Did you hear the news?
It’s fall y’all. #wawx
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) September 22, 2024
That means today it will be cloudy. But, also kind of warmer than you’d expect.
Carjackings are up: In Seattle and around the US, carjackings are hot right now. Nationwide, the crime has more than doubled over the past few years “from 7,626 in 2019 to 19,258 in 2022,” reports the Seattle Times. Locally, we’ve seen 66 carjackings so far this year and 46 of them have been armed. Last year, we saw 16 armed carjackings. Officials warn to be wary. Some jackers plan a small fender bender to initiate the crime. If you’re in a fender bender, the Washington State Patrol says to “pay attention to how many people emerge from the car” that struck yours and drive away if anything seems suspicious.
Dan Evans is dead: The former Washington state governor died Friday at age 98.
Alaska tech outage: Alaska Airlines requested a ground stop to slow or halt air traffic at SeaTac Airport Sunday night after experiencing a significant IT outage. This year has really reminded us how fragile our little digital worlds are.
Microsoft goes nuclear: Microsoft inked a deal with the clean energy company Constellation to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility. You may recall Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown in 1979. The tech company hopes the 835-megawatt nuclear reactor will power data centers while still abiding by Microsoft’s ambitious climate goals. Hell yes, let’s get nuclear back on the menu, boys.
Washington GOP hurting for cash: The state Republicans are cash poor as we near election day. The GOP only has $76,000 in its state accounts, which seems like a lot until you compare it to the $4.3 million that the state Democratic Party is holding. In the gubernatorial race, the trend seems the same. Republican former US Rep. Dave Reichert has raised $5 million while Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson has raised more than $11 million. Sources tell the Seattle Times that big Republican donors backed off after the state GOP’s chaotic convention and their endorsement of candidate Semi Bird, who failed to win the primary.
Cards Against Humanity sues Elon Musk: The raunchy card game company is suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX for trespassing. Cards Against Humanity (CAH) owns a vacant plot of land in Texas. SpaceX bought several plots near the CAH plot and, according to CAH, “has placed construction materials, such as gravel, and other debris on the [CAH] land without asking for permission to do so,” according to the Associated Press. Why does the Chicago-based card game company own a vacant plot of land in Texas? Back in 2017, CAH crowdfunded the purchase as a way to oppose Donald Trump’s border wall. CAH is asking for $15 million in damages from SpaceX.
John Mulaney’s Dreamforce roast: The comedian took the stage at Salesforce’s tech conference and roasted everyone present. “If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
john mulaney @ dreamforce set
oh to be there. we should bully tech nerds much more often. they should get cop treatment at this point pic.twitter.com/D0wubhMY6K
— 🕺🏽😎🪩 (@cockjuring) September 22, 2024
Trump’s would-be assassin left behind a note saying he planned to kill Donald Trump. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, tracked Trump to a West Palm Beach golf course and hid behind a bush with a rifle. Secret Service agents spotted Routh before anything could happen. Now, authorities have discovered the note Routh left at an unidentified person’s house with a box full of “ammunition, a metal pipe, and other items.” The note started with “Dear World” and was written as if Routh had failed the assassination attempt. “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” reads the note. In Routh’s car, authorities found a list of places Trump had been or would be, as well as six cellphones.
Israel kills 182 in Lebanon: Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon killed 182 people and injured around 700 people. The strikes, Israel says, were meant to target Hezbollah, the armed Iranian-backed militia. Israel expects retaliatory fire from Hezbollah. The latter force claims it will keep fighting against Israel until the country agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza.
Well, this can’t be good: Israel had a busy weekend. Israeli troops raided news network Al Jazeera’s satellite offices in the West Bank and ordered them to shut down for 45 days. Back in May, Israel raided Al Jazeera’s offices in East Jerusalem, seizing equipment, blocking its websites, and preventing broadcast. Israel’s attempt to stifle information that does not suit its agenda is terrifying. This should ring alarm bells. Israel explained the raid by saying Al Jazeera’s newsroom “was being used to incite terror, to support terrorist activities and that the channel’s broadcasts endanger … security and public order.”
