Someone is being paid for this: Line City.

Once in a while, the Internet throws up something so amazingly stupid that one must sit back in awe at the thought that some guy got paid for it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, direct from Blazing Cat Fur, I give you the Line City.

 

 

 

 

The project, simply referred to as "The Line," is a smart megacity project being proposed in the planned city of Neom, in the northwestern part of the country. The ambitious project will be just 200 meters, or about 650 feet wide and 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet tall, but is planned to stretch for 170 kilometers, or just under 106 miles long.

It's a wall the height of the CN Tower, and it goes from Queens Quay to Bracebridge. And everybody in Ontario lives in it. That's what we're talking about. Except its actually planned for Saudi Arabia. 9 million people they say.

 

Somewhere out there in the world, some shit head architect talked an oil-rich Arab dude into pursuing this idea. And they GOT PAID! Like, actual money. Probably a shit-ton of money, given the super slick advertising video.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this was Judge Dredd.

 

He was just told the building is 100 miles long.

 

The second thing was Logan's Run. 

 

 

Luxury living! But don't go outside.

 

 THX 1138?

 

Look, there's even a train.

Really, the idea simply screams Hollywood futurist dystopian hell doesn't it? We've seen a lot of movies like this.

Sealed up in a really long sky-scraper in the desert with 9 million other people, your life at the mercy of the guy with his hand on the water tap. Can you say 'pumping pressure'? Sure you can. Roughly 750 pounds per square inch. You gotta lift water at ten pounds per gallon 500 meters into the air. How much does a column of water 500 meters tall weigh? Answer is: Twelve (12) tons. 24,000 pounds. You've got to LIFT it with a huge motherhumping  water pump. This can be done, (there are two [2] buildings in the world taller than 500 meters) but not cheaply. What kind of steel pipe do you need for ~1000 PSI pressures (safety margin!!!)? The expensive kind. This is not the usual cast iron water main we're talking about here.

Oh, and no air conditioning. The city's 'micro-climate' will be created by 'natural ventilation'. Meaning hot, dry desert air will be sucked in on the shady side, heated by the 100 mile long, 500 meter high walls of glass, and then pushed out the top by convection. When the thermometer is hitting 115F out on the sand at lunch time, it'll be 130F by the time it exits out the top. Sounds awesome, sign me up.

The only thing missing was windmills on masts all along the upper edges of the building. I guess even an architect can figure out that if a normal 200 meter tall windmill uses a foundation with roughly 250 cubic meters of concrete in it, sticking one on top of a 500 meter tall glass wall might be... sketchy. Structurally speaking, y'know. Lots of bendy forces, right?

Also no word on what to do when there's a dust storm. The 'natural ventilation' is going to get a bit exciting with hurricane force winds blowing sand in there. And speaking of winds, what kind of gale-force breezes are they going to get with a 100 MILE long slab that's half a kilometer tall? Strong enough to pull the glass panes out, I would think. Also the sand-blasting is going to be a problem for that reflective coating.

What's the linear expansion on a wall of glass 100 miles long when the sun comes up? Half a mile? Couple hundred feet? More than an inch, anyway.

Snow storm? (Yes, it does occasionally snow in Saudi Arabia.)

Earthquake? Could be exciting if one of those suuuuper high pressure water pipes break. (750 PSI, baby. Think water-jet cutter. Spicy!)

Fire? You're 500 meters up a burning building in the middle of the desert. Head for the stairs? That's a lot of freakin' stairs, dewds. Letting out into... the desert. And don't forget, the train is -inside- the building. Where the fire is, right? No cars, no water.

And yet, here we are. Architect got paid, project moving forward.

If it's in the cloud, it isn't yours anymore.

People around here at Chez Phantom get tired of my ranting about cloud storage and government censorship. They continually say things like: "You're crazy, old man! Nobody would ever censor your cloud storage! That's impossible! And anyway, nobody cares about your damn book!"

Well, about that.

She [Mitu] had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of "spying on and locking my draft," citing the presence of illegal content.

