Mark: Morning, and welcome to Ashley River Radio. It is Friday, the twenty-eighth of August, it's going to be eighty-eight and thunderstorms likely, again, because of course.
Mark: I'm Mark, that's Lauren.
Lauren: [dry] Hi.
Mark: Coming up — there's a plane spraying West Ashley Sunday morning, there's a data center up in Spartanburg that a state commission has decided is somehow not a power plant, and, uh... games.
Mark: We get to games eventually.
Lauren: We do get there.
Mark: So Wednesday. Did you get the cell that parked over the peninsula?
Lauren: [amused] I heard about it.
Mark: Forty minutes, man. Forty minutes it sat there. And I'm in the office lot with all four windows down because I'd been loading stuff out of the truck —
Lauren: [interrupting] Oh no.
Mark: Yeah, no, it was — the seats were a swamp.
Mark: I drove home sitting on a contractor bag.
Lauren: [laughs] A contractor bag.
Mark: It's what I had!
Lauren: I got four minutes on the porch. Four. Coffee, chair, sat down, and the sky just... opened. Didn't even thunder first. No warning shot.
Mark: That's every afternoon this month.
Lauren: >> Which is — okay, so, that's actually where I want to start. Every yard on my street has standing water sitting in it right now. Every single one. Mine included.
Lauren: And that is exactly why there's a spray plane on the schedule Sunday.
Mark: There's a what?
Lauren: County's spraying. Aerially. Charleston and West Ashley, Sunday morning.
Mark: [surprised] Sunday coming.
Lauren: Sunday coming. And I found out from a TV station. Not the county.
Mark: Okay but the county does publish it. They post the maps, they post the schedules —
Lauren: [flat] Published and notified are two different words.
Mark: They're on the website, Lauren.
Lauren: So's every RFC ever written. Doesn't mean anybody read it.
Mark: >> Okay, no, let's — let's do the plane properly, because the timing on it is weirder than the plane.
Mark: So this was News 2. Charleston County Mosquito Control, aerial spraying for adult mosquitoes, Sunday August thirtieth. Six fifteen in the morning to eight fifteen. And if the weather doesn't cooperate, backup window is September sixth.
Lauren: And the trigger for it is West Nile.
Mark: Right, DPH confirmed positives in the county. That's what kicks the whole response plan over.
Lauren: Which — the plan is, confirmed detection, that area gets truck spraying every ten days minimum, plus targeted aerial, plus more surveillance. So Sunday's not a one-off. Sunday's just the loud part of a thing already running.
Mark: And it's been showing up all over. Georgetown County confirmed a positive sample mid-August. Chatham County over in Savannah had three back in late July.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Mark: But the aerial part over the peninsula is genuinely unusual. Like — back in 2016 the county said they'd flown at most four times that whole year, and mostly over Awendaw.
Mark: Places with nobody in them.
Lauren: >> Right, and 2016 is where I want to go, because there's a reason that early window exists.
Mark: The six fifteen thing.
Lauren: Six fifteen to eight fifteen. That's when the mosquitoes they're after are up and it's before honeybees are really out foraging. That timing is deliberate. Somebody thought about the bees.
Mark: Sure.
Lauren: So — okay. If you care about pollinators enough to build the whole schedule around them, and then beekeepers in this county have historically had to call and ask to be told... they request notification so they can go cover their hives.
Mark: [beat] Which they can do.
Lauren: Right. After they call and ask.
Lauren: And in 2016 there was the naled thing — that's the active ingredient in Trumpet — and Dorchester County did an application and it lined up with millions of honeybees dying at an apiary up in Summerville. And Charleston County spent the next while publicly defending how it notifies people and how it sprays.
Mark: Oh, I remember that. That got ugly fast.
Lauren: It was. So my thing is just — the burden of finding out shouldn't sit on the beekeeper. Somebody decided the map goes up and you come to it. That's a choice somebody made.