Homeward-bound: Rayne Beau, a cat, got lost in Yellowstone National Park after a noise startled him. After searching for him for four days, Rayne Beau’s family had to return to their home in Salinas, California. Two months later, the family’s microchip company alerted them that Rayne Beau was 200 miles away in Roseville, California, which is 900 miles from Yellowstone. The family has no idea how Rayne Beau journeyed back to California, but they choose to think he was trying to get home. Now he is.
A gradual landslide in California: There’s active land movement in the Southern California cliffside neighborhood of Rancho Palos Verdes. Likely caused by excess rainfall over the last few years, the shifting land has made it too dangerous for gas and utility companies to keep supplying services to homes. Around 300 homes are without electricity and 224 are without gas. There’s no plan to turn those services back on since there’s really no telling how to stop the shifting land.
Did you hear the news? It’s fall, so it’s time to listen to the Over the Garden Wall soundtrack on repeat.
Al Manar is having an absolute meltdown this morning. “Why, oh why, do these Zionists visit war crimes upon us for no reason?” they howl in one moment, and in the next moment: “Behold how our devastating rockets expand the circle of destruction to whole new regions of the enemy’s territory!”
It’s like listening to a deranged street preacher, except, you know, one who has rocket artillery.
Just a gentle reminder for those who still frequent that particular bag of flaming dog poop that embedded tweets consisting of a screenshot of several pages of text are unreadable at best and I couldn’t be the only one who completely skips over them on sight.
“It’s like
listening to
a deranged street preacher,
except, you know, one who has rocket artillery.”
a rather Weird reference to
bibi nutnyahoo but as long as
he can keep his fascist rear end
outta Prison I guess it’ll hafta Do.
Stop taking cats on vacation.
@4
Who can afford vacations these days?
the Money’s
all been Hoovered
UP They’d Like it if we’d
fight over the spoiled Spoilts
and
Never
looked up.
“The share of global energy produced by nuclear reactors is down from an estimated 16.7% in 1997 to 9.2% in 2022, largely owing to cost and the slow rate of deployment. Meanwhile, in the first half of 2024, wind and solar generated 30% of all of the EU’s electricity, narrowing the role of fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency suggests that by 2028, renewable energy sources will account for over 42% of global electricity generation.”
Physicist MV Ramana on the problem with nuclear power
[N]uclear is costly, dangerous and takes too long to scale up
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/04/mv-ramana-why-nuclear-power-not-solution-energy-needs
@5, Record numbers of people are traveling.
Business travel is down. So the increase is personal travel. AKA People taking vacations.
@7 cool story what’s your solution for renewable energy storage
What, no rant from The Stranger about this?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/income-inequality-grew-in-seattle-since-the-pandemic-new-data-shows/
We are soooo Progressive in Seattle. Not.
@7, Nuclear energy is less dangerous than wind, hydropower, biomass, natural gas, oil, and coal. It’s cleaner than all of them too.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
See the graph.
The expensive critique is spot on. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194327/estimated-levelized-capital-cost-of-energy-generation-in-the-us/
The problem with solar and wind is the lack of on demand base load and storage, with batteries being environmentally destructive to make, carbon intensive to produce, and expensive. Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, and most environmentally benign solution to the base load problem.
@11 No shit, chatgpt
Who’s giving Reichert $5 million?
@9 Storage is key: pumped hydro, thermal storage, mechanical storage, …
What’s your solution for halving carbon emissions by 2030?
https://unric.org/en/new-ipcc-report-emissions-can-be-halved-by-2030/
@11 NotMyopic: Put down the bong and take some deep breaths. Obviously, you’ve been reading the script the man in the expensive suit told you to. Evidently you’re too young to remember the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown of March 28, 1979, or the Oscar nominated film, The China Syndrome, which debuted in theatres on March 16, 1979, eerily preceding the highly publicized Three Mile Island accident.
Senator Joe Manchin’s reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is a big mistake. Especially when nuclear waste has a toxic afterlife of millions of years.
We are still struggling with cleaning up Hanford. History glaringly shows that going nuke is not the answer, especially when it can get into the wrong hands, along with AI. If we have another Three Mile Island, another April 26, 1986 Chernobyl, Soviet Union, or March 11, 2011 Fukushima, Japan level nuclear disaster the consequences will be unlivable to millions of people as the Earth will become increasingly uninhabitable from debris and radiation exposure.
This is not some dystopian 1960s sci-fi-TV drama–this is real life! We only have one planet. Let’s not destroy it for corporate corruption and ill-gotten gain.
