In 2022, I saw the best of America: its resiliency, its character and its strength.
As we move into the new year, I’ve never been more confident about our shared future and the progress that lies ahead. pic.twitter.com/2fhvTaARny
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) December 31, 2022
Happy New Year to all my Balloon Juice comrades, including DougJ:
Biden has yet to hold a solo press conference in 2023
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) January 1, 2023
Miley Cyrus und Dolly Parton singen „Wrecking Ball“ und „I Will Always Love You“ bei Miley‘s New Year‘s Eve Party
pic.twitter.com/Sd8VI0DPTZ— Miley Cyrus Germany???? (@MCyrusDE) January 1, 2023
This election was won by *persuasion.* Americans were *persuaded* that they needed to defend democracy. That argument was a tremendous success. But apparently, once you steer away from a tree, the tree instantly becomes an absurd myth, & evasive action a grievous overreaction. https://t.co/B9XGrhsLfA
— chatham harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison) December 31, 2022
I think it can be both true that people are ultimately responsible for their decisions, and one of the more important jobs of politics is to create a structure which makes people more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things.
— Checkless Starfish Who Can Change His Name (@IRHotTakes) December 31, 2022
Both sides!
They think your house is a dumpster and everyone inside is fresh garbage
You are in great danger https://t.co/7dvhBquZqM
— UAE Exotic Falconry & Finance 𓅃 (@FalconryFinance) December 31, 2022
NotMax
Have a great one!, y’all.
mrmoshpotato
Dammit, Doug! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
knally
Thanks for posting that duet. I would never have found it myself but it was a real treat.
mrmoshpotato
Why? Why start the new year screaming “Will someone slap some sense into me?!”?
OzarkHillbilly
Blech.
Baud
I thought the great moral panic was CRT.
@mrmoshpotato:
DougJ vs. Shadi Hamid. The two sides of Twitter.
cliosfanboy
@mrmoshpotato:
really. Who is this clown? Is he one of the professional contraryians on the dirtbag left????
Baud
@NotMax:
May all your deliveries be timely in 2023, NM.
NorthLeft
In my working life as a Chemical Engineer, I used to investigate “near misses” at our chemical plant. Some people would argue that they were not worth the time I was spending on them, but I considered them gifts that allowed us to correct a potential problem without suffering the consequences. Sometimes my boss agreed with me.
Because, spoiler alert, they are going to happen again.
Mr. Hamid has no clue, and no rear view mirror.
Baud
This is a problem we have with a lot of liberal efforts at harm prevention.
Baud
@NorthLeft:
Mr. Hamid is laying the groundwork for DeSantis 2024.
dmsilev
See also the Y2K thing. Dire warnings, followed by a huge amount of work by people to address the underlying issue, followed by not much of a problem when the clocks rolled over. But part three only happened that way because of part two, not because part one was overblown.
lowtechcyclist
@NorthLeft:
In the words of Modest Mouse (RIP Jeremiah Green):
Pack up again, head to the next place
Where we’ll make the same mistakes
Quinerly
Happy New Years from Flagstaff! Big storm to hit here today.
In related news, if ever in the Clarkdale, AZ area The Arizona Copper Arts Museum is a must! Indescribable. Perhaps the highlight of my two weeks of wanderings.
Kay
@cliosfanboy:
He’s a centrist thnk-tanker. Liberal think tanks hire and pay horrible, not-very-bright people.
Senior fellow @BrookingsInst; Research prof@FullerSeminary; Contributing writer
@TheAtlantic
Baud
@Kay:
🤮
Kay
@Baud:
These people. The world began when they were in college. All of their work is some bizarre, egotistical autobiography:
It’s all glory days. They don’t know how to grow up.
Baud
@Kay:
When did he become a centrist? When did centrists start sounding like lefties?
I don’t like the world outside of Balloon Juice?
ETA: The Iraq war was horrible, but no one was “lonely” in opposing it.
lowtechcyclist
@dmsilev:
I’ve still never gotten an explanation on this one. Sure, that explanation makes sense for the countries that had the resources to deal with this. But there’s well over 200 countries in the world, and I have a hard time believing that in every less-than-first-world country, every system of significance that had been computerized but had a 2-digit field for the year was fixed in time.
Something should have fallen through the cracks somewhere in the world, due to lack of resources, lack of local leadership’s concern about the problem, or simply lack of available manpower in the world to locate and take care of the problem in every last place. But nothing worse was ever reported than a postmark of January 2, 1900. No reports of the electricity not working on 1/1/2000 in the capital of Burkina Faso or anything like that. So I remain skeptical that the Y2K bug was the threat it was advertised to be.
Elizabelle
Happy New Year, jackals. I hope it is a better one for all good people. Off to brew the sacred first coffee of 2023.
Discovered the pleasures of celebrating midnight with several world cities last night. (With grapes, fresh and fermented). Madrid (6 pm Eastern). London (7 pm). Rio (10 pm). Enough of that.
Betty Cracker
Yesterday was certainly rewarding for college football fans! I had no dogs in the hunts but was happy to see two outstanding games that set up a Dawgs vs Frawgs championship. I always root for the SEC team but may have to make an exception this year because how can you not love a team called Horned Frogs?
Kay
@Baud:
Nothing can be as important as their formative political experience, which was Bush and Iraq. Taibbi and Greenwald became rich and famous in opposition to Bush. They were young men then. They want it to stay 2002 forever.
Baud
@Kay:
Very true.
WereBear
And yet no one does. It’s a Zen koan.
Capri
Happy New Year everyone from a mostly lurker.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: It reveals how shallow their respective youthful hobbyhorses actually were. Greenwald was always a shitty, humorless prig of a writer, so I find his heel turn less surprising, but he sure has exploded the myth that he ever truly gave a shit about privacy and the rule of law. Taibbi wrote righteous jeremiads decrying white collar corruption and somehow missed the fraud festival Trump brought to town.
WereBear
One of the reasons I think Authoritarian Brain is a mental condition is how so many conservatives won’t mange Cause and Effect. I think this demonstrably erodes useful parts of their brain, and the gears don’t engage the way they should.
It should be studied more. That’s the fascism cure. It’s a mental issue that seems to inflict a reliable crazification factor. Call it what it is.
opiejeanne
@Kay: Research professor at Fuller? What does he do research on?
I have a good friend who just graduated from Fuller, and from her description of the place I’m surprised he’s on staff there.
Gvg
@lowtechcyclist: it WAs overhyped. There was a real threat and the worlds real serious people went out and dealt with it, even the poor countries. What happend at the same time is that a lot of other people did not really understand it but went along with it just like you always get a lot of orders from your bosses you don’t understand but carry out and THEN some people fell in love with apocalypse doom scenarios and started exaggerating what could happen for all kinds of reasons. Attention getting, boredom, religious, love of storytelling, fraud etc. For some reason humans are especially prone to this around certain numerical dates we think re significant too. See the history of how nuts the Christian world got around the year 1000 AD for instance.
