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Folks: With the start of the term of Trmp, the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Distrust) machines have been running full bore. I’d like to urge people to calm down, and encourage people to get past the hyperbole, and to learn the facts of what is actually being done. It is simultaneously not as bad as is being made out to be, and is worse than you might think. As with everything Trmp, the noise and the swirl of what he does often sucks the oxygen out of the room, and serves to hide even more nefarious and significant items.

So, let’s take a deep breath, and go through some recent items and see what is really happening. This is a distillation of a number of recent posts on FB; I’m doing it as a blog simply because I can’t stand the artificial character limits of Bksy, X, and similar services. It also collects some thoughts that have been swirling around my head.

First, let’s look at some of the hyperbole that’s swirling in the ether:

• Male and Female. Regarding the EO about the government only recognizing Male and Female (and the fact that they wrote the EO wrong, referring to conception): Remember that a number of states once tried to legislate π to be 3. That didn’t work: You can’t legislate nature. Be authentically you, and do your best to ignore the government friction. It will eventually pass, and you are strong enough to outlast it. Always remember that Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice, doggie” until you can find a big enough stick. They may think they have won, but nature will always win out.
• What Do You Mean I’m Following Trmp? There’s a big furor on FB about people who suddenly discover they are following Trmp, and believe it is some form of Zuck-Conspiracy. It isn’t. It is what happens during the transfer of an administration. The old administration’s accounts are archived, new accounts are created for the new administration (POTUS, FLOTUS, VPOTUS, WH, etc.), and most importantly, the followers and friends of the old administration’s accounts are copied to the new accounts as a starting point. That’s what happened. You likely followed Biden’s POTUS account, and that transferred over. Simply unfollow, and block if you wish. BTW: If you are worried: Go to your profile. Click on Friends. Then click on Following. Review the list of who you are following, and prune appropriately.
• Birthright Citizenship. This is an example of the excess I’ve seen on MSNBC, and here on ‘da webs: Trmp is trying to overturn the 14th Amendment. Here I urge folks to read things more carefully. The 14th says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trmp is trying to reinterpret the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, which has normally been held to apply children of ambassadors and such, in a very different way. He’s trying to say it applies to children of undocumented folks, or folks here on tourist or short-term visas where the other parent isn’t a citizen. It also wasn’t effective immediately. That likely won’t fly with the courts, and remember that I said the courts are going to be our most effective avenue of attack. But what he is doing is more nefarious, and is not attempting to ignore the amendment completely.
• Prescription Drug Prices. There are posts going around claiming the Trmp’s EO rescinding Biden’s EO on Prescription Drug Prices undoes the cheap insulin and medicare drug out of pocket caps. That’s not true. Those were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and EO’s cannot override laws. Read this Reddit chain of discussion. It notes that the primary impact is to halt development of cost-reduction models to reduce drug costs. Without the implementation of new models focused on reducing costs, Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries might continue to face high out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs, possibly affecting access to certain medications. But it doesn’t change the law. Snopes goes into this in more detail.

And while everyone is up in arms about the above (and don’t forget all of his attacks on immigration, which were expected), a number of significant things have been below the RADAR, but are very significant:

• Artificial Intelligence. One of Trmp’s first EOs rescinded a bunch of Biden’s EOs — one of which was the EO that put guardrails on the use of AI. The next day, he announced a new AI initiative, which his buddy Musk is pissed about. This may be one of the most dangerous under-the-radar things, as AI can be really misused. Biden’s order required developers of AI systems that pose risks to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety to share the results of safety tests with the U.S. government, in line with the Defense Production Act, before they were released to the public. The order also directed agencies to set standards for that testing and address related chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks. Biden’s order came as U.S. lawmakers have failed to pass legislation setting guardrails for AI development.
• Cybersecurity. Not only did Trmp pardon the founder of Silk Road, a drug and cybercrime locus, but he cleaned out the DHS Cyber Review Board. This will delay an ongoing CSRB investigation into the Salt Typhoon hacks, which involved a wide-ranging Chinese infiltration into a number of telecom providers in the U.S. and around the world. Trmp is also effectively killing the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which is related to privacy issues.
• Water in California. Trmp is also overhauling water rules in California. He issued a memo that memo calls on the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior to develop a new plan within 90 days “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” Trump apparently is asking his agencies to override the latest version of the water delivery rules, years in the making, that the Biden administration, with the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, announced in December. Trmp thinks this would have helped in LA’s fires, even though the local reservoirs were already at capacity.

