Taylor Swift has been criticized a lot lately, most pertinently, for a short flight of her private jet.
If you buy a private plane, you want a test flight by a pilot, and you want it delivered. Several people in aeronautics stated that the last short flight of her plane looked like a sale, and it turned out that it was.
She still owns another private jet, but if you’re touring and you’re that famous, it’s more justified than a 17 minute flight just to get to the other side of town to shop like Kylie Jenner.
Christ, I sound like a 14 year-old girl, but many middle aged guys on the internet do.
MLB, NFL and NBA teams still take busses when possible, and use chartered or team owned planes, and typically travel as little and efficiently as possible for a combination of reasons until the playoffs, when the number and order of home games vs. away games is determined by the rules, and even then, they play by region until the NBA finals/World Series/Super Bowl.
NHL teams share chartered planes.
NBA and NHL teams play 82 games a season, and MLB teams play 162 games, and most of the billionaires who own them are cheapskates. The logistics behind setting up a relatively fair schedule in MLB for 30 teams over 162 games are insane. Each team has to have the same number of home and away games, and several games are postponed primarily because of rain. If possible, they’re made up for with a doubleheader the next day, or until the next series between the teams if it’s at the same place, or canceled entirely unless they have playoff ramifications later in the season.
You can argue the merits of paying for any of this at all when we have homeless people and several other crises, but as several authors have written, survival is not enough, and music and sports have quantifiable benefits, like keeping us sane, as do movies and videogames.
I am biased, but after 9/11, when MLB chose to continue and the Yankees made it to the World Series while there were concerns Yankee Stadium might be blown to smithereens, it lifted up the city. They ended up losing in seven games to the Arizona Diambacks, but it was the best World Series I’ve seen in my life.
This was the third time MLB games were delayed or canceled because of war or national security issues. The other two times were during WW1 and WW2. 227 MLB players fought in WW1, including Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey, George Sisler and Ty Cobb.
Over 500 MLB players fought in WW2, including Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Warren Spahn, Leon Day, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Ted Williams, Hank Greenburg, Buck O'Neil, Larry Doby and Monte Irvin.
Jackie Robinson was one of several who were drafted, and considering his treatment, I wouldn’t have blamed him for dodging (no pun intended), but as the first black MLB player, he was expected and determined to keep the door open.
Only a dozen MLB players fought in Vietnam, and I respect Muhammad Ali for refusing to go just as much as I respect Jackie Robinson for fighting.
Today, I don’t think any MLB players of stature would be allowed to play after another 9/11 type-like event or join the Army. There’s too much money invested in them, and if they broke their contracts to enlist, they would probably face enormous fines. If you can write a contract that bans players from riding motorcycles or playing basketball during the offseason, you can write one punishing enlistment.
After Ted William returned, he used to scream during batting practice.
“I’m Ted fucking Williams!” The best fucking hitter who ever lived!” as he hit balls out of the park.
Pitchers on opposing teams said this terrified them.
I can’t help wondering what their numbers might have been without spending two or more years of their primes at war.
These were different times, when most ball players weren’t making insane amounts of money. A time when stars on the Yankees had to get off-season jobs and work as car salesmen after they retired.
They were more connected to regular people, and more games used to be played on weekend afternoons so kids could watch on TV.
As far as Indian Point, their last reactor went offline in April 2021. These reactors went online in 1956, and they are outdated. They leaked irradiated coolant water, but the level of radiation in that water was less than half that considered safe to drink. A study claimed that the plant was killing eight million fish a year in the Hudson River, but during the 1970’s through the late 1980s, there were virtually no living fish in the Hudson River due to pollution, and that study was debunked.
Environmentalists then went for the 1 in a million increase in cancer and birth defect rates, and couldn’t prove that, but the last reactor was shut down anyway and CO2 emissions went up by over 30% the following month.
Now, three years and tens of thousands of panels later, emissions are still higher than they were and electricity is more expensive factoring for inflation.