No, Nathalie, let’s NOT go nuke. Your enthusiasm for it is as insane and woefully ignorant as your depiction of serial killer Ted Bundy as a Scooby-Doo cartoon villain.
@14, Here in the Northwest, environmentalists and tribes have opposed every pumped storage project that has sought permits. It’s much the same across Europe.
Thermal and mechanical storage hasn’t been proven economical at scale.
There are three outcomes sought from engineering an electrical grid. Cost, reliability, sustainability. The more you focus on one, the more you sacrifice the other two.
Wind and solar are cheap. They have massive reliability problems (and some environmental problems).
Coal and natural gas produce highly reliable, quickly dispatchable load, but with sustainability (pollution) trade-offs. The cost is moderate.
Hydro is cheap to moderate in cost, with high reliability, but with horrid costs for fish, ecology, and carbon associated with the concrete.
Voters want a silver bullet where there is none and never will be. Voters aren’t good at picking their poison and sticking with it.
Then there is the elephant in the room that you don’t address at all. By what moral imperative should we even seen to have humanity, or any other species, survive? Why shouldn’t we let the deterministic outcomes of random DNA mutation that created our decision making circuits play out? If there is a moral imperative to perpetuate this, and possibly other species, what is its source? Where did it come from?
Shorter @11: As long as we handwave away nuclear waste for the next 20,000 years, nuclear energy is awesome! Address how we handle waste, including long-term storage, and we can talk about adding new nuclear.
Regarding Al Jazeera, probably didn’t help that Abdallah Aljamal – a journalist who’s written for that organization was found to have kept 3 of the Israeli hostages.
Regarding Nukes – I was anti-nuke in the 70’s, but I’ve learned a lot more since. While I still consider PWR’s too dangerous, there’s an entirely new breed of reactors – Liquid Metal Salt – that are both orders of magnitude safer, and in fact can burn up a lot of the spent fuel generated by older systems leaving very little behind to dispose of.
All in all, I think a very good transition to bridge getting us to full solar/renewables with sufficient storage. And even after that, potentially useful for high latitudes that don’t necessarily have the year round sun they need. Read up on thorium salt reactors. I think you’ll see what I mean.
Something Progressives and Conservative ought to get behind:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/more-wa-districts-using-a-tool-developed-by-wsu-to-fight-absenteeism/
Washington has the highest absenteeism rates in the country. Who knew?
Restart a plant that had a partial meltdown… What’s next, reconstruct the Alaskan Way Viaduct from it’s landfilled concrete chunks?
Anyone who endorses the expansion of nuclear power should put their money where their mouths are and move into homes right next door to nuclear plants.
Meanwhile I’m more than happy to live next to a wind or solar farm.
This war must not be allowed to escalate further. The adults in the room must restrain Netanyahu and end his war crime spree. We are nearly a year out from 10/7 and you warmongers who cheerled this genocide insisted it would never escalate. Now 500 Lebanese die in a single day of air strikes and flee the country. How many after a week? A month? Don’t let Bibi wag the dog any further. Civilization may very well hinge on the coming days.
@21, Wind farms have higher death rates per unit of energy produced and higher wildlife kill.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
Nuclear is statistically nearly tied with solar on safety.
@22, “The adults in the room must restrain Netanyahu.”
Whose army will the adults use to restrain him? How many non-combatants will that army kill restraining him?
The Israeli electorate, according to polls, sees the ONGOING threat of Hamas (and increasingly Hezbollah) as an existential threat. So it doesn’t matter if Netanyahu’s authoritarian tendencies catch up with him and his government falls. The next government will continue the war against all comers, as long as Hamas remains intact on adjacent territory to bide their time until an even better 10/7.
It’s not about retribution for Israeli society; although that plays a part. It’s about eliminating the capacity or will of Hamas to do the next attack, and eliminating the willingness of Gazan society to tolerate Hamas, or a Hamas clone, to operate from their territory (polls show the war in Gaza has dramatically reduced Gazan support for armed struggle against Israel).
