President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is likely to deliver blackouts for millions, according to a North Dakota state assessment of new rules finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In May, the North Dakota Transmission Authority published a report with the firm Always On Energy Research examining implications of the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations on the state’s power grid.
The EPA’s strict emissions standards, researchers reported, “is not technologically feasible for lignite-based power generation facilities.” State investigators say the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Rule, finalized this spring, will force the premature retirement of reliable coal plants so they can be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent sources such as wind and solar. //
“We determined the closure of lignite-fired powered plants,” they added, “would increase the severity of projected future capacity shortfalls, i.e. rolling blackouts.”
Larry Behrens, the communications director for the energy non-profit Power the Future, called less power and higher energy prices “two guarantees of Joe Biden’s energy failures.”
“Sadly, the threat of blackouts is the logical result of efforts to destroy reliable energy sources in favor of intermittent wind and solar,” Behrens told The Federalist.
The North Dakota state findings corroborate warnings issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2024 Summer Reliability Assessment published last month. The Atlanta-based non-profit cautioned that the power grid will face extreme stress under higher-than-average temperatures expected this summer. //
Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein
·
Replying to @AlexEpstein
To function at its potential, AI requires massive amounts of power. E.g., state-of-the-art data centers can require as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor. ["several gigawatts"]
Image
Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein
·
Electricity demand from US data centers already doubled between 2014 and 2023. Now with the fast growth of energy-hungry AI, demand from data centers could triple from 2.5% to 7.5% of our electricity use by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group.
Image
3:17 PM · May 23, 2024
Fibber McGee and Molly - 400305 (238) Cleaning Hall Closet (Gracie Allen)
Originally broadcast Tuesday March 5th, 1940
All right, but that radish, you might have been more careful with.
Quick, help!
There's funny little insects all over me.
Brush 'em off, quick.
Oh, calm yourself, calm yourself.
them are my trout flies. [laughter] Doggone it, Molly, why did you have to go and mess up?
[knocking] Oh, dear, come in.
Pepper McGee and Molly?
Yes.
Tell me, with all these radio shows being changed, is it true that you're going to cut your program down to a half hour?
What do you mean, cut it down?
It's only a half hour now.
What?
Boy, it sure seems like an hour. [laughter] Well, as the guy says, when he fell off of the horse and heard something bust, that sounded to me like a rib. [laughter] Well, never mind that now.
We're going to go through that pile of whatnots and throw everything out we don't need.
Oh, yeah?
Well, I've been through this stuff a hundred times and there ain't a thing of it that I can spare.
Oh, there isn't?
No.
What's this old rusty horseshoe for?
Well, I found that in 19-aught-11. [laughter] As soon as I find three more, we can pitch horseshoes in the backyard. [laughter] I see, you expect to find three more, huh?
You betcha.
You don't think the automobile is here to stay, eh?
[laughter] Won't be if we don't catch up with the payments. [laughter]
Well, McGee, I've about exhausted my impatience with you.
Why?
Packing all this useless junk back in that closet.
How about these old books?
Let's see them.
Oh, them.
Well, that's my correspondence course in taxidermy.
Taxidermy.
Why on earth did you want to study taxidermy?
Well, how did I know it meant stuffing birds in animals?
And there I was, stuck with a chauffeur's license, a city map, and a pair of puttees.
Well, hurry up and put your playthings back in the closet.
Okay.
Looks terrible laying around here on the floor with it.
I'll get it. [phone ringing] Hello?
No, this is the McGee residence.
You got the wrong number.
Oh, is that you, Mert?
Oh.
He gadd every week the same thing.
Apologies to skinny Ennis.
How's every little thing, Mert?
What say?
Your Uncle Gulliver.
Oh, that's too bad, Mert.
Oh, my.
And they ain't found the body yet, eh?
Oh, heavenly days, McGee.
What happened?
Mert's uncle drove his car off a cliff and had to walk home.
They found the chassis up in a tree, but they don't know where the body is.
What say, Mert?
Oh, that's okay, Mert.
Everybody has the wrong number now and then, except Irving Berlin.
