renewbles are typically cheaper than the alternatives

But firms will charge market rate regardless of the source of energy. This is a problem we have in Texas under ERCOT.

Green power can come in at such high rates that local power is practically free. But because the energy is bundled and auctioned with coal and gas across the grid at large, and because electricity is priced at the maximum auction rate, a shortage in one municipality that’s filled with high priced fossil fuel power raises the retail price of energy into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a MWh.

One of the nicer upshots of cutting the cord with Russia is the sky high price of electricity incentivizing big investments in renewable energy.

I forgot why I didn’t like the original until I was at the third episode. It’s such an orgy of violence.

Lots of high tension mini-arcs where the payoff is just gunfire. So many characters are underdeveloped because they’re grist for the slaughter mill. Everyone who has plot armor has to survive at the last second. The votes are always impossibly narrow. There’s no significant trend or overall sense of self-preservation.

And as usual, everyone from North Korea is implied to be inherently evil.

Then they shaved two episodes off an already abbreviated nine episode season all so they could end it in a cliffhanger?

I’m just not feeling it, folks.

Okay, sure, but Greenwald’s an absolute fascist-apologist piece of shit who only hides behind a liberal-libertarian veneer when it is convenient.

Past that, the problem you run into with dissent is that it is heavily predicated on whether you are willing to endorse the dissenters. The more alien a community’s political views and activities, the less tolerant admins become. The cause of Luigi Mangione is the most notable one, as certain communities seem to reveal in cannonizing his image while others furiously scrub out anything but the most derogatory mention of his name.

How do you distinguish between the dissident Freedom Fighter and the dissident Terrorist? What do you perceive as the limit of tolerance towards the intolerant? What kind of advocacy is constructive and what is merely provocative or trollish?

When you’ve got a guy like Glenn paling around with Tucker Carlson and bemoaning the Woke Antifa Left one minute, then crying over their own community of MAGA Truthers getting deep sixed by the Deep State, it seems the very idea of legitimate “dissent” is predicated on whether you align with it or not.

It’s a very mixed bag, dependently largely on the personal views of the moderators at-large relative to the speakers. For the most part, the mods at .world seem egalitarian and amicable to liberalish dissenting views. We haven’t seen a slew of censorship/bannings over arguments about veganism or Israel/Palestine or capitalism vs socialism.

But the “y’all deserve to get banned” mentality is largely tied up in the idea that their ideas are bad for being outside the spectrum of your allowable discourse. Meanwhile, a community like .ml or Truth Social doing a censorship/ban on content is morally repugnant because its limiting conversations that are inside the spectrum of your allowable discourse.

The technical mechanics of these communities are the same, everyone’s just arguing where the lines should be drawn.

should hospitals be allowed to force or forbid doctors from providing medical care?

They provide the facilities, which includes administration and legal and billing. So in that regard, they have to have some kind of say, simply because they need to stock the equipment, train the nurses/MAs, and establish standard protocols for a given procedure. Otherwise, how do you contest a medical malpractice claim?

A doctor (Catholic or not) should never, and can never, be forced to perform a medical procedure, including abortions. And they also shouldn’t be forbidden from performing a medical procedure.

Doctors can and do regularly incur liability if they fail to perform certain necessary medical procedures, particularly in emergency room settings. A doctor that fails to follow protocol can be subject to malpractice. If, for instance, a Christian Scientist doctor refused to provide a blood transfusion to an individual suffering from sever blood loss or a narcotics prohibitionist doctor attempts to do surgery without providing anesthesia, they can get in some serious trouble.

Religious convictions don’t override medical protocols. What’s at issue is the legality of the protocols as they stand. Can a woman whose health is at risk from pregnancy receive an abortion without the doctors incurring criminal liability?

