Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 2 Dec 2021 @ 1:46am
Re: Re:
"...you're still left with whatever else isn't being taught by the system that failed them on the basics."
If you've got the skills to program a shock collar to hook onto the 1st amendment surely you can hook it onto the foundational principles of human rights in general.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 2 Dec 2021 @ 1:45am
Re:
"Is it really to much to ask to have everyone outfitted with shock collars that fire when they are wrong about the 1st amendment?"
...your idea isn't wrong. Just impractical.
Better to demand every entry into a commercial or government building is preceded with a very short quiz in the most basic privileges and rights granted by the UN human rights charter and the national charter. Failure to produce a correct response should result in a stint in the stocks and a solid whipping.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 2 Dec 2021 @ 12:59am
Re: Re:
"The Chinese population likes a lot of non-Chinese products, services, and entertainment (no accounting for taste), and might just bother to push back on a gov that caused all their favorite flavors to disappear."
Not really true. Take a look at China's online media market - as soon as Baidu had functionality akin to Google, Google was suddenly saddled with ever increasing burdens of accountability visavi the government - and finally caved, leaving China with their own search engine. Weibo instead of Twitter, Meimei instead of LinkedIn, WeChat instead of Facebook.
Hollywood now imports chinese movies and the middle kingdom is churning out blockbusters with any flavor imaginable - as long as that flavor can't be construed as criticizing the government or government policy.
The 90% of the citizenry the chinese government cares for will not even notice western offers vanishing from the marketplace and the 10% who do are free to leave or to accept being a silent minority.
The truth is that the west has only one lever against China. We foolishly placed all our manufacturing industry there and by this time retrieving it means tanking our own economies for about thirty years or more. But if we did accept throwing our economy on the table and giving it the chop...China would hurt as well.
And this is exactly what china has spent the last fifty years trying to accomplish. Full self-sufficiency while keeping the western savages in a state of perpetual dependency.
And in this they've succeeded. Western governments can not plan beyond the next election cycle and are unable to propose policy which would, in the short term, hurt the interests of their economies. Because the government which does that won't win the next election. Western corporations meanwhile, are all unable to plan beyond next quarter - because the CEO who takes too long to deliver a profit is replaced.
China, on the other hand, set itself up for losing a long string of battles - for decades - while putting themselves in the position where they would win the war. And they have.
"...they have a shot at an even bigger market should they wholesale pull out of China."
Not really, no. Look at the numbers. 1 in 6 people on the globe are chinese. Add all of europe and all of the US together and what you get is half the population of China.
Any call to make a western company leave China voluntarily is the equivalent of expecting US gun manufacturers to take the stance that from now on they won't sell any firearms to the NRA.
There's a lot of wishful thinking around China which still stems from it's decaying state in the 18th century or in the early years after Mao. The reality of it is that today China is such a massive market that for any global corporation to be denied entry to China while their competitor has access means the corporation denied access is no longer competitive, effective immediately.
And THAT is why Disney, Blizzard, Google, and every other western company to gain access to China at some point will go to any length to prolong the privilege of their stay there.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 1 Dec 2021 @ 2:13am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[addendum to this;]
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Sadly not enough. Germany and Sweden have both found that trying to increase the proportion of wind a measly 10% resulted in Sweden's case emergency measures to rise from 15 to 240 cases every year - brownouts, burnouts, blackouts. In Germany's case they had to pull the emergency plug on factories, at the risk of breaking billions of € worth in hardware.
To get wind to pose a significant part of energy production you literally need to retool most of the grid, putting significant storage facilities in every wind farm. And that's not counting the ecosystem cost of having those plants landbound where the sound and rotors have so far wiped out the populations of birds and bats in any place they're built.
Wind power was a nice idea. But at scale it just isn't sustainable to cover more than a fraction of society's needs.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 1 Dec 2021 @ 1:50am
Re: Re:
"It is an interesting idea, but we can't even think about free market competition in policing until we have achieved actual free market competition in the government that underlies the law enforcement system. "
That right there. There's a sort of libertarian religious belief in market forces which roots itself in the idea that participants will obey the rules.
Hence why you need a hybrid system where capitalism and socialism curb each other rather than one side dominating completely.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 1 Dec 2021 @ 12:39am
Re:
"Maybe It's time for Americans to think out of box. Think us as the market for security and learn from other markets."
In many european countries policing requires hell of a lot more than a mere ten months of training and practice peelian principles of policing. Where I live if i see a cop i may be nervous he's there because there's a problem in my immediate area but I have never in my life actually had cause to fear that officer the same way I'd fear people in gang colors eyeing my smartphone.
I think the US fscks up in so many ways because as a culture magical thinking is encouraged. The one who wears the badge can do no wrong. The screaming crackpot peddling snake oil is to many just a prophet the "establishment" wants silenced. Legislation and policies are based on religious tenets rather than observable evidence. The "truths" about the earth being flat, alien visitors, the holocaust and the moon landings being faked, and liberal cannibal cults....are all suppressed by the mysterious lizard people running the illuminati - who apparently everyone but a small handful people is a member of.