Well, now, let's see.
McGee, why are you saving this long stick of bamboo?
Why, Molly, that's got a very definite purpose.
If I was offered a job as sparring partner for Joe Lewis, that's the 10-foot pole I wouldn't touch it with.
Welcome Good Old Days subscribers!
Please find below your free downloads. You can click on the links to listen online or RIGHT click and choose “Save As” to download to your desktop:
Classic Radio Club
High quality audio of your favorite classic radio shows, Delivered Monthly
All 218 episodes in pristine audio quality (including more than 50 LOST episodes) transferred directly from the Ziv 16 inch discs //
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This private collection of discs is uniquely rare. The vast majority of these discs are un-played! No needle has ever touched them. There are no scratches or damage so the surface noise is low to none. Normally, a transcription disc has two sides and if the episode is 30 minutes long, you have part 1 on one side and part 2 on the flip side. With matched discs, you need two discs to get two complete 30 minute episodes. One disc has (for example) part 1 of episode 19 on one side and the flip side is part 1 of episode 20. The second disc holds both part 2s.
The odds of finding a single disc in un-played condition is slim. The odds of finding a matched pair of discs in un-played condition is nearly impossible. The odds of locating an entire series of matched discs in un-played condition is one in a million and finding 41 complete series of discs of this condition is one in a billion. That is how rare this opportunity is. I can not stress this enough. This truly is finding an old-time radio Unicorn. To let this opportunity pass — to not save — and not create THE definitive sets of these Ziv radio series, would be an absolute tragedy. I am doing everything I can to prevent tragedy, one series at a time, with YOUR help!
The petrodollar — a deal, not a currency — was born out of the late 1970s energy crisis. The United States, having just gone off the gold standard, struck a deal with Saudi Arabia — one of the largest producers of petroleum in the world — that meant the Saudis would price their oil exclusively in United States dollars and that any surplus revenues from their sales of petroleum would be invested in U.S. Treasury bonds. This had several effects: It ensured the U.S. a supply of oil, it established the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, and it helped the U.S. maintain what was, by today's standards, its modest federal debt.
That agreement is now over. //
Oil being denominated in U.S. dollars alone has significance beyond the categories of oil and finance. By mandating that oil be sold in U.S. dollars (DXY), the agreement elevated the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. This, in turn, has profoundly impacted the U.S. economy. The global demand for dollars to purchase oil has helped to keep the currency strong, making imports relatively cheap for American consumers. Additionally, the influx of foreign capital into U.S. Treasury bonds has supported low interest rates and a robust bond market. //
First, the effect on the dollar: Weakening the dollar, as this is bound to do, will have one major effect, namely, raising the price of anything imported into the United States. And from whom does the United States import the most goods, from knick-knacks to industrial electrical transformers? China. China, we may well remember, is a country that is not particularly friendly towards the United States. Second, the end of the dollar as the global reserve currency will almost certainly lower foreign investment in the U.S. Treasury bonds that are largely used to finance America's runaway spending. Interest rates, inflation, bond markets, and the public debt are all in for a sudden, dramatic readjustment, and it won't be good for American consumers.
GoldWave
Digital Audio Editing Software
Record • Restore • Convert • Analyze
For over 30 years we have designed and refined audio editing software that is intuitive, reliable, and affordable. We created GoldWave to do everything from recording and editing to sophisticated audio processing, restoration, enhancements, analysis, and conversions.
Mp3tag is a powerful and easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of audio files.
It supports batch tag-editing of ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags for multiple files at once covering a variety of audio formats.
Furthermore, it supports online database lookups from, e.g., Discogs, MusicBrainz or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and download cover art for your music library.
You can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.
They hold the keys to new physics. If only we could understand them.
Somehow, neutrinos went from just another random particle to becoming tiny monsters that require multi-billion-dollar facilities to understand. And there’s just enough mystery surrounding them that we feel compelled to build those facilities since neutrinos might just tear apart the entire particle physics community at the seams.
