Thursday Tidings

Deep Truths...Plus a Few Random Pictures

This Orwell quote is spot on. Always follow the money flows

My 10 year old read this meme this morning and told me “That’s actually pretty true.” My girls figure things out quickly!

I’m not sure we need to spend trillions. The money that is spent already largely goes to things that make the world a darker place or to incompetent, overpriced grifts.

For example for the last few days I’ve done a very busy back and forth on a long and overcrowded stretch of Interstate 15 highway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The two cities are seperated by 300 miles of desert, 200 miles of which are largely uninhabited. Both sides now support population centers of multiple millions. The I-15 corridor is the only major land route between the two areas and the road always seems to have overcrowding problems especially in areas where it narrows to two lanes in each direction. Any accident can close the road for hours. A bullet train proposal first backed by Obama has been delayed, and delayed again, with the cost up to $12 billion and counting:

“Lawmakers from the two adjacent states that will be home to the project have been lobbying the U.S. Department of Transportation to support the new rail service. When complete, the 218-mile trip will take about two hours on a train that will have a cruising speed of 200 miles per hour.

“As far back as 2001, I’ve been advocating to bring a true high-speed rail system to Southern Nevada, and I am thrilled that this funding will allow Brightline West and the Nevada Department of Transportation to do just that,” Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said in a statement, adding that the service will set “an unprecedented example for the possibilities of high-speed rail in our country.”

The funding is provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and will cover about a quarter of the cost of the $12 billion project. Brightline West has already received $1 billion in private activity bonds from the U.S. Department of Transportation.”

Does it sometimes seem like we incentivize failure even on projects that a lot of people would genuinely want? I’ve been on that I-15 corridor over 100 times in my life easily. The journey should take 4 1/2 hours by car without traffic, but six to 10 hours is becoming more the norm. There is simply no place to go out there if something goes wrong. And there’s too many people forced to travel that road even if everything goes right.

Long drive or no, we enjoyed our mini trip. Eliza is a good climber with or without trees to climb:

All went well with her new biometric Thai passport. All visa stuff for me has now gone digital, which I feel blessed by if it saves me any trips to any offices anywhere. Wasn’t that the promise of all of this remote stuff? To keep us from having to visit those dreaded offices? Why is it that something which promised convenience has made our lives harder and more complicated instead?

That’s government at work!

Venice Beach looked better than I thought it would. I was expecting a homeless apocalypse. The numbers weren’t much worse than I remember, which tells me that somebody must have cleaned up the place. Our old next door neighbor was home and genorously treated us all to a lavish meal. He told us that things were at their worst during the Covid shutdowns. The common themes of corporate greed and land and property grabs seem to be ongoing all over the world. Our governments are hard at work after all.

A lot of shops were closed. But it was a divine dinner:

I’m trying to teach my 10 year old in an online boot camp on how to spot fakes on the Internet. It doesn’t matter if they are scammers, trolls, actual predators or those trying the old love bomb routine for money. For example a “man” claiming to be from Toledo, Ohio, recently friend requested me. I noticed that his profile was only six weeks old and “he” was quite handsome. I don’t mean to impugn the good people of Toledo, Ohio, but this doesn’t look like any of my high school classmates that I recall:

Also why would you be shirtless in December in Ohio? And where do you get LUSO mineral water, which apparently is popular in Portugal and parts of Europe? Of course I accepted the friend request immediately and the “man” began messaging me immediately. As soon as I asked him any specific questions about Toledo he changed the story, especially after I mentioned that I was in LA. Now he went to Beverly Hills high school! (that’s a common name I’d guess Beverly Hills, CA has specific high school names). Then I told him I was staying in Las Vegas and that I was married with two daughters (one of whom is reading over my shoulder). I’m trying to teach her to recognize their scripts.

So far I think this is a Romeo scamboy. But pay attention to what these folks are messaging. Teach your kids how to think, not what to think. They may need to fix the world that we’ve mucked up…

Buy me a ko-fi