Clear and moderately warm in Houston today. I hope anyway. I have a bunch of running around to do and most of it involves the pickup truck. Which I couldn’t use yesterday due to a dead battery.
I’ll be dealing with that this a.m. Don’t know yet if it’s just run down or if it’s dead. I did notice it when I put fluids in all the vehicles, and thought “naw, it’s fine, I replaced it recently”… but now I’m not sure. Haven’t had a look yet.
With a start like that, or rather a lack of a start, I only got some stuff done. I put off going to Home Depot. It occurred to me that I could use Amex points for HD gift cards and buy my garden stuff with those. That is what I’ve BEEN doing, but didn’t actually think about it this year. So I ordered some cards, which are normally in my email inbox in minutes, but for some reason now say that they can take up to three days. They weren’t there yet when I went to bed. Seems odd that it takes any real time at all, let alone days.
Lot of weird stuff going on in the world at the moment. Par for the course at this point.
Speaking of stuff, according to my wife, NPR quoted NYTimes about the coming food shortages due to Ukraine not planting as much, and not exporting. Of course it’s all Russia’s fault, but they sure were late getting to the party. The flip side is that even lefties are now clued in, so expect the self fulfilling prophesy. Get yours while you can.
Violence continues to increase. Boston seems to be the latest city to lose control of their feral youths, but NYFC continues to lead the way. The west coast is well represented with violent crimes and attacks on innocents too.
Services are continuing to break down all over the place.
It sucks, but it’s coming. Get yourself ready, and stack up what you need.
nick
73F and 92%RH again this morning. Weather should be like yesterday.
n
something is different though, the ‘trigger finger’ in my right hand is snapping back and forth and my back is right on the edge of an issue….
The train wreck career means I’ve had various stress-related issues there my entire adult life so the symptoms of a serious problem tend to get ignored as work-related.
Who knew the SC wouldn’t recognize the word Linux.
Had to correct it this time, too.
still only 76F and the sun is breaking thru… looks like a nice day to replace my truck battery.
n
From CDC’s health alert network…
Recommendations for Adenovirus Testing and Reporting of Children with Acute Hepatitis of Unknown Etiology
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is issuing this Health Alert Network (HAN) Health Advisory to notify clinicians and public health authorities of a cluster of children identified with hepatitis and adenovirus infection. In November 2021, clinicians at a large children’s hospital in Alabama notified CDC of five pediatric patients with significant liver injury, including three with acute liver failure, who also tested positive for adenovirus. All children were previously healthy. None had COVID-19. Case-finding efforts at this hospital identified four additional pediatric patients with hepatitis and adenovirus infection for a total of nine patients admitted from October 2021 through February 2022; all five that were sequenced had adenovirus type 41 infection identified. In two patients, plasma samples were negative for adenovirus by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), but both patients were positive when retested using whole blood. Two patients required liver transplant; no patients died. A possible association between pediatric hepatitis and adenovirus infection is currently under investigation. Cases of pediatric hepatitis in children who tested negative for hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D, and E were reported earlier this month in the United Kingdom, including some with adenovirus infection [1].
This Health Advisory serves to notify US clinicians who may encounter pediatric patients with hepatitis of unknown etiology to consider adenovirus testing and to elicit reporting of such cases to state public health authorities and to CDC. Nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT, e.g. PCR) is preferred for adenovirus detection and may be performed on respiratory specimens, stool or rectal swabs, or blood.
Nick, seems your PU battery is fairly new, so you should get good warranty credit. If you bought it from an auto parts store, they will usually insist on checking your charging system. Fine, but they should also run a conductance test (CCA) on the battery and determine if it is defective. You should get a free replacement in the first two or three years.
I hate buying batteries from AP stores. Our local Walmart has no auto center, a sweet deal with the city to protect the auto shops. They can’t test batteries, and take the customer’s word. A Good Thing.
Hep A/B are required vaccines for children. I just got my own a few years ago. I had been vaccinated against Hep A since I joined the USAF in 1995, but never got the Hep B vaccine as the military would only give it to healthcare workers at that time. So, a few years ago when I was at the doctor for a regular groping I had them vaccinate me. You can get it as a combined Hep A/B shot now. I believe it’s called Twinrix. It’s a 3-shot regimen.
