I live not too far from where this project would be built. The manufacturing park is just the latest twist on this sordid project. With a bit more info, you can understand why the California Forever billionaires cooked up this project. First, some statistics:

Median home prices:
* San Jose ~$1.5 million
* San Francisco ~$1.3 million
* Fairfield ~$630K (largest town in Solano County, 121,000 people)
* Sacramento ~$490K

Fairfield is about 1.5 hour drive to San Jose with light traffic. Because of extreme differences in housing prices, a surprising number of people commute from Sacramento to the Bay Area (1.5 to 2 hours each way). Sacramento is an hour further away from the Bay Area than Fairfield. So, lots of people are willing to commute long distances to obtain cheaper housing.

The California Forever (CF) people quietly started buying up farmland in Solano County prior to 2018, with plans to build a new city on fertile and valuable farmland. At first, CF told the county that they only planned to lease land back to farmers. But, their actual plan was to secretly buy up enough contiguous farmland and then announce the project and convince county residents to abandon their 40-year-old orderly growth ordinance. CF had to strong-arm some farmers to force them to sell. CF finally sprung their plan on the county but despite a multi-million dollar campaign (which further alienate the locals), local organizers successfully fought the plan and CF pulled the proposal from the November 2024 ballot.

Now, apparently desperate to convince county residents for a 2026 ballot measure, CF is adding an industrial park to the plan. It's a common strategy in California's Central Valley to make large housing projects (which will pave over farmland) palatable to local residents. Lots of articles on the topic. Here's one:

The California Forever debate moves underground
A billionaire-backed company will continue sowing support, while residents weigh their options.
17 Sept 2024
https://www.hcn.org/articles/t...

The announcement of Bose buying McIntosh fits in with what's been happening with home audio in general. There has been a huge consolidation and shakeup of high-end audio companies over the last 15 years or so. And now, several of the large holding companies are in deep financial trouble:

Voxx International* Up For Sale, As Consumer Sales Plunge, Pioneer Brand Dropped
https://www.channelnews.com.au...

Former Sound United** Business Could Be “Discontinued” Next Year After Falling Revenues
https://www.channelnews.com.au...

* Voxx International (originally Audiovox Corp.) - owns about 35 brands, including Acoustic Research, Advent, Klipsch, Onkyo, etc.

** Sound United (Masimo) -- owns brands such as Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Polk Audio, Marantz, Boston Acoustics, etc.

On a side note, I was wondering why I haven't run across Harman Kardon equipment for sale while browsing equipment recently. Turns out that Samsung bought Harman International (which included HK, JBL, Infinity, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, etc.) in 2017. Since the Samsung purchase, Harman Kardon has quit making receivers, amps, and AVR equipment and the brand only seems to be selling Bluetooth "smart" speaker, headphones now (along with car & boat systems).

Most of my career was spent in pesticide regulatory arena and I can vouch that paraquat is incredibly toxic to humans. For herbicides, it's an outlier for mammalian toxicity and is infamous in developing countries as a way to commit suicide. On the surface, it's remarkable that paraquat has been left on the market for so long in the US. It's been banned since 2007 in the European Union. And if you think "why can't growers just not use herbicides and/or go organic?" -- when we surveyed organic growers in California about their pest control problems, they overwhelmingly said that weed control was by far their biggest expense and problem. Mechanical weed control (plowing) is energy intensive and expensive.

There has been pressure on the US EPA to keep paraquat on the market as the number of herbicide active ingredients (AIs) has been declining owing to AIs losing registration and the lack of new AIs being developed. Until recently, there had not been a single new herbicide AI commercialized for 30 years. This article explains why:

What’s preventing a new era of herbicides?
https://www.farmprogress.com/c...

And as an example of how hard it is to bring a new chemical AI onto the market, BASF released a new herbicide AI (trifludimoxazin) in 2020:

EPA Proposes Registration of Trifludimoxazin, a New Herbicide Active Ingredient
https://www.epa.gov/pesticides...

but soon withdrew it from the market when fish toxicity issues were found:

BASF to Stop Selling Pesticide Trifludimoxazin Rather Than Continue Litigation
https://www.centerforfoodsafet...

A few years ago, I was in a meeting with a bunch of wheat growers and their trade association. Most of them were not personally opposed to growing genetically engineered wheat. But, they were keenly aware of potential trade problems that would occur if GE wheat were allowed. The problem is that the US and Canada export a large percentage of their crop and much of it goes to countries which oppose genetically engineered crops. Much of Europe and Asia is like this.

You might think that it would be okay if some growers planted GE wheat for domestic consumption and others kept shipping old-school wheat to GE-averse countries, but you'd be wrong. The problem is that once it's being grown anywhere in the US or Canada, all exports are now suspect to contamination. All exports would be subject to testing. The growers in that meeting agreed that they would probably never grow GE wheat. The same is true for a number of other export crops -- GE cultivars were developed years ago but never released. Wheat goes into bread and that is something you don't mess with.

