This is actually an area that’s developing quite quickly. In 2023, California managed to put almost 14mw worth of storage on the grid; if they keep building out at that rate, peaky/transient power sources like wind and solar will have someplace to park until someone needs that energy. Almost 12mw of that was utility storage; it’s like the utilities have the chance to get out of the business of producing power themselves and into the role of renting storage (or buying surplus energy then selling it later when it’s needed)

Granted, 14mw isn’t a lot in the scale of California, but the rate of growth in grid-storage over time is humongous

It’s as if they all think that they’ll be rewarded for their loyalty to him.

It’s pretty okay. Lots of engagement, also there’s something of a ‘block early and often’ culture that seems to have a way of really reducing the drama and nonsense

Yeah I still can’t get over how a couple of days later his right ear didn’t have a mark on it. At his age, even with the best of plastic surgery, he wouldn’t have clean skin on an ear for at least a week if he’d actually had a bullet pass through any part of it. I don’t believe things he has to say about his health- he has a pretty solid track record when it comes to not telling the truth about his height, weight, bone spurs, being a stable genius, etc

Ahhh, the “continental shelf” toilet

Ehhhhhhh. 😒

For the ‘but sport has to be fair’ people, stop. Sport will never be fair, there are always people with better genetics, and with better access to training and equipment and the time to devote to developing their potential, bla bla bla.
The people trying to lawyer about who is or isn’t a woman here aren’t here to make sport fair, they’re using the fact you’d like sport to be fair as a way to get you to support their demand to be able to reduce sport into a thing they can pick winners with by disqualifying people on arbitrary standards they get to invent.

I mean, the people that have been insisting ‘you’re a woman if you were born with those parts’ are now insisting ‘you’re not a woman if I feel like you’re not a woman’. Your takeaway here is that the pretexts will continue to change in order to get or keep your support, the underlying thrust is they want to discriminate against people that don’t fit in to their ideas of what being a woman should mean.

It’s ABOUT TIME

Srsly, watching grocery chains consolidate and regional prices for staples like butter and cheese go up by 50% in a matter of months got me pretty mad- I mean, on the one hand those things didn’t become 50% more attractive or more expensive to make, they just didn’t have to compete on price. It was really the fact that they could do it and get away with it that hurt the most.

At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.

To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

Fun fact: spreading conspiracy theories about the evils of fluoride in the water (it’s mind control! pollutes our precious bodily fluids!) was one of the talking points that crypto-fascists threw against the wall to see if it would stick- if you recall the line about your “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove, that was a nod to that particular vein of conspiracy theory that was making the rounds in the far-loony fringes of what was then the Republican party

Grew up in a rural red state. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:

• They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.

• They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.

• They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity

• They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to

• They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn’t worked yet

The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn’t do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists

23k is the max annual contribution

If you’re over 50, you can put $30,500 in your 401k, the extra $7500 per year is called a ‘catch-up contribution’

It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.

It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s

So if I’m mathing correctly, logic dictates that we break them both

Legitimately, how do they fix this? Like what options are there?

When it’s a feature and not a bug, you don’t “fix” it, it is working exactly as planned.

In the first paragraph the article all but prompts the Fed to jack up interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive and when employers don’t borrow or spend on payroll, the result is more people lose jobs and when fewer people have money, in theory that should reduce upward demand pressure on consumer goods prices. In short, jacking up interest rates is the Fed’s way of prompting layoffs and wage cuts- by making working people poorer. They’ve been doing this very effectively to keep wages under control, so much so that even when ‘inflation’ like this is just price gouging it’s the first thing Wall Street wants to hear.

Of course, this ‘interest rates fight inflation’ mantra assumes that the inflation is really caused by too much money out there competing to buy too few goods and services, but when it’s the result of price collusion or just price gouging, it means prices for things went up and wages just went down. (and that in turn makes Wall Street fat and happy)

In the case of real estate, it’s been established that real estate commissions (and prices) have been inflated due to price collusion among realtor groups- in the case of rents, there is a lawsuit over price collusion driving rents up.

When it comes to gas prices, that’s less likely to be price gouging but it is very likely to be the consequence of supply/production decisions made with politics in mind, by people that probably stand to gain politically if voters vote against the incumbent.

Consider the possibility that the game here does not depend on Trump winning in the Electoral college- all that needs to happen is Biden not winning 271 or more EC votes for the congress to decide the presidency via the Contingent Election process outlined in article2, sec1 clause3 of the constitution, later modified in the 12th amendment.

In that scenario, each state delegation has 1 vote- and the GOP has enough state-level gerrymanders to control enough state delegations that if it comes to pass that the 12th Amendment process decides the presidency, they are very likely going to be able to install whoever they want.

If the smart money in the GOP has decided Trump won’t win but it still wants him in the oval, anything that prevents Biden from getting 270+ gets them better odds than any other pathway

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product