I lived in LA for about 9 years in the '70s. Walked home 1 block from Hollywood Blvd at 10 pm unmolested. took a bus to the beach on my day off a few times. Lovely '40s vibe in a lot of Hollywood then. A few bums but you could avoid them. I cannot imagine going back now. LA and Hollywood are experiencing deliberate ruination. Another aspect of the psyop to demoralize us all. We carry what used to be and what could be in our hearts. Tell your children and your children's children... Someday, your stories may be told around the evening fire. Keep civilization alive in your heart. ~ Ginger Breggin, co-author COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Society is in such rotten shape because the masses of little people have allowed it to get that way. And how did that happen? Because of one iron law: beliefs have consequences, and mistaken beliefs have rotten consequences. Everyone, including you dear reader, has happily allowed themselves to be brainwashed into perpetuating mistaken beliefs.
And what are the mistaken beliefs? First and foremost, the leftist belief that equality represents a moral virtue, i.e., equality is morality. All other evils fall out from that: feminism, racial equality, civic nationalism, censorship, support of hate speech laws, abortion, LGBTXYZ, transgenderism, open (non)borders, vaxxines, unlimited forgiveness, nonjudgmentalism, and on and on and on it goes.
But you go right ahead and lament that all the problems you see were caused by something or someone else. Of course, someday you might wake up from your stupor, look in the mirror, and start taking responsibility. But by then, it will be far too late to do anything about it.
Our moral and societal decay has one starting point, human nature. From it comes our desire for a free lunch. And the Communists prey on that desire to gain power. We want to believe that all of us can live happy, healthy, wealthy, full lives at the expense of others if those others would just share wit us the fruits of their labor.
The same as it has always been. Communism has failed and caused the same destruction over and over and over throughout history. This time is no different.
Your comment succumbs to the logical fallacy of overgeneralization. It says nothing specific about the specific problems we see today in society, nor does it have any explanatory power as a factor in causing such effects. Man's inhumanity to man, or evil, or 'human nature', or however else you wish to typify it, has existed as long as humans have been around. But the destructive elements we see today must be analyzed according to the unique factors that have appeared in recent history. Otherwise, it's just useless hand-waving.
BTW, attributing these things to communism is simplistic. It fails to account for the current instantiation of leftism called woke leftism, which includes elements of egalitarianism, progressivism, postmodernism, nihilism, and narcissism. If you can't or won't understand your enemy, if you mischaracterize him, then you are doomed to lose against him, which is obviously what's happening as the mindless masses do nothing while society is committing suicide.
With an economical measure of word substitution I could turn this comment upside down and argue that in-your-face building design is caused by capitalism, not communism or statism. Government architecture is rarely outstanding either positively or negatively. Rather it skews toward bland, "gray," functionalist mediocrity.
As to Elon Musk's brain dripping, it would be grotesque if planted in South Dakota, but will hardly earn a second glance in Los Angeles. In that endlessly sprawling metropolis the Tesla Diner isn't far off the centerline. Compared with what so many cool architects are inflicting on us, it is almost conservative. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, Frank Gehry's exploding aluminum nightmare, takes the prize for enhanced narcissism.
About the third picture, of the dispiriting view across Santa Monica Boulevard from the diner:
Almost all of us would agree it's a dreary no-man's-land that urgently needs a facelift. But to my mind it has one virtue. There are no residential high-rises stacking people on top of people as if they were merchandise in a Walmart storeroom.
James, you favor density as the answer to sprawl. I curse both alternatives. They are each anti-human in their own way. Some of us detest the sense assault of crowded spaces as much as you (and we) deplore endless urban expansion.
Cities and even towns metastasize not because of political wickedness or environmental indifference but because of population growth. If we want to return to life on a human scale, we need to stop the proliferation of people and even reduce our numbers, worldwide.
Yes, I said it! Now some dunce in the commentariat can write the usual smart-ass reply that if I want a smaller population I should begin by snuffing myself. Go for it and show how oxygen-starved your brain is.
The California of the Beach Boys and Mommas and Papas, is well on its way to becoming the dystopian nightmare of Bladerunner. Charlie Manson’s wokeness morality where Willie Brown’s “girlfriend” moves, almost to the top, of the political food pyramid in newscum’s regime and Nancy’s family gets better percentage returns on their investments than Warren Buffet. How despicable.
A generation ago Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “Mexifornia,” warned of the authoritarian transformation where California goes south into a third world oligarchical failed state. In 2028 Democrats will try to expand their Califailure model nationally.
Not just the LA area the rot from San Fransicko has metastasized down all the way to San Diego.
Our once great state is being methodically ruined by Democrats and their terrible policies.
It's not just homeless people drinking themselves to death the scourge of meth and most of all fentanyl laced drugs that cost as little as five bucks for an all day high and they are putting it in everything.