My dad was a computer designer, an engineer who was involved in their development. He told me about this years before but said we would get it fixed. I knew other programmers working then who said it was handled….but the bosses insisted they come i that night all night so they brought an RV and had a BBQ and fireworks with their families in the parking lot and nothing happened. The event was known so far in advance that it was taken care of. Really. Not a surprise, just a lot of work.
People like being scared a little. I don’t get it, but in a way Y2K was a safe fear compared to reality.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
A “tell” for people like Greenwald is their exclusive focus on federal law. It doesn’t make any sense to attribute all authoritarian impulses and policy to the federal system in the US. The vast, vast majority of laws are state law. It’s silly to go and on about the threat to liberty posed by the FBI and ignore all state and local law enforcement- a MUCH bigger and more present threat to people than FBI agents. Greenwald knows this – he’s a lawyer. His dumb, easily led followers do not.
Radley Balko is a lbertarian- leaning person who writes on liberty and criminal justice. The vast majority of his work concerns state law, because that’s most of the offenses. He doesn’t go on and on about the “Deep State” because he (rightly) has his hands full just covering out of control sheriff’s departments.
Scamp Dog
@lowtechcyclist: The apocalyptic elements were overwrought, but there were enough real problems that needed fixing to make it a real thing. So “massive power grid failure!” wasn’t much of a thing, but a number of companies needed to fix their billing systems to avoid “you’re 99 years late paying your credit card, we’re cutting you off!” incidents.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
DeSantis went to peoples homes and picked them up for false voter fraud charges. All of the charges are getting thrown out, now, but these people were wrongfully arrested and detained for months.
Not a fucking peep out of the celebrity “civil libertarians” – they were busy monitoring The Deep State. Ridiculous.
Geminid
@Baud: It might seem odd for a “centrist” to sound like a “lefty.” But there are other axes besides the left to right one.
Another might be an axis from priveledged/secure to non-priveledged/insecure. The Brookings Fellow has a cushy job and lives in a liberal metropolitan area. He might see things differently if he lived in say, Springfield, Missouri and worked for that city’s newspaper.
And I guess one other axis might be empathetic/aware to self-centered/indifferent. There are plenty of people as privileged and secure as the Brookings Fellow who see the danger and challenges other people face and center their analysis away from their own situation.
RandomMonster
My coffee maker bit the dust so I switched over to a french press, and I will say, it lives up to the hype.
opiejeanne
@lowtechcyclist: I have my doubts too, but by then I was no longer working for a startup in Silicon Valley, and the most likely indicator that the panic was justified would have come from my boss who was on call for thumping the computers at Lawrence-Livermore Lab.
There was a “boys home” scam in nearby Crow Canyon that I drove past, that had big black water tanks for sale for Y2K, for when the water systems all shut down.
What did happen on New Year’s Eve that year was the capture of some terrorists who came in from Canada aiming to blow up the sub-station near Altamont.
mrmoshpotato
@Quinerly:
Happy New Year! Stay safe!
Elizabelle
@RandomMonster: Very good. And the French press is a little ritual, too.
indycat32
Kitten update, if you’re interested. Still haven’t seen Houdini since he escaped. The remaining three are running around playing and being kittens. While still skittish toward me they aren’t quite so quick to run away. Also haven’t seen the momma cat. I guess once I captured her kittens, she decided her work here was done and she left. Also, yesterday afternoon when I went out to pick up the empty cat dishes, there was a quite large opossum helping himself to the dry food. I thought opossums were noctural, and question of the day: will it be agressive toward the cats/kittens?
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Yep — similar to all the Substack meeping about the tragic necessity of “self-censorship” to avoid getting ostracized by colleagues at liberal institutions while ignoring the honest-to-dog government censorship by the DeSantis admin. The thing all these whiners have in common is that every issue revolves around them. It’s embarrassing.
WereBear
One of the gifts I got Mr WereBear stuck. Unlike that Scottish Titles scam! I did get my money back. I can be too whimsical. But there’s not a resolution to change that in my list because most people like it, including me.
It was supposed to be a charitible gift for both of us, and while I did fulfill that, I also subscribed us to the combined stream of Curiosity, a channel of documentaries and Nebula, curated Youtube channels with no commercials. This way to watch Youtube is one I can literally sign on for. Favorites like The Closer Look, Legal Eagle, and J D Signifier get some support when I do, to get exclusive content and no commercials.
Nebula focuses on learning and explaining, and I’m finding new people to follow.
Ken
Dammit, and one of my New Year’s’s’ resolutions was not to kink-shame. Oh well, still have seven others.
(I was out most of yesterday, so just saw WaterGirl’s question about the spelling, and am covering all the bases until I have time to read the replies.)
WereBear
@indycat32: Healthy, well fed, possums prefer to avoid conflict. It’s not a danger per se. Trail cams for feral colonies shows them not disturbing anyone when they show up.
As long as the food keeps coming, everyone gets along better :)
prostratedragon
Dance on, Anita!
lowtechcyclist
@Scamp Dog:
So the threat was hyped as “your utility systems will stop working on 1/1/2000” but it was really more “you’ll get a nasty notice saying your January 1900 electric bill is a century overdue, you owe $166.42 plus $337,559.81 in accumulated interest”?
OK, that makes sense. But damned if I know why they had to get the whole world in a tizzy over it, then. Like being told that there are 30-50 feral hogs headed for your neighborhood, and actually it’s a pack of chihuahuas.
HinTN
@RandomMonster: I have a French press to which I resort when the cappuccino machine is too much trouble (which is nearly never). Back when I would canoe and camp overnight that glass press went with me. Good coffee!!!
OzarkHillbilly
Not in my experience but I’d keep an eye on them just to be safe.
SFAW
@RandomMonster:
Bought Mrs. SFAW an “AeroPress” for Christmas. It’s supposed to brew even-better coffee, because the grounds are only in the hot water for about 60 seconds, thus reducing the acidity that a normal French press would allow to be imparted.
I have no idea if it works as hyped. If my wife ever decides to try/use it, and she agrees that it works that well, I’ll let youse-all know.
[I, on the other hand, view coffee as nothing more than a caffeine-delivery vehicle, so am not qualified to assess it’s worth.]
WereBear
@SFAW: I use heavy cream to reduce the acidity. And it’s teen cat Rhiannon’s favorite treat.
RandomMonster
@Elizabelle: That is certainly part of the charm!
HinTN
@SFAW: To grossly torture a paraphrase with what is but a nonsequiter
When I was young I drank coffee all day, when I was middle aged I drank coffee all morning, but now that I am aged I savor it at the start of day.
