As someone who lives in Marin I’m not sure where you got this idea. Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.
They probably paid less than 300k for their home.
64.1% of those in the county 16 or older are in the labor force. Most people living in Marin County are not retired.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/marincountycali...
Which is related, but not totally, to who lives there.
"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
It's weird that none of the 'experts' in the news could figure this out and we've gone to blaming random homeowners, electric lines, 5G and everything else in this story without this information even coming up.
I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.
Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools
Private for-profit schools can use their money to get political influence and reduce public school funding in order to further its economic advantage.
But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.
> We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe
> The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.
> Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.
> Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology.If this is the study I'm thinking of, it's suspect for 3 reasons.
1. First off, the study didn't test against 5G. It used 2G and 3G emissions. Even if you believe the study, it doesn't make sense to use it as a reason to stick with 3G instead of 5G.
2. The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested? And only the males of that species? Sidenote- the mice were actually exposed to more energy than the rats
3. Even though the male rats exposed to 2G and 3G were more likely to get cancer, they also lived longer than unexposed rats. Male rats exposed to 3G lived nearly 10% longer than ones that weren't. If this life extending capability also applies to 5G signals, we should be accelerating 5G deployment.
That's explained pretty well by this -
A rebuttal to that article appears in the same publication, and adroitly takes apart it's claims: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
https://www.troyhunt.com/lets-stop-the-5g-hysteria-understan...
I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.
2. please try to explain the security issues that 5G presents that aren't present in 4G, 3G, etc.
3. a lack of information is not an excuse to promote doubt and misinformation. part of the reason we haven't been able to measure the long-term effects of cellular radiation is that it takes time to run those studies. please stop promoting lies and undermining trust in the systems that help manage our society
In response to #3, I have not posted any lies, and anything that disagrees with your narrative is not automatically FUD. There are serious doubts of 5G on many fronts by many experts, and these doubts should be discussed. However, as I've noticed here, there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber. Anything that's not in-group is not allowed, as we see here, where an expert has a serious concern about untested technologies. I wish we were able to have an honest conversation about this.
> It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Why not? When we moved from 3G to 4G I felt like it was kind of useless, but now that I have it I definitely enjoy all the things that become possible with it (lower latency everything, mostly). It was the same way moving from ISDN to cable. It's never bad to have better stuff - you'll find a use for it even if you don't have one now.
> can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G
Frankly the only real and reasonable concern to have is that there are very few engineers that roll out 5G networks that aren't Chinese. I'm not opposed to China, but I am opposed to a country's entire infrastructure being built and maintained by another country (that may want to use that to exert political pressure some day).
> there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber
In this case I really don't think it's that, it's mostly that you posted information that's just wrong and then you retreated to a (frankly lazy) defense as to why you're spreading misinformation. It makes you come off as the kind of person that's really unpleasant to talk to, because the lies tend to be so sticky and pervasive. It's exhausting to have to revisit every component of what you know just because someone else couldn't be bothered to figure it out for themselves.
However, I do think there is an echo chamber here, and I think that anything that cautions against the cavalier use of untested technology is not permitted, which I think is very dangerous.
What you think is a 'lazy defense' is really just a guy trying to subdue what he could already recognize as a geyser of vitriolic, and frankly wrong, comments. But, hey, this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact, and no criticism at all of 5G is allowed.
I'm going to stop commenting now.
You post a bunch of cherry-picked nonfactual stuff about 5G and then complain that HN doesn't have enough fact-based content?
It has no scientific basis and is not a recognized medical condition.
https://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/
High levels of RF exposure can of course do damage, in the form of burns. Any seasoned amateur radio operator at some point in the progression of their hobby can surely attest to the pain of being "bitten" by an energized RF cable.
But trying to promote the idea that cellphones are dangerous is just scaremongering. You'll absorb more energy in just a few seconds just by standing in a sunbeam.
I don't know why all the rebuttals focus on energy absorption and absence of ionizing frequencies. Seems like the mechanism of toxicity, if any, has nothing to do with that.
Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.
Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.
Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).
The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.
Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.
I appreciate that in your brief analysis you are considering several mechanisms of action besides just the heating. There may be many kinds of resonances, at molecular level, supra-molecular, etc. If very little 900/1800MHz suffices to alter BBB, then it is like a trigger to worse things, without the need of much energy. In the animals tested, the amount reaching the brain, at typical GSM levels, had already the observed result. Of course my tone is speculative here, but if the effect was confirmed in humans, it would not need much energy, and just the medium-to-weak signal reaching the brain could be worrisome.
There are not yet any studies on it, but if the effects of 5G on BBB were much stronger than with 900/1800MHz, it may also be the case that much lower signal intensities would still alter noticeably the BBB, even after the attenuation of the body traversal.
I am not a luddite at all, but I do hope that scientists working to certify that 5G is healthy are not hand-waving away the problem only by saying that the energy absorbed is too low or that the body is blocking its intensity. That would mean they did not hear at all about the effect of the mere frequency as a signal on the adhesion between cells.