This synthetic opioid is so powerful that it transforms people into passed out on their feet statues twisted into grotesque poses like something out of the walking dead series.
In our lower-energy future, parking won't be a problem any more. There may be so little electricity that you will need to make a reservation, and perhaps even buy a ticket, not just for a taxi, but for the mere elevator ride, to your 87th floor mini-closet of an apartment. Plan your shopping day carefully, or you may have to hoof it up those 87 flights with your groceries.
True fact: In Pyongyang, North Korea, poorer citizens live on the upper floors of those high rises, because it is seen as a disadvantage, given that the power to the elevators is frequently off. A sneak preview of our own future?
I know what you mean: I lived in South Korea a few years and had a spectacular view of the harbour. The Koreans told me I lived in the poverty zone up in the urban hills because the bus service wasn't good.
I saw a projection today that AI data centers will require every 15 days the amount of juice 100 million homes use ANNUALLY. That's a 2,300% increase in electricity production. Many would need to be located next to gas fields or have the proposed small nuclear reactors on site. What kind of grid infrastructure does this entail? If transmission wire emits "bad stuff" as has been claimed in the past, what negatives will these super lines bring?
It depends. Idiot technophiles and wannabe CommuFascist technocrats have so retreated conceited to their dissociation from reality that in most of their enfeebled minds only AI centralized control extended to the maximum possible reach into every human being could bring to fruition the Glorious Revolution
So wait and maybe we will see what hat they magically pull the Terrawatts from
I think the renewables at grid scale are meant to fail because the agenda is burn baby burn so they can build back better
At some level of financial &/or political/ military power it’s very hard for me to imagine given history and evidence that they do NOT have numerous technological aces in the hole
I think the plan is actually build back busted as everything is cheap imported junk.
But don't worry they will likely kill us all with cancer from the mRNA poison they will pump into the food supply or the twisted idea to sell everyone lab meat grown from cancer cells.
California reached a historic milestone. In 2023, it became the first-ever economy of global scale to derive two‑thirds (≈67%) of its electricity sales from renewable and zero‑carbon sources, including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, and biomass. Its grid has run on 100% clean energy for an average of 7 hours daily through 2025. And new infrastructure is underway to make it 100% 24-hrs per day.
Renewable deniers are the equivalent of being proud to piss against the wind.
Good stuff for a press release, but I actually live in California, and it is not all sunshine and rainbows here like they would have you believe.
The price of power here is outrageous, and outages are frequent. Now they even turn it off as a precaution whenever it gets windy, so that if a line gets taken down by a blowing tree branch, it won't start a fire.
California imports a lot of its power from outside the state, and not all of that is "renewable" (a term used incredibly loosely to advance the narrative). Someday soon we'll have one of those Spain-like grid crashes when the percentage of solar and wind get a little bit higher, since we'll no longer have adequate dispatchable reserves to quickly bring on line every time the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud.
And to anyone who thinks it is expensive NOW, you haven't seen anything yet. Once the subsidies for solar and wind go away, the price will skyrocket. Those are not "one-and-done" projects--they have finite lifetimes far shorter than the power plants they are replacing.
You may have read about the drive to drain some of the big reservoirs for the benefit of the fish--there goes the hydro power. And nuclear, whatever they say, is NOT renewable.
Right now we only have a small percentage of people driving EVs, and the push for those ginormous AI data centers and crypto mining operations is barely getting started. The bottom line is that this "renewable revolution" will not pencil out without some very, very dramatic changes in the way the human race lives. I spent my entire career in nuclear energy, and am quite familiar with the science and the math behind all this.
The article at your link is spot on. Also, by writing as I did above, I am not advocating that we stick with combustibles forever; I merely point out that a "renewable" energy future will be one where we have far less energy. The people flogging this renewable future are misleading the public, likely because they know the public will not embrace this if they truly understood the changes they will be forced to make to their ways of life as a result.
Dennis Merwood, I too believe in solar energy but here is a link that will demonstrate what is now happening to the US solar industry; because the decades of federal solar tax-credits corrupted the technological price-discovery process, between buyer and seller, with the federal government assuming the technological shortfall risks of solar energy and not the buyer. The result is miles and miles of obsolete Chinese solar PV farms that are already becoming hazard waste clean-up sites with the solar energy developer in bankruptcy. All because the federal solar tax-credits corrupted the economic phenomenon of price discovery:
Exactimundo ! And in my beautiful state of Maine, if you drive across it you'll see all the lovely fields of arable soil covered w/your stupid fucking solar farms !
I’m in Wisconsin. Nearby our home there some farm fields that have just this past year or two been converted to solar panel fields. They are absolutely hideous. Everyone living near them hate it (not that anyone cares). Of course, the entire field has been sprayed with some sort of powerful herbicide to keep all the weeds from growing over the panels. Which of course drains down into the groundwater…it’s simply inane.
