It’s five full days (about 120 hours) after the Election 2024 Nakba. The folks in California who say that they know how governments should operate have counted 72 percent of their presidential ballots (New York Times):
Let’s compare this to the numbers in Power restoration after Hurricane Milton. Recall that Milton was a Category 3 storm that hit Sarasota, St. Pete, and Tampa, knocking out power to 4 million “customers” (a household of 3 people would be just one customer). I didn’t stay organized to capture a number for how many were still out exactly five days after the hurricane made landfall, but four days afterward roughly 500,000 customers were still out, which means that more than 87 percent had been restored. Six days following landfall, roughly 190,000 customers were out from the original 4 million affected.
So.. Ron DeSantis-led Florida restored power after a Category 3 hurricane at a much faster pace than California has been able to count votes. (Florida also did count votes, but there aren’t any interesting statistics from that process because it took just a few hours.)
Before looking at Florida, let’s check to see what a correct vote would be:
Our ruling elite picked Kamala Harris more than 92 percent of the time.
How about down here in the Swamp? Thanks to the Lockdown Governors of the Northeast and California, who exported their conservative freedom-oriented residents to our peninsula, Florida is no longer a swing state. So it wasn’t surprising that Donald Trump prevailed over Kamala Harris by 56:43 (NYT):
Bigger government tends to favor city-dwellers and, therefore, it was surprising that Miami rejected the Democrat religion 55:44. Maybe it was a mistake for Kamala Harris to tell the residents “If you don’t vote for me then you ain’t Latinx”?
Who in Florida does love bigger government? The folks who work for the state government! The two counties up around Tallahassee voted Democrat 65:34 and 60:39. Orlando and Fort Lauderdale weren’t too far behind. Palm Beach County was evenly balanced with 49.9:49.2 in favor of the correct candidate.
Our fossilized senator Rick Scott, for whose retirement I pray daily (maybe somehow he can retire and Ron DeSantis can appoint himself to the job? Or DeSantis can quit his job and get Jeanette Nuñez to appoint him to fill the vacant Senate seat?), beat his Democrat opponent 56:43. Our Israel-loving Hamas-hating Congressman, Brian Mast, beat his teenage opponent, Thomas Witkop, 62:38. I’m not sure how political parties get these sacrificial lambs to agree to run in hopeless races.
The majority of Floridians (57-ish percent) wanted to turn Florida into a Massachusetts-style paradise in which abortion care and marijuana were available on every street corner. However, the state constitution amendments (3 and 4) that were on the ballot required a 60 percent vote to pass. (Abortion care in Florida would have been available through fetal “viability”, which is about 21 weeks from a medical point of view but somehow there is a legal fiction that viability occurs at 24 weeks. I don’t think that Florida would have permitted abortion care at 37 weeks if one doctor thought it would improve the pregnant person’s mental health, as is legal in Maskachusetts.) Being a redneck had 67 percent support so a “Right to Fish and Hunt” amendment passed. An amendment to change school board elections to partisan failed, garnering an insufficient majority of “yes” votes at 55 percent. (I’m pretty sure that all school board members in Palm Beach County are Democrats, but it is impossible to tell for sure due to the lack of this kind of amendment.)
I haven’t seen any race in Florida that was decided by one vote and, therefore, it is literally false for anyone to say “Your vote counts” or similar. Any given individual could have stayed home to enjoy Xbox games and the outcome would have been the same.
Unlike in our former suburb of Boston, the public school system here doesn’t seem to be offering grief counseling to students.
As I type this (Wednesday at 3:47 pm), California, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, D.C., and Alaska, at least, still hadn’t counted even 90 percent of their presidential votes, something Florida (population 23 million) managed to do within two hours after the polls closed. There are 52 “not yet called” House races, none of them in Florida.
No fewer than 3 out of 130 immediate neighbors have Taylor Swift themes for Halloween decor. Here’s the best one:
And on the other side of the sidewalk:
The nighttime view:
(I hate to brag, but the above photos were taken with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max. Nobody has a better phone than I do and nobody hates to brag more than I do.)
