Denver's wildly unrealistic & expensive plan, incentivizing illegal immigration even more than we have, and crushing a rail tanker car like a soda can.
Denver’s new transit plan.
This would be funnier if people in Denver (or those who pay taxes there such as my wife and I) weren't going to be expected to pay for it.
I have to give the devil his due, and that means that I should salute even the insufferable Kyle Clark for calling out the absurdities of Denver's transit plan (linked second below, under the little news video blurb by Mr. Clark).
If you watch Mr. Clark's segment you'll get an overview sense of the numbers involved in the city's plan and how ridiculously out of touch with reality it seems.
As I say above, this would be comical if things weren't such that people were going to be expected to start paying more for it.
Keep doing the same on immigration, keep getting the same results.
I guess that our recent brush with a (mini) flood of immigrants wasn't compelling enough to make some reconsider the incentive structure this state has re. illegal immigration.
In case anyone has forgotten, just weeks ago Denver had a huge problem with a sudden influx of people from the border. Apparently, the problems that this caused across the city were quickly forgotten because a new bill (see the story linked first below and the bill's page below it) is going to make it even more difficult to enforce immigration law in this state.
I can't say that this is the entirety of the cause, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that the incentive structure that some municipalities and our state have set up re. illegal immigration had absolutely nothing to do with our recent problem. How can it not?
The bill has passed its first committee hearing (of course) and is on its way to the House for a vote. If you're concerned about it, your first step now would be to contact your State Rep and tell him or her your concerns.
One last thing. Take a look at the screenshot and the part I underlined. Are we supposed to take quotes like this seriously? I.e. this wasn't said in an ironic tone as a joke? This bill doesn't stop the Feds from enforcing the law, it just makes it more difficult and costly (in the hopes they'll stop).
https://www.kunc.org/news/2023-02-10/lawmakers-push-to-phase-out-local-participation-in-federal-immigration-operations
http://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB23-1100
And lastly, a classic demo writ large …
Last one of the day and you know what that means: something for fun and not related to politics.
It'll also be the last one for a day or so. I'll be away from my computer tomorrow.
I wanted to share a video with you I saw recently (and also shared with my classes). It's linked below. Either be prepared to slog through excessive drone footage or leap ahead in the video: I'll be damned if they didn't pad that thing out with unnecessary footage!
In the video, they hook an empty tanker car up to a vacuum truck and, by sucking out the air, cause the tank to collapse. This one is a record I think. I've seen this done with soda cans, cans that held things like paint thinner, 55 gallon drums, but not yet with a tanker car.
So what is going on here? It's not quite, as the title cards in the video show, "the power of vacuum". It would be more accurate to say "the weight of the atmosphere".
Let's back up and talk pressure a little bit. Pressure is defined as a force per unit area. The air in your car tires, for example, is probably about 32 psi. That means that for every square inch of interior area on your tire, the air inside pushes with a force of 32 pounds.
This pressure is coming from collisions of the air molecules in the tire with the tire wall. Just like you'd be pushed back if I ran into and bounced off you, the wall of the tire feels a push with every tiny little ping of an air molecule. Each little ping may not be a huge amount of force, but there are just so many of them adding together that the tire feels a substantial force.
This is also why your tire pressure goes up when you drive the car and falls (sometimes enough to set off your car's low pressure warning light) when it's cold. Temperature tells you roughly how fast the air molecules move, higher temperatures mean faster molecules, faster molecules mean more energetic pings (and vice versa for cold temps).
Pressure in a tire can make decent sense. After all, you are taking air from the atmosphere, compressing it and releasing that compressed air into the tire. What about the atmosphere, however? How can a free body of air get pressure?
The air pressure you feel as you are out and about in our atmosphere is not due to it being through a compressor, the squeeze this time is due to the weight of the column of air that extends vertically above you: the higher layers of the atmosphere bear on the middle which bear on the air near the ground. That's why the air pressure is higher at sea level than at the top of a mountain. There's simply less air bearing down on you when you're 14000 feet above sea level. At sea level, the pressure is about 14 psi, about half a car tire's pressure.
That leaves a question though. Why don't we feel this pressure normally? Why don't we suffer under this weight? The reason is that it's not apt to change quickly and we are surrounded by it on all sides. I.e. the forces on all sides are in balance and thus there is no change.
Returning to the tanker, let me explain better now what I mean by the implosion happening because of the weight of the atmosphere.
1. Prior to the vacuum being turned on, the air inside and outside the tanker have the same pressure. This pressure is a result of the weight of the air column above the tanker bearing down on the air outside and inside the tanker.
2. This pressure is exerted in all directions equally. That is the forces are all in balance.
3. As the vacuum truck pulls air from inside the tanker car (and provided we don't let more atmosphere in) there will be an imbalance in pressure. The air pressure outside is greater than it is inside.
4. This causes an imbalance of forces where the air outside presses harder. When the imbalance gets stronger than the steel can tolerate, the car gets crushed. It gets crushed by the air on the outside. It's not "pulled in" by the truck.
One last niblet: see the vacuum truck? I'm not 100% on all the details but it's common anymore to let a vacuum truck do your earth moving! Rather than digging out the dirt with shovels or heavy equipment, if the conditions are right, you can drive in and use your heavy-duty vacuum to suck it out.
That's it. I hope your Friday doesn't put too much pressure on you (or suck for that matter).