The company agreed to kill its big Boardman coal-fired power plant by 2020, and after experimenting with biomass, opted instead for a natural gas-fired replacement. This is good news for Tri-Met, the development agency that runs their toy trains and streetcars on electric power generated at the eastern Oregon Boardman site. Much like Tri-Met, however, the utility bet on a contractor that was going bankrupt, so just as Tri-Met ended up propping up a failing (now defunct) rail-car manufacturer, PGE ended up pulling the plug on their contractor for the $660 million power plant:
Abeinsa is a subsidiary of Abengoa, which itself is in bankruptcy proceedings.
This development pushed to cost from $514 million to the present $660 million, but at least the thing works.
The Rev. Jeremy Lucas spent $3000 in church funds buying raffle tickets to win an AR-15 rifle. He succeeded.
Christ Church Episcopal Parish, where Lucas has worked for 2½ years, has a discretionary fund built upon donations and available for clergy members when the community or a member of the congregation is in need. It has been used to help with a rent payment, to prevent utilities from being shut off, to assist visiting priests from around the world. Although the AR-15 raffle cause wasn’t quite as traditional, Lucas said he felt it fit the criteria.
Yep, you can't get more purely Portlandia than that.
So he won the gun and had it legally transferred to him. But then it gets sticky.
The Reverend transported the weapon to the home of a parishioner who was willing to "store it" for him until such time as the Reverend found the means to destroy it. There's just one little teeny problem: that subsequent transfer is illegal under state law. The Reverend appears to have committed what is generally referred to as a gun crime.
I don't care what he claims his intent was, nor how he feels. The law is, indisputably, the law, and the Reverend has committed a criminal act in deliberately choosing to violate the law. Lock him up.
Under Oregon’s SB 941 (2015), if the firearm was transferred to the parishioner without a background check (through a licensed firearm dealer while both parties are present), that was a Class A misdemeanor (the most serious type of misdemeanor) – which is punishable by a fine up to $6,250 and/or up to 1 year imprisonment.
Australia's moving north, and that creates a GPS problem. So they're going to change the coordinates in order to accommodate the movement.
The Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country's local co-ordinate system, was last updated in 1994. Since then, Australia has moved about 1.5 metres north.
So on 1 January 2017, the country's local co-ordinates will also be shifted further north - by 1.8m.
"We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn't line up with the co-ordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems."
The country moves northward about 7 centimeters each year due to plate tectonic movement. Man, I'm gettin' old - I remember when plate tectonics was a novel hypothesis.
The BARCS animal shelter in Baltimore was emptied of dogs in just six hours on Saturday, one of numerous shelters cleared as pet lovers came forward to take in homeless animals.
"Empty cages!" the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter wrote on Facebook in a post that showed shelter workers waving goodbye from the cages. "All of these doggies found homes today during Clear the Shelters."
The effort was sponsored by Comcast/NBCUniversal/Telemundo last week and resulted in some 47,000 pet adoptions, ranging from dogs and cats to birds and iguanas from 680 animal shelters, most of which waived or reduced adoption fees and/or waived spaying/neutering charges for participants who elected to re-home homeless pets. Those expenses were picked up by the cable/broadcast giant so the animal shelters didn't take a financial hit.
It may be fashionable to hate on Comcast, but they do some good stuff that isn't often publicized.
Welp, this has been an interesting week. While I was on the east coast last week, the girls were apparently being eaten by blood-sucking critters, which my wife thought she might have brought home from a business trip, so she called Orkin. The guy showed up after I returned. He was perhaps 22 years old, and I was unimpressed. He claimed to have found a bedbug exoskeleton in our bedroom, and quoted us a price of $4600 for remediation, which he said would take half an hour. The next day, he said it would take all day.
So I found somebody who's been doing this for 20 years and who does remediation work for the major hotels in the area. He was amazingly thorough in his inspection, and found no bugs in our room, but killed one in the daughter's room.
And he was a fount of information. It's not a matter of sanitation, he noted - it's a matter of transport; wherever there are large numbers of people, like movie theaters and shopping malls, you're likely to find bedbugs. And the females lay some 500 translucent, pin-head-sized eggs at a whack. Better yet, the eggs are sticky, so they travel easily - you can pick them up without noticing as you sort through clothes at a store. Amazing.
The guy's into entomology, so he talks about instars, growth patterns, and even has a section in his space that he calls his lab, where he grows bugs. He also has his K-9 team, trained to sniff out the locations of hard-to-spot bloodsuckers. That's well above what the Orkin man offers.
He also notes that chemical treatments don't work so well any more, as the bedbugs have generated thicker keratin layers, so they're much less susceptible to chemicals. They die quickly at temperatures above 118 F., so they run temps to 130 in the house for four hours, then run a dog-check to ensure that there are no survivors. And they do it for less than the Orkin guys in terms of time and cash.
The big news today is Ryan Bundy's latest "legal" ploy, in which he declares himself a sovereign citizen and demands to be paid a million dollars to "accept the role" of defendant or inmate in the pending trial relating to his involvement in the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Ryan Bundy said he does not accept the role as defendant or inmate without fair and just compensation of $1 million. He also said he is willing to play the “role” of “judge” or “bailiff” for $1 million.
He also demanded $100 million if he has to face a judge for the conspiracy matter related to the takeover and occupation of the federal facility.