Speaking of night photos, a house with a headless horseperson of unknown gender ID and a dragon (also of unknown gender ID):
A generally scary look:
The grim reaper and three clowns don’t seem to hang together. Can anyone think of a unifying theme? The clowns are animatronic:
Women from an Islamic society?
A neighbor with preschoolers has put an extra stroller to good use:
Try not to schedule your birthday for any time near Halloween… the scene from last weekend:
Go Big or Go Home:
Folks in the adjacent non-HOA Jupiter Heights community are famous for their Christmas displays, but they had a few fun Halloween houses:
I would love to see Jabba the Hutt as the advertising mascot for an Ozempic-style medicine.
The initiative would legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 years old and older. Individuals would be allowed to possess up to three ounces of marijuana (about 85 grams), with up to five grams in the form of concentrate. Existing Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers would be authorized under the initiative to sell marijuana to adults for personal use. The Florida State Legislature could provide by state law for the licensure of entities other than existing Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers to cultivate and sell marijuana products.
Smart and Safe Florida is sponsoring the initiative. The campaign reported $61.28 million in contributions. Trulieve, a marijuana dispensary company that owns medical marijuana dispensaries in Florida, is the main contributor.
One weed shop had tens of millions of dollars of loose change to kick in, hoping to make a 10X return if the amendment passes? If the measure succeeds, cronies of the state government (the current approved dispensaries) will make huge profits partly due to the fact that it will still be illegal for a stoner to grow his/her/zir/their own dope. My comment on X:
That is beautiful logic. Marijuana is wholesome enough to be sold by the Miami Vice-style bale on every street corner, but the person found with a single plant must be imprisoned. Queers for Palestine is actually easier to understand.
I thought that unlimited calling was great because I would save 50 cents here and there on phone calls to friends. It didn’t occur to me that I would be getting 50 spam calls every day once the cost of making a call was cut to $0. Similarly, I was in favor of marijuana legalization in Massachusetts because I wanted tax dollars preserved for government functions other than enforcing marijuana laws. It didn’t occur to me that weed shops and their advertising would be omnipresent, thus changing the day-to-day experience of living in Boston or Cambridge (or looking at billboards on the various highways).
I hope that this fails! Does that make me anti-Weed? No. I would be in favor of a law that
eliminated medical marijuana (so that kids aren’t exposed to the idea that marijuana is healthful, which would have been risible to 1970s stoners)
allowed people to grow their own marijuana if they so desire, so long as the plants are inaccessible to minors
prevented marijuana businesses from advertising; people would have to find them via Google Maps and similar
required communities to establish zoning rules for where marijuana stores could be located (preferably not in strip malls where kids would be likely to go)
made it easy enough to get into the marijuana business that nobody could make tens of millions in profit simply by being a government crony
TD Bank will pay $3 billion to settle charges that it failed to properly monitor money laundering by drug cartels, regulators announced Thursday.
The fine includes a $1.3 billion penalty that will be paid to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a record fine for a bank. TD also intends to pay $1.8 billion to the US Justice Department and plead guilty to resolve the US government’s investigation that the bank violated of the Bank Secrecy Act and allowed money laundering.
The US Department of Justice said in a statement that TD Bank had “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its procedures of monitoring transactions. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news late Wednesday.
In one instance, TD Bank employees collected more than $57,000 worth of gift cards to process more than $470 million in cash deposits from a money laundering network to “ensure employees would continue to process their transactions” and not declare them in required reports, the DoJ said.
Aside from handling drug cartel money, what’s been management’s focus at TD Bank?
On Instagram they want to make sure that “every woman wins”:
On their Diversity and Inclusion web page, veterans are highlighted as a victimhood group in the same cluster as sacred Black female, and LGBTQ2+ (not 2SLGBTQQIA+? The “2” in LGBTQ2+ stands for two-spirt, I think, but somehow the Native American Queers end up last rather than first. White women in the L category displace the Native American victims as with most quota-based programs).
On YouTube, their executives are on a diversity, equity, and inclusion panel:
(They also sponsor a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council in another YouTube video.)