P.T. Barnum couldn't have made a living anywhere else. Only in the US does such a large herd of gormless fsckwits exist who will believe anything as long as it sounds good to them.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 30 Nov 2021 @ 1:28am
Re:
"It didn't really "cost" criminal convictions (although, given the attitude of many prosecutors, i suppose "cost" is a reasonable term in that context), at least not all of them, if the cases were bad to begin with."
It is, frankly, terrifying to consider that there may be a lot of people out there who will assume that all of said cases are valid and now a great many bad guys will be walking the streets because the bleeding-heart liberal prosecutors saw fit not to give some understanding to the brave cops going above and beyond their duty to "help" out a difficult case.
Rather than a pair of perjurers and a serial rapist with badges trying to meet their arrest quota by smearing dirt on anyone they thought it could stick to.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 29 Nov 2021 @ 8:26am
Re:
"And here is where I point out that the current Grand Poobah of that brand of sociopathic ignorance is the exact same person Lozenge voted to install as POTUS in 2016 and 2020."
Yeah, that, in the end, is why I can't respect Lostinlodos's stand on that particular issue, irrespective of all the parts where he sounds and appears sensible. His adherence to Trump despite that administration owning the headstones of more americans than were lost in every major war last century combined.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 29 Nov 2021 @ 8:18am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"You can't build nuclear any faster either, if anything the build will be slower. "
You certainly can. You only need one set of permissions - whereas in California I dare you to try to replace currently existing fuel plants with acreages of sun and wind farms. Unlike with sun and wind you also don't need to rewire parts of the grid if all you do is replace one type of plant with another.
"It may surprise you, but a nuclear plant needs a larger water supply that coal or gas to meet the emergency cooling needs, where a significant of power has to be absorbed for may hours."
It really doesn't surprise me, no. I'm writing this with at least basic knowledge of what I'm talking about. I'm assuming that you mean to say that a lot of fossil fuel plants aren't located conveniently near sources of water and thus not able to be replaced quite that easily? Yes, you're right. Water supply remains a problem, and won't be easily fixed.
"There is also a requirement for fast throttling generators..."
Not sure where you're going with this. any turbine-based generator can release or engage power efficiency quickly just by moving the coils generating the inducted electricity back from the rotating spindle.
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Within a narrow range, yes. Sudden cloud coverage or precipitation can cause drastic shifts in solar production. The blade pitch of a wind turbine won't help much to offset sudden squalls and slipstreams.
"A few big plants make sense where fuel efficiency is a concern..."
This is an issue of scale. France has managed to be 90% free of greenhouse gas emissions in power generation. But only because they focused on nuclear. Germany is at less than 50% of that. And that still includes 12% nuclear.
The US has 80% of its power generated by fossil fuels. To replace that as quickly as it will need to be replaced sun and wind are suckers bets.
Politically speaking far more motivated nations in the world than the US have tried to replace fossils with sustainables. The only successes we can point to is those who've used nuclear energy instead. To get from where you are today to where you need to be 2050...looking at having sun and water take over those 80% of power generation isn't even optimistic anymore. It's demanding a genuine miracle.
It's not that your points aren't all correct. They are.
It's that they're completely irrelevant unless they can all be implemented in a very brief period of time. And cheat sheet in hand we can look at the world and state, with authority backed by history, that unless the US manages to install leadership more devoted to sustainable energy than European Green Party fanatics and keep them in power...then you won't even see 10% more of power generation converted into sustainables.
Honestly, for myself I'd want a sensible mix of thorium liquid salt reactors, wind and sun power for our needs. Gradually brought in it would be an enormous boon to everyone. But it's not going to happen because we've squandered the time we need to invest and build it and no nation, least of all the US, will wreck itself to safe the prosperity of the next few generations. Not if it impacts the quarterly margins or the fiscal year today.
Replacing fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones may not work either. It just has a far better shot at succeeding.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 29 Nov 2021 @ 2:35am
Re: Re: Well, it doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
"Facebook doesn't have to make itself a place for anthropology, though."
They surely don't but given that Kardaschian's body paint picture slipped right through the message appears to be that it's OK with partial or full nudity as long as the subject is young and attractive but the same nudity in the form of actual science and art is a big fscking NOPE.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 29 Nov 2021 @ 2:30am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Progressives are saying this? Where?"
Correction. People who claim they are.
You know the ones. The average John/Jane Q Doe. Upper middle class, lives in a nice house they're up over both ears in mortgage on, send their kids to a nice school, think their savings are enough to push one of them through college. The ones who are all in on equality and affordable housing - but solidly vote against allowing the city to open zones anywhere nearby to high-density development. The ones all in favor of public health care, equal-opportunity education, sustainable energy, and recycling initiatives. Until it turns out to be expensive, inconvenient, and Dear God, 3$ the gallon on gas!? at which point they'll - reluctantly - vote for the other candidate.
