(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A New Era of Colorado State Open Threads, April 20, 2026 [1] ['View Profile', 'Back Of Bourke'] Date: 2026-04-20 This is going to be my first effort at a diary/story/post under the new DailyKos and my first thought is it needs fixes STAT!. I have found my way through most of the things that I have wanted to do so far – commenting on people’s posts, though I couldn’t post a link and then replace the link language with a much shorter text the way we could in the old system so I haven’t tried that again. What sucks, though, is when I went to post an image to start the diary, and yes, I’m such an old-timer I think I’m going to keep calling these posts diaries until they pry that term from my cold, clenched fingers, anyway, my image library contained all of twelve (12!!!) images and several of them went back at least eight or nine years since they were last posted. Two were borrowed from another Kosak, so they weren’t mine, other than I took them from the library and posted them in a comment or diary of mine (I can’t recall). At least we can delete images now, but I thought we could save images if we posted them in diaries. In searching through some of the diaries on problems and fixes in this new version, apparently images from the DK5 library were transferred to the DK6 library without some or all of their metadata, including who uploaded them. I see that’s on a bug report, but I’m not sure if that’s fixable. If not, whoooo boy! Has anyone else lost their image library? There’s no practical way to search through 60,000 media files by looking at each of them to see if any of mine had their attributions stripped and might be floating around waiting to be saved. I looked through about 1000 but didn’t recognize any of mine, which seems like a statistical unlikelihood. Oh, man. I should like, mellow out. It is 4/20, after all. Dudes and dudettes, Ranting is sooo last paragraph. Back to reality man. I ran into this couple one blustery evening a couple of weeks ago in downtown Estes Park. They were friendly, if a bit gruff. I haven’t met trolls or ogres before, but it seemed that evening that they brought some cold winds down from the mountains. I guess they were getting in some late season tourism action. I mentioned before they ate me that I had planned to visit their homelands in Norway and Iceland in a couple of months, so they spared me. They told me to look up their relatives but since I’m lousy with names and since their voices sounded like rocks grating together I don’t think I could have remembered it anyway. Probably for the best. Anyway, if someone wants to take on some Colorado State Open Threads in the month of June, maybe some things for writing diaries will have settled down by then. From the Colorado Sun: Effort to bridge divide between moderate, liberal Democrats in the Colorado legislature falls apart An effort to bridge the divide between more liberal and more moderate Democrats in the state legislature has fallen apart. The two sides were working on a bill to increase transparency around legislative caucuses in response to the Colorado Opportunity Caucus’ retreat at a hotel in Vail in October. The caucus is made up of moderate Democrats at the Capitol and doesn’t disclose all of its donors, though at least one of their funders is a nonprofit that has targeted liberal Democrats in primaries. But now the two sides are no longer talking about their transparency effort and the more liberal faction Friday introduced a very similar bill without their more moderate counterparts. That didn’t seem so bad. Now I just have to deal with quoted sections having larger text than the regular post. Also from the Colorado Sun: Jared Polis says Colorado needs a new prison ASAP, even as crime has fallen. How did we get here? A parole backlog and new laws lengthening sentences are leading to a surge in the prison population. It’s gotten so bad that Gov. Jared Polis is failing to make good, possibly even backtracking, on a key campaign promise to end Colorado’s contracts with private prison companies and reinvest those dollars in alternatives to incarceration. Polis is now proposing expanding the state’s correctional system by reopening at least one, but maybe two, prisons. Without another prison, Polis’ office said, the Department of Corrections will have to house more than 100 people on sled beds — plastic floor cots — in a gym. And so at a time when Colorado lawmakers are cutting social services, like health care for people with low incomes, to manage a $1.5 billion budget gap, they’re also considering how to find money for another prison, an outcome no one seems happy about. … It’s not that the state is sentencing more people to prison. New admissions are expected to decrease by 3% this fiscal year and crime rates have fallen. But the state isn’t letting as many people out as it could. By the end of June, the DOC’s most recent projection shows a 12% decrease in the number of incarcerated people granted parole this fiscal year compared with last. There are multiple reasons fewer people are being granted parole. For example, there are the laws mandating longer sentences. There is another one mandating life sentences for people who are convicted of trafficking minors that is on the ballot this November. There are also required classes for getting out on parole that require nine months so that inmates are ready for their time once they’re free, and there’s a large backlog of inmates waiting for those classes. Read the article. It will show you this is a complicated situation and it’s not just a matter of building more prisons, or releasing more inmates on parole. Pshaw. And you thought being a legislator was easy work! It’s hard for me to get through an issue of the Colorado Sun without finding plenty of interest. That’s why I subscribe and why I recommend you consider subscribing as well. From the Denver Post: Critics question feds’ plans for future of Colorado River: In years of severe drought, ‘the system is failing’ As a yearslong stalemate in negotiations persists between the seven states that share the river, it’s become increasingly likely that the federal government will impose its own long-term plan, choosing from a range of proposals officials have outlined in recent months. But experts and water managers across the 250,000-square-mile Colorado River basin are raising the alarm about the five plans, questioning if any of them hold up under the new climate reality. They say the federal plans won’t keep the system from crashing in critically dry years — which are becoming more frequent — and could wreak chaos on the pivotal lifeline for 40 million people in the American Southwest. “In every one of those alternatives, under what they call critically dry hydrology, the system is failing,” said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency based in Glenwood Springs that works to protect Western Slope water. “And critically dry hydrology is what we have continued to see consistently in the basin in the last 25 years and what we should expect going forward. It seems from this article that Washington is going to impose its will on the Colorado River by telling it that it must produce more water than it does. I’m not happy this is occurring under a Republican administration that refuses to use the words “Climate change” when describing why nearly every year the river does not produce enough water for their minimum flow scenarios and it pretty much never gets to one where the river is allowed to refill all the reservoirs and maybe even reach Mexico. The people in charge are just like those in charge of other areas of the government right now. Order (whatever department) to do better and the (staff/economy/resources/science) will do so without respect to reality. I didn’t have a paid account with the Post at this time, so I couldn’t do a gift link, but I do have standard Internet access for free through a free account. If you have problems accessing this article, please let me know in the comments or Kosmail and I’ll change how I post Denver Post articles. Finally, from the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, as a help for the last article: Cloud seeding couldn’t save Colorado from a historically bad snowpack, but the dry winter sparked more interest in the technology … Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that has been around since 1946. It involves dispersing silver iodide, or other harmless compounds, to serve as nuclei around which ice crystals can form during a storm, Rickert explained. He said cloud seeding systems can increase a storm’s snowfall by roughly 8-12% when generators are turned on. … “Cloud seeding can’t create storms,” Rickert said. “We need storms to be present with the right characteristics — wind speed, wind direction and the presence of super-cooled liquid water — and when all those things are there, then we can seed the storm to get a little bit more out of it.” … The ability of cloud seeding to add to Colorado’s snowpack was limited this year compared to past years due in large part to the lack of suitable storms that rolled through the state, Rickert said. He noted, however, that the technology still likely added small amounts of extra precipitation to the storms it did seed. In Colorado, Rickert said all seven wintertime cloud seeding programs use ground-based generator systems and operate from Nov. 1 to April 15, with contractors able to get an extension to the end of April if conditions allow. I’m going to go see about my missing photos. I’m sure they’re gone into the nether regions of the Intertubes, but maybe they might still exist someplace. Hope is a great thing, and as I sit here and look out over Rocky Mountain National Park, it’s easy to be motivated by hope and dreams. Talk amongst yourselves, put comments down below, and as always, the floor is yours… [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/20/800023715/community/a-bit-more-sno/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/