Are there things to be worried about, and that are perhaps worth hyperbole? Sure. There’s the fact that Trmp stylizes himself as a King and wants the trappings and the power. The courts will help fight back on that. There are his moves to end DEI, and even more so, to set aside anything in the government that ensures there will be no discrimination (including EOs that go back to Lyndon Johnson). If we had progressed enough that those initiatives weren’t necessary, that would be one thing. But with the rise of Whte Nationalist groups, emboldened by the pardons, expressing a desire for retribution and planning to bring back their groups, there is reason for fear. There are the broader impacts his moves will have beyond the government, such as restrictions he will place on government contractors. There is the clear discrimination that his administration will bring to the marginalized members of society.

Trmp’s MO is to distract us with the meaningless outrage, preventing us from organizing and pushing back in the areas where it really matters. PAY ATTENTION. Remember that we are the fact checkers. We should be checking everything, even the outrage and memes on our side, so that we can focus our outrage, power, and funds where it matters and is most effective. It is up to us to keep our focus on the fight for the next two years, when we can build the case that we must retake Congress to check Trmp.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as Calm Down! It's Worse Than You Think! by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

I haven’t done a “news chum” post in ages, but this seems strangely appropriate to do here, on my blog, as opposed to Facebook. In recent years, I’ve moved much of my comments on news and stuff over to Facebook. Today’s chum is about Facebook, and it seemed just to, well, meta, to comment about it directly on Facebook. The universe might implode, or something like that.

The news today is that Meta is getting rid of fact checking. According to the CNN article, they are “replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X”. They are doing this to supposedly address the perception of censorship (never mind that as a private organization, that term really doesn’t apply), and the feeling from the right that fact checking is used more to suppress posts from the right than from the left. [Of course, the flaw in that argument is that non-factually posts are equally distributed across the political spectrum, and that tends not to be the case: in other words, the far right has posts fact-checked more because they are posting more posts that are loose with the facts.]

I’m sure that, in response to this, folks are going to be kermit-hand-waving (think of that GIF) and stating they are going to flee FB. But are the other services better in this? I searched to see what Bluesky is doing, and they are doing the community notes as well. In general, Bluesky’s moderation seems to be community based and report based, and you choose the moderation that you want as opposed to a blanket enforcement of a policy. Is that better? Hard to say. It just looks like the appeal of services like Bluesky and Mastodon is that they aren’t owned by folks that are sucking up to Trump, as opposed to something specific in the service. But the same “better ownership” model would also apply to the post-Livejournal services such as Dreamwidth — and Dreamwidth has the advantage of being able to limit audiences and writing longer-form pieces.

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of X, Threads, or Mastodon. I’m not into the short-form posts that Twitter encouraged, and it also seems like everything is publicly shouted into the wind, hoping to find an audience (which hash-tags help with, but those aren’t working as well these days thanks to idiotic overuse). More folks I know moved over to Bluesky, but what I see there is mostly political articles and other article sharing. There’s much less sharing of what is happing with the person. The things that you might talk about between friends — what we used to have on the blogging services — is still primarily on Facebook. That’s also where the mass of people still are.

So this is a long form way of saying: Despite its flaws, the personal stuff is likely staying on Facebook, unless there is a mass exodus of my friends moving that stuff elsewhere. I’m not seeing it on Bluesky. I might return to more news chum posts, and then sharing blog posts across multiple services, as a way of finding out where those communities have moved to.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as News Chum: Just the Facts, Maybe by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

Words, words, words!
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through
First from him, now from you
Is that all you blighters can do?
(“Show Me” from My Fair Lady, M/L: Lerner and Loewe)

Words, words, words (and their underlying concepts): we use them everyday, but as they say in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Here are some articles that have passed through my various RSS feeds and sources of late that relate to words/concepts, and their use/misuse:

1. Words You May Be Using Wrong. This is an interesting summary of a scientific paper that explores 50 terms that people regularly confuse and use wrong. For example, there is a significant difference between asocial and antisocial, and most people use the latter when they mean the former. Envy and jealousy are similarly confused. Race and ethnicity. Serial killers vs mass murderers. Quite an interesting read.
2. Lost Words That Deserve a Comeback. Here’s another interesting word list: 30 Lost English Words that Deserve a Comeback. We had a good example of such a word in the last few days: dotard (meaning “an old person, especially one who has become weak or senile”). I’m not sure that’s the word I would have used.  Sillytonian seems better to me (A silly or gullible person, esp. one considered as belonging to a notional sect of such people). In any case, it is worth reading the list.
3. Open and Closed Minded. Speaking of Sillytonian people, one of the major complaints about that group is that they are so closed minded (but they would say the same about us). But what does it mean to be open or closed mined. Here’s an exploration of 7 significant ways you can tell open from closed minded. For example, closed-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged. They are typically frustrated that they can’t get the other person to agree with them instead of curious as to why the other person disagrees. Where are you on that spectrum?
4. Infinities of Infinities. Infinity is a concept that has fascinated me since high school. The math surrounding the concept is so weird: ∞ + ∞, for example, equals ∞. The infinity of all even numbers is the same as the infinity of all numbers. However, for the longest time, we have believed that the infinity of all rational numbers (that is, those that can be represented by a fraction of two integers) was actually smaller than the infinity of all numbers including transcendental numbers (i.e., the real numbers like π that can’t be represented by a fraction). It now appears that we were wrong, and all infinities are equal. I expect this is something we’ll keep seeing come back, because it is in someways counter-intuitive, like the ever-present Monty Hall Problem.

Words, words, words!
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through
First from him, now from you
Is that all you blighters can do?

P.S.: If you like words, here’s a newly discovered Kurt Vonnegut short story.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve accumulated a number of news stories that tell “the story behind the story”. I hope you find them as fascinating as I have:

• The Story Behind… Damaged Voices. An interesting article from the Guardian explores why so many singing stars have been losing their voices. The answer, on the surface, is that they have damaged their vocal cords. The solution is microsurgery and vocal rest while things heal, and they hope that their voices return to normal. But is that the cause? According to the article: “The rise in vocal injuries is linked to a change in what we consider good singing. Across all genres, it has become normal to believe that louder is better. (One reason that Adele is such a big star is because her voice is so big.) As a result, singers are pushing their cords like never before, which leads to vocal breakdown.” Why didn’t this happen earlier? Artists were taught to sing differently. Two artists quoted in the article, Brilla and Paglin, have been saying this for years. “You cannot solve the problem by simply relieving the symptom,” Brilla said. “It’s a motor problem. The singer has to understand it’s the way you’re running your engine” – the techniques they’re using to sing. “If you don’t fix the engine, it’s going to happen again.”
• The Story Behind… The Brooklyn Dodgers Moving to LA. Los Angeles celebrates some of its sports teams such as the Lakers and the Dodgers. But neither started in LA. An article from the NY Daily News explores the Dodgers move to Los Angeles. The person to blame: Robert Moses, who designed much of New York’s highways, who didn’t want the new ballpark proposed by the boys in blue.
• The Story Behind… Jewish Codebreakers. Many folks — especially cryptographers — are familiar with the story of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park (told in the recent movie “The Imitation Game”). But Turning wasn’t alone, and much of the hard work at Bletchley breaking the code was performed by a cadre of Jewish cryptographers. Here is their story. It is written by a former director of GCHQ, who notes: “Their role in codebreaking and in our “signals intelligence” mission was out of all proportion to the size of the Jewish community in Britain at the time. In turn, Bletchley’s contribution to winning and shortening the course of the war and therefore bringing to an end the Holocaust in Europe is clear. Less well known is the role of some of these staff in establishing and building the new state of Israel. This is a fitting time in which to remember and to celebrate their story, and to remind ourselves of the enduring values and unbroken line which links these great individuals and our work today.”
• The Story Behind… Civil War Statues. Most of us (OK, well a few folks) believe that the civil war statues in the news today were erected to commemorate the civil war, and were put up right after the war. That’s not as true as you think. The reality is that the civil war statues were mass-manufactured, often with generic soldiers, erected half a century after the war (in the first two decades of the 1900s) when organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were looking to reframe and glorify the Confederate cause, and in many states, the descendants of slaves had been stripped of the right to vote, which impeded their ability to effectively voice opposition.
• The Story Behind… Hurricane Reporters. This really interesting article is a collection of tips for reporters reporting from inside or near a hurricane. My favorite? “Don’t stand in standing water. Let the other idiots get electrocuted — we don’t need them anyway. You, we can’t replace because we’re in a hiring freeze. Also, if you die, we need to fill out a lot of messy paperwork.”
• The Story Behind… Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse. This is a really interesting article that explores common behaviors in those who have experienced emotional abuse as a child.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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The other day, I saw an article about the potential renaming of a “Jefferson Davis Highway” to something that didn’t celebrate the President of the Confederacy. It got me thinking about the cost of renaming things, and created the urge in me to explore it with a post:

• Removing Statues. What is the cost of removing a statue celebrating a son or daughter of the Confederacy? First and foremost, there is the surface cost of removing the statue and moving it somewhere that places it in historic context. This, in general, is a cost incurred by government, not private organizations. There likely aren’t significant other references to the statue; it is relatively straightforwards.
• Changing a Mascot. The next step up is changing a mascot, such as is common with schools that have a “Southern Rebel” as their mascot. In general, this would involve getting a new costume, perhaps renaming a building and changing a few signs. The impact on tradition is harder to cost.
• Renaming a School or Building. A step up the cost ladder happens when we rename a building. What happens when we rename a public school from “Robert E. Lee Elementary School” to “Sojourner Truth Elementary School”. There is likely the cost of new stationary and new websites, and the cost of resigning the school. There is the association of the old with the new, and how one might deal with old yearbooks and such.
• Renaming a Street. Here we see a significant cost increase. Changing Jefferson Davis Highway to Emancipation Highway impacts much more than a map. There is significant cost to government: street signs must be changed, directional signs on freeways require update. Property mapping databases require update. Similar updates must occur in all mapping services — an impact not to just the government, but many private organizations. Then there are all the businesses on the street that must update their advertising material and stationary, orders, and such. Homes must order new checks and such. This is a significant impact on private citizens, with no recompense from the government. How do we balance that cost against the impact of the name? Can there be a compromise of changing it to a less offensive name (perhaps dropping “Jefferson”)? This is a much harder question.

Then, of course, there is the overreaction renaming, such as ESPN pulling a sportscaster from a game because his name was “Robert Lee”, or similar reactions to the numerous folks named Jeff Davis and such. That is clearly stupid, and an overreaction (deserving of ridicule).

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Over the past few weeks, there have been quite a few articles I’ve uncovered related to California and Los Angeles history:

• Reseda. You’re probably familiar with Reseda as the home to the Karate Kid. Reseda — once known as Marian — is much more, and here’s a brief history.
• West Adams. This is the community where my daughter has been living. It is one I never explored, but sounds fascinating — with remarkable architecture and history.
• The Magic Castle. Here’s a trip inside the Magic Castle — a reclusive (and expensive) place in the Hollywood Hills. I think I’ve been there twice in my life.
• Studio City. Here’s a history of Studio City, one of the first master planned communities. (I’m not sure if Lemeirt Park was earlier)
• San Fernando Valley. Here’s an article on the Lost Architecture of the San Fernando Valley.
• Fort Ord. This is outside of LA, but fits: abandoned Fort Ord near Monterey. Much of this base became CSU Monterey Bay, and I think part went to a UC for research, but much is still just rotting.

Speaking of going away….

• Continental Graphics. Continental Graphics is closing. Yet another great art store bites the dust.
• Eat24. Grubhub is buying Eat24 from Yelp. Too bad. I liked Eat24 when I tried them.
• Surfas. And here’s the reason Surfas is closing: HBO wants a new HQ in Culver City.

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We’ve had the rock and roll, so how about some sex and drugs before the next writeup. Here’s is some news chum I found particularly interesting in these areas:

Sex

Three interesting articles related to the subject of sex:

• Bespoke Porn. Technology changes the porn industry. As free porn has become increasingly available on the Internet through sites like Pornhub, the primary industry in the San Fernando Valley — porn — has been hurt. When people don’t pay, how are actors to earn a living? The answer is a bit of a surprise: Bespoke Porn. What this means is porn specifically made for one individual for their particular tastes. This isn’t always the sex you think. The article notes cases of women fully clothed swatting flies or destroying stamp collections. To each their own; I find this interesting less for the sex aspect and more for the statement it makes about the larger industry.
• Cosplay Capers. The second article I found explores the trend for cosplayers (usually buxom young women) to create patreon pages where followers can pay to see even more risque photos (usually at the edge of R towards the S T U, but not getting as far as X or multiples thereof). I see this on FB: I have one friend that has befriended a bunch of cosplay models and comments on their pages; thus I see them promoting their patreons. It bothers me what such comments telegraph to others, but that’s neither here nor there. As for the evolution of cosplay, as long as this is the player’s choice I guess it is OK, but I can also see how such images play to the troublesome double standards we see in society.
• Sex on Stage. Here’s a fascinating article on intimacy directors: that is, those individuals whose job it is to choreography intimacy onstage to make it believable, and yet not cross actors’ personal boundaries.

