No. 275: Life's Too Short for a Slow Internet Connection

Good morning, everyone.

I heard a radio ad the other day (yes, I still listen to the radio) that said, "Life's too short for a slow internet connection." It's a kind of dystopian question to ponder, but it makes sense. We're all familiar by now with the inexpressible rage that comes from slow or spotty internet. It's the digital equivalent to road rage — seeing red and visualizing your computer flying through a window, its innards dashed across the concrete outside.

Louis CK had a funny bit about this on Conan a few years back wherein he declares that "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy." Speak for yourself there, bud.

All the 'woe is me' theatrics aside, in the little monologue, he talks about sitting next to a woman on a commercial flight and watching as she gets frustrated with how slow the plane's WiFi is. Louis, recounting the event, imagines what he'd say, "Give it a second... It's going to space! Can you give it a second to come back from space!?"

Yes, it's good to be grateful and humble and all that, but I'd have to disagree with Louis here. Internet should work, and yes, life is too short to deal with a shoddy internet connection. Asking as much from our the Technology Gods is not beyond the pale. It is the minimum requirement. The internet should work and be fast. Anything less than that is an affront to God and humanity.

Onward.

Today, we look at what happens when you spot a body in the Cumberland River and look at what could contribute to why things take so much longer to build.

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We released a conversation with TN-5 Congressional candidate Andy Ogles yesterday. You can listen here. It's the second in our series of conversations with TN-5 Congressional candidates in the run-up to the August 4th primary.

Thanks for reading.

↭ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Yesterday evening, a body was found and recovered from the Cumberland River.

UNDER INVESTIGATION

News 4 reports that Nashville fire officials received a report that something resembling a body was spotted floating in the river near Downtown Nashville. Metro Police have confirmed that the body had no signs of obvious trauma and the Medical Examiner will be taking over to determine the cause of death.

SADLY, THIS IS NOT AN IRREGULAR OCCURRENCE

This is an ongoing investigation and a morbid occurrence that happens more often than you might think. I, myself, have found a body floating down the Cumberland River.

THE RIVER FLOWS  FAST

Living near Downtown, the backyard of my apartment complex backs up to the Cumberland River. The current of the river is an unpredictable thing. The Cumberland generally flows from East to West starting in the Southeast corner of Kentucky, dips down into the Northern part of Middle Tennessee, then makes its way back up into Western Kentucky.

The 688-mile-long river flows pretty fast. When I reported a body floating down the river back in 2017, I called it in at dusk. The detective I talked to told me that had the body gone unnoticed overnight, it might have ended up in Kentucky by morning.

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU SPOT A BODY FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER?

Taking in a sunset over the city while relaxing at a picnic table overlooking an embankment with a 50 or so foot drop to where the Cumberland river cuts a corner and flows towards Downtown Nashville, I spotted something red floating down the river. My pair of heels sank into the ground as I followed the unidentifiable red object downriver to where the embankment meets the water’s edge. Once I realized that the red object resembled a t-shirt floating on a log, I called it in.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CALL IN A FLOATING BODY

Within minutes, multiple emergency responders showed up. At this point, it was getting dark and the spotlight of an emergency boat was searching the area. Multiple Metro police cars and an ambulance swarmed the property.

At first, there was a rush of intense protocols. It was at this moment that I started to feel guilty, thinking it a waste if the random object I called in was just a red rag. A detective asked me to go get my identification so he could ask me a few questions. By the time I came back to the scene, all the emergency crews and policemen were relaxed. Was I mistaken? Sadly, no. It was a body floating down the river. Following their protocol, until the reported “body” is determined to be either a misidentified object or Dead on Arrival (DOA), the emergency personnel remain activated as a rescue crew.

YOU HARDLY HEAR THE END OF THESE STORIES

The body was taken to the Medical Examiner to be identified. I scanned the news for weeks but, as with most of these incidents, if the case isn’t extraordinary in some way it gets lost in the shuffle. I never found out the story behind the body. Hopefully, the news brings peace to whoever was connected to him.