Gas and oil are supplanting the loss of Indian Point.
Now we have an on-again off-again plan to build a three billion dollar wind farm that will at optimum produce ¼ of the electricity of that one last reactor by 2030, and most environmentalists hail this as a victory.
Indian Point wasn’t perfect. It had a few leaks, again, of water considered safe to drink, and it only had a one pass water filtration system, which could have been upgraded for 1.1 billion, eliminating all of the spurious concerns about radiation and heat emissions.
The last two reactors were providing a quarter of the energy for NYC, and there is a third that could have been retrofitted.
New York’s energy grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, and NYC is on the way to once again being one of the dirtiest cities in the world in terms of air quality.
Life really is like baseball. It makes no sense and it isn’t fair,
But even if you get three bad calls and get punched out, you get another chance at bat, and I hope Indian Point will, too.
I don’t want to be insulting, but anyone who doesn’t recognize the dependability, safety, and necessity of nuclear power at this point is delusional, irrationally biased, and ignorant. I’ve learned to live with that, but younger generations shouldn’t have to suffer any more than they already have because of our collective stupidity.
I have a weakness for Taylor Swift because she can play the banjo, she’s gorgeous, and while she’s made mistakes, she’s a kid by my terms, and she’s trying to be a positive force.
Like Batman, I’m willing to die with this city, no matter how much I kind of hate it, but for fuck’s sake.
Everytime a reactor is shut down, CO2 emissions and the price of electricity goes up. Every fucking time.
Wind and solar are not viable primary electricity sources. Nuclear power is, and even including Chernobyl and without factoring for environmental footprint (nuclear puts out the same power more reliably than fossil fuel while taking up half the space and about 1/1000 the space of wind and solar per kWh), it’s in between wind and solar in terms of deaths per kWh, and if you kick out Chernobyl, which is statistically justified, it’s much safer than either.
Fossil fuel kills 5.1 million people a year.
Within an average year, nuclear power kills 0.
Nuclear power operates at maximum capacity over 90% of the time, while wind and solar are at about 30%, our newest reactors are powered on what was considered nuclear waste, and thorium or salt reactors don’t need any water coolant at all.
If you are committed to the environment and survival, you should support nuclear power.
A few years ago, I got almost nothing but vitriol for advocating for nuclear power, except for climate and energy scientists, mathematicians, logisticians, and other people who live in regions where reactors were shuttered in favor of solar and/or wind, and they all had the complaints. More expensive, less dependable, dirtier electricity, and the local leaders of these places promised to fix these problems by building more panels and turbines, which many found incredibly frustrating.
If something isn’t working, you go back to what was.
People are coming around, and even if I’m an infinitesimal part of that, I’ll keep on repeating myself.
When Jackie Robinson was being booed, Pee Wee Reese put his arm around his shoulder and said “Maybe one day everyone will wear #42 so people can't tell them apart.”
Pee Wee was from the South, and the last person to wear #42 was Mariano Rivera after Robinson’s number was retired by every team in MLB.
Pee Wee was a brave and good friend to someone who just wanted to be accepted, but now 42 has become an honor, or something everyone should aspire to be.
The person who does what is right and necessary, even while they’re hated.
The person who’s willing to be civil in the face of increasing incivility, bigotry, and ignorance.
I’m not Jackie Robinson.
But I hope I can be Pee Wee Reese.
The NBA understood what Brooklyn has when they moved the Nets from New Jersey to there. The other leagues will wake up sooner or later.
Jackie Robinson was court-martialed during his stint in the Army during World War II, which says a lot about how the military was then. And he actually lettered in four sports (baseball, football, basketball, and track) at UCLA, so he could have chosen a career where he wasn't so blatantly exposed to racism. But for all the racism he faced from fans and other players, he one-upped the haters by having a long and brilliant career.
And definitely, the world needs more Pee Wee Reeses...