Hello DeadSplinterites, it is I, your last-minute DOT substitute. You know what that means – commenters will be kindly asked to carry the weight of current events, pundit idiocy, political shenanigans, Florida man and turtle news, news from the EU and the UK, news from the stories of Cousin M . . . you know the drill.
Here is a Tweet showing the work of some clever pranksters in California:
I’m not sure what this is, but it is cute?
The Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data after the Titan submersible was reported missing Sunday. That anomaly was ‘consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,’ according to the senior Navy official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system. The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search.
This fellow eats a healthy lunch:
That installation on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is fabulous. There’s a move (it’ll probably go nowhere, because Mayor Patch comes up with these ideas and then abandons them) to make Fifth Avenue more pedestrian-friendly and perhaps even pedestrianize some of it. It’s already pretty pedestrian-friendly since vehicle traffic is always at a standstill and if you could avoid it at all you wouldn’t even attempt it. We could set one of those up outside Trump Tower, as a fitting monument to our 45th President.
Yesterday was my sister’s birthday. So I called her up and wished her many happy returns and she responded by singing, “I was born in the wagon of a traveling show” and I responded with “Mama used to dance for the money they’d throw.” One of the best gifts I was ever given was siblings to be close to and I find to be a joy to be around.
There are murmurs in the media (to return to my broken-record theme) that ConEd may not be up to this summer’s electricity demands. It’s actually been kind of mild so far. I don’t think I’ve turned the a/c on since last summer, and I don’t remember using it a lot then. There was one summer when it was absolutely brutal but we didn’t have any blackouts. Anyway, overnight I got my weekly email about my electrical usage, every week I seem to use more and more, but I don’t know on what, so I think I need to look into my SmartMeter to make sure someone isn’t mooching off my ConEd account. My ConEd email had this to say:
I want to write back to them. You know, ConEd, we paid a small fortune to replace our shitty developer-provided washer and dryer with much higher-end options, with the expectation that you could provide your product as promised. If I wanted to hang dry my clothes, I’d…I’ll stop here. Rip out all the gas stoves and oil heating systems and convert everyone over to electric vehicles? Welcome to the Wonderful Land of Oz.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Where are these murmurs about ConEd? I’m really curious where you’re seeing them. Maybe your media diet needs fewer Sandra Lee equivalents?
I did a search and found a million worries about the electrical grids run by Southern states. The notoriously sketchy grid run by Texas leads the list.
But the closest thing I could see of anything recent about ConEd was an article in the NY Post trying to whip up inflation frenzy over an application by ConEd that could raise rates by 3.8% from $83.50 to $87.00.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/new-yorkers-brace-for-summer-heat-and-higher-energy-bills-as-coned-hikes-up-rates/
Do New Yorkers really panic over a $3.50 monthly increase in electricity rates? Have they gotten that soft?
I mean, if that’s the best the NY Post can do, I’m guessing these murmurs are coming from people even nuttier. And what are they saying?
The fact that an energy-dependent company like ConEd wants to lock itself into a three year increase of 12% says they’re confident that their grid is strong and energy prices will be low.
In Texas, demand has pushed the peak cost per megawatt-hour up by 100%. This gets offset when the grid isn’t fully stressed to some extent, but that’s a million miles away from where ConEd is.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/texas-power-prices-record-heat-wave-cooling-demand-ercot-grid-2023-6
I’m honestly curious where this stuff is coming from. Who are the people who are pushing it?