From the MIT report, we get this:

The firm [WPS] has released two statements since the initial complaint, clarifying that the software does not censor locally stored files. But the company remains vague about what it does to files shared online. "All platforms that provide online information services are responsible for reviewing the content that's being spread on their platforms," a July 13 statement says, citing China's Cybersecurity Law and other relevant regulations. Kingsoft did not respond to MIT Technology Review's request for comment.

Commenting beneath WPS's latest statement on Weibo, users want answers. "Can you guarantee you won't view our documents? If you can, I'll keep using it; If you can't, I'll ask for a refund for my membership. I've renewed it for several years but I'm feeling terrified now," one user wrote. 

WPS has not officially confirmed whether it is the act of sharing work that triggers the algorithmic censors. But a comment left by WPS's customer service account on Weibo on July 13 seems to confirm that hypothesis: "Syncing and storing it on cloud won't trigger the reviews. Only creating a sharing link for the document triggers the review mechanism."

Readers will please note that this occurred in China, making it not really much of a surprise. Censorship and heavy-handed stupidity are expected in a totalitarian state. They obviously set up a bot to check for prohibited words and phrases.

Some readers will now say that I must be CRAZY to think that could ever happen here in the Free nations of the West. Others will recall the Freedom Convoy experience here in Canada, the continuing farmer uprising in Holland  and Germany, the efforts of ALL Western governments to censor anything to do with Covid-19 (for your safety, you know) and the proposed Bill C-11 in Canada's parliament right now, and maybe they won't think I'm quite so crazy.

But either way, the one thing we can all be sure of is that Google Docs, Microsoft 365, Apple iCloud, et cetera, all these web applications and cloud storage CAN do this type of thing. It's just at the moment they don't do it, except occasionally by accident.

Ladies and gentlemen, cloud storage is not a backup. It is a convenience. Treat it as such, and remember that if they can scrape your e-mail for advertising keywords, and they absolutely do, they can do it to your documents too. The only difference between here and Communist China is who gives the orders and what they're looking for. All else is the same for practical purposes.

How to spot a liar.

We, collectively, are the most heavily marketed generation in history. Literally everything we see, hear and most of what we touch and smell is marketing. Some of the things marketers say are true, most of it is smoke, mirrors and lies.

Nowhere is the marketing more intense than in politics. The lies come like a blizzard from all sides.

Here is an article that exemplifies how media companies lie in service to a political agenda.

EXCLUSIVE: How California's legal cannabis dream became a public health nightmare: It's a class B drug in the UK - but in the US state it's led to spiralling addiction, psychotic illnesses and hospitals facing a deluge of poisonings

Reading through this missive from the Daily Mail, the misdirection and outright lying fairly leap off the page. Despite an official effort that began in the 1930s and continues today in the United States, there is no provable medical evidence for major harms caused by cannabis.

1. It has never been proven addictive. The reverse is in fact the case, there  is no evidence that cannabis is physically addictive. Heavy users cut from their supply do not experience physical withdrawal symptoms.
   
2. It has never been proven to have a fatal dose. People routinely ingest ridiculously large doses of cannabis with no evident toxicity at all.
   
3. It has never been proven to cause mental illness, although there is evidence to suggest it may make certain individuals who already have mental illness worse. I use the word "may" advisedly, as there still is no proof of the effect and no delineated mechanism by which such an effect might work. There are merely associations and correlations, no clinical proof.

Making the article a lie right off the bat.

Then there is the use of language. Reading the first couple of paragraphs, we come across the words 'genetically engineered cannabis' which is another lie. Nobody is doing GM cannabis. They are all doing selective breeding.

Then we get the kicker: TEENAGE ADDICITION!!!! They're coming for your chillllldren!

And I must admit, the way it's all sold, as some kind of divine health-giving elixir, certainly makes the idea of dabbling more palatable. But I am not here to partake. Because behind the shiny pots and serenely smiling assistants, a far more disturbing picture is emerging.

Over the past few years, doctors in California have begun to voice concerns about the repercussions of increasing cannabis use. In particular, how the laissez-faire approach is fuelling a surge in addiction and mental illness.

Many are particularly concerned about Los Angeles, where teenagers use the drug more often than in any other Californian city.