That's why they tell people not to charge their electric stupidmobiles at certain times and have brownouts etc? They'll have that new infrastructure up at ten times projected cost twenty years after the original projections while being built by "disadvantaged populations" with "equity" using "sustainable" materials. One major data center blows your fantastic propaganda to smithereens.
Sorry Dennis as other have pointed out that is plain bullshit.
We have different tiers of price points now that so many people are using Solar panels on their homes and the highest tiers go into effect as the sun sets and the solar panels are at their lowest production.
Imagine that when everyone gets home and turns on the AC if they have it and can actually afford to run it.
I ran my AC off and on and my normally $100 electric bill skyrocketed up to $400 for the month of July and it was a mostly mild July.
As far as the bird murdering unsightly windmills one of them only powers a couple of homes.
It will take millions of them to power anything close to a percentage and the RIO investment is very low as the fall apart in 20 years.
Our county civil attorney told me the blades are having much shorter lifespans than predicted and there are no real disposal protocols. Originally the plan was to bury worn out blades in the field where the windmill is located. It has been discovered since that these monstrosities are somewhat toxic and cannot be buried to poison ground water and future crops.
complete rubbish...lived here since the 70s, got talk to my friends who lost homes in the Palisades...rolling blackouts is normal, riots and protest as normal part of our insane lives...people ask how do you live here? I still don't have an answer but the weather is great when you're not choking on the smog :)
Come on, man. It is okay to dislike the design, but the article reads like a jump-the-shark-already Elon-bashing from five months ago: tedious, overdone, and that train left the station quite a while ago.
Diners have ALWAY been gaudy. I would hate to see a future where gaudy diners didn't exist.
Luckily, my community has a plethora of independent restaurants, if not "diners" proper; we are hardly beholden to IHOP & Dennys, even though we have them here. Say, are you related to my brilliant audio engineer friend Matt Parmenter?
Born on Fourth Avenue, a block and a half from South Chicago Street. I hear it's pretty bad but no relatives are willing to go there and report. They've all gone to Shorewood and Plainfield.
Cairo is on the Mason-Dixon Line. Further south than Richmond, VA. For the trivia hounds, Illinois was first claimed as a Virginia county. During the Revolution, George Rogers Clark and his Virginian troops fought all the way from Virginia to Indiana and Illinois, taking Kaskaskia from the Brits and then fighting the westernmost battle of the Revolution on an island in the Mississippi off of Rock Island.
I meant culturally but thanks for the fun facts. "Western reserve" in Ohio refers to having been the western reserve of... Connecticut. Apparently some of the royal charters (rather naively) extended from sea to sea. (Though I sense that you may be more familiar with this than I.)
Spent a year in North Chicago at the Navy training center God what a horrible place to live.
Even there the crime was out of control Spring and fall were OK but the one winter I spent there cured me of ever wanting to live in the snow everything was a shade of black, grey or white.
IGY. One of my favorite tunes. As a mid-century child, I remember the fantasies of the utopian future where mankind leaves its petty differences behind and, as a team, we unite for the betterment of all.
The moon landing gave us hope. We were progressing towards controlling our future. If we could leave the bounds of Earth, we could accomplish anything.
A couple years later, I heard the song, “Whitey on the Moon”, and it brought me back to Earth. Then In my early teens and becoming aware of the world, I realized mankind hasn’t learned shit.
We still haven’t. Years later, we have the same old problems…with all the technical advances we’ve made, perhaps we have even more.
Oh well, Fagan’s description of our dreams at the time makes for a great tune as it reminds us of the dangers of being overly optimistic when it comes to expecting anything meaningful of mankind’s progress.
“Attempting to densify” means preparing for the 15-minute city boom…that’s what the whole LA area is doomed to become, adherence to the UN/WEF Agenda 2030. That out-of-place techno diner has all the promise of a macaroni feast for rodents.
Then please call him out rather than be dismissive so that his criminal activity may be stopped. In order to be held accountable his disgusting actions must be blasted.
There is much to like about Elon. I am particularly grateful for his DOGE implementation which was a mind boggling eye opener into how we all have been literally robbed blind by our government overlords for decades!
But I am so not on board with all his and tech world’s futuristic projects. Don’t get me started with the whole AI craze. I am as close to a Luddite as you can get when it comes to that.
I also have zero interest in going to Mars, or any other planet for that matter. I most certainly do not want nor need a robot in my life for any reason whatsoever. I think the idea of self-driving cars is virtually antithetical to the reasons why most people buy cars: driving is part the overall experience, not always pleasant, but just a cool thing to be able to do.
Elons mind seems to be a non-stoppable engine of ideas. And that’s great. He’s achieved astonishing things by virtue of many of those ideas, and made tremendous contributions for the betterment of others.
