Florida takes action against Flock cameras

Huh:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Department of Transportation on Monday revoked all existing permits for automated license plate readers installed by local law enforcement in state highway rights-of-way and said it will stop approving any new installations, citing an “exponential increase” in deployments, reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and “surveillance schemes.”

The Engineering and Operations Memorandum, signed by Will Watts, P.E., FDOT’s chief operating officer and assistant secretary, directs local agencies to remove the devices within 30 days. If they do not, the department said it will take them down. FDOT reserved the right to immediately remove any unit that poses a safety hazard.

From my perspective, the biggest immediate problem with the Flock system is that it has a very weak authentication and audit system.  This likely makes abuse of the system hard to find.  And given the widespread abuse that has been reported, that makes you wonder just how much abuse is happening.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Flock.  I mean, after all - if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, amirite? 

Well done, FLDOT. 

 

Censorship: Action, Reaction

So Youtube hates guns and is trying to demonitize shooting channels.  So one of the channels decided to follow the rules, with hilarious results.

Climate data is hopelessly flawed

Via Midwest Chick a while ago, there's a new independent audit of the weather stations that feed daily data to the climate databases.  This is a follow up to the 2009 Surface Stations Project.  Results are, well, what you'd expect:

The 2009 report found 89 percent of stations were unacceptable by NOAA’s own standards. The 2022 report found an even greater percentage of stations—approximately 96 percent—are sited unacceptably. The official U.S. temperature record, which was shown in 2009 to be heat-biased due to poor siting issues, appears to be even more biased in 2022.

Of the 128 stations surveyed, only two were found to be a Class 1 (best-sited) station: the Dubois, Idaho Agricultural Experiment Farm, and the St. Joseph, Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Farm.

Three stations were found to be Class 2 (acceptably sited).

The remaining 123 stations were found to be Class 3, 4, and 5, and therefore considered unacceptably sited in accordance with Leroy’s classification system and NOAA publication 10-1302.

The 7 percent increase in unacceptably sited stations from 2009 to 2022 seems to be in line with the Gallo and Xian study noting the increase in ISAs near USHCN stations.

Based on the sample, it appears that waste-water treatment plants (WWTP) comprise approximately 25-30 percent of the entire COOP network. It is difficult to get an accurate count because NOAA / NWS does not discern between WWTPs and other stations in the HOMR database. WWTPs are a poor place to measure data to detect climate change because they grow with population, and the industrial processes they perform (sewage digestion) generate substantial amounts of heat, creating a heat sink effect.

In some interviews with observers, it became clear NOAA / NWS personnel are aware their station siting does not adhere to NOAA standards, but they do not have the means or the time to take corrective action. A prime example is a Class 5 USHCN station in a radio station parking lot in Grants Pass, Oregon, where the radio station engineer recognized the problem, but the local NWSFO refused to address it—even after multiple requests to relocate the MMTS sensor.  

It's like they want lousy data, as long as it shows things hotter than they really are.

UPDATE 10 JULY 2023 14:04: Chris Lynch finds this, which is worth remembering.  The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) shows climate over the last 10,000 years or so:

I blame SUVs for all the warming during the Roman Climate Optimum ...

LOL [snort]

U.S. Tanks In Ukraine Already Destroyed After Being Easily Recognized By Their Rainbow Camouflage

Hat tip: Mike at Cold Fury.

So Ken Starr is dead

It must be said ...

You're welcome.

I think I've seen this movie before

Via Insty, new poll shows Biden losing to Trump by double digits in 2024:

“A majority of voters think President Joe Biden shouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, and he would lose a rematch with former President Donald Trump by double-digit margins,” read the early analysis of the Rasmussen Reports poll sponsored by the Heartland Institute.

That's very sweet, but has the Heartland Institute been asleep for the last two years?  Trump could beat Biden by 100% and Biden would get re-elected.  Math is hard, amirite?  Especially when people cheat.

But everybody vote harder next time!

OK, I'll play

Glen Filthie posted about some Twitter Chick and her, well, challenge:

He has his suggestions from North of the Border, so go read.  So here is my answer to Inna's excellent question.  Vladimir Putin is welcome to:

• California, Oregon, and Washington.  Sorry, we keep Alaska (and Canada keeps Yukon, per Glen).  Note to Vlad - there's a real crime problem in Seattle and Portland, and San Francisco has a problem with the homeless crapping on the street.  Maybe the Russian Mob can fix all this.
• New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania east of Harrisburg.  Sorry for northern Maine and New Hampshire but y'all know that you're screwed with all the Boston refugees.  Not to mention Glen giving away Quebec.
• Chicago, Denver, and Albuquerque.  Giving these "City-States" away will being sanity to Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Well, some sanity.  For a bonus, we'll throw in Austin if Vlad promises to keep it weird.
• Minnesota.  'nuff said.

I reserve the right to "gift" other places to Russia in the future.  Maybe in exchange for some good Vodka.

So let me know what you think in the comments.  Did I leave out anything important?

Quote of the Day, Online Voting snark edition

This one is a joint effort by Aesop and your humble host, commenting on my post Online Voting is A Persistently Bad Idea: 

Aesop: Like people haven't already absorbed the lesson of what happens when you order a president online?

Borepatch: You get one from China. 

 I'm here all week.  Try the veal.

Wait, Star Wars had Harleys?

