Is it just me or is Austin looking a bit run down lately?

This eclipse is going across a wide swath of the populated US.  Are any other places seeing fit to do this? 

Travis County issues disaster declaration ahead of total solar eclipse

Been reading about this EV. Supposed to be a nice car.  Price isn’t much of a surprise since the cost of EVs is overwhelmingly in the batteries, and battery prices are dropping rapidly.  I don’t see the US allowing these to compete with existing US auto manufacturers (including Tesla) but I can see lots of these in the rest of the world, in the very near future.

BYD launches cheaper Seagull electric car with starting price under $10,000 to fuel price war

I have always been fascinated by doomsday cults.  There are so many of them, even in modern America.   They have always been wrong, every single time, yet they persist.  From London Review of Books.

Apocalypse Now and Then

We have seen the low lake levels in the western US.  Seems it is happening in lots of places and causing a drop in hydroelectric power generation.  From MIT Review.

Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower.

I was thinking about the infamous Louisiana gubernatorial election of my youth between White Supremacist David Duke (R) and the ethically challenged Edwin Edwards (D).  Somehow I thought it was in the early 1980s but it was in fact in 1991.  I suppose I wasn’t so much young as naive.

When Donald Trump first began his run for the presidency, I remarked to a friend that he was Edwin Edwards all over again.  I was only half right, he was an uncanny (or perhaps canny) combination of Edwards and Duke.   Somehow he had combined the worst parts of both and attracted a large following.

Duke never won another election, but remained on the fringes of politics, less a cautionary tale than a low water mark.  Edwards spent much of his senior years in jail. He was looking at starring in a reality TV show after his release from prison but it never materialized.  Wiki has most of the facts from that historic contest.

1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election

I supposedly have a good memory, at least for things that happened a long time ago.  So my family and old friends tell me.  Ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and it’s a different story.  From Lit Hub.

The Man Who Remembered Everything—and Thought It Was Normal

It seems lack of transmission lines is holding back growth of the electrical grid in the US.  Adding new transmission lines is a very expensive prospect.  It looks like a good alternative would be to just replace the old, inefficient wires with newer technology.  This could quickly double the grid capacity at a relatively low cost.  It’s being called “reconductoring”.  From Oil Price:

Last year, a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory called “Queued Up” revealed that at the end of 2022, more than 10,000 power plant and energy storage projects (95% were zero-carbon resources) were waiting for permits to connect to the grid. That’s enough additional capacity to double the country’s electricity output, mostly from clean energy.

This Might Be The Fastest Way to Double U.S. Grid Capacity

Been seeing some unusual political ads on TV.  Mostly just collections of far-right talking points on guns, immigration and school vouchers.  I joked that one looked like it was made by AI (perhaps it was).  This is during a primary, not a general election, though.

It seems that Wilkes and Dunn, the far right wing frackers (autocorrect wants to call them “crackers”) who more or less own the Texas Legislature are behind these ads.  It’s all about getting their pet project, school vouchers, approved.  This plan would give about $10,000 per student to private (read: religious) schools, at the expense of Texas public schools.  Massively unpopular, but the Christian Nationalists are not giving up on this one.  From Texas Tribune.

Greg Abbott, Tim Dunn spend millions in Texas GOP primary fights over vouchers, impeachment

A funny one from the Guardian (UK).  My favorite:

Technology doesn’t just make it possible for me to find out what stupid people are thinking; it now curates their thoughts and serves them up to me daily, as if I were some kind of connoisseur of idiocy. I honestly do not remember asking for this.

No focus, no fights, and a bad back – 16 ways technology has ruined my life