I guess it’s just all the cold, hard, inhuman aspects of much of what he and the tech world are pushing on us that doesn’t rub me right. We need to become more human - humane - if anything, not less.
"I guess it’s just all the cold, hard, inhuman aspects of much of what he and the tech world are pushing on us that doesn’t rub me right."
One hears a lot of complaints -- they are valid -- about political and cultural Marxist brainwashing in our institutions of supposedly higher learning. But the most insidious brainwashing is the pervasive worship of technology.
From the day we begin to understand words till we close our eyes on this life we are endlessly subjected to a value system where every technical advance is claimed without discussion to be progress. The plebs and public intellectuals alike are conditioned to cheer autonomous cars, robot dogs, proposed colonies on the moon or Mars ... as long as it's technically feasible (or expected to be) we must do it. Because reasons, or in the absence of sane reasons.
Of course inventiveness can create products that make our life easier and healthier. But too many of them don't, instead just make things more complicated and non-human. We need to challenge our techy Utopians.
The families and friends of the million people that die in car accidents every year might beg to differ with you about driving and human drivers. Driving and self-driving are not antithetical- since the option to not drive the car personally has never been on the table before . Just a thought.
If you haven't already done so, check out the Obama library in Chicago. It's reminiscent of the marriage between a bunker and a dog turd, as ugly a building as could ever be conceived. But that's typical of Obama, who throughout his career made every decision on the basis of whether it would hurt white, Christian, traditional America. If it did, then you could take it to the bank that the half-black messiah would go for it. And now we have an unimaginable blight on the landscape to enshrine that vile mindset.
I’m totally on board with you, Suzie. I’m very disappointed in how badly DOGE was rebuffed…by our own elected representatives for goodness sakes! I’m not surprised at the Demon Rats, but many of the Repugnantkins who also resisted these cuts.
I retired from an automotive company and during my exit interview, I warned that while we may be able to master self driving car technology, we’ll never be able to outsmart the trial lawyers who see deep pockets and plenty of opportunities to assign blame to sue the car companies that produce them.
Tesla is experiencing that wrath now. I doubt they’ll prevail regardless of the strength of the Tesla’s case. If the plaintiffs prevail, self driving cars are done. For good or bad.
I have an alternate take. Even the trial lawyers will have a hard time defending the facts about safety and reduced accidents/ deaths. Even now, before the technology is perfected, SD vehicles are magnitudes safer (figures vary, but are realistically above 90% with current technology), than human drivers. In the end, humanity should demand SD vehicles. Although I admit, they would put the insurance industry into quite a quandary and possibly kill it. The industries with vested interests in keeping the status quo will not go down without a fight.
I lived in LA for about 9 years in the '70s. Walked home 1 block from Hollywood Blvd at 10 pm unmolested. took a bus to the beach on my day off a few times. Lovely '40s vibe in a lot of Hollywood then. A few bums but you could avoid them. I cannot imagine going back now. LA and Hollywood are experiencing deliberate ruination. Another aspect of the psyop to demoralize us all. We carry what used to be and what could be in our hearts. Tell your children and your children's children... Someday, your stories may be told around the evening fire. Keep civilization alive in your heart. ~ Ginger Breggin, co-author COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Society is in such rotten shape because the masses of little people have allowed it to get that way. And how did that happen? Because of one iron law: beliefs have consequences, and mistaken beliefs have rotten consequences. Everyone, including you dear reader, has happily allowed themselves to be brainwashed into perpetuating mistaken beliefs.
And what are the mistaken beliefs? First and foremost, the leftist belief that equality represents a moral virtue, i.e., equality is morality. All other evils fall out from that: feminism, racial equality, civic nationalism, censorship, support of hate speech laws, abortion, LGBTXYZ, transgenderism, open (non)borders, vaxxines, unlimited forgiveness, nonjudgmentalism, and on and on and on it goes.
But you go right ahead and lament that all the problems you see were caused by something or someone else. Of course, someday you might wake up from your stupor, look in the mirror, and start taking responsibility. But by then, it will be far too late to do anything about it.
Our moral and societal decay has one starting point, human nature. From it comes our desire for a free lunch. And the Communists prey on that desire to gain power. We want to believe that all of us can live happy, healthy, wealthy, full lives at the expense of others if those others would just share wit us the fruits of their labor.
The same as it has always been. Communism has failed and caused the same destruction over and over and over throughout history. This time is no different.
Your comment succumbs to the logical fallacy of overgeneralization. It says nothing specific about the specific problems we see today in society, nor does it have any explanatory power as a factor in causing such effects. Man's inhumanity to man, or evil, or 'human nature', or however else you wish to typify it, has existed as long as humans have been around. But the destructive elements we see today must be analyzed according to the unique factors that have appeared in recent history. Otherwise, it's just useless hand-waving.