HEADLINES

• Tennessee Has Lowest Unfunded Pension Liabilities Per Capita In U.S. (TCN) Tennessee again had the lowest unfunded pension liabilities in the U.S., but that liability grew from $6,345.77 per capita in 2011 to $8,511.92 per capita in 2022.
• NewsChannel 5 Investigates what happened to the millions donated after the 2020 tornadoes (Channel 5) Almost immediately, millions of dollars in donations began to roll in to help the victims. But what happened to that money?
• ‘Our deputies will eliminate you’: Putnam County Sheriff issues warning to anyone threatening violence on school grounds (WKRN) Sheriff Eddie Farris issued the message in a release sent out on Monday. The statement on school safety comes less than a month after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that killed 19 students and two adults.
• EPA offering grants to rural Tennessee counties to run new, ‘clean’ school buses (WPLN) Prioritized school districts were identified as high-need, low-income, rural or, in the case of some other states, funded under the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

POLITICS

• Beth Harwell Releases Border Security Plan After Visit to U.S. Southern Border in May (Star) In a statement, Harwell said, “America’s illegal immigration crisis starts at our southern border, but it ends in our own backyards. The soaring numbers of crime, human trafficking, opioids and fentanyl are the result of reckless policies coming from the Biden administration.”
• Tennessee Supreme Court Denies Nashville’s Request To Reconsider School Voucher Program (TCN) Tennessee’s Supreme Court will not reconsider its prior ruling on an educational savings plan in Nashville and Memphis. On June 1, Nashville had filed a request for the court to re-consider the opinion on the grounds that it had not considered Metro Nashville Public Schools to be a part of Metro Nashville Government.
• Nashville could use state law to snuff out 21-and-up smoking bars (Lookout) The Legislature passed a measure enabling local governments to outlaw smoking in age-restricted venues, even honky tonks where people have been smoking and jamming for years.
• Tennessee Courts Administrative Office Sued To Open Judicial Conference Meetings (TCN) The executive editor of The Center Square is suing the Director of the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts in an attempt to open meetings at the upcoming Tennessee Judicial Conference to members of the public and the press.

DEVELOPMENT

• Progress On The 133-Room Hotel On Music Row In Nashville (Now Next)
• New luxury outlet mall coming to Nashville (Channel 5)
• Sylvan Park building near Otto’s Bar sells for $1.3M (Post)
• Smith Currie, A Construction & Gov’t Contracts Law Firm, Opens Its Newest Office In Nashville (Now Next)
• Donelson property with Sinatra component sells for $7.54M (Post)

❏ RED TAPING THE RED TAPE

What's it take to build a rocket these days? Well, aside from a healthy dash of optimism and incomparable drive, and in addition to the basic materials and the clever engineering you expect, it seems a lot. As old-timers are fond of saying, "They don't build 'em like they used to."

As part of SpaceX's contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) to launch its Starship in support of NASA, the company will need to satisfy additional requirements from the FAA:

• Prepare a historical context report of the historic events and activities of the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) that took place in the geographic area associated with and including the Area of Potential Effects (APE).
• Provide $5,000 annually to enhance the existing TPWD Tackle Loaner Program. This funding may be used to purchase fishing equipment (rods, reels, and tackle boxes with hooks, sinkers, and bobbers) for use at existing, heavily visited sites and/or allow the program to expand to new locations.
• Participate in wildlife photography introduction and instruction opportunities on site.
• Make an annual contribution of $5,000 to the Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge Adopt an Ocelot Program within 3 months of the issuance of the BO and by March 1 of each year thereafter for the duration of the BO. Funds donated to the program are intended to pay for…Special events to raise awareness about the ocelot.
• Provide enhanced satellite monitoring via solar powered Starlink for remote wildlife viewing opportunities. Enhanced satellite monitoring will be provided at location(s) to be determined by USFWS, in coordination with SpaceX.

It's worth asking why it takes us 17 years to finish a subway tunnel when it used to only take four — this instance gives some insight into why.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison compiled "some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. Among the more interesting anecdotes is Charles Lindbergh designing and building the Spirit of St. Louis in 60 days by using a globe at the library and a piece of string to estimate the distance from New York City to Paris. Some other examples:

• As far as space travel goes, it only took NASA 134 days to get Apollo 8 to the moon after deciding that they should go.
• The Empire State building was constructed in 410 days.
• Only two months after deciding to build the Pentagon, construction commenced and 491 days later, it was complete.

