Electric Class 8 Trucks Now At The Los Angeles Port -- December 22, 2020

This made my day. Just as I predicted earlier this month. 

I've learned that there are now electric Class 8 trucks at the Los Angeles port. Whoo-hoo!

 Re-posting a re-post, from December 4, 2020:

Think about this.

First, re-posting:

US ports:

• Port of Los Angeles: busiest it's been in 2000 years.
• ships wait to unload at Port of Los Angeles as imports boom -- Reuters;
• US import boom is delaying cargo at nation's busiest port -- Reuters;
• shipping container freight rates soar amid export boom -- Hellenic Shipping;
• container shipping is booming again; probably won't last -- Yahoo!Finance;
• it seems there is a trend here;

If you get the chance, wander down to the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach -- they share the same San Pedro Harbor. Notice all the truck traffic.

The Teamsters must be doing very, very well with these records being set. 

House values will increase significantly in the San Pedro, CA, area.

But this is what gets me really, really excited.

It's only a matter of time before the County of Los Angeles mandates EV-only trucks to service the San Pedro Harbor ports. The mandate will come when EV truck manufacturers tell Janice Hahn they can meet demand. And assuming the Teamsters agree. Career politician and politically connected. Really, really politically connected.

My hunch: there's at least three truck manufacturers that are preparing for this mandate. We should see the mandate sooner than later. And the specs for the trucks don't have to be that onerous. The trucks will only be local -- Los Angeles County, serving customers inside the county, and transferring containers to BN (Warren Buffett/Berkshire Hathaway) and UNP on cargo headed outside the county.

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The Book Page

On Color, David Scott Kastan, c. 2018.

Chapter 8: Basic Black.

There is probably no more celebrated dress than the black satin sleeveless sheath that Audry Hepburn wears in the opening scene of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's. It is the most famous Little Black Dress of all time, even though it is  full length. It is also the most expensive. In 2006, one of the three versions that Givenchy designed for the movie sold at a Christie's auction in London for Ł467,200.

At the beginning of the film, Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, wears the evening dress as she exist from a New York City tax on an empty Fifth Avenue in front of Tiffany's. It is about 5:00 a.m. (and she has not risen early).

Her hair is in a high bun with a small tiara in front; she wears a rope of pearls, long black gloves, and big sunglasses. She stares up at the engrave name Tiffany and Co. above the closed doors and walks to the store window. She stands there, looking at the jewels, as she eats a pastry and drinks her morning coffee from a paper cup.

That's her breakfast at Tiffany's. I don't have to watch any more of the movie. That's all I need to see.

And like my epiphany with Catcher in the Rye, I finally "get" Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

Holly Golightly was born Lulamae Barnes, in Tulip, Texas, a real town on Farm Road 2554, about fifty miles northwest of Paris, TX, and, about an hour-and-a-half northeast of Grapevine, TX. Memo to self: road trip. 

She had married when she was fourteen years old, but at the age of fifteen ran away from her first husband and from rural Texas to try to live her dreams in New York City. Wow. 

Coco Chanel knew a good thing when she saw it. By 1936, the LBD was already a fashion staple, having been popularized in the 1920s in large part by Coco Chanel's iconic "Ford" design, Vogue, October, 1926.

With the Little Black dress, the color of funerals became the color of fashion, though fashion now made democratic -- functional, accessible, and black -- available both to the Duchess of Windsor and to Lulamae Barnes. "Ford" had become a fashion term, not just a automotive one.

And then this:

As matters of fact, the Chanel dress was no more the first LBD than the Model T was available to any customer in "any color that he wants, so long as it is black." 

In 1908, when the Model T was first produced, the car was available in red, blue, gray, and green -- but not black. In 1912, it was available only in blue with black fenders. Not until 1914 did black become its sole available color, and it stayed that way until 1926, when, ironically, Ford introduced color choices in the very year Chanel identified her black dress with Ford's once exclusively black cars. 

And that's just the beginning of a wonderful history of the LBD and the color black.