Yesterday Hurricane Ida came ashore in Louisiana. Today all of New Orleans is without power. My understanding at this point, which may be incorrect, is that at least two, and possibly all eight major transmission lines into the city have collapsed. This could take weeks or longer to repair.

I have to point out that these towers survived Katrina and lots of lesser storms and should have been able to handle Ida, which did little other property damage in the area. I am also led to believe that maintenance was deferred or even ignored in recent years. Surely multiple independent systems should not have failed like this. I’m going to shoot from the hip and blame for-profit infrastructure providers like Entergy who have every incentive to cut maintenance and boost profits.

i hope there is an investigation and people are held to account. But like the similar power event in Texas this winter, I am not expecting much.

One of the more disturbing things I have seen lately. Watch the 60 day animation of cases per 100,000 people.

U.S. coronavirus map: What do the trends mean for you?

I started making sauerkraut a bit unintentionally. A friend had brought by a gift in this big 2 quart mason jar, while we also had some cabbage going bad in the fridge. I also happened to read an article on sauerkraut, but I suppose my smart devices (Alexa, phone) could had sent me the article, knowing about my cabbage and new jar.

In the last year or two I have experimented a bit, which mostly hasn’t worked out. My last batch of sauerkraut wasn’t so good. Not bad, just basically wet cabbage. I put a bit of lemon in, just a couple of thin slices in, just for flavor. My guess is I lowered the pH and cut into the fermentation. This time I went fairly traditional. A head of cabbage, sliced as thin as I could manage, a red onion, also sliced thin, some matchstick carrots which I admit were going a bit slimy in the fridge (I did rinse them off). I added a bit of garlic and some peppercorns. I realized I also omitted red pepper flakes. Oh, and I measured the one tablespoon of kosher salt instead of just estimating.

For the first time I didn’t have to add water. It is bubbling nicely and even overflowed a bit. Looking forward to tasting this batch in a week or two.

I like Uber the service. I despise Uber the business. Lyft too. I have always considered them simply illegal taxi operations siphoning off equity from their employees (contractors?) cars. Mr. Doctorow lays it out from the accounting side. And yes, I’m have noticed Uber has gotten dramatically more expensive and waits dramatically longer. Probably worse in most cases than old fashioned taxis.

It finally got laughable to me when they started all the self-driving car nonsense. Uber was going to replace every one of it’s basically free labor and capital with roughly $50k worth of hardware? You need lots of cash for that. And a self-driving car that actually works. You also lose the ability to exploit the equity in all those employee / contractor cars. A good read below, for anyone who doubts this was always a fraud.

End of the Line for Uber

Leander is pretty much a suburb of Austin. Over 400 cases and a recommendation by the county that they have a shutodown. Except they won’t because, well, I’m not sure why.

400+ COVID-19 cases confirmed at Leander ISD, officials recommend shutdown

I was looking for something else on Google (a person) and this popped up. From 2016. I vaguely recall this guy as some sort of “libertarian”. He seems to have moved on to COVID-19 denial. Yawn.

Obama is “dead wrong” on climate change (2016)

Some small towns in Texas are already shutting down schools, because too many staff and students are sick with COVID-19. This is from a few days ago in some west Texas towns outside of Midland. There is lots of misinformation out there but I don’t see how you can say this is being well handled in Texas. From The Texas Tribune.

Rural schools shut down to keep COVID-19 from overwhelming their small communities

Is fracking in West Texas the stupidest thing ever done by mankind? I think it is in the running. I wonder who is going to pay to clean up this mess?

The Methane Hunters

When I think of all the misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating these days I always blame The Internet. I was curious about who is spending time on the internet, since you might think people more prone to believing misinformation are the people spending the most time on the internet. It seems like there is a more interesting question. Who is watching broadcast TV vs other on demand streaming media?

How the Median Age of TV Viewers Differs Across Platforms