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

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.

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.

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

Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.

You mean something like a third Reich?

Well, yeah. In very real ways WWII was about upending the post-WW1 order (which was punitive of Germany generally). It’s really interesting to understand how crazy the flows of money were, and how badly the US in particular bungled its role as the issuer of the world’s de facto reserve currency at the time- in the aftermath of WWI, Germany and its allies were made to pay reparations, France occupied the industrial territory on their border, and any money France or Belgium or Holland received in reparations promptly went to American banks, to repay war bonds borrowed to finance the fighting (which had, in turn, been spent in American factories on war materiel, weapons, munitions, etc).

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/ (sorry this is paywalled now, it was a really good read when it was available so I’ll summarize briefly)

By the end of the first world war, all of the belligerent nations’ economies were in tatters, their leadership were forced to inflate their currencies to make payments- but the US declined to inflate its own currency to make it workable for them- and when the US didn’t think about its new role in maintaining a viable world order, it put everyone that owed it anything in the position of paying their debts not in their own inflated currencies, but in US dollars. This essentially collapsed the German economy and its currency, and it was just unnecessary.

I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:

“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover

All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia

California has more blue-water navy in San Diego than Russia has in the world. It also has more air force stationed there than Russia has.

(granted, these are US forces, not California forces, but there is no real-world scenario right now in which California would face invasion without the full military support of United States and NATO)

Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?

The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

Since you asked where, here it is on a map

Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.

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.

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

Also it occurs to me that there are other factors that disqualify candidates from being president- the bit about being 35 or older means AOC can’t be president right now and the bit about being a natural-born citizen disqualifies Schwarzenegger and isn’t it interesting that the court hasn’t taken up the issue on how that denies voters their democratic rights? I mean, when you want to understand how to apply the constitution as it pertains to who may not serve in office, don’t you want to consider all the disqualifiers and their mechanisms?

If you’re under 35 or foreign-born, it doesn’t take an act of congress to bar you from office, those things are the law and already in the constitution with plain wording. A plain reading of sec 3 of the 14th amendment basically reads as if the authors of the amendment intended it to take an act of congress (with 2/3rds majorities, in both houses) to allow an insurrectionist that previously took an oath of office to serve again, but the court magically inverted that by asserting the only congress could invoke section 3

Nope, this is the court bending over backwards to deliver a political outcome

“total victory” sure sounds like they’ve given some thought to their objectives and it’s no accident they’re killing lots of civilians

I’ve been watching the tech to make actual meat from cell lines emerge with some optimism- it promises to make it possible for us to have meat in our diets without all the greenhouse gases and feedlots and the like- but it also threatens to consolidate the protein industry into even fewer corporate hands if it’s not well-regulated.

The meat industry is honestly pretty awful (environmentally, politically, ethically, etc.) and I find myself rooting for the plucky young frankenmonsters that might come along and knock them down even though I’m pretty sure they’ll be worse if they’re not well regulated from the start.