And who are all in for equality in race and gender but when their young kids are taught the realities of what slavery was like in school and they find LGTB-friendly literature in the school library they eagerly help the local republicans to keep that sort of stuff hidden until the kid turns 18 or so. Because kids at the age of 10 and early teens shouldn't learn about the real world.
There's a reason Biden can win big in a number of states where the democrats are currently being clobbered. Part of it is the message, but a lot has to do with the fairly large amount of people eager to see change made - somewhere else, far away. Because on the local level that change will, more often than not, be expensive, expose your small child to hard truths about the world, or cause your house values not to rise quite as steeply.
There are a lot of these. They go to the polls for president and vote democrat...and that's their act of conscience for those four years.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 29 Nov 2021 @ 12:51am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"There are several issues with nuclear plants."
That's putting it mildly. If only the focus of research had been on liquid salt thorium reactors rather than barely subcritial reaction uranium reactors producing weapons-grade fissiles as rest product we'd all be in better shape.
However, issues or not; we don't have the time. We either replace - fully - our fossil fuels with sources not generating greenhouse gas, or we hand to the next generation a smoldering wasteland.
"The grid modifications are not that extreme, as solar and wind is a distributed generation, and can feed back to the backbone grid via the existing distribution system, while feeding power to local users."
Then why is that one of the major issues facing nations like Germany and Sweden? Even nations with up-do-date power grids need to rebuild theirs to accommodate the shift to drawing generated power from thousands of places which so far only planned for the power draw of a few isolated households. Because the thing about wind and solar power is that you put it in isolated places no one wanted to build housing in. Hence there is no coverage, and hence you need to expand the grid to the point where you might as well rebuild it.
Which you'll have to do anyway given that none of it is built to handle the load of every car turning EV.
"Wind generators on the coast and pumped storage in the mountains is viable..."
If we had fifty years or more to build it which we don't. There's a logistical issue with coring out a mountain for an artificial lake, there's even more of a logistical issue trying to find the water to pump into that lake these days, and there's an issue with drawing the pipe.
If this project wasn't planned in the nation of "No, we can't" I'd say it might be feasible...but we are talking about a nation which can not maintain its existing infrastructure, can't manage any public project properly, and has tried to build high-speed rail for over a decade as a result of which the state of California has burned money like there was no tomorrow and barely managed to draw a line between Bakersfield and Merced.
I don't credit the US to, within the timeframe (too late), to build storage pumps, solar panels, and wind farms to cover the 80% of its energy production still relying on fossil fuels. No matter that would be the preferred option.
But those ships have all sailed. We don't have the time. The best options all take time which doesn't exist.
"A nuclear power station on the other hand is a concentrated generator and needs high power connection to the backbone of the grid."
Which already exists since all you need to do is build the nuclear plant where the current coal or gas plant stands and plug it into the same trunk. The wind or sun farm, otoh, is going to be placed where there's a lot of surface with no habitation and thus no grid coverage to begin with.
Nuclear plants aren't desirable by any means but they are comparatively plug and play.
As we've seen in Europe where we've focused far more on green power than the US has, there is only one nation which managed to switch and keep it's energy production into more than 90% non-fossil. And only did so by having some 70%+ be nuclear.
Germany, meanwhile, in the throes of the Green Wave for decades, has tried frantically and is still over 50% reliant on fossils. And only at that point because 12% is still nuclear power.
We can ivory tower this around as much as we like but the facts are in; humanity has proven incapable of replacing a major proportion of its energy needs with sustainables. And blame voters for that, who all pay good lip service to the concept of renewables but the very second they discover it means a higher power bill or paying more in taxes to build the damn replacement to coal they cast their vote on the candidate in the pocket of the coal and oil barons.
Yeah, in theory we could do all you claim. In vivo the best we can hope for is to swiftly persuade the body politic to put down a few plug-and-play nuclear plants to replace the coal and gas burners.
We don't have the time any longer to hammer out the details, find the proper engineering, plan and build grand works of energy storage all over a nation the size of a continent and plaster the damn thing with photovoltaics, sun towers and wind generators.
Greenland's glaciers are done for no matter what we do now, so the tipping point of Earth's albedo losing several percent is a given. The siberian permafrost is melting and so we're at the second tipping point when the stored methane is released én másse.
It's too late to fix any of this. It's too late to mitigate it to tolerable levels. We either shut the exhaust tap on emission right now, right here...or a hundred years from now humanity will be in the middle of an extinction event of its own making.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 7:49am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"A pumped storage system does not need the vast water storage of the likes of the Hoover dam, as it not expected to run continuously for months on the water in the storage lake"
Correct as written, but for the storage to perform it still requires all the relevant criteria - a long distance between high and low point, sufficient water, and sufficient pump capacity to react appropriately to grid fluctuations. And that's still a tall order because it requires a lot of suitable terrain, a lot of water, and, if the idea is to cover for the unpredictable fluctuations in wind and sun power, an unholy fuckload of high-capacity pumps.