Happy New Year
Low Key Swagger
Morning! I used to really love to read articles written by Steven Weber, does anyone here know if he is on social media? Don’t think he has written for Huffpo in quite awhile.
geg6
@Kay:
Hell, I got into giant public fights with people about it. So did lots of my friends and family.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I think it’s ideological, which none of them will admit but the federal focus is so consistent that it jumps out at you. Only a federal (national) government can overreach. State and local governments are inherently more legitimate. That’s a bedrock conservative belief and so it’s a little surprising how many “liberals” and “Leftists” also believe it because where it falls apart is civil rights. A weak federal government won’t work for civil rights protection. We actually tried that in the US. Big failure.
Betty Cracker
Here’s a gift link to a fascinating WaPo story about a woman in Houston who saved more than 1500 bats from hypothermia during the recent cold snap. Mary Warwick is director of the local Humane Society’s wildlife service, so she has expertise with bats, knew the location of two colonies in Houston tunnels and knew how to save them. Other people heard about her efforts and helped her collect bats that fell off the ceilings and were in danger of freezing.
RandomMonster
@HinTN: I bought mine years ago for just such travel purposes, but I never used it at home much.
@SFAW: I only recently even heard of an aeropress, which is astounding as someone drinking espresso from the age of 13.
Dave
@SFAW: The aeropress is pretty good but you probably want more like 90 seconds and water closer to 200 (a little less if you can manage) than the recommended parameters. Of course that’s personal preference so YMMV.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
All I needed to know about Brookings of late is one of their housing experts: neoliberal yimby who preaches against he “evils” of single family houses/zoning while living in a $1.4m single family place in NW DC.
The fact that Totebagger Radio, when it needs to find what it thinks is an obvious liberal think tank, always goes to Brookings mouthpieces and what comes out is classic Nice Polite Republican talking points, is all I need to know about the hires there.
Kay
@geg6:
Maybe he means “lonely” within the tiny subset of centrist think tankers and Atlantic writers. A lot of them supported the invasion.
We had to leave the “prosecutors ball” (an annual party for police and prosecutors) because my husband was outspoken anti-invasion and everyone at the table was attacking him as unpatriotic but this is a super Right wing county so he really was the exception, especially as a prosecutor.
Gin & Tonic
@Gvg: Wait till 2038.
indycat32
@WereBear: @OzarkHillbilly: Good to know. I’ll bring the food in immediately after breakfast and hopefully the possum will look elsewhere for his afternoon snacks. I thought I just had to worry about raccoons.
Baud
@Kay:
I’d take it a step further. It’s precisely because a strong federal government will advance civil rights that these folks want people to distrust the national government.
Kay
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I believe think tanks are good- that paying people to think might be worthwhile – I just wish they weren’t all Right leaning contrarians re the Democrats. I don’t know why our think tankers are so oppositional to the Democratic Party, why that is the measure of how rigorous their thinking is.
Gin & Tonic
@SFAW: The verdict among the aeropress owners in my family is that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. They are very seldom used. YMMV.
Baud
@Kay:
The worst insult you can receive as a “thinker” is being called “partisan.”
prostratedragon
@Baud: Yep. “States’ Rights” probably back to the arguments over the Constitution.
Betty Cracker
My dog Pete, who is a giant chicken when it comes to confronting local wildlife (for which I’m grateful!), went after an armadillo Friday night. I had let Pete out in the pre-dawn darkness to do his business. He rarely strays from the pool of light from the porch, but this time, when he got downstairs, he started growling and barking and chasing something across the yard. I had no idea what he was after, so I went running down the stairs in my PJs to investigate and saw him pursuing the armadillo, which escaped into a hedge after I convinced Pete to leave off the chase. Pete never touched the creature, but I was surprised he went after it at all.
matt
Funny to see pissant Hamid causing consternation again with his dumb bullshit.
2liberal
re: y2k and computers. I was on Microsoft’s front line response team for this. At the time i worked for Microsoft support (my calls started “thank you for calling microsoft NT Server support for Macs, Apps and printing. May i have your case number please?” and callers paid $150 for each support incident to speak with us.)
They called all hands to be on deck when we rolled into y2k and it was a big nothing – NOTHING HAPPENED.
trnc
@mrmoshpotato:
Many will volunteer. None will be successful.
Baud
@2liberal:
“I was promised an apocalypse.”
rikyrah
Happy New Year, Everyone 🎉🎊🍾🥂
Baud
@rikyrah:
Happy New Year.
MagdaInBlack
@RandomMonster: I’ve used a french press for years, for much the same reason: my coffee maker died. I’ve just never bothered to replace it, as the french press works just fine.
kalakal
@rikyrah: Happy New Year
opiejeanne
@Baud: Happy New Year!
opiejeanne
@rikyrah: Happy New Year!
Ba
@opiejeanne: Happy New Year!
Baud
@opiejeanne:
Happy New Year!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@rikyrah:
Happy New Year!
satby
@indycat32: possums and cats usually co-exist ok. They seldom fight, possums don’t like to. They and raccoons both like cat food though. So do groundhogs, I’ve had all three at my feral feeding stations. To minimize freeloaders (though I would be thrilled for a possum to show up) take up the food dishes overnight.
Geminid
@indycat32: There was a possum at the cat food pan Friday. I was going to throw something at him but he’d already scurried under the shed attached to the cottage.
Then I thought, “leave him be. He’ll be around to eat ticks when they come out this Spring.” So now I’m trying to put out just enough cat food.
I don’t think a possum would be a threat to a cat or kitten unless it was attacked, and that seems an unlikely fight. The cats here watched the possum from 15 feet away and they looked like they wanted nothing to do with him.
satby
Exactly why I would love to see a possum in my yard too!
SFAW
@Gin & Tonic:
Why the heck didn’t you tell me that before I bought it? I mean, I’m not that far away (geographically), you shoulda been able to read my mind at that distance.
But thanks for the evaluation, I appreciate it. Yes, I really do.
Barbara
@RandomMonster: My coffee maker bit the dust and I switched to a stove top Bialetti. You can use any kind of coffee, not just espresso. A 3-cup unit makes one perfect cup of coffee. IMHO.
Barbara
@Gin & Tonic: Yep. BTDT. Very good for camping but way too much fuss for everyday use.
Kay
@Baud:
That’s on the Right though. I think “liberals” and “Leftists” who ignore the federal role in civil rights might be less likely to ignore it if they could manage to put politics into a context that is larger than “how things were when I, personally, was in college”. The Democratic Party has a real history! The Party GOT TO a federal role in civil rights the hard way, the wrong way, thru bitter experience with pursuing the (failed) states rights approach.
They should spend more time among people either older OR younger than themselves. Neither of those groups experience politics solely thru the lens of the years 2000 to 2008.
sdhays
@lowtechcyclist: I was fairly young back then, but now with an extra 20+ years of seeing how this stupid-ass world works, I suspect that if it hadn’t become a “crisis” that “everybody” was talking about, a bunch of CEO’s would have brushed off their employees begging them to spend money to fix their issues before it was too late.