I spent a week travelling across LA and beyond, meeting emergency doctors in the eye of the storm, as well as devastated parents who say their families have been torn apart by cannabis.

So now we get the tear-jerker stories of the sweet young lad who was "addicted" to cannabis for four years before he was finally killed by an overdose.

Michelle Leopold, 57, from San Francisco, has fallen victim to the worst possible consequences of the normalisation of cannabis use. In 2019, her 18-year-old son Trevor (together, above) died after dabbling with prescription painkillers – and unwittingly taking a tablet of powerful opioid Fentanyl – following four years of addiction to cannabis

Yeah, not killed by cannabis then, eh? Fentanyl. But we're treated to the fantasy that the weed made him do it. 'If not for that deeeeemon weed, my boy would be alive today!' Sorry but no, probably not. Some other shit would have got him, likely booze. Although I understand meth is very popular among the permanent brain damage set these days. The streets of LA abound with burnouts doing the Meth Shuffle.

So, why all the abject, bald-faced lying and heart-string tugging? Politics. You have to go more than halfway through the article to find this:

Part of my journey followed in the footsteps of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who recently visited a number of LA's dispensaries on a 'fact finding mission'. He announced that a new group would be set up to look at the benefits of legalising cannabis in the UK,

Uh huh. All this because somebody at the Daily Mail doesn't like London Mayor Sadiq Khan. They're going to use this hot-button issue to make him look bad.

Now, I must say that I don't like London Mayor Sadiq Khan either. He's a socialist. He's looking at cannabis in hopes of getting himself a nice taxation cash-cow to milk. Extract some more shillings from the pockets of Britons and also profit from the brand-new companies and production facilities that will spring up. Odd that a socialist would be excited about starting a new industry, but once you realize it will be entirely encompassed and controlled by the government from seed to escaping smoke, it makes sense. It also represents a completely new bureaucracy, something socialists love.

Now, the truth of the matter is that we heard all these "blood in the streets!!!" scare stories in Canada, right up until Legalization Day, October 17th 2018. On the 19th and carrying forward to today, you don't see the word cannabis in the news at all. You do see it in the business pages as company after company goes under or gets bought out, but otherwise no.

Net effect of legalizing the Demon Weed in Canada? Nothing. Net effect of legalizing weed in California? Despite all the "experts" and scary stories, the net result is... nothing. The net effect of legalizing weed in Britain will be nothing as well. The Dutch stopped prosecuting weed offences in 1976 and nothing has happened for 40 years. It'll come and go, and no one will notice or care a damn.

What about London Mayor Sadiq Khan? Well, he's telling everyone that legalizing weed will be a boon to society, because of the health benefits of weed and all the lovely taxes they will get from the recreational side. Also lies. The fact is, from the Canadian experience, that there won't be much tax income from the recreational side because getting stoned on the weekend is not that much fun. The huge demand that all the boffins and factotums predicted just isn't there. The health benefits have been quite nice, mostly for old ladies and gentlemen who suffer from arthritis and so forth. Medical cannabis is mostly consumed by the over-50 set for aches and pains. Not really "boon to society" level stuff.

Who's the bigger liar? It doesn't matter. They're both lying, it doesn't make much sense for me to pick a side. For my money the biggest liars of all were the stupid sons of bitches who made cannabis illegal in the 1930s. That was some world class bullshit, piled high and deep.

But, do you notice a pattern, dear reader? None of this is actually about cannabis. All the bullshit is politics. Cannabis, the actual thing itself, is no big deal.

Media bubble is real.

A new study today reveals that yes, the US national media lives in their own special cone of silence, devoid of input from outside itself. Journalists think they are fair, balanced and generally doing a great job.

As we know, no one else thinks that.

To say there's a disconnect between many journalists and the public they serve is a gross understatement, according to a new in-depth survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. 

Per Pew, 65 percent of the nearly 12,000 journalists surveyed say the media do a solid job of "covering the most important stories of the day" and reporting news accurately. But a solid majority of the American public at large has the opposite view, with just 35 percent feeling the same way. That's a 30-point perception gap. 

When asked if journalists perform well when "serving as a watchdog over elected leaders," 52 percent of journalists agreed. But the number dropped precipitously again when the general public was asked, with less than 3 in 10 agreeing with the assessment. 

