very dark days.
No particular expertise in this area but in physics and many fields measurement often opens up new vistas. Sometimes I get the impression we "discover" new particles only when we develop a new machine capable of detecting/creating them. Likewise, an art critic once said people never recognized how beautiful mountains were until artists started painting them.
Today through measurement of "clicks" we can determine audience reaction and thus tailor the message. Were Mcluhan alive he would probably say "measurement is the message." Measuring popularity of news by how many unsold newspapers were returned was not a fine-tuned estimate.
Haven't been in a classroom as a teacher for 11 years so out of touch with contemporary youth. I hope you are right to have confidence in them. Their disdain for Trump and all climate change deniers is understandable and that will grow like tornadoes in the moment—a physics first principle.
In old age it is difficult realizing how much of what I know is just a restating of the obvious, my measurement disability. Too bad Marx so fundamentally misunderstood Hegel. That old one once said "The real is rational, and the rational is real." On this plane, Hegel, like Buddha, is a monist. The mind/body problem, the distinction of self from others, the notion of consciousness separate from an external world, are all false distinctions, illusions if you will. How frustrating it is for Trump and other narcissists to deal with others who also create their own reality.
If the stakes weren't so high it would be merely amusing to see how skillfully grandma Pilosi winds, and rewinds, Trump's tightly wound clock. (Almost dropped the "l".)
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