The list goes on.

I've been picking through Polybius' history chronicling the Rise of the Roman Empire, and there's an interesting note about Greece as Rome absconded with the crown:

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics... For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

Though "birth rates" don't seem related to "things taking longer," I imagine the two are entangled and emerge from the same place. The coordinated action of the sort enumerated above requires a shared civic duty, at a minimum, and a threat from outside forces at most. As we detailed a few weeks back when the "Great Replacement" was the talk of the town, Israel who is constantly embroiled in existential conflict and has the wealth to make good even in those circumstances, has seen steady birthrates as other nations' have plummeted. They have also begun to punch above their weight in their contributions to technology and medical science.

Something to consider.

↣ GRAPH OF THE DAY: DEFUND FALLOUT

⚔ MISSIVES ⚔

• 💸 Congress is pressing ahead with legislation that could rewrite the rules for American companies investing abroad, proposing the screening of investments in countries like China seen as adversaries to protect U.S. technologies and rebuild critical supply chains.
• 💰 Congressional Republicans are beginning to detail their plans to combat inflation and soften its impact on households, indicating some tax, trade and regulatory policies they might pursue if they take control of the House and Senate in this fall’s midterm elections.
• 🔥 The Biden administration has proposed higher energy-efficiency standards for home furnaces powered by natural gas, which could cause a popular form of gas heater that lacks condensing equipment to be phased out, appliance industry officials and conservation groups say.
• 🤡 A report from UCLA’s Williams Institute has found that the number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled.
• 📈 President Biden blamed Congressional Republicans for record-high inflation in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
• 🚨 The House passed a bill extending additional government-funded security to the Supreme Court justices and their families on Wednesday, sending the legislation to President Biden for final approval.

THINGS TO DO

View our full calendar here.

🍺 The Pamphleteer hosts Bar Hours this Thursday at Lucky's 3 Star Bar from 6-8 PM. The first ten guests get drinks on the company tab.

🎪 Check out our favorite driving distance festivals this summer - Redneck Rumble in Lebanon this weekend, see us there.

👨🏻‍🌾 The Pamphleteer farmer's market guide.

👂 Listen to The Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of the bands featured in this week's calendar.

TONIGHT

🎻 Bluegrass Night @ The American Legion Post 82, 7p, Free, Info
+ Chelsea Lovitt

💀 The Dead Kennedys @ Brooklyn Bowl, $30, 6p, Info

🍸 Electric relaxation @ Bar Sovereign, 9p, Free, Info

ON THE RADAR

🚨 Eprom @ Eastside Bowl, (6/25), $25.50, Info

🎹 Steely Dan @ First Bank Amphitheater, (7/13), $34+, Info

🏜 Hiatus Kaiyote @ Marathon Music Works, (8/14), $35+, Info

🐂 Professional Bull Riding @ Bridgestone, (8/19-21), $20+ Info

🐖 Roger Waters @ Bridgestone, (8/27), $39, Info

🎹 Stereolab @ Marathon Music Works, (9/6), $35, Info

🎸 My Morning Jacket @ Ascend Amphitheater, (9/23), $22.88, Info

🎸 Smashing Pumpkins @ Bridgestone Arena, (10/10), $133+, Info

NEW THIS WEEK

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Around the Web

✦ The man who built his own cathedral For nearly 60 years, a former monk toiled almost single-handedly on an extraordinary building outside Madrid. Is it a folly or a masterpiece?

➫ The State Department’s Toxic Equity Agenda Woke forces are working to turn America’s diplomatic corps into an arm of the Democratic Party.

☪ The new war on Islamism The West has been terrorised into silence

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Words of Wisdom

“If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.”

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire

Today's newsletter is brought to you by Megan Podsiedlik (Nashville), Edward Landstreet (Local Noise), and Davis Hunt (everything else).