Facebook Drones circling the Skies above?

Facebook in talks with drone maker Titan Aerospace about possible acquisition, report says

By Trevor Mogg

Published March 04, 2014

Digital Trends

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  Titan Aerospace

Facebook is reportedly in talks with drone maker Titan Aerospace, with those familiar with the situation suggesting the social networking giant could be preparing to offer up to $60 million for the company.

You might be wondering why on earth Facebook would have any interest in a drone manufacturer; after all, it’s not in the business of delivering pizza or beer – or any other goodies for that matter – to its many users.

Affordable Internet accessThe fact is, Titan Aerospace can help Mark Zuckerberg with his dream of bringing affordable Internet access to everyone on the planet, with the near-orbital, solar-powered pilotless flying machines helping to provide that access. The New Mexico-based company already has experience of such work with the Internet Africa Project, which is helping to provide Internet access to previously isolated populations across the continent.

Its solar-powered drones, which are capable of staying airborne for as long as five years at a time, could be used “to blanket parts of the world without Internet access, beginning with Africa,” TechCrunch reported Monday night.

According to an unnamed source, Titan Aerospace would start off by building 11,000 ‘Solara 60′ drones to help with Facebook’s plan.

The so-called ‘atmospheric satellites,’ which would fly at a height of around 12.5 miles (20 km), are capable of carrying out many of the functions of higher-placed orbital satellites but are cheaper and more versatile, according to TechCrunch.

The Facebook boss talked about his plan to bring Internet access to all during a speech delivered at MWC in Barcelona last week.

“Most of the world don’t have any Internet access at all,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that to bring global connectivity would require “dramatic changes” in the tech industry.

As a major backer of the Internet.org initiative, Facebook has already teamed up with a number of big firms – Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung among them – as part of a long-term effort to reduce the cost of Internet access around the world. Its acquisition of Titan Aerospace would obviously fit with this initiative.

Revenue boostMark Little, principal analyst at tech consultancy firm Ovum, told the BBC recently that putting money into emerging markets would go toward helping to boost advertising income for the social networking company in the future.

He added that the current situation (ie. limited Internet connectivity around the world), combined with the dominance of regional social networks, both hinder Facebook’s global expansion plans. If Mark Zuckerberg can “make it easier for the world to share information,” Little said, then “the more ads Facebook can sell.”

Of course, much of Little’s thoughts on the subject can be applied to Google’s Project Loon initiative, too, which also has the goal to bring affordable Internet access to various parts of the world, as well as to isolated areas.

VIDEO: The theft of private property in Alameda County

This powerful 5 minute video about Measure D in Alameda County sums the plight of ALL homeowners in the Bay Area under the ABAG mandates.  While the video specifically speaks of what is being done to ranchers,  essentially each homeowner in Marinwood-Lucas Valley is subject to the same authoritarian mandates by the unelected regional body, Association of Bay Area Governments.  

We are under a serious attack of our private property rights which will permanently alter our concept of property ownership and local democracy.  Check out other postings under ABAG for a reference.

While we are fighting the location of 71% of all affordable housing in Unincorporated Marin within our 5.78 square neighborhood,  this is only the beginning.  In the Marinwood Priority Development Area for Urbanization, even more high density 30 unit per acre housing is expected.

This must not stand. 

The people of Marinwood-Lucas Valley will not be fooled.

The State wants to increase your cost of Gas to pay for trains and low income apartments

Editor's Note: Crony Developers are lining up for their ladle full of government freebies.  There are literally 200 billion dollars worth of contracts and subsidies PLUS Cap and Trade funds.  Never before has their been such a wholesale fleecing of the taxpayers.  Of course it is all wrapped up in a pretty package of "environment, economy and "equity" but it boils down to corporate welfare for the politically connected developers.  We will not let this happen in Marin. We will Save Marin Again!

State: Affordable housing at issue in cap-and-trade talks

By Matthew Artz Oakland Tribune

Posted:   05/16/2014 06:35:09 AM PDT0 Comments | Updated:   14 days ago

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California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, (D-Sacramento) center, speaks during a press conference on green gas emissions at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) speaks during a press conference on green gas emissions at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

Consruction is underway as California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and others speak during a press conference on green gas emissions at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan speaks during a press conference on green gas emissions at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

See additional gallery images here.

California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) speaks during a press conference on green gas emissions at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

OAKLAND -- With billions of dollars forecast to flow into state coffers under a landmark clean air act, there is a battle underway over how to allocate the money.