“Considerable structural damage … was observed on brand new, well-built homes and included segments of concrete block walls missing and large sections of roof removed,” the NWS said in a report released Thursday afternoon.
A house in this part of Florida is supposed to be built to handle 170 mph, I think (map). A house is a “Risk Category II” building. If the headline is correct and the tornado was blowing at only 140 mph, why was a house engineered to handle 170 mph damaged? Could it be that a rotating wind is more damaging than a relatively steady wind from one direction? Were the houses not built properly? Human engineers aren’t as smart as they claim to be? Here’s a picture from the Palm Beach Post of the Nature v. Human contest:
Here’s Ron DeSantis on Friday leading a 38-minute press conference (without teleprompter) on the clean-up challenges related to Hurricane Milton:
Governor DeSantis Holds a Press Conference in St. Petersburg Following Hurricane Milton https://t.co/eHiTXaEpBM
It seems as though flgov.com is updated regularly with summaries of challenges and achievements. Example from Oct 11: “In a multi-agency response, FWC [Fish and Wildlife] officers and partner agencies rescued and evacuated approximately 426 people and 45 pets from flood waters in a Clearwater apartment complex. FWC officers used a high-water swamp buggy, UTV, and shallow-draft vessels during the rescue effort.”
Less attention is paid to those who have endured some of the worst Milton-related suffering. I’m talking, of course, about private aircraft owners. It’s very expensive to build a hurricane-proof hangar and, consequently, the typical hangar hasn’t been built hurricane-proof (the latest building code likely requires them to be able to withstand at least a Category 4 hurricane, a lower wind standard than for houses because the theory is that nobody will be inside a hangar during a hurricane). The general aviation hangars at KSRQ and KSPG are apparently badly damaged. Sarasota. which previously had a 4-year waiting list for a hangar:
The St. Pete downtown airport (walking distance to some museums), which previously had a 10-year waiting list:
Florida officialdom doesn’t seem to credit FEMA with savings lives or property. This is consistent with friends in Maskachusetts deploring the Deplorables’ lack of respect and awe for the Great Father in Washington. The righteous of MA, NY, and CA are particularly upset that Republicans have spread misinformation, e.g., that FEMA has handed out about $640 million on sheltering migrants while native-born hurricane victims aren’t getting lavish aid. Prior to Milton, one Democrat mentioned on Facebook that Congress had appropriated $20 billion for Hurricane Helene victims (Congress is currently in recess; the Democrat-run New Republic says “Lawmakers left town last week without passing additional natural disaster funding, and approving additional money may prove tricky when they return.”). Multiple Democrats responded by heaping scorn on Trump supporters for being so easily gulled into believing the Fake News about FEMA spending money on migrants.
Where could the Deplorables have gotten this misinformation? Let’s check fema.gov:
Landfall: October 9, 2024 at 8:30 pm. Supposedly about 4 million customers lost power (source: Ron DeSantis press conference).
Mid-afternoon the next day:
Early evening:
The morning of the second day:
Apparently there was power at the big airport in Tampa because they resumed operations about 36 hours after the hurricane made landfall:
FIRST FLIGHT OUT: We reopened and resumed flight operations this morning at 8 a.m. ❤️ As always, please check with your airline for the latest flight information. ✈️ pic.twitter.com/exAPP6KBfS
(Orlando had reopened a few hours earlier, so they too had power despite being in the middle of the Band of Destruction (TM).)
Afternoon of second day:
About 48 hours after the hurricane hit, the total customers out has declined from 3.4 million to 2 million:
The bad news is that restoration for some Floridians won’t be until 8 days after the hurricane made landfall. Here’s FPL’s estimate:
I’m not sure if people in neighborhoods with underground lines (like ours!) will get power sooner. Currently, 10 percent of FPL’s customers are out versus 17 percent for the state.
I can’t figure out why the customer numbers are so high. I thought that the transmission lines were designed to handle hurricane-force winds (and they were further beefed up after 2019; see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). Maybe there are a lot of neighborhoods with above-ground powerlines for local distribution?
