{ "through_line": "Who is asked to wait and who gets read the law as written \u2014 residents who have flooded since before the last drainage study, mothers priced out of a job by childcare, historic communities getting a pause instead of an ordinance, against a data center that got told the siting rules don't apply to it.", "segments": [ { "key": "cold_open", "minutes": 2, "opens_with": "Mark says hello, names the show, says it's Friday the twenty-eighth of August, eighty-eight degrees and thunderstorms likely again, and teases a plane spraying West Ashley on Sunday morning, a data center that a state commission decided is not a power plant, and games.", "beats": [ { "item_ids": [], "beat": "Mark complains about Wednesday's storm cell that parked over the peninsula for forty minutes while he was standing in the office lot with the truck windows down; Lauren counters with her porch coffee lasting four minutes before the sky opened.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "298bf5e92b62a6ca55f5" ], "beat": "Lauren notes that this pattern \u2014 rain every afternoon, standing water in every yard on her street \u2014 is exactly why there's a spray plane scheduled, and she is already annoyed that she found out about it from a TV station and not from anyone official.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark thinks the county does publish it and people just don't look; Lauren thinks 'published' and 'notified' are different things." } ], "hands_off_with": "Mark says fine, let's do the plane properly, because the timing on it is weirder than the plane." }, { "key": "local", "minutes": 6, "opens_with": "Mark lays out the News 2 item: Charleston County Mosquito Control aerially spraying Charleston and West Ashley Sunday the thirtieth, 6:15 to 8:15 in the morning, backup window September 6.", "beats": [ { "item_ids": [ "298bf5e92b62a6ca55f5" ], "beat": "They establish what triggered it \u2014 DPH confirmed West Nile positives in the county \u2014 and that under the response plan confirmed-detection areas get truck spraying at least every ten days plus targeted aerial. Mark points out aerial over the peninsula is unusual; historically it was a handful of flights a year, mostly over Awendaw.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "298bf5e92b62a6ca55f5" ], "beat": "Lauren goes at the notification question: the early window exists so honeybees aren't foraging, and beekeepers have historically had to ask to be told. She brings up 2016 \u2014 naled, the Dorchester application, the Summerville apiary that lost millions of bees, and the county having to publicly defend its procedures afterward. Her position: if the schedule matters enough to time it around pollinators, the county should be pushing the notice out, not waiting for people to find the map.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark says it's a Public Works division doing a real public health job with a phone number and posted maps; Lauren says the burden of finding out landing on the beekeeper is the design choice, not an accident." }, { "item_ids": [ "298bf5e92b62a6ca55f5" ], "beat": "Quick practical beat \u2014 it's the county, not the city, the city just points you at them; 843-202-7880 for an inspection; the online split every time between people asking why their street was skipped and people demanding to opt out.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "6961740360d65c39aec5" ], "beat": "Lauren brings the Live 5 piece on the Central Park Drainage Basin: $1.5 million Resilient Infrastructure grant, public meeting coming, channel stabilization, bigger box culverts under Central Park Road and Riley Road, a muted tide gate and check valve. She reads the stormwater director's line about original infrastructure not being big enough as development happened, and does the arithmetic out loud \u2014 a 500-acre basin, work on a small portion of it, Laurel Park, Marlborough, EME Apartments.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "6961740360d65c39aec5" ], "beat": "The disagreement lands: Mark says bigger pipes and a tide gate are genuinely the fix for that stretch and he'd rather see one funded, buildable project than another study. Lauren's position is that residents asked for flooding fixed before more approvals went through, the approvals went through anyway, and now a grant is paying to move water the new roofs and driveways produce. Both angry that it took years and a grant cycle.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "Whether a small, real, funded project is a win or a way of not answering the upstream question about what got approved while people were flooding." }, { "item_ids": [ "8fe7c36418d222828d23", "6961740360d65c39aec5" ], "beat": "Short number contrast: the Corps just awarded $28.2 million to a California dredging outfit for routine maintenance on two turning basins and nineteen miles of lower harbor channel, work that happens every year. Lauren sets that next to one and a half million, once, for a basin that has flooded for a decade. Mark defends the harbor as an actual strategic port with a defense mission and doesn't think it's the same pot of money \u2014 Lauren says it's the same idea of what counts as maintenance and what counts as a special grant you have to go win.