State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, was in Oakland on Thursday promoting his plan that includes setting aside one-fifth of the funds for affordable housing construction near transit hubs.

Steinberg's plan differs from a proposal laid out earlier this year by Gov. Jerry Brown, who suggested spending more on high-speed rail and didn't include money for transit-oriented affordable housing development.

Starting next year, the state's cap-and-trade program for major polluters will be expanded to include gasoline producers. That is expected to increase the price of gas by about 12 cents a gallon. But the requirement for the industry to buy carbon credits from the state is expected to produce more than $1 billion next year for clean air programs. The cap-and-trade law is expected to generate up to $5 billion a year by the end of the decade.

Steinberg, who will be termed out this year, said it was important to specify funding percentages for various programs so politicians and developers can plan projects knowing exactly how much money will be available. "This is the antidote to the feeding frenzy," he said at a rally at the MacArthur BART station, where an affordable housing project is being constructed in the station's parking lot.

The BART project was subsidized with state redevelopment dollars, but with redevelopment eliminated, transportation and affordable housing advocates are backing Steinberg's proposal to set aside 20 percent of the cap-and-trade funds for transit-oriented affordable housing.

"With this proposal, we can begin to have true affordability. That means low-cost transportation right near affordable housing," said Stuart Cohen of transit advocacy group TransForm.

On Thursday, the organization released a study backed by the Ford Foundation that showed poorer people living within a quarter-mile of transit drove about half as often and owned less than half as many cars as wealthier people living the same distance from transit.

While Steinberg is planning to tinker with his plan to address issues faced in rural communities, the key negotiations are expected to be with the governor, who proposed allocating one-third of the funds for the state's high-speed rail program. Steinberg has proposed a 20 percent allocation.

Jim Evans, a spokesman for Brown, wrote that "the administration looks forward to working with the legislature on an overall cap-and-trade funding plan."
Steinberg said of the upcoming negotiations, "There is give and take. I think we'll do fine with the governor."

 

ABAG wants to impose more draconian laws to get you to take mass transit and live in apartments

The regional agencies of ABAG, MTC and others threaten to destroy
livable Marin to create their Smart Growth Urban Utopian Cities. 

Editor's Note: One of the lies told to citizens before Plan Bay Area was approved, was that we must build more "transit oriented development" i.e. big box apartments next to the bus stop or Smart train to reduce our Green House Gases (GHG) to 1990 levels. Thanks to efficient cars like the Prius, we have  already achieved this goal WITHOUT disruption of our cities and towns.  But, the social engineers at ABAG and MTC need to justify their plan and so now are creating whole new standards for the Bay Area that is 20% below the rest of California.  (They do know that we share the same atmosphere with the rest of the world, right? This is as stupid as trying to lower the ocean with a teacup). Everyone will be forced to pay more for food, clothing, transportation, housing.  Some crony capitalists, bureaucrats and politicians will get rich and more powerful at the expense of your freedom. We must Save Marin.

From ABAG website

Regional Climate Event explores local approaches to mitigation, adaptation

June 3, 2014

 

California has until 2050 to cut its GHG by 80 percent from 1990 levels, according to state law enacted in 2006, (AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act). With this goal in mind, some 150 public, private and non-profit leaders from throughout the Bay Area gathered on Tuesday, June 3 at MTC and ABAG’s Oakland offices.

The workshop included delegates from over 100 local projects representing best practices and promising initiatives for addressing climate change in each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. The three-hour program encouraged participants to consider new collaborations and partnerships that would expand on locally successful projects in each county in order to advance the shared objectives of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

“The project is about giving people hope and a giving them a sense of some really terrific work going on in the region, and to help them see that there really are things we can do [about climate change],” explained Bruce Riordan of the Bay Area Joint Policy Committee, which sponsored the event. The State of California created the Joint Policy Committee to coordinate planning efforts by ABAG, BAAQMD, BCDC and MTC. 

Keynote speaker Linda Rudolph of the Climate and Health Alliance—a national nonprofit headquartered in Oakland—emphasized that sustainable transportation projects have natural allies in the public health sector. “If we could shift from an average of four to 22 minutes of active transportation a day, we’d not only reduce GHGs by 14 percent, we’d reduce heart disease by 14 percent,” Rudolph stated. She highlighted San Mateo County’s Health Department as an outstanding example because they actively promote complete streets and affordable housing as public health priorities.

