Understand, that if your transmission lines and power poles are properly maintained, the only reason they will stop working is if something hits them. A tree branch falls and strikes a wire hard enough, it pops loose from whatever it's connected to, and then you have a live wire laying on the ground, electricity arcing and starting fires.
The solution to this is to cut away the branches that could reasonably be expected to fall on the wires and to do other maintenance to the areas where power lines run. You keep your poles in good shape, you make sure the wires are secure, and--in general--maintain the network and ensure nothing interferes with it.
In California, however, they are not allowed to do that.
They're not allowed to prune branches away from wires. They're not allowed to clear underbrush from around power poles. And--to make matters worse--the electric company is not maintaining its infrastructure. They repair things when they break, but they don't replace things that are wearing out--and yes, telephone poles can wear out!--and so, when the winds rise in late summer and early autumn, and it stops raining, then any failure in the system, just about anywhere, can cause a fire.
The solution, then, that is being employed in California is not to fix the infrastructure or to prune branches or any of that other stuff, but to shut the power off.
This is happening, by the way, in the same state which is mandating a huge shift to electric vehicles. But if the electricity is not on, the cars won't charge.
Gas has hit $5 a gallon in Los Angeles.
* * *
So, communism--
American leftists are no better than any other leftists in world history. Give the left unlimited power and the mass executions will start happening. Take everyone's guns away in America and there will be real concentration camps, gulags, and mass graves.
"Marxists are trash, who in a just world would be treated like Nazis, their moral equivalents." They are not better than Nazis; they're worse, in fact. Because the other socialist countries killed close to twenty times the number of people that were murdered by Nazi Germany.
Speaking of socialism, Bernie Sanders got treatment for his heart attack the same day that he suffered it. Kim du Toit is referring to a Daniel Greenfield article, and in that article Greenfield keeps talking about how long Bernie Sanders would wait in other countries for the treatment he received in one day in America. He is both right and wrong.
He is right because if we were talking about "average guy Berny Sanders" in Canada, he would have waited 11 weeks for angioplasty. "Average Joe" Bernard Sanders of London would have waited at least two months for his angioplasty. But that's better than NHS' maximum wait time of 18 weeks--four and a half months--and considerably better than the wait time suffered by some 16% of patients who wait three months.
Greenfield goes on:
In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.IF, that is to say, he was an average citizen. If he was one of the great unwashed, the hoi polloi, just some guy who lives in one of those countries, then yes he would experience the true proletariat-hating joys of socialized medicine.
In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days. In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.
But you see, the dirty secret of all of those places is that if it were "Bernie Sanders, important politician"--as he is here--then he'd get immediate care exactly as he did in the United States. No waiting. Every single one of the socialized medical systems that the American left holds up as an example of fairness works that way: if you are rich and powerful, you go to the head of the line and don't wait. And there's no "death panel" looking over your doctor's shoulder and saying, "All right, that's enough spent on this one! Palliative care only from now on."
But in all those systems, if you are an average, everyday citizen, then you wait...and maybe you end up waiting too long. In the eyes of the death panels, the problem thus solves itself.
Bernie Sanders wants socialized medicine for America because that puts an enormous amount of money and power in the hands of the federal government. And also because he knows that as President, he would not be subject to any of it, ever. Even as Senator Bernie Sanders he will never have to suffer under any socialized medical system that is foisted on the rest of us; he will always get top-notch, immediate care and never, never, ever have to wait so much as a day for treatment.
Because, as Greenfield himself says, "Socialist leaders don’t live by the same rules they make for everyone else."
* * *
It's often referred to as, simply, "the System" for a reason. Once your kids are taken from you by the CFS or DCFS stormtroopers, it's very difficult to get them back, and there is no due process.
The girl--12 years old--exaggerated when she told a teacher about an argument she had with her father. Based on those exaggerations, CFS took her away from him and put her in the foster child system. The girl has since explained to all and sundry that she had not told the truth, but the same people who believed her when she exaggerated now refuse to believe her when she's claiming otherwise.
Here's the thing about the System: it is funded based on how many peoples' lives it ruins. There is every incentive to bring children into it, and to keep them there; there are no incentives to release them from it.
* * *
With one simple announcement, the biggest knitting site on the Internet ruined itself. They lost 3,000 ranks in 90 days. And now it's nothing but SJW/NPC types, and the long knives are out as they compete to see who is the "most woke". The losers are, of course, excommunicated.
Way to go, asshats.
* * *
Although I didn't bother to do any research into the actual numbers, I figured that this was approximately the case.
Understand, the Amazon jungle is five and a half MILLION square kilometers. Okay, just for comparison's sake, the land area of the "lower 48" United States is 7.6 million square kilometers.