I’ve never heard of Hep D or Hep E.
Speaking of batteries:
I drove my Subie to our storage unit to p/u some books. Came back, packaged the books to ship, and Subie wouldn’t start. Threw the jump battery on, but I had let it run down too much. Put the super cap in parallel with the batteries and let it charge to 100%. The Subie started. Put my NORCO charger on the battery and it charged to “green” in 15 minutes. I decided to put the charger in “repair” mode let it sit for 24hrs. Hope it is OK this am. Or off to get a new battery. It’s the original, so 4+ years old now.
Seems your battery could be EOL (End of Life.) Typical sign of sulfation.
I buy from AutoZone because their batteries aren’t terrible and the nearest store is within (a long) walking distance from my house if I had no other choice.
Three years and out is typical for a battery in Texas and Florida due to the climate. I never changed a battery in four years outside Portland, but as soon as we hit Texas, bam, both cars, within a month.
I forgot to mention this yesterday, but there were holdouts to Disney’s property buying spree in the 60s, especially once word got out that The Mouse was behind the parcel acquisitions.
The Bonnet Creek hotel cluster parcel within the Disney “Florida Project” is the most famous and, possibly, longest tenured holdout property owner, but there were others, some parcels still in private hands.
The Mouse refused to cut a road through to Bonnet Creek within the district for decades, but the owner eventually won a long court battle.
Yep. The Subie popped off once and then didn’t have enough juice to start again. New battery today or tomorrow.
I think the idea that Disney is a guest in Florida is a bit offputting?repulsive? hypocritical? States hand out billions and blowj0bs to get the kind of business that is 1/10th as lucrative as the Disney properties.
Add to that that Orlando would be a swampy orange grove with NO convention business, no Universal, no Busch Gardens, no mega time shares, none of that without Disney’s investment.
They aren’t waterfront, they weren’t a wintering spot for the wealthy, nor were they the jumping off point to the casinos of Cuba. They don’t have any spectacular or unique scenery, nor any innate beauty.
Disney asked for and got the sort of protections they learned they needed when they built Disneyland inside greedy Anaheim. They took a HUGE risk. It was the largest civil engineering project in the world at the time. They drained swamps, built 55 miles of flood control canals, raised the Magic Kingdom 20ft, lined an entire lake with white sand when the water started turning brown… they built their own sewage treatment, and state of the art sewers. They built a telcom infrastructure from scratch. They pioneered modular construction with the Contemporary resort. At one point they had the fourth largest navy in the world if you just count hulls floating…
Remember that Disney invented the theme park. Maybe someone would have eventually expanded the county fair “Tunnel of Love” or “House of Horrors” into something similar, but why would they do it on 144K acres in the middle of a wasteland of pestilential swamp and orange groves? Remember too that it rains there, every afternoon for months. It’s so hot and humid, alligators hide from the heat. The whole shape of DisneyWorld’s Magic Kingdom reflects those realities. Almost all the attractions are inside. Air conditioned. Dry. The difference is stunning when you are caught in a rainstorm at Universal Islands of Adventure- almost the whole park shuts down.
Like every large corp that strays from its foundation, they are making and have made mistakes. Those tend to be self correcting in the long run. The article I linked before that looks at their current fan base to explain their current actions makes a ton of sense. Yes, the woke rainbow warriors need a good smackdown. Yes, I’d like to see all the family un-friendly stuff spun back off, and a return to roots. You need a strong and well liked leader with a vision for that though, and they don’t have one. No adults in charge.
n
n
@nick
They are only “self correcting” when there’s some reason to correct. Negative feedback is a part of that, and it doesn’t always come from consumers.
How many years is the state obligated to provide sweetheart deals to Disney? Forever?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t look to the .gov to be a benign influence. But there may be room for nuance here.
But there may be room for nuance here.
– can Disney realistically leave? No. Did they invest and build with the understanding they would remain in control of the stuff they were granted control of? Yes, or there would have been either sunset provisions or provision to transition to another legal structure. I understand the “special” things to be setting tax rates, being their own building inspector and setting their own life safety requirements, and little else. Not clear what the “sweetheart” part is. Can you imagine a building inspector with no entertainment or theme park experience walking the site with a copy of the code book open in their hand? I have been there and done that and it ain’t pretty. Disney literally wrote the book on theme park safety.