With respect to transit-oriented development, “the benefits are huge,” said fellow keynote speaker Sandi Galvez of the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative. Galvez said she was pleased that MTC planners will be looking at public health modeling with transportation and land-use planning as part of the next update to Plan Bay Area.
Other plans and ideas were explored during tabling sessions and interactive exercises. International climate expert Bill Collins of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory discussed his Climate Readiness Institute, which unites top researchers and local practitioners to develop localized climate change models. ABAG and BCDC presented jointly on their Bay Area Housing and Community Multiple Hazards Risk Assessment, which helps jurisdictions manage housing growth in communities vulnerable to climate and seismic events. Marc Holmes of the San Francisco Bay Institute discussed research on the economic benefits of restoring the region’s tidal marshes, which prevent floods as effectively as levees and would cost half as much.

Summarizing recent progress in the area of climate change mitigation and adaptation, Riordan said he felt “the kind of momentum that maybe we haven’t had since 2006,” when California passed its Global Warming Solutions Act. As a sign of this progress, “GHGs from transportation are going down despite the growth in population and in the economy,” he reported.

Friday Night Music: The Zombies Mix

Kotkin: The War Against Suburbia

The War Against Suburbia


By Joel KotkinThursday, January 21, 2010


Filed under: Public Square, Culture, Government & Politics

A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography, suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime.




A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography, suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime that many perceive threatens their way of life, values, and economic future. Scott Brown’s huge upset victory by 5 percent in Massachusetts, which supported Obama by 26 percentage points in 2008, largely was propelled by a wave of support from middle-income suburbs all around Boston. The contrast with 2008 could not be plainer.

Browns’s triumph followed similar wins by Republican gubernatorial contenders last November in Virginia and New Jersey. In those races suburban voters in places like Middlesex County, New Jersey and Loudoun County, Virginia—which had support President Obama just a year earlier—deserted the Democats in droves. Also in November, voters in Nassau County, New York upset Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, an attractive Democrat who had carefully cultivated suburban voter.

The lesson here is that political movements ignore suburbanites at their peril. For the better part of a century, Americans have been voting with their feet, moving inexorably away from the central cities and towards the suburban periphery. Today a solid majority of Americans live in suburbs and exurbs, more than countryside residents and urbanites combined.

The suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington.

As a result, suburban voters have become the critical determinants of our national politics, culture, and economy. The rise of the Republican majority after 1966 was largely a suburban phenomenon. When Democrats have resurged—as they did under Bill Clinton and again in 2006 and 2008—it was when they came close to splitting the suburban vote.

Mark Levin on Plan Bay Area, California and the War on Suburbia

Ralph Nader Q&A: How Progressives and Libertarians Are Taking on Corrupt Dems and Reps.

SMART or not? Will SMART train be more efficient than this Portland Light Rail line?

Light Rail: Worse Than Buses?

 

Light Rail: Worse Than Buses?

By Michael Cipriano

"High-cost, low-capacity." That's how Randal O'Toole, a public-policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, describes the country's newest light-rail transportation systems in a new paper.
Is it really that bad? We recently took a few minutes to speak with O'Toole about his analysis. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity:

Cities around the world have built railroads as a remedy to traffic congestion. You pointed out there are two different types of rails: light rail and heavy rail. Can you explain the difference?

Light rails often travel on city streets at the ground level with cars and pedestrians. They actually end up often creating more traffic congestion. Heavy rails are completely separated from streets, either elevated or subterranean subways. So it potentially could relieve congestion, but only if ridership is very high. A lot of recent heavy-rail lines, such as ones in Baltimore, Miami, and Los Angeles, have very low ridership and have done nothing about congestion. All they have done is spend a lot of money.

Why are light rails appealing to cities? What are the drawbacks?
Light rails first became popular in the 1980s, when San Diego built a light-rail line that was really inexpensive. It cost less than $10 million a mile. And at that time, heavy-rail subways and elevateds were costing over $100 million a mile. Adjusted for inflation, the San Diego line was $17 million a mile in today's dollars. The problem is that since 1981 when the San Diego line was built -- because of federal requirements and because of general pork-barrel considerations – light-rail lines have become gold-plated. The average light-rail line today costs $110 million a mile. The least expensive one is $51 million a mile, three times as expensive as the San Diego line. There is even one line that is costing well over $600 million a mile for a three-mile line. And it won't be able to carry any more people than the $17 million-a-mile San Diego line. So we are spending a huge amount of money and getting very little capacity in exchange.