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark: different funding, different agency, not a fair comparison. Lauren: the comparison is about which flooding is treated as routine." }, { "item_ids": [ "da0af1feab2d27e7198c" ], "beat": "Mark brings the county council vote extending the historic-district moratorium to 24 months for Phillips, Beefield, Ten Mile and Hamlin Beach \u2014 one vote on council, Kobrovsky's line about developers wanting to subdivide through there, Habersham on knowing every family for miles. Mark thinks two years is enough runway to actually write protections.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "da0af1feab2d27e7198c" ], "beat": "Lauren's position: it covers major subdivisions and not minor ones, which is where she expects the activity to go, and a pause with nothing written at the end of it is just a later fight with the same lawyers. Callback to Berkeley County inventing a Transitional Agricultural Zoning category that conveniently sits outside their moratorium \u2014 her 'the workaround is the compliment' line applies, and she wants to know who drafted it. Mark, from permitting meetings, agrees the carve-out is where he'd look but says two years of a hard no still changes what a developer will underwrite.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Whether a time-limited pause without a drafted ordinance behind it protects anyone, or just moves the deadline." } ], "hands_off_with": "Mark says at least a moratorium is a body of elected people voting on something \u2014 which is more than can be said for the thing Lauren has been furious about all week." }, { "key": "deep_dive", "minutes": 4, "opens_with": "Lauren brings the SC Daily Gazette story: the Public Service Commission ruled a Spartanburg data center that wants to generate its own power isn't subject to the Utility Siting Act.", "beats": [ { "item_ids": [ "33ac8e60dab889844ce1" ], "beat": "Facts on the table \u2014 NorthMark Strategies and its subsidiary Valara, $2.8 billion, converting the old Kohler kitchen and bath plant; environmental and citizens groups petitioned in June for a review and to halt construction; the commission ruled unanimously that the law doesn't apply because the facility won't export power to the grid for public use. The company's statement: we didn't ask for an exception, we asked for the law to be read as written.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "33ac8e60dab889844ce1" ], "beat": "The number that sets Lauren off: state environmental regulators initially approved roughly 50 megawatts, and the company has since amended the application to 450. Mark, from the permitting side, says the amendment pattern is familiar \u2014 you get the small number approved and then grow it \u2014 and he's blunt that nobody scoping a $2.8 billion build thought fifty was the real figure.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "Mark reads it as ordinary permitting behavior he sees monthly; Lauren reads it as the whole point of the first application." }, { "item_ids": [ "33ac8e60dab889844ce1" ], "beat": "Mark makes the strongest case for the ruling: if they burn their own fuel for their own load, they are not on the grid, not in a rate case, not on anybody's residential bill \u2014 which is more than you can say for the hyperscalers everyone is fighting about elsewhere. Lauren concedes the bill point and then refuses the rest: four hundred and fifty megawatts of generation goes somewhere \u2014 air, water, the people who live around the old Kohler site \u2014 and 'for our own use' is the sentence that got it out of siting review.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "Whether not touching the grid is the meaningful question or just the one the statute happens to ask." }, { "item_ids": [ "33ac8e60dab889844ce1" ], "beat": "Commissioner David Britt \u2014 former Spartanburg County Council, supported the company coming to the county \u2014 recused himself and left the room. Lauren says the recusal is the correct move and also tells you what the room is. She ties it to the same commission holding the NextEra/Dominion merger on a six-month clock ending January 29, with only two of the seven sitting commissioners having been there for SCANA, which took eleven months.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark thinks recusal is exactly the system working; Lauren thinks a body that thin on institutional memory is about to make a very large decision very fast." }, { "item_ids": [ "33ac8e60dab889844ce1" ], "beat": "Where they land, unresolved: Mark wants to know what actually gets built and how many people work there before he calls it a bad deal; Lauren wants to know what happens the first time a facility like this decides it would like to sell power after all, and whether anyone will have standing to object by then.