Mark: Okay but this is Public Works. This is a division doing an actual public health job, they've got a lab up in North Charleston testing samples, they post ground and aerial schedules, and there's a phone number.
Lauren: I'm not saying they're bad at it.
Mark: [amused] You're circling it pretty close.
Lauren: [flat] I'm saying "it was on the website" is what everybody says after.
Mark: Alright, practical stuff, 'cause people are gonna ask. It's the county, not the city. Call the city and they just point you at the county — that's the whole answer.
Lauren: Which is fine, actually. Right handoff. It's their lab, their trucks.
Mark: And if you want an inspection at your place, it's 843-202-7880.
Lauren: They cover a lot, too. Charleston, North Charleston, Folly, James Island, Mount Pleasant, Awendaw, Hollywood, Ravenel, sea island towns.
Mark: Sixty-ish species in the county, and they're really only chasing about a dozen that matter for disease.
Lauren: And then every time they post one of these, you get the exact same fight in the comments.
Mark: [laughing] Oh, every time.
Lauren: Half of them going why isn't my street on the list, other half going I demand to opt out of the sky.
Mark: [laughs] And both of 'em dead certain they're right, too.
Lauren: >> So — different thing, sort of. Related by water. Did you see the Live 5 piece on the Central Park Drainage Basin?
Mark: Over on James Island. Yeah.
Lauren: City's holding a public meeting to start the process. It's funded through a one-point-five million dollar Resilient Infrastructure and Adaptation grant.
Mark: What's it actually buy?
Lauren: Channel stabilization, new drainage box culverts — bigger pipes under Central Park Road, under the driveway into EME Apartments, under Riley Road — and then a muted tide gate and a check valve at the downstream end so the tide doesn't shove back in during the extreme highs.
Mark: Okay, that's real work. Culverts, tide gate — somebody's actually digging.
Lauren: It is real work. And Matthew Fountain, the stormwater director, said the quiet part out loud, which — credit to him — quote, "as this development occurred, a lot of the original infrastructure that went in wasn't big enough to handle the amount of water."
Mark: [beat] Okay.
Lauren: The basin is five hundred acres. Central Park Road on the south, Maybank on the north, Folly Road east, Woodland Shores west. The improvements go to a small portion of that.
Lauren: Laurel Park, Marlborough, New Central Park Cluster, EME Apartments.
Mark: And those folks have been sitting in it for years, right?
Lauren: Years. The article says it — residents sharing concerns for years, long-duration flooding, recent growth made it worse.
Mark: [exhales] So — look. I'd rather have this than not have this. One and a half million, buildable, funded, somebody's actually putting pipe in the ground. On a job site that's a real project. I've sat in enough meetings where the outcome is another consultant.
Lauren: I know.
Mark: So don't go throwing the win out, man.
Lauren: I'm not taking it off the table. I'm saying those residents asked for the flooding to get fixed before the approvals. Approvals went through anyway. And now a grant cycle is paying to move water that the new roofs and the new driveways make.
Mark: [conceding] Yeah, no, that part's — that's fair.
Lauren: They ate it for a decade and the reward is bigger pipes, eventually, on a small portion of a five hundred acre basin. That's not nothing.
Lauren: It's also not a plan for the basin.
Mark: It's the piece somebody could actually get a check for.
Lauren: Right. And who had to go win that money? The city. By application. On somebody else's clock.
Mark: [flat] Yeah. Which is how the whole damn thing works now.
Lauren: >> Okay so hold that, because here's my dumb comparison and you're going to hate it.
Mark: [amused] Go on, then.
Lauren: The Army Corps just awarded twenty-eight point two million — twenty-eight million, one hundred seventy-five thousand, five hundred — to a dredging outfit out of San Rafael, California, for maintenance dredging in the lower Charleston Harbor.
Lauren: Two turning basins, about nineteen miles of channel.
Mark: The Dutra Group. I saw that.
