One of the other things we’ll be dealing with on Monday is the total eclipse that will sweep across northern New Hampshire. Traffic traveling north is expected to be heavy both today and tomorrow as folks wishing to experience the total eclipse head into Grafton and Coos Counties to be in the path. Fortunately most of those affected by this past week’s Nor’easter were south of there so there shouldn’t be many problems caused by the storm up in those areas. It does mean lodgings are fully booked and restaurants, stores, and gas stations will be having well above normal patronage. It also means traffic will be well above normal as well.
I’ll be here at The Gulch as the eclipse starts. While not in the path of totality we will see a partial eclipse and that’s good enough for me. If I really want to see it I can catch it on our local TV channel. As long as I don’t have to travel to see it I’m good.
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One subject of discussion that has popped again in the aftermath of the widespread power outages is why New Hampshire hasn’t buried its power lines to help reduce the probability of future outages. I can explain that with one two-word phrase:
Granite State.
New Hampshire’s nickname – the Granite State – exists for a reason, that being we have a lot of granite…everywhere. That means burying things like power lines can be difficult because in a lot of cases it will mean digging, drilling, and blasting to cut the trenches needed to bury those lines. They can’t be shallow in order to ensure safety as many of the distribution lines run at 3800 volts or more, something that can ruin your whole day if that electricity ‘escapes’ because someone did something stupid. It could require thousands of miles of trenches to be dug and cut through the rock in order to bury all of those power lines that can be buried.
While it would be nice to see most of the power lines and poles that go with them disappear, the question is whether it is worth the time, and more specifically, the money it would take. Then there’s a follow-on question that needs to be asked: Who would be paying for all of those power lines to be buried?
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I found this rather amusing considering it is likely accurate.
Democrats Warned Not To Register Young Voters, ‘They’re Going to Vote for Trump.’
If that is indeed the case it means the Democrats will have to work harder to register the dead and non-citizens.
A confidential memo circulated among top Democratic donors has sparked a furious debate in Democratic circles about whether to narrow the focus of voter registration efforts to avoid signing up likely Republicans.And where did the DNC get the money to offset those costs?
For decades, nonpartisan groups allied with the Democratic Party have run wide-ranging efforts aimed at increasing voter registration among people of color and young people — groups that tend to lean Democratic but have historically voted at lower rates than older and White people.
In recent years, however, there has been a marked shift among the roughly 1 in 5 citizens of voting age who are unregistered toward Republicans, raising fresh questions about how much boosting nonpartisan voter registration could help presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump heading into November.
[Strauss] also warned that efforts to gain Democratic votes among younger and non-Black people of color were often expensive — costing more than $1,200 per net vote in 2020, by one estimate — because the groups now include so many non-Democrats. Among voters of color, he wrote that “only African American registration is clearly a prime opportunity,” adding that netting Democratic voters among Black people cost approximately $575 per vote in 2020.
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A great quote from Lincoln Brown that gets right to the point:
What irks us is that you [Progressives] are not content to live your lives as you see fit. You demand that we live our lives as you see fit.They want us to sit down, shut up, and do what they tell us to do. We won’t do that because we know they are mentally ill, live in a delusional world of Marx’s making, and will have no problem eventually imprisoning or murdering us to get their way. Sic semper tyrannus.
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Common Cents Blog asks the question “Is California Going Red?”
Possibly...but I always figured that would happen by the coastal counties being kicked out of the rest of California once they had enough of the delusional Marxists presently running the state into the ground. Every time I’ve thought the California Assembly and the Governor couldn’t get get any crazier/stupider, they prove me wrong. At some point the sane people have got to reach the point where they’ve had enough and they make those blue counties a separate entity – preferably a foreign entity – and let the red counties get back to business without interference from their self-anointed ‘betters’.
However, one thing that is giving some people hope is that a Republican – Steve Garvey – is leading the vote count in the primary race for the upcoming US Senate race in November. Could this be but the first step in California shifting back to the right?
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It looks like yet another blue city is learning the lesson of the Law of Unintended Consequences, that city being Minneapolis and their making sure Uber and Lyft drivers lose their jobs with an ill-advised ordinance that was supposed to ‘help’ those same drivers.
I want to strike a Nietzschean note in this comment on the rideshare ordinance enacted by the City of Minneapolis this past month. Under the ordinance, Uber and Lyft would be required to pay drivers a minimum rate of $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute to ensure that they earn the equivalent of local minimum wage of $15.57 per hour — effective May 1. The city council overrode the mayor’s veto to enact the ordinance.Yet another example of the willfully ignorant making economic decisions they are not qualified to make which have real world consequences for constituents they care nothing about...until the next election cycle. Uber and Lyft will be pulling up stakes with Uber also pulling out of neighboring St. Paul.
Uber and Lyft would be required to comply with the ordinance, that is, if they are still around on May 1, but they will both be out of Minneapolis by then. Indeed, Uber will depart the entire Twin Cities metropolitan area.
The ordinance represents an exercise in the pure Nietzschean will to power. It resolves a nonproblem with a law that destroys thousands of jobs providing millions of rides. NRO quotes a local Lyft drivers speaking of his fellow contractors pushing the ordinance as “just absolutely lazy people.”
One of the ironies is that just over 60% of the drivers are immigrants, with most of them being male and African. Now their jobs are going away courtesy of the Minneapolis City Council. (The mayor vetoed the ordinance, but the city council overrode his veto.)
Another irony is that Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, sees the problem and has excoriated the Minneapolis City Council for “magical thinking” that a new rideshare app will just appear out of thin air to replace Uber and Lyft.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the clean-up continues apace, preparations for the upcoming boating season have resumed, and where Monday is going to show us just how bad it can get by making sure the sun goes out in the middle of the afternoon.