The late great FOSTER BROOKS roasting DON RICKLES in 1974.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

In October, I wrote about how five of the country’s 10 largest coal-fired power plants had retirement dates. Today, I’m revisiting the list, providing some updates and then taking a few steps back to look at US coal plants as a whole. Consider this the “before” picture that can be judged against the “after” in four years.

Some coal plant owners have already pushed back retirement timetables. The largest example, this one from just before the election, is the Gibson plant in Indiana, the second-largest coal plant in the country. It’s set to close in 2038 instead of 2035, following an announcement in October from the owner, Duke Energy.

But the changes do not constitute a coal comeback in this country. For that to happen, power companies would need to be building new plants to replace the many that are closing, and there is almost no development of new coal plants. //

The United States had about 176,000 megawatts of coal plant capacity as of October, down from about 300,000 megawatts in 2014.

The coal plants that do remain are being used less. In 2023, the average capacity factor for a coal plant was 42 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a plant has generated relative to the maximum possible if it was running all the time. In 2014, the average capacity factor was 61 percent.

Given the number of people working for tech startups (6 million), the failure rate of said startups (90 percent), their usage of Google Workspaces (50 percent, all by Ayrey's numbers), and the speed at which startups tend to fall apart, there are a lot of Google-auth-connected domains up for sale at any time. That would not be an inherent problem, except that, as Ayrey shows, buying a domain with a still-active Google account can let you re-activate the Google accounts for former employees.

With admin access to those accounts, you can get into many of the services they used Google's OAuth to log into, like Slack, ChatGPT, Zoom, and HR systems. Ayrey writes that he bought a defunct startup domain and got access to each of those through Google account sign-ins. He ended up with tax documents, job interview details, and direct messages, among other sensitive materials.

You have to close up shop, not just abandon it
Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson provided a statement:

We appreciate Dylan Ayrey’s help identifying the risks stemming from customers forgetting to delete third-party SaaS services as part of turning down their operation. As a best practice, we recommend customers properly close out domains following these instructions to make this type of issue impossible. Additionally, we encourage third-party apps to follow best-practices by using the unique account identifiers (sub) to mitigate this risk.

Google's instructions note that canceling a Google Workspace "doesn't remove user accounts," which remain until an organization's Google account is deleted.

Notably, Ayrey's methods were not able to access data stored inside each re-activated Google account, but on third-party platforms. While Ayrey's test cases and data largely concern startups, any domain that used Google Workspace accounts to authenticate with third-party services and failed to delete their Google account to remove its domain link before selling the domain could be vulnerable.

NEW: During a one-on-one meeting, Speaker Johnson asked President Biden why he paused LNG exports to Europe, says Biden was completely unaware he had done so.

The United States hasn't had a president for four years.

Johnson says Biden was completely unaware of an executive

The upper stage, meanwhile, appeared to fly normally until a telemetry display on SpaceX's webcast indicated that one of the ship's six engines shut off more than seven minutes after liftoff. The display then showed more engines failing, and the data stream froze.

In an update posted on SpaceX's website later Thursday evening, officials said ground teams lost contact with the spacecraft approximately eight and a half minutes into the flight. At the time, information on SpaceX's live video stream showed the vehicle was traveling at about 13,246 mph (21,317 km/hr) at an altitude of about 91 miles (146 kilometers).

"Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly with debris falling into the Atlantic Ocean within the predefined hazard areas," SpaceX officials wrote in the update.

The falling debris caused air traffic controllers to divert or reroute commercial flights over the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Air traffic controllers have the ability to activate a "Debris Response Area" if a spacecraft experiences an anomaly with debris falling outside of identified closed aircraft hazard areas, where the FAA notifies pilots in advance about the risk of reentering space junk. Activating a Debris Response Area "allows the FAA to direct aircraft to exit the area and prevent others from entering," the statement read.

This is what the FAA did Thursday evening. Air traffic controllers closed a swath of airspace between the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to commercial air traffic for more than an hour, causing some passenger airline flights to enter a holding pattern, return to their departure airports, land at alternate airfields, or delay their takeoffs.

Random US Citizen bintexas
12 hours ago edited
Well, if you can turn a man into a woman just by saying it's true, certainly you can turn an unratified amendment into a ratified one...