Drugs

Here are two articles related to … well, not quite drugs, but something that acts like a drug for the current generation: smartphones.

• Smartphones and the iGen. As I wrote in my last post, we’re dealing with a teen who constantly has her face in her phone: snapchat, youtube, constant selfies. We don’t think it is healthy, and this article gives some facts and statistics to confirm it. It leads to significant sleep deprevation and depression, and serves to isolate the generation from personal contact and interactions with friends (not in all cases, but as a general statistical sample). It really is an interesting read.  Here’s an example of such a statistic: “All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.”
• Sinister Screens. Here’s a shorter article that addresses the same subject, and again an interesting quote: Brain-imaging studies have shown that the dopamine released when users are getting their technology fix is akin to what is seen in other forms of addiction — one of the reasons Peter Whybrow, director of UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, has referred to digital technology as “electronic cocaine.”

Bringing It All Together

Now, think about these articles in the large. Are we creating a generation that finds intimacy online through individualized porn and patreon girls? Is this an unanticipated side effect of the growth of the Internet? What does that say about society as a whole?

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Continuing to clear out some articles, here’s some travel and transit related articles:

• Canceling Hotel Reservations. I wrote earlier about how it is getting harder to not pre-pay for hotels. Now comes news about how Hilton and Marriott are making it harder to cancel reservations without penalty. Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Marriott International will now penalize people who cancel reservations within 48 hours of the planned stay, up from 24 hours. In most cases, the penalty is the price of one night’s room rental.
• Bigger Than a Breadbox. The TSA has a present for you: You now get to separately screen all electronics bigger than a phone. More trays you get to balance; more chance for stuff to disappear.
• RealID and California. There used to be a worry as to whether California Drivers Licenses would comply with RealID and thus be good for travel. Good news: You can opt for a RealID compliant license in January 2018. The bad news is that you have to brave the DMV in person to do it.
• Riding the River. A graphic designer has envisioned America’s rivers as a subway system.
• Reading Reflectors. We’ve all seen the colored reflectors in the roads. Here’s how to decode them.
• Refilling TAP Cards. LA County has made more places you can get TAP cards: any county library. That’s a plus. On the other hand, Tap2Go is still a pain. We lost two TAP cards, and went there to cancel them. You could replace them for a $5 fee (more than the cards were worth, on average), but there was no option to transfer the balance to an existing TAP card on the account. Boo.

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Continuing the clearing of some themed groups, here are some interesting histories that I’ve seen come across my feeds of late:

• LA Theatre. Here’s a complete history of LA Theatre while standing on one foot.  OK, well, it’s not complete (there’s no mention of the LA Civic Light Opera, for example, or the other major large theatres that are no more, like the Huntington Hartford or the Shubert in Century City), but it is a great summary of the current situation with 99 seat theatres and how we got there.
• Jewish Culinary Tradition. Here’s an article (and a discussion of a cookbook) related to a classic Jewish food tradition: pickling and preservation. A number of the recipes described sound really interesting .
• Left Turns. If you’re like me, you get … annoyed … at the current crop of drivers that wait behind the limit line to make a left turn, and then do a sweeping arc that almost cuts off the car waiting on the cross street to turn (plus, it means one car per light). If you’re like me, you were taught to pull into the middle of the intersection, and then to do an almost 90 degree turn to go from left lane into left lane. Turns out, left turns have changed over time, and I’m old-school.
• Old Subway Cars. When your light rail cars die, where do they go? Often, they are dumped in the ocean. Los Angeles did that with some of the Red and Yellow Cars. New York does it with its subway cars. But this isn’t pollution, and here are the pictures to prove it. Rather, it is creating reefs for oceanlife.
• Tunnels Back In Service. An LADWP tunnel that dates back to 1915 is going back in service.The Los Angeles Daily News reports the tunnel is being refurbished to capture water runoff from the Sierras, which was inundated with snow this winter.The tunnel is part of a larger system, called the Maclay Highline, that runs from “the L.A. Aqueduct Cascades in Sylmar to a group of meadows in Pacoima.” Once restored, the tunnel will carry a significant amount of water—130 acre-feet a day—to the Pacoima Spreading Grounds, where it will filter down into the city aquifer and become drinking water. (One acre-foot can supply two households with water for a year.)