Desantis wants to slap them for opposing him. I agree that they need a slap. But we also have this precedent that you can’t make a law that only affects one person or punishes one person. That’s probably why they initially phrased it as revoking all the special districts set up before 1968. I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of those districts to begin with, nor many left other than Reedy Creek.
If this wasn’t Disney, and the pedos and gays weren’t involved, would anyone conservative be cheering a Governor threatening to change an agreement that has been in place for decades and resulted in BILLIONS of dollars in income and investment, over a political disagreement?
n
–I don’t see anything “sweetheart” in that summary. In fact, I see the opposite, as the local governments would be whining about providing those services to Disney without being “fairly” compensated if it weren’t for the District. They have the powers of a local government, because they provide the services of a local government to an area and a (transient) population bigger than most local governments.
n
(my 144K acres came from an early Disney book about WDW, where they liken it to the size of the entire state of Delaware. They may have sold off some since the mid 70s, or my memory could be wrong, or Reedy creek only encompasses part of their total land ownership.)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10743089/Disney-stocks-tumble-31-set-stripped-special-privileges-Florida.html
gotta scroll down in the article to get to facts.
–and I’ll bet that all of them in the Orlando area only exist BECAUSE WDW is there. I still want to see how many pre-date 1968.
Oh, and it’s a law that established the district not an agreement or anything less binding.
n
The Busch brewery and bird garden section of the theme park in Tampa predates Disney. 1959.
The post-Roy Disney management’s feud with Wally Crump led to Crump’s exile period which included the creation of “The Dark Continent” expanded theme park in the 70s. Crump also helped develop the late Circus World which used to be where Target and Belk are currently located at the US 27 exit from I-4.
The special district dissolution will probably not happen, but regardless of what Disney has done for Florida, a message had to be sent. 2024 is being fought now in the state between DeSantis and the media, including ABC affiliates, and Disney was starting to make noise about the composition of the Legislature suddenly not being to their liking. Also, no doubt exists in my mind that they’re funding Val Demings’ challenge to Little Marco.
I’m not a Little Marco fan, but, as Obama said, “Elections have consequences”. Getting the Senate out from under control of Kamala’s tie breaker is critical this year.
Until about 10 years ago, Disney management in Florida tended to be conservative and avoided meddling in state politics. Obviously, that has changed.
@greg, yeah I forgot that Busch gardens was actually in Tampa… but as you said, the theme park came after WDW.
n
Just like other big corporations, like Apple, meddling in politics has consequences. If these corps would keep their yaps shut, they’d be raking in the dough with little pushback, but, no, they are pushing the LBGTQWERTY agenda for some reason. For Apple, Cook is a QWERTY, but why push the woke nonsense in a corporation? Evil agendas I guess. Pedo, Commie, Woke, whatever, it is not in the best interests of shareholders. Make money and shut up.
If you look at a map of Busch Gardens, the brewery (where Gwazi sits now) and bird gardens opened in 1959. The first expansion, covering the “Serengheti Plain” and what is now “Edge of Africa”, including the east loop of the train and an Alweg (!) monorail tour from the old station next to the Crown Colony House, opened in 1965.
When we moved to Florida in the early 70s, Busch Gardens admission was based on the carload – however many sweaty, stinky relatives you could pile into a station wagon got in for one price. Times have changed!
Disney definitely motivated the Busch family to up their game with the Africa theming and expansion of the Stanleyville and Timbuktu map areas in the 70s — including Wally Crump’s solo take on a Jungle Cruise — but Busch Gardens as much more than the brewery tours and animals didn’t happen until Kumba arrived in the 90s as the first B&M coaster in Florida.
Who is to say whether Busch Gardens would have grown to where it is today without Disney. They always had free beer, and Disney lacked alcohol in the park until EPCOT opened.
Ironically, the free beer at Busch Gardens has always originated with the real A-B powerhouse in Tampa, the Pepin family, owners of the distributorship for the area.