It shouldn’t be that way, but it seems that this is the way the world works.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
From the quote box:
That may have been true of the first two. Certainly the Patriot Act was pushed through so fast that there was barely any time for it to even be an issue.
But there were massive protests against going to war in Iraq, and dozens of Congresspersons voted against it. Opposition to that war was hardly a ‘lonely place.’
JPL
Happy New Year! 👪🌃🥂🎇🎄
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: cf. John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder on the Voting Rights Act.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I can no longer distinguish professional centrists from the dirtbag “far left”. A reflexive contrarianism toward partisan Democrats, while insisting they’re not just Republicans, is the common aspect.
Geminid
@satby: People used to hunt possums for food, at least in the South. They were country people’s food, and for the poorer ones possum and sweet potatoes were a feast.
In early 1909, a group of well-off Georgians hosted President-elect William Howard Taft for a “Possum and ‘Tater” banquet in Atlanta.
I think I remember a Wallace Stevens poem titled “No Possum, No Sop, No Tater.” Stevens had a lively inner life for a Hartford insurance executive.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
I was reading Grover Norquist’s Wiki page recently, because I wasn’t sure if he was still alive or not and came across this:
Insanity. Because the the US and the world are no different than at the turn of the 20th century
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: He sure did. “Let be be finale of seem.” That line has been rattling around in my skull since 7th grade.
lowtechcyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
Yeah, I’ve read about that little problem with 32-bit time.
One of my occasional hobbies is keeping track of where we are in SF literature. 2038 is the year David Brin’s Earth is set in. Hard to believe it’s only 15 years away.
Of course, the year 2000, which was The Future when I was a kid, is now 23 years in the rearview mirror. Where are is my flying car, dammit?
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: The “centrists” and the “dirtbag” left can likely be distinguished by their stance on Ukraine. That war has really shown a harsh light on foreign policy positions among further-left people.
There seems to be a lot of controversy about this war within the Democratic Socialists of America and among those politically adjacent to the party. That and other issues may make for some spirited meetings when the DSA holds its bienniel convention this summer.
Soprano2
@Kay: He evidently didn’t pay any attention at all to what was happening after 9-11. There were literally millions of people around the world, including in the U.S., marching against Bush’s Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. Lots of people protested our government endorsing torture. Many people wrote about what a clusterfuck Iraq turned out to be. I guess he was watching Fox News that whole time.
Cameron
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just guessing, but in context it appears that “we” means “people of whiteness.”
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: It’s a good thing that armadillo did not turn around and fight it out. Florida’s a “Stand Your Ground” state, and the armadillos there might not just roll up into a ball anymore!
MagdaInBlack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Grover is and always has been a smug, pompous asshole
Josie
@lowtechcyclist:
Maybe he should have taken another look at the people he surrounded himself with and made some changes. It’s just possible that could still hold true.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Cameron:
Definitely
HeleninEire
Happy New Year to all my Balloon Juice friends.
2023 will be GRAND! I promise! 😃
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Matt McIrvin:
‘Professional Centrists” should be a rotating tag.
MisterForkbeard
@lowtechcyclist: I’ll sort of give them the Iraq one. Sorta.
Opposing it in the media could get you fired and it ruined a couple of careers. There really was a huge, coordinated response to attacking anyone who opposed the war as “hating america” and “loving terrorists”.
It got resolved because they deployed it against the slightest criticism and the critics were eventually proven correct. But for awhile, it could be professionally dangerous to be anti-war in the media.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Uh oh. Has Pete made a new year’s resolution?
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, the risk was mostly to things like corporate billing and accounting and scheduling systems, not things like the power grid. But it was genuinely a big, big problem. And nobody could prove there wouldn’t be life-and-death consequences in advance, without a lot of work that was tantamount to the investigation required to fix it.
Where the doom predictions really went off the rails was when the religious End Times hucksters got into it, and then it just became an excuse for millenarian apocalyptic nonsense with a superficial technical gloss. Jack Van Impe was very keen on Y2K bringing Armageddon.
Cameron
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): For some reason l thought he was older than me. Christ. Dude’s five years my junior.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I could see that–the centrists have a tendency to admire/align with neocons, whereas the horseshoe left favors paleocons.
Anyway
@MisterForkbeard:
Yep. Remember Phil Donohue? His MSNBC show got canned bcuz he spoke against the Iraq war. Opinions against the Iraq war were quickly marginalized. The one large-scale protest that occurred in the US was memory-holed so fast –like it never happened. The Bush-Cheney admin was scary-efficient about squashing any dissenting voices against their war.
Eunicecycle
@lowtechcyclist: George Jetson was just born last year. There’s still time!
Matt McIrvin
The Y2K bug that I personally saw pop in January 2000 was a script that was intended to put copyright date stamps on source-code files–it started generating the year “19100”, because some line of Perl code was concatenating strings when it should have been adding numbers.
That was a common enough Perl bug that the invitation for a Perl conference that year identified the date as 19100, a joke that it was safe to assume everyone in the Perl community would get.
Cameron
@MisterForkbeard: Our Liberal Media weren’t exactly champing at the bit to dispute the Bush/Cheney version of events in the Middle east. I remember being part of a protest against the Iraq invasion in Philly. Not a whole lot of people, but we did surround City Hall. Didn’t even make the news.
Matt McIrvin
@Eunicecycle: I’ve been seeing a lot of jokes about John Boorman’s strange science-fiction movie Zardoz being set in 2023, and I’m wondering where that came from because it’s not. It says it’s set in the year 2293 pretty explicitly. Maybe there’s some element of the backstory that happened in 2023; I forget.
Robert Sneddon
@Matt McIrvin: The “people will get hurt or die” machines like airliners that were subject to Y2K issues got fixed because, well, people might get hurt or die. If a hospital medical device suddenly thought it was Jan 01 19100 rather than Jan 01 2000 and switched off or did something it shouldn’t when the clock rolled over then the lawsuits would be Theranos-sized.
Other stuff would just cost money and inconvenience — I sorted a Y2K “bug” in a certification system where very expensive machinery couldn’t be insured to operate safely unless the certificates all lined up with the pieces of hardware they referred to, and yes the naming process used two-digit year codes. The “fix” I created would only work until 2050 but I documented that fact and it was accepted by the insurers for rollout.
Eunicecycle
@Matt McIrvin: I hadn’t heard of this movie but looking it up, I certainly hope it’s not supposed to be this year! What I read said it was supposed to be 23rd century. And it was amusing to see Sean Connery from 1974.
Scout211
Happy New Year all.
The sun is shining here in NorCal but flood warnings are still in place until mid-day due to runoff from the foothills. Our rain gage registered 6 inches for the past few days. Wow.
