Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

It's been kind of wild to see my credit card statement go from Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Lyft, Lyft, Uber--in Chicago and LA--to just the occasional Oyster top-up.

The train strikes have been a pain. Hopefully that will resolve eventually.

The Swiss train system was something to behold. Italy has pretty amazing trains, too. High-speed, especially, is a total revelation coming from the US. Imagine being able to go between Chicago and NYC in, say, 5-6 hrs as opposed to 20. That's easily achievable, given the political will, but the problem is that the tracks are owned by the freight companies, so Amtrak doesn't even have priority/right of way.

 

Political, but hey... The privatisation of Britain's rail system was a piece of sheer vandalism by a political party that knew it was about to be defeated. A kick in the face on their way out.

If you think the rail network is good, and goes everywhere, take a look at how it was before there were huge cuts in [about] 1967!

I used to live in Manor Park, and, before that, Forest Gate. Just up the road. But I left in 2005, so check sources before going.

When I first took my wife-to-be from India, to visit, she looked at two adjacent food/general shops in High Street North and said, "Amazing! I can shop in in Tamil in this one, and Malayalam* in that one. In London!"



*Kerala language

 

And trains are pricier than they ought to be, too. No illusions that it couldn’t be better, but compared to the US, it impresses

 

I've had some similar experience even traveling in 2018/19 vs 2015/16.

My understanding is the current (or soon outgoing) administration spent quite a bit of money marketing Taiwan as "a separate place". Particularly with the food. Strongly suspect concurrent chip wars and shortages have probably also contributed to this awareness.

 

@Psalmanazar

I wonder how these sound like. Genelec 1237a. They have both Digtal and Analog input. Maybe they have the crossover in the input via IC and bypass A/D D/A conversion. If thats the case these would be a viable option. Genelec uses custom Seas drivers so this part is probably quite good. The "compromised" 2-way 8" woofer does quite a lot for it size already.

 

Seas do not offer 12" on their website but there a lot of other companies that do. Just checked Scan Speak woofers. Scan Speak is expensive but you get your moneys worth in KG.

 

To my dismay, I have to agree with Trump and Biden on this - our major and international airports are 3rd world and horrible, even compared to major airports in actual 3rd world countries. Definitely behind other developed nations as well. I will say our small and medium airports are on average a bit better.

This is nothing new per se... but going to LAX today and thinking back on ohare (which I don't fly into anymore so maybe it's better now??), laguardia+jfk, orlando, etc etc reminded me of this. Also reminded me of the times I've had visitors from different countries, rich and poor, come to the US for the first time and flat out ask "I thought the US was supposed to be a developed country how are the airports and cities so shit here".

Is stuff like this why Trump won saying "hurr hurr things suck make better" and Obama won saying "hurr hurr hope for change guys"

 

DIA in (ok 30 miles outside of) Denver is functionally very good ime. The possessed horse? Not so sure about that. But it didn't keep me from getting anywhere.

 

I haven’t been to every large domestic airport, but of the ones I have been to, Denver and Minneapolis were probably the best run ones. Atlanta wasn’t great, but was definitely ok as well.

None of these have the wow factor that airports in other countries sometimes have, but I have minimal complaints with these airports unlike the majority of other large US airports.

 

Most of our major airports opened in the 40s and 50s, earlier than many major airports around the world, and we don't really fix up our old infrastructure the way some other countries do. Many active terminals are still the ones built around that time, with additional newer terminals operating alongside those. Of course that's only part of the problem, the other part of the problem is how often the entities running our airports are just generally corrupt, inefficient and incompetent, and deeply insulated from most pressures to change.

 

LGA is actually pretty nice now having completed a multi-year, $$$ overhaul of the terminals and surface infrastructure leading in and out.

 

this is probably a little offtopic, but this sbf stuff has had me thinking about something i think about all the time. i may have mentioned it before. i was in a cult for a bit when i was younger, which is something i do not talk about often, but it did happen. i have come to the conclusion that a lot of what ails society and the economy is "cult power". that is to say, no matter how well you design a political or economic system, you can't engineer out at least one motherfucker being really good at talking. what's really important is to have a strong, stable, and grounded social, emotional and psychological support system. that is the best defense against it, and i think the greatest ill of the way society is currently structured is that it robs people of that. i think if we had a lot more of that, we'd have a lot fewer of these sorts of things happening.

