Canadians will soon have a zippy new way to get around—if TransPod has anything to say about it, that is. The Canadian start-up recently unveiled a hybrid between an aircraft and a train that it claims will transform travel in the Great White North. The fully electric FluxJet will be able to soar at more than 621 mph sans emissions. For comparison, that’s a little quicker than the average private jet or about three times faster than a high-speed train.
The plane without wings, as the company calls it, is based on a new field of physics called “veillance flux” and features an innovative “contactless power transmission.” It is also equipped with aerodynamic and propulsion systems designed specifically to reduce friction. Essentially, a vacuum tube setup allows the magnetically levitated pods to travel at a faster speed than trains, cars and jets. The project if it is approved and funded is expected to create up to 140,000 jobs and add $19.2 billion to Canada’s GDP throughout construction. It will also reduce CO2 emissions by about 636,000 tonnes per year.
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Earlier this week I reported that two referendums may be kept of the ballot in November because of some spacing issues on the petitions that were signed by over 700,000 Michigan citizens. Today Bridge Magazine wrote of good piece about the issue. Here are excerpts.
An abortion rights petition signed by more than 735,000 Michigan voters could be kept off the Nov. 8 ballot because of what opponents say are “60 missing spaces between what were formerly words.”
Welcome to the great “kerning” debate of 2022, the biggest fight over a seemingly tiny petition issue since a font size challenge in 2012 nearly derailed an eventually successful push to repeal the state’s emergency manager law.
The stakes were big then, and they’re bigger now after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade.
While several words appeared to be merged together on the petition, Bridge Michigan was able to detect clear spaces on Thursday by copy-and-pasting the text into various word processing programs.
The apparent issue was introduced when organizers removed an extra “the” from the petition before circulating it, as requested by canvassers in March. The revision process somehow created “60 missing spaces between what were formerly words,” according to Kimberly Walcott, a printer who explained her findings in an affidavit that opposition attorneys presented to canvassers. Walcott said she arrived at her conclusion by comparing an earlier version of the petition to the circulated version “by means of a high resolution scan.”
But an attorney for Reproductive Freedom for All contends there are still spaces between the words. To the extent they are hard to detect, that’s because a word space setting in Adobe InDesign software used to prepare the petition caused the words to appear to run together on the page, he said. “Spaces were not removed,” attorney Steve Liedel told Bridge on Thursday. “It’s clear that there is spacing and that there is variation in word spacing in those lines.”
In Wednesday arguments, Liedel told canvassers they could more easily identify the spaces by copying and pasting the text of the proposal into other software. He’s not wrong: Bridge Michigan reporters requested a copy of the March 30 petition from Liedel and were able to detect clear spaces when pasting the text into Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Mac TextEdit.
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Former Attorney General William Barr appeared on Fox News on Friday to say there is no “legitimate reason” for classified documents to have been at Mar-a-Lago and cast doubt in the idea that they had somehow been declassified. Here is what he had to say.
“No. I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they should have been — could be taken out of government, away from the government if they are classified. I, frankly, am skeptical of the claim that [Trump] declassified everything,” “Because frankly, I think it’s highly improbable, and second, if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse and that shows such recklessness, it’s almost worse than taking the documents. Let me just say, I think the driver on this from the beginning was loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this [raid] was unprecedented — well, it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay. And how long is the government going to try to get that back? They jawboned for a year, they were deceived on the voluntary actions taken, they went and got a subpoena, they were deceived on that they feel, and the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around. And so how long, you know, how long do they wait?”
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Elections Matter. Pray for peace and tolerance. What are you doing to stop the violence and mass killings?
Orchid of the Day: The match tonight between Serena Williams and Ila Tomjanovich. Regardless of the outcome, it has been a great match as it heads into the third set after two tie-breakers in the first two sets.
Onion of the Day: The people who use the electric bikes on the bike trail and have no idea what they are doing and how much of a risk they create for regular cyclists.
Quote of the Day: “What people are missing is that all the other documents taken, even if they claim to be executive privilege, either belong to the government because they are government records — even if they are classified, even if they are subject to executive privilege — they still belong to the government and go to the Archives.” Former Attorney General John Barr
Question of the Day: Is college football going to a 12 team playoff system in 2025 a good thing?
Video/Image of the Day: Former Attorney General John Barr
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/politics/barr-trump-documents-fox/index.html