On further consideration, depending on who in the corp structure actually holds the debt obligation, if I were Disney I might celebrate the end of Reedy Creek. Yes it will make everything harder. EVERYTHING.
It will destroy the guest experience, unless there is a massive bully pulpit and a willingness to name and blame…
With one stroke of a pen, DeSantis transfers $1B in obligations from disney’s balance sheet to the county balance sheets, and cuts disney’s opex by $100M a year. That’s better than all the blockbusters combined.
Every pothole, every un-mowed right of way, every minute of time someone waits for EMS can now be laid, very loudly and publicly, at the feet of the Governor. EVERY dime Disney loses in park revenue due to declines in guest experience can be publicly and loudly laid at DeSantis’s feet. Every overflowed creek, every clogged waterway, every ALLIGATOR, ditto.
Meanwhile the Dems will suck up every dime of sales and property tax money that used to go to maintaining infrastructure on disney property. They won’t spend any of it on disney, because “F disney and their free riding on the backs of taxpayers”. They’ll institute occupancy taxes on every hotel room, because every taxing authority in the country LOVES soaking out of towners. They’ll choke the Golden Goose in a couple of years.
And all that while, desantis picked a fight with someone who “buys ink by the barrel.”
Again, if it wasn’t the pedos, would anyone on the right be celebrating this?
n
Orange County is currently controlled by Dems, who bend over backwards to keep Universal and Sea World happy. The “County Executive”, Jerry Demings, is the husband of Val Demings, currently the Congresswoman representing the park area and probably the eventual Dem candidate to take on Little Marco.
My wife’s nephew works as a sound tech on media productions in and around Orlando. Val Demings has been producing commercials for Senate going back at least six months if not last summer.
DeSantis isn’t in any real danger of losing reelection, but Little Marco could be in trouble.
As for DeSantis and the media, every press room in the state would still prefer to see this kind of activity in the Governor’s Mansion nightly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WAIn7vZ36E
I deliberately chose the coverage from Warren Buffett’s TV station. Other outlets beyond the state had far more salacious details, including The Daily Mail if you go look.
Florida politics are much more complex and brutal than it looks on the surface. You’re used to Texas where the Republicans don’t have much of a plan in general beyond winning the next election.
Florida had a well-established, enviable, tourism industry long before Disney. Florida also was experiencing booming sustained growth, especially of young families, in the post-war period before Disney. A strong argument can be made that Disney only chose Florida to exploit that existing growth and tourism and has merely capitalized on it since.
Today, Florida has such a well established and diverse economy that Disney can leave tomorrow and Florida will not miss them. Nearby small towns might whine for a couple of years, but other companies will pick up the slack.
There are vast numbers of people to whom Disney is simply one more theme park, and they won’t notice its absence when they visit Florida.
I wondered when the “food plants catching on fire” story would finally hit the media, and yeah, GP, but they usually front run stories the MSM later picks up.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/plane-crashes-near-general-mills-food-plant-amid-outbreak-fires-food-processing-facilities-across-nation/
n
What’s the quote about once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action?
bTW, I’ll mail a dollar to anyone who can come up with a 2 month period with a similar run of fires and accidents… because food plants DON’T burst into flame all the time. Ditto for healthy athletes dying or having heart attacks on the field. Yes, it happens but not in the density we’re seeing recently.
Kinda like bankers jumping off hotel balconies, or nailgunning themselves to death in their garages.
Pearls Before Swine: Guard Duck and Health Insurance
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/04/22
I might need the guard duck since my wife’s colonoscopy yesterday turned from an inspection to a full blown procedure with a metal clip holding her large intestine together.
As the saying goes, MechEs design weapons systems, CivEs design targets.
ChemE was considered one of the top 3 hardest majors at Rice when I was an undergrad. There was a required course sophomore year that exactly 16 students would get an A or B in. Why? Because you needed an A or B to finalize your major and they only had space for 16 students in Junior ChemE lab.
(The other two were Architecture and Physics/Astronomy – my major.)
Everything can be fixed with money. Probably around two cents/kwh to the ratepayers of Texas.
And a mandate that if you cannot supply power to the grid in the bad times then you cannot supply power to the grid in the good times. That will flush many of the wind turbines out so I doubt that nothing will happen.