What all potential storage solutions will cost is money. Money that will not ever come from the private sector - because unless the government directly outlaws coal there will never be a point where green energy trumps coal in cheapness in the quarterly profits.
And honestly, the US does not have a great record when it comes to public works, particularly not California.
Relying on sun and wind requires the extra steps of heavily modifying the grid and inventing, building and maintaining expensive and extremely cumbersome storage solutions (which may not even be possible at the location). All of which significantly adds to the bill then passed on to the customer.
Or they build a few new nuclear power plants to replace the coal plants and call it a day.
At the end of this I'm hoping for nuclear plants to be the winner because it can replace the 90% of the US energy consumption still made of fossil fuels quickly - possibly even in time for it to matter.
The reality is that although everyone would more likely want sun power to be the winner, we are out of time. We were out of time years back. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 0 as soon as we can, irrespective of what it costs, because if we hit a single tipping point we're done. It's no longer a race to ward of the apocalypse. It's a race to mitigate it as far as possible, as fast as possible.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 6:08am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yeah. Baghdad Bob keeps trying to bring up Australia - which is one of those rare countries lacking a decent telecommunications act.
And, if I had to venture a guess, never will obtain one given the demonstrated technological illiteracy of people who decided to outlaw the creation of code without government backdoors, forcing what IT industry the aussies had to die stillborn.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 6:00am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: On review
"In the real world; they’re quite lucky it was over zealous illicit law enforcement and not the pillow cover brigade. "
I'd have to argue that the two are increasingly likely to be one and the same. The argument that these people were lucky it was just "ordinary" criminals wearing badges rather than white supremacists wearing badges...isn't really a comforting one.
"All, literally all, is was pointing out was in this case they weren’t completely innocent civilian bystanders. They actively and intentionally put themselves into that confrontation."
I'll take exception to the use of the word "innocent" here. As you've implied earlier on, self-defense is a thing, and you've argued up one side and down the other in favor of defense of self, others and property.
By definition, even if they gathered to ambush an expected van of shooters they expected to show up, they'll still be innocent of any wrongdoing.
Nitpicking, to be sure, but given todays climate I'm more in favor of accurate wording leading to actual arguments rather than a sentence resembling gaslighting leading to the Monty Python skit about "the argument".
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 5:51am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: On review
"The US has a plague of so-called drive-by shootings. One that hasn’t come close to slowing. Be it gangs spraying from illegal fully automatics or snipers in hotel rooms. A terrorist in the trunk of a car or an initiate on a highway overpass. "
I'd argue this underscores the point; "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."? Well, yeah, but every other constitutional amendment has been provided with caveats and conditionals. The US strips the vote from criminals but is unable to make gun ownership a subject of licensing and training? Can't keep lethal weapons out of the hands of the obviously insane?
And the normalization of death gets to me as well. The US lost, in a single year, more people than they lost in the damn world wars. Because defying basic medical safety had become a loyalty test inspiring "covid parties" and similar gatherings out of spite.
It's like catching a glimpse of...17th century Japan or medieval europe. A place where in modern times the citizenry seems to consider violent death a normality. And actively oppose any action to reduce the death toll. It's...surreal.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 4:36am
Re: What is so surprising?
"The question of importance is if Trump knowingly had direct help.
No such evidence exists. "
What does exist is that Trump is sitting with massive loans for which he owes the Russian FSB as a guarantor.
What also exists is the tacit fact that Trump has consistently been the best US president Russia ever had.
Legally speaking there may be little you can do but if your actions benefit your own company that much at home and abroad while benefiting the competition to the extent that Trump did, questions should be asked.
Statistically, if the US administration had just sat on their hands they should, by now, be looking at roughly 50k dead or so. Possibly a 100k with bad luck.
Instead, entirely due to Trump's administration making defying basic medical standards a test of loyalty, the US is looking at more casualties courtesy of Covid-19 than you guys lost in vietnam and both world wars combined. Some 700k more than what ought to have been the case for any other G8 nation.
And yet the adherents of Dear Leader exculpate him, as if that death toll was somehow a...minor hiccup.
And then as a minor addendum to that monumental fsckup he undid some 50 years worth of patient US diplomacy and more or less handed the keys to the middle east completely to russia.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 26 Nov 2021 @ 2:30am
Re: Re: Oh look! Reality!! Quick. Someone change the channel.
"It's not fascism which is all about the state but its crony capitalism..."
So it is, but quite a lot of the adherents of the one tend to be happy adherents of the other as well. Plenty of motivation for corporations to be in the position where the state is their extended arm and legislation a way to knock out their competition. Ultra-authoritarianism is just another tool in the box to make that happen.
On the post: Even As Grifters Insist Otherwise, Courts Know That Social Media Are Not State Actors Because Of Section 230
Re: Re:
"...you're still left with whatever else isn't being taught by the system that failed them on the basics."
If you've got the skills to program a shock collar to hook onto the 1st amendment surely you can hook it onto the foundational principles of human rights in general.