Strong independent female linewomen continued to work through the night, apparently…
2.5 days after landfall, it looks like Naples and Fort Myers are on their way back to normal while half of Tampa is dark. More than half of the Floridians who originally lost power now have it back (thanks once again to the efforts of linewomen who identify as female):
around lunch time…
Three days (72 hours) after landfall:
The pace of restoration seems to slowed down in the dark:
3.5 days after landfall:
Not a great situation in Tampa, with more than one third of customers without power. On the other hand, the total is down below 1 million compared to 4 million at the start.
Four days (96 hours) after landfall and about 500,000 customers are still out. More than 235,000 of them are Tampa Electric customers, which has only 840,000 total customers.
Florida Power and Light now says that they’ll have nearly everyone restored, even in directly hit Sarasota, by Tuesday night. (Also that they’ve thus far restored 90 percent of their affected customers, 1.8 million people who’d lost power at one point.) Speaking of FPL, if you were to watch their X feed you’d learn that electricity restoration is definitely not something that white males do:
Crews are working through severely damaged areas in Manatee County — one of the hardest-hit areas during both #Milton and #Helene — to repair damaged equipment where it is safe to do so. Rest assured, we will not stop until every last customer has power restored. pic.twitter.com/0AZbFeIsv0
We continue to restore power to our customers in Volusia County. We'll keep working around-the-clock to turn the lights back on. pic.twitter.com/eXsDrXOLsj
And as of Tuesday at noon, FPL indeed had all but 38,000 customers back online. Tampa Electric (TECO) continued to be an outlier with 100,000 customers still dark.
As Hurricane Milton “barreled” (the obligatory verb for an object moving at 5-10 mph) into Sarasota, Kamala Harris threatened merchants:
About 12 hours later, Orbitz is showing hotel rooms in Orlando for a stay beginning tonight at $122/nights. If you’re willing to stay at the La Quinta… $72/night. For those who want to be ready for Disney World’s reopening tomorrow, the on-property Swan hotel is $252/night. Perhaps Jussie Smollett reported having been overcharged?
What about a hotel in Miami, which was never forecast to be “barreled into”?
I won’t be staying in a hotel tonight because I need to get back up on a ladder. Like Jeffrey Epstein, these hurricane screens didn’t hang themselves and I fear that they won’t unhang themselves either. (The previous owners of our house invested in impact glass doors and windows, but the front door is an unusual shape and they left the original door in place. The wide Armor Screen covers an outdoor dining area that has a bug screen whose frame is hurricane-proof (supposedly) but whose screen material is sacrificial. My thought on the hurricane screen for that area was that we could use it to store all of our outdoor items in the event of a truly bad storm.)
It was mostly peaceful yesterday here in Jupiter (Palm Beach County). The schoolteachers were enjoying the start of their two-day taxpayer-funded holiday while everyone else worked (health care, retail, expert witness, etc.). There was a bit of rain and the wind picked up around 9 pm. There were a handful of tornadoes in SE Florida caused by Hurricane Milton, but none came into Jupiter itself (one was in Jupiter Farms, to our west, one in western Palm Beach Gardens in Avenir, and a sad one for aviators in Fort Pierce that deposited some airplanes outside the airport fence).
An American faced with hazardous weather who wants to know whether to evacuate his/her/zir/their house or apartment must first do a web search to find a site that maps flood or evacuation zones, typically A through E. Then the citizen, documented immigrant, temporary protected status migrant, or undocumented migrant must scour various state and county web sites to try to figure out what the latest evacuation orders are by city, county, or state. Here’s part of a story from our local newspaper:
There are many ways for the above process to go wrong. Why not a phone app that gets GPS data from the phone hardware and operating system and does all of the above work reliably? The server just needs to have a database of evacuation and flood zones and a canonical up to date list of evacuation orders. Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?
For Floridians during hurricane season the app could run continuously in the background and send alerts as necessary.
One wrinkle is that people who live in mobile homes are often ordered to evacuate even if they aren’t in a surge-prone zone. The ideal app, therefore, would know about trailer parks and maybe get loaded with a database from Zillow or similar regarding the housing type at a given address.
