"Driving 100 Miles in an EV Is Now More Expensive Than in an ICE/Deadhead miles and opportunity costs make electric vehicle ownership dramatically more expensive..."

"....than just your average car powered by a gas engine.... Combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles on the road. EV drivers who charge up at home spend about $11.60 per 100 miles. The price difference is more dramatic for those who mainly recharge at stations. Frequent charging station users pay $14.40 per 100 miles.... [given] the deadhead miles to reach stations and the opportunity cost of waiting for vehicles to charge at stations. The difference highlights the lackluster coverage for electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the United States."

Jalopnik reports.

ADDED:

The very bottom of the Electric Vehicle supply chain. pic.twitter.com/SGC8q6DwNT

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 25, 2023

What else can an art exhibit do about climate change other than to be "trite" and "alienating"?

I'm reading this WaPo piece by Kelsey Ables: "‘Coal and Ice’ exhibit won’t help you understand climate change/At the Kennedy Center, giant photos of glaciers and coal miners do little to overcome a trite, alienating narrative about the climate crisis." 

Divided into sections titled “Coal Miners,” “Landscapes” and “Human Consequences,” the installation aims to visualize the connection between coal and ice. It’s an alluring artistic idea: the mines’ grime contrasting with the Arctic’s white. But it’s unlikely that the average viewer will feel immediately invested in either — especially without the help of wall text, which the show strangely avoids...

It’s not that “Coal and Ice” doesn’t have powerful images. It features work by dozens of photographers.... But from the start of the show, there’s a disconnect, a protective layer between you and the kind of stirring, substantive emotion that sticks with you.... It’s difficult to connect....

Why do we ever connect with art? Or is the problem here that we might very well connect with the art — dramatic, beautiful photographs — but that connection doesn't launch us into environmental activism. Oh, God help us, if art had the power to launch us into activism! Isn't the complaint here that the human mind doesn't yield so easily to propaganda?

The show caters to flickering attention spans....

By the way why is contrasting the "mines’ grime... with the Arctic’s white" "an alluring artistic idea"? On other days, in other contexts, the critics would be saying that this white good/dark bad concept belongs in the dustbin labeled Things That Are Too Close to Racism. But that trite, alienating meme has been alienated from this discussion. 

"The early miner has never been truly painted. I protest against the flippant style and eccentric heroic of those writers who have made him a terror..."

"... or who, seizing upon a sporadic case of extreme oddity, some drunken, brawling wretch, have given a caricature to the world as a typical miner. The so-called literature that treats of the golden era is too extravagant in this direction. In all my personal experience in mining camps from 1849 to 1854 there was not a case of bloodshed, robbery, theft, or actual violence. I doubt if a more orderly society was ever known. How could it be otherwise? The pioneers were young, ardent, uncorrupted, most of them well educated and from the best families in the East. The early miner was ambitious, energetic and enterprising. No undertaking was too great to daunt him. The pluck and resources exhibited by him in attempting mighty projects with nothing but his courage and his brawny arms to carry them out were phenomenal. His generosity was profuse and his sympathy active, knowing no distinction of race. His sentiment that justice is sacred was never dulled. His services were at command to settle differences peacefully, or with pistol in hand to right a grievous wrong to a stranger. His capacity for self-government never has been surpassed. Of a glorious epoch, he was of a glorious race."

Wrote E. G. Waite, in the May Century Democratic Times, Jacksonville, May 8, 1891, from a collection of letters at "Life and Death on the Althouse." (The Althouse is a creek in Oregon.)

Why is Sherrod Brown giving us the yellow bird?

It gets your attention and you're likely to laugh and say "what?!"...



... but it's actually very easy to figure it out. My google image search (above) produced an image for "Canary Cast," and clicking, I saw that's the name of Brown's podcast.  That image shows a yellow bird — obviously a canary — in a cage, so even though I want to veer into a joke like "I Know Why the Caged Bird Runs for President," I immediately see that it's the idea of a canary in a coal mine. Brown must see himself as someone who is aware of problems early on, though the canary in a coal mine doesn't really notice and think about problems; its early warning comes in the form of dropping dead, so it doesn't really seem like a good metaphor. But it's Sherrod Brown's metaphor, and he got your attention. From the podcast website:

Brown’s podcast is named Canarycast, a nod to the canary pin Brown wears on his lapel instead of the official Senate pin. An Ohio steelworker gave Brown the pin. He wears it as a reminder of the progress the country has made since the days when the only thing coal miners had to protect them was a canary – and all the work still left to do to ensure American workers are valued.