Wow.  Just wow. 

You don't tug on Superman's cape

You don't spit into the wind.  You don't pull the mask of that old Lone Ranger and you don't f*** around with Miguel. 

Srlsy, you don't do that.

Quote of the Day, blogging edition

 It's been a while since Tam has gotten QotD, but this is classic:

What kind of loser still writes a blog in 2020, anyway?

Made me laugh out loud, that did.  This one, too.

The lighter side of plague

Sometimes in a crisis, you just need to laugh.  Here are some that kicked over my giggle box.

Chris Lynch found this:

Gorges Smyth found this:

LL found this:

Reddit has a whole thread on this subject:

Lastly, be glad you don't live in France.  You need to get a permit from the government to walk your dog there.

Quote of the Day: Don't Try This At Home, Kids edition

The Silicon Valley Redneck wins the All Quiet On The Western Front Memorial Snark Award, as well as Quote of the Day:

Here is one [disinfectant] specially recommended by the Board of Irresponsible People:

Hey, kids!  Know what's really good at killing the WuFlu virus on surfaces?  A mixture of bleach and ammonia, that's what!

Probably works, too.  There's just the slight side effect of the user and bystanders coming down with N₂H₄ pneumonia.  (Yes, that's a thing, though technically it's pulmonary edema.  Seriously, this is a Bad Idea.  But you know someone will push it sooner or later, sans disclaimer.)

That's funny, right there.  I guess I have to add this:

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS!  Mixing bleach and ammonia will create chlorine gas, which will kill you graveyard dead.  Seriously, the only way you could do a more realistic simulation of the Western Front would be to dig a trench next to the street and string barbed wire.

Still funny snark, though.

Donald Trump reads Borepatch

Well, that's my explanation for this:

President Trump on Tuesday announced the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative launched at the World Economic Forum as world leaders seek to combat climate change.

Trump made the announcement during an address to global business leaders gathered for the annual event in Davos, Switzerland.

So why do I say that he reads this blog?  Well, back in July I posted this:

A simple and cheap solution to burning fossil fuels?

Plant trees:

OK, the study simply argues that by adding 10 million squared kilometers of forests – the area equal to the territory of the U.S. (or Canada, if you wish), 2/3 of the man-made emissions of CO2 since 1800 could be removed from the atmosphere (they apparently pre-decided that the elimination of 2/3 of a problem is a good plan). Planting a tree costs $0.30, they claim, and because one needs about one extra trillion of new trees (the number of trees would be increased by 1/3 in this project – they did use the same estimate of the number of trees in the world as I mentioned above), the total cost would be $300 billion. This is the overall amount, not an annual one.

So for $300B over 30 years we could eliminate the excess carbon dioxide that we've put into the atmosphere.  Even if this figure is off by an order of magnitude, this is a huge win compared with the $122 Trillion that the UN wants to "fight Climate Change".

Alas, planting forests does not allow the industrial scale graft that the UN has come to expect.

$10B/year is a bargain compared to what everyone else is talking about, and will give us a bunch of pretty forrest to hike in.  I can't see how anyone can possibly oppose this, unless they're a bunch of statist pricks trying to boss everyone around.

A note to President Trump: it would be awesome if you started referring to her as "Snippi Longstockings", amirite?

UPDATE 25 January 2020 08:31: Courtesy of Aesop in the comments, LOL:

Yoko Windsor

It's funny because it's true.

The TV was on and the (ex?) Royal couple came on.  The Queen Of The World coined the nickname in the post title.  I laughed for ten minutes.

My first (and only) viral meme

Ten years ago today I posted what would become my only viral meme.  It was satirizing the ClimateGate shenanigans.

What happens when you run the Climate Models?

There's been a lot of analysis of the Hadley/CRU emails disclosed in the data leak. There's been less - but very interesting indeed - analysis of the source code disclosed in the leak.

That got me wondering: what happens when you run the code? I mean, the whole IPCC Thermageddon story is based on this code, right? Running the code might be interesting.

So I ran it. "Interesting"? Boy, Howdy.

The first thing that became obvious is that this is not at all a manual process. There is a lot of operator intervention, with the program asking you for all sorts of input. So much so, in fact, that it looks like a programmer at CRU took a shot at trying to automate the process:

I'm not interested in grants, and it looks like the editor of GRL has already been properly dealt with, so I selected the first option and forged ahead.

Unfortunately, the code looks to be very fragile, with poor error handling. I'm in the middle of stack dumps, but thought that these results so far were interesting enough to post. Here's the (admittedly limited) error report that I have so far.

A picture says a thousand words

Quote of the Day, Political Mockery edition

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford declared a month or two ago that he was running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.  The nation yawned.  Yesterday he dropped out, once again to thunderous yawns.

Don Surber gets QOTD on the whole l'affair Sanford:

Don't cry for Mark, Argentina.

Snerk.

A conversation with Snippi Longstockings

LOLOLOLOL

Hahaha! pic.twitter.com/ORaCR5rqbW

— Rep. Steven Smith 🇺🇸 (@RepStevenSmith) October 12, 2019

And I love the tip of the Slouch Hat to Johnny Cash.  Good on ya, Cobber!

Hat tip: Chris Lynch.

So Bob O'Rourke says he's going to confiscate all the AR-15s

Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.  Solid plan.