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Delayed
Germany-Sweden – 2:0. Nice game, though ASKOD’s milage will probably vary.
I was watching the game at home with open windows. There were two other groups nearby glued to their TV screens, one in a neighbours garden and one on a balkony some fifty yards away.
We all were watching the game "live", but when the first goal did occure, there was a funny effect. About three second after I shouted YEAH!, the neighbour’s garden crowd responded with their war cry. Two additional seconds later, the folks on that balkoney started to cheer.
These delayed reactions repeated themselfs with the second goal and with some following near misses.
The delays, I assume, are based on different TV signal we are catching. I am watching on analog cable, the three second delay would be the neighbours digital broadcast receiver, which needs some time to decrypt and decode the digital signal. The additional two second delay for the balkony could be caused by receiving the game through a satellite receiver. They do have a sat-antenna up, so I guess their TV signal took the long space relay way from source to drain.
Funny to see "live" delayed.
Living … Delayed
Puget Sound Crush
API – Bellevue
Thursday, 29 June, 2006
They say the Arctic ice shield is melting, parts of
Antarctica are growing grass again, and now in
sleepy Puget Sound, Washington State, global
warming has brought a new problem. Evacuees.
Their numbers are nebulous and hard to define,
but real estate sales tells the story. Seattle is in
it’s third year of rebound after the 9/11 dropout,
with housing prices jumping by double digits.
New condo developments are sold out, in some
cases, before a spade touches earth. All over the
verdant green basin of giant fir trees, looking from
above more like Alaska than a Southern California
it’s becoming, humongous housing developments
are springing up. And with houses, comes cars.
On Thursday and Friday last week, the end to the
school year for most working teenagers, traffic in
morning and evening commutes became a heart-
stopping freeway parking lot, with normal forty-five
minute commutes taking as long as two hours.
From twenty minutes north of Seattle on last Friday
evening, clear to Dupont, a new planned community
nearly seventy miles to the south, traffic crawled
along at between five and ten miles per hour. But
worse, from Dupont heading northbound, the so-
called reverse commute, traffic sat shimmering in
a the perfect evening sun characteristic of Puget
Sound’s dazzling summertime, a silver parking lot.
The future of crush.
Unlike the Bay Area or Atlanta or Los Angeles,
with their network of freeways, Puget Sound has
only Interstate 5 for most of the commute, with
Interstate 405 passing parallel to I-5 to the east
into Bellevue, and Interstate 90 bringing in new
development commuters from the foothills.
“520 is a parking lot,” says a helicopter traffic guy.
“I’m not seeing any movement on I-5 below me.”
Even those faithful workers who rise at 5AM for
a pre-crush commute found themselves stuck,
and those lucky workers who can skip out at
3PM couldn’t even make it onto the on-ramp.
It’s now that bad. Global warming on steroids.
Though Governor Christine Gregoire had the
foresight to raise the gas tax, although it was
originally just an attempt to save the bloated
WSDOT system from budget layoffs, instead,
commuters now have the double crush of new
freeway construction, and doubling population.
Will the new gas tax bring relief? Probably not.
Every single bridge over I-5 was built with only
a six-lane span. Adding another lane to help
with the commute would require billions and
billions of taxes, and as long as ten years of
continuous construction to widen the freeway
after rebuilding all the bridge spans.
What will happen to the accumulating new gas
tax revenues in the meantime?
Seattle Mayor Greg Nichol had his eye set on
those new gas tax revenues even before the
State pushed them through without referendum.
Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct, like the infamous
earthquake-collapsed Oakland Freeway, is the
center of attention now for literally hundreds of
millions of dollars in expensive consultant studies.
And their conclusions?
Not to seismically retrofit the viaduct at all!
Instead, Mayor Nichols is pushing his own
version of Boston’s “Big Dig”, the largest
cost-overrun highway project in US history.
Nichols plans to force the state highway
department to build a colossal tunnel
system, and completely underground the
aging viaduct. What he’s not telling the
taxpayers, in fact, he’s already shelling
out tax money for fancy renderings of the
porkbarrel project to influence lawmakers,
is that the Seattle waterfront sea wall,
now over one hundred years old and
rotting into wood pulp and steel wool,
is about to collapse.
Unlike the SR-99 Alaskan Way Viaduct,
owned by the State and maintained at
State taxpayer’s expense, the Seattle
Sea Wall is very much a local problem.
Local problems result in higher property
taxes for people like Bill Gates and Steve
Ballmer, two of the richest Seattleites in
the world. Property taxes on all those
MicroSoft millionaire Seattle estates.
Hence the Alaskan Way Tunnel Project,
which will suck between $4 billion and
$5 billion out of the State treasury, at a
time when every penny needs to be
spent to widen and traffic control I-5,
as they already do in Rotterdam.
Instead, those monies have been tied
up for two years now, on a tunnel project
that will have no positive effect whatsoever
on the choked I-5 / I-405 corrider, or the
grossly overtrafficked SR520 floating bridge.
Ten years for the tunnel, versus ten years
to fix the commute, versus 1,000,000’s of
commuters whose daily travel time just
went from a routine forty-five minutes
each way to two hours, no matter how
they flex their time. Over 1.5 billion hours
lost each year on Puget Sound commutes.
They’re building new homes at record levels,
selling new SUV’s like hot cakes. Welcome
to the in-your-face future of global warming,
and to pork-barrel tax revenues diversions.
Maybe Mayor Nichols can start a student
welfare program, paid by the interest that’s
accumulating on his porkbarrel sea wall
set-aside funds, titheing students to stay
home this summer and off the freeways?
Posted by: Peristroika Shalom | Jun 25 2006 2:47 utc | 7
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