I really would like to see some study elucidate the mechanism (or the absence thereof, and the flaws of the previous study), maybe some sort of resonance, soon enough to avoid to be in a situation were Wifi/4G/5G would be everywhere yet with dangerous long-term effects on health.
I'd worry more about standard heat given off by devices like laptops. The radio emissions aren't gonna do much but the 80C hot air out of the exhaust blowing into your lap is definitely going to do something. There is plenty of studies on the effects of overheating genitals in males.
But back to the topic; the energy is too small. If these radio waves had an effect, being out during a cloudy day would. The energy you get from solar radiation over a day is probably about the same.
Things like DNA breaking apart don't generally happen with this low frequency, largely because they require a bunch of energy to happen. Like ionization, even 1000W of 100MHz radio waves aren't going to make it happen. There is no amount of energy you can dump into a 100MHz transceiver that would cause ionization of atoms. It simply won't happen. Well, they will ionize but not because of the radio waves but because they've heated up enough that they're starting to undergo plasma formation. But that semantic difference is still important.
The sender in your cellphone or the energy you get from your wifi router are too small to be measured and by all acounts of physics, their effects are too small to be reasonably measured even in long term studies. We're talking literaly sub-milliwatt over your entire body. The entire body uses atleast 100Watts to stay alive. <0.1% change in thermal energy.
However, I really hope they find what was the flaw(s) that led to the surprising result on the BBB of rodents.
Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-09-lindsey-graham-never-sen...
In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on the pure science of an issue. Quoting one of them pretty much means you are trying to sway me by using their position, not research.
Also, nothing that you quoted about 5G actually says it is unsafe. Saying that 2G and 3G are unsafe and that we don't know what 4G does, and that government doesn't want to investigate 5G, and that tumors of a certain type 'may be at least partially attributable' to cell phone radiation, and all of the other slights, all of that doesn't add up to 5G is unsafe.
This is the direct rebut to the article you linked, even from the same site.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
> On the strength of epidemiological evidence, cancer fears are dangerously misguided: While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008, there has been no indication that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period—a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies.
> David Robert Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and John Maddox Prize–winning science writer. He is based at Dublin City University and is a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford. He advises, across Europe, on the public understanding of science, particularly on vaccination policy and combatting cancer misinformation. His first book, The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World, is now available from Simon & Schuster UK.To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.
To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"
Senators who don't send emails don't do so because they don't know how to send emails -- they do it because they're doing seriously fucked up stuff and don't want a paper trail. As the fictional drug kingpin Stringer Bell says in The Wire -- "is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"
That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If the climate permits them to bury, they should go for it.
I grew up in an old (for the US), hilly east coast city and nothing was underground. Because it wasn't very dense and didn't have gridded neighborhoods, it would have been quite expensive to run utilities underground. I subsequently moved to a newer part of a different city and all the new construction had underground utilities. It still doesn't prevent outages at the substation or high voltage transfer line layers.
Power outages are a once ever few years or more thing.
For a few years I lived in a neighborhood that had above-ground lines, but further down the street they were below ground because that neighborhood was significantly richer. Our power went out fairly frequently. The neighbors told me it was because of the transition from below ground to above ground, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if NIMBYism kept older equipment in service.
I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D
I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.
Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.
All of those things were super solid improvements though.
Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.
Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.
I take it you've never been to Japan
Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.
I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.
I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.
There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.
“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”
There's an effort to underground the utilities near Foothill College by tapping into Santa Clara County Fire's funds for improved fire safety, since they're allowed to use these funds in that specific location.
A simplistic napkin math computation says that the cost delta in electricity between what Santa Clara pays and what PG&E customers pay, times the amount of electricity that LAH residents consume would pay for the entire undergrounding in 5-6 years.
So to my mind, it seems like a simple argument in favor of a municipal power utility that charges PG&E rates until it pays off its infrastructure, and then charges a more reasonable rate thereafter. Of course this assumes that LAH could achieve Santa Clara levels of cost efficiency, but it doesn't seem crazy either.
Too bad the deadline has passed for nomination for LAH Town Council. You should run next time ;)
More likely, though, is that smaller and newer utilities are likely to be more nimble than the big behemoth that has lots of tech debt and internal and external bureaucracy.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/how-rates-w...
Then again, maybe it's the same demand for power and independence that we are seeing with "Karens", masks, protests, Confederate statues, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, etc. As individuals feel more powerless, they will almost certainly lash out at anything they can, including local utilities disrupting their life/convenience.
I think it was worth it. But there are crankypants types that hate any change because it's change.
Not all locations are amenable to underground cables.
Here is a white paper that lays out all the tradeoffs and includes some costs. New construction costs can differ between overhead and underground by 2-10x. Conversion costs aren't negligible either. https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...
Where I live, 99.9% of power is delivered via underground cables, I get power outages like once every 5 years. Brownouts are more often but usually not related to cable issues. America needs to catch up to the rest of the world there.
It is complicated, as are most things.
The actual cost of construction and maintenance are going to vary from place to base based on geology, existing infrastructure, weather, labor costs, regulatory oversight, cost of capitol, etc. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
That's incomprehensible to me... and then these same people complain about outages? Wow.
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/01/08/a-third-manhattan-bea...