Thousands are still without power and many roads and highways are still closed due to flooding. Early this morning “dozens” of people were rescued from their vehicles on state highway 99 south of Sacramento and as of early this morning, state highway 101 was still flooded in South San Francisco. We have today to recover and then starting tomorrow we have yet another atmospheric river headed our way. The rain and the snow is much needed but no one seemed to be prepared for the amount of rain and the extent of the winds.
Wish us luck for the next one.
J R in WV
@lowtechcyclist:
As a professional software developer from 1985-2008 I can state authoritatively that without a huge outpouring of technical expertise successfully applied to software systems all over the world, 1999-2000 would have been a catastrophe.
Older COBOL experts in retirement were offered huge sums to return to the workplace, as recent IT graduates were wholly incapable of understanding large COBOL based systems, which had tons of oddities to work around physical limitations in older hardware.
Those work arounds were still implemented even though the newer hardware those systems were running on had very few of the physical limitations the work arounds were intended to solve. But no one was asked to eliminate them as new hardware was introduced — does the old system still run correctly on the new mainframe? OK, job over!
I was offered triple my income to move to Pittsburgh to work on banking software which was going to fail at 00:00:01 am Jan 1 2000. But we decided that our several tracts of inexpensive forested WV hillside would cost millions of dollars more to duplicate within commute distance of PBGH and so I remained in WV.
Plus I hate working with financial systems, artificial complexity to obfuscate the real stuff taking place. Enviro software deals with real world complexity [plus crazed regulations to keep polluters from being shut down to stop their emission of toxic stuff.]
Also, Happy New Year to all the Jackals !!! Here’s hoping 2023 is a bit smoother than ’22 was…
The interviews for experienced COBOL software folks were like a train station though. Nearly everyone with any experience got some kind of job, many made out like bandits, and rightfully so.
Immanentize
@Matt McIrvin:
My FiL, dead you know, was a programmer, mostly in the oil and gas industry, from the mid-60’s until his retirement in 2003. He claimed the Y2K problem was actually an odd artifact of the punch card days of very limited command spaces on the horizontal of a card. They never added beyond two digits for years in dev. because, as he put it, “anyone who thought our programs (mostly fortran) would live beyond 1980 were seen as utter idiots.” But there he was, at the end of his career, fixing vintage and new programs with the carry over limitation still intact.
ETA or what JR in WV said.
Kay
@Soprano2:
The Atlantic “liberal” writers spent all four years of Trump bleating about cancel culture, the existential threat of “wokeism” and impolite law students at Yale. DougJ is dead on with this crowd when he depicts them as fighting “the Oberlin student council”. Their “battle” is a fucking joke.
That may be why they think Trump wasn’t damaging- they were stupidly chasing a threat they invented that mattered to like 15,000 elites with huge platforms and no one else. It didn’t resonate with the public in terms of elections because it’s dumb and narrow. Most people don’t attend Yale or Oberlin. The most popular undergrad degree in the US is not “gender studies”, it’s “business”. Most people go to college to learn a specific marketable skill, like nursing or teaching or engineering or “business” (so they can be managers).
SFAW
@Cameron:
Thank you!
I am so tired of seeing the abominable “chomping at the bit.”
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think that in the case of Ukraine the “centrists” are aligning with the internationalism that was the majority position, almost the consensus, in this country after the Second World War.
The later “Neocon” strain of interventionism was somewhat of an outlier and would have remained so had the attacks of 9/11 not shifted public opinion so much. Neocon success was self-limiting though, because the Iraq war was such a fiasco. That war’s advocates are too proud to admit they were wrong, but I think they’d take that terrible move back if they could.
“Neocon” originally was used to describe liberal intellectuals like Irving Kristol who shifted right in the early 1970s. The joke then was that “a Neocon is a Liberal who got mugged.” Irving Kristal’s son William was in the later generation of Neocons who applied neocon framing to foreign policy, to the nation’s detriment and their own discredit.
Now the younger Kristol is famous as a Republican Never-Trumper, and the joke is that a Never-Trumper is a Neocon who got mugged, by Neofascism.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Not that there’s anything wrong with gender studies! It’s just the idea that huge public colleges aren’t churning out massive numbers of accountants and engineers and nurses and marketing majors is just nonsense. Yes, they are.
They didn’t need to worry that it would be 100% gender studies graduates. That’s an idiotic concern that doesn’t comport at all with the real world of US higher ed, which is mostly not Yale or Oberlin.
MSU alone produced 900 graduates in engineering in 2022. I don’t know how many nurses or teachers or medical techs or accountants they produced, but it’s a lot.They do that year after year, decade after decade and that’s one huge state school.
Steeplejack
@lowtechcyclist:
Photo:
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
That’s about 3x the number of graduates that my little LAC alma mater produces a year.
BlueGuitarist
@Geminid:
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks for your Wallace Stevens references!
Adding
“It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing. And it was going to snow” (13 ways of looking at a Blackbird)
and (of course)
“Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
happy new year, all.
Soprano2
@Kay: If you listened to those people you’d think everyone who went to college was an art or gender studies or philosophy major. What’s really dumb about that is they were all in college, so they know who was actually there and what they majored in. I went to a private liberal arts college where the most majors were business! I was one of them!
BellyCat
@lowtechcyclist:
Oh noooo…. Spectacular band. Age 45 is too young. Fuck Cancer.
schrodingers_cat
Taibbi’s analysis was pretty shitty back during the late aughts as well. His numbers never really added up but he said what we wanted to hear. So we hailed him as a truth teller.
Suzanne
@Baud:
I don’t know about that. I definitely felt gaslighted and alone. I am probably very close in age — 9/11 happened in my senior year of undergrad — and all around me, people were raring to get their war on.
Mr. Suzanne and I met in 2008, and one of the things we talked about very early on was how, as people who were dating at that time, supporting the Iraq War was a hard pass for both of us, and that it ruined a lot of dates.
BlueGuitarist
@Capri:
”comment more” could be a New Year’s resolution!
VOR
Y2K was used to justify much needed computer infrastructure investments. People weren’t just patching old systems and waiting for failures, instead they invested in newer, more capable systems. That 1960s vintage billing system was replaced by a new ERP system. Old hardware was replaced by newer, faster gear.
Barbara
@Suzanne: And yet, in less than a decade people were falling all over themselves to prove they hadn’t blindly entered into the conflict. It was fucking stupid. I got so agitated at times my husband asked me to be quiet and when I more or less shouted “what do you think?” he more or less said that he agreed with me. I think many people squelched their misgivings, and were too easily misled, but I will always believe that Judith Miller belongs in hell
Steeplejack
@J R in WV:
I worked on a Y2K project at a large financial company. In the end it turned out to be about 70% “checking” and 30% “fixing.” But it all needed to be done.