These guys are true whackadoodles, but at least they aren't Oregonians. That's okay; we've got enough nutters here as it is:
Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith owes more than $26,000 in unpaid personal income taxes and another $10,000 in fees and interest, according to a warrant obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Loretta's wages are now being garnished. She's in Philly as a DNC delegate, so the good County Commissioner is unavailable for comment at this time. Her homeowners' association has also filed a lien against her property. She has previously claimed that her troubles are all the result of "a mixup".
Perhaps she should take a course in personal finance.
Meanwhile, the First Squeeze of former Oregon governor Retread is appealing a Marion County court ruling that she owes nearly $128,000 after losing her battle to keep the emails stored on a state server from the public eye. She may be crafty, but she's not very smart. The federal criminal investigations into Retread and his First Squeeze for influence peddling are ongoing, as is the IRS investigation into her allegedly fraudulent tax filings.
What a train-wreck. But as is always the case with train-wrecks, the visual effects can be spectacular.
Even though the Federal Communications Commission has repeatedly said that wireless and landline phone providers are allowed to offer robocall-blocking services to their customers, some carriers have continued to incorrectly insist — and provide misinformation to consumers — that they simply don’t have the authority to deploy this technology. In an effort to make things clear once and for all, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has sent letters to these companies that there are no regulatory roadblocks stopping them from helping their customers stop annoying — often illegal — automated and prerecorded robocalls.
“Nothing in the Commission’s rules and orders prevents [phone companies] from offering customers robocall blocking technology,” writes Wheeler in letters to the chief executives at AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon. “I strongly urge you to offer your customers robust call blocking at no cost.”
Well, it's certainly long overdue. It's probably that whole "at no cost" thing that has companies balking, which is why I bypassed them completely and implemented free robocall blocking technology on my own. I'm not big on government deciding to find ways to make companies do stuff like this; it's easier to just go ahead and do it yourself. Let's face it: government "do not call" lists are pretty much worthless, so your best bet - as always - is to simply not rely on government agencies in the first place.
And the same goes for the companies themselves; it's unrealistic to expect them to expend resources if they're not required to do so, however minimal the expenditure might be.
You're going to buy services from some company anyway, so you might as well take steps on your own to insulate yourself from annoyances wherever possible. Your doctor will love your blood pressure readings.
Half a dozen more state employees were charged with criminal offenses today in District Court in relation their actions and inactions regarding the water supply issue. In the latest development, employees from Health and Human Services and the Department of Environmental Quality got court appearances. They're alleged to have altered reports and generally hid data that might have led to earlier detection of corrosion-related leaching issues in the Flint supply following transition to using water from the Flint River.
Given the recent uproar over high levels of lead in Portland Public Schools water - and the coverups and failures to act that have been documented to date - it should be interesting to see whether or not any similar charges will be forthcoming here.
There's "having a drug problem", and then there's "taking elephant sedatives".
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A drug used to sedate elephants and other large animals, 100 times as potent as the fentanyl already escalating the country's heroin troubles, is suspected in spates of overdoses in several states, where authorities say they've found it mixed with or passed off as heroin.
The appearance of carfentanil, one of the most potent opioids known to investigators, adds another twist to the fight against painkillers in a country already awash in heroin and fentanyl cases.
Carfentanil is so powerful that zoo veterinarians typically wear face shields, gloves and other protective gear — "just a little bit short of a hazmat suit" — when preparing the medicine to sedate animals because even one drop splattered into a person's eye or nose could be fatal, said Dr. Rob Hilsenroth, executive director of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians.
A loaded syringe of a reversal drug is kept on hand just in case, and the extremely limited carfentanil supply regulators allow for such facilities is kept locked away and subject to auditing, Hilsenroth said.
Yep, carfentanil (known as M-99 in large animal veterinary practices) is incredibly dangerous stuff; the reversing agent (known as M-50-50) has to be kept on hand whenever M-99 is used, and even that is no guarantee of successful remediation. Over the years, I developed a very healthy respect for the stuff, particularly after a vet failed to engage the luer-lock on a syringe of M-99 and caused a back-splash of it as he injected an elephant that we'd planned to sedate for a procedure. We made a beeline for the sinks and eyewash, and got shot in the butt with luck. From that day forward, it was masks and goggles and gloves every time we had to use the stuff. I figure the adrenaline rush also helped us that day, as we knew we had mere seconds to get it out of our faces and eyes before it'd knock us down; something meant for a five-ton animal doesn't take long to act when you weigh 150 pounds. Fortunately, we didn't have to self-inject the M-50-50.
And now some of these fools are cutting heroin with M-99. Good lord. No wonder people are dying. Legally speaking, carfentanil is among the most highly restricted drugs and approved only for sedation treatment in very large animals, but our Chinese friends are apparently peddling it via the Internet. This is a Very Bad development, although I suppose it could be argued that the Darwin effect is acting to cull the herd a bit.
This jerk lives in Virginia, but every few years for the past couple of decades he's pushed measures to build light rail lines in Kansas City. Thus far, they've voted him down every time, but he just keeps coming back like a bad case of chiggers. The dork lives half-way across the country, but like all east-coast denizens, he believes he knows what's best for everyone else. And for some unknown reason, they find it impossible to stay at home where they belong.
Ryan Bundy said he does not accept the role as defendant or inmate without fair and just compensation of $1 million. He also said he is willing to play the “role” of “judge” or “bailiff” for $1 million.
Perhaps she should take a course in personal finance.