When asked if journalists manage and correct misinformation consistently, 43 percent of those in the industry said yes, while just 25 percent of the general public agreed. 

Quite apart from anything else, this is a catastrophe for the media in general. They literally have no idea who their audience is or what those people need or want. So, big brains, why is  this happening?

So why the disconnect? Perhaps it's like the old saying about the key to good real estate: Location, location location. Most of the national media are located in two places: New York City and Washington, D.C. 

In the 2020 election, just 9 percent of Manhattan voters voted for Donald Trump. In D.C., the Trump support was just 5.4 percent, underscoring that those who live in or near these cities exist in overwhelmingly liberal silos. It's only human nature that a journalist's perception of issues will generally conform to the places and people with whom he works and lives.

Longtime newsman Bob Schieffer dove into this subject a few years back, explaining just how insulated journalists have become.

"In 2004, one reporter in eight lived in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles," Schieffer notes in his must-read book "Overload: Finding the Truth in Today's Deluge of News." "That number is now down to one-in-five who live in those three places."

The article goes on to talk about the death of local newspapers and television, leaving people stuck with the NY/DC/LA news drip. Which leads to local corruption of course, because nobody but a paid journalist would be interested in wading through the megatons of bullshit in local politics to find the guys with the sticky fingers, stealing wholesale from the public purse.

Essentially the cannibalization and centralization of the national media in the USA is complete. All of them that matter work out of New York and Los Angeles, they keep a dreary outpost in Washington DC so they can report on the eye-catching antics of the President and the big cheeses of Congress and the Senate. That's about it.

Now, in Canada this dynamic has been going since roughly the 1980s to my eye. If it didn't happen in Toronto or Ottawa, it pretty much didn't happen. Outside chance to hear about it from Vancouver, Montreal, maaaaybe Calgary/Edmonton/Winnipeg. (To the Canadian media those are all one city, by the way. They think of it the same as Toronto/Mississauga/Oakville. Despite the thousand mile distances between them. To the media, Saskatchewan does not exist.) The "national" newspapers are both 100% based in Toronto, and report basically on Toronto.

This concentration has become so pronounced that the Federal government was able to essentially -buy- the Canadian media for $600 million bucks a couple of years ago. They didn't call it that of course, this was a "subsidy" to get "select media companies" through "tough economic times." But, since 2019 it has been pretty tough to find inconvenient coverage of the Liberal Party of Canada. Easy to find it in the European media though, they've been calling the Shiny Pony a dictator.

The bad part of this media bubble is that stuff like the Uvalde, Texas shooting situation occurs. I use this as an example of really quite amazing incompetence in local government. Their incompetence started with the police department letting 21 people die (and the more comes out about this atrocity the more we know that they fucking well let it happen) but the freight train of Fail keeps on going, as the middle management minions hurry and scurry to cover up their misdeeds, mistakes and outright sabotage by all pointing fingers at each other as hard as they can.

 

The people of Uvalde Texas showed up armed and dangerous to the event, and in one case went in and rescued their kids themselves when the cops wouldn't do it. So I very much think that those people did not vote for this shit. It all happened behind closed doors and in smoke-filled rooms with ideologues and corrupt assholes horse trading among themselves.

In Canada the best example of no media oversight is windmills. They're everywhere. They are the most visible taxpayer fleecing scam in this country, and nobody in the media will ever talk about it.

The good part is that this monoculture is self-correcting. As Netflix just found out, being the biggest guy on the top of the hill just means you have the most to lose. Netflix is the biggest in streaming, and they are bleeding customers this year in a huge way. This is happening, again, because all the people who work for Netflix live in New York City and Los Angeles. All the people who make content for Netflix live in NY and LA. All the people who buy foreign content for Netflix live in NY and LA. They are in the bubble. The AUDIENCE, the people who actually pay for all this, do not all live in NY/LA. They do not share cultural values with NY/LA. And therefore they are quitting Netflix. Because what rational human pays for a streaming service where there is nothing that they want to watch?

