Favorites: Risks, Plans, and Flames
Cool to see how they pick up water without stopping. Sadly one super scooper damaged (cached) by a drone that someone was flying illegally
This thread is in response to an anecdote from a New Yorker about how great the new congestion pricing has turned out to be. NYC congestion pricing is not dynamic (cached), might be better if it rose and fell based on traffic conditions. One upside is that reduced traffic makes it easier for emergency vehicles to get where they need to go faster, but the fire chief Is complaining (cached) that he won’t be able to take his private car to work anymore. By the way congestion pricing in NYC doesn’t hurt the poor (cached), if you were wondering.
Longer Reads
• Thread about how hard it is to light a round table conversation for television (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Trump was fed questions Fox town hall in advance (src)(cached)
– Naming a startup? Where do you get your name: Tolkien or Hinduism (src)(cached)
– CA reservoirs are full, that’s not what’s causing the fires to be hard to fight. Fire Hydrants were dry not because of the reservoir, but because the demand for water in a small area was super high and they just can't maintain pressure under those circumstances. (src)(cached)
– LA is going to need to allow people to hire private building inspectors, they already have a huge backlog of inspections right now. Plus they need to rethink their massive real estate transfer tax. This fire is on the way towards being the most expensive fire (cached) event in history (src)(cached)
– Clip of MAGA folks storming the Capitol on Jan 6th 2021, they were not simply “let in” (src)(cached)
– Wild that Eric Schmidt’s secret company is Hooglee (very nearly Hooli, the satire of Google from HBO’s Silicon Valley) (src)
– Watch duty, which I recommended recently for tracking fires, is now a top app on the App Store. You can apparently watch little planes dump water (cached) live if you pay the annual subscription. (src)(cached)
– Musk is already giving up on his claim he can cut $2T from the federal budget. Tim Lee quips “Nobody knew the federal budget could be so complicated.” (src)(cached)
– Court voted 5-4 to require Trump to appear in court in NYC, really scary that whether he’s subject to laws is a question of how Roberts and Barrett feel about a given case (src)(cached)
– FB may have loosened their speech rules to now allow some hateful rhetoric, but Bluesky has no content moderation, and it’s the “leftist” social media platform. Ok, less moderation (cached), not none. (src)(cached)
– The eucalyptus all over SF is invasive and also super flammable and dangerous, but the Sierra Club stops the city from tearing them out. Of course SF wildfire risk is low (cached) enough so that maybe it doesn’t matter (src)(cached)
– TikTok repeating that they’ll shut down rather than sell to US buyers indicates they’re not a corporation really (src)(cached)
– If your house burns down, you can rebuild without triggering a Prop 13 tax basis reset. But most people sell instead of rebuilding, so municipal budgets are actually helped by a fire because the reassessment brings in more taxes. Prop 13 once again leads to very unappealing outcomes. (src)(cached)
– Left NIMBYs admitting the affluent people losing their homes will drive up rents in LA (src)(cached)
– Here’s the California prop from 1988 that makes it hard for insurance companies to raise rates, and here's a detailed thread (cached) on how prop 103 has messed up the CA home insurance market (src)(cached)
– Idea from New Hampshire: cities can’t zone for less lot coverage than the 90th percentile in 1000 foot radius (src)(cached)
– TikTok argues that they can’t be separated from Bytedance because the engineers updating their source code are in China. Because they’re the same company, TikTok being separate is a fiction. (src)(cached)
– China is now building a huge fleet of landing barges capable of carrying troops across the Taiwan Strait. This means they're not planning for just a blockade (cached). Here's a post with satellite photos (cached), of course it was posted by a Republican who thinks Trump will defend Taiwan and deter China from attacking, I hope he's right. (src)(cached)
– Chinese language patents for devices to quickly and cheaply sever underwater fiber optic cables, seems like the recent cable cuts haven't been accidental! (src)(cached)
– California passed a law to try to fast track environmental review for prescribed burns. Sadly it ended up being slower than CEQA somehow (src)(cached)