And then ongoing inspection and maintenance program will be needed.
I would buy a whole house generator. I did.
A few thought re WDW:
Disney claimed they needed autonomy to build Epcot–Experimental Prototype Community of the Future, as envisioned by Walt Disney. After Walt’s death, Roy Disney delivered something different, but kept the advantages of Reedy Creek. Is Reedy Creek is worth big bucks to Disney’s bottom line each year? I’d like to see a persuasive argument that it is not. (Stock market doesn’t think so.)
If Reedy Creek is a huge monetary (and regulatory) advantage to Disney, how can it be justified to other corporations as a matter of fairness?
It’s not just a matter of Disney having another opinion, it’s Disney the giant media company using their might to trumpet lies and falsehoods about the actions of state government, and specifically, one party of state government. You can argue freedom of speech for the former, and even the latter, and might get agreement. What I won’t agree with is that state government has to sit on their hands and wait for some market correction for the latter. Eff that. State government has a self-correcting mechanism called elections, and Disney just weighed is with millions of dollars of non-monetary contributions to one party. It appears that the response of state government has been effective, in the self-correcting mechanism for corporations called stock price.
The whole idea of a Reedy Creek dissolution dumping billions of dollars in debt on local and/or state government is ludricrous. There’s a compensatory mechanism called taxes that will take care of it nicely. Yeah, having taxes pay for it is probably less efficient in theory. In practice giving that taxing authority to the same sort of political machine that has spent years refining their ability to produce Blue Shiiteholes is asking for trouble. But if you frame it as giving more local control of Disney to the party of woke that Disney is trying to curry favor with, it sounds like a just and right consequence.
“Marching Through Georgia (Draka Novels, 1)” by S. M. Stirling
https://www.amazon.com/Marching-Through-Georgia-Draka-Novels/dp/0671654071?tag=azlinkplugin-20/
Book number one of a five book alternate history military fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Baen in 1988 that I bought used on Amazon. I read the fourth book in the series recently and am now back tracking. I have acquired the second and third books in the series and am reading the second book now.
After the American revolutionary war, the British loyalists in the colonies mostly escaped to Canada. But in a alternate timeline, those 90,000 British loyalists were exiled to the southern tip of Africa at the direction of George Washington from 1783 to 1786. They took over the Dutch colony of South Africa as other unwanted groups joined them and merged into their slave holding culture. They eventually called themselves the Domination of Draka.
By 1942, the Domination of Draka is 36 million free peoples and 500 million slaves XXXXXX serfs, one quarter of the people on the planet Earth. They have spread throughout the entire continent of Africa to Egypt, the middle east (Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia), Turkey, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and they have just completed taking Italy. They have used their incredible mineral riches to develop and purchase the best weapons in the world.
Now the Draka are fighting the Germans who have rolled through Russia since the Soviet Union is no more after the Draka took their southern satellites. And the Germans are very concerned about the Draka whose eventual aim is to control the entire planet. The USA is fighting an all war with the Japanese in the Pacific who have occupied Hawaii since the Draka subjugated much of China.
The prolific author has a website at:
https://smstirling.com/
The five books of the series are listed at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (42 reviews)
Roy O. Disney died in 1971. EPCOT as delivered was the brain fart of Donn Tatum and Card Walker. I also lay responsibility at the feet of Ron Miller, who knew better but kept his mouth shut.
Eisner kinda-sorta delivered the original Disney vision as Celebration, but that was the end result of having nothing better to do with the Osceola county portion of the Florida property beyond standard real estate development. IIRC, in the 60s, Osceola did not want to go along with some aspect of the special district carve out, and Disney never built park-related structures south of US 192 save for the Mickey power pole along I-4. Taxes?
Disney is out of Celebration management at this point, and the community is now just another FL development with severe deed restrictions protecting what are basically stucco shacks with fancy facades.
File this one under “I wouldn‘t fire that, for $400, Alec” :
https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2022/04/22/smeth-and-methson-built-not-bought/
@Greg Norton
After Walt’s death it was brother Roy who changed the direction of EPCOT in the belief that Walt’s original vision of a community was not viable, largely in the economic sense. He and Card Walker–and after Roy passed, Walker alone–struggled to find something that would be true to the memory.