And... put a bird on it:



ADDED: After writing this post, I read "Sherrod Brown Gives America the Bird/Breaking down Sherrod Brown's canary" (The Bulwark), and it too embeds the "put a bird on it" Portlandia clip. Also:

Sherrod Brown’s logo somehow ignores... all commonly held principles of visual cohesion. He’s attempting to combine a (stale) wordmark with a (vague and enigmatic, but in a bad way) pictorial. The effort toward a logo system is apparent, but it’s the design equivalent of eating the whole wheel of cheese. I’m not even mad. It’s amazing....

 

The canary is not my favorite thing in the world. It’s weak. It’s lifeless. It guarantees that Trump will nickname Brown “Tweety Bird.” Let me amend that: I hate the canary.

But at least it’s an idea. And if you have a visual idea that means something to the product—even if it’s a bad visual idea—then you can use it to anchor a brand.

"Viewers cannot determine the intention of an artist’s work. Art also exposes society’s blind spots. Blackface is only a glimpse of a larger issue."

"The larger issue is the lack of representation of marginalized people and their voices in Phoenix.... At the downtown Phoenix restaurant, my concern that the photograph of men in blackface was a threat to me and my face and voice were ignored. A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, 'Whites Only.' It says people like me are not welcome. The operators of that downtown restaurant can choose to take the photograph down, leave it up or create a title card with an intention statement. No matter their decision, I think the photograph should be taken down — sacrificing one image for the greater good."

Writes Rashaad Thomas — "a husband, father, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, poet and essayist" — in "Phoenix restaurant says this is a photo of coal miners. But I see offensive blackface."

Here's the photo that troubled Thomas so much that he doubled down even after he learned he was mistaken in not understanding that these are human beings whose faces were darkened not by their own deliberate imitation of black people but by terribly hard physical labor:



Thomas is saying the picture made him feel so bad that he wants the restaurant to proactively spare him from his own misperception. He's not taking this opportunity to reflect on his own good fortune — he is able to be a poet and an essayist — in comparison to the grinding work of coal miners. And I can see that he's getting mocked for calling attention to what is, after all, his mistake.

But if it were my restaurant, I wouldn't put up a photograph that was subject to this misperception. I like to think that if I were considering decorating my restaurant wall with this photograph, I would at least notice that some people might think this is white men in blackface and I would pick something else. Certainly, if I'd put it up and a customer confronted me with this misperception I would feel compassionate and very eager to let him know not just what the picture really was but also that I never meant for anyone to imagine that it was blackface. And, really, I would hold myself to a higher standard. Quite aside from blackface, I would ask myself whether my comfortable establishment should trade on the aura of poor coalminers. It's "poverty porn."

From the Wikipedia article, "Poverty porn":

Poverty porn... has been defined as "any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause." It is also a term of criticism applied to films which objectify people in poverty for the sake of entertaining a privileged audience.... Poverty porn is used in media through visually miserable images, in order to trigger some sort of emotion amongst its audience....

Now, of course, I see that the men are smiling and enjoying the alcohol and camaraderie. That's what makes it seem like a good idea for a restaurant photograph. It says, no matter how hard your day, and especially if you've had a very hard day, it's great to spend some time hanging out over drinks.

But messages can be misheard. You could be standing on the street one day, smiling, and find out half the world reads your face as an asshole racist smirk.

"C’mon fellas. You know what this is? You know what this says? You’re going back to work."

Said President Trump to the coal miners who stood around him as he signed an executive order, setting in motion the undoing of some of what President Obama put in place to fight global warming.

"A 1,111 carat gem-quality diamond, second in size only to the Cullinan diamond cut into the British Crown jewels, has been unearthed by Lucara Diamond Corp. in Botswana."

