The rest of it, too true. The saddest thing about someone stealing my Mac during the last summer was that I’d sold my CD player/radio/etc. machine because my music usage has changed so much.

Yep. And once again, they’ve been running into the usual “but if we make ships coming into our ports use cleaner fuel and fit themselves for the (free!) dockside power we provide, they’ll go somewhere else” arguments.

To which there are two useful responses:

First, what LA adopts this year, everyone else will adopt in the near future (especially once they figure out that, because of LA’s regs, many ships are already fitted with dual-fuel systems and dockside power plugs).

And, second, if they insist on polluting the air and giving our citizens cancer, then fuck ‘em, let ‘em take their toxic evil don’t-give-a-shit business somewhere else.

We have a long history of chasing people who don’t care about being good corporate citizens out of our city, and replacing them with people who do.

We don’t have enough room, enough road capacity, enough berths, enough housing, and so on for all the people who would like to be based in LA, and we’re perfectly happy to arrange things so the less conscientious businesses go elsewhere.

It’s actually a fairly useful sorting device.

Since about 1996 and ODB II cars emit remarkably little pollution. In Fact, for the past decade the number one source of smog and pollution in Los Angeles has actually been the Port of LA.

LA has attempted to ban the burning of “bunker oil” by ships coming into port, and is currently requiring docked ships to run of grid power rather than on board generators.

And waiting 6 weeks plus for your beloved music to arrive from the record and tape club…I still like checking the mail daily, but now you usually get stuff in the same week.

I’m waiting with baited breath for WI to go smoke free. And I know it will diminish business in most of the places I go. It’s a major improvement to me, but not without a price.

I wonder how many people who whine about smokers polluting their air drive cars that pollute, use electricity generated by polluting power stations, and do other things that pollute my environment.

That’s a reasonable point, and as soon as we replace the energy infrastructure and the transit infrastructure I’ll happily take part in ostracizing anybody still running coal power plants or driving internal combustion vehicles.

Given the current political-economic structure, I’ll expect those things to happen only about 50 years after it would have been smart to do so.

As to vinyl vs. CDs: you need pimp gear to hear the difference. I lost my wife while shoping at Magnolia HiFi (when it was called that and not owned by those asshats at Best Buy) only to find her drooling in the high end audio room listening to Abbey Road on vinyl through speakers that cost as much as our house at the time. It was awesome.

Thankfully technology moves forward and the remastered discs sound just as good, on gear that I didn’t have to sell a liver to afford.

So, lossless rips and media servers FTMFW.

Speaking as one of those San Diegans who bitched about the smog, we only bitched because it was LA’s smog, not our own. ;)

Hah. I didn’t realize anyone as far away as San Diego used that excuse. :-)

That’s funny.

I once heard someone claim that LA’s smog extended all the way up to Big Sur, where he’d once seen a thick brown bank of haze hugging the ocean surface off the coast.

Turned out that what he had seen was actually the smoke plume from a large inland wildfire nowhere near LA, as it cooled and settled over the ocean.

LA is a warm climate where a near-coast series of tall mountain ranges (mostly uplifted by our friend the San Andreas Fault and its associates) trap the warm, moist, foggy marine layer when low-level onshore flow pushes it inland – which it frequently does, due to the Catalina Eddy, a persistent vortex caused by the bend in the coastline.

That cool, moist marine layer tames the summer heat, producing the mild summer climate for which LA is famed – and moderates the winter cold, producing the pleasant, frost-free winters, likewise.

But as B. Durbin notes above, that moist marine air produces a thermal inversion that caps the basin formed by the coastal mountains, trapping pollutants beneath it, especially in the summer.

LA’s worst smogs, at the peak of the mid-50s post-war building boom, were produced both by the proliferation of automobiles, and by the fact that the city had no municipal trash collection, so everyone burned their trash in backyard incinerators.

The banning of backyard incinerators in 1957 was the first step on the long road of air quality regulation that has made such a difference.

When I moved to LA in the late ’70s, about one out of every three days was a Stage I or Stage II smog alert. More than a hundred of the former, and twenty-some of the latter in one year.

These days, we haven’t had any Stage II alerts in many years, and Stage I alerts are rare – some years have a couple, while others have none, depending on the weather.

(LA itself has never had an official Stage III alert, because the three-stage system was implemented after the worst of the ’50s smog attacks – which would have qualified. The last Stage III alert in the US was in 1974, in the Upland area of the Inland Empire near San Bernardino.)

These days, the worst smog in Southern California isn’t in LA – it’s in the Santa Clarita and San Bernardino Valleys.

Both those areas have a long history of blaming their smog on LA. Now that LA has cleaned up its act, it’s become apparent that most of their smog is home-grown, not “blown in from LA”, and they’re starting to take it more seriously.

But they still have quite a way to go to catch up with the progress LA has made.

(And of course their smog gets reported as “LA-area smog” by the national media, so our present-day reputation exceeds our actual reality.)