Monument @ Monument @lemmy.sdf.org

Posts

0

Comments

906

Joined

2 yr. ago

One of the things I’m wondering about is whether Helene chopped up the water and caused some overturning/cooling that may lower surface temps.

And if it did (or did so to a meaningful degree), is that helping to temper Milton before it makes landfall?

And I guess I’m commenting here because you seemed so confident. (Maybe you’re just making it up as you go along, too. Who knows?!)

That’s ridiculous and was clearly shown to be false by my joke.

Obviously, hippos evolved so their poop was irresistible to tourists. This is something my joke mentions to explain why hippos are always attacking tourists.

But I bet their poop is great for growing the grasses they eat. It’s probably also really good for tourists, who it seems to attract and that they also eat.

Wait, so your premise hangs on thinking that synonyms mean different things?

Imagine, for a moment, me waving my hands over my head while bobbling my head back and forth in a syncopated rhythm, as I walk away, muttering. “Oh, but the defense budget isn’t the military budget!” “No, we’re just pretending colloquialisms don’t exist for the purposes of this argument.” “There’s always at least one!”

No shit. I posted this on one of this first articles, where a commenter pointed out the headline was a lie and the first ruling just found that Georgia had no standing, and that the judge had transferred the case to Missouri.

Which is more or less what happened the last time Biden tried to forgive student loans. Eventually Missouri was found to have standing, and all his efforts were thrown out.
Aside from a nagging feeling that it was known this was going to happen, and this was all for political talking points, I wanted to info dump.
A few tidbits from that prior lawsuit:

• MOHELA supported loan forgiveness, although I can’t recall why. (I think it was about simplifying administration in the face of a bunch of loans that had already paid for themselves in terms of the interest collected. At this point the cost to maintain the loan on their books and or chase accounts they can’t write off is more expensive than attempting to recover the loan.)
• MOHELA refused to be a plaintiff, and it was the state of Missouri claiming standing.
• The state of Missouri only had standing due to a voluntary agreement where MOHELA would pay a certain percentage of revenue back to the state of Missouri - something it had not done for nearly a decade. Missouri’s standing was merely technical, and more or less un-realized.
• Yet it still was used to fuck over millions of people, because Misery loves company.

Someone indicated that a court of appeals would take this up - that just means it goes to the supreme court eventually, where they come up with some dumbfuck ruling.

It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.

The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.

Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.

As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)

You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).

Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.

Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.

It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.

Which is more or less what happened the last time Biden tried to forgive student loans. Eventually Missouri was found to have standing, and all his efforts were thrown out.

Aside from a nagging feeling that it was known this was going to happen, and this was all for political talking points, I wanted to info dump.

A few tidbits from that prior lawsuit:

• MOHELA supported loan forgiveness, although I can’t recall why. (I think it was about simplifying administration in the face of a bunch of loans that had already paid for themselves in terms of the interest collected. At this point the cost to maintain the loan on their books and or chase accounts they can’t write off is more expensive than attempting to recover the loan.)
• MOHELA refused to be a plaintiff, and it was the state of Missouri claiming standing.
• The state of Missouri only had standing due to a voluntary agreement where MOHELA would pay a certain percentage of revenue back to the state of Missouri - something it had not done for nearly a decade. Missouri’s standing was merely technical, and more or less un-realized.
• Yet it still was used to fuck over millions of people, because Misery loves company.

The bear-pig part merely raised eyebrows. Manbearpig is what got the feds involved.

Well now I’m thinking of Babe the Blue Ox as being a mighty hunter.
Maybe they call him the blue ox because he crushes his victims to death (starving them of oxygen!), leaving them blue?!

The problem is that now the first page of results is all AI garbage and wrong, so you’re not 100% sure at what point you’ve reached the sane internet.

"The secretary also increased the readiness of additional U.S. forces to deploy, elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies," Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday.

Military.com: Thousands More US Troops, Attack Aircraft Heading to Middle East as Israel Targets Hezbollah in Lebanon

Ehhhh….. Israel is making this threat because the U.S. is sending more people to the region. Israel’s insanity and posturing is enabled by the U.S. putting itself in a position to be committed.

We already know Russia has assets in Syria and is fighting a proxy war with both the U.S. and Ukraine there.

It’s so shameful what greed and broken electoral finance laws in the U.S. have done to the country. Right now, an investment of a few million by a PAC can turn into billions of dollars from the government, via direct aid, passing laws, or simply looking the other way if a company isn’t being too obviously evil.

The primaries this year were highly telling in that regard - politicians were being nakedly bought in plain sight, but, again, because “you don’t fuck with the money” it’s not a question in political circles of whether overhauling campaign finance should be undertaken.

Devils advocate: It may not be “pee tapes”, it may be video of him sexually assaulting a Miss Universe candidate.

Well. That’s it. Get the flamethrowers. Time to burn down the Amazon.

No. Not the one that’s already burning. The other one.

Reddit comment: Shaving does make your dinghy look bigger!

My comment said I was amused.

What point are you trying to make, or what angle are you trying to get at?

Hey, and you’re right about that. It’s what I get for commenting on stuff with 4am insomnia. The photos are clearly credited to Maxar Technologies, which for some reason I know to be a satellite imaging company. (Yet I can’t remember my own zip code without thinking about it.)

Yeah - absolutely.
I didn’t explicitly agree with you in my response, but what you’re saying makes perfect sense. I’m just… dumbfounded it did not occur to me. Having my hands in that space is literally something I do.

If I can spare my ego just slightly - I’m sure the military has way better imaging than what was shown (but my comparison to Google maps was a bad one).

….

In two hours I have a reoccurring leadership-type meeting where finding replacement vendors for Nearmap has been a topic of discussion for a few years. (TBF, my focus is on data accessibility and interoperability. I kind of zone out for that part of the meeting.)

I honestly don’t know why I have never considered that Google flies its imagery.