Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a somewhat screwy weekend weather-wise, between sunshine, clouds, rain – both light and heavy – as well as fog. One other thing is that the leaves have been coming out on the trees with the birches leading the way, at least around here at The Gulch. I’ve also seen the leaves coming out on the apple tree next to the house, and on maples here and there. I think the oaks will be out shortly.

The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout will be coming out of winter storage in a little less than 2 weeks. After some work like clean up and getting the gear loaded into the boat it should be back in the water a few days after we pick it up from storage.

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I have been dealing with a changeover from my old work laptop, a Lenovo P50, to my new one, a Lenovo P16, for some time now. The P16 is using Windows 11 and from my previous post on the subject you know I really don’t like Windows 11.

I spent almost the entire work day this past Friday trying to finalize the changeover and have hit a few snags, something I hope to get squared away over the next couple of days. I have made the suggestion to one of our IT head honchos that maybe it’s time to consider dumping Windows for Linux. While I heard sympathetic noises, it looks like my employer is held in thrall to Microsoft.

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Elon Musk won his first election...by a landslide!

The results: 173-4!

In this case it was about incorporating the town of Starbase, Texas.

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Just when I thought the hypocrisy couldn’t and deeper I was proven wrong. In this case it’s taking place in the UK.

The hypocrisy?

The Members of the UK Parliament have lost access to EV charging stations in the New Palace Yard’s underground parking garage, having been removed due to “health and safety grounds following a review by the Safety and Fire teams, and in consultation with the Chair of the Administration Committee.”

In other words, they don’t want anyone charging EVs – the same ones they pushed as the solution to climate charge – because they are too dangerous to be allowed to charge in a parking garage because they might ignite and cause damage and destruction to neighboring vehicles and to the underground garage itself.

It looks like they are admitting (finally) that EVs are not much more than wheeled thermal grenades with loose pins.

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As if it isn’t well known that California’s High Speed Rail project is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, it seems that the Pyrite State isn’t willing to admit it’s a doomed project, one that should be canceled. From the beginning this was a doomed project, with poor planning regarding its route and which sections of the rail line would be built first.

California’s high-speed rail project is a lesson in the inefficiency of big government. The project was started nearly twenty years ago and they have not even started laying down tracks.

One of the reasons it’s in the news right now is because it has gone way over budget and the people in charge are looking for alternate forms of funding.

The current CEO, who came on board last summer, is now claiming that the project might be finished in twenty years. That would be the year 2045.

It’s going to take a total of 40 years to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco? Maybe they should have hired the guys who designed and built the TGV high speed rail system in France. It would have been done in only a few years and would have been operating for almost 15 years by now. But then, California isn’t exactly known for getting things done in a timely fashion and hasn’t been for decades. Heck, they can’t seem to repair a quarter-mile stretch of Highway 1 in Big Sur, something that’s been waiting for repair for 840 days now and isn’t likely to for another 840 days if past performance is any indicator.

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I’m not sure what to make of this. Is it calculated act to open dialogue with the US or is it an act desperation to keep its economy operating?

China EXEMPTS A Quarter of US Imports From Tariffs

China quietly exempts US goods from tariffs, covering around $40 billion worth of imports, in an effort to soften the blow of the trade war on its own economy.

Chinese officials are quietly drawing up a “whitelist” of critical U.S. goods that importers rely on to exempt them from Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs, Reuters reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The news adds to a growing number of reports from China of businesses discovering that tariffs have been waived on some goods, such as certain semiconductor and integrated circuit products.

It also shows how, underneath its tough rhetoric, Beijing is trying to mitigate the impact of the U.S. trade war on its export-reliant economy, the world’s second-largest, which was already under pressure from a broader slowdown.

Even before the trade war China’s economy had been struggling. The punitive tariffs placed an even greater burden on its economy as trade fell off. Then add in the purported demographic problems facing China and it is a perfect storm of bad economic forces.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Hmm. What do we have here?

A blast from the past, indeed.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rain is hanging around for a couple of more days, everyone is getting ready of the summer tourist season, and where we wonder where the heck the weekend went.