Intro / Preface / Extra Words
Everybody get hyped up! Why? Because it's INFRASTRUCTURE WEEK!! Let's go!!!
Veedeeohs
Katmai Bear Cam - Brown Bears at Brooks Falls
Ok... well I guess bears aren't infrastructure. But they should be. And a live bear cam that let's you watch dozens of bears in Alaska catch fish in real time shouldn't have to wait in line behind infrastructure week. -B
Business Time
The Great American Story of Waffle House
Waffle House is DEFINITLEY infrastructure. Critical infrastructure. A place of safety and nourishment-B
Why the Price of New Solar Electricity Fell an Incredible 89% in the Last Decade
Solar manufacturing and and installation is still on a cost learning curve and has zero fuel related operating costs... basically we just need some sort of real energy storage that doesn't involve strip mining lithium and about 4x the grid infrastructure and we'll be good to go. No big deal. -B
TravelMASity
Gen Z’s dream of high-speed rail and Green New Deal infrastructure
Famously, the one fan-dom you don't dare tick off on twitter is choo-choo twitter. -B
Follytics
Let’s quadruple the standard of living by 2040
This is completely wrong and makes no sense but also I kind of like it? -B
I love technology (and science)
America Is Bad at Building Power Lines. We Can Fix That.
...or can we? Good ideas here about something I never think about, or notice as I'm driving my fossil fueled vehicle down the road. But alas, ancient rules and disincentivized lawmakers may mean we keep on doing nothing. I guess maybe someone could make a movie? Transmission Curmudgeons Go To Washington by the Cohen Brothers sounds right. -C
The World Needs Nuclear Power, And We Shouldn’t Be Afraid Of It
My personal hot take on clean energy is that a key piece of the climate change puzzle or whatever we want to call that fuzzy collection of issues has to be the clean, reliable, and safe new nuclear reactors that have been developed in the last 20 years, amongst many other things. This is to me obvious when you realize that China is still building dozens of coal plants every year which desperately need to be nuclear plants instead and have zero chance of being solar panels or wind mills. -B
_______ is not real life
Inside the Right’s Fracking-Meme Campaign
At the moment my career has wandered into the shadow of the energy industry so I have some personally incentivized and economically influenced opinions on things like fracking and pipelines that are probably too caustically aggressive for me to successfully communicate here. However, pro-fracking memes I think are OBJECTIVELY hilarious and should be celebrated as the sweetest distillate of Hello Fellow Kids dot Meme. -B
Further Reading
Rerouting the Mississippi River could build new land—and save a retreating coast
H/T Joe D.
My working theory is America has tipped into a long and slow asphyxiation caused by our inability to actually build relevant and economically effective infrastructure. We will likewise be unable to build relevant and effective green / restorative infrastructure. The bureaucracy has enveloped us in vaguely pork scented gelatinous ooze such that no good idea goes unimplemented.
I think this is true from pipelines to high voltage transmission lines to restoring the lost marshlands of the coast. This is one reason my politics have recently moved in a direction that may be unique to me which I am currently calling Federalist Libertarian Monarchy. If you corner me with a small glass of brown liquid and ask me about it I'd be glad to fill your ear with my nonsense for an hour or three. -B
Underground skyscrapers and off-grid bunkers: inside the world of preppers
I saw a meme somewhere that said something to the effect of "there's a 99% chance that in a post apocalyptic world you're going to die of diarrhea from drinking contaminated water before you get a chance to wear a football uniform and wield a lawnmower blade machete" and that's what I thought about while reading this. -C
My apocalyptic strategy is to be one of those who are referenced in the crawl of the movie's opening scene: 90% of the world's population is dead.... I think that's where you want to be, honestly, not in the last bit trying to develop survival rules against zombies or avoid having your spine chewed by the spine chewing insect alien invaders or whatnot. -B
Rear View Mirror
Haunting Photos Reveal a Massive Abandoned Town of Disneyesque Castles
This is incredibly strange, so much so that the images don't seem real to me. For some reason I'm reminded of Alys Beach developments in Florida, except people are actually living in those. -C
This reminds me of driving through the southern Chinese rural countryside sometime after the Great Financial Crisis. Die-cast, Pre-cast, Injection-Molded, Chinese-Flavored McMansions were scattered around the rice paddies and sprawling factories. Empty apartment buildings that would never be occupied rose stark from amidst green, watery pools sporadically peppered with bored, cud-chudding water buffalo strapped into various and asundry agricultural implementations. -B
Trash Fire
Horn Lake, Southaven want to negotiate with Memphis over sewer
Drama drama. On first read it seems to me that suburbs not in TN should pay at least as much as the ones in TN, but as with most local politics I have no idea how this stuff works. - C