"The Type-IIa stone, just smaller than a tennis ball, is the largest diamond discovery for more than 100 years.... It was recovered by machines at the south lobe of Karowe mine in central Botswana...."

I like the "recovered by machines" part, because I don't have to picture a miner making the discovery of something he cannot keep.

"The hilly, wooded area of southwestern Wisconsin where frac sand mining has exploded goes by the romantic name of the Driftless Area..."

"... so called because it was bypassed by the glaciers that ironed flat the rest of the Midwest during the last Ice Age. 'It is the most beautiful part of the state,' said Kevin Lien, the director of the Trempealeau County Department of Land Management. It is also, thanks to its unique geology, the best source in the nation for diamond-strong kernels of silica sand: smooth, round grains of almost pure quartz that can be found in lower Wisconsin’s sandstone bluffs."

From a New Republic article with the polemical title "Scott Walker's Sand Grab: Wisconsin Wants a Piece of the Fracking Boom, No Matter Who Gets Hurt."

"Shining blue and bright above a subterranean labyrinth of hollow shafts, a warehouse sits upon the abandoned remains of a coal mine that once defined this working-class English town."

"It is as bright as the mines are dark, as vast as the shafts are claustrophobic, as clean as they are filthy."

An Amazon fulfillment associate might have to walk as far as 15 miles in a single shift, endlessly looping back and forth between shelves in a warehouse the size of nine soccer fields. They do this in complete silence, except for the sound of their feet. The atmosphere is so quiet that workers can be fired for even talking to one another. And all the while, cardboard cutouts of happy Amazon workers look on, cartoon speech bubbles frozen above their heads: "This is the best job I ever had!"

"The workers at Rugeley are effectively human robots," [photographer Ben] Roberts says. "And the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages."

Oh, noooo! It's spacious, clean, brightly lit, and — gasp! — quiet.

A hostile environment toward women at Harvard Law School?

Women "just can't do as well" because of "the way the school is structured"?

Is it the way the school is structured or the way women are structured? Consider this analogy:

So I think what I would say to you is probably captured by the miners' canary metaphor — that the women in law school are the canary in the coal mines. So they're more vulnerable when the atmosphere in the coal mines gets toxic. The canary, because of its different respiratory system, is more likely to start gasping for air, and that's a sign that the atmosphere is toxic not just for the canary but for the miners as well. So it's a signal to evacuate.

Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if what's toxic about the structure is the demand that students grapple with analogies? A woman at Harvard is like a canary in the coal mine, a different and much more delicate species than the coal miners, but useful because the miners can see when the canaries keel over and get the hell out before they die too.

That might be sexist, saying women are far more fragile than men, structurally sensitive to the stressful environment. But that's said — watch the video at the link at 1:55 — by female lawprof Lani Guinier, so modify your understanding of the analogy accordingly.

You might have thought something like this: Harvard Law School is very competitive, and women can get in and compete equally with men, and whatever the outcome is is the way it should be. It was a tough contest, but — as Guinier conceded — men are much tougher, so more men did well, and women had their fair shot, and if the top of the class is 20% (rather than 50%) female, there's nothing at all wrong.

But maybe an excessively competitive and stressful environment is bad for everyone, and maybe women do help us all by noticing and complaining. The men, advantaged in the competition, could say keep it like this because we like winning, and it's our love for winning that drives us to win as the game becomes more and more competitive, but our culture, our civilization, is built on combining males and females. Think about the way opponents of same-sex marriage keep going back to the idea that the marriage of a man and a woman is the fundamental building block of society. Though I support same-sex marriage — individuals should be able to choose their life partner in accordance with their sexual orientation — I can see the good that flows from males and females figuring out how to live together.

I'm just trying to open up a conversation here. I'll come back to this later.

Fighting over posters... it's like something that would happen in a dorm room

But it happened in the Wisconsin legislative assembly.

"This is a sham," cried Brett Hulsey.

I read that aloud and Meade went "Sham! Sham! Sham!" — which is amusing if you know your Wisconsin protest references. (If you don't, look at this and this and this.)

"An envelope full of feces was sent to the office of state Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee."

"The return label read, 'Milwaukee Trade Unions Want The Iron Mine.'"