People sometimes forget that when something turns out not to be a disaster it doesn’t mean that the work that was done to prevent the disaster was not needed.
There was—and no doubt still is—a lot of fragile legacy code out there surviving because of the philosophy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (for generous definitions of “ain’t broke”).
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yeah I wrote several op-ed pieces opposing the Iraq war in my college newspaper. People stopped me to tell me how they agreed with me.
In my anecdata most international students and most immigrants were against the war. Among the native born, in the business school the ratio was about 50/50 for and against the war. In the sciences I would say 30 for the war and 70 against. Most engineering students( overwhelmingly white male, native born) were for the war
Among those who were for the war the refrain was ” Oh but we were attacked”. My retort was, “but not by Iraq”.
Suzanne
@SFAW:
I bought one for SuzMom some years ago, and she loves it. She used it (and washed it) so many times that the rubber part dried out. So I replaced it for her. Anyway, she probably uses it five times a day. She agrees that it is better than the French press or the Chemex. I have given it as a gift to others on her recommendation.
There is an excellent small coffee shop chain in the PHX area called Cartel, and they offer AeroPressed coffee at a premium relative to drip.
Matt McIrvin
@Eunicecycle: It’s a deeply ridiculous movie in many ways, with a lot of bizarre costumes and massive nudity sometimes verging on softcore porn, but I also admire its ambition–there are some actual science-fiction ideas in it, reminiscent of Clarke’s The City and the Stars.
zhena gogolia
@Eunicecycle: I saw that movie when it came out. A real snooze, as I recall.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: That kind of nudity was commonplace in the 1970s. I don’t know when movies got so prudish.
J R in WV
@Kay:
Wife watched “Mississippi Burning” last night. Was about the 3 young civil rights organizers who were murdered by basically the county sheriff and his deputies, who were all KKK members. The local justice system was great with having those kids just disappear off the face of the earth. The FBI had to really stretch their good policing morals to put the bastards away. Which happened.
When we lived in MS for the year of 1972, it was still obviously pining away for Jim Crow, nearly every white person was a tone racist if any opportunity to show that side came around. Still is from all we can see up here in WV.
It was too stressful for me to watch, I just saw bits and pieces when I went into the kitchen to do prep work for the sauerkraut and Kielbasa sausages, which we both agree was the best sauerkraut dish I’ve made in at least many years.
Diced and minced celery, onion and carrots, several smushed cloves of garlic, 3 sausages and a pouch of really good sauerkraut with seeds and spices. Oh yeh, a diced small potato also too. And chicken broth, tho many recipes call for wine, which I intended to use but forgot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Barack Obama won the ’08 primary because he called it a “dumb war” in 2002. IMHO.
JAFD
A couple of decades back, I lifed in the middle floor of a three-flat in West Philly. My kitchen was in the back, and the fire escape angled upwards across the window. The lady upstairs often kept a window open so her cat could climb along gutter, down fire escape, and roam. One summer morn I woke up, stumbled into kitchen, saw, climbing up, a cat ? cat ?? NOT CAT !!! And hurriedly called her up to say “A mama possum and a half-dozen baby possums are coming up to join you for breakfast.”
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat:
Huh. At my workplace there was a 80-20 split for and against the Iraq war. Those of us against the war were always outnumbered in lunch-table talks…
ETA after that we kinda stopped discussing politics/ current events at lunch.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: The thing that started to bother me back then was that his rhetoric verged on the things said by goldbugs–banks were running a giant scam with made-up funny money based on nothing of intrinsic value, etc. And while there’s a kind of truth to that, it doesn’t necessarily get to why the particular financial manipulations that led up to the 2008 crisis were bad, and it’s also a point of view with a bad track record and ugly political associations.
Steeplejack
@VOR:
This is true.
Quinerly
@mrmoshpotato: thanks!
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yep. After John Kerry’s “I was for it before I was against it” Democrats wanted their anti-war pols to be purer, and Clinton wasn’t. Of course, Obama never had to vote on the matter.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Yep same here. His screeds that DougJ and JGC excerpted here were fun to read because I agreed with them but when I went to read the articles mostly in Rolling Stone IIRC, I realized that they were overly long and lacking in evidence. Also, what you said.
JAFD
“They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn
And whence they came and wither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.”
Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Matt McIrvin
@Immanentize: That was one cause. But another was just that early computer systems had very limited memory and anything you could do to save a tiny bit of space would pay off.
And yet another was a far more fundamental and widespread issue, that systems calculating anything to do with a date that had always operated in the 20th century had not necessarily been adequately tested with the situation pertaining in the 21st. Any number of bugs could creep in just because the situation was a little different.
I remember a rash of bugs associated with leap-year calculations in February 2000 that happened because programmers were trying to be cute and handle the low-frequency cases in the Gregorian calendar, and getting it wrong. The funny thing is that if they’d just stuck with the Julian rule of a leap year happening every four years, they’d have been fine until 2100. Even a very simple piece of code will often produce bugs when run in a situation where it hasn’t been tested, because coders’ reasoning is fallible.
BlueGuitarist
@Steeplejack:
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.
“We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,”
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
Oliver Herford
munira
@indycat32: Cat food is very popular – blue jays also love it. I once fed stray cats and had quite a collection of critters coming for it.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Another financial-criticism site that was popular on the left back then was Zero Hedge. I remember people like Brad DeLong taking it seriously enough to argue with it. And then Zero Hedge got more and more goldbuggy and eventually flipped to a full-on alt-right/MAGA site.
Suzanne
Agreed.
There was definitely a cohort of people who don’t really think too critically about things who just saw how terrible 9/11 was, and felt like it couldn’t go unanswered.
I just want to note that, probably in some parts of the country more than others, it was definitely a weird experience to be firmly in opposition to the war. It was honestly a bit disorienting to see such a strong consensus. Arizona was definitely a red state at that time, but by no means were they absolute blowouts. But it definitely felt like 90% of the people I interacted with were on #TeamInvade, even people who I thought otherwise would have known better.
indycat32
@satby: I never leave food out overnight because of raccoons, but the possum showed up in the middle of the afternoon. Have never before seen a possum here.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Zero hedge and Oil Drum were both pretty bad. Also, Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith. That was pretty terrible too. All three trafficked in conspiracy theories.
indycat32
@munira: during the frigid temps last week, there were lots of birds helping themselves to the cat food.
Chief Oshkosh
@Betty Cracker: As dog is my witness, I grew up being told and continued to think for decades, right up to last year (late last year), that they were called the Horny Toads. Heck, even my Grandma called ’em that. And not in a nice way…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What’s this about Rudi Giuliani?
JAFD
Got an AeroPress about a year ago. I ain’t a coffee connoisseur, but I liked the brew it made.
But my usual morning rehydration is a couple of 20-ounce mugs of tea, and that much coffee would have me wired all week.
If you’re a serious coffee drinker, it’s probably worth trying out.