On the post: Even As Grifters Insist Otherwise, Courts Know That Social Media Are Not State Actors Because Of Section 230
Re:
"Is it really to much to ask to have everyone outfitted with shock collars that fire when they are wrong about the 1st amendment?"
...your idea isn't wrong. Just impractical.
Better to demand every entry into a commercial or government building is preceded with a very short quiz in the most basic privileges and rights granted by the UN human rights charter and the national charter. Failure to produce a correct response should result in a stint in the stocks and a solid whipping.
On the post: Even As Grifters Insist Otherwise, Courts Know That Social Media Are Not State Actors Because Of Section 230
Re: Re:
"What, no John Smith merchandise?"
You mean a T-shirt with the text "I stepped in a turd and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"? Doesn't really have the same ring to it.
On the post: Disney Yanks China-Mocking Simpsons Episode From Its Hong Kong Streaming Service
Re: Re:
"The Chinese population likes a lot of non-Chinese products, services, and entertainment (no accounting for taste), and might just bother to push back on a gov that caused all their favorite flavors to disappear."
Not really true. Take a look at China's online media market - as soon as Baidu had functionality akin to Google, Google was suddenly saddled with ever increasing burdens of accountability visavi the government - and finally caved, leaving China with their own search engine. Weibo instead of Twitter, Meimei instead of LinkedIn, WeChat instead of Facebook.
Hollywood now imports chinese movies and the middle kingdom is churning out blockbusters with any flavor imaginable - as long as that flavor can't be construed as criticizing the government or government policy.
The 90% of the citizenry the chinese government cares for will not even notice western offers vanishing from the marketplace and the 10% who do are free to leave or to accept being a silent minority.
The truth is that the west has only one lever against China. We foolishly placed all our manufacturing industry there and by this time retrieving it means tanking our own economies for about thirty years or more. But if we did accept throwing our economy on the table and giving it the chop...China would hurt as well.
And this is exactly what china has spent the last fifty years trying to accomplish. Full self-sufficiency while keeping the western savages in a state of perpetual dependency.
And in this they've succeeded. Western governments can not plan beyond the next election cycle and are unable to propose policy which would, in the short term, hurt the interests of their economies. Because the government which does that won't win the next election. Western corporations meanwhile, are all unable to plan beyond next quarter - because the CEO who takes too long to deliver a profit is replaced.
China, on the other hand, set itself up for losing a long string of battles - for decades - while putting themselves in the position where they would win the war. And they have.
"...they have a shot at an even bigger market should they wholesale pull out of China."
Not really, no. Look at the numbers. 1 in 6 people on the globe are chinese. Add all of europe and all of the US together and what you get is half the population of China.
Any call to make a western company leave China voluntarily is the equivalent of expecting US gun manufacturers to take the stance that from now on they won't sell any firearms to the NRA.
There's a lot of wishful thinking around China which still stems from it's decaying state in the 18th century or in the early years after Mao. The reality of it is that today China is such a massive market that for any global corporation to be denied entry to China while their competitor has access means the corporation denied access is no longer competitive, effective immediately.
And THAT is why Disney, Blizzard, Google, and every other western company to gain access to China at some point will go to any length to prolong the privilege of their stay there.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[addendum to this;]
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Sadly not enough. Germany and Sweden have both found that trying to increase the proportion of wind a measly 10% resulted in Sweden's case emergency measures to rise from 15 to 240 cases every year - brownouts, burnouts, blackouts. In Germany's case they had to pull the emergency plug on factories, at the risk of breaking billions of € worth in hardware.
To get wind to pose a significant part of energy production you literally need to retool most of the grid, putting significant storage facilities in every wind farm. And that's not counting the ecosystem cost of having those plants landbound where the sound and rotors have so far wiped out the populations of birds and bats in any place they're built.
Wind power was a nice idea. But at scale it just isn't sustainable to cover more than a fraction of society's needs.
On the post: The Bad Apples Control The Bunch: USA Today Report Details Law Enforcements Punishment Of Good Cops
Re: Re:
"It is an interesting idea, but we can't even think about free market competition in policing until we have achieved actual free market competition in the government that underlies the law enforcement system. "
That right there. There's a sort of libertarian religious belief in market forces which roots itself in the idea that participants will obey the rules.
Hence why you need a hybrid system where capitalism and socialism curb each other rather than one side dominating completely.
On the post: The Bad Apples Control The Bunch: USA Today Report Details Law Enforcements Punishment Of Good Cops
Re:
"Maybe It's time for Americans to think out of box. Think us as the market for security and learn from other markets."
In many european countries policing requires hell of a lot more than a mere ten months of training and practice peelian principles of policing. Where I live if i see a cop i may be nervous he's there because there's a problem in my immediate area but I have never in my life actually had cause to fear that officer the same way I'd fear people in gang colors eyeing my smartphone.
I think the US fscks up in so many ways because as a culture magical thinking is encouraged. The one who wears the badge can do no wrong. The screaming crackpot peddling snake oil is to many just a prophet the "establishment" wants silenced. Legislation and policies are based on religious tenets rather than observable evidence. The "truths" about the earth being flat, alien visitors, the holocaust and the moon landings being faked, and liberal cannibal cults....are all suppressed by the mysterious lizard people running the illuminati - who apparently everyone but a small handful people is a member of.