BTW, attributing these things to communism is simplistic. It fails to account for the current instantiation of leftism called woke leftism, which includes elements of egalitarianism, progressivism, postmodernism, nihilism, and narcissism. If you can't or won't understand your enemy, if you mischaracterize him, then you are doomed to lose against him, which is obviously what's happening as the mindless masses do nothing while society is committing suicide.
With an economical measure of word substitution I could turn this comment upside down and argue that in-your-face building design is caused by capitalism, not communism or statism. Government architecture is rarely outstanding either positively or negatively. Rather it skews toward bland, "gray," functionalist mediocrity.
As to Elon Musk's brain dripping, it would be grotesque if planted in South Dakota, but will hardly earn a second glance in Los Angeles. In that endlessly sprawling metropolis the Tesla Diner isn't far off the centerline. Compared with what so many cool architects are inflicting on us, it is almost conservative. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, Frank Gehry's exploding aluminum nightmare, takes the prize for enhanced narcissism.
About the third picture, of the dispiriting view across Santa Monica Boulevard from the diner:
Almost all of us would agree it's a dreary no-man's-land that urgently needs a facelift. But to my mind it has one virtue. There are no residential high-rises stacking people on top of people as if they were merchandise in a Walmart storeroom.
James, you favor density as the answer to sprawl. I curse both alternatives. They are each anti-human in their own way. Some of us detest the sense assault of crowded spaces as much as you (and we) deplore endless urban expansion.
Cities and even towns metastasize not because of political wickedness or environmental indifference but because of population growth. If we want to return to life on a human scale, we need to stop the proliferation of people and even reduce our numbers, worldwide.
Yes, I said it! Now some dunce in the commentariat can write the usual smart-ass reply that if I want a smaller population I should begin by snuffing myself. Go for it and show how oxygen-starved your brain is.
Sir, this is the best comment on any article anywhere that I have ever seen. Mirrors my observations 100%.
Universal suffrage was the biggest mistake ever made in history, anywhere it's been done.
The California of the Beach Boys and Mommas and Papas, is well on its way to becoming the dystopian nightmare of Bladerunner. Charlie Manson’s wokeness morality where Willie Brown’s “girlfriend” moves, almost to the top, of the political food pyramid in newscum’s regime and Nancy’s family gets better percentage returns on their investments than Warren Buffet. How despicable.
A generation ago Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “Mexifornia,” warned of the authoritarian transformation where California goes south into a third world oligarchical failed state. In 2028 Democrats will try to expand their Califailure model nationally.
Oh my I just saw your names!!!
🙌❤️❤️‼️🙏🙏😇
We soldier on as we must
Deliberate exactly
Not just the LA area the rot from San Fransicko has metastasized down all the way to San Diego.
Our once great state is being methodically ruined by Democrats and their terrible policies.
It's not just homeless people drinking themselves to death the scourge of meth and most of all fentanyl laced drugs that cost as little as five bucks for an all day high and they are putting it in everything.
This synthetic opioid is so powerful that it transforms people into passed out on their feet statues twisted into grotesque poses like something out of the walking dead series.
Ginger, you are absolutely correct ❤️
If we ARE Prey then we need to know how to Deep Poison our predators. Or their children...
In our lower-energy future, parking won't be a problem any more. There may be so little electricity that you will need to make a reservation, and perhaps even buy a ticket, not just for a taxi, but for the mere elevator ride, to your 87th floor mini-closet of an apartment. Plan your shopping day carefully, or you may have to hoof it up those 87 flights with your groceries.
True fact: In Pyongyang, North Korea, poorer citizens live on the upper floors of those high rises, because it is seen as a disadvantage, given that the power to the elevators is frequently off. A sneak preview of our own future?
I know what you mean: I lived in South Korea a few years and had a spectacular view of the harbour. The Koreans told me I lived in the poverty zone up in the urban hills because the bus service wasn't good.
Lower energy because AI has SUCKED THE ENERGY OUT OF EVERYTHING! BEWARE!
I saw a projection today that AI data centers will require every 15 days the amount of juice 100 million homes use ANNUALLY. That's a 2,300% increase in electricity production. Many would need to be located next to gas fields or have the proposed small nuclear reactors on site. What kind of grid infrastructure does this entail? If transmission wire emits "bad stuff" as has been claimed in the past, what negatives will these super lines bring?
Who WANTS AI? Certainly not your average citizen anywhere. TPTB want AI so they can institute their ultimate surveillance state.
Beware.
It depends. Idiot technophiles and wannabe CommuFascist technocrats have so retreated conceited to their dissociation from reality that in most of their enfeebled minds only AI centralized control extended to the maximum possible reach into every human being could bring to fruition the Glorious Revolution
So wait and maybe we will see what hat they magically pull the Terrawatts from
I think the renewables at grid scale are meant to fail because the agenda is burn baby burn so they can build back better
At some level of financial &/or political/ military power it’s very hard for me to imagine given history and evidence that they do NOT have numerous technological aces in the hole
I think the plan is actually build back busted as everything is cheap imported junk.