Lauren: And that's routine. Lower harbor annually. Entrance channel every other year, upper harbor every fifteen to eighteen months. Nobody applies. It's on a calendar.
Mark: Okay but that's a different pot of money and a different agency entirely. That's a federal navigation project. Fourth-busiest container port on the East Coast, one of seventeen strategic ports, there's a defense mission attached to it —
Lauren: I know all of that.
Mark: So it's not the same money, man. You can't line 'em up like somebody at a desk picked one over the other.
Lauren: I'm not saying they raided the drainage fund to buy dredges. I'm saying look at what gets called maintenance and what gets called a grant you go compete for. Harbor silts up, that's Tuesday. Laurel Park floods for the twelfth year, that's an application.
Mark: [pause] Mm. That's a better version of it than you usually make.
Lauren: [dry] Third cup.
Mark: [laughs] Shocking.
Mark: >> Alright, county council. Did you catch the moratorium vote?
Lauren: I did.
Mark: Twenty-four month extension on the moratorium in four historic districts — Phillips, Beefield, Ten Mile, Hamlin Beach. And it came down to one vote on council. One.
Lauren: One vote.
Mark: Kobrovsky, District 2, said — I wrote it down — developers "literally say foaming at the mouth to subdivide and bulldoze through there, and this is to say no, we're slowing it down."
Lauren: And Richard Habersham from the Phillips Community Association talking about growing up there, knowing every family for miles.
Lauren: Seven Mile, Four Mile, Ten Mile.
Mark: And his line was the good one — keep the character, hold the prices down some, and the people already there can still afford to stay.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: Two years is real runway. On the permitting side, two years of a hard no changes what a developer will underwrite. You can't carry land that long on a maybe.
Lauren: >> Okay, so — here's where I'm less happy about it.
Mark: I figured.
Lauren: It's major subdivisions. Not minor ones.
Mark: [beat] ...Yeah.
Lauren: That's where the activity goes. Wall up one lane, everybody's in the other lane by Tuesday.
Mark: Yeah, that's — that's the first place I'd look too, honestly. Minor plats all week.
Lauren: And it's a pause. Nothing drafted behind it that I've seen. So in twenty-four months it's the same fight, same lawyers, except the community's burned two years of volunteer energy just holding the line.
Mark: Okay but a pause with nothing written behind it is still two years those families are in their own damn houses.
Lauren: That's true and I'm not dismissing it. I want to know what's getting written during it. Because if the answer's nothing —
Lauren: Somebody should be able to answer that.
Mark: [conceding] Somebody should.
Lauren: And — look at Berkeley County. They invented a whole new zoning category. Transitional Agricultural. Eastwood Homes, two hundred-plus acres, hundred forty-seven-ish subdivision rentals, half conservation. And that category conveniently sits outside their moratorium.
Mark: [dry] Convenient.
Lauren: The workaround is the compliment. Nobody builds a loophole around a rule that doesn't bite.
Mark: [laughs] There it is.
Lauren: And I still want to know who drafted that category.
Lauren: Not who voted for it — who wrote the words.
Mark: Council postponed it, and the Planning Commission recommendation could send it to Land Use Committee September fourteenth.
Lauren: I'll be watching that.
Mark: Well — okay, and say what you want, at least a moratorium is a body of elected people voting on a thing in public. Which is more than I can say for what you've been furious about all week.
Lauren: >> [flat] Oh, I'm getting to it.
Lauren: SC Daily Gazette. PSC ruled that a Spartanburg data center that wants to generate its own power isn't subject to the Utility Siting Act. Because — sure.
Mark: Isn't a power plant.
Lauren: Is not a power plant. So — NorthMark Strategies, and their subsidiary Valara Holdings. Two point eight billion dollars.
Lauren: They're converting the old Kohler kitchen and bath plant.
Mark: Kohler, like the sinks.
Lauren: That one. In June, environmental and citizens groups petitioned the commission to do its own review and halt construction. Commission ruled Thursday, unanimously, for Valara. Reasoning being — and this is the quote from the order — "the facility will not export power generated to the electric grid for public use."