What about people who aren’t competent users of smartphones? Nearly all of them have an app-capable TV and I think those TVs can and do run software when the TV appears to be off. Some code could be built into TVs to connect to the same server that the phone apps connect to. In the event of an applicable evacuation order, the TV would wake up and display/speak “Time to evacuate!”. This would be a little more complex to set up because TVs don’t include GPS receivers and the street address of the TV might have to be entered.
As an added bonus to this app infrastructure, a resident of the U.S. could register his/her/zir/their address and phone/email with the server. The server could then put the registrants into a geospatially indexed database and query to find those affected by a newly issued alert and then email/text the relevant subscribers: “If you’re at 1141 George Perry Floyd Memorial Boulevard right now, which you said was your home address, your county has issued an evacuation order covering your neighborhood. Click here for more information, including a list of county-run shelters.” No matter how fast the U.S. population grows via open borders the computational capability of server CPUs should grow yet faster and, therefore, it would never be impractical to issue personalized alerts to every resident of the U.S.
With all of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the federal government on disaster-related projects over the years, why hasn’t something like this been built by the government? Google, Apple, or Amazon could probably build it pretty easily given that those companies already know our addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. If the above capabilities were built into Android and iOS that would cover almost everyone. Maybe these big companies wouldn’t want to implement this capability, though, due to fear of liability in case they happen to miss an evacuation order. (Maybe they could be protected from liability as the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers were?)
Here’s a concrete example from Tampa (wiped out in 1848 and hit badly again in 1921), starting with the “evacuation zone map” for Hillsborough County:
The official evacuation order says “Hillsborough County has issued a mandatory evacuation order for Evacuation Zones A and B…”, but the the legend doesn’t mention “zones”. The legend refers to an “evacuation level” of either A or B:
If we look at a satellite view of the city we can see that a lot of people shouldn’t have to run away:
My favorite steakhouse, Bern’s, is in the center of the city and Zone C. Same deal for Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. The art museum, on the other hand, is in Zone A. Need to go to the hijab store in Brandon, Florida (suburban Tampa)? That’s not in any evacuation zone (i.e., the hijab inventory should be safe). The Tampa Zoo, on the other hand, seems to be in Zone A, which is not great news for the animals. Busch Gardens is not in any evacuation zone. The big airport? Zone A.
During the Tampa evacuation it seems that some people ran away who didn’t need to and some people stayed despite an order to evacuate because they didn’t know what zone they were in. Once on the road, things got more chaotic with shelters that filled up and traffic jams. Officials were saying “You don’t have to go more than 10 or 20 miles”, but residents didn’t know which shelter was the most sensible destination so some folks might have driven 100+ miles away to a hotel or relative’s house. Ships always have muster stations so that people know where to go in the event that the whistle blows 7 times and then there is a long horn sound. Maybe the app could have a preplanned idea of which shelter people in which blocks of a city should go to first, adjusted for the pet ownership status of the app user (it’s more complex to evacuate with a pet than one might think; only some shelters are pet-friendly and the owner is required to have and bring a crate big enough for the pet and the owner can’t stay with the pet while in the shelter). This could be refined if information is received that a shelter is full and turning people away.
What about after the hurricane arrives? The app/server combo could send an SMS or push notification reminding people to put their phones into low-power mode. The software could then notify people when it was safe to return to their individual neighborhoods (this can be complicated after a hurricane because sometimes bridges to barrier islands are destroyed and/or roads are blocked by trees). Using data from poweroutage.us, the software could include SMS information about whether power was likely to be available at a user’s home (maybe someone would choose to remain with friends or relatives until power was likely back).
Separately, here were our neighbors’ Hurricane Milton preparations as of yesterday, which may or may not meet FEMA standards:
“FEMA Scrambles to Confront Two Storms—and Misinformation” (WSJ): “Instead, federal officials’ efforts to save lives are being complicated by an unusual level of politically charged misinformation, which authorities say risks leading people to disregard evacuation orders…” (the authorities are sure that the problem is that Americans are allowed to speak their minds on Twitter and not that people in a country where IQ is falling might not have the brainpower and diligence to get through the multiple web sites that are required to make an evacuation decision. (If the “authorities” are correct maybe Twitter and Facebook need to be shut down any time that an emergency has been declared? If “misinformation” is killing people and saving lives from COVID-19 justified suspending the First Amendment right to assemble then surely it would make sense to suspend the First Amendment as a hurricane approaches the U.S.)
