Tag: California

Chipleggers of the Pacific Coast!

This is sooooooo close to the Line.

For the time being, Dell is no longer shipping certain Alienware Aurora R12 and R10 gaming PC configurations to half a dozen US states because those product lines potentially fall out of bounds of newly adopted energy efficiency requirements.

When attempting to configure one of those systems, a warning message appears in bold red lettering to alert buyers that their order will not be honored if the destination resides in one of the affected states. This was first spotted by Marie Oakes, an independent content creator who highlighted the disclaimer on Twitter.

“This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled,” the message states.

Continue reading Chipleggers of the Pacific Coast!

Denvertown, California [The Day After Ragnarok].

Denvertown, California – Google Docs

Denvertown, California

[The Day After Ragnarok]

 

Officially, it’s the Owens Valley Resettlement Camp in California; in a heavy bit of irony, the camp existed prior to the Serpentfall as the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The Japanese-Americans who were interned there have long since been repatriated to their (suddenly-vital) farms and fishing boats, of course; in their place were put those who managed to get out of Denver and the Rocky Mountains in the Evacuation of ‘46, but who lacked immediately useful skills (like farming and fishing). The Warren government has had little luck in finding these refugees better living conditions.

Continue reading Denvertown, California [The Day After Ragnarok].

California’s Oroville Dam about to overflow.

Apparently that state can’t catch a break.  It’s been raining in California this winter at record-breaking levels — much to the relief to state residents I’m sure — and now the dam’s literally bursting:

An evacuation has been ordered for low-lying levels of Oroville and several areas downstream from Lake Oroville, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office said.

“Officials are anticipating a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes (5:45 p.m.),” the California Department of Water Resources said on Facebook.

OK, so the dam is just too full and probably won’t actually burst.  Which means that ‘literally’ is being misused.  But I don’t care.  This post approaches the line of what I’ll post about these days as it is, and if we discuss infrastructure at all it WILL go over that line.

Surprising new California poll!

Naturally, the LA Times buried the lede: their title is “Donald Trump leads in California primary race but threatens a GOP fracture.” Which, of course, fits the LA Times‘ preferred narrative of the election cycle: Donald Trump is poised to take the GOP down with him into a fiery crash into a dumpster fire at the goat rodeo while the clown show watches. But if you take a look at the actual numbers? Well, among registered voters that poll has it Trump 37, Cruz 30, Kasich 12. Not actually in itself bad news for Ted Cruz, because he was polling at single digits in California up to this point, and he can make up the difference. But if you look at likely voters?  Then that poll gives you Trump 36, Cruz 35, Kasich 14. Continue reading Surprising new California poll!

California’s $68 billion high-speed rail line going through earthquake country. …Of course.

Remind me never to take the train in California.

The monumental task of building California’s bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles.

Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped.

Continue reading California’s $68 billion high-speed rail line going through earthquake country. …Of course.

Running from the California Wildfires: 1:55 of absolute terror.

Via Constant Reader BJM here we see something that is… well. It’s terrifying, despite the fact that nobody visibly got hurt and nobody visibly died. I would personally have been reeking of unapologetic fear-sweat by the end of the first minute:

It is literally like something out of a video game. No, seriously, there’s a place in The Secret World MMO that looks a lot like this. Fun in a game; not so much fun in real life.

Latest California wildfire threatens their wine crop.

If you drink wines from the Napa Valley, savor last year’s crop. You might be waiting a bit for the next one: “Two wildfires north of San Francisco forced thousands of people to flee their homes and prompted Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency on Sunday, continuing a drought-fueled fire season that could be the worst the American West has ever endured.” This is happening in the Napa Valley, you see – which means that the grape harvest is likely to be affected. Or burnt to the ground. Continue reading Latest California wildfire threatens their wine crop.