Mark: And the company said what?
Lauren: "We didn't ask for an exception, but for the law to be read as written."
Mark: [pause] Hm. That's a hell of a sentence.
Lauren: Isn't it.
Mark: >> Okay, wait — what's the megawatt number on this?
Mark: Because I saw something about that.
Lauren: State environmental regulators initially approved roughly fifty megawatts.
Mark: And then?
Lauren: They've since amended the application to four hundred and fifty.
Mark: [laughing] Oh, come on.
Lauren: Nine times. Nine.
Mark: Yeah, no, I mean — okay, that pattern I see every month. You get the small number approved, you get your footing, then you amend up.
Mark: That is boring, ordinary permitting behavior.
Lauren: [flat] Boring.
Mark: I'm not saying it's good! I'm saying nobody scoping a two-point-eight billion dollar build sat in a room and thought fifty was the real figure. Nobody. That's not how any of that gets budgeted.
Lauren: Then the first application was the strategy.
Mark: [beat] I mean — yeah, probably.
Lauren: That's my whole point, Mark.
Mark: Okay but let me make the actual case for the ruling, because there is one and you keep skipping it.
Lauren: Make it.
Mark: If they burn their own fuel for their own load, they're off the grid entirely. No added demand, no rate case, nothing showing up on anybody's residential power bill.
Mark: Which is more than you can say for every hyperscaler people are fighting about everywhere else in the country. That one's real.
Lauren: [pause] That's true and I'll give it to you fully. The bill point is real.
Mark: Thank you.
Lauren: And now I'm going to refuse the rest of it.
Mark: [snorts] Naturally.
Lauren: Four hundred fifty megawatts of generation goes somewhere. Air, water, and the neighborhood around the old Kohler site. Those are people.
Lauren: They live there.
Mark: Sure.
Lauren: And "for our own use" is what got them out of siting review. That's the hinge. The statute happens to ask do you export it, they said we don't export it, door opened.
Mark: The law says what it says, though.
Lauren: It does. Which tells you about the law. Tells you nothing about whether anybody in Spartanburg got looked after.
Mark: [conceding] ...Yeah, alright.
Lauren: >> And then there's the Britt thing.
Mark: Which is?
Lauren: Commissioner David Britt. Former Spartanburg County Council member, supported Valara coming to the county.
Lauren: He recused himself and left the room for the vote.
Mark: [rushed] That's the system working. That's exactly what you want.
Lauren: Correct. Completely correct, he did the right thing.
Mark: But.
Lauren: But it also tells you what the room is. A guy on the commission deciding whether the siting law applies used to sit on the council that recruited them. In a state this size that's just Thursday.
Mark: That's a small state.
Lauren: [dry] Everybody's had lunch with everybody.
Lauren: And that same commission is holding the NextEra–Dominion merger on a six-month clock ending January twenty-ninth. Six months.
Mark: You brought this up Tuesday.
Lauren: Because SCANA took eleven. And only two of the seven sitting commissioners — Whitfield and Chairman Williams — were there for it.
Mark: [pause] Okay, wait. Say the concern plainly.
Lauren: A body with two people who've ever done a big one is about to do a very large one very fast.
Mark: [beat] Ohh. Okay, yeah, that's — yeah, that's fair.
Lauren: That's all I'm saying.
Mark: Look, on Spartanburg — I want to know what actually gets built and how many people work in it before I call it a bad deal. That plant's been empty.
Mark: And those are real jobs, dude. I'm not gonna pretend that's nothing.
Lauren: And I want to know what happens the first time one of these decides it'd like to sell power after all. The ruling turns on "not for public use." That's a sentence. It's not a wall.
Mark: They'd have to go back in front of the commission.
Lauren: Would anybody have standing to object by then? Genuine question. I don't know.
Mark: [pause] I don't either.
