• John McLaughlin, CFO of Edgewood Companies, and Ken Riley, senior vice president of Kiewit Infrastructure Group, have joined the Tahoe Prosperity Center board.

• Dolph Lundgren will star “The Lake”, a movie being filmed this fall in the Tahoe-Reno area. It’s about freshwater sharks in Lake Tahoe.

• Mike Panici of Incline Village released his album “Darlin” this week on the Tate Music Group label. It is available through iTunes, Amazon, or TateMusicGroup.com.

• Forever Dreams for Veterans scheduled for Sept. 5 at MontBleu in Stateline has been canceled.

• Drone Promotions, a Lake Tahoe company, shared this video with LTN:

Jim Porter of Porter-Simon will talk about ADA compliance at the Sept. 2  North Lake Tahoe Chamber of Commerce breakfast.

His talk is titled It’s the Right Thing To Do … And You Won’t Get Sued. It is about what businesses need to know regarding ADA laws, regulations, updates and especially parking requirements and signage.

The talk is from 7-8:30am at Granlibakken in Tahoe City. Cost is $15.

A group of locals has been working on removing graffiti from a heavily tagged beach on the East Shore. Now they are enlisting the help of others.

On Oct. 12, people are invited to help clean up graffiti at Bonsai Beach, which is one mile south of Sand Harbor in Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park. Meet at 9:30am at Sand Harbor (volunteers park for free), then there will be a shuttle to Bonsai Beach. Cleaning supplies and a light breakfast will be provided. Wear beach gear, bring sunscreen, lunch and water.

Boreal Mountain, which is owned by Powdr Corp, provided the group with a grant to help with expenses. The grant will also provide resources to remove graffiti from other state park beaches in Lake Tahoe State Park and DL Bliss.

Here is a video from People of Tahoe’s first clean up day. The group has also set up a Facebook page.

By Kathryn Reed

Lake Tahoe is making strides to have a coordinated regional transit system. A significant step is this week there will be a job posting by Tahoe Transportation District for a transit system program manager.

“We need to answer: ‘What does an integrated transit system in the entire Tahoe area look like?’,” Carl Hasty, TTD executive director, told Lake Tahoe News.

As TTD goes forward with developing the environmental documents for ferry service on the lake between the North and South shores, it must explain how the basin could have coordinated service. This is because if ferry passengers are left at the terminus without public transit, the boat will be a failure.

As it is now, the bus companies operating at the lake are not integrated.

Improvements are already happening on Highway 28, like the roundabout at the base of Mount Rose Highway. Photo/LTN

The person who is hired will be tasked with coming up with a plan that links current systems and anticipates for future growth.

One thing planners are looking at is how the 6.5 million people who are in the Bay Area/Sacramento market could come to Tahoe. How will they get here? And how will they get around when they are here? And with the forecast calling for that number to grow by 4 million more in the next few decades, it could be gridlock in the basin if everyone is in a private vehicle.

That is why local transit officials are also looking at transit along Highway 50 to Sacramento, Interstate 80 to Sac and Highway 395 in Carson City-Reno and then the routes to Tahoe.

“The system needs to be attractive to riders who don’t typically ride,” Hasty said.

What that looks like still needs to be worked out.

While TTD is and will continue to do its own studies, it will also tap into other resources. One of those is the travel survey the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency did Aug. 15-24.The survey conducted by NuStats Research Solutions was intended primarily to gather data on travel patterns involving commercial and recreation areas.

TTD is not letting the lack of a coordinated transit manager slow down its progress in making the region more transit friendly.

Instead of going on a project-by-project basis, the new thinking is to look at the entire transit corridor. This was and is still being done along Highway 28 from Spooner to Incline Village. Fourteen stakeholders are involved.

BlueGo helps eliminate the need for a vehicle on the South Shore. Photo/LTN file

The roundabout at Highway 28 and the Mount Rose Highway is one component, as is the East Shore Express bus that operates in the summer.

Now those stakeholders – which include public land owners, NDOT, IVGID and others – are working on a state highway erosion control project that will include highway parking lots. A park and ride at Spooner is being considered, as well as a different location for the aquatic invasive species decontamination operation. It’s possible fire hydrants will be installed along Highway 28.

Incline Village General Improvement District needs to move its sewage export line that sits in the highway. That line would be moved into the forest where 11 miles of bike trail are proposed. If the trail goes where the line is, then IVGID would be responsible for the maintenance of it.

The economies of scale approach to planning means total implementation costs less, maintenance could be less and more gets done. Ideally, it’s mostly for the public benefit.

Hasty said a coordinated synergy exists today that hasn’t been there in the past that is allowing for this cooperative approach to take place.

The corridor approach will be used whenever possible and practical, he said. The Y section of South Lake Tahoe from about Trout Creek to Emerald Bay has been plotted as a corridor, as has Trout Creek to Zephyr Cove.

By Sara Scribner, Slate

A young poet, enough of a rising star to be profiled in the New York Times magazine, posts a poem called “The Rape Joke.” It begins, “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.” It is about as intense and intimate as an online post can get. In the magazine article, the poet’s mother reads the poem, but it is the comment thread that makes the mother cry. “Do you see what these people were saying about you?” her mother asked. “Mom, it’s OK,” the writer, Patricia Lockwood, said. “It’s just the Internet.”