Thus the good part, if you can call it that, is that the NY/LA Axis of Media can and will go out of business if they keep ignoring their audience. Netflix did an emergency U-turn in May by firing a bunch of Wokester employees, but given their inventory is All-Woke-All-The-Time they are going to have to scramble for content their audience likes. I doubt they can do it.

This is very much the case in Canada as well. Without that federal "subsidy," most media in Canada would be going out of business right now.

Something foreigners would not necessarily appreciate or know about Canadians is that we all hate Toronto. You ask any random person in Canada on any street corner outside the 416 area code how they feel about Toronto, you will hear some bad words. Fuck Toronto. Toronto sucks. Toronto steals all our money. You'd have to be crazy to live in Toronto. Etc.

Canadians do not want to hear about Toronto. They will not pay for media content and news that talks about Toronto. Where is ALL the frigging media in Canada? Toronto. Therefore they are doomed to bankruptcy. Government can prop them up for a while, but eventually the Toronto-centric Liberal Party of Canada will be forced out of office by the rest of the country.

Update: Here's a perfect example of the Canadian media being perfectly, completely absent on a hot topic.

Podcaster Joe Rogan slammed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his recent comments that Canadians do not have the right to own a firearm for self-defense. 

On last Tuesday's episode of 'The Joe Rogan Experience,' Rogan played a clip of Trudeau's appearance on the podcast 'Pod Save the World,' during an interview with his guest and gun rights activist Colion Noir. 

'He said you don't have the right in Canada to own a gun to protect your life. It is one of the most wild things I've ever seen anybody say, because first of all, I don't believe it's true,' Rogan said on his show. 'I don't believe he is correct in terms of what — what do they have up there? They don't have a constitution. It's not the same, whatever it is.'

In the podcast clip that aired on June 8, Trudeau said Canadians were only able to obtain firearms for hunting and sports shooting, and that people in his country who want a gun for self-protection do not have that right.

The Prime Minister of Canada came right out and said that Canadians do NOT have the right to own a firearm for self defense. Where do we hear about it? From Joe Rogan, an American, and the article is in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper.

What did we hear about it in Canada? A quick DuckDuckGo search reveals that ZERO Canadian media outlets carried that tidbit. We heard nothing from them. Crickets. Coincidence? I think not.

Moores Law at work.

 Randomly, from Slashdot today, a story about running Doom on a chip out of an LED lightbulb.

The system runs a downsized version of Doom that requires less RAM. The chip from the Ikea lamp has enough processing power to play the game at 35 frames per second over a cheap 160-by-128-pixel display.

 

 

Remember when Doom was used as a benchmark so you could brag how awesome your PC was? Now it can run on part of a lightbulb that costs $15 at Ikea.

Kinda makes me wonder what else an enterprising lad could fit in a cheap lightbulb. Microphone? Camera? Internet connection via Ethernet over powerline?

Why do Greenies always lie about solar power?

Today's Greenie Lie comes to us from Slashdot, where a  large number of people who ought to know better are having a rapture about solar power in Australia.

Dr. Saul Griffith, the author of "Electrify" and the founder and chief scientist of Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia and Otherlab, writes in a column: I recently moved back here to my home country partly because I believe Australians can show the world how much money households can save through simple climate solutions like rooftop solar. How is it that Australia, a country that historically has been a coal-burning climate pariah, is leading the world on solar? The four-bedroom house we recently bought provides a hint: It came with two rooftop solar systems of 11 kilowatts of combined capacity and a battery with 16 kilowatt-hours of storage. This system should produce more than enough to power my family's home, one electric car and both of our electric bikes with some left over to send back to the grid. Solar is now so prevalent in Australia that over a quarter of households here have rooftop panels, compared with roughly 2.5 percent of American households.

Oh? How interesting. Say on, Dr. Griffith.

Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution to high energy costs? The failures are mostly regulatory: local building codes and zoning laws, state rules that govern the grid connection and liability issues. Permitting can take as little as a day in Australia and is done over the web; in the United States permitting and connecting to the grid can take as long as six months. Many customers just give up. America also generally requires a metal conduit around the wiring; in Australia, the connections can be less expensive soft cables, similar to extension cords.