It started out innocently enough. Nobody asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos, but there they were in our early particle experiments. Occasionally, heavy atomic nuclei spontaneously—and for no good reason—transform themselves, with either a neutron converting into a proton or vice-versa. As a result of this process, known as beta decay, the nucleus also emits an electron or its antimatter partner, the positron.
There was just one small problem: Nothing added up. The electrons never came out of the nucleus with the same energy; it was a little different every time. Some physicists argued that our conceptions of the conservation of energy only held on average, but that didn’t feel so good to say out loud, so others argued that perhaps there was another, hidden particle participating in the transformations. Something, they argued, had to sap energy away from the electron in a random way to explain this.
Eventually, that little particle got a name, the neutrino, an Italian-ish word meaning “little neutral one.” //
All this is… fine. Aside from the burning mystery of the existence of particle generations in the first place, it would be a bit greedy for one neutrino to participate in all possible reactions. So it has to share the job with two other generations. It seemed odd, but it all worked.
And then we discovered that neutrinos had mass, and the whole thing blew up. //
Nazgutek Ars Scholae Palatinae
23y
866
That was a fun read. I feel like I've climbed a single Dunning-Kruger step and now I feel like I know that I know less about the universe than I did before reading this article! //
NameRedacted Ars Praetorian
7y
445
Subscriptor
karadoc said:
such that relative to you the neutrino's direction of motion would then be reversed (compared to before you overtook it)... so then I'd expect that to be a right-handed neutrino from the point of view of that speedy observer.
I may be very wrong here, but I think that the entire point of chirality is that you can’t just reverse it by changing your perspective.NameRedacted Ars Praetorian
7y
445
Subscriptor
karadoc said:
such that relative to you the neutrino's direction of motion would then be reversed (compared to before you overtook it)... so then I'd expect that to be a right-handed neutrino from the point of view of that speedy observer.
I may be very wrong here, but I think that the entire point of chirality is that you can’t just reverse it by changing your perspective. //
NameRedacted Ars Praetorian
7y
445
Subscriptor
Back when I first graduated with my engineering degree, I really wanted to go back and get a PHD in physics because I loved QM so much.
Every time I read one of these articles, I’m glad I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is exciting: but I don’t think I could handle how much the universe “wants” to perplex us.
I have little doubt that the physics world will need to completely change everything to figure out all four of the big “mysteries”: Neutrinos, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Hubble Constant. I also have little doubt that the solution will be complex, expensive, and be an advancement on the level of QM (I.e. atomic energy and semiconductors).
I hope I’m alive for when it happens, but *$&@ am I ever glad I haven’t spent my career trying to sort it out. //
Simk Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
56
Subscriptor++
I really enjoyed that article! I'm none the wiser for having read it, but that seems fitting for the subject matter. //
neil_w Ars Praetorian
13y
464
Well, the properties of neutrinos don’t line up like this. They’re weird. When we see an electron-neutrino in an experiment, we’re not seeing a single particle with a single set of properties. Instead we’re seeing a composite particle—a trio of particles that exist in a quantum superposition with each other that all work together to give the appearance of an electron-neutrino.
For a moment I considered just closing the browser tab after reading this paragraph.
This was a very good article, trying to explain the nearly unexplainable. Hat tip to the physicists who are able to grasp it all. //
dmsilev Ars Praefectus
14y
5,375
Subscriptor
The sum of all three neutrino masses cannot be more than around 0.1 eV/c2
The absolute value of the square of the difference between m2 and m1 is 0.000074 eV/c2
The absolute value of the square of the difference between m2 and m3 is 0.00251 eV/c2
One thing which the article didn't mention is that there's an additional question hiding in these constraints. Usually, mass scales with family; the electron is lighter than the muon is lighter than the tau, and similarly for the quarks. We assume that that's the case for neutrinos as well, that m1 (the major constituent of electron neutrinos) is less than m2 is less than m3. That's called the "normal hierarchy" solution. However, the data doesn't prove that. There's also an "inverted hierarchy" fully consistent with the data which swaps the ordering. And we can't tell which one is correct. The only reason for the somewhat prejudicial names "normal" and "inverted" is the sense of elegance that the laws of physics should be somewhat consistent.