…in most respects I haven’t a clue about what might be behind ConEd claiming to be under duress…but I have seen a few things in the last few months that talk about more general problems with the national electricity supply/demand curve in relation to transitioning simultaneously to less fossil-fuel based sources & much more electrically-driven stuff wanting to draw on it
…WaPo had this one https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/17/blackout-risk-summer-heat-grid/ in which there’s a report that’s pretty dry & possibly says something other than what I made of it…but the gist seemed to be that june & august were as high as the risk got that there might be outages in the NY area according to something called the “North American Electric Reliability Corp.”…presumably because of peak a/c demand during the hottest predicted weather periods…though it did mention something about an ongoing transmission outage that continues to prevent exchange between NY & ontario…either way the NPCC-NewYork page/slide/summary/whatever is 19/47 in the .pdf
…that said…it’s possible that along with trying to set expectations at a level lower than they think they can deliver they’re also trying to ease in gently to the increase in costs that I expect a lot of places are going to pass on to customers when it comes to the significant upgrade (& in some places creation) of “the grid” is going to need if any of this is going to work the way it’s ostensibly intended to…I put a thing in a DOT a while back (probably more than one on each count, actually, but off the top of my head one was top of the heap) about the bottleneck that prevents existing renewable sources getting hooked up to be made use of…& that’s just one facet of a pretty complicated problem that’s maybe more complicated in the US than some places because it never really had what some places call a “national grid” so much as a patchwork of small ones to distribute what for a long time & a lot of places was a fairly localized supply…& just the other day the NYT ran a thing specifically on the no-national-grid thing
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-electric-grid-energy-transition.html
…basically its an east/west split at this point…except whatever bullshit texas thinks counts as a third grid…but it’s an interesting read?
…it’s just a guess…but I’d imagine the city that never sleeps is already drawing a lot…& going to need to draw considerably more…from ever further away…& the likes of ConEd are used to an entirely more parochial approach than the sort of long term planning & infrastructure investment & provision that it sounds like they’re going to need to pay for sooner rather than later…so the thin end of a costs-regretfully-passed-on-to-the-consumer wedge coming hand in hand with a warning that previous levels of service may not be an accurate guide to the future rather than an admission of why either of those might be on the horizon…seems like it wouldn’t be as out of place as it might sound at first glance?
…mostly just guessing on my part…but even if you skip the report those two articles were interesting in their own right?
On a national scale, the US grid is a giant mess. It’s run on a regional basis, and some of those regions are run on chewing gum and baling wire. Texas is the notorious example, where the ice storm in 2021 that caused Ted Cruz to flee to Cancun was made vastly worse because the rickety state of the regional grid caused cascading failures.
And while the NY state grid has had occasional failures, they’re overall on the stable side.
The telling thing for me in that Post article is how ConEd is asking for a three year rate hike of 12%, or roughly 4% per year (compounding makes it a bit lower than 4%). Utilities are one of the most data-hungry, analytical places around, and when they look at predicted three year energy costs and capital costs for infrastructure and settle on such a low number, it tells me something about where they think we’re headed.
They traditionally hedge rate increase requests by a significant degree to try to profit off the difference, and 12% doesn’t leave much room for hedging, for that matter.
There are obviously risks which ConEd may not have anticipated — another Hurricane Sandy, for example. But on a regional basis, they’re probably one of the stronger utilities.
The bigger issues show up in other regions and then the effect that has on the national economy. And of course from a climate perspective, it has awful implications. Any move to renewables gets hammered as long as grid issues remain fractured along regional lines.
Which is why I’m curious where this stuff is coming from. The Koch network is obviously a piece of it, but who else is pushing it?
For example, one of the many creepy things about RFK Jr. is that he’s been a longtime backer of Koch efforts to kill wind power. He’s pretty clearly been hooked up to Russian antivax disinfo networks too, and I’m curious if other dupes and confederates of Russian disinfo are going to be making common cause with Koch types to push anti-renewable propaganda too.
Knowing where this stuff comes from is a first step in defusing it.