Well, no. Not really.  That business about the "less expensive soft cables similar to extension cords" thing really brings it home. In the USA and Canada, you can't have a multi-kilowatt solar system on a roof without conduit for the wiring. The reason is simple: snow. Also rain, hail, lighting, birds, mice, raccoons, all sorts of things which will make the insulation fail and cause a fire.

I'm not talking about a little puff of smoke here, this is a burn-your-house-down sort of fire. Little known fact, solar panels do not have an "off" switch. If light is hitting them, they are making power. You short them out, they just keep going. 11 kilowatts is going to make for a hell of a fire. I don't want that on my roof in Canada unless the wiring is running through a hefty conduit. So yes, putting that stuff up there is going to cost you and batteries are expensive.

The grid connection is the real issue. The cost of the system is too high to pay out if you can't sell power to the grid. Is there a way to connect millions of small solar generators in a grid that maintains an even voltage and amperage with low line-noise?

Here in Ontario, 15 years ago or so the McGuinty Liberal government offered to pay ~$0.50 per kilowatt hour for solar generated electricity. Lots of farmers and people with big roofs jumped at that and hurried to install solar panels. This was at the same time that the government was busy erecting huge windmills all over Southern Ontario. (I can see one of the damn things from my kitchen window, idle about half the time.) They also de-commissioned and demolished the Nanticoke coal-fired generation station on Lake Erie. (You never saw government contractors move so fast in your life.)

Well, there was a problem with all that. The problem is that the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow all the time. You have night, you have clouds, and you have calm days. Solar power supplies fluctuate from zero to max output every morning and night. They have an output drop with every cloud. Windmills are the same. Lots of power and then very little, unpredictably, all the time.

Electric power grids don't work like that. There is a very smooth and constant power supply from generation stations, and there is a similarly smooth and constant load from all the houses and businesses connected to it. The load increases and decreases in a predictable way. This can be summarized in one notion: no sudden movements.

Wind and solar are nothing but sudden movements. In principle, you can't just attach a solar generator to the power grid. It will melt the power lines every morning, because sunrise dumped 11 kilowatts-per-household into the already fully-supplied grid. Wires can only take so much electricity before they get hot. If they get hot enough they melt. That's how welding works.

Well, how did the McGuinty Liberals (and the sexy librarian Wynne Liberals) solve this problem? The solution was ingenius, my friends. They just didn't connect the windmills and solar panels to the grid. Ontario Hydro had a "permitting process" which did not begin until you already bought and installed your solar panels. Basically they didn't tell you if you could be connected to the grid or not until after you spent $100k on a system. Then the permit process worked away until after the provincial election, and they told you no. Lots of farmers got screwed. Big time.

The big, giant windmills stood and turned for years before any of them were hooked up. Even then, most of the power was sold to the Americans at a huge loss. Nine billion bucks as of 2014 and still counting They could save a fortune by unplugging those windmills and selling them for scrap.

Did the Ontario Liberal Party know this? Yes, they absolutely did. Every power engineer at Ontario Hydro told them exactly what was going to happen. It wasn't going to work. They did it anyway. For votes and money, one supposes. The long term results so far  are A) manufacturing businesses have fled Ontario, B) we have the most expensive electric power in North America, C) lots of hooked-up Friends of the McGuinty Regime made absurd, obscene amounts of money on this scam and D) the Ontario Liberal Party is no longer a party with standing in the provincial parliament. They have seven (7) seats. Too bad we couldn't have turfed them -before- they fucked over the grid, eh?

And that's the real, actual reason why there are no solar panels on houses in the USA and Canada. They don't pay. Simple as that.

If you live on an island far from electric grid power, then they're feasible. For grid connected houses? Nope. Well, not unless your local grid is so unstable that you have blackouts all the time. Then it might be worth it to add a diesel or propane generator, because it will most definitely be cheaper/easier/better than screwing around with solar panels and batteries.

Given that, why do people like Dr. Saul Griffith keep on lying about it? Probably money, would be my guess. Or possibly they're just stupid. Greenies generally are, in my experience. The type of people who think if you just wish hard enough your wish will come true, and Santa will bring you a pony.

Wish harder, Dr. Griffith.