I'm reading (on the twitter) that there's a lot of empty seats.
Of course, everybody is crowded together to be closer to the stage. But the upper deck is mostly empty.
Jammies was just telling me the same thing. That's a relief. On so many levels.
My husband signed us up for two seats so some those were ours.
It was apparently an effort by left wingers to reduce the crowd.
I avoid signing up for things like whatever thing we're using instead of the plague but he thought it was worth being on the list. Also the GOP think I'm a republican in Arizona anyway so I don't want to encourage them.
The video panorama is really something. That is not a lot of people.
It's not a lot of people for a rally, but it's still a lot for a pandemic, no?
Right, but probably almost none of them are from Pittsburgh.
Maybe the whole covid aftermath of the rally will just fizzle out.
Am I to understand that democrats gave money to Trump in an effort to stop republican voters from killing themselves?
I don't think anyone gave money. The tickets were free.
They did allow the Trump campaign to harvest their email addresses, but at most all that means is they'll get some annoying email solicitations over the next few months.
over the next few months remainder of their natural lives
Hydrohubby, I thank you for your service.
I was going to say it would only be for the rest of Trump's natural life, but on reflection the grifting will certainly go on after he dies.
I have no idea whether it's legit, but I've seen a screenshot of a text conversation with someone who is friends with a Tulsa stagehand union member who reported the indoor head count at 6611. Just from looking at the empty space, I can't imagine there more than 10000.
And Trump cancelled his address to the overflow crowd, because they're wasn't one. 6600 is still too many people inside without masks, but it's a lot less than they were expecting. Also, some of his logistics people tested positive.
My understanding is that a lot of tickets were bought by people on tiktok in South Korea.
"Andrew Little, the Public Information Officer for the Tulsa Fire Department, confirmed to Forbes on Sunday that a tally taken by the fire marshal clocked the turnout at just under 6,200 people, far fewer attendees than the campaign expected."
The Public Information Officer for the Tulsa Fire Department confirmed today that a tally taken by the fire marshal clocked the turnout at just under 6,200 people.
Can you even imagine the screaming tantrum his campaign staff must have endured on the plane ride back to DC?
Parscale is madly tweeting excuses. Including one picture of a a "blocked" gate ( a few black women and some people with signs it looks like). Reporters say there were several gates and in that one instance the police did ask every one to move back and 15 to 20 minutes later it was no longer "blocked." And there is photographic evidence that that is the case.
And there were far more tickets than seats given out (I think no limit) so it was always going to be first come first served. So the kpop/tiktok people probably gobbled up a lot but it should not have really had much of an effect on the actual crowd size. (It almost certainly was what led Parscale and others to keep bragging about the number of ticket "requests" (over a million I believe.)
It did yield one of the abject displays of political toadyism I've ever seen. Jeff Sessions who has been attacked relentlessly by Trump in the run up to his primary against a demented (but Trump-backed) ex-Auburn football coach tweeted thusly:
President @realDonaldTrump displayed tonight his incredible drive, understanding of the history and principles that made America great. Masterful! Unleashed! Winning message!! @JoeBiden cannot match this. Game on!
So let's see. Tulsa County has a population of 650K, and currently has 770 known active cases. So with 6K people in attendance, we could speculate that 7-10 is a reasonable lower bound of attendees who are actively shedding the virus. The daily cases chart sure does look roughly like exponential growth over the past week or two.
well, lower attendance makes the contact tracing easier.
Supposedly a lot of attendees were coming from out of town, so it could cause spread well beyond Tulsa, but I haven't seen reporting that confirms that.
There were some articles on the "deadhead" analogues who have been to dozens and come from all over. But not sure what those number are.
31. Yes, Mrs Y pointed out that Tulsa is up in the corner by the intersection of Oklahoma with Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas, so people from the surrounding countryside could have come from any of those without too much expense and effort.
Fortunately, the black helicopters of the federal police state recognize no such borders.
Less fortunately, nor do viruses; but state government policies do.
Can you even imagine the screaming tantrum his campaign staff must have endured on the plane ride back to DC?
And the airborne particulates that come with tantrums?!
Looking forward to seeing Trump declare war on BTS Army.
What healthier way to spend COVID summer than to be following Trump rallies in a VW bus?
I just plotted new COVID-19 cases in California counties by region, population-adjusted. It looks like those rising the fastest in the past few weeks are Orange County, San Diego, Inland Empire, and the Central Valley.
LA County is still by far the highest but is more level; Bay Area and Sacramento are both low and fairly flat, though a bit of increase in the last few days.
Damnit, Spike, you somehow led me to scroll through the mostly-useless Wikipedia article trying to figure out how the F-150 engine has evolved since the 1970s, because... I just have no executive function anymore at all. I don't even remember what it's like to have intellectual priorities. (Hmm, apparently I also don't remember what it's like to be able to stop routing "Rustic Bakery Organic Flatbread Bites" into my mouth.) I do remember that summers in the Arctic don't usually hit a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, though.
Getting sucked into automobile Wikipedia is the worst. Oh, lets spend 20 minutes learning about the Toyota Previa and its weird-ass mid-engine layout!
We've long wanted a hybrid minivan and apparently they've been available for years in other countries but they won't sell them in the US? It does look like they're more of a luxury or chauffeur vehicle, $75k-$175k.
You should get a '95 Toyota Previa instead. You have to put in more gas than a hybrid, but it will cost well under $75k.
I keep trying to get Chrysler to sell a two-wheel drive version of the Jeep Patriot and call it the Fair Weather Patriot.
Seriously. These lines. Previa was streets ahead of its time.
