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 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

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.

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.

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

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

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

…you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you’re claiming that “the production processes” (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that’s plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren’t equivalent inputs, and you don’t need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified “production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products” and that’s not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

it is literally just Poland between Germany and russia

Poland has one of the most powerful militaries in Europe. If you think Russia’s been struggling in Ukraine, you haven’t seen anything yet. Since Poland joined the EU (and later, NATO) it’s become much more prosperous than it was under Soviet/Russian influence:

It’s been using that prosperity to spend on military. It’s not the pushover from days of yore any more, and it’s in NATO

Yes, the downsides of at-large reps would surely be that if no one rep is responsible for particular local issue(s), it’s possible that none would take it up and that would leave some constituencies unrepresented. My thought about that is that when district maps are drawn to purposely divide particular constituencies (I mean, look at all those pack-and-crack maps that split minority groups into districts that mostly elect people that don’t represent them), an at-large system might allow those constituencies to unify around particular at-large reps?
I don’t know, I’m spit-balling here. But thank you for taking up the question constructively!

Ranked Choice Voting? 100% approve.

Get rid of the EC entirely. The popular vote would work quite a bit better as a means of ensuring power is exercised with the consent of the governed.

Scotus and congress both desperately need oversight that is different from ‘we oversee ourselves and find we did nothing wrong’ when obvs. that doesn’t work too well

Tax prep companies… I wish them a prompt and thorough viking funeral.

Fun fact about corporate power at the time of the framers: the colonists felt first-hand the abuse of being effectively governed by crown corporations and shortly after the founding of the USA, corporations were drastically limited in what they could do- for example, they could not engage in politics, they could not own other corporations, could not engage in activities not strictly related to their charters, had charters of finite span, and their charters could be revoked for any violations. If corporations are going to be people today, it’s about damned time we started charging them with crimes when they commit crimes- and yank their charters if they re-offend.

One thing worth questioning: do we really need representative districts? Why not have at-large representatives on a per-state basis, with seats allocated to states/apportioned via census? It would be pretty hard to gerrymander an at-large system, I think

Oh, no!

Well anyways

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

Also genX, I went hard in corporate life for a long time, survived many rounds of layoffs and watched good friends go for reasons that are bad ones- until one fine day I was laid off with 18,000 others. Meanwhile they kept hiring H1B workers and issuing stock dividends and doing mass-layoffs every 2 years to keep the regional labor market full of competition and wages depressed. Knowing that they’re not interested in keeping their promises of stability and prosperity goes a long ways towards me never going above and beyond

Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?

He’s mad that there’s a move afoot to sell seized Russian assets and use the proceeds to fund Ukraine’s defense. The signal is: if you buy these things (yachts, real estate, whatever) Russia will see to it as a matter of official policy that you will fall carelessly out of a high window somewhere. The quiet part said out loud, tho, is that Russia now claims that anything it ever held, whether as the USSR or imperial Russia, or the current Russian Federation, is theirs forever no takebacks.

Basically the read on this should be: Russia is having trouble laundering rubles into non-sanctioned currencies (those foreign assets are basically conduits to do that) and is now saying essentially that if they can’t keep our offshore loot they’ll just seize all of Eastern Europe and demand tribute from their vassal territories

…of course, if Russia could actually do any of that it already would have