09:45 – We’re running low on finished kits again, so we’ll spend some time this weekend building batches of chemistry kits and biology kits. I’ve intentionally run down our inventory of sub-assemblies because for 2014 ktis I intend to reduce the number of subassemblies by one by combining items that formerly went into X subassemblies into X-1 subassemblies. I’m also working hard on the earth science manual, with the goal of having a prototype kit/manual ready in time for the SPARK competition, which is to say by year-end.
Thursday, 21 November 2013
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80 F here in the Land of Sugar. The weather liars say that winter shall resume over the weekend but I think that they are lying again. They did have 28 F predicted for Saturday night but have changed it to 49 F.
I am continually amazed at the modern day Luddites in our society, the Global Warming XXXXX Climate Change idiots. The latest musing of theirs is how to stop the Canadian tar sand crude from entering the USA in rail cars, “Environmentalists look to block crude-by-rail plans from Canada into US”:
http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/3281093/Latest-News/Environmentalists-look-to-block-crude-by-rail-plans-from-Canada-into-US.html
“A draft environmental review released by the US State Department in March found that Keystone wouldn’t impact climate change in part because trains would pick up the slack if the pipeline wasn’t built. Environmental groups have spent the months since trying to discredit that finding. Rail lines, they argue, are a complement, not a replacement, to the pipeline.”
“Keystone could carry 830,000 bpd of oil to US refiners. By comparison, an average of 175,000 bpd of oil were imported by rail this year, about 75,000 bbl of it heavy oil, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. About 45,000 bbl of oil was shipped to the US daily on average in 2012, according to the group.”
“Rail proposals in western Canada could load as much as 450,000 bpd of heavy oil by the end of 2014. An insufficient number of tank cars could create a bottleneck through at least next year, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a report in October.”
These people have managed to kill the northern stretch of the Keystone pipeline, 24 thousand highly skilled, highly paid jobs for 4 years. Now they want to kill movement of crude oil via railroads, a problem that they have caused.
I think of the USA as a high order interdependent machine. A little bit of failure in one portion can cause major problems down the road in other portions of the machine. We could actually hydrocarbon product shortages (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, etc) as these idiots use so-called environmental and safety regulations to shutdown common practices.
See, it’s one thing if production levels of various fuels can be met, while noting that all of the alternative fuels put together cannot match oil production in keeping modern industrial “civilization” afloat, but once various environmental, legal and State organizations get involved, anything can be shut down or destroyed or lost, like those 24k jobs. They refuse to build nuke power plants and they’re going to be down to more and more expensive exploration and extraction of oil around the world over the next twenty years. Based on the past many decades of performance of our government, I have all the confidence in the world that they will screw this up for us, while taking care of their own elites, per usual.
Wind turbines, solar panels and fracking won’t even be close to matching oil as what greases the wheels of modern life.
Thirty years ago, when I first started driving, I noticed that it took just one bad driver to screw up a highway’s worth of traffic. I described the problem as one turd blocking a sewer line.
This has much broader applicability. Oddly, many people resent being called the turds in the metaphor.
I see my Senator Harry “Fuck Bipartisanship” Reid has invoked the nuclear option on the filibuster. If the ReDoucheBags don’t win some seats next year, it is all over.
Mr. OFD, any houses for sale up by you? Land for growing crops and shooting feds. Any fish in that big lake? I used to ice fish all the time in my youth.
MrAtoz, yes, houses and farmhouses and land by itself, throughout the state, but more affordable outside of Chittenden County, the state capital and the college towns, where, coincidentally, the libruls and progs and other assorted cretins and morons live and work. Regular folks like us are mainly outside of those locales.
We regularly see decent houses under $200k with good-sized lots, and some a bit more with more acreage, for growing whatever crops and shooting nosy feds.
Fish in the lake? R U joking? Fish galore! All year! Place we bought our new woodstove had a gigantic brown trout mounted, the record for that year by one of the sales guys there. Northern Pike, pickerel, bass, you name it. Ice-fishing is BIG. The village on the bay where we are has the shacks out as soon as the ice will hold them every year and a five-minute walk from our front door is a specialty fishing and ice-fishing shop during the winter and in the summers they sell garden veggies and pumpkins and squash and mums in the fall.
Fish from the lake; hunting all over; and many, many square miles of the best farmland in New England from one end of the Champlain watershed to the other on both sides, NY and VT. Population here? In the village a few dozen; in the “city” three miles to our east, about 8,000. Statewide less than the city of Boston, about 700,000.
As for the political shenanigans down in Mordor; I said the Repubs were toast a good while back, via demographics alone. I was blown off, laughed at, and folks kept wishing and hoping for a new young Repub savior. Joke’s on them. Then we hear from the libertarians about some savior of theirs’, or placing three or four candidates in office *nationwide* and they quite frankly have the proverbial snowball’s chance of ever doing anything meaningful. Tea Party? Yeah, they get to Mordor, inhale the vapors, get invited to parties, and game over.
As far as electoral politics, the voting chicanery, etc.? We lost. We’re done. It IS all over now; only hope for change we might like won’t come until the entire system has been crashed, re-formatted, rebooted and a new o.s. installed and updated.
Re the “nuclear option” – don’t understand why the Dems don’t just confirm the pending nominees and then change the rule back to 60 votes and then rinse/repeat as needed.