…I don’t think I can help much in terms of figuring out where that stuff comes from any more than I know how that nonsense about furries & litter boxes in schools not only got spun out from what I’ve variously heard described as a handy equivalent to sawdust for many of the same reason that used to be what they had on the saloon floor in the old west into some sort of depraved-pandering-to-woke-insanity nonsense…but I gather from friends who pay more attention than me to the daily mail has now managed to traverse the ocean
…but…out of interest on the other side of the thing…you say
…& I might be making an unwarranted assumption but I think the post in question is NY rather than washington…so I guess I’ve been looking at it from a rather different angle…but I take the “telling” part to mean that you’d take that level of increase to imply that they don’t expect to get hit by large unexpected expenditures & think the books will accommodate the expected ones…so the telling part would be that playing up unlikely outages as a thing to worry about is duplicitous…or thereabouts?
…whereas I suppose what I find telling in that equation is that they don’t seem to think they need to make provision to cover costs that the pair of articles I linked to & various others I’ve read that broadly accord with your opening description of a de facto national infrastructure that broadly isn’t fit for purpose because it’s a lot of little parochial systems in a big coat suggest are beyond overdue for exactly that investment
…so I don’t know as how reassuring people that the status quo is just fine & anyone saying there are grounds for concern about demand outstripping supply while renewable energy projects spin their turbines in vain because they can’t get the hook up to make the energy they’re producing a viable resource…not to mention the likes of NY having a lot to gain from throwing into any kitty that proposes to pay to improve the overall circuit diagram so that city folks can enjoy that a/c whichever way the wind is blowing…is exactly a solution to the problem you describe…not that I can’t see why it might be worthwhile in principle?
As far as why ConEd isn’t asking for more from regulators in terms of dealing with grid issues, it goes back the fractured regional nature of the grid. They’re local and simply don’t have the authority to spend on national issues.
The Biden rebadged Green New Deal put a lot of money in the pipeline to get past the fractured grid (probably only a fraction of what’s needed, but hopefully it’s a camel’s nose and head and neck toward the whole beast).
Which is one of the reasons why the House right wingers made killing Green New Deal funding one of their top priorities in their attempt to leverage the debt ceiling. And it’s one of their main goals as they move next to trying to force a government shutdown.
The libertarian/fossil fuel types are worried that once grid projects get permitted and funded, they will have too much momentum to stop. And the pressure to tax fossil fuels to fund further grid projects will also grow. They’re trying to kill it all as soon as possible.
One thing I find encouraging is even places like Texas are adding a lot of renewables to their regional grids. I saw that Texas is now getting 38% of its electricity from wind and solar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/us/texas-heat-solar-energy.html
From a wider perspective, they obviously need a lot more. Texan cars burn gigantic amounts of gasoline, and moving to electric means within the grid they will need a lot more expansion.
And the variability of renewals means they’ll need a lot of surplus capacity to deal with low production times. Which of course points to the stupidity of their grid isolation policies.
If the Texas grid was better connected to other grids, they could sell that surplus power to states like Indiana or Kentucky which might have fewer options for generating renewable power.
But as that Times article points out, there is still a lot of the fossil fuel mindset at work in Texas.
…I get that they lack the authority…but if I were in their position I’d probably think that starting to ear-mark funds anyway would be wise…whether because at some stage it seems inevitable that there will have to be some sort of massive investment from a possibly-to-be-created federal authority which might well look to the coffers of long-standing utilities for the means to undertake it…or simply because they already seem not to think their infrastructure can support the real-terms peak usage under conditions that are by all indications only going to get more common for a while yet even in a best case scenario
…& I think that at some level saying the denizens of NY needn’t be concerned because their patch is fine for now might lend itself to an unwarranted sense of complacency…which was why by the time I got to the “Knowing where this stuff comes from is a first step in defusing it.” I wasn’t as sure as I felt like I should be what exactly “this stuff” was or what defusing it usefully translated to…so to the extent that you’ve clarified that part…ta muchly
We are constantly being inundated with tips on how to use less electricity this summer. Here’s one I just saw today:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/con-edison-manager-gives-tips-for-conserving-energy-this-summer-as-the-heat-sizzles/
The stated goal is to help save money but the subtext is not that we will save money but we won’t overload the system and we’ll be forced into rolling brownouts, like in California. It’s not the money I’m worried about, although if you stripped out all the city- and state-applied hidden taxes and fees my ConEd bill would be at least 1/3 lower, it’s the supply. Imagine any other entity begging its customers to use less of its product. But here in Oz…
Did you know, and this is not difficult to imagine, that the single largest consumer of electricity in the City is the subway system? Those third rails consume massive amounts of electricity, and I don’t know if there’s even a way to make something like that more energy efficient. A huge waster of energy are the housing projects, which are barely habitable as it is, so energy efficiency is probably pretty low on their list of priorities.