 

I wanted to input here on a topic regarding energy, EVs and modern political trends.

Context.
1. Recent news. EU is withholding internal combustion ban (Brussels). I'd say a smart decision.

Why is it smart decision? I did a simple calculation about power consumption regarding EVs (electrical vehicles).

Let's say a modern ~1+ million community / medium size city has peak power consumption.. around 1.0- 1.5 GW (gigga watts --> Power and not energy in kWh) without EVs.

Lets say you have an active fleet of 500k vehicles. How much power is needed to charge these over night?
500 000 * 10kW = 5 000 000kW => 5 GW.
Ok so take 30% off that (lets say maximum realistic peak from charging).
Thats 3.5GW of power. Now add this to the regular power and you get 4.5GW to 5GW of power consumption (peak).
What is the ratio of more potential power sources and grid power handling needed? (say over 1.25GW) 5GW / 1.25 = 4
4 X the normal power consumption at peak. Policies are gona fix that ? Unlikely.

Its way more realistic to burn some biowaste as internal combustion fuel as in piston engines + EVs + hybrids + hydrogen. Context here. Australians hiking on a desolate island see crap all over the beaches. Turn all the man made garbage to energy. We have diesel made of recycled waste that they claim has relatively low footrpint.. Maybe this one of the solutions.

 

Give it some time to scale and we may see synthetic carbon neutral liquid fuels that we can continue to burn in our combustion engines. Porsche is leading the way on this.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/1...gasoline-factory-comes-online-today-in-chile/

 

This looks like something.. Co2 + H to methanol is all synthesized.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/porsche-invests-75-million-in-chilean-synthetic-fuel-startup/

 

I like your reasoning, but they did not do it because they are smart. They did it because their bullshit was finally exposed.
Using EV requires extremely efficient and reliable grid. Consider transport we have today. Some percentage of it, still very small, is powered through the electrical grid. All the rest is some form of fossil fuels or biofuel. They wanted ALL of it to go through the grid. But some gov institution in Germany simply calculated that increasing the # of EV by 10% would collapse the existing transmission grid. All this energy suicide is aspirational bullshit, If you do not want NG, oil, coal, and nuclear the alternative is to die, freeze, and vanish in some other way. And that's what the "green" position in Europe was until Putin invaded Ukraine. Now Germany is polluting Europe burning coal at unprecedented rate.

 

The "green" position is virtue signaling and painting a reality based on how you like to be.. Thats how it seems to me. Not enough logic/science based knowledge and lack of pragmatism

Show the public working solutions and set realistic goals etc..

A 2 cm diameter nuclear fuel ("coin size") pellet fuels an aparment for 1 year. Wait now that I think of it.. Try to heat a house with solar panels on private property. Even with heatpumps.. Though call. Can be done but not that easy to achieve off-grid. I think they have no clue how these things work.

Well, actually private home owners are good. They have options and can make it work.. I guess bottom lines is do not go nuts with the "green" mentality and use what actually works.

 

I genuinely believe in clean energy or how I fundamentally see it, not crapping your bed and peeing in your water.

Problem is exactly what you guys are saying - it's done by people with blinders on who seem like they haven't done any due diligence with regards to "the science and math of it all" along with "the bigger realities at hand" and they implement crappy half baked solutions that may even actually set us further back from an actually cleaner and well implemented "green" future. Yeah, probably so they can virtue signal and feel like their otherwise relatively noncontributing existence "has meaning and contributes" or buy votes by letting people play the above. Not that my life is necessarily SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL AND GOODER, I'm just more OK with the fact that most of us don't "really" make that big of a difference in the world.

 

IMO this may help but I think that at the end of the day, if some sleazebag is "that much better than you" at their game, whether it be at "talking" or "reasoning" or "being a brutal dictator" - the last of which we are relatively powerless against without the ability to legitimately fight back, they will win regardless of what any one person may have in place. This whole SBF thing may have just been a hype / fomo train which seems to happen frequently enough in business and finance anyways.

At a simpler level, I also think of the general public's desire for IG, tiktok, or consumption of marketing. Or how people can be fooling into following dictators, bad leaders, and/or inefficiency at their own cost (from socialism to right wing juntas to disorganized chaos like the "CHAZ" that was in seattle) for often times what seems like only the "belief that it will get better". On and on and on.