@16 is on the right track. Any conversation about moving to non carbon emitting energy that does not include nuclear as an option is not serious. Just as a reminder, in the NW we are already forecasted to not have enough power to meet our demand today (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/surge-in-electricity-demand-spells-trouble-for-pnw-forecasts-show). That power consumption doesn’t include converting all gas vehicles to electric and phasing out natural gas which accounts for another 30% of our energy today. Quite simply you can not build enough wind and solar farms to meet WA’s energy needs and if those are the only options the result will be massive spikes in costs and forced rationing. The new generation of nuclear plants that will utilize fusion instead of fission to generate power are smaller and cleaner than the plants of old that @15 is talking about. They absolutely need to be looked at as the permanent long term solution to the climate and power crisis.
hey
nuclear waste is good for you doncha know??
@17, @26, Nuclear fuel, and nuclear waste is incredibly dense. The storage space required for all the spent fuel in the U.S. is less volume, than a small warehouse south of Seattle’s downtown.
Also, waste can be reprocessed into new usable fuel. That would require a treaty change and some sort of monitoring scheme, but its doable.
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-boring-truth-about-nuclear-waste
Then what about Hanford you say? Apples and oranges. The U.S. was in a hell of a hurry to do something that had never been done before, much less at scale, before the Germans did. Go fast and break things with a bottomless checkbook. So you try shit and irradiate a whole bunch of material and liquids at low-levels, creating a whole range of toxic chemical byproducts, even without the radiation. Just massive volumes of mildly to moderately toxic shit, uncontained in anything. It won’t hurt anyone as long as nobody is next to it for years at a time. What to do with it? Drag it out in the dessert and bury it. It winds up everywhere and will stay where its put until it hits the water table. That’s what they did then. We don’t do that now. We irradiate very little and we keep it contained.
The spent reactor from the old Trojan Plant (St. Helens, OR) is encased in plastic and stored at Hanford. It’s the size of a small car.
The myths vs. the reality are staggering.
Or we can keep doing what we are doing now to create energy, which kills four to five figures worth of people per year through asthma, cancer, and pretty pedestrian diseases; however, its spread out across the population, so nobody notices in a visceral, tangible way, that makes CNN or The Stranger.
@16: “Any conversation about moving to non carbon emitting energy that does not include nuclear as an option is not serious.”
Also @16: “The new generation of nuclear plants that will utilize fusion instead of fission to generate power”
Fusion power plants, huh? Now who’s not being serious?
@22: Hizbollah spent the last year firing rocket artillery into Israel. You’re unhappy about the pager-bombs and airstrikes, take it up with Hizbollah. Israel has been more than patient with these clowns.
@28 if we’re going to solve climate change it will come from the development of new technology not the restriction and rationing of current ones. Fusion is going to take some time but it’s coming. I don’t see how you eliminate fossil fuels without it unless you plan to kill millions of people.
@30: As the physicists like to say, “Fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/why-a-skagit-county-town-hopes-to-fight-off-a-battery-storage-project/
Everyone is in favor of de carbonizing the electric grid. NOT!
@31 then you better get used to warmer weather and accept the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change has theoretical damage, cutting off peoples power is a guaranteed disaster.
@33: Fusion power’s not coming to save us, nor is any other form of magical thinking. Luckily, there are plenty of alternatives to combat climate change beyond the false choice of magical thinking on the one hand and the reckless burning of fossil fuels on the other.
@34 none that are scalable at the magnitude we need and thinking that they are is equally delusional.
@20 &@21 K: +2 for the WIN!!!
@27 NotMyopic: “Drag it out in the dessert and bury it”? Is that pie or cake?
Someone left the cake out in the rain….
And I don’t think I can take it,
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again…..ohhh, noooooooo….
Maybe you should check your spelling before going off on another pro-nuke rant.
@33 to claim that the effects of climate change are “theoretical” in 2024 is climate change denial.
@35 What is delusional is to think that we can keep destroying ecosystems without dire consequences. Don’t you have any kids to think about?
The cult of forever growth is obsolete. We have to start living within our means and it will not affect quality of life.
@13 DOUG: My guess is that a chunk of it is coming from ~39,000* MAGA morons here in Washington State, as well as from Trump itself.
According to Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, this is roughly the number of Republican voters in Washington state who blindly keep sending their Social Security disability and / or retirement funds to help bail out Trump’s lawyers. Meanwhile, they’re about to get their mortgage foreclosed or evicted from back rent; any number of cars repossessed; their kids / grandkids don’t eat, and the phone and utilities bills are usually past due and on the brink of shutoff.