booly

leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump's Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein's island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump's cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump's orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump's circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

There's lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

I mean, it really wouldn't be hard.

As of 10:30am ET on November 11, populous states that have counted less than 95% of the expected votes include:

• California (72% counted): current count is 7.27 million to 4.79 million.
• Washington (91% counted): 2.07 million to 1.39 million.
• Maryland (86%): 1.66 million to 0.97 million.
• Oregon (87%): 1.16 million to 0.86 million.
• Colorado (94%): 1.69 million to 1.34 million
• Arizona (92%): 1.47 million to 1.65 million
• New Jersey (94%): 2.14 million to 1.91 million

Just eyeballing those, and a few other smaller states with a significant number left to count, it looks like we can probably expect a few million more Harris votes to be added, and maybe another million or two Trump votes to be added.

So a quick eyeball estimate is that the 2020 minus 2024 gap should probably shrink by about half when it's all counted.

As of right now, California is reporting about 72% of the expected total, at about 12 million votes. If the ratio is maintained, we can expect about 2.8 million more votes for Harris from California alone. And Trump can expect another 1.8 million from California.

There are a couple hundred thousand votes to count in each of Oregon, Maryland, and DC.

"ah you see this is my dissertation, totally academic, and also I tattooed this symbol on my arm"

The EU had an 8% decline in emissions last year.

The US peaked at 23.1 tonnes of carbon emissions per capita in 1973. It came off that peak but stayed pretty flat through 2007 or so, at 20.2 tonnes per person. Since then, it's steadily come down, and is now at about 14.9.

There's still a long way to go, but the 35% reduction that the US has already accomplished shows that it's possible to keep making progress.

Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.

And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.

I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can't understand why people who care about climate don't acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).

The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don't think I've ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.

I haven't combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they're also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

In context, what we're seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there's no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What's going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?

He just turned off the switch in the breaker, right behind the meter. The meter itself is still hooked up, so from the power company's perspective, he has an account and everything.

At least that's how I read the article he wrote last year:

Nevertheless, I opened the main circuit, disconnecting my apartment from the grid and committing myself to solving what problems arose as they came. As I type these words in January, I’m in my eighth month. My Con-Ed bills continue to show zero kilowatt-hours.

Watch him try to open this truck door. He looks frail and uncoordinated.

Well I'm actually sitting at a computer right now so I might as well provide citations in support of what I was saying.

It wasn’t a close case back then

Here's the judicial ruling. Note that the plaintiff lost on three independent issues, each of which was enough by itself for Pepsi to win:

• Advertisements are almost never binding offers, and this ad didn't fall within the requirements to be a binding offer. In fact, even order forms and pricing lists/catalogs printed by the merchant aren't binding offers by the merchant to sell the items on the list at the listed price, and must be affirmatively accepted by the merchant in order to form a binding contract.
• No reasonable person would understand this joke as an offer, even if it weren't an advertisement, so even if analyzed outside of the advertising context Pepsi would still win.
• There's no written contract, and contracts for the sale of physical goods worth over $500 require a written contract. The actual written materials in the points program all indicated that the only items available are those within the points catalog, and there was no Harrier jet in the actual printed catalog.

Then, on appeal, three other appellate judges unanimously ruled that the district court got it exactly right.

There's been some reporting that Musk's Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it's poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I'm not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they're not sending their best.