Mark: >> Okay. I need something that isn't a commission docket. And you promised to be nice about the Xbox thing.
Lauren: [dry] I promised no such thing.
Mark: Ars Technica had this. Xbox is doing a disc-to-digital program, testing with Insiders starting August thirty-first. You put the disc in, you launch the game, and you get a digital entitlement for most Xbox One and Series X disc-based games.
Lauren: And then?
Mark: And then it's playable digitally. No disc, as long as you or somebody on your family account is logged in. You get Play Anywhere on PC, cloud gaming on supported titles — and Microsoft says the disc "will continue to work exactly as it always has."
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: That's a thing that gives people something back! You bought that disc in 2019, it's in a shoebox, now it does more.
Lauren: [pause] So I read the fine print.
Mark: [laughing] Of course you did.
Lauren: One revokable license per game disc.
Mark: Right.
Lauren: So if you sell the disc, or lend it to a friend, that entitlement can transfer to whoever puts it in their console next.
Mark: Which — yes, obviously? Otherwise you'd just pass one disc around a whole apartment building.
Lauren: I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying they're attaching a license to a thing you own and keeping the right to move it.
Lauren: The disc is now a key.
Mark: Okay but the alternative is what we had yesterday, which was nothing. Zero. Nobody was doing this.
Lauren: True.
Mark: You're describing a feature like it's a betrayal.
Lauren: [dry] I'm describing a lease with better manners.
Mark: [laughs] Man.
Mark: >> Alright, GTA. Rock Paper Shotgun had the writeup on the extended preview.
Lauren: This is the car thing.
Mark: That's the one. You can't just press one button and take anything anymore. Rob Nelson — he's a Rockstar co-founder — said they put, quote, "layers of stratification into the vehicles."
Lauren: [amused] Stratification.
Mark: So cars have alarms, trackers, electronic keys, different security.
Mark: And there's a phone app called WAINK that scans a car and tells you it's locked, it's got an alarm, no tracker, what it's worth at a Pay n' Spray or a specialty fence, and what it'd cost you to get into it.
Lauren: [delighted] Okay, that's — no, I love that.
Mark: You love that?
Lauren: Because that's how car theft actually works now! Relay attacks, key cloners, Slim Jims. A crime game finally caught up to the real security model and that's funnier than anything in the trailer.
Mark: See, and my angle is design. Taking a binary action — press triangle, get car — and making it a decision, that's good. That's more game.
Mark: I'll die on that.
Lauren: [skeptical] Or it's the same button with three menus in front of it.
Mark: It's not —
Lauren: You scan, you read, you press the button. That's a loading screen with lore on it.
Mark: [exasperated] It's progression!
Lauren: [laughing] Sure.
Mark: They're also doing the thing where it's up to you whether Lucia and Jason stay together.
Lauren: [flat] That's a slider with two labels.
Mark: You don't know that.
Lauren: It's a slider with two labels, Mark.
Mark: >> Last one, fast. Exodus finally got a date. April seventh, 2027.
Lauren: That's the Mass Effect-shaped one.
Mark: That's the one.
Mark: And the new trailer's about a super-intelligent octopus sniper named Salt who fights in a mech with segmented tentacle arms.
Lauren: [surprised] A what?
Mark: An octopus. In a mech. And the reviewer's whole point is that they resisted making her Wholesome — she's written as a selfish jerk.
Lauren: [pause] Okay, that's a good instinct.
Mark: That's a great instinct! I'm sold. That's the whole sale for me right there.
Lauren: The bit that stuck with me was the complaint about the main guy. Jun Aslan. Backwater scavenger, greatness thrust upon him, celebrity dad issues, Paragon-Renegade morality —
Mark: [interrupting] Who cares, the octopus is there.
Lauren: — and apparently no proper character editor, so you're stuck with the default guy, who the reviewer says looks like how people want to look on Instagram. Glossy parted hair. Designer stubble.
Mark: [laughing] Harsh.
