“In this here melting pot, we burn away all our differences until we’re left with only the pure white flame of Christian nationalism.”

I had to put the statement in quotes because while being hyperbole, it’s not too far from how some people think, and I don’t want to be confused with those folks.

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.

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.

For the 5% of my adult life that I’ve had short hair and no beard: Quentin Tarantino. For the rest of my bearded, long-haired adulthood: Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus. But they need to have blue/green eyes and forehead wrinkles.
(Huh. On paper that just sounds like I look like Nick Offerman, but not really.)

My understanding is that they are focusing on adding in “AI” features in a big way, and that’s why they cut development on the other work. 🫤

Who was it intended toward?

Someone that hasn’t watched TV since the 1980’s? ChatGPT, for when someone invariably turns it loose on the fediverse?

It’s not niche as a concept. Your explanation is known worldwide.
Its inclusion in the discourse is unwarranted.

Next time you feel the need to add a disclaimer that justifies/explains/adds caveats to racist language: fucking don’t.

Maintaining a policy of radical annoyance, I see.

I’m still traumatized from Reddit, where everyone had an opinion, and the consensus is that whatever I said was wrong.

My old car was a Kia. (Don’t hate me. It was 2009, and I was earning $19,000 a year.)

I got a used model that was the one higher than base, that included the deluxe audio package. Basically, it included an aux input and the crappy speakers had metal grills instead of plastic ones.
I spent years trying to figure out why the aux jack never worked, until in 2014 I took apart the insides, and then took it to a dealership to confirm that the factory had installed the standard wiring harness, which didn’t include connectors for the aux jack. They said it would be cheaper to buy a new car than it would be to have them fix the wiring.
I wound up missing the aux roadtrip experience entirely, and replaced the radio with one that did Bluetooth.
Bastards.

But your statement is now relying on skills and equipment that - sure, don’t have that high of a barrier to entry - aren’t within everyone’s skill level, or budget vs storage capacity.

For what it’s worth, I personally wouldn’t go back to wired headphones, but I also want a mic jack because I want to play music to non-Bluetooth stuff and cars I don’t own/don’t trust with my privacy.

I like to look up stuff, even if I’m not remotely qualified to understand the results.

Tartrazine induces structural and functional aberrations and genotoxic effects in vivo
Is tartrazine really safe? In silico and ex vivo toxicological studies in human leukocytes: a question of dose

My (thin) grasp of things is that even though it’s a food additive, it’s not heavily studied, and not at higher doses, but the two studies above don’t paint a great picture. And slathering it on your skin is definitely more than you’d come into contact with than what’s needed to color food.
So, yeah - not a parlor trick I’d do to gross out my friends.

The article I read mentioned this person has co-morbidities. Presumably, that’s why their symptoms are worse/they even got tested. Perhaps this means that it only weakly infects humans (currently, anyway). Hence the lack of prior detection.
I’m sure we’ll start to see more community cases. Hopefully that won’t translate to the virus mutating further in ways that make it more infectious or harmful.