Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:49 on 10 June 2015

Despite how Tacoma has had a successful, municipally-owned cable TV and Internet utility for years, Seattle’s idea on doing anything vaguely similar is a big no-can-do. It’s basically the same attitude that made Seattle about forty years late to the game when it comes to building a rail mass transit system.

Of course, any time a billionaire wants pet projects for that entire neighborhood which he owns, or a taxpayer-funded sports stadium for his team, the City of Seattle sits ready and eager to bark on command. Same if it’s a freeway project, even if it uses a risky, unproven technology and it’s a road which would normally be the state government’s responsibility, anyhow.

Because, well, priorities. Duh.

This is another one of those days where I get to feel smug and satisfied about living outside the Seattle City Limits.

Published at 08:28 on 11 May 2015

Much worse, in fact.

The reason is not nuclear contamination, but chemical contamination. Specifically, PCB’s. Yes, they are banned. But the ban started only in 1979. Indian Point dates back to the early 1960s. So it’s entirely possible that the transformer that caught fire contained PCB’s. One that caught fire there in 2011 did, in fact.

If so, there is now a major environmental contamination event in progress. Worryingly, there is no mention in the Establishment media that the transformer in question did not contain PCB’s. That makes me suspect that news that it did is being hushed up.

It’s the only reason I can think of for not bringing up the subject of PCB’s in the news about this event. If it was known that the transformer was in fact PCB free, it would be in the interest of plant’s operator (and its regulators) to make this fact well-known. Omitting such information only becomes in the Establishment’s interest if PCB’s are in fact present.

It’s much like the subject of asbestos (known to be widely-used at the time the World Trade Center twin towers were constructed) was conspicuously absent from news accounts at the time the 9/11 attacks happened.

No, this doesn’t prove anything, but it certainly raises valid suspicions.

Published at 20:15 on 9 February 2015

What’s happening with the ongoing gentrification of the inner cities is the end of the real great inversion: those decades following World War II when the cities were abandoned pretty much wholesale throughout the USA as desirable places to live.

The inner city basically hit rock bottom in the 1970s, after several decades of accelerating decline. That was the decade when large areas of the Bronx burned and New York City almost went bankrupt. By the end of the 1980s, historic preservation was starting to make people appreciate those older urban core areas and they began a gradual, ongoing process of revival.

Those postwar decades of urban decline are an anomaly in an overall historical record in which cities have traditionally been seen as the most prestigious places to live. That those same decades encompass most of the lifespan of the Baby Boomer generation does not make it any less an anomaly.

Published at 08:23 on 12 December 2014

That’s long been my estimate (even before I made that linked post) of how much the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement boondoggle is going to end up costing. And it’s an open question as to whether or not there will be a usable tunnel after pouring all that money down that rat hole.

The latest in the saga of foibles is that the access tunnel is that the access pit they are digging to repair the damaged tunnel boring machine is causing a whole neighborhood to start subsidng. That’s going to be a healthy chunk of change just to compensate all the affected property owners right there.

Remember, this is a unique and never-before-attempted project. Nobody has ever used a tunnel boring machine this large. Nobody has ever dug a tunnel this deeply through saturated soil. So nobody really knows how difficult it actually will be.

Anyone who said it would cost $1 billion, tops, was either a liar or a rank idiot. Or both.

Published at 21:21 on 17 November 2014

They apparently hired a theoretical physicist to review all the cosmology in their series, yet when it came to earthly things the special effects (and story) was so bad I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief to engage in it.

Probably the most noteworthy case in point was the dust storms. Pure cheap Hollywood special effects done by people who’ve never seen a real dust storm, or even a photograph of one. The dust was this light fluffy house-dust like stuff that looked and acted absolutely nothing like the soil dust that makes up real dust storms.

The aftermath of the storms looked particularly unrealistic, like someone emptied a bunch of vacuum cleaner bags at quasi-random. The aftermath of actual severe dust storms looks much like sand dunes, as any one of a large number of photographs from the 1930s Dust Bowl attests. The ready availability of such photographs means the producers really had no excuse for such shoddy special effects.

And what’s up with dust storms blowing up when everything is green outside? The actual Dust Bowl happened in a severe multi-year drought, when there was precious little green anything, and the fields were lying fallow instead of growing lush crops of tall corn stalks. Another epic fail.

And then there’s this “blight” which breathes nitrogen and in doing so somehow consumes oxygen. Hello? Oxygen and nitrogen are two completely different elements. Any massive outbreak of a new, nitrogen-breating organism would increase the relative concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere by consuming some of the nitrogen. So the movie flunks basic chemistry as well as basic meteorology.

How the producers could do such a terrible job on mundane aspects of science while obsessing over cutting-edge issues perplexed me for a while.