Right now, it appears that State AGs in prohibitionist states are threatening the licenses and freedoms of doctors who would provide life-saving care. Hospital administrators are acting as intermediaries because the hospital itself would suffer legal liability if staff knowingly permitted/facilitated an illegal procedure.

they don’t do tubal ligation unless it’s approved by their board

So they aren’t above doing the procedure entirely? They’re just persnickity about who is “worthy” of receiving the service?

If you don’t want to do abortions, fine

It’s crazy how a life-saving procedure is off-the-table on the “Pro-Life” grounds.

The land is (re: was) cheap

For highways, it makes sense that you’re not supposed to walk there.

Americans have created such a large and dense web of highways that it is difficult to cross the street in some areas without walking miles in a given direction to reach a crosswalk.

Houston, in particular, has this bad. You can easily find yourself near a freeway or overpass that sends you on a 20-30 minute hike to cross the street.

Trucks and SUVs are being weaponized today in the same way airliners were weaponized in 2001.

Who Will Be Eaten First?

Until the Democratic Party stops excluding the Bernies of the world

So long as the entire corporate media system is poisoned against even the most mild democratic socialism of a 1980s-style left-liberal, the party isn’t going to do that.

Go back and watch what happened in 2020 when Sanders won Nevada. MSNBC, the “liberal” news outlet had Chris Matthews wailing in fear at the prospect of being lynched in Central Park. FOX News was screeching about how the entire campaign had been infiltrated by Chinese Communists and Hamas Terrorists. I’m amazed Sanders didn’t get the Harvey Milk treatment after he took California.

Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the progressive movement as a whole is entirely at odds with the Amazons and Starbucks and JP Morgan Chases that rule our world. Even in big blue states like New York (in big blue cities like NYC), progressives can’t win the high offices, because the establishment is so nakedly hostile to economic populism. Bernie’s own bright blue home state of Vermont voted in a Republican for governor by a Ba’ath Party 73/21 margin, rather than tolerate another Howard Dean style progressive Dem in that seat.

No one believes Democrats will actually do what they say they’re going to do

Joe Biden to rich donors: “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected

I believed him. I believed statements like this paved his road to victory in 2020.

the lesson he learned from Watergate was that Nixon could have gotten away with it if the media was more sympathetic.

Then we got Reagan, Bush, and Trump, and he proved it.

Have you tried voting harder?

I prefer “Pokemon Go To The Polls”, myself.

Either way, I’m not sure where OP’s “40 Million Registered Democrats” are coming from. Obama set a high water mark for Dem turnout in 2008 with 69M votes and still managed to carry out a win four years later with 65.9M votes. Hillary pulled in 65.8M votes four years after that. She just racked them in the wrong states this time around and lost to a guy who hit his own GOP high watermark of 62.9M.

Then, in 2020, the country implemented a temporary state of national mail-in voting. Turnout surged enormously. Republicans brought in 74M votes! Enough to win in a landslide in virtually any other year. But still not enough to beat the Dem 81M vote haul. An absolutely historic turnout by either party, all thanks to a change in the mechanism used to submit ballots.

But even using these very temporary figures, I have no idea where you’re finding a full 105.8M Democrats to vote for your candidate, relative to 2016. Set aside how much our antiquated and archaic machine-voting system suppresses turnout. Set aside the deliberate disenfranchisement by determined State Secretaries in democracy-hostile states and districts. Set aside voter disenfranchisement and intimidation, misinformation and scammy robocalls. Tell me which rock these 40M Democrats are hiding under.

And when you do, make sure there’s not another 40M Republicans hiding right alongside them. Because we played this game in Texas for nearly a decade. And what we discovered was a large surplus of lackadaisical conservatives, who came out to swamp the state in 2022. So much for simply being a “non-voting” state.

Never even fucking mind all the “Obama to Trump” voters who showed up in 2016 absolutely revolted by the ghoul Democrats put up as Obama’s replacement.

Joe Biden is either the singularly greatest president to have ever lived and our only hope for the future or the worst president in history, a total disaster, possibly the entire reason everything bad has ever happened.

I haven’t decided who I’m voting for yet, so I can’t tell which.