You say that U.S. cities like Seattle and Honolulu, and a number of foreign cities such as Mumbai, India; Fortaleza, Brazil; Panama City, Panama; and other Latin American and Asian cities, are building hybrid railroads that combine the worst aspects of the two rails. What do you mean by "the worst of both"?
Heavy rail –- subways and elevateds –- cost a lot more than light rail. But they are capable of carrying a lot more people, so you have to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each. What we are seeing, however, is that cities around the world, including Honolulu and Seattle in particular in the United States, are building lines that have heavy-rail costs yet light-rail capacities. In other words, they have high costs and low capacities, which is the worst of both. It would be nice to have a low-cost, high-capacity system, but these are high-cost, low-capacity systems. Buses actually have more capacity than any light-rail line, and they especially have more capacity than these high-cost systems. So why are these cities spending huge amounts of money to get a system that has no more capacity than a bus line?

Why have cities taken these measures?
In the United States, Congress has given transit agencies a fund to tap from to build rail transit. The fund essentially works like this: The cities that come there with the most expensive plans and get there first, get the most money. So the cities that have less expensive plans get less money. So transit agencies in cities that want a lot of federal dollars come up with really expensive plans. And since the demand for transit isn't very high in cities in the United States -- outside of New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. -- there is no need to build a high-capacity system, so you might as well build a low-capacity system. But since your goal is to spend as much money as possible, build a high-cost low-capacity system. And we just see this over and over again. Cities and transit agencies are trying to get as much money out of the federal government as possible, ignoring the fact that taxpayers are having to pay close to half the cost of construction and all the future maintenance costs and operating costs of these systems.

Double-decker buses have an average transit capacity of more than twice that of eleven-car New York City heavy-rail trains. You also mention they can transport more people more comfortably to their destination. Why do cities continue to insist on building railroads?
Buses have huge advantages. They can go anywhere the streets go, as rails can only go where we spend a lot of money building rail lines. Buses are safer than light rail. They have about the same safety record as heavy rail. On a full train, more than half the people are standing, whereas on a full bus, almost 80 percent of the people are comfortably seated. We can also put Wi-Fi, power ports, and other comforts in buses to make them even more attractive. And yet, buses are a commodity. It is like wheat. You buy flour and you don't really care whether it is Gold Medal flour, or generic brand flour, or King Arthur flour, or whatever. Buses are a commodity. Every single train is unique. Every single rail-transit line is one that requires huge amounts of spending on engineering, design, construction of railcars, almost all of which are unique to each system. So you end up spending lots and lots of money, enriching lots and lots of contractors who then take their riches and then make campaign contributions to lots and lots of politicians. So rail has this huge political advantage because it is expensive. Because it is all one-off rather than a commodity like buses.

Rail advocates tend to leave out the hidden costs of maintaining railroads over the years. Why are the maintenance costs so high?
Like anything, rails wear out. They have a lifespan of about 30 years. Not just the rails, but the stations, the power-supply systems, the overhead lines, the railcars. Everything wears out after about 30 years. People are familiar with the Washington, D.C., Metro system, which was such a beautiful system when it was first opened. Today, more than 30 years after it first opened, it is rapidly deteriorating. You have problems on an almost weekly basis when sometimes three lines are shut down. The reason is that about every 30 years you have to go back and completely rebuild everything at just about the same cost you spent building it in the first place.
And nobody ever budgets for this. The Washington Metro system has no money for it. The Boston T has no money to rehabilitate their system. The Chicago Transit Authority is on the verge of collapse. All of these systems -- systems that are more than 30 years old -- are having serious problems. Portland's system is just about 30 years old, and it is starting to have problems breaking down and having maintenance. The Federal Transit Administration says America's rail-transit systems have a $60 billion maintenance backlog, and it is growing because they are spending less money on maintenance than is needed to keep them in their current state of repair. When transit advocates say "Let's build a new rail line," they never mention this cost. In fact, they will sometimes even say, "Once you build a rail line, it is there forever, for 100 years or more," without mentioning that in 100 years you are going to have to rebuild it three times at an enormous cost. So it is just part of the big lie of rail transit being somehow more efficient despite the fact that it costs more.