Then it hit me: it’s actually consistent with the whole strange premise of the movie, that it’s somehow going to be more easy and more practical to travel through a wormhole to the far reaches of the universe, and colonize some barren desert world (even the final scenes of that one last planet showed a pretty inhospitable place that made the Dust Bowl Earth look like a green Eden by comparison) than it would be to focus on fixing problems here at home.

It’s all about ignoring (neglecting, even) the mundane and chasing madly after the esoteric and distant.

Published at 19:45 on 7 October 2014

Today not only dawned foggy, but in some areas the fog never dissipated all day. That’s definitely a sign that it’s now autumn; it means the sun isn’t strong enough to ensure the that morning fogs always burn off.

Autumn is fog season in the Pacific Northwest, particular in the Puget Sound region. The salt water is still quite warm from the summer yet the nights keep getting longer and colder. All that warm water pumping moisture into air that can hold less and less of it causes the inevitable to happen frequently.

Published at 22:14 on 23 August 2014

First, capitalism unleashed the industrial era which set the stage for the unfolding catastrophe.

Second, as a system capitalism is uniquely ill-suited to addressing a problem like climate change. Reason is, its worst effects won’t happen until everyone presently alive is dead, so there is very little self interest for anyone to address the problem today. And capitalism is all about the pursuit of self-interest.

To the contrary, what self interest there is lies in denying the existence of the problem and opposing any action intended to address it, as is illustrated by the actions of the Koch Brothers and others.

Published at 11:23 on 14 July 2014

I normally work out of my home office, which like the rest of my home, and most homes in Western Washington, does not have A/C.

I didn’t use it when camping, of course. I neither have nor want one of those monster RV’s, nor do I want to confine myself to camping those misnamed RV “parks” that are more like parking lots where RV’s sit cheek-by-jowl.

And, as I wrote before, if I wasn’t engaging in physical activity, the warmth was actually pleasant. It’s great to be completely warm, even in one’s extremities, while being able to wear little or nothing. All that’s needed is to get over any hang-ups one might have about being in some state of undress. So I didn’t use the A/C in my truck on the way back, either. The breeze from the open windows on my bare chest kept me plenty comfortable.

Cut to today, when I have to don a sweatshirt against the assault of overchilled air pouring forth from the registers, and my fingers and feet are still chilly.

Sure, if this were a baking-hot Phoenix day or a steamy, muggy Atlanta one, some A/C would be most welcome. But this is Seattle, the temperature today is forecast to peak only in the mid-80s Fahrehneit, and it’s not even out of the 70s yet.

Natural ventilation would easily suffice, maybe with a dash of artificial cooling later in the afternoon, were this building built for it. And, coupled with a few cultural changes (i.e. loosening “business attire” standards), would be more, not less, comfortable.

Too add insult to injury, as a result of spending the day inside I will now become less acclimated to the heat outside, so the artificially-generated discomfort will not end when I leave the convention center this evening. Not to mention the environmental impact of all this over-cooling.

It’s not just me, either. Others have made similar observations.

Published at 12:21 on 15 June 2014

It’s more environmentally responsible to use a bicycle than a motor vehicle. It’s also more environmentally responsible to live in multi-family attached housing rather than single-family detached housing.

If you ride a bicycle year-round, your bicycle will get very dirty if you ride it frequently in wet weather (and the weather is typically wet for much of the year in this part of the world). The onus to wash or at least rinse one’s bicycle frequently gets even more urgent if one lives in a cold-winter climate where the local authorities use road salt.

If you live in an apartment or a condo, odds are iffy that you will have access to a hose bibb. If you have no way to wash your bicycle yourself, you have no way to wash your bicycle. Unlike with automobiles, there are not (at least in the USA, at least in the vast majority of cities) businesses that offer bicycle-cleaning services.

This has actually been an issue for me at a number of points in my life. I’ve typically had to beg friends for permission to use their garden hose, and it means my winter bicycle gets far grimier than I’d like in between its infrequent washings.

I recently solved the problem for myself by purchasing a garden-hose adapter for my bathroom sink, which is conveniently located in front a window through which the hose may be routed while in use. But I shouldn’t have to do something that awkward, and such a solution is useless for those who live in large, multi-story buildings instead of a 4-plex like I presently do.

My apartment complex provides a sheltered bike rack (one they recently expanded). That’s nice, and it might even have been required by law. But such requirements are incomplete; they need to be paired with requirements for furnishing some facility for washing bicycles as well.

The regulatory burden of such, whatever it is, will be far less than the burden of existing regulations for minimum automobile parking facilities, and one could negate it completely by pairing the new regulation with a relaxing of the latter.

Published at 13:16 on 30 May 2014

I don’t completely agree with everything said in it (it’s too dismissive of radical analyses), but this article is in general very accurate and makes some points I have made here myself previously. Warning: it’s not exactly brief.