Internet cruelty is nothing new. It might only surprise children and the uninitiated, who dip into the public sphere for the first time and are shocked by what comes back at them. But Lockwood’s response reveals a generational shift. Her mother calls the commentators “people.” Lockwood identifies them as “the Internet,” a strange hybrid of human and computer, innately vicious but also ubiquitous, phenomena to be ignored.

Others have a more difficult time ignoring it.

After reaching out to her father’s mourning fans, Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda became a target of sadistic trolls — piling trauma upon trauma. She closed her Instagram account and shut down her Twitter feed. A budding journalist who had just had one of her first stories posted on her university newspaper’s website was so stunned by the comments that she decided to find another line of work. A young writer in New York City who was photographed trying to make ends meet by hauling his typewriter to the High Line and busking stories was savaged online. (He ended up writing an article about his ordeal called “I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything.”)

The list of examples seems endless, and there doesn’t seem to be a single space online that is free from overblown antagonistic invective. Once, when speaking to an almost impossibly sweet colleague, I voiced some concerns about my son’s eating habits. She told me to post on an online forum for moms. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The flowing curlicues and sweet-pea-pink background of the site’s design must have lulled me into some kind of trance, so the vitriol that came back was a shock. Internet moms are angry, too, real angry. And they just hate you.

Read the whole story

By Chris Ip, Columbia Journalism Review

If social media users think their followers don’t share their opinion on the news, they are less likely to post those views on Facebook and Twitter, according to a new Pew Research Center report, released today. It showed Facebook and Twitter users posted less about Edward Snowden and his revelations of government surveillance if they felt their networks would disagree with their viewpoints, and were nearly twice as likely to share on Facebook if they felt their network agreed with them.

The authors connect these findings to the ‘spiral of silence,’ a phenomenon where people who think they hold a minority opinion don’t speak up for fear of social exclusion. “One of the possible theories [for this study] is that when people see diversity in opinion, they don’t want to challenge other people, or upset them, or risk losing a friendship,” said Keith Hampton of Rutgers University, one of the study’s authors, in a telephone interview. For the authors, the study implies that the long-documented suppression of minority opinion exists online just as in real life.

As every social media user becomes an amateur publisher, the Pew study also shows the consequence of depending on individuals to disseminate the news. Indeed, it shows 58 percent of their sample of 1,801 American adults got information about Snowden from TV or the radio while only 15 percent received it from Facebook and 3 percent from Twitter.

Further, the study found that while 86 percent of respondents wanted to discuss the Snowden story in real life, only 42 percent would post about it on social media. Here, the authors speculate that social networks increase awareness of different points of view, making users more hesitant to express their own.

Read the whole story

By Mark Glover and Bill Lindelof, Sacramento Bee

Raley’s has agreed to pay nearly $1.6 million in civil penalties, costs and funding for environmental projects as part of a settlement related to allegations of improperly disposing hazardous waste.

The judgment is the culmination of a civil enforcement lawsuit filed in San Joaquin County to stop the West Sacramento-based supermarket chain from unlawfully transporting and disposing of retail hazardous waste, according to a press release from at least two of the 25 district attorneys who announced the suit.

The settlement was approved by San Joaquin Superior Court Judge Bob McNatt.

In addition to devoting resources to complying with California environmental law, Raley’s has agreed to purchase five mobile freshwater purification systems to provide safe drinking water to local communities during emergencies. The mobile purification systems will be located in Placer, El Dorado, Sonoma, Sacramento and Contra Costa counties, but will be available to communities statewide during emergencies.

Rui Cunha, Placer County assistant director of emergency services, said the water purification trailers “could make a difference for areas hardest hit by temporary water shortages.”

In a statement Monday, Raley’s said: “Upon learning of this inquiry by the district attorneys, we began an immediate investigation and worked with the district attorneys’ offices to find a resolution agreeable to both sides.”

Read the whole story

Remains found in Truckee on July 12 have been identified as Duane Colin.

The Truckee resident had been reported missing in March.

Investigators do not believe foul play was involved. The exact cause of death remains unknown.

Two hikers found teh skeletal remains west of Donner Lake Road in a steep and heavily wooded area above Donner Pass Road.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Fred Barbash, Washington Post

Starting the school day before 8:30 in the morning is bad for kids. It’s bad for their physical health, their mental health and their academic performance.

So says the American Academy of Pediatrics, which issued a formal policy statement Monday recommending that middle and high schools do away with those 7:30 or 8am school bells and begin no later than 8:30.

“Chronic sleep loss in children and adolescents is one of the most common – and easily fixable – public health issues in the U.S. today,” said pediatrician Judith Owens, lead author of the policy statement. She added, “The research is clear that adolescents who get enough sleep have a reduced risk of being overweight or suffering depression, are less likely to be involved in automobile accidents, and have better grades, higher standardized test scores and an overall better quality of life. Studies have shown that delaying early school start times is one key factor that can help adolescents get the sleep they need to grow and learn.”

Read the whole story

• If the water bond passes in November, California Tahoe Conservancy is slated to get $15 million.

• These photos show the impact of drought in California.

• Tesla is working with the Truckee Donner Public Utility District to put in an electric car charging station.

•John Cefalu is having a fundraiser for Health to Humanity and Think Kindness on Aug. 27 from 5:30-8:30pm. Tickets are $25. For more info and location, call 530.308.4456.

• Washoe County sheriff’s substation in Incline Village is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a community picnic on Sept. 21 fro 11am-2pm at the Incline Village Aspen Grove/Village Green Center. For more info, go online.