More people have reported severe poisonings in an ongoing outbreak marked by people seizing and needing to be intubated after consuming microdose candies made by Diamond Shruumz, the Food and Drug Administration reported Tuesday.
The animals seem to respond more actively to calls that include their "name." //
On Monday, researchers reported what may be the first instance of a human-like language ability in another species. They have evidence that suggests that elephants refer to each other by individual names, and the elephant being referred to recognizes when it's being mentioned. The work could benefit from replication with a larger population and number of calls, but the finding is consistent with what we know about the sophisticated social interactions of these creatures.
The ordeal was a microcosm of Joe Biden's career. For over five decades, across three major federal offices, he has managed to stake out his position as the worst foreign policy mind in history. //
All of this is completely unnecessary. Palestinians do not need a ruling "council" made up of the Palestinian Authority and others who celebrated the October 7th attacks. The Gaza Strip has forfeited its right to self-governance for the time being. Did the United States quickly usher the Taliban back into leadership roles after just eight months of war in Afghanistan? That would have been ludicrous, and this plan for Gaza is just as much so.
What needs to happen is exactly what already happens in the West Bank. Israeli forces need to maintain a presence to ensure security. The Arab nations will cry like they always do, and radicals in America will proclaim it an "occupation." So what? They were calling Gaza "occupied" prior to October 7th despite Israel not having a presence there in nearly two decades.
The only thing that should matter is a workable security plan that ensures Hamas or any similar groups never retake control.
To put it plainly, the left hates President Trump more than they love this country. Government officials at the federal and state levels have censored President Trump, filed civil suits in order to sanction him, illegally removed him from the ballot, and perverted the law in order to prosecute him. This is a strategic attack against a former President of the United States, against a current candidate for President, and against the value we as a Nation place on our system of government, our legal system, and our very identity. The term lawfare, while apt, fails to adequately convey the moral depravity underpinning this strategic attack. I encourage this body to address each tactical front in the broader conflict provoked by lawfare. //
Bailey outlines numerous flaws inherent in the prosecution:
- Failing to uphold the rules of professional conduct by which prosecutors are bound
- Failing to specify the other crime Trump was alleged to have committed/intended to commit in falsifying the business records, such that his Sixth Amendment rights were violated
- Seeking a gag order in violation of Trump's First Amendment rights
- Perverting the law to meet the facts rather than objectively applying the law
- Failing to require unanimity from the jury on the predicate offense(s) //
Ready2Squeeze
18 minutes ago
To put it plainly, the left hates President Trump more than they love this country.
This should read:
To put it plainly, the left hates President Trump more than they love hate this country.
On Tuesday, Stoke Space announced the firing of its first stage rocket engine for the first time earlier this month, briefly igniting it for about two seconds. The company declared the June 5 test a success because the engine performed nominally and will be fired up again soon.
"Data point one is that the engine is still there," said Andy Lapsa, chief executive of the Washington-based launch company, in an interview with Ars.
The test took place at the company's facilities in Moses Lake, Washington. Seven of these methane-fueled engines, each intended to have a thrust of 100,000 pounds of force, will power the company's Nova rocket. This launch vehicle will have a lift capacity of about 5 metric tons to orbit. //
Lapsa and Stoke, which now has 125 employees, have also gone for an ambitious design in the first-stage engine tested earlier this month. The engine, with a placeholder name of S1E, is based on full-flow, stage-combustion technology in which the liquid propellants are burned in the engine's pre-burners. Because of this, they arrive in the engine's combustion chamber in fully gaseous form, leading to a more efficient mixing.
Such an engine—this technology has only previously been demonstrated in flight by SpaceX's Raptor engine, on the Starship rocket—is more efficient and should theoretically extend turbine life. But it is also technically demanding to develop, and among the most complex engine designs for a rocket company to begin with. This is not rocket science. It's exceptionally hard rocket science. //
Dtiffster Ars Praefectus
8y
3,002
Subscriptor
deadman12-4 said:
How is a big bulky weight penalty on your second stage good for reuse?
