admiralteal

admiralteal , 3 months ago to world in Biden backtracks on climate plans and ‘walks tightrope’ to court both young voters and moderates

The IRA is a fantastic overall piece of legislation that gives us a fighting chance. Most policy experts agree that it has a lot of very achievable goals -- thanks to its structure that offers uncapped subsidies for certain beneficial productions that are estimated to represent well over a trillion dollars in real investment, on top of the fact that renewable energy already out-competes fossil on NEARLY all financial metrics.

And if Biden loses, huge amounts of this progress can be undone by executive action, inaction, and feebleness by a Trump administration. Which he, I remind everyone has pledged to do.

If the bill lasts more than a couple of years, it will build its own constituency a la medicare and become VERY sticky and hard to remove. But it's very vulnerable right now.

So yeah, as someone who thinks climate is the top issue everyone should be caring about since it represents an existential threat to our entire human race, I think it's fine for Biden to focus for the next year on winning that election. If he wins that election, most of the very significant progress will get 4 more years to cure -- it will be pretty well locked in and indeed many growing industries will be craving more. Rural states seeing major investment for the first time in decades in the form of renewable energy industry will want more. It has the potential to be really transformational.

Plenty of solid reasons to criticize Biden. Climate is not one of them. He's made progress that is difficult to fathom for people who only have cursory knowledge of the US energy economy.

admiralteal , 3 months ago to world in Biden says he’ll sign bill that could ban TikTok if Congress passes it

Really resembles a bill of attainder, to me.

We'd ALL be much better off, and a similar outcome could be achieved, by putting to law strict data security and privacy rules. Plus it wouldn't inevitably be challenged on very reasonable 1A grounds. But that isn't as politically possible because so many -- especially conservatives -- don't believe in the liberty of privacy.

admiralteal , 3 months ago to news in Oil companies used fraudulent scheme to shift liability for orphaned Colorado wells onto the state, lawsuit claims

They've known for at least 50 years that their product is destroying the planet.

Yet the plundering never stops.

It is not possible to be running an oil company ethically at this point. If you're working in the industry, you're one of the baddies.

admiralteal , 3 months ago to world in Elon Musk sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming betrayal of its goal to benefit humanity

Boring company/hyperloop is the clearest example.

Literally any subject matter expert on the subject of transportation can spell out a half a dozen things that make no sense/are actively harmful about all the attention and investment these projects got. Well There's Your Problem has a 3 hour slideshow on the subject, for example. Musk was even caught on the record admitting one of its motivations was to fuck with real transportation projects like California HSR. The whole thing was all-but-provably an elaborate con.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in The HDMI Forum rejected AMD's open source HDMI 2.1 implementation

I love having mysterious cables that may or may not do things I expect them to when plugged into ports that may or may not support the features I think they do.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in Idaho halts execution by lethal injection after 8 failed attempts to insert IV line

And the way they determine "unusual" is by doing this absolutely ahistoric, arbitrary polling of current policy. They cherry pick whatever statistics serve the politics of the person writing the decision.

e.g., when ruling whether it was "unusual" to execute people with cogitative disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia), they did a tally of how many states allowed execution in these cases vs did not but deliberately omitted how many states do not allow ANY executions. Then concluded that slightly more states allow executions of the mentally unfit than don't even though it was absolutely incontestable fact that the vast majority of states did not allow this kind of execution.

Ignore that the ruling technically banned those executions... because it factually didn't, since it left it up to states to define cognitive disability however they pleased and the behavior of the kill-happy states was not affected by the ruling.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to nottheonion in Lauren Boebert rails about “Biden Crime Family” just before her son is arrested for crime spree

Yes yes, both sides are exactly the same and calling out hypocrisy is somehow the exact same as being a hypocrite. That's nice, dad, now remember that dinner is at 6.

admiralteal , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to news in Argentina’s Milei bans gender-inclusive language in official documents | CNN

They never were. Libertarianism is a more or less a fake ideology that is, in practice, just a thin veneer over garden-variety conservatism.

People who actually care about being staunch defenders of individual liberties call themselves liberals because that's what the word means.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Elon Musk’s Vegas Tunnel Project Has Been Racking Up Safety Violations

Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.

Glad to see news that it wasn't. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would've made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in This ballot measure would restore Roe. Abortion rights groups are attacking it.