One of the things that makes it clear that our society continues to deteriorate is the almost Medieval level of superstition we're seeing almost every day. Saying something makes it true (this amendment was ratified). Naming a thing allows you to control it (western medicine widely contains this superstition) A magical belief that behavior can effect nature (climate change). The belief that words can cause physical/spiritual harm (conservatives talking is the same a violence). Belief that a person is the incarnation of the devil (Trump)

Western civilization isn't dead yet, but it certainly is ill.

The researchers began by testing a glass formed from a mixture of boron, sulfur, and lithium (B2S3 and Li2S). But this glass had terrible conductivity, so they started experimenting with related glasses and settled on a combination that substituted in some phosphorus and iodine.

The iodine turned out to be a critical component. While the exchange of electrons with sulfur is relatively slow, iodine undergoes electron exchange (technically termed a redox reaction) extremely quickly. So it can act as an intermediate in the transfer of electrons to sulfur, speeding up the reactions that occur at the electrode. In addition, iodine has relatively low melting and boiling points, and the researchers suggest there's some evidence that it moves around within the electrolyte, allowing it to act as an electron shuttle.

Successes and caveats
The result is a far superior electrolyte—and one that enables fast charging. It's typical that fast charging cuts into the total capacity that can be stored in a battery. But when charged at an extraordinarily fast rate (50C, meaning a full charge in just over a minute), a battery based on this system still had half the capacity of a battery charged 25 times more slowly (2C, or a half-hour to full charge).

But the striking thing was how durable the resulting battery was. Even at an intermediate charging rate (5C), it still had over 80 percent of its initial capacity after over 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. By contrast, lithium-ion batteries tend to hit that level of decay after about 1,000 cycles. If that sort of performance is possible in a mass-produced battery, it's only a slight exaggeration to say it can radically alter our relationships with many battery-powered devices.

What's not at all clear, however, is whether this takes full advantage of one of the original promises of lithium-sulfur batteries: more charge in a given weight and volume. The researchers specify the battery being used for testing; one electrode is an indium/lithium metal foil, and the other is a mix of carbon, sulfur, and the glass electrolyte. A layer of the electrolyte sits between them. But when giving numbers for the storage capacity per weight, only the weight of the sulfur is mentioned.

Still, even if weight issues would preclude this from being stuffed into a car or cell phone, there are plenty of storage applications that would benefit from something that doesn't wear out even with 65 years of daily cycling.

mikwcas
3 hours ago edited
All I saw [in these videos] was, well, you're fired you're fired you are too, and you and you and you. And so on and so forth.

And I'm not talking about Milley, Yellen or Garland. Talking about all the clapping seals. See ya'.

There's an old joke that goes, "How can you tell if there's a vegan at your party?" The answer: "They'll tell you."

The entire issue of health factors and ethical matters around diet has been battered endlessly. "Ethical vegans," the most strident of the lot — and the most fact-challenged — make all kinds of outrageous claims about animals, their nature, the biology of humans, and how a "vegan" diet somehow causes "less harm" to animals than a diet that includes meat — a claim that they cannot back up.

That's the extreme end of the spectrum, though. There are plenty of people who forgo meat for reasons of their own without being self-righteous about it, and that's fine; live and let live. But there are matters of science involved, especially where pregnant women are concerned. We've known for some time now that excessive alcohol use by pregnant women can damage a developing fetus; this is what Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is. However, a recent study indicates that forgoing animal protein in the diet may be more damaging than moderate alcohol use. //

Realistically, while any cell mutation can happen any time, you are unlikely to get cancer caused by an occasional drink, but US culture always has pregnant women and new mothers on blast, so they are told to abstain from alcohol, coffee, too many foods to count, etc.

What we should really be cautioning pregnant women about is vegetarian diets. While some epidemiological data on alcohol can be critiqued on merit, people who believe claims about PFAS in water, GMOs, pasteurized milk, vaccinated chickens, Scotchguard, or cancer-causing spatulas absolutely cannot deny the risks of a vegetarian diet. This is far more rigorous than any of the epidemiology in those claims. //

It's important to note that the paper cited is not original work; it's what is called a "meta-analysis," an examination of previous peer-reviewed studies. That doesn't make the study any less credible, especially given the size of the data sets that were examined; eight studies, taking in 72,284 participants.

If you understand biology and the human digestive tract, though, the study isn't necessary. This isn't new information. It's been known for literally all of the history of humankind; that women who have a well-balanced diet have healthier babies. //

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589936824000707 //

Eeyore1953
4 hours ago
How is it possible that Baby Boomers were born, with their mothers smoking and drinking through the pregnancy? And how is it that the French even exist?