The extra drymass that come from the low density hydrolox is partially mitigated by it's Isp. If the upper stage was expendable, the more than double the volume (and thus likely cost) would be a bad tradeoff for what is close to a push in performance for payload to LEO. But as a reusable upper, hydrogens much better heat of vaporization vs methane and the really low ballistic coefficient are definitely big wins. The low ballistic coefficient combined with lift from their asymmetric design means they can shed velocity very high in the atmosphere where they can reradiate a lot of it back into space. And then when they get lower they use the excellent heat carrying capacity of the hydrogen to protect them from high heat fluxes. From an integrated system perspective, the trades start to make a lot of sense. //
greybeardengineer Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
12,948
Malmesbury said:
Seems like yesterday that Henry Spencer was telling us (and we all agreed) that developing new rocket engines for new launchers was a terrible idea. It would always cost billions. Even warming over old engines was fraught.And it seemed to be true - see the J2-X comedy.
And no one could match the Russian engines from the Forgotten Years.
Now we have slack handfuls of rocket nerds creating orbital class FFSC engines.
That, right there, is New Space
Once a leadership company achieves something new and very difficult it does two important things: 1) it tells entrepreneurs and investors that it can be done, and 2) a cadre of engineers and managers is created familiar with the technology who are free to move on and disseminate the general understanding of the new technology elsewhere.
As someone once said the greatest secret of the atomic bomb was that it can be built and that it works. Same goes for ORSC. :sneaky: //
That, right there, is New Space
It's quite an accomplishment to blow past the performance of the Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian ORSC engine designs. //
jandrese Ars Legatus Legionis
22y
12,795
Subscriptor++
Bad Monkey! said:
This is amusing considering how long it took BO to get a not terribly ambitious staged combustion engine into production, yet Stoke is all of four years old. Did BO lose all the good ones to Stoke?
Blue Origin is run like an old Aerospace company, which is more risk adverse and slow to develop. Rockets are hard, and being able to prototype designs and work out problems is an enormous productivity boost. Years and years of experience shows that trying to do everything on paper first before building the rocket results in very slow and expensive development. Building engines and blowing up your first half dozen is much faster and cheaper and leads to a better product in the end. //
Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
14y
34,700
deadman12-4 said:
How does resources matter. We are talking about a 50 year improvement in technology. This has nothing to do with it being a "commercial" company. Look at China - it'd be embarrassing for them if their engines also didn't blow away old soviet stuff.I'm not saying "soviet stuff is bad cause its soviet", we need to realize its 50 year old tech. Worshiping it is silly. Everyone should be able to do better than 50 yr old tech, no matter who made it. Its strange how soviet tech is a sacred cow. Its just tech made by someone like anything else. It was good for its time, but that was half a century ago.
You seem to think that "technology" improving just makes everything easier. Sometimes, someone's expertise matters more than technology.
Pratt & Whitney actually had a license to manufacture the RD-180 engine domestically. They literally had the blueprints and everything they needed to know on the metallurgical side to make it happen. They eventually chose not to execute on the license because just duplicating the Russian/Ukrainian design was sufficiently outside of the capabilities of P&W that they felt they would never be cost competitive with the price ULA could buy the engines as imports - duties and all. And lest you think P&W were just a bunch of schleps, they were the makers of the RL-10 engine.
So it's not just a 50 year-old technology. Less than 20 years ago, one of the premier rocket engine manufacturers in the US couldn't make it work even with the recipe. //
I Like Pi Seniorius Lurkius
16y
23
deadman12-4 said:
) How is a big bulky weight penalty on your second stage good for reuse?
Um…you get the stage back… //
Malmesbury Smack-Fu Master, in training
1m
91
deadman12-4 said:
hmm... I would disagree at this point. We're talking about 1970s tech. Yes they were amazing for time, but their time was like 2 generations ago. They are only still relevant because so few engines have been made and used in the last 50 years.
I would say it would be embarrassing if a company couldn't blow past the benchmarks of soviet engines today.
Not long ago, the Received Wisdom from professionals in the industry was that only incremental improvements on existing engines were worthwhile. And possible.