As we’re talking history, here’s another interesting themed historical group, this time focused on air travel:

• Lockheed L-1011. I remember back in the 1990s flying between LAX and IAD, when I could still occasionally get an L-1011. This was a tri-jet from Lockheed, and was nice and spacious with great overhead space. They have long since disappeared, but one recently took to the skies as part of a ferry to a museum. The refurbished plane will be used as part of a STEM teaching experience.
• Boeing 747. The Queen of the Skies has been dethroned by someone skinnier and cheaper. The last few 747s for passenger service are coming off the line; airlines are phasing them out of the fleets. There will be a few more for freight service, but like the DC-10, they will be disappearing. The market can not really support such large loads — and the multiple engines and fuel it takes to ferry them. The Airbus A380 is facing similar problems. Airlines want at most two engines, with the planes packed to the gills.
• Old Airports. Here’s an article on an interesting dilemma: What to do with old municipal airports, such as the one in downtown Detroit? (NYTimes article) Should they be restored for general aviation purposes, and perhaps the occasional commercial craft? Should their land be repurposed for more housing and manufacturing, as was done quite successfully with the old DEN (Denver Stapleton). Repurposing can be temping. Cities such as Detroit will soon run out of wide-open, city-owned spaces that can be offered to companies looking to build manufacturing or other commercial facilities here. A decomissioned airport can provide just the opportunity needed. But others say cities should reinvest in the airports, saying it could be an economic engine as well. (I’ll note similar questions exists for former Air Force bases as well — how is former George AFB working out, San Bernardino?) The article  notes that cities across the nation are reconsidering the value of municipal airports in the era of superjumbo jets and budget cuts. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association estimated the nation loses 50 public-use airports a year. Almost all are general-aviation airports, ones that cater primarily to owners of private planes, and most have operating deficits that the cities must make up for in their budgets. Detroit, for instance, faces a $1.3 million operating loss in the 2017 fiscal year for Coleman Young, which averages just 30 landings a day. The main airport for the region is Detroit Metropolitan, a Delta Air Lines hub about 20 miles west of the city limits.

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Today’s lunchtime news chum post brings you three interesting recent reports related to food and medicine:

• Artificial Sweeteners. Obesity is a growing problem in the world — although the issue should really be not the size, but the health of the individual. For the longest time, people believed that “diet” products were (a) good for you, and (b) helped you either lose or not gain weight. Increasingly, we’re believing and discovering otherwise. Specifically, a recent analysis of data from 37 studies has shown that artificial sweeteners are associated with weight gain and heart problems. After looking at two types of scientific research, the authors conclude that there is no solid evidence that sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose help people manage their weight. And observational data suggest that the people who regularly consume these sweeteners are also more likely to develop future health problems, though those studies can’t say those problems are caused by the sweeteners.  In other words, if you are going to have something sweet, have the real sugar.
• Carbohydrates. If you have tried to lose weight, you know how it is. Those carbs call to you. Here’s an explanation of why it is so hard to cut carbs. The answer is: Insulin. It directly links what we eat to the accumulation of excess fat and that, in turn, is tied to the foods we crave and the hunger we experience. It’s been known since the 1960s that insulin signals fat cells to accumulate fat, while telling the other cells in our body to burn carbohydrates for fuel. By this thinking these carbohydrates are uniquely fattening. As insulin levels after meals are determined largely by the carbohydrates we eat — particularly easily digestible grains and starches, known as high glycemic index carbohydrates, as well as sugars like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — diets based on this approach specifically target these carbohydrates. If we don’t want to stay fat or get fatter, we don’t eat them. This effect of insulin on fat and carbohydrate metabolism offers an explanation for why these same carbohydrates, are typically the foods we crave most; why a little “slip,” as addiction specialists would call it, could so easily lead to a binge.Elevate insulin levels even a little, and the body switches over from burning fat for fuel to burning carbohydrates, by necessity. In other words: The more insulin you release, the more you crave carbs.
• Expiration Dates. We’ve all been taught to throw away stuff that is expired. Food, medicine, grandparents. If it is expired, throw it away. But it turns out, that’s really bad advice and a waste of money. Food dates rarely are true expiration dates: most are “best by” dates and the food remains perfectly fine and nutritional, and for some, the printed date can be overtaken by poor handling. A study recently released shows that medicine expiration dates are also meaningless. A cache of medicine was recently found in a hospital from the late 1960s, and it was tested for efficacy. Of the 14 drugs, 12 were as potent as when they were manufactured.  Both of these findings point to needed better rules on “expiration dates” to avoid waste and early unnecessary disposal; it also should teach you to use your common sense. Look and smell before using. You may discover it is still good.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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