But don't worry they will likely kill us all with cancer from the mRNA poison they will pump into the food supply or the twisted idea to sell everyone lab meat grown from cancer cells.
Remember the adage you are what you eat.
I expand that saying: "You are what you eat...and what you eat eats."...
California Shatters Renewable Energy Lies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQrUR6BjX7I&t=511s
California reached a historic milestone. In 2023, it became the first-ever economy of global scale to derive two‑thirds (≈67%) of its electricity sales from renewable and zero‑carbon sources, including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, and biomass. Its grid has run on 100% clean energy for an average of 7 hours daily through 2025. And new infrastructure is underway to make it 100% 24-hrs per day.
Renewable deniers are the equivalent of being proud to piss against the wind.
Good stuff for a press release, but I actually live in California, and it is not all sunshine and rainbows here like they would have you believe.
The price of power here is outrageous, and outages are frequent. Now they even turn it off as a precaution whenever it gets windy, so that if a line gets taken down by a blowing tree branch, it won't start a fire.
California imports a lot of its power from outside the state, and not all of that is "renewable" (a term used incredibly loosely to advance the narrative). Someday soon we'll have one of those Spain-like grid crashes when the percentage of solar and wind get a little bit higher, since we'll no longer have adequate dispatchable reserves to quickly bring on line every time the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud.
And to anyone who thinks it is expensive NOW, you haven't seen anything yet. Once the subsidies for solar and wind go away, the price will skyrocket. Those are not "one-and-done" projects--they have finite lifetimes far shorter than the power plants they are replacing.
You may have read about the drive to drain some of the big reservoirs for the benefit of the fish--there goes the hydro power. And nuclear, whatever they say, is NOT renewable.
Right now we only have a small percentage of people driving EVs, and the push for those ginormous AI data centers and crypto mining operations is barely getting started. The bottom line is that this "renewable revolution" will not pencil out without some very, very dramatic changes in the way the human race lives. I spent my entire career in nuclear energy, and am quite familiar with the science and the math behind all this.
Yes JPB, you are correct. You will find this interesting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zuz3IvjX232XQ1oaT1he9XDBc1kO8qBbZZEYUbGyLt8/edit?usp=sharing
The article at your link is spot on. Also, by writing as I did above, I am not advocating that we stick with combustibles forever; I merely point out that a "renewable" energy future will be one where we have far less energy. The people flogging this renewable future are misleading the public, likely because they know the public will not embrace this if they truly understood the changes they will be forced to make to their ways of life as a result.
We already had one about a decade ago.
Some substation on the border of Arizona fritzed out and plunged all of southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico into a blackout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout
Dennis Merwood, I too believe in solar energy but here is a link that will demonstrate what is now happening to the US solar industry; because the decades of federal solar tax-credits corrupted the technological price-discovery process, between buyer and seller, with the federal government assuming the technological shortfall risks of solar energy and not the buyer. The result is miles and miles of obsolete Chinese solar PV farms that are already becoming hazard waste clean-up sites with the solar energy developer in bankruptcy. All because the federal solar tax-credits corrupted the economic phenomenon of price discovery:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FmZMHJmp3mMFgIpP3otf4dbYqjhNDluC7tdp1eEFg1U/edit?usp=sharing
Exactimundo ! And in my beautiful state of Maine, if you drive across it you'll see all the lovely fields of arable soil covered w/your stupid fucking solar farms !
I’m in Wisconsin. Nearby our home there some farm fields that have just this past year or two been converted to solar panel fields. They are absolutely hideous. Everyone living near them hate it (not that anyone cares). Of course, the entire field has been sprayed with some sort of powerful herbicide to keep all the weeds from growing over the panels. Which of course drains down into the groundwater…it’s simply inane.
I assume you mean ---insane?
Both inane and insane…sure.
That's why they tell people not to charge their electric stupidmobiles at certain times and have brownouts etc? They'll have that new infrastructure up at ten times projected cost twenty years after the original projections while being built by "disadvantaged populations" with "equity" using "sustainable" materials. One major data center blows your fantastic propaganda to smithereens.
Sorry Dennis as other have pointed out that is plain bullshit.
We have different tiers of price points now that so many people are using Solar panels on their homes and the highest tiers go into effect as the sun sets and the solar panels are at their lowest production.
Imagine that when everyone gets home and turns on the AC if they have it and can actually afford to run it.
I ran my AC off and on and my normally $100 electric bill skyrocketed up to $400 for the month of July and it was a mostly mild July.