P.T. Barnum couldn't have made a living anywhere else. Only in the US does such a large herd of gormless fsckwits exist who will believe anything as long as it sounds good to them.
On the post: Lying NYPD Officers Cost Prosecutors Sixty More Criminal Convictions
Re:
"It didn't really "cost" criminal convictions (although, given the attitude of many prosecutors, i suppose "cost" is a reasonable term in that context), at least not all of them, if the cases were bad to begin with."
It is, frankly, terrifying to consider that there may be a lot of people out there who will assume that all of said cases are valid and now a great many bad guys will be walking the streets because the bleeding-heart liberal prosecutors saw fit not to give some understanding to the brave cops going above and beyond their duty to "help" out a difficult case.
Rather than a pair of perjurers and a serial rapist with badges trying to meet their arrest quota by smearing dirt on anyone they thought it could stick to.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Re:
"And here is where I point out that the current Grand Poobah of that brand of sociopathic ignorance is the exact same person Lozenge voted to install as POTUS in 2016 and 2020."
Yeah, that, in the end, is why I can't respect Lostinlodos's stand on that particular issue, irrespective of all the parts where he sounds and appears sensible. His adherence to Trump despite that administration owning the headstones of more americans than were lost in every major war last century combined.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"You can't build nuclear any faster either, if anything the build will be slower. "
You certainly can. You only need one set of permissions - whereas in California I dare you to try to replace currently existing fuel plants with acreages of sun and wind farms. Unlike with sun and wind you also don't need to rewire parts of the grid if all you do is replace one type of plant with another.
"It may surprise you, but a nuclear plant needs a larger water supply that coal or gas to meet the emergency cooling needs, where a significant of power has to be absorbed for may hours."
It really doesn't surprise me, no. I'm writing this with at least basic knowledge of what I'm talking about. I'm assuming that you mean to say that a lot of fossil fuel plants aren't located conveniently near sources of water and thus not able to be replaced quite that easily? Yes, you're right. Water supply remains a problem, and won't be easily fixed.
"There is also a requirement for fast throttling generators..."
Not sure where you're going with this. any turbine-based generator can release or engage power efficiency quickly just by moving the coils generating the inducted electricity back from the rotating spindle.
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Within a narrow range, yes. Sudden cloud coverage or precipitation can cause drastic shifts in solar production. The blade pitch of a wind turbine won't help much to offset sudden squalls and slipstreams.
"A few big plants make sense where fuel efficiency is a concern..."
This is an issue of scale. France has managed to be 90% free of greenhouse gas emissions in power generation. But only because they focused on nuclear. Germany is at less than 50% of that. And that still includes 12% nuclear.
The US has 80% of its power generated by fossil fuels. To replace that as quickly as it will need to be replaced sun and wind are suckers bets.
Politically speaking far more motivated nations in the world than the US have tried to replace fossils with sustainables. The only successes we can point to is those who've used nuclear energy instead. To get from where you are today to where you need to be 2050...looking at having sun and water take over those 80% of power generation isn't even optimistic anymore. It's demanding a genuine miracle.
It's not that your points aren't all correct. They are.
It's that they're completely irrelevant unless they can all be implemented in a very brief period of time. And cheat sheet in hand we can look at the world and state, with authority backed by history, that unless the US manages to install leadership more devoted to sustainable energy than European Green Party fanatics and keep them in power...then you won't even see 10% more of power generation converted into sustainables.
Honestly, for myself I'd want a sensible mix of thorium liquid salt reactors, wind and sun power for our needs. Gradually brought in it would be an enormous boon to everyone. But it's not going to happen because we've squandered the time we need to invest and build it and no nation, least of all the US, will wreck itself to safe the prosperity of the next few generations. Not if it impacts the quarterly margins or the fiscal year today.
Replacing fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones may not work either. It just has a far better shot at succeeding.
On the post: Content Moderation Case Studies: Facebook Suspends Account For Showing Topless Aboriginal Women (2016)
Re: Re: Well, it doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
"Facebook doesn't have to make itself a place for anthropology, though."
They surely don't but given that Kardaschian's body paint picture slipped right through the message appears to be that it's OK with partial or full nudity as long as the subject is young and attractive but the same nudity in the form of actual science and art is a big fscking NOPE.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
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"Progressives are saying this? Where?"
Correction. People who claim they are.
You know the ones. The average John/Jane Q Doe. Upper middle class, lives in a nice house they're up over both ears in mortgage on, send their kids to a nice school, think their savings are enough to push one of them through college. The ones who are all in on equality and affordable housing - but solidly vote against allowing the city to open zones anywhere nearby to high-density development. The ones all in favor of public health care, equal-opportunity education, sustainable energy, and recycling initiatives. Until it turns out to be expensive, inconvenient, and Dear God, 3$ the gallon on gas!? at which point they'll - reluctantly - vote for the other candidate.