EPCOT in all it’s incarnations has been largely a train wreck. I have serious doubts that Walt could have delivered anything better. In some sense Biosphere II could trace lineage to EPCOT, and the legacy there is somewhere between a warning and a horrible example.
Mad Max outfitted by the prop department at Golan Globus.
For a long time, EPCOT has been about letting the parents get tanked in the German pavilion with park hopper privilege upcharge at the end of a long day of indulging the kids.
The Mouse could have saved a lot of money by simply leaving Energy and Communicore intact and doubling the floorspace in the “Festhaus”. The “Frozen” changes to Norway alone are probably driving a lot more business to Germany throughout the day even though parkhopper is suspended (was?).
Question for The Hive Mind:
Walking to p/u the Subaru, I spotted a large shiny tank by the sidewalk. When I got there, it was a cylinder of LN2 with a hose going into a box on a pole that read “ATT Underground Cable”. Any idea what the LN2 is used for?
Didn’t there used to be a special character button in the editor?
Can I subscript a number in this editor?
A dry nitrogen source. Cables are probably in a pipe purged with dry nitrogen. Low delivery rate without a heat exchanger.
LN2
Our President, flying 5,000 miles in a jumbo jet on Earth Day, says this:
Wait, WHAT? Here’s how Biden wants to keep Brazil from cutting down their forests
Fire up the printing presses, and, open your pocket books.
One of many plugs’ WTF is he saying moments on Earth Day.
5,000 miles to get back to the Secret Clinic at BidenHom?
And you thought all the monkeys had disappeared from the labs due to WuFlu?
Question for The Hive Mind:
Walking to p/u the Subaru, I spotted a large shiny tank by the sidewalk. When I got there, it was a cylinder of LN2 with a hose going into a box on a pole that read “ATT Underground Cable”. Any idea what the LN2 is used for?
LN2 = Liquid Nitrogen that vaporizes and absorb water (what Dr. Williams said)
LN<sub>2</sub>
doesn’t work for me using Safari on a Mac. Am I doing it right?
Yes, we used it at Cape Canaveral. After venting out of its underground tank, the vaporized N2 was still cold enough to cool the payload units in the nose that required it to lift off.
(I think that I mentioned yesterday that I am a Thermodynamicist.)
Re: subscripts – the CKEditor5 used here is their “Classic Editor” style, which contains (by default) the icons and formatting options you see.
There is the ability to customize the button bar. For instance, adding a super/subscript button, or taking away the image buttons.
I haven’t implemented any of those potential features in the theme, because tahe comments here don’t need to be highly formatted. And even allowing the ‘heading’ styles are distracting to reading the content (IMHO).
I think that excessive (other than the features shown in the button bar) formatting are distracting, and not necessary to the discussion and content here.
I suppose that you could add some tags via the ‘after-editor’. But still think that excessive formatting is not needed here. I don’t think we need ‘pretty’ content in comments.
Testing1, Testing2, Testing3…
Looks like it’s converting your < and > to < and > and that’s breaking your HTML. Try submitting the comment first and then going in afterwards and editing-in the <sub>2</sub> manually.
Fun hater. 😛
“US military OKs prototype mobile nuclear reactor in Idaho”
https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-business-environment-idaho-675b6da044293ab8b676e68308e30b04
“BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The U.S. Department of Defense plans to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho.
The department late last week signed off on the Project Pele plan to build the reactor and reactor fuel outside of Idaho and then assemble and operate the reactor at the lab.
The decision follows a two-volume, 600-page environmental impact statement that includes public comments evaluating alternatives for building and operating a gas-cooled microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power.”
“The Air Force’s Secret New Fighter Jet Will Get Software Updates as It Flies”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a39752243/ngad-software/
What could go wrong ?
It really puts the D in BSOD.
“Global decarbonization is a more than $50 trillion opportunity for private capital: Blackstone”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/blackstone-decarbonization-100-trillion-investment-opportunity-for-private-capital/622439/
“Global decarbonization efforts over the next three decades will require a $100 trillion investment, generating a massive opportunity for private equity to deploy capital and drive the energy transition, according to Rob Horn a senior managing director and global head of the sustainable resources group at Blackstone Credit.”