One thing people forget about Roe and Casey is that it was a bad decision in the first place.

Privacy about decisions in care should absolutely be a patient's right, make no mistake. The government has no business intervening in medical decisions made between competent medical professionals and their patients so long as everyone is acting in good faith and with proper consent. Including a patient seeking an abortion. The state has no sufficient interest to intervene in these decisions that justifies the profound violation of a person's liberties. In that sense, Roe is good policy that should be on the books. But it kind of never was, because it only ever really extended this specific right in the case of abortion. Which is just needlessly limited.

And it also wasn't really protecting the right to autonomy over your own body through access to abortion or otherwise. It was instead just forcibly shoving some abortions under the umbrella of this limited, incomplete right to privacy in medical decisions, with a bunch of huge loopholes formalized. In spite of what people say, there was factually no Constitutional right to an abortion under Roe. The Constitutional protection you had was one that just made it impossible in practice for the government to stop the abortions from happening, but it did so in a weak and circuitous way that, as we saw, was easy to undo.

So while the practical effect was a more just society, the reality of the decision was that it failed to truly fulfill either of its promises.

So yeah, I understand why a serious advocate for both body autonomy rights and for privacy rights would not be super stoked to merely restore Roe. In a vacuum, you really would want to separately and clearly protect both of these right formally and resiliently. But I also all but guarantee that nearly all of those "abortion rights" groups' members, if push came to shove and this was going to vote as a ballot measure or some such, would turn out and vote for it.

Good on them for pushing for more. But the advocates saying they are in a hurry to get this fixed are also right; every minute the right is missing from the state normalizes this flagrant violation of individual liberties and makes it harder to restore rights to their citizens.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to news in West Virginia Senate passes bill that would remove marital exemption for sexual abuse

It is West Virginia. 31/34 state Senators and 89/100 delegates are Republicans. It is a Republican show through-and-through. Anything that happens there is going to be Republicans.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to youshouldknow in YSK: About BangYourBuck.com, which lets you sort Amazon by price per pound/count/etc.

Getting the best value is frequently an economic mistake for a buyer because it does not take into account the present vs future value of money. Not to mention how it is sure to increase your waste/shrink factor and so can eat up its own savings.

Don't deliberately overconsume just to feel like a savvy buyer. Buy a reasonable amount for your own needs and no more. I get that we all like Costco, but the business model really isn't that good for typical consumers.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Why are there no commercially available helmets with HUD's?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Speed limits themselves are only very loosely related to safety (85th percentile rule and civil engineering voodoo science) and the speedometer is more about staying on the right side of the police state when confronted with roads that overwhelmingly signal to drivers that they should be going WAY faster than is legal.

And even then those speed limits, at least outside of the comparative safety of highways, are almost always set well higher than what is actually safe for the neighborhood or useful to keep the traffic network freeflowing.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Why are there no commercially available helmets with HUD's?

What really gets me about these expensive gadget helmets is that helmets are fundamentally a consumable good. They can only take so many bangs and bumps, so much sweat, so much all that before they start to wear out. The miscellaneous wear and tear on them. Getting dropped on the ground, banged against things, taken apart and washed and put back together. And for most helmets, once the foam wears out, that's it. They no longer are fit to purpose as a helmet and should be replaced.

Back when I rode a motorcycle -- which was commuting to work for the better part of 2 decades -- I always got the most affordable, comfortable DOT-labeled helmet I could find. Any extra gadgets had to be aftermarket addons that could be portable. Because things like headphones, for me, always lasted 2-3 times as long as the helmet.

MAYBE a really high-end helmet has a longer service life. But I am skeptical even a really fancy one worn by a commuter using it near-daily would last more than maybe 4 or 5 years. They're going to have lifetimes like smartphones, for sure. Which means these gadget helms sure do have a high subscription fee to use.

admiralteal , 4 months ago to technology in Why are there no commercially available helmets with HUD's?

I dunno, if you're relying on a number to determine if you are proceeding at a safe speed, I am a bit skeptical you have sufficient mastery of whatever motor vehicle you are operating.

Just as if you're relying on a speed limit sign & law enforcement to control what speed drivers go rather than road design feedback, you have insufficient mastery of your engineering trade.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/6/22/facing-an-uncomfortable-truth-about-speed-limits