And who are all in for equality in race and gender but when their young kids are taught the realities of what slavery was like in school and they find LGTB-friendly literature in the school library they eagerly help the local republicans to keep that sort of stuff hidden until the kid turns 18 or so. Because kids at the age of 10 and early teens shouldn't learn about the real world.
There's a reason Biden can win big in a number of states where the democrats are currently being clobbered. Part of it is the message, but a lot has to do with the fairly large amount of people eager to see change made - somewhere else, far away. Because on the local level that change will, more often than not, be expensive, expose your small child to hard truths about the world, or cause your house values not to rise quite as steeply.
There are a lot of these. They go to the polls for president and vote democrat...and that's their act of conscience for those four years.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
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"There are several issues with nuclear plants."
That's putting it mildly. If only the focus of research had been on liquid salt thorium reactors rather than barely subcritial reaction uranium reactors producing weapons-grade fissiles as rest product we'd all be in better shape.
However, issues or not; we don't have the time. We either replace - fully - our fossil fuels with sources not generating greenhouse gas, or we hand to the next generation a smoldering wasteland.
"The grid modifications are not that extreme, as solar and wind is a distributed generation, and can feed back to the backbone grid via the existing distribution system, while feeding power to local users."
Then why is that one of the major issues facing nations like Germany and Sweden? Even nations with up-do-date power grids need to rebuild theirs to accommodate the shift to drawing generated power from thousands of places which so far only planned for the power draw of a few isolated households. Because the thing about wind and solar power is that you put it in isolated places no one wanted to build housing in. Hence there is no coverage, and hence you need to expand the grid to the point where you might as well rebuild it.
Which you'll have to do anyway given that none of it is built to handle the load of every car turning EV.
"Wind generators on the coast and pumped storage in the mountains is viable..."
If we had fifty years or more to build it which we don't. There's a logistical issue with coring out a mountain for an artificial lake, there's even more of a logistical issue trying to find the water to pump into that lake these days, and there's an issue with drawing the pipe.
If this project wasn't planned in the nation of "No, we can't" I'd say it might be feasible...but we are talking about a nation which can not maintain its existing infrastructure, can't manage any public project properly, and has tried to build high-speed rail for over a decade as a result of which the state of California has burned money like there was no tomorrow and barely managed to draw a line between Bakersfield and Merced.
I don't credit the US to, within the timeframe (too late), to build storage pumps, solar panels, and wind farms to cover the 80% of its energy production still relying on fossil fuels. No matter that would be the preferred option.
But those ships have all sailed. We don't have the time. The best options all take time which doesn't exist.
"A nuclear power station on the other hand is a concentrated generator and needs high power connection to the backbone of the grid."
Which already exists since all you need to do is build the nuclear plant where the current coal or gas plant stands and plug it into the same trunk. The wind or sun farm, otoh, is going to be placed where there's a lot of surface with no habitation and thus no grid coverage to begin with.
Nuclear plants aren't desirable by any means but they are comparatively plug and play.
As we've seen in Europe where we've focused far more on green power than the US has, there is only one nation which managed to switch and keep it's energy production into more than 90% non-fossil. And only did so by having some 70%+ be nuclear.
Germany, meanwhile, in the throes of the Green Wave for decades, has tried frantically and is still over 50% reliant on fossils. And only at that point because 12% is still nuclear power.
We can ivory tower this around as much as we like but the facts are in; humanity has proven incapable of replacing a major proportion of its energy needs with sustainables. And blame voters for that, who all pay good lip service to the concept of renewables but the very second they discover it means a higher power bill or paying more in taxes to build the damn replacement to coal they cast their vote on the candidate in the pocket of the coal and oil barons.
Yeah, in theory we could do all you claim. In vivo the best we can hope for is to swiftly persuade the body politic to put down a few plug-and-play nuclear plants to replace the coal and gas burners.
We don't have the time any longer to hammer out the details, find the proper engineering, plan and build grand works of energy storage all over a nation the size of a continent and plaster the damn thing with photovoltaics, sun towers and wind generators.
Greenland's glaciers are done for no matter what we do now, so the tipping point of Earth's albedo losing several percent is a given. The siberian permafrost is melting and so we're at the second tipping point when the stored methane is released én másse.
It's too late to fix any of this. It's too late to mitigate it to tolerable levels. We either shut the exhaust tap on emission right now, right here...or a hundred years from now humanity will be in the middle of an extinction event of its own making.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
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"A pumped storage system does not need the vast water storage of the likes of the Hoover dam, as it not expected to run continuously for months on the water in the storage lake"
Correct as written, but for the storage to perform it still requires all the relevant criteria - a long distance between high and low point, sufficient water, and sufficient pump capacity to react appropriately to grid fluctuations. And that's still a tall order because it requires a lot of suitable terrain, a lot of water, and, if the idea is to cover for the unpredictable fluctuations in wind and sun power, an unholy fuckload of high-capacity pumps.