So, decarbonizing the first world countries is about the financial guys making a lot of money. I am shocked.
@nick, re: Disney
You haven’t yet convinced me that DeSantis is wrong. You have shown me there is a lot more going on than sticking it to the woke pedo supporters.
You have also convinced me that there’s plenty of opportunity for the stupid party to screw this up. A fact I hate being reminded of.
>> You haven’t yet convinced me that DeSantis is wrong.
Politicians (see: Ron DeSantis) only want three things:
1. Power
2. Money
3. More of #s 1 and 2
Everything else for them is a means to an end.
Enact term limits for all political positions (with no skipping from job to job), including SCOTUS.
>> So, decarbonizing the first world countries is about the financial guys making a lot of money. I am shocked.
You’re not paying enough attention here 😉
“Tesla owner uses ‘Smart Summon’ feature, crashes it in $3.5 million jet”
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/tesla-crash-vision-jet-autpilot-video/
Oops.
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
>> So, decarbonizing the first world countries is about the financial guys making a lot of money. I am shocked.
You’re not paying enough attention here
Oh, I figure that our lords and masters want to take away our air conditioning and heating. And maybe give us a few extra kwhs on the weekends. You know, if we are good.
Home for a second or two.
Wrt taxes compensating for the loss of Reedy Creek, SOMEONE has to provide those services. Does anyone think the county will do a better job of it than Disney did, for less money?
WRT the drop in the stock price, most of the gamblers just know there is conflict, and think that disney might have a toy taken away, so bet against them. I doubt 4 people trading the stock know where the Reedy Creek money shows up, or how it’s laundered back to the parent. OR for that matter, anything at all about the web of companies known collectively as “Disney.”
WRT whether or not the changes to EPCOT preclude the necessity of the District, as I said, they provide the services of a government, for more people than most local governments, and STARTED ALL OF IT FROM SCRATCH when the whole state of Florida couldn’t have come up with the money. Florida couldn’t have done it, didn’t want to do it. Now they see the tax value of the property, which would be around ZERO if not for what disney built on it, or built next to it, and they want their taste.
It IS about money, they want what Disney pays to themselves, and they are sure they can keep more of it and provide less service than Disney does.
WRT why should Disney get the benefit of providing all their own service (ex-police) when no one else does? It’s a provably false statement. The article says it’s not uncommon, with over 600 districts like it. Disney was probably first, and may be the biggest that’s all.
I’ll reframe it again, do you want a government to change decades old laws to punish a company for their politics? Because that WILL NOT END WELL.
“Never vote yourself a power you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to have” was good advice.
n
@rick, comment formatting that increases understanding is a good thing. Like the subs and supers, being able to use white space to separate thoughts, etc.
The single best fancy formatting is blockquote. And it’s pretty fancy but it definitely improves the exchange of ideas. I’ve never been in another comments section and had that option and I miss it when it’s not there.
n
I did also, but we didn’t need it last year during the Fimbulwinter of 2021. We never lost power – because the local fire station is only a block away. So if you don’t want power outages and also don’t want to buy a generator, buy a house on the same subgrid as a fire station, police station, or hospital.
Term limits: There are a COUPLE of types of term limits that we need to impose.
First, we need to limit how long people suck on the government teat. Starting from age 20, anybody who wants to run for public office needs to have spent at least half of their adult life working for a paycheck with a PRIVATE enterprise. By age 40, the candidate must have spent at least 10 years in the private sector. You’re a senator and you haven’t spent at least 6 years in the private sector? Kiss off your re-election and get a job.
Second, there are 330 million people in America; we shouldn’t keep electing the same losers. No candidate may run for ANY Federal office who is a close relative (parent, grandparent, sibling, 1st or 2nd cousin, child or grandchild) of any President, VP, Governor or Senator. No more Kennedys or Shrubs or Clintons or Romneys or Cuomos. We need NEW “elites”!
Complaining about Wall Street not giving a damn is a bit like complaining about the tide.
