Stray Thoughts

* The U.S. does a horrible job of using contraflow (i.e. having major highway have some lanes run in the opposite direction to accommodate the needs of people evacuating) when it is appropriate for things like people evacuating from Hurricane Milton in Florida. It also greatly underuses this tool to manage day to day shifts in the direction of traffic in and out of central cities with commuters. This should be standard operating procedure in both cases and would not be expensive. It could save hundreds of lives a year and get people where they needed to be much faster with existing infrastructure.

* Similarly, the National Guard underinvests in resources for evacuating people from natural disasters and places with civil unrest, despite the fact that this is one of its core missions. Amphibious all terrain buses with light armor sufficient to deal with debris and distant civilian small arms fire, for example, is an asset almost every National Guard could use.

Image from here.

Image from here.

* Search and rescue drones for the National Guard (e.g. small ones like the one in the link that can go into small spaces that may be unsafe) should also receive more funding.

* Self-righting boats are cool. They are mostly used as lifeboats. Being on a cruise ship in the direct path of a Category 5 Hurricane on the other hand, is terrifying.

* There is a $4000 device that prevents people from dying while they are trapped in a flood of grain in grain elevators. It should be much more widely used.

* Poor training and tactics for responding to people with mental health crises or who are suicidal, who don't have firearms, is one of the biggest unnecessary source of deaths caused by police. Colorado Springs police officers provided us with an example of this just after midnight this morning.

* For a lot of reasons, I favor abolishing municipal courts in Colorado. Some abuses in Pueblo illustrate the problem.

* The U.S. economy is extremely healthy. Crime is down dramatically to the lowest levels since 1969. We are not at war for the first time in more than twenty years. The fundamentals couldn't be better. This should not be a close election.

* Denver Ballot Issue 309 is probably a constitutional taking as it would shut down the sole slaughter house in Denver, potentially exposing the City and County of Denver to hundreds of millions of dollars of inverse condemnation liability.

* The U.K. has conceded it is not sovereign over Diego Garcia, while retaining its military base there.

* The U.S. Navy recently rescued some civilian Iranian mariners who were in distress.

the brand-new destroyer received a fresh tasking: deter aggression and protect “the free flow of commerce” in the waters of the Middle East. While there, the crew heard an emergency call. “A distressed mariner is a distressed mariner,” Cmdr. Kevin Dore, the commander of the Inouye, said Friday after his ship and crew tied up at their homeport here. “If an emergency like that happens, it is ‘Get there as fast as you can and do everything you can’ to save what, in this case, was two distressed mariners who happened to be Iranian.” The crew sent search-and-rescue swimmers out in a small boat, rescued the mariners, and gave them medical assistance.

* Quality pre-school is more beneficial to a child when the child's peers in later grades also went to quality pre-schools. When the child's peers in later grades didn't receive the same quality pre-school, the benefits of quality pre-schooling "fade out."

* Wars involving Israel are ongoing a year after October 7, 2023. It is simultaneously fighting in Gaza against Hamas, against the Houthis of Yemen, against Iranian missile strikes, and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. It's military is remarkably effective on all fronts and it is stopping something like 99% of inbound missiles and drones. It is fighting lower key fights against Hamas in the West Bank. Despite the devastation in Gaza, Hamas was still firing missiles at Israel this week.

* Russia has been clamping down on reproductive rights and now bans even talking about why someone might want to not have kids at all. 

* Seriously underwater mortgages are, surprisingly, most common in places that don't have particularly high housing prices.

* This could be true:

* Fewer high school and college students are also working than there were thirty years ago.

* A downtown Denver high rise office building recently sold for 80% less than it was purchased for. Vacancy rates in downtown high rise office buildings are at record highs in most major U.S. cities, mostly due to the rise of remote work that reached a tipping point during the pandemic.