As far as the bird murdering unsightly windmills one of them only powers a couple of homes.
It will take millions of them to power anything close to a percentage and the RIO investment is very low as the fall apart in 20 years.
Our county civil attorney told me the blades are having much shorter lifespans than predicted and there are no real disposal protocols. Originally the plan was to bury worn out blades in the field where the windmill is located. It has been discovered since that these monstrosities are somewhat toxic and cannot be buried to poison ground water and future crops.
Wind power doesn't fly w/out subsidies, and biomass is zero-carbon how ? You're suggesting nuclear too ?
What a load of 💩
complete rubbish...lived here since the 70s, got talk to my friends who lost homes in the Palisades...rolling blackouts is normal, riots and protest as normal part of our insane lives...people ask how do you live here? I still don't have an answer but the weather is great when you're not choking on the smog :)
Prequel to the long plan: Elon buys CA. Rapid clean up.
DON'T LET IT HAPPEN! ELMO IS EVIL!
Come on, man. It is okay to dislike the design, but the article reads like a jump-the-shark-already Elon-bashing from five months ago: tedious, overdone, and that train left the station quite a while ago.
Diners have ALWAY been gaudy. I would hate to see a future where gaudy diners didn't exist.
In the “old days” I’ve eaten good food from backwoods diners. Today all we get is Dennys and Ihops. No thanks
Luckily, my community has a plethora of independent restaurants, if not "diners" proper; we are hardly beholden to IHOP & Dennys, even though we have them here. Say, are you related to my brilliant audio engineer friend Matt Parmenter?
Check out what the POS did to Memphis, TN. He ought to be deported.
Where you get a free Tesla Truck with every Double Bacon Mars Burger and fries
Not as alarmingly ugly as a Frank Gehry Building.
Hey! Joliet has gotten a lot nicer! You take that back!
I dunno man. I accidentally stopped there to get gas on a recent cross country road trip. If it's nicer now I can't imagine what it used to be like.
You don’t wanna know
Born on Fourth Avenue, a block and a half from South Chicago Street. I hear it's pretty bad but no relatives are willing to go there and report. They've all gone to Shorewood and Plainfield.
Ah, don’t forget Joliet is still in Illinois.
Actually most of Illinois is not in Chicago. Or Springfield.
I know. Joliet was my hometown until 2016.
Without Chitcago it would be probably be the reddest or nearly reddest state.
Yup. We used to say the Cairo (that's Kay-ro, of course) was further south than Atlanta. But some said that about Cincinnati, too.
Cairo is on the Mason-Dixon Line. Further south than Richmond, VA. For the trivia hounds, Illinois was first claimed as a Virginia county. During the Revolution, George Rogers Clark and his Virginian troops fought all the way from Virginia to Indiana and Illinois, taking Kaskaskia from the Brits and then fighting the westernmost battle of the Revolution on an island in the Mississippi off of Rock Island.
I meant culturally but thanks for the fun facts. "Western reserve" in Ohio refers to having been the western reserve of... Connecticut. Apparently some of the royal charters (rather naively) extended from sea to sea. (Though I sense that you may be more familiar with this than I.)
Spent a year in North Chicago at the Navy training center God what a horrible place to live.
Even there the crime was out of control Spring and fall were OK but the one winter I spent there cured me of ever wanting to live in the snow everything was a shade of black, grey or white.
Summer was HOT humid and miserable.
If you are born there, you are used to the weather. Although I never did get used to how humid some summer days were.
Yeah!
The weather is better than Illinois. Other than that, the communist death spiral is similar.
I was immediately reminded of Donald Fagen's ' What a beautiful world'. Retrovisionary. I kind of like it.
IGY. One of my favorite tunes. As a mid-century child, I remember the fantasies of the utopian future where mankind leaves its petty differences behind and, as a team, we unite for the betterment of all.
The moon landing gave us hope. We were progressing towards controlling our future. If we could leave the bounds of Earth, we could accomplish anything.
A couple years later, I heard the song, “Whitey on the Moon”, and it brought me back to Earth. Then In my early teens and becoming aware of the world, I realized mankind hasn’t learned shit.
We still haven’t. Years later, we have the same old problems…with all the technical advances we’ve made, perhaps we have even more.
Oh well, Fagan’s description of our dreams at the time makes for a great tune as it reminds us of the dangers of being overly optimistic when it comes to expecting anything meaningful of mankind’s progress.
I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)
The "I.G.Y." of the title refers to the "International Geophysical Year", an event that ran from July 1957 to December 1958.
And now the lyric, by 76 will be A-Okay, makes sense.
I was just wondering about that. Thanks for the post!
You're welcome!
“Attempting to densify” means preparing for the 15-minute city boom…that’s what the whole LA area is doomed to become, adherence to the UN/WEF Agenda 2030. That out-of-place techno diner has all the promise of a macaroni feast for rodents.