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Unresolved on purpose \u2014 neither concedes." } ], "hands_off_with": "Mark says he needs something that isn't a commission docket, and reminds Lauren she promised to be nice about the Xbox thing." }, { "key": "rotating", "minutes": 4, "opens_with": "Mark brings the Ars Technica piece on Xbox's disc-to-digital program, testing with Insiders starting August 31: put the disc in, launch the game, get a digital entitlement for most Xbox One and Series X disc games.", "beats": [ { "item_ids": [ "b50c86132765c4b762db" ], "beat": "Mark's enthusiasm: this is the rare thing that gives people something back, including Play Anywhere on PC and cloud play for supported titles, and the disc keeps working like it always did.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "b50c86132765c4b762db" ], "beat": "Lauren finds the fine print \u2014 one revokable license per disc, and if you sell or lend that disc, the entitlement can move to whoever puts it in their console next. Her position: that's not converting ownership, that's attaching a license to an object you own and reserving the right to move it. Mark says she is describing a feature as a betrayal and that the alternative is what we had yesterday, which was nothing.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Whether a revokable entitlement counts as a win for buyers or just a nicer-sounding lease." }, { "item_ids": [ "1f98d7a55063c2bb3dc1" ], "beat": "Mark pivots to the Rock Paper Shotgun writeup of the extended GTA 6 preview: you can no longer press one button and steal anything. Cars now have alarms, trackers, electronic keys, and there's a phone app called WAINK that scans a car and tells you whether it's locked, what it's worth at a Pay n' Spray, and whether you need a Slim Jim or a key cloner.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [ "1f98d7a55063c2bb3dc1" ], "beat": "Lauren delights in this because it is roughly how car theft actually works now \u2014 relay attacks, key cloners, the whole thing \u2014 and says a crime game finally catching up to the security model is funnier than any of the marketing. Mark's angle is design: making a formerly binary action into a decision is good, and he'll die on that hill. Brief tangent about whether the relationship-choice mechanic between Lucia and Jason will amount to anything or is a slider with two labels.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark thinks added friction is good design; Lauren suspects it's the same button with three menus in front of it." }, { "item_ids": [ "4592244ee04bbcce742d" ], "beat": "Fast one to close: Exodus dated for April 7, 2027, with a super-intelligent octopus sniper in a tentacle-armed mech who is written as a selfish jerk rather than made wholesome. Mark is sold on the octopus; Lauren is stuck on the reviewer's complaint that the main character is a glossy chosen-one with father issues and no real character editor.", "who_leads": "Mark", "tension": "Whether a great companion carries a dull protagonist \u2014 Mark says yes, Lauren says that's how you end up eighty hours into someone else's Instagram photo." } ], "hands_off_with": "Lauren says she'd rather spend money on a mech octopus than on what the state is currently arguing about at a grocery checkout." }, { "key": "quick_hits", "minutes": 2, "opens_with": "Lauren reads the SC Daily Gazette item: the plan to pull candy, soda and sugary drinks out of SNAP purchases in South Carolina is delayed to at least November 1 after a federal judge found USDA skipped the public comment requirement.", "beats": [ { "item_ids": [ "b7ec9e1e279811ef0c20" ], "beat": "The specifics that make it real \u2014 a woman with diabetes who uses juice boxes and small sodas to manage blood sugar, a mother whose autistic daughter eats a short list of safe foods, a man allergic to coffee and tea who relies on low-sugar energy drinks. Lauren's position: twenty-three states signed up for a rule that requires a cashier to adjudicate somebody's medical needs at the register. Mark doesn't defend the rule, just notes retailers had been told to be ready by Monday and now get told to wait until November, which is its own mess.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "Mark's irritation is at the whiplash on stores and staff; Lauren's is at the rule existing at all." }, { "item_ids": [ "42e80b8bdca92ab48f1d" ], "beat": "Lauren goes straight from that to the United for ALICE figure in the Gazette op-ed \u2014 a single parent with one child in childcare needs $24.20 an hour in South Carolina to cover basic bills \u2014 and to the detail that got her: women losing jobs inside the ninety-day probation window because there are zero paid days off, or unable to start at all because childcare couldn't be locked in by the employer's start date. Angry, short, not analyzed to death.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "" }, { "item_ids": [], "beat": "Sign-off: thanks for listening, back Monday the thirty-first. Lauren gets her standing demand in about the Flock contract \u2014 who signed it, term length, auto-renew, retention clause \u2014 and Mark tags it. Mark tries one more time on Char House Social and the Tumbleweed Onion; Lauren declines.", "who_leads": "Lauren", "tension": "" } ], "hands_off_with": "Mark's tag line and out." } ] }