Geminid
@Suzanne: The 9/11 attacks really jolted American politicul culture. They made possible the interventionism expressed in the Iraq war.
This interventionism was opportunistic. I remember reading an article by a Neocon advocating for the impending war, in which he countered the argument that even if Iraq might be a potential threat, that did not justify an invasion at this time. This will have to be done sometime, the Neocon explained, and the shoc of the 9/11 attack has opened up a window for public support that we cannot count on staying open.
There are parallels in the early 1950s. The shock of Chinese intervention in Korea on top of the the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons jolted the American people, I think much like the 9/11 attacks did 50 years later..
The conservative reaction had started already after Roosevelt’s death and the end of the Second World War, but after 1950 it could dominate public discourse. The way dissent was marginilized in the years after 9/11 is comparable to the way dissent was marginilized in the 1950s, and being “soft on terrorism” became the new “soft on communism.”
Chief Oshkosh
@Geminid: I think you have it entirely correct. That bum has a cushy existence; he’s too much of a dullard to see outside of his gooey cocoon and too shallow for introspection.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Oh, the Peak Oil panic!
Even back then I tended to agree with the people who argued that the real problem was environmental emissions–we had more than enough fossil fuels to fry ourselves to death. But there was this idea that when the price of crude reached some critical value associated with oil production hitting its all-time peak and starting to decline, it would cause a cascading failure that would suddenly destroy civilization. I still hear it occasionally from people who say we just put off the crisis for a few years.
They never really gave a mechanism, other than observing that a lot of stuff depends on petroleum (true), and that there was no simple substitute for everything petroleum does (also true, but do we need to substitute everything with one thing? There’s been a lot of progress already on individual applications.) A while back I was trying to figure out where the idea came from exactly, and Carlos Yu argued that it was from the original Club of Rome/Forrester Research “Limits to Growth” model back in the early 70s–the model had the characteristic than when the limiting resource was about 50% consumed and production hit a peak, everything would simultaneously go to hell. It was a very simplistic model but got a lot of attention at the time
These days it seems like a bigger problem that when demand for fossil fuels declines for environmental and technological reasons, the people who make their dough off that demand COMPLETELY FLIP OUT. And do things like invade Ukraine.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: My recollection (with the caveat that I didn’t hang out there a lot) is that there was a lot of good and sensible stuff at TOD, but a lot of it was in the realm of “these guys seem to be or claim to be experts, but I cannot independently evaluate their claims and predictions”. Like the hand-wringing about the “water cut” at Ghawar and how it was obviously past its peak and KSA was lying and on and on.
I think their general warnings about the world being very different when oil is expensive than when it is dirt cheap was a good one. I think they got it wrong in underestimating how clever oil companies would be in finding ways to wring more of the stuff out of the ground when the price is high enough.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Agreed.
I spent my adolescent years in Mesa, AZ, which was noted by some political scientists to be the most conservative large city in America, in part because it was founded by Mormon settlers and is still heavily LDS. (Jeff Flake and Andy Biggs are from there.) As someone who was left/liberal basically from birth, I can assure you that I often felt politically lonely and that definitely affected my friendships and relationships. I don’t think “lonely” is a bad characterization.
Steeplejack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Rudy Giuliani, you say? He had a rockin’ New Year’s Eve, thank you very much!
Sister Golden Bear
Belated Happy New Year from the SF Bay Area.
New Year’s Eve was a mess with numerous roads, highways and freeways closed due to flooding. The ground here is mostly clay, and was saturated even before yesterday’s record-breaking rains. It rained so hard for so long that my sump pump for the drainage system couldn’t keep up, and I had three inches of water in the front yard, two in the garage. Plus to add injury to insult, while trying to deal with it, I slipped and messed up my knee. Thankfully, I can still walk on it. Sort of.
So today is gonna be pulling the wet stuff out of the garage so it doesn’t mold, and then sandbagging before the next 10 days of storms hits tomorrow.
Hopefully, 2023 will be better, but at this point, I’m trying to be quiet and not make any sudden moves that will draw its attention.
Denali
I couldn’t understand why people supported a war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, until I realized that the war was at the gut level about revenge.
Marc
Truth. Back in my late teens I started working on the internals of operating systems and (a bit later) compiler run time libraries for minicomputers. We used these to control telephone switches, warehouses, elevators, trains, planetarium projectors, etc. We weren’t inclined to count time in decimal like the IBM Cobol folks were, instead we counted time in some number of binary bits past an arbitrary date. Given I was still in my teens, the notion that any of this stuff would still be in use 50 years later was idiotic. Hah, here it is 50 years later and I know some of that code is still running.
For those of us in the binary world, Y2K was never the big problem. The biggest problem is likely to be 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038, when 32 bit Unix time counters rollover to a negative value. Some unsupported (and therefore unpatched) systems will likely break badly. Another, more periodic problem is that GPS satellites keep track of weeks using a counter that rolls over every 19.6 years, which tends to brick some number of GPS receivers and applications every time it happens. Just about everything that requires precision timing uses GPS as the source. The next rollover is 00:00 UTC November 21, 2038. 2038 is going to be another good year for programmers…
BellyCat
If you wish to test this theory, and are interested in judicial disregard for State rules and Federal rights, reach out to Watergirl for my contact info. You will likely adjust your position.
ricardo
The cartoon is by Clay Jones, not Drew Sheneman….
Steeplejack
@BellyCat:
I don’t think that is Kay’s position. Her very next sentence: “That’s a bedrock conservative belief.”
James E Powell
@Kay:
I admit that I’m not wired into Florida media, but it is striking to me that there does not appear to be any outrage over that stunt. It seems that the worse he gets, the more popular he is in Florida.
James E Powell
@RandomMonster:
The coffee is very good, but it’s messy. Or maybe I’m not doing it right. I have watched several youtube videos where the person always makes it look easy & fun!
Soprano2
@Geminid: The neocons thought they could install Ahmed Chalibi as ruler of Iraq, and that the people there would welcome him with open arms. Then, the theory went, Chalibi’s Iraqi government would recognize Israel and establish friendly relations. This, they thought, would start a domino effect in the Middle East where more and more countries would do the same. This was all delusional, but it was their plan. This was the reason they disbanded the Iraqi army, which was by far the dumbest thing the Bush administration did in Iraq.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
it was said explicitly, including by some extremely serious persons
For the record, here’s Friedman speaking to Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003:
Of those three countries, I believe Iraq is the only one that didn’t have some tie to AQ and/or the Afghan gov’t (but it’s been a while and I’m tired)
Richard Cohen, then and for donkeys years of the Washington Post
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think that around 2000 petroleum engineer (and soon-to-be-weathy oil man) Harold Hamm pioneered horizontal drilling. That along with fracking allows extraction of oil and gas that was previously unrecoverable. This seems to have pushed the timing of “Peak Oil” back a few decades.