Someone never got the memo
Why would Elon Musk open a diner? Things just keep getting stranger and stranger. :)
Billionaires and their toys & projects.
Elmo's toys are very dangerous and so is he. Are y'all blind?
I never said his toys weren’t dangerous. They are indeed.
Then please call him out rather than be dismissive so that his criminal activity may be stopped. In order to be held accountable his disgusting actions must be blasted.
Well, you’re completely misinterpreting my comment, but hell, I don’t care. Let’s move on. Goodbye.
And you're misinterpreting mine. Buh bye.
There is much to like about Elon. I am particularly grateful for his DOGE implementation which was a mind boggling eye opener into how we all have been literally robbed blind by our government overlords for decades!
But I am so not on board with all his and tech world’s futuristic projects. Don’t get me started with the whole AI craze. I am as close to a Luddite as you can get when it comes to that.
I also have zero interest in going to Mars, or any other planet for that matter. I most certainly do not want nor need a robot in my life for any reason whatsoever. I think the idea of self-driving cars is virtually antithetical to the reasons why most people buy cars: driving is part the overall experience, not always pleasant, but just a cool thing to be able to do.
Elons mind seems to be a non-stoppable engine of ideas. And that’s great. He’s achieved astonishing things by virtue of many of those ideas, and made tremendous contributions for the betterment of others.
I guess it’s just all the cold, hard, inhuman aspects of much of what he and the tech world are pushing on us that doesn’t rub me right. We need to become more human - humane - if anything, not less.
The idea of colonizing Mars rather than improving things here on Earth is beyond ludicrous. And don’t get me started on AI.
"I guess it’s just all the cold, hard, inhuman aspects of much of what he and the tech world are pushing on us that doesn’t rub me right."
One hears a lot of complaints -- they are valid -- about political and cultural Marxist brainwashing in our institutions of supposedly higher learning. But the most insidious brainwashing is the pervasive worship of technology.
From the day we begin to understand words till we close our eyes on this life we are endlessly subjected to a value system where every technical advance is claimed without discussion to be progress. The plebs and public intellectuals alike are conditioned to cheer autonomous cars, robot dogs, proposed colonies on the moon or Mars ... as long as it's technically feasible (or expected to be) we must do it. Because reasons, or in the absence of sane reasons.
Of course inventiveness can create products that make our life easier and healthier. But too many of them don't, instead just make things more complicated and non-human. We need to challenge our techy Utopians.
Thanks, Suzie. You inspired my comment below.
The families and friends of the million people that die in car accidents every year might beg to differ with you about driving and human drivers. Driving and self-driving are not antithetical- since the option to not drive the car personally has never been on the table before . Just a thought.
Most car accidents are from not paying attention and now people toying with cell phones.
Down the list is driving too fast and aggressive did I mention the most aggressive drivers now seem to drive teslas and prius.
A computer driven car will suffer with none of that. 😁
God help us as they implement this when windows 11 blue screens while driving 65 in the fast lane and suddenly swerves to the left and center median.
Have you not heard what he did to Memphis??? Beyond evil. Lock him up or deport him.
Good, Lord! That's hideous. Wonder if everything served there is genetically modified, too?
If you haven't already done so, check out the Obama library in Chicago. It's reminiscent of the marriage between a bunker and a dog turd, as ugly a building as could ever be conceived. But that's typical of Obama, who throughout his career made every decision on the basis of whether it would hurt white, Christian, traditional America. If it did, then you could take it to the bank that the half-black messiah would go for it. And now we have an unimaginable blight on the landscape to enshrine that vile mindset.
I’m totally on board with you, Suzie. I’m very disappointed in how badly DOGE was rebuffed…by our own elected representatives for goodness sakes! I’m not surprised at the Demon Rats, but many of the Repugnantkins who also resisted these cuts.
I retired from an automotive company and during my exit interview, I warned that while we may be able to master self driving car technology, we’ll never be able to outsmart the trial lawyers who see deep pockets and plenty of opportunities to assign blame to sue the car companies that produce them.
Tesla is experiencing that wrath now. I doubt they’ll prevail regardless of the strength of the Tesla’s case. If the plaintiffs prevail, self driving cars are done. For good or bad.
I have an alternate take. Even the trial lawyers will have a hard time defending the facts about safety and reduced accidents/ deaths. Even now, before the technology is perfected, SD vehicles are magnitudes safer (figures vary, but are realistically above 90% with current technology), than human drivers. In the end, humanity should demand SD vehicles. Although I admit, they would put the insurance industry into quite a quandary and possibly kill it. The industries with vested interests in keeping the status quo will not go down without a fight.
Looks like an Edsel hubcap to me.
https://savageonwheels.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/edsel-hubcap.png?w=1024
👍 Perfect! 😁