Not only does Texas want to slap a large tax on Teslas, it seems it is illegal to directly sell Teslas in Texas. So vehicles manufactured at the coming Texas Gigafactory will have to be shipped across a state line, and shipped back, for local customers. Really.

Teslas from Austin factory will have to be shipped off-state before being sold in TX

Visiting Mom and the Sisters. Weather cool but humid. Had a tornado (literally) over our hotel last night (woke me up).

I have been reading the New Yorker magazine for about as long as I can remember. I like the cartoons and I read the movie reviews every week, but my favorite are the Personal Histories. I’m not sure what the criteria is for these. Sometimes the writers are famous, sometimes they aren’t. They don’t seem to occur with any regularity, and I sometimes miss them. In fact I see a bunch I hadn’t noticed during the pandemic. In fact, on the web site I see there are two slightly different categories, one subtitled “Essays and Memoirs” (under “culture” in the URL), even thought they all seem to be essays and memoirs. You may need a subscription to read these.

Personal History

Personal History (Essay and Memoirs)

I might have taken more interest in history if this sort of thing was taught is schools. I had never heard of the Astor Place Riot. From Wiki:

The riot resulted in the largest number of civilian casualties due to military action in the United States since the American Revolutionary War, and led to increased police militarization (for example, riot control training and larger, heavier batons). Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

I was going to try to make a list of all the things that are difficult to get these days. I realize there is a pandemic on, but some of this seems more local and might have happend anyway. The list includes “Chicken, lumber, microchips, gas, steel, metals, chlorine and ketchup packets”

Supply chain interrupted: Here’s everything you can’t get now

I was looking for info on fracking in Texas. There have been large numbers of bankruptcies for years and my understanding is that the whole endeavor never made money, but consumed hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. Still looking for that data (although a count of bankruptcies is easy to find).

Ran across this really good article from the New Yorker from 2018 that is worth a read. A bit dated but it seems to spell out the end for the fracking boom and perhaps oil and gas in Texas. My favorite quote (and there were a few good ones):

“Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth—whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite—often leads to corruption and authoritarianism. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Louisiana are primary examples.”

The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil

Looks like the US is over 900k Covid-19 deaths already.

New analysis finds global Covid death toll is double official estimates