It looks as though Florida is more or less cleaned up after Hurricane Helene. All schools were open as of yesterday:
Today in Perry, I announced that all school districts are open following Hurricane Helene. It’s essential for kids to have a sense of normalcy, uninterrupted education, and access to resources—especially in challenging times.
As of today, approximately 23,000 of Florida’s 11.4 million electricity customers are out:
I’m in Fort Worth, Texas right now as part of a software/electronics/avionics expert witness project so I haven’t been carefully following hurricane clean-up outside of Florida. The New York Times gives the impression that nothing bad has happened to anyone in North Carolina, for example. The current front page is all about the bad things that the prophets of the NYT expect Donald Trump to do if a second Nakba should occur:
(Note that the Biden-Harris-Whoever-Is-Actually-Running-Things administration recently prosecuted and imprisoned a Republican for a troll tweet that Democrats should vote by SMS. Harvard Law Review: “That Mackey’s primitive meme — sandwiched between thousands of his other tweets — could have fooled American voters into believing that the 2016 election allowed voting by text does indeed strain belief.” See also “Man Who Spread Misinformation on Trump’s Behalf Sentenced to 7 Months” (NYT). Reasonnotes that the Biden-Harris-Whoever criminal justice apparatus used its discretion to refrain from prosecuting a Democrat for similar behavior and that the law used to imprison the Republican was passed in 1870 “to deter the Ku Klux Klan from trying to prevent black people from voting”.)
The next section down is about how Trump is bad while Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney are good:
If the NYT is our guide, as I hope that it is for all of us, nothing newsworthy is going on with respect to Hurricane Helene damage either in Florida or anywhere else.
…. for the schoolteachers here in Palm Beach County. The forecast called for some rain, winds of about 20 knots, and for the storm to track off Florida’s west coast (i.e., “the other coast”) and then, in a move sure to delight Democrats, directly over Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee (Greta Thunberg may have moved on to Queers for Palestine, but the Wrath of Climate Change God is still just).
With all of the spinning air there was a tornado watch, but that could be a reason to keep schools open. For many teachers and children, school is a far safer place to be during a tornado than home, especially if the home was built prior to the statewide Florida Building Code of 2002.
Every business was open, except for a few restaurants with primarily outdoor seating. We did not lose power even for one second (thanks to the grid hardening initiative approved by Governor DeSantis in 2019 and opposed by Democrats?).
A few palm trees shed fronds in our neighborhood, but this won’t damage even a parked car. It is nothing like being in the Northeast where an oak tree can destroy a house due to the weight being substantially near the top of the tree. (A friend’s house in the Boston suburbs was recently assaulted by an oak tree (fell down on a calm wind day). The removal of the tree via crane cost over $5,000 and only now is he beginning to contemplate roof, window, and siding repairs.)
The event was an interesting study in media-driven fear. A dozen friends and relatives called to see if we had survived the apocalypse. They knew that we lived on the east coast of Florida and that the hurricane had traveled off the west coast, but the media reports that they’d consumed made it sound as though most of Florida was threatened/trashed.
Related… if Americans vote correctly in November, Naples, Sanibel Island, Sarasota, and Palm Beach will be on track for extra federal taxpayer assistance. After Hurricane Ian trashed wealthy west coast barrier island beachfront property in 2022… “VP Harris slammed for saying Hurricane Ian aid will be ‘based on equity’” (New York Post):
Vice President Harris came in for a torrent of criticism after telling an audience that “communities of color” would be first in line for relief in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity,” she said during a discussion with Priyanka Chopra at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum on Friday.
“If we want people to be in an equal place sometimes we need to take into account those disparities and do that work,” she added.