The clean energy transition is a happening thing anyway. Horizontal drilling could not make fuel for transportation, heating etc. cheap. It just kept prices from skyrocketing. Meanwhile costs for soar and wind electrical generation achieved cost parity with that of natural gas, the least expensive alternative. Batteries are now cheap enough to make small and medium electric vehicles economical. Federal subsidies and mandates (and state mandates too) are accelerating a transition that market forces now support.
It would be nice to think that companies like UPS and Amazon are converting their delivery fleets to electric because they want a sustainable planet. Their ads will even make it appear so. But while they might want a sustainable planet, they must have a sustainable business that is not dependent on the unreliable price of oil. Plus, electric vans are cheaper to maintain.
The Infrastructure bill has funding for electric school buses, and that interested me. When I looked them up I found that although an electic school bus costs 70-80% more to buy than a diesel bus, cost over its life cycle made the electric bus cheaper. So adoption of electric school buses is now a problem of financing and not cost, as economists like Robert Pollin would put it.
I think the goal of the Infrastructure bill is to electrify 20% of the nation’s schoolbus fleet by 2030. I bet that goal will be exceeded. Once parents understand how much cleaner the air kids breath on an electric bus is, every school system will want them.
So, what about Peak Oil, and it’s potential timing? This is still an important question. But the answer could be that the timing of Peak Oil will be conditioned by the timing of Peak Demand.
James E Powell
@lowtechcyclist:
From the quote box:
I was loudly against all three. I was not lonely at all. There were plenty of people who opposed those things. Of course, I was living in West Los Angeles at the time, so not exactly hostile territory.
@Anyway:
It was the largest world-wide protest in history & in the USA it was memory-holed by the end of the day that it happened.
Jager
Baud, your boss at Home Depot, Bernie Marcus says guys like you are “fat, lazy, and don’t want to work” Hell of a motivator, isn’t he?
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Democratic primary voters went from insisting that their nominees be in favor of the Iraq invasion (only criticizing how it was done), to insisting that Hillary Clinton taking the exact same position was disqualifying. To be honest, I think it had something to do with her being female. Kind of like how giving a speech to Goldman Sachs become history’s greatest crime in 2016.
Origuy
I was in my office the night of December 30,1999 and on call December 31. I worked on a COBOL compiler for Compaq at the time. Compaq leased some huge generators to keep our lab machines running. I think there was one issue with the page header for a report by a rarely used utility. My take on it was that while everyone knew THEIR code had been fixed, they couldn’t know that everyone else’s had. We knew how much work had been done in the previous decades and couldn’t be sure that upper management in other companies and government agencies had spent the necessary money to fix the problems.
Robert Sneddon
@Geminid: Demand worldwide for fossil fuels is yet to peak. The total production of coal, oil and gas increases by two or three percent each year and it probably won’t start going down for several decades, possibly even until after the end of the century.
Energy poverty is real poverty and those areas of the world (Africa, India, South America) that are poor need energy to to climb out of poverty. Promises of cheap wind turbines and solar panels and storage next year or five years down the road, honest aren’t going to trump digging up coal and drilling for gas right now.
Another Scott
@Geminid: It looks like Hamm was more involved in fracking and increasing production in the Bakken field. Both horizontal drilling and fracking are quite old, but were perfected over time.
Directional drilling goes back to the 1930s.
Fracking goes back to 1950.
As usual, the timing has to be right (e.g. the oil price has to be high enough and the technology has to be mature enough) for it to take over as a common technique.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
StringOnAStick
@James E Powell: I would like to see the ACLU or some similar civil rights protection group sue FL and DeSatin for this egregious use of state power, especially since as I recall, all the people arrested as not being legally allowed to vote had one thing in common: none of them were white.
JPL
@Jager: Fortunately, he is no longer a boss at Home Depot.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@satby: EVERYONE likes dried cat food, from ants to opossums! The stuff is 30 – 40 % protein, depending on brand.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@SFAW: Contrary opinion here – although it’s all de gustibus ( </spurious-profundity> ) – I’d say the Aeropress makes very good coffee indeed.
(IMO. YMMV. And other abbrevs as applicable.)
Geminid
@Robert Sneddon: Yes. Demand for fossil fuel energy has yet to peak.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Yes, horizontal drilling and fracking have been around much longer than since 2000. These are commonly known facts but I can see why you would want to enlighten those here who might not know them.
I did not say Hamm originated these technologies, I said he was a pioneer in the application of these technologies, and I am not the only one to say this. But whether one describes Hamm as an a “pioneer” or merely an early adopter, or chooses Texas oilman George Mitchell as the example for combining horizontal drilling to access “tight oil,” my point was that technological innovations and applications have postponed the time of “Peak Oil.” That was my was my central point, and it still stands.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
I think it’s more like they stripped their gears because those gears were made out of vanilla pudding and the operators only know full IPM, which stands for irrational pudding movement. They don’t actually think, they react – at full IPM, which of course completely strips those pudding brained idiots of any cognitive thought whatsoever.
NotMax
@Anyway
Eighty-sixing Phil was an ultimatum laid down by Tweety, who was riding high in that channel’s ratings at the time.
lowtechcyclist
@Steeplejack:
In a sense, we’re infinitely far away from 1990 or any other past date, including yesterday. Because you can’t get there from here. (Well, maybe if you’re looking for the old Same place. “Cut ’em off at the past!”)
Uncle Cosmo
@MagdaInBlack: Easy for you to say. Somewhere around the turn of the millennium after a restaurant supper with a friend I bade her come over for dessert and coffee. I unlimbered my new (and newly-washed) French press, and after serving the pastries set it on the table, loaded the freshly-ground beans, poured in the hot water, and after a suitable interval, pressed the plunger down.
It exploded. I.e., the bottom burst. Steaming hot brown water everywhere. (Fortunately my guest leaped quickly up & back and no one was burned. But oy, whadda mess!)
I bought another one soon after…it’s around here somewhere…gathering dust: Never again have I worked up the slightest interest in using it.
Chris T.
@Kay:
So… same deal as conservative think-tanks then? Or is the pay much worse?
Chris T.
@Gvg:
And in another 15 years, we can all fear the Y2038 bug! 😀
(For those not in the know: storing “seconds since 1 Jan 1970” in a signed 32-bit integer causes the clock to roll over during 2038. There’s a cheap-ish fix, “treat the integer as unsigned”, that gets you another 68 years, and the more expensive “make it a 64-bit integer” that really fixes things. Lots of systems use this Unix/Linux-style counting method now.)
Chris T.
@lowtechcyclist:
Of course, the year 2000, which was The Future when I was a kid, is now 23 years in the rearview mirror. Where are is my flying car, dammit?
It’s in Slovakia.
Chris T.
@SFAW:
How about “using the chamfering bit?”