Lauren: So that's eighty hours inside somebody else's profile picture.
Mark: Nah, a good sidekick carries a boring hero. Works every time.
Lauren: Mm. Not for eighty hours.
Lauren: >> Okay, and honestly I'd rather spend money on a mech octopus than on what the state is currently arguing about at a grocery checkout.
Mark: What's this?
Lauren: SC Daily Gazette. The plan to pull candy, soda and sugary drinks out of SNAP purchases in South Carolina — it's delayed to at least November first.
Mark: Why?
Lauren: A federal judge, Amy Berman Jackson, ruled back in June that USDA skipped the public comment requirement. Just went around it. So USDA wrote to the state this week and said hold until November first while they figure out what the order means, and they'll take more comment from retailers and recipients.
Mark: It was supposed to start Monday.
Lauren: Monday. Approved back in December, retailers were told get ready.
Mark: [groans] Oh, that's a mess. That is a genuine mess for stores. You've retrained your front end, you've flagged your inventory, and now — wait till November.
Mark: And then probably wait again.
Lauren: Twenty-three states signed up under the "make America healthy again" thing. People in five of them sued.
Mark: On what grounds?
Lauren: That they need things on the prohibited list. For health. A woman with diabetes uses juice boxes and small cans of soda to keep her blood sugar under control. A mother said her autistic daughter only eats certain safe foods, and most of them would've been banned under Tennessee's version. There's a man allergic to coffee and tea who relies on low-sugar energy drinks.
Mark: [pause] Huh.
Lauren: So the rule as designed puts a cashier in the position of adjudicating somebody's medical needs. At the register.
Lauren: With people behind them.
Mark: I'm not defending the rule. I just — the whiplash on the stores is its own thing.
Lauren: It is. And it's the smaller thing. That's a diabetic woman explaining herself to a seventeen-year-old at a register because a governor wanted a goddamn press release about health.
Mark: [flat] Yeah.
Lauren: >> And then — one more, same paper, this was an op-ed and it's been sitting on me all week.
Mark: Okay.
Lauren: United for ALICE number. In South Carolina, a single parent with one child in childcare needs twenty-four dollars and twenty cents an hour to cover basic bills.
Mark: Twenty-four twenty.
Lauren: Basic. Bills.
Mark: [exhales] Twenty-four bucks an hour for basic bills, and the jobs here pay nothing like that. That's the bullshit of it.
Lauren: And the part that got me — she's describing women who get the job and lose it before the ninety-day probation's up, because there are zero paid days off. Zero.
Lauren: Kid gets sick twice and you're done.
Mark: Or you can't start at all.
Lauren: Or you nail the interview and then you can't lock in consistent childcare by the start date the employer picked. So you don't start. You did everything right and the calendar ate you.
Mark: That's — man, that's shitty.
Lauren: It's designed. Somebody picked that start date. Somebody wrote a probation policy with no paid time in it. Are you shitting me?
Lauren: Those aren't weather.
Mark: [beat] No. They're not.
Lauren: [flat] And we'll fund a study about workforce participation before we'll fund a sick day.
Mark: [pause] Alright.
Lauren: >> Okay. That's us for Friday. We're back Monday, the thirty-first.
Mark: Sunday morning, six fifteen to eight fifteen, if you keep bees, go cover them, and if you don't want to be outside during it, don't be outside during it.
Lauren: And before we go — somebody make council answer on the Flock contract. Who signed it. Term length. Whether it auto-renews.
Lauren: What the retention clause says.
Mark: [amused] She is never letting this go.
Lauren: Four questions, Mark. Four.
Mark: Char House Social. Opening this fall, old Smoky Oak space on James Island. I'll be there in October. Tumbleweed Onion — haystack of onions the size of my head.
Lauren: [flat] No.
Mark: The size of my HEAD, Lauren.
Lauren: [laughing] That is not the pitch you think it is. Monday.
Mark: Monday. Stay dry, y'all.