It sounds like the name of an antacid.
This one is pretty nice. That All Wheel Drive/Supercharger combination sure commands a premium, though.
FORTY-EIGHT COMMENTS AND NO ONE HAS MENTIONED MY SONG?!?
Don Williams wrote a song about Japanese minivans from the 90s?
I was thinking more Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan.
Aw, I love Don Williams. "If Hollywood doesn't need you..."
Also the first line of Good Ol Boys sure doesn't hold up well.
Speaking of the elderly, I don't like that my phone can't seem to accept that certain people only have land line phones and cannot be texted no matter how many times you ask if I want to text them why I called.
One of my brothers was a late adopter of mobile phones - this was at least 15 years ago if not more. At the time we were sharing an apartment and we had a landline. Every so often one of his friends would forget and text him and we would get a weird/comical text-to-speech voicemail.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/covid-19-sustainable-aviation/
...The COVID-19 pandemic will have significant financial implications for most communities around the world. But it is also amplifying a few truths of which we were all aware, but which we have never reacted to with the urgency they demand.
One is the truth about pollution. We now have a global opportunity to declare war on climate change and to link our efforts to sustainable growth. The onus is now on governments and market leaders in the transport sector to make the long-term plans that will prepare us for future pandemics and decide on what kind of world we want after the crisis. It is about making the right progressive choices to stimulate the economy....Aeroplanes are not necessarily the best option, so why not take the opportunity to launch and accelerate green infrastructure packages that set targets for emission-free electric connections across the world? Let's get the tenders in for high-speed rails or massive electric charging networks. But why stop there? What about solar cargo airships for freight or hybrid wind-electric ekranoplans for short-distance travel on water?
This is our world now. This time is our time.
Yes! Bring back dirigibles and bring on the hybrid ekranoplans!
I had thought decrease in CO2 emissions from lessened air travel since the pandemic was fairly low. Disappointingly so, but I haven't seen figures recently.
Is an electric ekranoplan even theoretically possible?
Depends on battery density/power generation efficiency, surely.
An electric aeroplane is possible, and many prototypes have flown, though the range is limited by the comparatively low energy density of batteries. Jet fuel is 43 MJ/kg. A lithium-air cell is 9 MJ/kg - so a fifth of the usable energy per unit weight.
But!
One study found that an ekranoplan uses 20% of the fuel of a conventional aircraft to travel the same distance (albeit much more slowly) so an electric ekranoplan would have the same percentage of gross weight devoted to fuel as a conventional kerosene-burning aeroplane.
This NASA study https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/IFAR_AeroAcademy_2014.pdf suggested the optimum ekranoplan would have a take-off weight of 675t of which 250t would be fuel. But that's for something huge crossing oceanic distances at high speed. And this ekranoplan yacht claims that 40t of fuel (out of a total TOW of 140t) will give it 4000km range at 350 km/h. https://www.yachtboutique.com/Designers/Ekranoplan/Ekranoplan.htm
So, taking the yacht, if you replaced all that fuel with batteries, you'd have something that could go 800 km. Fill the 20t "cargo capacity" with batteries too and you'd have another 400km.
But these are all going really, really fast - hundreds of miles an hour. If you think of an ekranoplan not as "slow aeroplane" but "fast ship" and design for a cruising speed of a more reasonable 80 kts, you get something like the AirFish 8:http://www.wigetworks.com/w-w/wp-content/uploads/WW-AF8-Brochure.pdf
200 kg of fuel, and a total payload of 1000 kg, for a range of 300 miles. If you packed it out with batteries, you could match that range and speed on electric (at the expense of having no usable payload).
Or you could go with an electric ekranotrain.
A TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL, HURRAH!
60. That would effectively be maglev, n'est-ce-pas?
Except without the maglev bit - it levitates thanks to good old fashioned wings. You could have an electric ground-effect vehicle that drew its power from a fixed overhead line - and indeed this has worked, at least in model form.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/ground-effect-robot-could-be-key-to-future-high-speed-trains
https://web.archive.org/web/20070501083246/http://www.ifs.tohoku.ac.jp/kohama-lab/aerotrain_outline-e.html
They call it the AeroTrain which to me is a disgraceful waste of the opportunity to call it the EKRANOTRAM.
Ground effect plane tethered to a rail that supplies electricity.
That level of pwnage is how you know I'm a dirigible man at heart.
Ekranoplans are a lot like spacecraft in the sense of being entirely fantastic in every way and also in the sense of needing two different sorts of propulsion; you need a lot of kick to unstick them from the water, but once they're up in ground-effect flight you can manage with a much smaller engine at high efficiency. The Caspian Sea Monster had eight engines, all of which were needed on takeoff, but when it was up it could shut down six of them. Alternatively having a very large tug ekranoplan tow you along until you unstick, and then detach, would seem like a good option (analogous to the Shorts Mercury-Maia Composite, which addressed the problem that you could put enough fuel on an aircraft for it to fly from England to South Africa and it would still be able to stay up but it wouldn't be able to get up in the first place).
I'm a dirigible man at heart.
Ekranoplan in the streets, dirigible in the sheets.
A tug, yes. Or some kind of ekranoplan-catapult. And, to accommodate the longer-distance vehicles, an ekranoplan-atlatl.
A man, an ekranoplan-atlatl, a canal - Catalan Ponarke Nanama. Well, more or less.
They'd have to really increase the fines for improper use of the emergency brake.
You know how you watch TV these days and your brain hiccups when people hug without wearing masks, or violate other social distancing norms
I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be reflexively stepping into the street to get away from people passing on the sidewalk for the rest of my life.