Now, everyone and his dog is building new engines. Using cycles that the pros said they couldn’t do. //
greybeardengineer Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
12,948
Just to be clear, this Stoke first stage engine is methalox. They use hydrolox for their second stage. The article doesn't make that clear and it appears that some in the comments don't realize this. //
phat_tony Ars Centurion
18y
291
Subscriptor
Joey S-IVB said:
445 kilonewtons for each engine, or 3.1 meganewtons for all seven engines combined on the first stage. That's under half of the Falcon 9's approximately 6.9 meganewtons. So, if it can put 5 tonnes into LEO, I'm guessing the second stage isn't as powerful/efficient as the F9's second stage? If this first stage is roughly half as powerful as the F9's booster stage, it is putting less than half the tonnage in comparison (should be about 8.5 tonnes to LEO if half). Still, it's great to see that Stoke is making rapid progress.
Others have pointed out the reusable second stage adds mass vs expendable; but furthermore, you just shouldn't expect rockets to scale linearly at all. Other things being equal, the larger the rocket, the higher percentage of the rocket's total launch mass can be payload.
The SS-520 is the smallest orbital rocket and it's 5,700 lbs and the mass to orbit is effectively 0 - it's 9 lbs. Any smaller and the rocket could not even get itself to orbit.
Some things on the rocket don't scale - the avionics and sensors for a tiny rocket and Starship aren't necessarily very different, so there's a flat mass you need to take. But the most important thing in rocket scaling is that the volume of a fuel tank goes up faster than the surface area when you make it bigger, keeping all proportions identical. The bigger the tank, the lower the ratio of tank mass to fuel mass.
In a CBS/YouGov poll, 62% of Americans embrace mass deportation. The anti-Israel anarchy is a microcosm of our greater national anarchy, and people are getting fed up. //
CBS News
@CBSNews
A nearly six in 10 majority of voters say they would favor, in principle, a new government program to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, a new CBS News poll shows.
(That isn’t purely partisan, it includes a third of Democrats. It rises to nine in 10 Republicans.)
7:01 PM · Jun 11, 2024. //
4fun | June 11, 2024 at 9:25 pm
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”
― Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
In Sex and Culture (1934), Oxford scholar J. D. Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. //
MCP
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexual repression is the foundation of civilization.
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2008
That is the basic thesis of this unjustly forgotten book. According to Professor Unwin, who was influenced by Freud, it is the "limitation of sexual opportunity" which creates the "mental energy" necessary to build a civilization.
He backs this up with exhaustive examples of the historical cycle he proposes. The cycle goes as follows: in a primitive society, people take their pleasure at whim, without commitment or limits. Then the practice of monogamous marriage, including premarital chastity, is instituted. (How he believes this first arises would take far too long to summarize here; read the book!) The sexual repression required for this chastity and fidelity increases the "mental energy" and the inner strength of those who practice it, enabling them to embark on long-term projects such as monumental architecture, agriculture, and conquest. In this early stage, men have enormous power over their wives and children, even when the children have grown up. ... //
Cornelius
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Brilliant and Shocking Exposition of Sexual Regulations and Cultural Advance
Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2019
Unger surveys eighty so-called 'primitive' civilizations, as well as six advanced civilizations, and finds a stunning correlation between the extent of a society's pre-marital and post-marital sexual regulations, and its civilizational advance (conquest, exploration, abstract thought, industry, commerce, etc.). In general, the more restrained a society is when it comes to sex, the more repressed sexual energy is created; that repressed energy is then transformed into, and given full expression in, productive, outward endeavours. As an anthropologist, Unger is surprisingly careful; since this book was published in 1934, I expected a stereotypical Englishman's exaltation of the white man's superior intellect. Unger does not fall for such preposterousness; he even admits that there is no reason to believe that coloured men have inferior intellects or abilities. In fact, he argues against the racialism that prevailed in his day. Although Unger's correlation is interesting, and his causation convincing, I am not convinced by his proposed mechanism: Freudian sexual sublimation. In fact, there are more direct mechanisms that would explain why repressed sexuality translates into powerful outward displays of productive and expansive energy: 1. When sex is more difficult to procure, people engage in more productive activities. This is a simple opportunity cost formula. 2. Men won't invest resources in children that aren't theirs. Sexual restraint ensures that women are less likely to cheat and conceive children with other men. 3. Hypergamy is dominant: without sexual restraint, men and women expend energy in attaining unachievable sexual partners. Aside from these shortcomings, Unger's book is worth reading if you are interested in why sexual restraints come about, and how they relate to civilizational advance.