…so…I know a number of people who live in (current &/or ex) council properties…not “projects” exactly…though in some places the scale of the buildings can be comparable…& one of the leading complaints is that they pay a lot for building-wide heating/hot water systems…even if they’re council tenants who get a bit of relief in various forms because in some cases they get a lot of their basic rent/accommodation costs covered either in part or in full…but either way more than someone in their own place with their own boiler on a use/cost basis
…& the london underground has more waste heat than it knows what to do with
…but has there even been a suggestion by so much as one of those councils that they & london transport could do each other a solid & tap that pre-existing ground source to replace the current systems that routinely break down at the coldest times of the year & are expensive & slow in repair terms?
…of course not…that would be crazy talk…that’s…just not how any of this works…it doesn’t even need your koch-equivalent press…I know dacre’s kind of in the background now but I’ll probably always think of the mail as his mouthpiece…to lift a finger…one foray into the kafka-esque mire of any kind of dealings with a london council & the concept of applying joined up thinking to the context of even one of the things leaves most people’s mind…runs screaming might be more accurate…almost certainly never to return
…arguably the problem there is the opposite in that the people way back when did such an amazing job over-engineering the infrastructure that nobody was willing to burn the political capital required to inconvenience voters in order do to anything more than the bare minimum of maintenance & repair for so long people lived whole lifetimes never having to consider that it wouldn’t just keep on being more than good enough forever to all practical purposes they were paid to care about
…but it feels like the result comes to much the same sort of problems-that-likely-could-have-been-avoided?
…
In New York what they do is charge you a certain percent of your income and throw in the utilities for free. This creates a huge disincentive to find employment, obviously, because there are non-cash assistance programs, like what used to be called food stamps but is called something else now, and that’s not included in the calculations. Also, the rent is based on the income of everyone living in the apartment, so there are tons of “secret” tenants who are unknown to the city. The official population is about 400,000 but it’s widely assumed to be more like 600,000, at the very least.
There’s also the fact that it was designed to be temporary. The thought was that people would be temporarily relocated in the wake of “slum clearance” projects but people would then move on, maybe even to the suburbs, which is why so many housing projects have huge parking lots, to accommodate tenants’ cars. That didn’t happen. People cling to those apartments for dear life, crime-ridden and developing-worldish though they may be.
It’s not about the grid, it’s about the types of peak pricing contracts utilities are locked into.
Utilities make commitments to residential customers to sell at mostly fixed prices. There can be a limited amount of flex pricing in a typical residential rate payer’s agreement, but it can fall far short of what the utility may need to pay if they’re forced to buy power on the spot market.
What’s happened in recent years is utilities have increasingly moved away from purchase models where they go to big coal companies and hydroelectric plants and just buy in bulk at long term rates, and now they try to time everything short term, buy from as many suppliers as possible, and set up complex models for meeting demand.
It’s profitable for them when everything works, but there is the potential for them to underestimate their supply contracts, such as during a heat wave. They have to pay through the nose to get a generator to run at a higher capacity and burn more fuel, but because they can’t contractually raise prices or cut supply, they’re stuck eating the difference.
Which is why they want people programming their thermostats and cleaning their AC filters now ahead of any potential spikes in demand.
They’re not seriously worried about brownouts, they’re worried that people will be paying $1.00 for electricity that is costing them $1.20 on the spot market.