What all potential storage solutions will cost is money. Money that will not ever come from the private sector - because unless the government directly outlaws coal there will never be a point where green energy trumps coal in cheapness in the quarterly profits.
And honestly, the US does not have a great record when it comes to public works, particularly not California.
Relying on sun and wind requires the extra steps of heavily modifying the grid and inventing, building and maintaining expensive and extremely cumbersome storage solutions (which may not even be possible at the location). All of which significantly adds to the bill then passed on to the customer.
Or they build a few new nuclear power plants to replace the coal plants and call it a day.
At the end of this I'm hoping for nuclear plants to be the winner because it can replace the 90% of the US energy consumption still made of fossil fuels quickly - possibly even in time for it to matter.
The reality is that although everyone would more likely want sun power to be the winner, we are out of time. We were out of time years back. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 0 as soon as we can, irrespective of what it costs, because if we hit a single tipping point we're done. It's no longer a race to ward of the apocalypse. It's a race to mitigate it as far as possible, as fast as possible.
On the post: Biden Administration Intervenes In Donald Trump's Silly Lawsuit Against Twitter To Defend Section 230
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Yeah. Baghdad Bob keeps trying to bring up Australia - which is one of those rare countries lacking a decent telecommunications act.
And, if I had to venture a guess, never will obtain one given the demonstrated technological illiteracy of people who decided to outlaw the creation of code without government backdoors, forcing what IT industry the aussies had to die stillborn.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: On review
"In the real world; they’re quite lucky it was over zealous illicit law enforcement and not the pillow cover brigade. "
I'd have to argue that the two are increasingly likely to be one and the same. The argument that these people were lucky it was just "ordinary" criminals wearing badges rather than white supremacists wearing badges...isn't really a comforting one.
"All, literally all, is was pointing out was in this case they weren’t completely innocent civilian bystanders. They actively and intentionally put themselves into that confrontation."
I'll take exception to the use of the word "innocent" here. As you've implied earlier on, self-defense is a thing, and you've argued up one side and down the other in favor of defense of self, others and property.
By definition, even if they gathered to ambush an expected van of shooters they expected to show up, they'll still be innocent of any wrongdoing.
Nitpicking, to be sure, but given todays climate I'm more in favor of accurate wording leading to actual arguments rather than a sentence resembling gaslighting leading to the Monty Python skit about "the argument".
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: On review
"The US has a plague of so-called drive-by shootings. One that hasn’t come close to slowing. Be it gangs spraying from illegal fully automatics or snipers in hotel rooms. A terrorist in the trunk of a car or an initiate on a highway overpass. "
I'd argue this underscores the point; "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."? Well, yeah, but every other constitutional amendment has been provided with caveats and conditionals. The US strips the vote from criminals but is unable to make gun ownership a subject of licensing and training? Can't keep lethal weapons out of the hands of the obviously insane?
And the normalization of death gets to me as well. The US lost, in a single year, more people than they lost in the damn world wars. Because defying basic medical safety had become a loyalty test inspiring "covid parties" and similar gatherings out of spite.
It's like catching a glimpse of...17th century Japan or medieval europe. A place where in modern times the citizenry seems to consider violent death a normality. And actively oppose any action to reduce the death toll. It's...surreal.
On the post: Donald Trump Says He's Going To Sue The Pulitzer Committee If They Don't Take Away The NY Times And WaPo Pulitzers
Re: What is so surprising?
"The question of importance is if Trump knowingly had direct help.
No such evidence exists. "
What does exist is that Trump is sitting with massive loans for which he owes the Russian FSB as a guarantor.
What also exists is the tacit fact that Trump has consistently been the best US president Russia ever had.
Legally speaking there may be little you can do but if your actions benefit your own company that much at home and abroad while benefiting the competition to the extent that Trump did, questions should be asked.
Statistically, if the US administration had just sat on their hands they should, by now, be looking at roughly 50k dead or so. Possibly a 100k with bad luck.
Instead, entirely due to Trump's administration making defying basic medical standards a test of loyalty, the US is looking at more casualties courtesy of Covid-19 than you guys lost in vietnam and both world wars combined. Some 700k more than what ought to have been the case for any other G8 nation.
And yet the adherents of Dear Leader exculpate him, as if that death toll was somehow a...minor hiccup.
And then as a minor addendum to that monumental fsckup he undid some 50 years worth of patient US diplomacy and more or less handed the keys to the middle east completely to russia.
On the post: FAA Blocks 5G Deployments Over Safety Concerns Despite No Actual Evidence Of Harm
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[addendum]
And by the request for citation I'd like evidence those offices aren't, in fact, wrapped in tinfoil.
On the post: Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
Re: Re: Oh look! Reality!! Quick. Someone change the channel.
"It's not fascism which is all about the state but its crony capitalism..."
So it is, but quite a lot of the adherents of the one tend to be happy adherents of the other as well. Plenty of motivation for corporations to be in the position where the state is their extended arm and legislation a way to knock out their competition. Ultra-authoritarianism is just another tool in the box to make that happen.
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