Who are the winners and losers of the hybrid rail trend?
Well the big winners are consulting and design firms -- like Parsons Brinckerhoff and HDR -- that design these systems and sometimes get the contracts to build these systems. And then there are the construction companies such Kiewit Construction and the railcar manufacturers such as Siemens, which has been fined $1 billion for bribing governments around the world to buy their systems. They were fined by the German government. There are other railcar manufacturers like Bombardier, and Oregon Iron Works, which is manufacturing streetcars at twice the cost of their European competition so that we can buy American. All of these are winners.
Taxpayers are losers. Transit riders end up losing because unless you are lucky enough to be on one of the rail lines, probably they are going to cut your bus service in order to pay for the rail transit. Drivers end up losing because you end up having more congestion, either because the light rail is getting in your way, or because they spend a lot of money on a heavy rail line that nobody is riding instead of money that actually would have relieved congestion doing things like traffic signal synchronization.
So really, everybody loses except for the contractors who build the systems.

What Should Come After Plan Bay Area? by Richard Hall

What Should Come After Plan Bay Area?

by Richard Hall | Jun 11, 2014 | ABAG, emissions, Future, PDA, Plan Bay Area, Solutions, Transit | 0 comments

     

Plan Bay Area hit really stiff resistance – the opposition is now mobilized and highly organized – and primed and ready for Plan Bay Area 2.0. Some might argue that some kind of revolution is needed; instead I strongly suggest ABAG and MTC incorporate new thinking into future regional transportation plans:

1) Build Bridges & Involve Opponents
ABAG and MTC need to build bridges and connections with opposition leaders – to commence genuine engagement that never occurred with Plan Bay Area 1.0.
Plan Bay Area 2.0 admits that this was a grave mistake.  It should not repeat this same error in the latest version of the Plan.

2) Amend Senate Bill 375 so it does not Selectively Reduce Emissions for Cars
Senate Bill 375, a Steinberg Bill, needs to either be thrown out or amended so that instead of solely focusing on reducing the emissions of cars and light trucks, it reduces emissions from all forms of transportation. Since 2010, market forces, aided by government regulations, have resulted in the sharp decline of car emissions. Car emissions in Marin are now far lower than ferries and lower than buses. Given likely SMART train ridership the train will likely achieve have lower passenger emissions than cars.


3) Allow Residents to Vote for their ABAG Representatives
There is insufficient accountability for ABAG representatives. ABAG representatives are effectively distanced from their electorates. In Marin there are three seats on ABAG (of 110). More populous areas are better represented, so if Marin and other suburban and rural areas have different needs, representatives from more urban constituencies typically trump them.
Bay area residents should be able to vote for their ABAG representatives. The choices offered might still be limited to those already serving on city councils or county boards of supervisors, but all residents should have a say in this. ABAG should divide its decisions into three subgroups representing urban, suburban and rural areas. Otherwise the representatives of urban residents will dominate decisions.
However if such voting is instituted it is vital that district boundaries respect urban boundaries. For instance Marin should not be combined into a district like San Francisco with a system based on one representative for say every million residents.
Likewise Marin should not be combined with Sonoma which appears to have a massive appetite for growth (there are 24,010 new housing units in Sonoma County SMART Train station area plans) and that got us into the economically burdening, traffic congesting, greenhouse gas increasing mess that is the SMART train.

4) Review the Role of ABAG & MTC Committees

MTC and ABAG committees wield immense, misproportionate influence

 

ABAG General Assembly representatives have relatively little influence on the final product. Typically they attend an annual budget rubber-stamping exercise or endorsement of a near finalized plan, rejection of which by them would create challenges such as missing mandated deadlines or exceeding budgets. Beyond this, they have little influence. The real challenge is that members of ABAG and MTC committees, especially the executive committee, have disproportionately large influence – and this is where the representation of suburban counties and small towns can be squelched.

A good way to solve this would be for the ABAG General Assembly representatives to perform the work of the ABAG executive committee.

Marin Supervisor Steve Kinsey is in a very safe seat.  He serves on highly influential MTC committees. His jurisdiction, Marin District 4 is perhaps one of the lowest electorate populations of any supervisor in the Bay Area.  It is a highly gerrymandered district with tentacles stretching into Corte Madera, Larkspur, San Quentin and small parts of San Rafael. He won his seat with just 4,739 votes in his most recent 2012 victory – equivalent to the votes needed for election to a mid-sized town council.

Kinsey’s jurisdiction is practically insulated from Plan Bay Area as it is almost entirely off limits for development. While his district is insulated from growth Kinsey serves on multiple MTC and ABAG boards that serve to set policy that directs where growth should occur. No one in Marin, bar the small number living in West Marin who are insulated from overdevelopment, can vote Kinsey out. In his district Kinsey can appear a saint – where existing land protection legislation prevent growth from even being considered. 

Article continued HERE

Free Dive in the Bahamas

NARCOSE from Les films engloutis on Vimeo.