There are sleazy PR types out there who are trying to turn this situation into some kind of paranoia about oil drilling restrictions, or solar power, or big government ruining local electricity. Which is why I’m wondering if there’s anything specific which generated this reading of an energy conservation message. It’s certainly not what’s in that CBS piece, even in the subtext.
…I’m trying to follow this…& I understand how the pricing works & the relationship between consumer & wholesale markets…but if “it” isn’t about the grid but you’re right about all of this
…I don’t get how that isn’t all very much about the grid…in ways that would seemingly be in the interests of all concerned whose margin doesn’t come from burning fossil fuels to see improved by overhauling & increasing the transmission capacity in terms of load, storage & distance to source?
Also, since there’s no FYCE today, here’s something to satisfy our appetites. I just want to confirm that my Olive Garden Kopy Kat recipe was prewritten before this hacking scandal and the FYCE vertical remains untainted.
I have to say that I’m kind of glad the sub debacle ended the way it did — a quick death is far less horrifying than the idea sitting in a metal coffin waiting for the air to run out.
Also, I know he is an expert, but seeing James Cameron show up on interviews to offer expertise in deep-sea submersibles is such a weird, weird thing.
I agree. The thought of being dying slowly inside a
metaltubecarbon fiber encased titanium coffin freaked me the fuck out.From Giz…
Guillermo shut the fuck up.
WHO THE FUCK IS GOING TO RELAX IF THEY KNOW THEY’RE DYING IN A DARK, COLD DANK METAL FUCKING TUBE 13000 FEET BELOW SEA LEVEL WITH NO WAY OUT?!? STUPID BRAINDEAD MOTHERFUCKER.
It’s not like anyone’s ever experienced that feeling nor should they. Just imagining it, made me want to scream and never ever ever want to seal myself up in a tiny space.
BTW, if anyone wants to see an artists rendering of what I would like look in that situation… here it is.
It was always going to be found in pieces. The porthole alone was a huge weak point. The experimental carbon fiber hull was another.
I keep seeing reporters asking about recovering remains. Uh, no, pressure at that depth is 6,000 psi (it’s about 15 psi on the surface). There is nothing to be recovered.
That’s true. It’s what I figured based on the limited info I had.
The MSM is asking a truly pointless question as the crew is either charcoal or chum depending on who you believe whether the pressure wave hit or ignited the O2 first.
I was trying to observe some level of discretion and decorum but your description is accurate, except charcoal would also have been crushed to paste. How reporters go to these things without doing basic Google searches is beyond me.
…I mean…corrosionpedia says in the google precis that galvanic corrosion isn’t a concern where there’s titanium married up against carbon fiber…but the longer version doesn’t seem quite as certain as that makes it sound
https://www.corrosionpedia.com/galvanic-corrosion-of-metals-connected-to-carbon-fiber-reinforced-polymers/2/1556
…not to mention this is #4 on their 10 things to know about carbon fibre reinforced polymer and corrosion
…#8 on that list makes titanium a better choice than steel if the two are in “electrical contact” in a saltwater environment…but physics class was a lot of years ago & I don’t know my specific strength from my yield strength…so maybe the dead guy who bragged about breaking rules creatively & intelligently was smarter than me…but my dumb ass took one look at this
Galvanic activity of carbon fiber reinforced polymers and electrochemical behavior of carbon fiber [ScienceDirect]
…& figured I’d have spent longer at the drawing board…not to mention sprung for a window rated for the depth I planned on repeatedly visiting?
I saw an interview with a materials engineer and she was baffled by the use of carbon fiber. She said it’s well known that while it has great tensile strength it does not have very good compression strength.
What I haven’t seen is any accounting for how many times that vessel had already made the trip, and whether cumulative stress from repeated trips could have caused the failure.