Can't read the paywalled article, but it's Interesting that the summary doesn't mention predatory scientific journals. These journals will publish anything for a page fee (e.g., $500/page). These journals advertise that they have a review process but this is clearly not the case. For respected journals, the review process can take months or even up to a year.

The temptation for scientists is immense. Example: a colleague submitted one of our papers to a respected, long-established journal but it was rejected for what seemed like lame reasons. We had waited six months to get that verdict. Rather than go through that process again with another quality journal, he decided to send it to a journal I had never heard of, but which advertised a fast turnaround time. This journal was published by MDPI, based in India, which publishes hundreds of journals. By the time I had figured out this scam, the journal had already concluded their "review," accepted the paper and our payment (less than two weeks for the entire process).

Here's the thing -- this was a decent paper, written by a highly respected leader in his field. Since then, I've seen lots of excellent scientists publish solid papers in these lame journals. But, since these journals will publish anything from anybody, you need to be careful. Apparently their business model is working and the result is a polluted scientific literature. Beall's List — https://beallslist.net/ -- has a list of predatory publishers. Interestingly, Beale removed MDPI from the list, but warns authors to carefully consider submitting to their journals. See Wikipedia for details.

I can't read TFA (paywalled), but the problem with strawberry breeding is that the genetic variability is very low -- just a handful of original genotypes were used in the vast majority of breeding programs, especially in California (https://9lib.co/article/breeding-potential-of-the-wild-strawberries.zgw6wrjn). A large amount of pesticides are used (again, especially in California) because of disease and pest problems. There was a USDA program to bring in a lot of new breeding material from wild strawberries (Oregon State University) about 10 years ago and I know Driscolls was involved. If Discolls has 25,000 phenotypes, it sounds like they've incorporated the new genetic material from wild populations. This could be a successful project.

I realize people are eager to push forward clean energy plans, but it might be good to wait until the current funding has been implemented, at least partially, and then reassess the situation. I know someone working at the California Energy Commission. Currently, the Energy Commission already has a huge amount of money that will be encumbered for a variety of clean energy programs. The money is coming from many state and federal sources (for example: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). Given the the CEC has more than $10 billion to disperse, it would be prudent to see how the dust settles before deciding what is left to do. It's possible that Prop 30 would have flooded the system with more money than could be absorbed efficiently. I've been involved with other California state programs that tried to fix something by allocating too much money, too quickly. It takes time to build infrastructure.

Indeed, not taking the full course of antibiotics and hospital contamination are two reasons, but you missed perhaps one of the bigger sources -- animal agriculture. Antibiotics are routinely given on a massive scale because they promote growth, even in the absence of infection. These antibiotics end up in the environment and are a massive selective force for bacteria to evolve resistance.

Antibiotic Use in Agriculture and Its Consequential Resistance in Environmental Sources: Potential Public Health Implications
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

For folks with older Macs that are no longer getting security updates, there are two good options -- install Linux, or use OpenCore Legacy Patcher (https://github.com/dortania/Opencore-Legacy-Patcher). I've done both and they're excellent options. I just updated a 2011 Mac Mini with OCLP to MacOS Monterey and was impressed how easy it was. Soon after the upgrade, I was prompted to install the latest update for the OS and had no problems at all.

Yeah, the pandemic has been a nightmare for many doctors. But, I'd be more sympathetic if the medical community had a more reasonable system for increasing the number of working doctors. Think about this -- in the US, how long has it been since we've had a shortage of doctors in rural areas? Pretty much forever and we still can't solve the problem? The reason, at least in part, is the American Medical Association has kept a tight cap on residencies.

It's not like there aren't a lot of people who'd like to be doctors. Indeed, something like 75% of undergraduates start off as premed. The AMA is essentially a union for doctors and they've kept supply of physicians tight to keep salaries up. A friend's daughter started her first physician job a few years ago for $250K/yr, working four days/week. I think she's making something like $400K a few years in and she's totally burnt out. So yeah, they paid a shitload of dough and they have to work their asses off.

Doctors say they need to make a lot in order to pay medical school loans. There are solutions for this too. Why not run medical school like graduate school? Have doctors in training work as orderlies in hospitals, etc. while they're in school, just like grad students teach and work as research assistants. Sure, it'd take them a few years longer but they could come out debt-free and maybe a bit more humble.

If you're interested in a more in-depth analysis of New Zealand's Covid policy, these two articles (and others linked within) are a good place to start:

Did New Zealand Let Too Few People Die of COVID?
https://sciencebasedmedicine.o...

Jay Bhattacharya errs on excess mortality in New Zealand
https://sciencebasedmedicine.o...

Americans tend to live in a somewhat isolated world where it's easy to forget that there are other people and countries out there. So when it comes to assigning blame for something like inflation, we tend to only think about the U.S. If President Biden, or the US government, or the Fed for that matter, are mainly to blame for the US's inflation woes, are they also to blame for the inflation all around the world (and didn't some of that spending happen under the previous administration)? Perhaps US & European government spending did bring about some inflation but what would have been the result if they had not? Maybe there are other factors, e.g., the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supply chain issues related to the pandemic, etc?

Inflation Rate - By Country -- https://tradingeconomics.com/c...