Union nastiness turns on the Democrats who opposed the big iron mine (assuming the return label reflects to the source of the shit).

Here's some info on the mine. Here's a letter to the editor of a Manitowoc newspaper:

Why do the private-sector unions support the Democrats? Not one Senate Democrat will vote for good-paying, union-related mining jobs in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Senate Democrats are losing some union members.

"Lyle Balistreri... represents more than 15-thousand construction trades workers in southeast Wisconsin, men and women who would have benefited from the mining reform bill."

"For the Senate Democrats to vote against this bill is a sign that they're not with us. They're certainly not job creators, and in fact they're job killers. And I'm sick and tired of the partisan politics in the State of Wisconsin. The working people in the state of are taking a beating. Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats, and this sort of thing has to stop."

ADDED: David Blaska writes:

Real people in economically depressed Northern Wisconsin are paying the price for the Democratic Party’s fealty to government employee unions. Who has declared war on the middle class? Democrats have....

Legislative Democrats defeated the mining bill in order to sabotage the governor’s job-creation efforts. Those Democrats intend to play working men and women off each other: they’ll happily trade the industrial unions, whose numbers have been declining for decades, in exchange for the more numerous and more prosperous teachers unions and AFSCME affiliates.

"For them the whole mountain is a temple..."

"... and the gold and silver below the ground are there for a reason — they contribute to the energy, and it would be best if they just left it alone."

Religion versus mining.

"In truth, the art project is akin to a massive resource extraction project, and under federal law should be treated as one..."

So reads the complaint in a lawsuit brought by a group of University of Denver law students against federal land managers who approved Christo's draping fabric over 6 miles of the Arkansas River.

[I]n classifying an art project as a “recreation activity,” the suit says, the federal analysts framed their assessment in ways that excused the impact of the thousands of bore-holes, rock-bolts and anchors that will have a cumulative effect, the suit says, not unlike industrial mining.

This is a new twist on the old "what is art?" question. These law students are arguing about the art/mining distinction.

Let me add: I love Christo. I used to hate him.

"Working in the Coal Mine."

At Meadhouse this morning, we're talking about the song "Working In The Coal Mine," not because of the abysmal jobs situation these days, but because... well, because there was a little too much milk in my coffee. (This stream of consciousness has nothing to do with the suffering of unemployment and working in coal mines, so please forgive me.)

Meade decided to make me a double-shot, and I — helpful in my usual abstracted way — started playing "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" (by the Swingin' Medallions) — a song about a woman who "loved [her man] so hard" that he woke up with... "the worst hangover [he] ever had."

That got me talking about the frat rock cassette recording that I bought when my kids were very young. It had "Double Shot" along with stuff like "Hang On Sloopy" and "Louie Louie." It was one of a series of tapes that I bought to play in the car after I realized that rock and roll oldies were good children's music. (Well, not "Double Shot.") I first had this realization back in the 1980s when, for some reason — maybe a toddler said "ya ya" — I started singing "Sitting in Ya Ya Waiting for my La La." Baby talk!

"Who sang that?" I ask, playing it on YouTube. Meade says "Sam Cooke." No! It's Lee Dorsey! Do you know any other Lee Dorsey songs? There's only one other that you might remember. It's this. "Working in the Coal Mine." (Not to be confused with this Sam Cooke song, which is, frankly, much better... as a recording. I will not compare the degree of workplace suffering described in the 2 songs.)

But check out these 2 other recordings of "Working in the Coal Mine" — this and this. I can't picture any of those people actually working in a coal mine, but in a pinch, if I had to say, I'd pick The Judds.

Have you had enough coffee this morning? I have.

ADDED: "Get your ya-yas out." Remember when Barack Obama said it? Back in June 2008, when he was thanking his campaign workers for "submerging their egos." The "Ya-yas" remark comes at 10:45. But start here:



Based on that part — before the "ya-yas," I think he didn't expect to win in Iowa. "If I'd lost Iowa, it would have been okay." But: "Because we won, we now have no choice." It seems as though he'd intended to make his mark, then reemerge in 2012 or 2016 as the frontrunner. But he won. It came too soon. Yet he had to plunge forward. It was all a crazy miscalculation. He just didn't expect to be that loved in Iowa.