…I don’t know the trip count…but I do know that the cumulative impact of the stress in materials terms is the one thing about carbon fibre vs. metal I knew before this episode…namely that while carbon fibre posts awesome numbers in a variety of strength/stress tests…& at a weight/mass value that makes it sort of amazing…its big flaw is that you can’t rely on those numbers after the material has undergone the test
…metal takes a lot of punishment & degrades in a pretty predictable fashion…most metals, anyway as far as the predictable bit even if the punishment thing is kinda variable between types
…but…for example…the guy branson used to bankroll to mess about with round the world balloons & other billionaire pursuits built a carbon fibre one man sub…& branson threw a lot of good money after bad trying to commercialize the design…but ultimately binned it because (I don’t know the real reason but in my head, anyway) someone finally got through to him that the guy who designed it was prepared to trust it…once
…it was a single-use insanely expensive vehicle that one guy would get to take for a spin one time & after that wouldn’t trust to get back in even to float around on the surface
I believe it was three and one of those was down to the Titanic. And the materials engineer I mentioned said the trips would have weakened the hull.
I had a panic attack once when I was stuck in traffic on a very hot day and unable to run the AC. I was unable to relax knowing I’d eventually be on my merry way and didn’t need to be rescued.
I agree too. Worst case, in my imagination, would be sitting in that death trap while floating on the ocean. Knowing that oxygen is right outside your porthole cursing why the doors were not designed to open from the inside too.
If the Navy heard the implosion, why did they keep searching? And does that mean there was a sliver of a chance that they could have been rescued had they looked exactly in that spot from the beginning?
No, no rescue was possible. Manchu alludes to this above, but a single leak would result in an implosion and literally tons of water would come together like two giant smashing fists. Picture a mosquito that you slap between your hands as hard as possible. That was the noise the Navy recorded. The pressures are nearly unimaginable, which is why piloting a largely untested sub to these depths is an incredibly fucking stupid idea.
My understanding is that the Navy reported it to the Coast Guard immediately, but could not positively confirm it was the sub imploding. Coast Guard policy is to continue searching until there is no possibility of recovery. They kept analyzing the sound that was recorded and that apparently did help them locate the wreckage. That’s the point where the Coast Guard said, okay, there’s nothing more to be done here.
Honestly, as Manchu also mentioned, there’s no reason to send manned craft down there except for bragging rights. There’s nothing to see that hasn’t been photographed. It’s too dark to see anything without searchlights, and even with searchlights the water pressure warps the light wavelength so that you’re not really seeing anything “in color,” as it were. It’s shades of gray.
It’s a stupid reason to die. I’ve also seen references, but can’t find much, that the kid was utterly terrified, but his father badgered him into it as a Father’s Day present. If that’s true, that’s probably the most horrible thing about the entire debacle.
It’s like the Everest mania that was in a DOT recently. Horrible, dumb rich people do it for bragging rights, lots die, but they also put a lot of other people at risk.
At least 12 died this year, with five more missing and probably dead.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/everest/climbers-death-mount-everest/
Well, I’m shocked. One might think that Republican Supreme Court justices are a group of criminals.
‘Shady and corrupt’: Add Barrett real estate deal to list of Supreme Court ethics scandals
What Supreme isn’t corrupt? A lack of ethics rules for the SUPREME COURT seems… unethical.
So….
When do we find out who paid off ‘ol Brett-Likes-Beer’s Baseball tickets?
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Edited to add links;
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/new-strike-against-kavanaugh-season-tickets/565022/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/12/politics/brett-kavanaugh-baseball-ticket-debt-washington-nationals/index.html
It’s odd, but I think Beer Pong Kavanaugh is actually … scared. I think he knows he’s got way too many skeletons in his closet, and he really doesn’t want anybody opening those doors. It’s been almost five years since then, and he’s been relatively low-profile.
Whoever paid him off got their favorable judgement and Kavanaugh seems just nervous enough about it to stay relatively clean.
…speaking of nervous…given their stated position on people who turn out to be less guilty than advertised
…trying to deny things on the basis they lack merit & nobody has the requisite standing to impugn them might just be a kneejerk reaction to knowing only too well the flavor of their patented brand of medicine?
