El Niño sends the jet stream southward. Once the jet stream gets far enough south it tears apart any developing storms in the Gulf and Caribbean Sea before they have a chance to become a problem.
95% come from China? Why ban importing the materials you desire, which are not going to magically be cheaper by banning them, instead of providing services to simply and easily recycle them?
Collection and recycling these safely at scale seems mind boggling difficult. Various batteries, electronics, resin encrusted elements, oils, plastics, and mouthy guckiness.
I would love to see how this process works. Banning them seems to be the most economic and safest solution.
You’re correct, it isn’t worthwhile in either case, imo. However, I’m more curious as to what the “solution” is so supposed to achieve.
If you took the lithium from every disposable vape imported into the US yearly and instead used the lithium for industrial scale batteries, you’d get like 100. That’s it. Or maybe 5k batteries for EVs. That’s about 0.005% of yearly EV sales.
100% of its generation and grid stability is provided by PG&E. All it provides is the local distro and local maintenance. Also, in a low generation scenario, you are the first to be cut off to save the rest of the grid.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
> remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too
Crazy thought—dedicate the resources to maintaining them. From what I can tell, this tolerance of power-sparked wildfires is uniquely American (and concentrated, fairly and unfairly, in California).
Also, you don’t have to put it straight on the municipal balance sheet. Stick it in a distribution subsidiary with a little outside capital. (Hell, make it a member-owned co-operative.)
Alternative: sell off that transmission to someone else. Just handle last-mile distribution. Not transmission.
Some generation PG&E owns, some is in a shared vehicle split between PG&E and a group of private investors, some is owned by other utilities (Edison) and some is just privately owned. Remember that generation was built up over 70 years. Different plants at different times with different politics ends up with different ownership arrangements. They all bid into CAISO and independently choose to produce or not based upon prices. The generators sell futures contracts and PG&E (and Edison) buy them either in 1 day cycles or 15 minute cycles (almost always some of both).
Georgism? In the big 2026? Now that's a blast from the past!
Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.
> And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.
As a counterexample, tobacco taxation is less effective for reducing smoking than alternative policies [1]. So, yes, we can hope that higher taxes help people make better choices. Or we can implement better policies that are known to be more effective.
Some recent studies have shown that a properly implemented LVT avoids harming most homeowners, in fact you may come out ahead if other taxes are eliminated. (LVT alone is adequate to fund government spending and entitlements.) The homeowners who will typically feel a pinch are those who have inherited very large estates which don’t generate income. They may need to sell or develop part of their estate.
Land speculators, however, will be in serious trouble.
Yep. Take every seat, make it 15 seats. Ideally we’d have ranked choice and STV. Something like how Australia has a quota system for Senators being elected. People who achieve 1/16th of the votes get a seat, distribute preferences, repeat until all seats are full.
I still think biased sortition is the way: after voting, eliminate any candidate with less than (say) 1/11th the vote. Choose the winner proportional to the number of votes they received. It has the following nice properties:
1. Extreme candidates have very little chance of winning;
2. The system is (formally) fair in the long run; and,
3. It secures the election against tampering from both domestic and foreign actors.
Also, frankly, the sort of person who's good at winning an election is almost diametrically opposite from the sort of person you want as a leader. It's hard to combine "ideologue" with "rational compromise ready actor".
The problem is that open codecs can still be encumbered by patents and the holders will sue. VP9 and AV1 have their own patent pool for that very reason. Google may have open sourced its codecs but if they don’t indemnify users people who think they’re safe might be in for a bad time.
100%. Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.
I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.
The electorate does give control but they get bored after a few years and want to wreck everything all over again. It's goldfish levels of political memory in this country.
Getting pristine resampling is insanely expensive and not worth it.
If you have a mixer at 48KHz you'll get minor quantization noise but if it's compressed already it's not going to do any more damage than compression already has.
And we learned zero from the change after shutting down the Purdues. The electorate just wants to see drug users punished, not treated. Even though treating cheaper, more humane, and has way better outcomes.
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