And now, it's 2011, primary time once again, and our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, Iowa, ya ya ya.

"Vast deposits of rare earth minerals, crucial in making high-tech electronics products, have been found on the floor of the Pacific Ocean..."

"... and can be readily extracted, Japanese scientists said on Monday."

"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo....

He estimated rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion tonnes, compared to global reserves currently confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey of just 110 million tonnes that have been found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States....

China, which accounts for 97 percent of global rare earth supplies, has been tightening trade in the strategic metals, sparking an explosion in prices.  

Great news!

"Those snaps are all you need to know."

"The working man's plight is boiled down to the struggle for money.  Ford uses his gospel training to make this fight seem almost as fight that Jesus himself would join to defeat the forces that make him 'another day older and deeper in debt'.  But because he lacks hope of escape, Ford's message here seems to subscribe to the 'take this job and shove it' school of country music as opposed to the aspirational.  The snaps, though; that's the heartbeat of America there."

#180 on List-a-Beefy's top 200 #1 songs of the last 55 years.

"Rescued Miners’ Secrecy Pact Erodes in Spotlight."

Oh, no. I sense that the recent joy will melt into tragedy. What personal details do these men know about each other, and what antipathy will arise as they tell each other's stories and disagree about what really happened?

“We’re poor — look at the place we live... you live off our stories, so why can’t we make money from this opportunity to feed our children?”

Miners have asked for as little as $40 and upward of $25,000 for interviews....

“We paid $500 for the interview,” Ari Hirayama of Asahi Shimbun of Japan, said upon exiting the house. “And it felt like he was withholding details.”

33 men with 69 days together. That's over 50,000 hours of human drama to be remembered and put into words — words that men who've always been poor can now sell. What a strange market! So there is the betrayal of the secrecy pact being broken, and the competition for money, in which the most talkative and imaginative men will win the most and, perhaps, cause the most pain.

[One] interview also touched on the crying fits some men had, the unsanitary conditions they endured, even the rumors that some had sexual relations with others underground...

We will never hear the end of this. 

33 men, trapped 2300 feet underground, must wait 4 months for rescue.

A mine in Chile. For 17 days, there was no contact with the men. Now, there is communication — such as the note from the miners: "All 33 of us are fine in the shelter." There is hope and jubilation and food and water.

"It will take months to get them out," [said Chilean President Sebastian Pinera]. "They'll come out thin and dirty, but whole and strong."

Mr Pinera also saw images of the miners taken by a camera that was lowered down the borehole....

"Many of them approached the camera and put their faces right up against it, like children, and we could see happiness and hope in their eyes," Mr Pinera said.

It's hard to begin to imagine the emotions of the men and the people above ground who love them. First, the shock of the cave-in, with the uncertainty — both underground and above — about survival. Then the 17-day wait, with hope and suffering changing all the time. Then, the immense joy of contact, the families above ground all learning their men are alive and well and the men knowing their loved ones know they haven't died. All the basics of getting food and water. The comfort of notes back and forth. The window to the outside world that is the camera. What a relief to know that rescue is coming. But the wait is so long.

Think what it must be like to be trapped in a group that size, for that long. What do you think they are doing, with all that time? I assume that, since they were miners, they have mental resources for dealing with the fears of confinement and danger that far exceed ours, so maybe it is a bit presumptuous to try to put ourselves in their place, but let's try. I think I would devote myself, above all, to preserving a calm attitude for everyone. You couldn't have any fighting or craziness.

Then, what would you do about the boredom? You would talk, but perhaps you'd get sick of the men who talk too much, and you can't have talk that is upsetting or arguments about what's okay to talk about and what isn't. There would be much prayer, maybe too much for some people. But there are 33 of you, you'd break into small groups or pairs. Some would be religious, others would play games or tell stories. Some would keep to themselves. Would you make sure that no one was despairing or lonely?

There are some ways in which the terrible limitations would intensify the richness of life. And, upon rescue, the true richness of ordinary life will be brilliantly obvious to them. The love, the light, the air — why do we not see that overwhelming beauty all the time?