…that joke tweet about leaving thomas & alito off the list of “respected” justices seemed several names shy of getting that balanced with the “plain language” of the term…so maybe there’s…well…a majority on that bench that are worried about something analogous to the sudden catastrophic implosion that’s been so prominently discussed lately
…the right’s approach to regulatory capture of any & every branch of state & federal government & judiciary may well have been a multi-generational project that checks a lot of movie-style shady conspiracy boxes…but it does often seem to share the late oceangate CEO’s grasp of the materials & engineering it took to get them to overturning roe & hobbling the voting rights stuff?
Here’s something of interest for the linguists among you:
It is thought that Coney Island got its name because of the number of wild rabbits that the Dutch encountered when they settled the area, and the word for rabbit was “konijn.” So I always think of her as Amy Wild Rabbit Barrett. And since she has something like 14 children, many of them adopted…
…I always thought the fact I don’t remember not knowing some people called rabbit coney meant it was still used someplace I had some familiarity with it growing up…but judging from this
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81085/coney-and-rabbit-what-s-the-difference
…maybe it had more to do with reading the lord of the rings at an early age?
I didn’t know “coney” had a wider English usage! It was definitely the Dutch that got there first, though. I wonder if, four centuries ago, the English and Dutch languages were even more closely aligned than they are today.
…I think I’ve said this before but yes…for a lot of the last thousand years or so dutch had a much bigger influence on english than generally seems to be acknowledged
…but I don’t think it was a lot of generations ago that hoping to come home with a coney or two was pretty common…& somewhere I can’t immediately recall I think I saw it suggested that it referred specifically to the “european” species…but I don’t know what other kinds of rabbits there might be for it to not strictly apply to?
My man, you are writing that very comment from near the site of New Amsterdam! My bit of New York is heavily laden with Dutch-adjacent names because they were here first and English has never been shy about
mugging and thievingborrowing from other languages.Oh, I know. I love the whole Dutch aspect of New York living. Have you ever read Washington Irving’s satirical A History of New York? It’s hilarious, and scathing about the Dutch and the English.
Nazi Moms!
https://apnews.com/article/moms-for-liberty-adolf-hitler-newsletter-quote-bcce698e901b9e782970030ccd710512
Going to be an interesting election season!
https://www.commondreams.org/news/fec-rejects-public-citizen-petition-to-regulate-political-deepfakes
House GOP continues the circular firing squad.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/23/house-freedom-caucus-members-00103296
It’s another sign that DC pundits hailing McCarthy’s leadership in the wake of the debt ceiling deal were just carrying water for him.
It’s worth noting that when Pelosi had a similarly thin margin, she was vastly better at keeping her party together and passing legislation.
In part it’s because she was a much better Speaker than McCarthy, but the insider press doesn’t want to admit how bad he is. But it’s also because the GOP doesn’t care about fixing anything, which the insider press also doesn’t want to admit.
Even the most liberal Democrats like AOC and Ilhan Omar care about policy and want to work on reality-based issues. This meant that Pelosi had options to negotiate and make deals with her weak hand.
But the addiction is so strong of the pundit class to cliches of centrism and bipartisanship that they have to elevate fools and bomb throwers and tear down serious legislators.
…I guess I must have somehow skipped over that insider press…since the near-universal takeaway from every piece I’ve read where his name comes up has been that he’s on borrowed time & can’t back up very nearly anything at all he’s tried to claim about being able to perform the duties of speaker
…even the stuff directly quoting him & pointing to the nearest thing to a win he can lay claim to on any given day haven’t gone more than a paragraph without swinging back to the many & varied ways the odds are better he won’t deliver than anything else?
I dunno, my read on most of that stuff was not them being all that hyped about his abilities or suggesting he was good at the job. They’re not clear enough about that the MTG/Boebert caucus (lol, they hate each other) is insane to the point of national concern, but I don’t think they were unclear that McCarthy made a deal with the devil that was always likely to end badly.