That excludes Alaska, which--by itself--is about 1.5 million square kilometers.
The "Western United States" encompass some 4.5 million square kilometers.
Okay? Are we all on the same page with regards to how freaking huge the Amazon jungle is? I was just going to compare it to "the entire United States west of the Mississippi" but I wanted to check the numbers; and that wild-ass guess doesn't look far wrong, as long as you exclude Texas and Alaska. If it were square, it would be a square some 2,345 miles on a side. Huge.
So they tell us that an area of about 0.0108 square kilometers of jungle are being cleared every minute. At that average rate, how long will it take to clear the entire jungle?
Well, 5,500,000/0.0108 is 509 million minutes. After you do the math, that works out to about 969 years. Let's be totally pessimistic and assume they started cutting it at that rate 69 years ago, in
1950; that leaves us just 900 years before the Amazon jungle is all gone.
But! We are further told that about a third of the clearcut area ends up reverting to jungle, either because it grows back naturally or because people plant trees. So let's reduce our depletion figure by 0.3333 and see where that leaves us.
5,500,000/0.007236 is 760 million minutes. That's a mere 1,446 years before the Amazon jungle is gone.
When all the screeching started last month (or whenever it was) about the Amazon, I knew all of this in a qualitative way; I knew that the Amazon jungle is huge and the human impact on it was miniscule by comparison.
Could we do it, if we wanted to? I expect we could--but it would be very difficult and there'd be no way to pay for it. We use trees for a lot of things, but clear-cutting the Amazon would drop the price of wood into the bedrock, so doing the thing would take big government financing. There's quite literally not enough money in the world; that means clear-cutting the Amazon jungle is economically impossible. And in fact it's also not economically viable, meaning there's no way to make a profit on it. In just about every case, taking on a project like this, sooner or later the companies (or the governments paying them) go broke.
The work stops, the jungle reclaims what was cleared, and we're more-or-less right back where we started.
The Amazon jungle isn't in any danger, people. It's just not.
* * *
These kinds of articles always depress me because they're right.
Just remember, it took five years to build Hoover Dam.
* * *
Winter is coming.
Of late I have begun to notice that ZeroHedge loves it some doomsaying. It was probaby ever thus, but I've only just begun to notice it.
Still, we're in the deepest solar minimum in a very long time, and I guess it's to be expected. They're saying our winter will be cold and damp; I guess we'll find out.
Anyway, freezing temps predicted for Friday night. That doesn't seem early, nor does it seem late. But I wonder how long the trees will keep their leaves this year?
* * *
Gun-free zones may as well call themselves "free fire zones" because those signs all but guarantee that someone intent on mayhem will find himself presented with a soft target.
* * *
So, today was "Safety Day" at the plant. Had to be there half an hour early for it.
Instead of IT work I attended training sessions. I got a couple of t-shirts out of it, a nice LED lantern, and a set of bits for an impact driver like the one my wife bought me for my birthday. The latter, and one of the t-shirts, were raffle prizes.
There were so many raffle prizes, they went through all the raffle tickets, twice. "Luck" was being called early enough to get your pick of prizes; there was a pair of nice Craftsman toolkits I would not have minded grabbing one of, but they were gone before I was called. Various lunch boxes and coolers and packs; USB battery packs for phones etc; a slew of gift cards, etcetera.
But the bit set is something I can use, as is the t-shirt (day-glow yellow) and it was a very informative and fun day.
Still--during the day some of my access issues got fixed, so now I can go through all the "mystery machines" and correct their entries in the database and get my inventory right. I met a bunch of people from both my plant and the other locations I service.
And FedEx alleges that my work phone was delivered.
No one could find it, of course; after something like that is delivered it's supposed to go in one of two places, but the person who handles the receiving end of things didn't see it.
Lunch had only been half an hour and I'd gotten to work, as I said, half an hour early; by the time the festivities were over I was fain to exhausted. I went home after ensuring I'd been there for a full eight hours.
Hit the can, lay on the bed intending to do a jigsaw puzzle on my phone...and found myself falling asleep, so I shut the phone off and went with it.
Mrs. Fungus got pulled over, and ticketed, because her car's taillights were out. When she got home I had a gander, and saw that somehow both bulbs had blown out. I stepped on the brake pedal and the driver's side rear brake light went on but when I pulled the bulb, it was blown--WTF?--and the right side had no filaments in it at all.
New bulbs, lights check out, we're good. Fine is $50 and we're just going to pay it rather than screw around with it, because who has time to go to court? We both work for a living; going to court will take at least half a day, and neither of us wants to waste our precious PTO time on that. It actually ends up costing us less just to pay the fine. Isn't that a heck of a thing?