REPORTER: Your office told us that you plan to appeal the gender-affirming ruling from yesterday. So my question today, since we're talking about the budget of taxpayer dollars, why should taxpayer dollars go to this case for the appeal?
DESANTIS: Because it's wrong to mutilate minors. It is wrong to perform a sex change on a 16-year-old. You're not allowed to get a tattoo, but somehow, you can have your privates cut off? Give me a break. //
It's ridiculous. Of course, a state can protect children. //
DESANTIS: This idea of using tax dollars because the media will point out, "Oh, the state is spending money to do." So if you say that we shouldn't do that, you're saying that any liberal judge should be able to veto the policy of the State of Florida because they go to the same judges every time, we lost almost every time, and we win on appeal almost every time.
That's what happens so if you're not willing to defend Florida's duly-enacted statutes against liberal jurisprudence, then you're basically saying the people of Florida shouldn't govern themselves and that we should just turn over our destiny to some trial judge somewhere. That I refuse to do.
DESANTIS: What this is doing, when they're doing a sex change on a teenager, there's a lot of people that want to make money off that, consequences be damned, their lining their pockets and they could care less about what's going to happen to that teenager when they become 25, which many regret and have big-time problems as a result of that.
But it's also just a fact of, you used the term "gender-affirming-care," which is what media uses and what the left uses. You're not affirming that. You're trying to change their basic biology, which you can not do. You can not do that. How you're born is what you are. And so I think it's about, are we going to be rooted in truth as a society or not? And if we're rooted in truth, then you would say, of course, you can't do these surgeries because it's not going to take and transform somebody that's a male into a female.
Mrs. Alito, in my opinion, is quickly approaching legend/thug life status in my book for how she's responded to the nontroversies, unapologetic while poking a gigantic needle in all the leftist stereotype balloons about supposedly meek and subservient conservative wives.
But beyond that, her remarks have indeed undercut the central argument behind the New York Times' flag hit pieces and the corresponding blowback from left-wing critics and other various and assorted hacktivists. She indeed is the one who flew the flags, not her husband, who she also confirmed is not a flag aficionado at all.
Puzzling out the power supply to Urals atom plants.
THE DECRYPTION OF A PICTURE, by Henry S. Lowenhaupt
One day in August 1958 Charles V. Reeves showed me a picture of the Sverdlovsk Central Dispatching Office of the Urals Electric Power System which he had found in the July issue of Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Look magazine (Figure 1a). He remarked that at the Boston Edison Company he had controlled electric power generation and flow in the Boston metropolitan area from just such a dispatching station. //
[Source: Studies in Intelligence. Volume II. Issue: Summer. Year: 1967]
Dear Dr. Zoomie – I was watching The Man in the High Castle and there was a bit about weapons-grade uranium posing a health risk to people around it. Is this true? //
The short version is that uranium – even highly enriched uranium – is simply not very radioactive. I can confirm this from personal measurements – I’ve made radiation dose rate measurements on depleted uranium, natural uranium, and enriched uranium and none of them are very radioactive. Here’s why: //
. It takes about 100 rem to cause radiation sickness, about 400 rem to give someone a 50% chance of death (without medical treatment), and nearly 1000 rem to be fatal. With a dose rate of 1 R/hr at a distance of 1 meter this part’s easy – it’ll take 25 hours of exposure to cause a change in blood cell counts, 400 hours to give a 50% risk of death, and 1000 hours to cause death. At a speed of 60 mph it takes about 50 hours to cross the US – not even enough time to develop radiation sickness. And that’s for a person sitting for that whole time at a distance of 1 meter from the uranium...