Wall Street gave the company a lot of latitude after the technical details turned to garbage in September, when DIS broke key support numbers that the algorithms use to make trading decisions.
Beyond the parks and Baby Yoda, the company has nothing in the pipeline to justify a 70 PE.
Back home.
If wall street was smart enough to understand, the stock price drop could have come from a holistic understanding of how hard it will be for the company to maintain the guest experience, and to build new attractions from now on… having the city/county fix every pothole means the potholes won’t get fixed.
And if the whole thing is a grab of the property tax money that’s even more despicable and I’ll go Godwin and liken it to stealing property from the Jews because you don’t like Jews. Changing the law because you don’t like a company’s politics is not good.
If the locals get control of taxation, they will add an occupancy tax, a “special entertainment district” tax like Miami, ie an additional 25%, they’ll increase the normal sales tax, and the best thing about it for them is that there are only a couple hundred voters in the district. I’ve watched this happen elsewhere. Pretty soon, the golden geese stop coming.
n
Elected officials should not have retirement plans based on their elected position; Social Security only.
Combine local, state and federal service: after ten years elected office at any level (dog catcher, governor, and/or senator, etc.) and ten years appointed at any level (local planning commission, judge, attorney general, etc.) you can not be elected or appointed to any position.
Appointed service is should be limited to twenty years combined. NO RETIREMENT PLAN EXCEPT FOR Social Security or 401K.
Where you been, @Nick? already been done.
There’s not enough free electrons on this planet to record the number of examples of the PLT’s doing exactly that, while the Republican Party, led by the worthless, spineless RINO’s and neocons, have counted on the conservatives to follow their lead and not respond in kind.
(Ask a certain cake maker, after his government masters have tried three times, if “winning” has meant that any of the would-be masters have suffered one iota in their defeats)
Not any more.
The party of Elephants is lined up to be handed the next election. Not through any efforts of their own, and mostly in spite of their efforts, but through the sheer ineptness of the PLT’s and the willingness of the Middle and the Independents to follow them based largely on ginned up falsehoods about Orange Man Bad.
I do not expect that they have learned one damned thing. I expect that they will continue to be lead by the likes of McConnell, and deliver nothing.
The elephants and the Independents and the PLT can line up in the netherworld and be inoculated with elephantiasis of the private parts. For a start.
Elected officials wholesale abrogation of their oaths of office is sufficient entire for that wish. We are no longer a sovereign nation–we do not control our borders. First up against eh wall, after we pry them from their compounds.
From January 2023 to November 2024 I am going to buttonhole everyone who will listen to me: I will vote for conservative candidates in the election if they have shown that they can lead us forward. If not, I will vote a straight Democrat ticket then and forevermore.
I will be cursed if I’m going to stand behind barbed wire and scream to children to avenge me. Better to hasten the denouement.
Robert Frost–the gentle poet who was arrested for assault as a young man–was wrong. Ice is not the same as fire.
@Robert Sprowl
I’d consider military service above the rank of captain as appointed service.
@Nick
As I said earlier: it’s not their politics. See above.
If a level playing field is not fair, why not?
But there is a danger there: Two buses of illegals and you change the election.
Orange County already collects property taxes on the parks. The Mouse just won a lawsuit recently over assessments.
In the end, Florida voters will decide the fate of DeSantis and the Legislature this fall. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter.
For an encore, DeSantis is going to take on The Geico Gecko later this year.
“Don’t expect other Houston refineries to follow in LyondellBasell’s footsteps, one expert says”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/don-t-expect-other-houston-refineries-to-follow-in-lyondellbasell-s-footsteps-one-expert-says/ar-AAWvaJ7?cvid=470492c0ef3344c9aa9600bf585179d5
“The future plans of the LyondellBasell refinery in southeast Houston are up in the air after the company’s announcement that it will close by the end of 2023.”
I worked at this refinery for a day back in 1987 or 1988. I was inspecting their power generation equipment and making sure that they could fulfill their contract with us. They did. In fact, they exceeded their contract during a tough time with us.
“The LyondellBasell facility has the capacity to convert 268,000 barrels of crude oil a day into transportation fuel and other products.”
Big refinery. This may be the biggest refinery in the USA to close down.